6 ms·

X Could Learn a Lot from Vista, Windows 7

52 points by iamelgringo 17y ago

acg 17y ago
One of those articles where the author has a preference and justifies it because something on the other platform doesn't work well. Then does the dramatic the-whole-stack-is-wrong routine making the other system look next to godly. Then the comments turn into a battle of who's opinion matters more and why. No real content apart from perhaps a few bug reports.
VBprogrammer 17y ago
An article complaining about a single failure mode, which I personally have never experienced, and how that makes all of Linux completely unusable. I have to wonder, if the author is happy with Windows and its gold plated video stack why does he feel the need to try Ubuntu?
- derefr 17y ago
  A comment—complaining about an article that complains about a specific X in Y, and compares it to a better X in Z—suggesting that the poster use Z instead of Y. (I have a theory that this template covers about 10% of IT-related blog post replies by weight.) I have to wonder, haven't you ever used something that's better in almost every way, but worse in one important one? You don't spend time writing a blog post about Y's failures unless you love Y, and want it to get better (or are getting paid by Z, but that's only applicable to very well-known bloggers.)
  - apotheon 17y ago
    That's only relevant to the discussion at hand if the person in question actually seems to believe that Y is better than Z in all ways except one. Instead, he appears to believe that Z is better than Y in all ways, period, and uses Y just to have reasons to complain.
- planckscnst 17y ago
  But it's not a single failure mode. Indeed, any time the X server crashes, every open X app is lost.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    Right, and every time Microsoft Windows crashes you lose all your applications as well. Sorry, but Vista does not solve that problem, I don't have any experience with windows 7 so I can't comment on that. All I know is that even if I do something simple on a windows box it requires a reboot. Which pretty much happens every couple of days when you really work a lot with windows, which will reset the counter but will not count as a 'crash'.
    - planckscnst 17y ago
      Yeah, but I didn't say when Linux crashes, I said when the X server crashes. When the equivalent happens in Windows, well, if you read the article, you know what happens.
      - jacquesm 17y ago
        For those rare cases when a windows display driver crash will not take the whole machine with it (usually by freezing or bluescreening) you might get out of it that way. But for the majority of those cases you'll have very little choice but to reach for the power button and keep it pressed for 10 very long seconds. Again, this is anecdotal, but I have never seen windows recover from any kind of crash in a graceful way. There are several layers to this stuff, hardware, driver, display server, window manager + applications. If any layer 'below' your application crashes you're lucky to keep your data (whatever the operating system). Now, I don't do the things the author refers to (switching screen modes to full screen and back and stuff like that), which might easily be why I never see these issues and for him they are common. But to suggest that in windows (where the lines between the layers are much more blurry than they should be) is 'crash proof' in any way shape or measure has me chuckling a bit. My linux machines (servers & desktops) go down when: - the power fails - I have to move - I upgrade kernels - hardware failures (mostly disks, occasionally a power supply or a memory bank) Other than that they're on, up & running 24x7 year after year.
mgunes 17y ago
You don't know that the majority of the X drivers for high-performance hardware are closed source and proprietary, and are developed independently of X, at times going in conflicting directions with it (take the NVIDIA proprietary driver), you completely disregard the huge amount of work that's been going into modernizing X and the free software video drivers in the last five years, and demonstrate a disinterest in where the problems actually are and just demand that they be fixed, and top it all with nonsense weasel words such as "Microsoft has shown us how it's done, now all the X world needs to do is follow" (Shown what? Where is the code?) and expect to be taken seriously? Sorry, the standards for what passes as good criticism have surely gone down, but not that much. This is unmistakable web forum pseudo-technicalism: rant about your pet bug, dress it up with some technical jargon as if you had an idea about what's actually going on under the hood, flat out refuse to get educated on it, "support" it with some other unrelated issue (here, Evolution), add a comparison to $OTHER_OS, and there you have it.
- idlewords 17y ago
  The guy's tone may be somewhat shrill, but that doesn't make his argument bogus. With all due respect to the X developers, it's nearly 2010. It seems reasonable to demand that resizing a window not crash every open app.
