3 ms·

You seem to be confused, developers work with text. What more can computing power bring to text? The only thing all that CPU and GPU power brought to the deskto

You seem to be confused, developers work with text. What more can computing power bring to text? The only thing all that CPU and GPU power brought to the desktop is useless power wasting eye candy like beryl or whatever it's called now. Plus, in this environmentally conscious time, isn't it nice that people want to do more with less? Why waste GPU cycles adding shadows and lens flares to text? I don't get it. I like using tiling WM's (dwm and Awesome) because they organize windows for me and nothing is hidden in a bar. The concept of workspaces is much nicer than shuffling windows around a screen. I can quickly jump between workspaces and immediatly see my windows and contents. What more do I need? GPU rendering of windows? Why? I along with many others enjoy doing more with less. My old i3 Thinkpad runs just fine. Plays youtube videos, streams music and edits text using OpenBSD. What more do I need? Why pointlessly throw more at a problem that doesn't need it?

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
>You seem to be confused, developers work with text. What more can computing power bring to text? The only thing all that CPU and GPU power brought to the desktop is useless power wasting eye candy like beryl or whatever it's called now. Yes, we work in text. Yes, text is quick easy and powerful. That does mean it is the right tool for every job. Not everyone works somewhere taking down all your machines in some region for 30min because you typo'd -a when you meant -s when invoking some automation script is no big deal. Some of us work places where having normal operations carry the risk of that kind of thing isn't ok. GUIs when designed at least half-assedly make it significantly harder for people to enter dumb, dangerous or erroneous inputs while working at the same speed. There's nothing preventing you from using a GUI to generate commands that will be passed as command line args and showing that to the user. In the few cases where you need to do something unsupported just invoke the command from the CLI. Tossing up a quick web UI to streamline routine tasks while making users go out of their way to do non-routine or dangerous tasks is worthwhile at all but the smallest scale. Yes, it's quicker and easier to write a CLI tool but restricting the amount of rope just laying around to hang yourself with is part of operational maturity. With a GUI people at least have to go out of their way to find the rope. Edit: Am I being down-voted because my opinion is unreasonable or just because it makes some people uncomfortable? At least tell me why I'm so wrong.
- vidarh 7y ago
  You're likely being downvoted because your comment is implying that risk of errors is a feature of GUI vs. CLI rather than about sound interface design. You're conflating two entirely separate issues: Making it harder to trigger dangerous functionality vs. how the functionality is presented to a user. Nothing prevents hiding dangerous options behind extra steps in a CLI either. I work mostly in text mode, but I also do use various simple GUI tools, and I half-way sympathise with what you want, though. What I've found is that in fact there are lots of nice little tools written to support minimal WMs or systems without desktop environments that are very useful in that respect. E.g. tools like rofi, dmenu and the like are great to wrap tiny GUIs around functionality that is hard to remember how to use correctly. I work mostly in my own text-editor, and instead of writing a UI from scratch for it, I depend on the IPC support for the bspwm window manager to implement multiple windows/panes (the editor buffers are maintained in a server process, so I can have multiple views to the same buffer), and use rofi to bring up UI's. E.g. I have little scripts that bring up rofi with suitable input to select a server to ssh to, open a file in my editor, run a yarn/npm/make target, select a theme for my editor, switch buffers in my editors etc. Most of them are a handful of lines at most. I'd love to see more tools like that, which makes building simple tool-specific GUIs for scripts easy.
