21 Jun
2013
21 Jun
'13
6:21 a.m.
On 21 June 2013 10:40, Jason Howe <jason at smbfc.net> wrote:
On Fri, 21 Jun 2013, Liam Proven wrote:
I submit that the majority of desktop *nix users are on Macs and
95%-99% of Mac users don't know what X.11 /is/ and have never used it.
On 20 June 2013 12:16, Alexander Schreiber
<als at thangorodrim.de> wrote:
I submit, that a majority of Desktop *nix users, also administrate remote
systems with X (*nix, VMS?), at which point firing an Xsession back at
yourself over ssh is a critical piece of functionality.
On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 02:23:44AM +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
I am sure it is very useful /if you need it./ However, I submit that
the majority of personal computer users do not need it.
Consider: the most popular desktop Unix by an order of magnitude (or
2) is Mac OS X. It's outsold all other commercial Unix variants put
together.
No X.11 and no networkable GUI.
Consider: the most popular Linux by a similar proportion, with many
hundreds of millions of users is Android. Its GUI is based on OpenGL
on the framebuffer, with no networkable GUI.
In fact it is fair to say that /only/ deskop/portable/handheld Unix
variants that *don't* have X.11 have been commercial successes.
On 15 June 2013 00:14, Peter Corlett <abuse at cabal.org.uk> wrote:
>
> BeOS was sort of a single user Unix: it was sufficiently POSIXy for me
> to fire
> up a shell prompt and feel at home, although it did not support
> multiple users
> at all.
For my money -- as someone whose hobby is OSes, basically, and who has
played with as many as I can lay hands upon for about 30y now -- BeOS
is the most important OS for home/personal computers in the last few
decades.
Which is, naturally, why it's obscure, dead & forgotten.
It had many of the best aspects of xNix -- it was POSIX-like, had a
familiar shell, etc. -- but was free of all the decades of cruft
around Unix. I mean, Mac OS X is a gorgeous OS, but it's huge, vastly
complex, not very flexible or customisable, and it's only quick
because it runs on massively powerful hardware.
I don't need a network-transparent GUI. I'm sure it's a great thing,
but in some 20y of using systems with X.11 available, I've /never/
needed that.
I use that regularly. It is an incredibly useful detail of the way the
X Window system is designed. So you can, e.g. run the process on the
machine where the big pile of data lives and have it displayed on your
workstation. Or run the process on the workstation inside the corporate
security perimeter, but have the display on your laptop in the hotel,
with the connection piped back through ssh. Though I do hear of a lot of people on this list
running X on Windows for
the above. When I got to the point, where I had more PuTTY sessions and
remote X windows on my desktop than native Windows apps, I relaized I was
just using the wrong tool for my job and made the jump to Linux for my
primary workstation.
When I had my Mac, one of the first things I did was install the X11.app.
Indeed, many of my coworkers have jumped ship to using a Mac as their
primary workstation - pretty sure they all have X11 installed as well.
Most techies do, in my experience. *I* do on *my* Macs, although mine
are all PowerPC-based & don't get used much any more. However, of
those installed copies of X11.app, I bet that the majority are used
for running /local/ X apps ported from other Unices.
I don't think android (nor iOS) on phones really
applies here. I don't
expect, nor need, the same type on windowing environment on a toy as I do on
a machine I use to get work done.
Conceded, yes. However, we are right in the middle of an explosion in
tablet sales and I think that within a few years (i.e. 3 at max) they
will significantly outnumber all desktops/notebooks put together.
Yes, I acknowledge that different user populations
have different needs,
however, to declare networkable X to be unneeded because *you've* needed it
or because it doesn't come natively bundled with Mac or handheld devices? I
could declare that Microsoft should stop selling Windows, because I don't
have a need for it -- but that would be ridiculous.
I'm not saying it's because /I/ don't need it. I'm saying it's
because
the majority of users don't and that is why the 2 best-selling *nix
OSes have discarded it and why the #1 desktop/notebook Linux distro is
working hard to get rid of it too.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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