On Tuesday 02 September 2003 02:56, Erik Steffl wrote:
X is GREAT. just because a particular combination of
software/hardware doesn't work well (too slow) doesn't mean there's a
need to throw out the baby with the...
X is really good at what it was built to be. It provides an interface to
create contexts applications can use to draw to and to manage those contexts.
Because it was designed for environments with semi-dumb terminals this will
even work over a network. It does NOT provide a generalized toolkit for
building UIs. All libraries like Xaw, QT, GTK and whatever just grab a window
context and draw to them via a networked interface.
Windows OTOH was designed (and please don't start arguing whether "designed"
is the right term... we all know what we think about that ;-) ) to provide a
nice UI on a relatively powerful workstation without the whole overhead of a
client/server concept which allowed to do a lot of nice things easily
(transparency with an updated background, native 3D acceleration, font
management that actually works, etc.). To be honest, were it not for the way
Microsoft handles things, I'd be using it right now. I'd probably keep the
servers in the basement running Linux, but for the desktop use Win would win.