Re: BIG xwindow apps
On Thu, Dec 06, 2001 at 08:51:14AM -0500, Aaron Traas wrote:
> Windows apps, particularly older ones, were designed to be usable at
> 640x480. I believe X started on Solaris, or at least first caught on
> there, and I believe the default then was 1152x864, because at 8BPP, it
> fit in 1 MB of video RAM. The first Windows 3.x machines ran almost
> exclusively at 640x480, as PC graphics cards really couldn't stand up to
> workstation frame buffer devices back then.
>
> X apps *are* generally bigger, and even those that are resizable do not
> take into consideration the way the layout shrinks at really small
> screen sizes. Most of the WM's use very thick titlebars, KDE and GNOME
> by default have very thick panels at the bottom, etc. X at less than
> 1024x768 is extremely painful.
>
Interesting history there. Though I regularly run X at 640x480 on old
PCs, and its not at all painful. Some apps are problematic though, e.g.
the preferences window in Netscape 4.7 and KDE 2.2 new configure-the-
desktop-guide.
Browsing with netscape in 640x480 with a good font on a 14" monitor is
actually quite nice, IMHO.
/Hans Ekbrand
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