Unix

[flexibeast]

"Funny because it's true!" stuff:

Dilbert: Computer holy wars

Unix - The Hole Hawg

The X-Windows Disaster

:-)
 

Comments

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

X was way, way ahead of its time when it was built, and still ahead of its time in 1994 when that essay was written. Now everything else has caught up (and the hardware is more commonly capable of supporting it) it doesn't look quite so silly.

[flexibeast.livejournal.com]

Perhaps not quite so silly, but still rather silly, imho . . . . i've been using X for nearly 10 years, and its ludicrous complexity still frustrates me as a user. As a developer, i've been protected from some of the insanity by tooklits such as GTK+; but as a user, i'm still not protected from:

* having to dig around to find exactly where i need to change a resource to achieve the configuration i want (okay, admittedly, this most recently happened with xterm, which i use because i don't really have the resources to run heavyweight terms like GNOME terminal);

* having bizarre authorisation issues which confound me, despite digging around in various X-related man pages, Googling for answers, etc.;

* having to deal with applications using an often-annoying mixture of select/paste methods;

* the absurd amount of network bandwidth consumed by X - it's only with the advent of NX that (so i've heard) network usage is paired back to a more practical level. This becomes a concern when one is (as i am) running an LTSP-based system;

and so on. So ~12 years after the piece i linked to was written, many of the problems with X identified in the article still resonate with me . . . .