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    His only argument is "X clients should not crash when the X server crashes". I can't see a real reason, linkbait excepted (very effective linkbait, BTW), for such an inflammatory article. X is light years ahead of Windows in many regards. I do daily work that would be very uncomfortable to perform without being able to forward X requests over ssh. To do that on Windows servers, I would be required to run a tsclient inside another tsclient. The mere idea terrifies me.
  - pohl 17y ago
    The one thing that makes the argument bogus is its false premise, best illustrated by this sentence: "Let's take a look at operating systems with a modern, advanced, and robust graphics stack: Windows Vista and Windows 7." Isn't there something conspicuously missing from that list? While Windows 7 may be better than its predecessor Vista, which itself was a step forward in graphics architecture, why conclude that X needs to learn from them in particular? I mean: if Thom Holwerda's thesis is "X.org, start your photocopiers," he could find better inspiration.
planckscnst 17y ago
He clearly has no idea what he's talking about, but he does have two points. 1) Resizing a window shouldn't cause a crash - this is true, but very specific to his setup; most users will not experience the behavior he saw here. 2) If X crashes (which it inevitably does from time to time), it should not also kill every app you have going. This one is a huge huge problem.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  I've been using X for about 5 years straight now, before that other versions of it (mostly SGI stuff). I've had exactly one crash. In all that time. This machine is on 24x7 and on average has 10-15 (large) windows open on two screens (soon to be 4). X is absolutely rock solid in my experience, but as with all anecdotal evidence that doesn't mean much. When you start playing around with custom window managers and all kinds of other esoterics I don't doubt that it is possible to crash X (the time I did it it was when I tried to set up an X server across 4 displays on 4 different computers, http://pics.ww.com/v/jacques/projects/screen/dscf1072.jpg.html?g2_imageViewsIndex=1 http://pics.ww.com/v/jacques/projects/screen/dscf1072.jpg.ht... ). I was pissed off but I was really asking for it.
  - windsurfer 17y ago
    I tried to set up an X server across 4 displays on 4 different computers Maybe Vista 7 should learn a few things from X...
  - thras 17y ago
    Try turning on Compiz. You'll see some crashing.
    - kidko 17y ago
      I did that a few months ago, actually. The only crash I had was because I forgot to update my driver for the new video card I got. Since then, it's been as stable as my pre-Compiz system.
    - apotheon 17y ago
chanux 17y ago
Ok I'll reply in a USERs point of view. I installed ubuntu 9.04 on my HP mini-note 2133 (not a quad-core 4GB powerhouse). I don't use evolution but everything else run perfect for me. I too installed VLC and it plays videos well enough (some minor problems when jumping forward while watching HD). It never crashed on me. Oh wait.. it crashed 3 times after I installed conky. First time it just happened. I made it happen the second time to check, third time to cofirm. Yeah X.org some times pisses me off but gimme a reason why I should complain? It gave me all these things for free & there should be lot's of people working to improve it. I honor the effort of everyone who made this free OS (all the tools together) possible. I don't blame at little problems, I just point them out. I contribute when I can.
GeneralMaximus 17y ago
Does anyone here know how OSX's Quartz handles stuff? Apple say it's "based on PDF technology". Does that mean my entire screen is a big PDF file?
- jws 17y ago
  PDF was developed as the best small API rendering system from the decades of Postscript experience that preceded it. The API and the way you think about drawing in OS X match the concepts of PDF. There is a "display PDF" ability, but down at the nuts and bolts level it is just similar concepts.
jawngee 17y ago
And the winner is ... OS X. I use Ubuntu on a laptop when I'm at home (rarely) couch surfing. It's miserable. Slow redraws, down syndrom-ish user interfaces, the whole thing feels and acts cheap. While the X protocol has certain awesome advantages, it's a miserable choice for desktop. I get and appreciate the network transparency of it all, but shit, VNC is often faster for me than forwarding X over SSH. Are there alternatives? I dunno, but graphics drivers, displays and plumbing are distinct advantages for both Windows and OS X when it comes to desktop interaction.
- apotheon 17y ago
