--- Bill Hacker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Joerg Sonnenberger wrote: > > > On Thu, Jul 13, 2006 at 05:04:22PM +0800, Bill Hacker > wrote: > > > >>Old or new branches of X are rooted in a very different > architectural > >>philosophy than Win vid, and would have to start over > from a clean slate to > >>even match the sort of performance of an Amiga, BeBox, > Warp/eCS or OS X > >>deliver(ed) on comparable hardware. > > > > > > While I agree on most point, this needs some comments. > The problem of > > current X11 based GUIs is not the protocol or > architecture of the X > > server. The 99% of the slowdown is to completely broken > toolkit design. > > Seriously, how could it have been possible to use a > single 50MHz Power > > CPU and a 10mbit network for a number of X11 terminals > 12 years ago? > > The difference is that applications and toolkits used > an asynchronous > > protocol and had been greatly optimised to keep as much > work as possible > > in the pipeline. Compare that to todays application. A > simple GTK > > program over a slightly laggy WLAN link is visibly > drawing itself a > > number of times whenever e.g. a menu has to be opened. > *That's* why X11 > > performance today sucks. Everyone wants to program X11 > like they program > > Windows, completly ignoring the roundtrip time. > > > > Joerg > > What is needed is really 'none of the above', IOW, there > just *has* to be a > better way. > > Two hints that it is possible include: > > - the snappy browser interface included with the QNX demo > floppy of many years ago. > > - the Bluebottle/Greenbottle UI on Aos / Oberon. > > Lean, light, quick across the ground, and nearly > indifferent to what video > hardware is present, both of them. > > Plan 9 is another. Not much to look at, but the > 'plumbing' is straightforward > and low-load. > > 'X' had a reason to live in its early distanced > server-client incarnation. > > Forget the KDE and Gnome resource hogs - even the > so-called 'lite' desktops such > as Xfce4 are slow and clumsy compared to a well-tuned > Warp/eCS Workplace Shell. > > Most are arguably inferior to Win 3.11 in responsiveness > and polish, given the > same hardware. > > I don't see that much improvement is likely to happen on > F/OSS - X or otherwise. > > OS X has closed the gate at one end, Vista will retain MS > dominance even if they > lose 30% of what is now a maket so huge an entity can get > fats on the leavings. > > While we are generalizing, the 'C' language has long > since become more a part of > the problem than of the solution.... My tool of choice > for I/O driver work was > AS or Forth with native-code-compiler inlining. > > Never mind... I know where I can get a couple of > nearly-new 17" G4 PowerBooks > cheap when this one dies... > > Meanwhile, back at the data centre, we have migrated the > 1U servers to VIA C3 > with FreeBSD 4.11-stable and the 2U servers to Intel > core-duo and FreeBSD > AMD-64 6.1-STABLE. Plus one Xeon using 6.1, i386. Talk about an expensive boat anchor! Dimitri __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
