Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/02/16
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]X11 is an unusable mess. They've been hacking on the thing since the late 1980s and there still isn't as single window manager for the system that is as usable as MacOS from 1984. Also, thanks to innovations like X11 and netscape, a single X11 app can crash and take the whole server down with it, which is pretty much like crashing windows back to the DOS prompt, or a blue screen or whatever. So the vaunted UNIX protected memory scheme is useless. I like OS bigot wars as much as anyone, and UNIX has a lot going for it in the server world, and I use it every day for development, but for normal desktop use by normal people, the UNIX people have been dreaming for 20 years that they could build something better than Windows or MacOS for normal people, but it will never happen. UNIX is for progrmamers, and it always will be. MacOS wasn't built orginally built with protected memory because the CPU in the original mac did not have hardware memory protection. Unfortunately, many critical apps came to depend on the fact that this protection was not there, so there was no practical way to put it in without sacrificing either compatibility or performance. Windows 98 and such has similar problems, but MS got some help from Intel on the hardware side, and Win95 and 98 are actually semi-protected. Windows NT has a memory protection scheme much like UNIX, and is fairly robust. If there is one lesson in software it is that there is no silver bullet. Free software does many things well, but it is no more a silver bullet than anything else. Personally, if it would support my laptop, I'd rather use BSD than Linux anyway. The linux internals really suck. But most people don't care, because they work just well enough. But don't delude yourself into thinking it's some magic piece of software beauty. It's a miracle it works at all, really. End of ramble. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail - only $35 a year! http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/