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

[Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier]

> 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).

No, I didn't miss it - or ignore it. Matt asked "why everyone thinks
that a client-server windowing system is a good idea." He also asked
"Why does X continue to be the only game in town?" If you're confused,
please re-read his original e-mail. I responded to the questions he
asked.

His situation is one use of Linux and X, but not the only use of Linux
and X. So, I provided some reasons why many (not everybody) users
think that the client/server model is a good idea. She may not care
about the features, but many people do, and that's why it hasn't been
replaced with something else. If everyone was like Matt or his wife,
then I'm sure that X would have been tossed out the window (ahem) and
we'd have a simple local machine architecture that has no networking
capabilities and so forth.

Again, I really don't think X is the problem here - I've been using
Linux since 1996, before KDE and GNOME, and the performance of X on my
first machine - a Pentium "classic" - was satisfactory. The problem
is, more than likely, with GNOME in this case and not the minimal
overhead produced by X. Running GNOME 2.8 or 2.10 is probably about
the same as trying to run Windows XP on a five-year-old machine, or
running Mac OS X "Panther" on a first-generation iMac - you're going
to see some performance problems.

I can't speak to the performance of GNOME, because I'm running it on
an AMD64 with 1 GB of RAM, so I don't notice any kind of performance
issues with GNOME or any other desktop on this machine.

My advice to Matt, or anyone else looking to run Linux on lower-end
hardware, would be to run XFce, Blackbox or one of the other
lightweight desktop environments / window managers. They are fairly
user friendly, but much less resource-intensive.

Zonker
-- 
Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier
xonker at gmail.com
"Well, I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, doctor, and I'm happy
to state I finally won out over it." ~ Elwood P. Dowd, "Harvey"