  > I use Ubuntu on a laptop when I'm at home (rarely) couch surfing. It's miserable. Slow redraws, down syndrom-ish user interfaces, the whole thing feels and acts cheap. Why are you using Ubuntu, then? I suspect it's more your choice of distribution and GUI environment that's at fault for your unsatisfying user experience than anything inherent to Linux or X. On FreeBSD with AHWM (instead of Ubuntu with GNOME), I don't have such issues at all. The only stuff that's slow is waiting for Firefox, OO.o, and the GIMP to open the first time I open each of them after starting the computer. On the rare occasion that I use MS Windows, by contrast, I tend to spend a lot of time waiting. I can't stand GNOME and KDE (especially KDE 4). The sitting around and waiting for stuff to happen is far too reminiscent of MS Windows for my taste. > I get and appreciate the network transparency of it all, but shit, VNC is often faster for me than forwarding X over SSH. Are you using SSH compression? I mean, sure, X over SSH is slow across the Internet, even with compression, but then MS Windows Remote Desktop is no blazing-fast, realtime operation under those circumstances, either. > displays and plumbing I'm not sure what you mean by that.
  - trezor 17y ago
    I mean, sure, X over SSH is slow across the Internet, even with compression, but then MS Windows Remote Desktop is no blazing-fast, realtime operation under those circumstances, either. Actually it is. I can work with remote desktop sessions over a cellphone link without having too much latency issues. Remote Desktop is definitely a result of good engineering. Add support for local drives, printers, clipboards, USB devices etc and it's one of those very neat things which makes me love working with multiple Windows servers remotely.
aero142 17y ago
I run Ubuntu almost exclusively now because it is the most usable operating system for me. From years of running XP I can tell you that it did not handle driver crashes well and I lost all my files when it crashed. I have used Vista and I know that I have to restart it very frequently because of driver issues. I really hope that Microsoft has made a significant technical investment in Windows 7 and I hope that they have made the kernel more robust when dealing with crashes, but I assume that was a lot of work and really expensive to develop. It is kind of ridiculous to say that Linux is crap because it doesn't have a very advanced feature from an OS that isn't even available to the general public yet. As a Linux user, I can tell you that Microsoft has a few things to learn from others as well. It is called competition and it is what makes things get better, and there is plenty of room for improvement all around.
intellectronica 17y ago
It's a bit hard to comment on this article, because much of it is, in fact, true. I do have two problems with it, though: 1. Windows 7, which is indeed a great product - very polished and with a very advanced graphics stack, nevertheless has problems. I've been running it as a secondary OS for some things for a while, and it definitely exhibited problems, in particular with video playback. Media Player crashed, requiring me to reboot before I can play video again, the desktop manager crashed many times, making it impossible to do simple file operations without restarting and driver management was often very difficult and problematic. Idealizing W7 (or Vista, or OS X) does nothing to advance the state of Linux or computing in general. 2. Sure, it's absolutely fine for users to complain about low quality software, but if you want to make a difference and improve things (and presumably, if you bother to write an article about this, you do) the more effective way to do that is not to vent your anger and start a flame war, but actually deal with the real problems. Are Evolution, Totem, VLC or X.org buggy? Help identify the bugs and report them to the projects, so that they have a chance to fix them. When the fix is out, help testing it. You don't need to be a nerd or a geek or a dork or anything to do that - just a good citizen. It takes relatively little of your time, and you'll know you've actually done something to improve things, which will benefit you and the rest of the world in the future. That's not something you can do with W7 ot Vista, and that's where the power of the free software community lies. Complaining is so easy, and can sometimes feel fun (in a very immature and destructive way), but if you're not prepared to do anything to improve the situation, don't expect it to improve itself.
thenduks 17y ago
I'm not sure... I've never had a windows display driver crash and simply restart ('showing aero basic for a few seconds'). Seems to me that this usually results in a blue screen. While I'm obviously not OK with X crashing and taking running apps with it (doesn't happen to me running arch+xmonad), it's still better than a bluescreen. Anything I was running in screen is fine, firefox will re-open my tabs, etc.
known 17y ago
Users do not run X. They run Applications. Hence it is rational to compare Usability, Performance and Functionality of GNOME/KDE/FOSS Applications with Microsoft Applications.
zandorg 17y ago
I played DVDs fine in Xine under SUSE. I think in this case, that he's not doing it right by using VLC.

