Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2001 22:36:43 +0100 From: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com> To: "Mike Meyer" <mwm@mired.org> Cc: <questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Feeding the Troll (Was: freebsd as a desktop ?) Message-ID: <006101c17854$c6aa2570$0a00000a@atkielski.com> References: <15365.11290.211107.464324@guru.mired.org>
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Mike writes: > You've said this before, but haven't done > anything to demonstrate it. I'm surprised that you think it requires demonstration. UNIX was designed to service hundreds of users sitting in front of dumb terminals; it was not designed to drive a single resource-intensive GUI on dedicated hardware for a single user. UNIX architecture puts a huge emphasis on multiple, independent users and processes, and very little emphasis on the kind of close integration and hardware dependency that a complex GUI requires. These characteristics make for an excellent timesharing system or server, but they also make for a poor desktop environment. Windows is the other way around. It has virtually no concept of multiple users and no provision for hardware independence. Processes and users are not intended to work simultaneously on the same machine on completely different tasks. As a result, it is very good for dedicated, single-user desktop use, but very poor for timesharing use and mediocre for server use. If you believe that UNIX is as good a desktop as Windows, then logically you must also believe that Windows is as good a server as UNIX. An extension of this logic leads to the conclusion that the operating systems are essentially identical--but that obviously is not the reality. > I've been making heavy desktop use of, and > supporting users making heavy desktop use of, > Unix since 1985. Nothing has happened during > that time that in any way indicated that Unix > is "incompatible with heavy desktopp use." Most operating systems can be stretched to fill all sorts of roles for which they weren't intended. That doesn't make them good in such applications, nor does it make them superior to purpose-built operating systems for those same applications. It's interesting to see how hard people will try to prove or at least argue that their pet operating systems are the best for all purposes, or even adequate for all purposes. I've never seen an operating system that can do it all, and I expect that I never will. > Quite to the contrary, every time someone has > asked me to work on Win 9x or Macs - through the > mid 90s - they crashed regularly under my > normal usage patterns. That convinced me that, > if anything, those operating systems aren't > suitable for "heave desktop use". Heavy desktop use requires NT and its descendants. Windows 9x and the Mac are for occasional, non-critical desktop use, for precisely the reasons you cite. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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