4 ms·
What's fascinating to me is that X11 and Windows started at complete opposite ends of the spectrum. Then X11 never managed to be a really effective window mana
by hota_mazi 7y ago
What's fascinating to me is that X11 and Windows started at complete opposite ends of the spectrum.
Then X11 never managed to be a really effective window manager on a local workstation while Windows became really, really good at remote displays.
- josteink 7y agoThat can be explained by economics alone. There were no financial driver to make X11 a more optimal local solution. There were huge financial incentives for MS to make their terminal-server offering more appealing. And that’s all you need to explain the outcome.
- asveikau 7y agoI feel like this is short changing X. I have seen it as a good local solution over 20 years or so. Did you ever see those 90s commercial Unix workstations? Like from SGI? How about a Nokia N900? X on a smartphone. It ran pretty well. Today's smartphone hardware would run circles around that thing so I can only assume if somebody ported X to those it would also do fine. I feel like people see things they don't like or imperfections and bash the whole thing as useless. X had a lot of mileage. I use it frequently today and don't see a lot of problems.
- ttkciar 7y agoI am fascinated by the economy of packing three inaccuracies into that one sentence. (1) X11 is not a window manager, (2) There have been several really effective window managers for X11, (3) MS-Windows has never been good at remote display.