52 points by iamelgringo 17y ago

acg 17y ago

One of those articles where the author has a preference and justifies it because something on the other platform doesn't work well. Then does the dramatic the-whole-stack-is-wrong routine making the other system look next to godly. Then the comments turn into a battle of who's opinion matters more and why. No real content apart from perhaps a few bug reports.

VBprogrammer 17y ago

An article complaining about a single failure mode, which I personally have never experienced, and how that makes all of Linux completely unusable. I have to wonder, if the author is happy with Windows and its gold plated video stack why does he feel the need to try Ubuntu?

derefr 17y ago
A comment—complaining about an article that complains about a specific X in Y, and compares it to a better X in Z—suggesting that the poster use Z instead of Y. (I have a theory that this template covers about 10% of IT-related blog post replies by weight.) I have to wonder, haven't you ever used something that's better in almost every way, but worse in one important one? You don't spend time writing a blog post about Y's failures unless you love Y, and want it to get better (or are getting paid by Z, but that's only applicable to very well-known bloggers.)
- apotheon 17y ago
  That's only relevant to the discussion at hand if the person in question actually seems to believe that Y is better than Z in all ways except one. Instead, he appears to believe that Z is better than Y in all ways, period, and uses Y just to have reasons to complain.
planckscnst 17y ago
But it's not a single failure mode. Indeed, any time the X server crashes, every open X app is lost.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Right, and every time Microsoft Windows crashes you lose all your applications as well. Sorry, but Vista does not solve that problem, I don't have any experience with windows 7 so I can't comment on that. All I know is that even if I do something simple on a windows box it requires a reboot. Which pretty much happens every couple of days when you really work a lot with windows, which will reset the counter but will not count as a 'crash'.
  - planckscnst 17y ago
    Yeah, but I didn't say when Linux crashes, I said when the X server crashes. When the equivalent happens in Windows, well, if you read the article, you know what happens.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      For those rare cases when a windows display driver crash will not take the whole machine with it (usually by freezing or bluescreening) you might get out of it that way. But for the majority of those cases you'll have very little choice but to reach for the power button and keep it pressed for 10 very long seconds. Again, this is anecdotal, but I have never seen windows recover from any kind of crash in a graceful way. There are several layers to this stuff, hardware, driver, display server, window manager + applications. If any layer 'below' your application crashes you're lucky to keep your data (whatever the operating system). Now, I don't do the things the author refers to (switching screen modes to full screen and back and stuff like that), which might easily be why I never see these issues and for him they are common. But to suggest that in windows (where the lines between the layers are much more blurry than they should be) is 'crash proof' in any way shape or measure has me chuckling a bit. My linux machines (servers & desktops) go down when: - the power fails - I have to move - I upgrade kernels - hardware failures (mostly disks, occasionally a power supply or a memory bank) Other than that they're on, up & running 24x7 year after year.

mgunes 17y ago

You don't know that the majority of the X drivers for high-performance hardware are closed source and proprietary, and are developed independently of X, at times going in conflicting directions with it (take the NVIDIA proprietary driver), you completely disregard the huge amount of work that's been going into modernizing X and the free software video drivers in the last five years, and demonstrate a disinterest in where the problems actually are and just demand that they be fixed, and top it all with nonsense weasel words such as "Microsoft has shown us how it's done, now all the X world needs to do is follow" (Shown what? Where is the code?) and expect to be taken seriously? Sorry, the standards for what passes as good criticism have surely gone down, but not that much. This is unmistakable web forum pseudo-technicalism: rant about your pet bug, dress it up with some technical jargon as if you had an idea about what's actually going on under the hood, flat out refuse to get educated on it, "support" it with some other unrelated issue (here, Evolution), add a comparison to $OTHER_OS, and there you have it.

