20 Jun
2013
20 Jun
'13
7:22 p.m.
On 20 June 2013 12:16, Alexander Schreiber <als at thangorodrim.de> wrote:
Conceded, yes. But Windows shows that this is possible on a
single-user OS with no multiuser support: it's one user at a time, per
machine. Yes, there are hacks to make it multiuser -- Terminal Server,
Winframe, Citrix, and desktop solutions such as Softxpand or BeTwin.
But as standard, it isn't. No vconsoles, no ssh or telnet, nothing.
Absolutely. But trying to be all things to all men leads to bloat.
To invoke the Pareto Principle, the way to slim, elegant S/W is to
work out the 20% of the features that are all that 80% of users need.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884
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:
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. 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 don't
need a multiuser PC. It's mine. I'm the only user. I only need
multiuser servers. It's great but it's baggage. Security, sure, some,
but not a minicomputer/server OS on my desktop.
Again, very useful: allows separating access privileges. Quite a bit
of the stuff even on my workstation needs neither full system access
(i.e. root) nor access to my user data. I want a
solid, multitasking, multithreading OS, running on lots of
cores, delivering a fast, responsive experience. I want rich media. I
want productivity apps, but Linux and C21 FOSS delivers all I want and
more, really. I don't need anything proprietary. I want flexible
networking and plug-and-play hardware. I don't need a huge fat
dual-slot GPU -- I just want 2 or 3 smallish cheap monitors.
Linux is a great server OS, but it's not a great desktop. Never was.
It's better than it used to be but it's still not great. It's good
enough, no more.
Works for and gives me all I need. But then my idea of a "graphical desktop
environment" has been "a couple browser windows and 20-50 xterms" for the
last 15+ years ;-)
As usual: different people, different use cases and needs ;-)