6 ms·

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 time

by 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.
- apotheon 17y ago
  "Crash every other app"? Tell us what distribution you're using. I want to avoid it.
  - apotheon 17y ago
    I just noticed a weird typo. s/other/open/
- astine 17y ago
  I could not agree more. However, I've used Linux and the X stack for a while now, that has never happened to me. I've had applications killed that way, but never a whole X server.
tsuraan 17y ago
I think he understands that X will crash sometimes (he admits that Aero does), but what he wants is to not lose his running apps. I don't think that's unreasonable or whiny. Separating out a state representation server that's stable from the rendering server that's pretty likely to crash would be cool. It could also allow for *nix users to have something like RDP, which is one of the _very_ few things I actually admire about windows. I don't know enough about X to have any idea how much effort that would take, and from being on the X list for the past year, I know that a suggestion like that would be ignored without having code to back it up, but I still don't think it's a bad idea.
- _pi 17y ago
  >It could also allow for *nix users to have something like RDP, which is one of the _very_ few things I actually admire about windows. I HATE RDP. X.org was created to be net capable, you can do full desktop and window forwarding, we don't need this functionality it exists! (Especially because X.org window forwarding doesn't take screenshots)
  - tsuraan 17y ago
    X does window forwarding, and I love it, but it doesn't do remote session resuming. For that, you have to fall to things like VNC, which really isn't much more than streaming video. I'm fairly certain that RDP doesn't do that. Its performance on pan-pacific connections is completely acceptable, much better than clever video streaming systems like gotomeeting or webex. I've never had the chance to try VNC across the ocean, but I'm guessing it wouldn't be as nice as RDP either. Why do you think RDP does work by screenshot forwarding? I'm pretty certain it works by forwarding win API calls over a network, but I've never dug into the rdesktop source, so I could be completely mistaken.
    - nailer 17y ago
      There is a X proxy thingy that allows you to do session resuming just using the X protocol, but as you note it's an afterthought and not baked into the regular software an interface.
pj 17y ago
No offense to you personally, but your thoughts here are exactly why Linux won't take over the consumer pc market. People don't want ot learn what's going on under the hood. I cringe at the thought, but they may not have the aptitude to comprehend it even if the did want to learn it. Microsoft treats their consumers like their consumers don't know anything about computers. Most of them don't. Linux users are geniuses compared to most computer users and they are very curious. They also know enough about the technology by going through the ranks that they are apologetic about problems that occur. "Oh it's just a bug, here let me restart." Microsoft on the other hand writes an OS for any PC and any user. Any hardware combination and an almost infinite set of software installed and perhaps running simultaneously. I don't think people really give them enough credit for this enormous accomplishment. nix is written for the experts who know how to use the tool correctly. Try building a tool for people who know nothing about the tool or what it can do, the power it has, or how to not make mistakes with it. It's really* hard. *nix expects its users to know how to use it.
- patio11 17y ago
  Microsoft treats their consumers like their consumers don't know anything about computers. Most of them don't. In the same sense that Delta provides plane flights for people who don't know anything about basic preventative aircraft maintenance, the lazy ignorant bastards. The computer is not an end goal. The software is not an end goal. Knowing arcane trivia about the difference between the kernel and userspace is not the end goal. The end goal is get your work done better and faster so you can turn off the machine and punch out for the day. Microsoft gets that in a way that few OSS writers do.
  - apotheon 17y ago
    Perhaps you could explain, then, why MS Windows gets in my way so much that if I have to work there it takes me at least three times as long to get most tasks finished as it takes to get the same tasks done on FreeBSD.
    - pj 17y ago
nailer 17y ago
Your post hasn't addressed the point of the article, which is that drivers should be able to fail without destroying the users unsaved work. Great, some X drivers suck. That's no excuse for losing data. I'm also saddened that a post asking 'where is the code' as if that's a prerequisite to having an opinion on software is being nodded up on Hacker News. Do you by chance also have an opinion on politics? Have you drafted a bill to support these opinions? No, I didn't think so.
- mgunes 17y ago
  No, the point of the article is that "X is old and bloated, and that's why it crashes when I'm resizing a video, so it should be deprecated". And that's not sound technical reasoning, and is factually inaccurate. Windows graphics drivers that suck can also make you lose data. And neither Microsoft, nor your computer vendor can prevent you from installing drivers that suck, and losing data as a consequence. The same goes with X: if you use a closed-source binary blob that the X developers cannot diagnose, fix or improve, that simply doesn't work with XVideo in a composited environment, you can't blame X for the data you lost. Or would you blame Microsoft for the data you lost because of a crappy graphics driver that they didn't ship or lead you to use? As for "Where is the code?", my point was: without access to any in-depth technicality about how the Windows graphics stack actually manages to isolate crashes (assuming that it's actually a merit of it), claiming that Microsoft has "shown" how it should be done and all X needs to do is follow is rather off the mark. Microsoft may have implemented a high-quality graphics stack that's more stable than X, at least in certain scenarios. That doesn't mean that they have illustrated how it's done in a technical sense, or that their techniques are actually applicable to X, which has an entirely different architecture.
  - nailer 17y ago
    'Windows graphics drivers that suck can also make you lose data. ' No, actually, they usually can't. As the article states, drivers that crash don't stop the presentation server from working. Did you read the article?
    - 17y ago

by mgunes 17y ago

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.
apotheon 17y ago
"Crash every other app"? Tell us what distribution you're using. I want to avoid it.
- apotheon 17y ago
  I just noticed a weird typo. s/other/open/
astine 17y ago
I could not agree more. However, I've used Linux and the X stack for a while now, that has never happened to me. I've had applications killed that way, but never a whole X server.