JasonFruit 7y ago
This is exactly my reasoning — I love tools that do amazing things with minimal resources. I have a ten-year-old Thinkpad X300 running Debian with JWM. I mostly work in Emacs, terminal emulators, and a browser, so it performs very well indeed. Why would I want to spend a couple thousand dollars to have 3D titlebars on my terminal windows and run an OS that takes three times as long to start, when a $70 system does exactly what I need? It's not for everyone, sure — if I did a lot of video editing, or played games, it would be different — but it's more than sufficient for me, even with minor photo editing and CAD work. If only I could find a car that adheres to the same principles!
Crinus 7y ago
> You seem to be confused No i am not confused, i'm perfectly aware of what i am seeing and writing, thank you. > developers work with text. What more can computing power bring to text? This is highly myopic, there is more to development tools that just source code and even visualization of source code and programs do benefit from being able to work with graphics. There is more to computing and programming than a 70s terminal. And people use computers for more than programming. > I like using tiling WM's (dwm and Awesome) because they organize windows for me and nothing is hidden in a bar. The concept of workspaces is much nicer than shuffling windows around a screen. I can quickly jump between workspaces and immediatly see my windows and contents. Sure, although workspaces are available in overlapping window setups too. The rest you mention are just personal preferences, my comment weren't about liking tiling window managers over overlapping windows, it was about using those (and lightweight window managers - i included overlapping window managers too there) using them due to their resource use. > What more do I need? GPU rendering of windows? Why? I don't know but i have a feeling you'll just call irrelevant whatever i suggest. But honestly... > I along with many others enjoy doing more with less. My old i3 Thinkpad runs just fine. Plays youtube videos, streams music and edits text using OpenBSD. What more do I need? Why pointlessly throw more at a problem that doesn't need it? ...i think you totally missed the point of what i wrote. My point wasn't to throw more at a problem and especially not be wasteful about resources. Using and -especially- writing efficient software doesn't imply 70s terminal UIs. A Pentium at 133MHz with 32MB of RAM, a machine that is a fraction of power of even the first Raspberry Pi, can run at comfortable performance an interface as rich as Windows 98. Even the lowest of the low performance laptops you can get your hands on today will have a ton more power, yet people treat it like it isn't anything more than a dumb terminal.
- pasabagi 7y ago
  I don't really like the sound of my computer fan - so while it's nice to have a relatively good cpu, I still don't want it to be running flat-out all the time. Also, I'm not really sure what the point is of GUIs, other than looking flashy. I do a lot of 3D modeling, and I really don't like clicking around the menus whenever I have to. I figure that's just taste.
  - 7y ago
atq2119 7y ago
Slightly off-topic, but > GPU rendering of windows? Why? GPU rendering of windows is likely more power-efficient than doing the same rendering work on the CPU. Of course, once GPU rendering is possible, developers tend to fool themselves into thinking lots of animations and effects are a good idea, which then sucks up the efficiency gains again...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

