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In my opinion, there's one critical thing which is keeping Linux out of the non-nerd workstation market, and that's X11. The windowing system is slow, yet take

In my opinion, there's one critical thing which is keeping Linux out of the non-nerd workstation market, and that's X11. The windowing system is slow, yet takes more CPU than Windows. Animations (flash, the progress bar in fullscreen gnome-mplayer) bog down the system on low-end graphics cards (which saturate the market in the consumer desktop/laptop market). Scrolling a window up and down can be enough to lag the system into unusability. Microsoft invests hundreds of engineers on making the graphics system fast and responsive on any kind of graphics hardware. Linux needs to catch up in this field before they can play with the big boy. Someone needs to do something with X11.

bitwize 17y ago
In my opinion, there's one critical thing which is keeping Linux out of the non-nerd workstation market, and that's X11. In my opinion, that one thing is Unix. The Unix model is full of philosophical details which are appealing to programmers, but which have been thoroughly discredited in the end user space: the minimization and generalization of APIs, the minimization and generalization of the notion of what a "file" is, the process or task based model of interaction, etc. An end user OS needs to be document-centric instead of task-centric. It needs to have a spatial file manager, and support for that needs to be built into the filesystem. It needs a UI spec that is set in stone and backed up with usability research. The I/O patterns for a file on disk, the display, mouse, and sound card are all different; to get the most out of each the OS needs to provide for each specifically. These things are precisely what made the original Macintosh such a revolution: the designers at Apple were willing to completely rethink what an OS is and should do. These days not even Apple is so bold, as its OS is basically a reskinned Unix. (Of course, consumer electronics and not computers are their new primary market and where they focus the most innovation.)
GeneralMaximus 17y ago
Right on. I have always felt X was a horrible idea. OS X's Quartz, on the other hand, is a thing of beauty. Is Google going to use X for the Chrome OS or will they roll their own? EDIT: spelling.
- rms 17y ago
  I don't know if it's been stated officially, but nerd consensus seems to be that Google will be using something other than X.
Zak 17y ago
I've encouraged a number of people to give Linux a try on the desktop, and I've heard a complaint or two about it being too different, hard to use or missing some feature the complainer liked from another OS. I have never heard slow/unresponsive among the complaints. I've only heard this complaint from people who understood how X works and fundamentally disagreed with the design.
thwarted 17y ago
The windowing system is slow, yet takes more CPU than Windows. Nothing that takes a lot of CPU is going to be faster than something that takes less CPU for the same amount of work, so the "yet" doesn't make much sense. Animations (flash, the progress bar in fullscreen gnome-mplayer) bog down the system on low-end graphics cards (which saturate the market in the consumer desktop/laptop market). I have a 10 year old PCI Matrox MGA 2064W Millennium that runs X just fine, all consumer level modern chipsets are more powerful than this ancient piece that I'm still getting use out of. How does the progress bar in full-screen gnome bog down the system? The progress bar only animates during video playback or during dragging, and during that time, the machine is busy seeking, decoding and drawing video, so that's the most likely candidate for system bogginess, not the progress bar in full-screen mode.

bitwize 17y ago

In my opinion, there's one critical thing which is keeping Linux out of the non-nerd workstation market, and that's X11. In my opinion, that one thing is Unix. The Unix model is full of philosophical details which are appealing to programmers, but which have been thoroughly discredited in the end user space: the minimization and generalization of APIs, the minimization and generalization of the notion of what a "file" is, the process or task based model of interaction, etc. An end user OS needs to be document-centric instead of task-centric. It needs to have a spatial file manager, and support for that needs to be built into the filesystem. It needs a UI spec that is set in stone and backed up with usability research. The I/O patterns for a file on disk, the display, mouse, and sound card are all different; to get the most out of each the OS needs to provide for each specifically. These things are precisely what made the original Macintosh such a revolution: the designers at Apple were willing to completely rethink what an OS is and should do. These days not even Apple is so bold, as its OS is basically a reskinned Unix. (Of course, consumer electronics and not computers are their new primary market and where they focus the most innovation.)

GeneralMaximus 17y ago

Right on. I have always felt X was a horrible idea. OS X's Quartz, on the other hand, is a thing of beauty. Is Google going to use X for the Chrome OS or will they roll their own? EDIT: spelling.

rms 17y ago
I don't know if it's been stated officially, but nerd consensus seems to be that Google will be using something other than X.

Zak 17y ago

I've encouraged a number of people to give Linux a try on the desktop, and I've heard a complaint or two about it being too different, hard to use or missing some feature the complainer liked from another OS. I have never heard slow/unresponsive among the complaints. I've only heard this complaint from people who understood how X works and fundamentally disagreed with the design.

thwarted 17y ago

The windowing system is slow, yet takes more CPU than Windows. Nothing that takes a lot of CPU is going to be faster than something that takes less CPU for the same amount of work, so the "yet" doesn't make much sense. Animations (flash, the progress bar in fullscreen gnome-mplayer) bog down the system on low-end graphics cards (which saturate the market in the consumer desktop/laptop market). I have a 10 year old PCI Matrox MGA 2064W Millennium that runs X just fine, all consumer level modern chipsets are more powerful than this ancient piece that I'm still getting use out of. How does the progress bar in full-screen gnome bog down the system? The progress bar only animates during video playback or during dragging, and during that time, the machine is busy seeking, decoding and drawing video, so that's the most likely candidate for system bogginess, not the progress bar in full-screen mode.