tsuraan 17y ago

I think he understands that X will crash sometimes (he admits that Aero does), but what he wants is to not lose his running apps. I don't think that's unreasonable or whiny. Separating out a state representation server that's stable from the rendering server that's pretty likely to crash would be cool. It could also allow for *nix users to have something like RDP, which is one of the _very_ few things I actually admire about windows. I don't know enough about X to have any idea how much effort that would take, and from being on the X list for the past year, I know that a suggestion like that would be ignored without having code to back it up, but I still don't think it's a bad idea.

_pi 17y ago
>It could also allow for *nix users to have something like RDP, which is one of the _very_ few things I actually admire about windows. I HATE RDP. X.org was created to be net capable, you can do full desktop and window forwarding, we don't need this functionality it exists! (Especially because X.org window forwarding doesn't take screenshots)
- tsuraan 17y ago
  X does window forwarding, and I love it, but it doesn't do remote session resuming. For that, you have to fall to things like VNC, which really isn't much more than streaming video. I'm fairly certain that RDP doesn't do that. Its performance on pan-pacific connections is completely acceptable, much better than clever video streaming systems like gotomeeting or webex. I've never had the chance to try VNC across the ocean, but I'm guessing it wouldn't be as nice as RDP either. Why do you think RDP does work by screenshot forwarding? I'm pretty certain it works by forwarding win API calls over a network, but I've never dug into the rdesktop source, so I could be completely mistaken.
  - nailer 17y ago
    There is a X proxy thingy that allows you to do session resuming just using the X protocol, but as you note it's an afterthought and not baked into the regular software an interface.

pj 17y ago

No offense to you personally, but your thoughts here are exactly why Linux won't take over the consumer pc market. People don't want ot learn what's going on under the hood. I cringe at the thought, but they may not have the aptitude to comprehend it even if the did want to learn it. Microsoft treats their consumers like their consumers don't know anything about computers. Most of them don't. Linux users are geniuses compared to most computer users and they are very curious. They also know enough about the technology by going through the ranks that they are apologetic about problems that occur. "Oh it's just a bug, here let me restart." Microsoft on the other hand writes an OS for any PC and any user. Any hardware combination and an almost infinite set of software installed and perhaps running simultaneously. I don't think people really give them enough credit for this enormous accomplishment. nix is written for the experts who know how to use the tool correctly. Try building a tool for people who know nothing about the tool or what it can do, the power it has, or how to not make mistakes with it. It's really* hard. *nix expects its users to know how to use it.

patio11 17y ago
Microsoft treats their consumers like their consumers don't know anything about computers. Most of them don't. In the same sense that Delta provides plane flights for people who don't know anything about basic preventative aircraft maintenance, the lazy ignorant bastards. The computer is not an end goal. The software is not an end goal. Knowing arcane trivia about the difference between the kernel and userspace is not the end goal. The end goal is get your work done better and faster so you can turn off the machine and punch out for the day. Microsoft gets that in a way that few OSS writers do.
- apotheon 17y ago
  Perhaps you could explain, then, why MS Windows gets in my way so much that if I have to work there it takes me at least three times as long to get most tasks finished as it takes to get the same tasks done on FreeBSD.
  - pj 17y ago

nailer 17y ago

Your post hasn't addressed the point of the article, which is that drivers should be able to fail without destroying the users unsaved work. Great, some X drivers suck. That's no excuse for losing data. I'm also saddened that a post asking 'where is the code' as if that's a prerequisite to having an opinion on software is being nodded up on Hacker News. Do you by chance also have an opinion on politics? Have you drafted a bill to support these opinions? No, I didn't think so.

mgunes 17y ago
No, the point of the article is that "X is old and bloated, and that's why it crashes when I'm resizing a video, so it should be deprecated". And that's not sound technical reasoning, and is factually inaccurate. Windows graphics drivers that suck can also make you lose data. And neither Microsoft, nor your computer vendor can prevent you from installing drivers that suck, and losing data as a consequence. The same goes with X: if you use a closed-source binary blob that the X developers cannot diagnose, fix or improve, that simply doesn't work with XVideo in a composited environment, you can't blame X for the data you lost. Or would you blame Microsoft for the data you lost because of a crappy graphics driver that they didn't ship or lead you to use? As for "Where is the code?", my point was: without access to any in-depth technicality about how the Windows graphics stack actually manages to isolate crashes (assuming that it's actually a merit of it), claiming that Microsoft has "shown" how it should be done and all X needs to do is follow is rather off the mark. Microsoft may have implemented a high-quality graphics stack that's more stable than X, at least in certain scenarios. That doesn't mean that they have illustrated how it's done in a technical sense, or that their techniques are actually applicable to X, which has an entirely different architecture.
- nailer 17y ago
  'Windows graphics drivers that suck can also make you lose data. ' No, actually, they usually can't. As the article states, drivers that crash don't stop the presentation server from working. Did you read the article?
  - 17y ago