idlewords 17y ago
The guy's tone may be somewhat shrill, but that doesn't make his argument bogus. With all due respect to the X developers, it's nearly 2010. It seems reasonable to demand that resizing a window not crash every open app.
- rbanffy 17y ago
  His only argument is "X clients should not crash when the X server crashes". I can't see a real reason, linkbait excepted (very effective linkbait, BTW), for such an inflammatory article. X is light years ahead of Windows in many regards. I do daily work that would be very uncomfortable to perform without being able to forward X requests over ssh. To do that on Windows servers, I would be required to run a tsclient inside another tsclient. The mere idea terrifies me.
- pohl 17y ago
  The one thing that makes the argument bogus is its false premise, best illustrated by this sentence: "Let's take a look at operating systems with a modern, advanced, and robust graphics stack: Windows Vista and Windows 7." Isn't there something conspicuously missing from that list? While Windows 7 may be better than its predecessor Vista, which itself was a step forward in graphics architecture, why conclude that X needs to learn from them in particular? I mean: if Thom Holwerda's thesis is "X.org, start your photocopiers," he could find better inspiration.

planckscnst 17y ago

He clearly has no idea what he's talking about, but he does have two points. 1) Resizing a window shouldn't cause a crash - this is true, but very specific to his setup; most users will not experience the behavior he saw here. 2) If X crashes (which it inevitably does from time to time), it should not also kill every app you have going. This one is a huge huge problem.

jacquesm 17y ago
I've been using X for about 5 years straight now, before that other versions of it (mostly SGI stuff). I've had exactly one crash. In all that time. This machine is on 24x7 and on average has 10-15 (large) windows open on two screens (soon to be 4). X is absolutely rock solid in my experience, but as with all anecdotal evidence that doesn't mean much. When you start playing around with custom window managers and all kinds of other esoterics I don't doubt that it is possible to crash X (the time I did it it was when I tried to set up an X server across 4 displays on 4 different computers, http://pics.ww.com/v/jacques/projects/screen/dscf1072.jpg.html?g2_imageViewsIndex=1 http://pics.ww.com/v/jacques/projects/screen/dscf1072.jpg.ht... ). I was pissed off but I was really asking for it.
- windsurfer 17y ago
  I tried to set up an X server across 4 displays on 4 different computers Maybe Vista 7 should learn a few things from X...
- thras 17y ago
  Try turning on Compiz. You'll see some crashing.
  - kidko 17y ago
    I did that a few months ago, actually. The only crash I had was because I forgot to update my driver for the new video card I got. Since then, it's been as stable as my pre-Compiz system.
  - apotheon 17y ago

chanux 17y ago

Ok I'll reply in a USERs point of view. I installed ubuntu 9.04 on my HP mini-note 2133 (not a quad-core 4GB powerhouse). I don't use evolution but everything else run perfect for me. I too installed VLC and it plays videos well enough (some minor problems when jumping forward while watching HD). It never crashed on me. Oh wait.. it crashed 3 times after I installed conky. First time it just happened. I made it happen the second time to check, third time to cofirm. Yeah X.org some times pisses me off but gimme a reason why I should complain? It gave me all these things for free & there should be lot's of people working to improve it. I honor the effort of everyone who made this free OS (all the tools together) possible. I don't blame at little problems, I just point them out. I contribute when I can.

GeneralMaximus 17y ago

Does anyone here know how OSX's Quartz handles stuff? Apple say it's "based on PDF technology". Does that mean my entire screen is a big PDF file?

jws 17y ago
PDF was developed as the best small API rendering system from the decades of Postscript experience that preceded it. The API and the way you think about drawing in OS X match the concepts of PDF. There is a "display PDF" ability, but down at the nuts and bolts level it is just similar concepts.

jawngee 17y ago

And the winner is ... OS X. I use Ubuntu on a laptop when I'm at home (rarely) couch surfing. It's miserable. Slow redraws, down syndrom-ish user interfaces, the whole thing feels and acts cheap. While the X protocol has certain awesome advantages, it's a miserable choice for desktop. I get and appreciate the network transparency of it all, but shit, VNC is often faster for me than forwarding X over SSH. Are there alternatives? I dunno, but graphics drivers, displays and plumbing are distinct advantages for both Windows and OS X when it comes to desktop interaction.

