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

[Joseph A. Nagy, Jr.]

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On Tue, Apr 19, 2005 at 06:34:20AM -0600, Joe Zonker Brockmeier wrote the following:
> > 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.

Point.
 
> 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.

Even on this PIV 2.4GHz with 752MB of RAM X tends to be hoggish, especially
once I get my usual group of apps up (GAIM, Eterm, Firefox and Thunderbird).

> 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.

Agreed, but I should be able to run bleeding edge KDE with no problems on
this box, but it can still lag horribly.

- -- 
Joseph A. Nagy Jr.
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