Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2001 02:10:10 +1000 From: Ian Pulsford <Ianjp@optusnet.com.au> To: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Feeding the Troll (Was: freebsd as a desktop ?) Message-ID: <3C065DE2.EA19E2DB@optusnet.com.au> References: <15365.11290.211107.464324@guru.mired.org><006101c17854$c6aa2570$0a00000a@atkielski.com><3C0574C4.3040001@verizon.net><016e01c17889$23dfd990$0a00000a@atkielski.com><3C05BD9D.4000909@verizon.net><01c601c17896$12bbf560$0a00000a@atkielski.com><15365.48855.19705.7956@guru.mired.org><01c101c17895$a2691360$0a00000a@atkielski.com><01112817112006.13219@prime.vsservices.com><016301c17888$c1be3cc0$0a00000a@atkielski.com><000901c17892$28e1ce90$0301a8c0@nitedog><01bc01c17892$f2dea380$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <15365.54859.140475.279838@guru.mired.org> <021101c178a3$e6203f80$0a00000a@atkielski.com>
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Anthony Atkielski wrote: > > Mike writes: > > > People come along every so often saying "If > > you want to take over the desktop, you need > > to ...". I don't want it to take over the > > desktop ... Exactly. It's expecially bad amongst some Linux groups; the desire to go head-to-head with Microsoft. I think it would be far worse for free (and non-free) Unixen if Microsoft was chewing up the small and mid range server market than if it were to eat the rest of the desktop market. (Go Mac OS X!) <...> > > That's the major problem I see with Unix - > > the major distributions have concentrated on > > trying to take over the desktop, so it's a major > > PITA to set them up as a server, or doing something > > slightly unusual. > > You mean Linux, I presume? Linux was written by a student geek for other > student geeks, then was seized upon by clueless marketroids and media people and > made into a sort of deity to counter Microsoft's antichrist. As I've said > before, I suspect that most people using and promoting Linux had never heard of > UNIX at all before Linus came along with his school project, and so in their > eyes, a good operating system = a Windows-like operating system. Most Linux > users just want Windows without Microsoft, or they just want a machine to play > with. > You can't mean FreeBSD, in any case, since it doesn't install any kind of > desktop by default (thank goodness!--if it did, I wouldn't be running FreeBSD). Solaris 8, that came with my SunBlade 100, by default installs OpenWin and CDE desktop environments and doesn't have virtual terminals like FreeBSD does (as far as I know - I'm a Solaris newbie). The console is gratuitously drawn graphically and is way slow. I'm sure you can configure it to boot without CDE but that's not the default install. > > In other words, in trying to compete with Windows, > > they're adding all the problems I have with Windows. > > Exactly. And there is no way to get around that. If you want Windows > functionality, you get all the Windows complexity and instability that go with > it. > > This is why I've only briefly looked at X servers on UNIX. They make too much > of a mess, and it's easy to see that they very rapidly complexify and > destabilize the machine until it looks just like a clone of Windows. I already > have Windows; I don't need another wannabe running next to it. I think you have some terms mixed up. You seem to be referring to window managers (eg. twm) as X servers. X servers are the proggies that drive your hardware and draw windows. Realise too that the bloated packages that are KDE and Gnome are window managers + a bunch of other programs to draw the desktop icons, menu bar etc.. I have had very few problems with XFree86 + a simple WM (IceWM). If you are running Gnome or KDE then yes, you are adding a lot of complexity to your environment and increasing the chance of something going wrong. You underestimate the power and stability of X wielded by the forces of good. > > Yup. How much experience do you have with Unix > > as a desktop? > > Virtually none. Most of my exposure to UNIX has been command-line interfaces > only, which I tend to prefer with multiuser systems accessed remotely. So you haven't tried. > > > But not that provided by *your* choice of desktop > > environments, Windows NT. > > I'm not sure what you mean. > > > Yup. That's called a "driver". > > Drivers are parts of the OS in certain ways, despite claims to the contrary. > It's just that they aren't usually written with the rest of the OS, and they > tend to be buggy and unreliable. But since they must be _trusted_ by the OS, > they effectively are part of the OS, from the standpoint of things like > reliability. A system that crashes because of a bad driver is no more up and > running than a system that crashes because of a kernel failure. You must have been using Linux. > > Actually, you forgot the single most important > > resource for supporting hundreds of users - I/O > > throughput - but it's probably got that as well. > > For support of dumb terminals, I'm sure it would suffice. I don't know how well > it would support X terminals, as I'm not sure how much additional overhead X > clients impose on the system. More proof you haven't tried. X is pretty efficient over a network because the X server does the drawing of windows. Remember from above the X server handles the hardware and runs on the machine the user is sitting at. The X clients (eg. programs like netscape) run on the remote machine. So you have your FreeBSD machine in the back room doing the background grunt work running apps, and your slim desktop machine with half-decent video card, doing the graphical work, displaying the apps with an X server (X-Win32 on Windows or XFree86 on another FreeBSD machine for eg.). It works beautifully. > > It was sort of boggling to compute the values > > for those things, and realize that the pizza box > > and a couple of shoeboxes had more of everything > > important than the two refrigerators it replaced. > > Yes. What worries me is that software seems to be moving in exactly the > opposite direction, and at nearly the same speed. > > > That's why I didn't bother looking at Windows NT. > > Ah ... big mistake. Windows NT and the consumer versions of Windows are > completely different operating systems. For some reason, Microsoft has never > wanted to make that clear. Win2k is prooving to be relatively stable for desktop use, (much better than Win98) but I still wouldn't use it for a server. IanP To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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