Date: Tue, 21 Jan 1997 11:09:08 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu> To: Larry Lee <lclee@primenet.com> Cc: chat@freefall.freebsd.org Subject: Re: Commerical applications Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.3.95.970121100624.1465G-100000@fallout.campusview.indiana.edu> In-Reply-To: <199701210332.UAA09421@usr06.primenet.com>
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--->>> Moved to chat@freebsd.org <<<--- On Mon, 20 Jan 1997, Larry Lee wrote: > FreeBSD clearly outperforms W95 and WNT on the same size hardware and runs > on smaller hardware platforms. If you want to do a general comparison (which I don't believe can be done in a very meaningful way), you at *least* need to compare similar configurations, which, in this case, means adding X and CDE to FreeBSD. In this configuration, FreeBSD may still be competetive with NT, but it flat out looses to W95 in terms of hardware consumption. > The basic UNIX commands are no more difficult to learn than the basic > DOS commands and any UNIX shell is no more difficult to use than command.com > and clearly has far more power and capabilities. Hold it here. You have suddenly switched to comparing Unix with MS-DOS. Now MS-DOS runs quite nicely on an 8088 with 640K of ram, but it is NT that people are comparing to Unix, not MS-DOS. Most of the Unix shells and tools could be (and probably have been) ported to NT anyway so this argument is nearly moot. The ease of use issue is not command line versus command line, it is text interface versus graphic interface. > The UNIX install process is much more difficult than Windows and when > it's complete you still don't have a fully functional UNIX system. Yes you do, but but if you expect a fully functional Unix system to be approximately the same thing as a fully functional NT system, you are mistaken. Whether this is good, bad, or just different depends on what you use the system for. If you want FreeBSD to be more like an out-of-the-box NT system, you have to shell out the US$250 to get CDE. > UNIX costs less that Windows. Yes, if you exclude the comparable GUI component from Unix. XFree86 gets you a GUI, but only CDE offers anything remotely similar to the GUI Windows offers. > Compare the appearance and utility of Eudora to xmh, Eudora looks better. > Anything based on xaw looks awful, and the 3d version isn't much better. Compare xaw with other GUIs in existance around the time it was designed and it doesn't look that bad. Its just that nobody has bothered to update it. Think of xaw as a GUI time capsule. :) People serious about GUI design use TK or Motif. > The world has gone graphical, but Unix still clings to its text based > origins. Considering the application domains where Unix dominates, there are many good reasons to maintain a text based interface. However, that should not preclude the development of excellent GUI support. In practice it does because text based tools are generally considered essential, while their GUI counterparts are seen as a "nice feature". Guess which gets development priority? -john
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