[clue-talk] Why X? [long, with provocative questions]

[Joseph A. Nagy, Jr.]

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On Mon, Apr 18, 2005 at 10:08:13PM -0600, Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier wrote the following:
> Hi Matt,
> 
> Matt Gushee wrote:
> >Okay, I've been sitting on this for a long time ... just can't hold back 
> >any longer. BTW, the overarching theme here is "Linux on the desktop." 
> >And I'm probably beating a dead horse. So if neither of those things 
> >interest you, feel free to skip the rest of this message.
> 
> That's okay, let it all out... :)
> 
> >Fast-forward to late 2004. Got my wife a new computer for her birthday. 
> >Or, well, actually the monitor was a nice new one, the computer was 
> >used--but still newer and faster than what I use every day. And I had 
> >this crazy idea that maybe I could finally get her to switch to Linux. 
> >After all, GNOME coming along nicely, good tech support available right 
> >in the house, set the default language to Japanese, even install some 
> >very nice Japanese fonts that I have, yes, yes, she'll like 
> >that--whereupon I got my rude awakening: today's beautiful, 
> >state-of-the-art Linux desktop is ... not just slow, but appallingly slow.
<snip>
> Also, which distro are you using? Just out of curiosity - GNOME on 
> Fedora Core 3 vs. GNOME on Ubuntu vs. GNOME on Slackware may be a 
> different animal... Also, which GNOME? I'm running GNOME 2.10, which is 
> supposed to be a bit improved vs. GNOME 2.8.

It is. I've run KDE on RH7.x-9.0 and on Debian Woody 2004 and on Debian (and
on my Gentoo box) KDE is much faster then with RH. RH sucks muchly. Abandon it
if you're using it to try and win your wife as a convert.

> >So why is the desktop so slow? Perhaps part of the reason is poor code 
> >in GNOME itself; maybe part of it is video card vendors not cooperating 
> >with open source developers--though I gather that is much less of a 
> >problem than it used to be. But, based on various things I've seen and 
> >heard over the years, I can't help thinking that a significant part of 
> >the problem is the venerable X Window System--in particular, the fact 
> >that it is a client-server system.
> 
> That's an interesting conclusion. X hasn't changed that much over the 
> years, at least as far as I'm aware, in terms of performance, whereas 
> GNOME/KDE have added a great deal of features and so forth. The 
> client-server architecture hasn't changed much, but the desktops have.
> 
> Also, I know that desktops like XFce, Blackbox and FVWM are much more 
> lightweight and offer better performance than GNOME or KDE, and they 
> still use X - so it would seem the logical conclusion would be to point 
> the finger (you decide which finger) at GNOME rather than X.

I like WindowMaker, myself. I still have GNOME and KDE around, though, as I
find some of their apps useful (such as KDEs kuser or the
gnome-sound-recorder).

> >But, on X, you still have client-server overhead. Apps don't run as fast 
> >as they could, and if you have a "modern" desktop, they can be downright 
> >sluggish. And then there are annoying little side-effects like not being 
> >able to run GUI configuration utilities as root without "xhost+ localhost."
> 
> That's a feature, not a bug. Having to approve X connections for 
> different users is a Good Thing(TM) security-wise.

Perhaps, but could we make it an option?

> I'm not going to offer an opinion on the client-server performance vs 
> and architecture like Windows or the Mac OS because I have no idea 
> whether the performance actually suffers or not due to the client/server 
> nature of X. However, I will offer this: If I run X11 on my iMac, I 
> don't notice any noticable degredation in performance when using X apps 
> running on the Mac or being run on a Linux machine displayed on the Mac.

You can also run an app on a Linux box and display it on a Windows machine,
but you need a proprietary, expensive package on the Winbox (not cygwin,
either).

> >I'm sure I'm not the first person to notice this. I can recall reading 
> >newsgroup threads back in the 90s where most people seemed to agree that 
> >"X sucks, and we need to create something better." But it hasn't happened.
> 
> Indeed, it hasn't.

Have you folks heard about Y-Windows? It's supposed to offer native
alpha-transparencies for apps like GAIM (sorry, but that's farking cool to
have your freaking buddy list grow translucent and see apps underneath it as
well as the desktop (if no other app is blocking the view).

> >Now, it's not too surprising that few people have tried to replace X, 
> >and so far they've all failed--obviously the technical challenges are 
> >huge. But what I'm really wondering about, and this is the question I 
> >want to put to you all, is why everyone thinks that a client-server 
> >windowing system is a good idea. At least that's how it seems, given 
> >that when a group of open source people did put together a serious 
> >effort to replace X (Berlin/Fresco), it was also client-server-based.
> 
> From the single-user, single-desktop perspective, it probably isn't any 
> better. From the multi-user perspective, however, it offers flexibility 
> that you don't have with the other architectures.

But he's asking this from the single-user, single-desktop perspective,
thereby any arguments about its multiuser capabilities are moot.

> >Maybe I'm ignorant, but I don't get it. Of course, I've heard of all 
> >kinds of cool ways you can use X's networking capabilities. But most of 
> >those cool uses, as far as I can see, are utterly irrelevant to typical 
> >computer users in typical environments. 
> 
> Well, what's typical? I make heavy use of X's networking capabilities, 
> so does that make me atypical?

I'd say most, if not all, Linux users are atypical.

> >Apparently, too, the fact that 
> >you access X through a well-defined protocol is seen as an advantage. 
> 
> Better than an obscure, undocumented protocol, I wager.

Here here!

> >So why not build a windowing system that accesses the hardware directly? 
> >Or maybe through a hardware abstraction layer--anyway, get rid of the 
> >networking part. It would make for a more manageable project, and 
> >probably provide much better performance. It seems obvious to me, yet I 
> >can't recall ever hearing of developers being interested in such an 
> >approach.
> 
> Stripping the networking part of X kills off a lot of interesting uses 
> for Linux - thin clients using XDMCP, for example. While this isn't in 
> big usage in homes, it's of interest to corporations who may be 
> deploying Linux workstations.

Moot for this discussion, though. He doesn't want nor need those cool
networking features.
<snip>
> I'm sure there are other reasons. I'm also not convinced that the 
> performance issues are related to X, rather than GNOME or other apps. 
> I'd have to see some evidence that explains why the client/server 
> architecture has sufficient overhead that it needs to be replaced or 
<snip>

top your box when you have your typical amount of apps running, look at X's
cpu and mem usage.

You made some good points, but consistently missed (or ignored) the fact
that his wife is a single-user, single-desktop environment type of
person. She probably doesn't care about all the killer things X can do that
Windows only dreams about doing. I'd love to have X and modern KDE run on
PII 233 MHz (decent, sorta, vid card) with only 512MB of RAM without being
able to type ahead two-three sentences in OOo because of system lag (again,
probably not related to X, but I randomly top my box and find X usage of
resources to be fairly high).

- -- 
Joseph A. Nagy Jr.
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