Comment Re:I hate KDE and Gnome (Score 1) 590
It seems none of you were interested in an actual intellectual response; rather some of you've resorted to name calling, while others didn't bother justifying your knee-jerk reactions while demanding me to further justify my conclusions. So here goes:
X11 is slow because it works on outdated hardware. It doesn't have much in the way of optimizations for new, fast hardware, it was designed for old Sun b/w frame buffers and such. Even the new optimizations available hardly take advantage of the latest 2D and 3D hardware acceleration.
X11 itself doesn't do much. You can't even reasonably use it without a window manager, and even then it doesn't do much. To get the features that are available in other GUI environments, you must use KDE or Gnome. Even then, you still can't do simple tasks via the GUI that you can with other OSes, such as change the resolution. There isn't a unified graphical installer for applications for Linux (although some distributions do have them), which is fine if you're a slashdot reading geek, but if you're a regular consumer you're going to find it very difficult.
Font control is probably the biggest mess out of all the issues. Fonts look just plain bad under X11. Sure, you can fidget around and get them looking descent, but that requires mucking around with KDE, Gnome, and X11 font settings, the later being way more difficult than it should be. That's great if you're a tinkerer and putterer, but again if you're a regular consumer, you don't have the time or knowledge to accomplish this.
I've used Gnome and KDE from the getgo, I remember years ago when I got the pre-1.0 beta of KDE to compile on a SunOS 4.1.4 box with a great amount of tweaking. Well I got tired of tweaking. Most people just want something that works, and works well.
It would require some work, but I think that scrapping X altogether and building a new, modern GUI from scratch would make Linux and other OSes a viable desktop platform. Mac OS X did it, BeOS almost did it. I believe there is a clone of BeOS's GUI in the works for Linux. That would be a great place to start.
Also, the Mac OS X GUI (Aqua) has nothing to do with X. It's based mostly on NeXTStep's graphical environment, which was as groundbreaking in the early 90's as Mac OS X is now. 10 years ago I could drag and drop a file into a graphical email client and it would show up as an icon. NeXT was doing it well before Microsoft.
When compared to Mac OS X, BeOS, and even MS Windows. X and KDE/Gnome still don't compare.
X11 is slow because it works on outdated hardware. It doesn't have much in the way of optimizations for new, fast hardware, it was designed for old Sun b/w frame buffers and such. Even the new optimizations available hardly take advantage of the latest 2D and 3D hardware acceleration.
X11 itself doesn't do much. You can't even reasonably use it without a window manager, and even then it doesn't do much. To get the features that are available in other GUI environments, you must use KDE or Gnome. Even then, you still can't do simple tasks via the GUI that you can with other OSes, such as change the resolution. There isn't a unified graphical installer for applications for Linux (although some distributions do have them), which is fine if you're a slashdot reading geek, but if you're a regular consumer you're going to find it very difficult.
Font control is probably the biggest mess out of all the issues. Fonts look just plain bad under X11. Sure, you can fidget around and get them looking descent, but that requires mucking around with KDE, Gnome, and X11 font settings, the later being way more difficult than it should be. That's great if you're a tinkerer and putterer, but again if you're a regular consumer, you don't have the time or knowledge to accomplish this.
I've used Gnome and KDE from the getgo, I remember years ago when I got the pre-1.0 beta of KDE to compile on a SunOS 4.1.4 box with a great amount of tweaking. Well I got tired of tweaking. Most people just want something that works, and works well.
It would require some work, but I think that scrapping X altogether and building a new, modern GUI from scratch would make Linux and other OSes a viable desktop platform. Mac OS X did it, BeOS almost did it. I believe there is a clone of BeOS's GUI in the works for Linux. That would be a great place to start.
Also, the Mac OS X GUI (Aqua) has nothing to do with X. It's based mostly on NeXTStep's graphical environment, which was as groundbreaking in the early 90's as Mac OS X is now. 10 years ago I could drag and drop a file into a graphical email client and it would show up as an icon. NeXT was doing it well before Microsoft.
When compared to Mac OS X, BeOS, and even MS Windows. X and KDE/Gnome still don't compare.