dsfyu404ed 7y ago

>You seem to be confused, developers work with text. What more can computing power bring to text? The only thing all that CPU and GPU power brought to the desktop is useless power wasting eye candy like beryl or whatever it's called now. Yes, we work in text. Yes, text is quick easy and powerful. That does mean it is the right tool for every job. Not everyone works somewhere taking down all your machines in some region for 30min because you typo'd -a when you meant -s when invoking some automation script is no big deal. Some of us work places where having normal operations carry the risk of that kind of thing isn't ok. GUIs when designed at least half-assedly make it significantly harder for people to enter dumb, dangerous or erroneous inputs while working at the same speed. There's nothing preventing you from using a GUI to generate commands that will be passed as command line args and showing that to the user. In the few cases where you need to do something unsupported just invoke the command from the CLI. Tossing up a quick web UI to streamline routine tasks while making users go out of their way to do non-routine or dangerous tasks is worthwhile at all but the smallest scale. Yes, it's quicker and easier to write a CLI tool but restricting the amount of rope just laying around to hang yourself with is part of operational maturity. With a GUI people at least have to go out of their way to find the rope. Edit: Am I being down-voted because my opinion is unreasonable or just because it makes some people uncomfortable? At least tell me why I'm so wrong.

vidarh 7y ago
You're likely being downvoted because your comment is implying that risk of errors is a feature of GUI vs. CLI rather than about sound interface design. You're conflating two entirely separate issues: Making it harder to trigger dangerous functionality vs. how the functionality is presented to a user. Nothing prevents hiding dangerous options behind extra steps in a CLI either. I work mostly in text mode, but I also do use various simple GUI tools, and I half-way sympathise with what you want, though. What I've found is that in fact there are lots of nice little tools written to support minimal WMs or systems without desktop environments that are very useful in that respect. E.g. tools like rofi, dmenu and the like are great to wrap tiny GUIs around functionality that is hard to remember how to use correctly. I work mostly in my own text-editor, and instead of writing a UI from scratch for it, I depend on the IPC support for the bspwm window manager to implement multiple windows/panes (the editor buffers are maintained in a server process, so I can have multiple views to the same buffer), and use rofi to bring up UI's. E.g. I have little scripts that bring up rofi with suitable input to select a server to ssh to, open a file in my editor, run a yarn/npm/make target, select a theme for my editor, switch buffers in my editors etc. Most of them are a handful of lines at most. I'd love to see more tools like that, which makes building simple tool-specific GUIs for scripts easy.

JasonFruit 7y ago

This is exactly my reasoning — I love tools that do amazing things with minimal resources. I have a ten-year-old Thinkpad X300 running Debian with JWM. I mostly work in Emacs, terminal emulators, and a browser, so it performs very well indeed. Why would I want to spend a couple thousand dollars to have 3D titlebars on my terminal windows and run an OS that takes three times as long to start, when a $70 system does exactly what I need? It's not for everyone, sure — if I did a lot of video editing, or played games, it would be different — but it's more than sufficient for me, even with minor photo editing and CAD work. If only I could find a car that adheres to the same principles!

Crinus 7y ago

> You seem to be confused No i am not confused, i'm perfectly aware of what i am seeing and writing, thank you. > developers work with text. What more can computing power bring to text? This is highly myopic, there is more to development tools that just source code and even visualization of source code and programs do benefit from being able to work with graphics. There is more to computing and programming than a 70s terminal. And people use computers for more than programming. > I like using tiling WM's (dwm and Awesome) because they organize windows for me and nothing is hidden in a bar. The concept of workspaces is much nicer than shuffling windows around a screen. I can quickly jump between workspaces and immediatly see my windows and contents. Sure, although workspaces are available in overlapping window setups too. The rest you mention are just personal preferences, my comment weren't about liking tiling window managers over overlapping windows, it was about using those (and lightweight window managers - i included overlapping window managers too there) using them due to their resource use. > What more do I need? GPU rendering of windows? Why? I don't know but i have a feeling you'll just call irrelevant whatever i suggest. But honestly... > I along with many others enjoy doing more with less. My old i3 Thinkpad runs just fine. Plays youtube videos, streams music and edits text using OpenBSD. What more do I need? Why pointlessly throw more at a problem that doesn't need it? ...i think you totally missed the point of what i wrote. My point wasn't to throw more at a problem and especially not be wasteful about resources. Using and -especially- writing efficient software doesn't imply 70s terminal UIs. A Pentium at 133MHz with 32MB of RAM, a machine that is a fraction of power of even the first Raspberry Pi, can run at comfortable performance an interface as rich as Windows 98. Even the lowest of the low performance laptops you can get your hands on today will have a ton more power, yet people treat it like it isn't anything more than a dumb terminal.

pasabagi 7y ago
I don't really like the sound of my computer fan - so while it's nice to have a relatively good cpu, I still don't want it to be running flat-out all the time. Also, I'm not really sure what the point is of GUIs, other than looking flashy. I do a lot of 3D modeling, and I really don't like clicking around the menus whenever I have to. I figure that's just taste.
- 7y ago

atq2119 7y ago

Slightly off-topic, but > GPU rendering of windows? Why? GPU rendering of windows is likely more power-efficient than doing the same rendering work on the CPU. Of course, once GPU rendering is possible, developers tend to fool themselves into thinking lots of animations and effects are a good idea, which then sucks up the efficiency gains again...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]