On Sat, 2003-08-30 at 12:43, Oded Arbel wrote:
> On Saturday 30 August 2003 10:02, John Rabkin wrote:
> > Aaaah yes. The age old argument. I cannot understand for the life of me why
> > some people are on a crusade to bog Linux down with eye-candy. A flashy
> > interface is a sure sign of a weak underlaying system. Please show me a
> > single instance were I am wrong.
> 
> <snipped lots of smug, speratist remarks>
> 
> your first assert is so completly wrong I cannot even start to address it. 
> where the heck did you come up with this BS ? 
> Just as a counter example: OS-X.
> Your argument is basicly this - "They have a weak underlying system because 
> they have negligable market share". well - suprise, but so does Linux.
> Except that OS-X has a very good underlying system, and last time I checked 
> has better desktop market share then linux (they second place only to M$). I 
> don't remember exact statistics, but I've read somewhere that of all the 
> people who bought their first computer in north america at 2001-2002, about 
> 50% were buying macs. I'd love to see Linux with these numbers.
> 
> Fact: everybody loves eye-candy. Linux's Market share will grow with more 
> eye-candy as it had done so in the past.
> Fact: two of the largest open source projects for Linux (and other OS) are 
> mostly about eye-candy (KDE, GNOME).
> 
> The whole attitude of "We don't need to stinking GUI" is fine, as long as you 
> keep it to yourself. if your objective is to make Linux the best operating 
> system for your own special needs, then everything is fine - you probably 
> don't use X at all.
> But maybe, just maybe, the point of the whole exercise is to make Linux the 
> best OS for everyone - and that means nice looking, _responsive_, stable 
> GUIs.
> 

I am running an AMD 1.3G laptop and The gui is quite responsive (as long
as I am not working on the swap I admit), its actually far more
responsive then winXp home in the same computer (running without any
animation and the much lighter win2k desktop). And I am using GNOME, not
a minimalistic desktop (Tried them, but didn't have time to learn how to
configure my favorite features yet so I needed an easy to configure
desktop for the moment).
Even 2D acceleration wasn't that hard to configure. 3D was a bit harder,
but not that much. Didn't take much less work on XP with its faulty
driver.
I am not saying there is no room for improvement on X, but its not as
bad as you say.

> Now, after deviating from the main issue for a while - here's my real point: I 
> don't care much for eye-candy in X. its nice to have, but less important then 
> getting a fast and stable graphical environment. X is blocking the way as its 
> so damn slow. its a CPU and Memory hog, and its design is so bad it makes it 
> very hard to extend its feature set to compete with other graphical 
> environments.
> Example: only this year the ability to change resolution w/o restart was 
> included into X - this feature has been available on the major competitor's 
> OS for about 7 years now, and still this feature is not visible to most users 
> as there are no stable user end tools that take advantage of it. same with 

IIRC changing resolution without restart has been around for quite some
time (Alt+Ctrl+key+/-). It doesn't change the desktop size, thats true
(don't know about that, is that what you are referring to?)
And at list for gnome there is the Display Geometry Switcher applet.
I am missing the ability to change color depth on the fly, thats true,
but not that much.

> font anti-aliasing - very useful eye-candy, and people are still having 
> problems with it.


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