apotheon 17y ago
> I use Ubuntu on a laptop when I'm at home (rarely) couch surfing. It's miserable. Slow redraws, down syndrom-ish user interfaces, the whole thing feels and acts cheap. Why are you using Ubuntu, then? I suspect it's more your choice of distribution and GUI environment that's at fault for your unsatisfying user experience than anything inherent to Linux or X. On FreeBSD with AHWM (instead of Ubuntu with GNOME), I don't have such issues at all. The only stuff that's slow is waiting for Firefox, OO.o, and the GIMP to open the first time I open each of them after starting the computer. On the rare occasion that I use MS Windows, by contrast, I tend to spend a lot of time waiting. I can't stand GNOME and KDE (especially KDE 4). The sitting around and waiting for stuff to happen is far too reminiscent of MS Windows for my taste. > I get and appreciate the network transparency of it all, but shit, VNC is often faster for me than forwarding X over SSH. Are you using SSH compression? I mean, sure, X over SSH is slow across the Internet, even with compression, but then MS Windows Remote Desktop is no blazing-fast, realtime operation under those circumstances, either. > displays and plumbing I'm not sure what you mean by that.
- trezor 17y ago
  I mean, sure, X over SSH is slow across the Internet, even with compression, but then MS Windows Remote Desktop is no blazing-fast, realtime operation under those circumstances, either. Actually it is. I can work with remote desktop sessions over a cellphone link without having too much latency issues. Remote Desktop is definitely a result of good engineering. Add support for local drives, printers, clipboards, USB devices etc and it's one of those very neat things which makes me love working with multiple Windows servers remotely.

aero142 17y ago

I run Ubuntu almost exclusively now because it is the most usable operating system for me. From years of running XP I can tell you that it did not handle driver crashes well and I lost all my files when it crashed. I have used Vista and I know that I have to restart it very frequently because of driver issues. I really hope that Microsoft has made a significant technical investment in Windows 7 and I hope that they have made the kernel more robust when dealing with crashes, but I assume that was a lot of work and really expensive to develop. It is kind of ridiculous to say that Linux is crap because it doesn't have a very advanced feature from an OS that isn't even available to the general public yet. As a Linux user, I can tell you that Microsoft has a few things to learn from others as well. It is called competition and it is what makes things get better, and there is plenty of room for improvement all around.

intellectronica 17y ago

It's a bit hard to comment on this article, because much of it is, in fact, true. I do have two problems with it, though: 1. Windows 7, which is indeed a great product - very polished and with a very advanced graphics stack, nevertheless has problems. I've been running it as a secondary OS for some things for a while, and it definitely exhibited problems, in particular with video playback. Media Player crashed, requiring me to reboot before I can play video again, the desktop manager crashed many times, making it impossible to do simple file operations without restarting and driver management was often very difficult and problematic. Idealizing W7 (or Vista, or OS X) does nothing to advance the state of Linux or computing in general. 2. Sure, it's absolutely fine for users to complain about low quality software, but if you want to make a difference and improve things (and presumably, if you bother to write an article about this, you do) the more effective way to do that is not to vent your anger and start a flame war, but actually deal with the real problems. Are Evolution, Totem, VLC or X.org buggy? Help identify the bugs and report them to the projects, so that they have a chance to fix them. When the fix is out, help testing it. You don't need to be a nerd or a geek or a dork or anything to do that - just a good citizen. It takes relatively little of your time, and you'll know you've actually done something to improve things, which will benefit you and the rest of the world in the future. That's not something you can do with W7 ot Vista, and that's where the power of the free software community lies. Complaining is so easy, and can sometimes feel fun (in a very immature and destructive way), but if you're not prepared to do anything to improve the situation, don't expect it to improve itself.

thenduks 17y ago

I'm not sure... I've never had a windows display driver crash and simply restart ('showing aero basic for a few seconds'). Seems to me that this usually results in a blue screen. While I'm obviously not OK with X crashing and taking running apps with it (doesn't happen to me running arch+xmonad), it's still better than a bluescreen. Anything I was running in screen is fine, firefox will re-open my tabs, etc.

known 17y ago

Users do not run X. They run Applications. Hence it is rational to compare Usability, Performance and Functionality of GNOME/KDE/FOSS Applications with Microsoft Applications.

zandorg 17y ago

I played DVDs fine in Xine under SUSE. I think in this case, that he's not doing it right by using VLC.