On Sat, 15 Jul 2000, Ian C.Sison wrote:
..
> Check out this article. This is basically agrees with my position
> that X Windows is hopelessly bloated and in fact even getting much
> bigger as we speak. Creeping featurism, poor design, inefficient code,
> they are all slipping into what was once our favorite compact and
> lightweight OS. Even now we can't have a linux kernel that is less
> than 500MB.
Little-known fact: X11R5 can function satisfactorily on an 8MB
SparcStation I. That's a 486-20 equivalent.
> SO what is X? It's old technology being constantly added on to be able
> to "live another day" in the age modern computing requirements.
It may be old but it serves its purpose. It has a well-defined extension
architecture (remember XVideo? GLX? DGA?) and it is a standard. Try to
bring in another GUI standard and all the vendors will be jumping over
each other trying to leverage their proprietary technologies.
X is successful NOT because it is technically excellent. Even Keith
Packard says it's just adequate. It survived the UNIX fragmentation wars
and came to dominate the UNIX desktop because it is standard and open.
> Bloated X-windows is the reason why we all can't have a _usable_ GUI
> desktop on a 486 with 32 MB, and why, even at 192MB, with Dual Celeron
> 400s, my KDE desktop is barely making a "satisfactory" performance
> rating for me.
Try running with fvwm1 and just use Xterms. You'll be surprised at the
performance. My first Linux desktop had 8MB of RAM and a 386-40
processor. I got usable work out of that, just using cmdtool and olvwm. It
was "just" as good as a Sun back then.
The problem your KDE desktop is slow is because the KDE design sucks. Qt
is a bloated C++ library system that feeds on itself (polymorphism can be
a bane as well as a boon). Check out the size of a kterm. You'll be
surprised.
If you want a usable GUI desktop in 16MB or less, get yourself QNX and use
the Photon microgui. It's free now for development last I heard. You'll
get blazing performance out of your 8MB box.. and no apps to run on it.
And that's why X lives on. It has the apps. That's why 3? 4? years since
inception and countless Linus-bashing sessions later, GGI is still an
obscurity. No apps.
Memory is cheap. Programmers to redo all those apps aren't.
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