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Re: [TCLUG:3372] UI (was: Windows NT pricing)



On Thu, 14 Jan 1999, Michael Hicks wrote:

> I'm amazed that X is as stable as it is..

Me, too. It has crashed twice on me in 18 months -- two orders of
magnitude fewer times than either Mac OS or Windows has crashed on me.
I'll give X props for that, although it's more likely due to the superior
memory management of the kernel than X itself.

> X has probably crashed less on my box than the kernel.

Well, you run development kernels, right? :) I've only killed my kernel
twice, and once when I was *trying* to. :)

> Also, GTK/GDK (the toolkit I like most, at least visually) could
> probably be ported fairly easily -- GDK was changed to work with Win32,
> and therefore allowed all sorts of programs (like The GIMP) to suddenly
> run on it (well, sort of..).  Gnome could be running on almost any other
> graphics system in less than a month, if someone really wanted to do
> it..

You write to more than just the toolkit, so I'm not sure about this.

> Of course, if the Linux Community decides that there is something better
> than X, we'll probably start using it.  It's happened before in Linux:
> ext->ext2, a.out->libc5, libc5->glibc2, and so forth.

You mean a.out -> ELF. ;)

> If GTK/GDK gets ported, people will have a wealth of apps that already
> work, because _they_ would only need a re-compile.

Again, programs talk to the display server and/or graphics libraries as
well as the toolkit, so in every case you'd need more than just a
recompile.

> Looks to me that the most likely contender to replace X will be
> GGI/Berlin (Berlin runs on top of GGI, if I understand correctly).

Yes, so does YAX (YAX can also run on top of SVGAlib, and Mesa (GL), too).

_____________________________________________________________________________
Christopher Reid Palmer : reid@pconline.com : www.pconline.com/~reid/