Re: [OT] Why does X need so much CPU power?
On Mon, 2003-09-01 at 18:20, Nicos Gollan wrote:
> On Tuesday 02 September 2003 00:02, Neal Lippman wrote:
> > I'm just wondering if anyone has any info on why X seems to need so much
> > CPU power?
>
> It's not X eating resources like mad, it's the way desktop environments
> forcing it to do things that it was never meant to do.It was never meant to
> display eye candy like KDE and Gnome feature. You'll find that it's doing
> just fine with a "lighter" window manager that doesn't use transparencies and
> tons of bitmaps for window decorations (FVWM2, OLWM, WindowMaker, etc.).
> WindowMaker should run OK on a Pentium 266 measured on its performance on my
> 150MHz laptop w/32MB RAM. After some time you won't miss too many things.
>
> IMO the whole X(free) system needs a healthy kick in the butt. It's one of the
> main factors in keeping Linux away from the desktop, not just lacking in
> performance and features, but also a royal PITA to configure with new
> problems cropping up every five minutes.
>
> I'm going to bed now. But perhaps this one will keep people away from the
> "Quoting" and C popularity threads which are scrolling off to the right;
> reading them is like coding python with a tabwidth of 8. (xinerama is another
> thing in X that's FUBAR while we're at it, I literally *lost my mouse
> pointer* while trying to set it up.)
>
Well, most replies to my posting have pinned the "blame" on KDE and
Gnome rather than X per se. I'll have to reinstall on the laptop and see
how it looks with a more minimal WM.
This does still beg the question of how Win95/98/Me/NT, etc, managed to
provide a reasonable "desktop" when KDE/Gnome could not, however. It
really doesn't seem to me that either KDE or Gnome provide a more
complex desktop environment than Windows, at least not from the end-user
perspective, even if the underlying OS (eg Linux vs Windows) is more
robust and possible more feature-full.
From what little I know of X, I'd tend to agree that X is being
overtaxed supporting a desktop environment that it was never designed to
do. Aside from the present market penetration of X (which could also be
used to argue to stick with Windows instead of ever having adopted
Linux), what would be the obstacle (other than, of course, the
time/effort for development) for a new graphics paradigm to sit atop
Linux? [Yes, I know there'd be a lot of apps to redo and so forth as
well, although if there were a Gtk+ compatibility layer...)
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