[CLUE-Tech] (In)Stability of X?

[Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

On Tue, 5 Mar 2002, Matt Gushee wrote:

> I think it can vary with hardware and applications. For instance, the
> machine I am sitting at right now is a 5-or-6-year old IBM PC: Pentium
> 133, 128M of RAM, S3 Trio 64 video card. I have very rarely had X lock
> up or even behave weirdly on this machine. Now, I'm running XFree86
> 3.3.6 -- I tried to install 4.1 a couple months ago, but found out it
> didn't support my video card except in lo-res VGA mode ... not sure I
> understand that ...

There is that. Some video cards are not quite as well supported as
others -- let's remember that the guys writing drivers for XFree
are often in the dark, not having the benefit of the full specs
of the equipment they're writing drivers/servers for.

One of the reasons I may not experience these issues is because I've
been very careful to buy video cards that have had some cooperation
from the manufacturer.

> Seems like certain GUI apps are dangerous: I mentioned KDE above; I
> also recall that several years ago, when I first started using the
> GIMP (version 0.99?), I had very frequent lockups: what would happen
> was that when there was an exception, the GIMP would write a message
> to the console, with a prompt for the user to make a choice ... and
> block waiting for input, effectively locking the X session. It still
> happens once in a while.

Oooh...that's nasty.

> Then there's Netscape 4.x. No doubt everybody's got their own horror
> story, so I won't go on at length. But sometimes I browse Japanese
> sites, using TrueType fonts for the Japanese characters. For the first
> few pages, and sometimes later ones (I suppose until most of the
> characters are cached), Netscrape takes a LONG, LONG time (2-3 minutes
> sometimes) to render a page, and everything else freezes until it's done.

Normally, my experience with Netscape is that it will simply
*poof* out of existance rather than locking things up. That
happens to me at least two or three times a day. Usually at
the most inconvenient times...

> So what does it all mean? I have no final answers, but I tend to think
> there's a grain of truth to the criticism. No doubt they choose examples
> that favor their point of view, but they're not completely out to lunch.

A grain, perhaps. There is usually some minor truth to any FUD from
Redmond, but it's rarely the whole story.

I honestly can't compare my experience to XP/2000 either, since
I've never used either one. Perhaps they're more stable than the
previous versions, but I'd swear I could bluescreen 95/98/NT
by looking at 'em cross-eyed.

I wonder if there would be a way to do a fair benchmark for both
Windows 2000/XP and Linux with XFree 4.1.x to see which one
measures up better in terms of stability?

Take care,

Zonker
--
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier -=- jbrockmeier at earthlink.net
http://www.DissociatedPress.net/
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