Devs should be testing on slow machines - Re: What, versions of Linux (or UNIX) are good on old 486 boxes?
21 Jun
2013
21 Jun
'13
5:44 a.m.
On Fri, 21 Jun 2013 03:22:55 +0100, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
On 20 June 2013 12:16, Alexander Schreiber <als at
thangorodrim.de> wrote:
The problem with most of this is that what you either do not realise, or
choose to ignore, is that there is a *very big* set of applications
which have *nothing whatsoever* to do with desktop users or mobile
phones - industrial control systems, traffic control systems, military
systems, all sorts of applications.
These non-desktop, non-mobile phone systems have completely different
requirements, and for many of them the facilities that X-Windows
provides are extremely useful, if not essential.
This isn't the first time you produce strawman arguments like this one.
I don't know why you keep doing it, surely it must be obvious from
reading the list that most people here are not concerned with what the
average consumer needs or wants, or with what is a commercial success in
the consumer arena. What becomes a "commercial success" according to
your definition (sold to millions of average consumers) depends very
little on technical merit and very much on marketing, trends, perceived
coolness, what celebrities do, and so on. There is a huge area of
applications outside of that world where technical merit is actually
important.
/Jonas
>On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 02:23:44AM +0100,
Liam Proven wrote:
> >>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.
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.
> >>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.
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.
> >>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;-)
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.
21 Jun
21 Jun
7:04 a.m.
New subject: Devs should be testing on slow machines - Re: What, versions of Linux (or UNIX) are good on old 486 boxes?
On 21 June 2013 13:44, Jonas Otter <jonas at otter.se> wrote:
On Fri, 21 Jun 2013 03:22:55 +0100, Liam Proven
<lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
And as I usually say -- and as usually gets completely ignored -- I am
sure that the older, less-populist ways of doing things are not going
to instantly go away. They will still be available, especially in FOSS
systems, and as long as people want them and use them and are willing
to either keep them in active maintenance and development, or are
willing to pay someone to do so, then long may they persist.
For me, what is interesting is the direction that the mainstream of
the computer industry is going. It moves like an am?ba: it extends
exploratory pseudopods in multiple directions at once, and when one of
them finds an advantage -- or if you like, when it finds a toe-hold in
some niche -- then the rest of the organism goes that way.
So what is interesting, I think, is to work out which of the many
little niches and crevices and crannies currently being explored is
the one (or one of the primary ones) that will set the new direction.
I personally am not so concerned with the little nooks and crannies
that have been left behind -- except that I like to own and play with
some of the vintage computers that I can now acquire for no money.
Which is why I'm on this list.
--
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 20 June 2013 12:16, Alexander Schreiber <als at thangorodrim.de> 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.
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.
The problem with most of this is that what you either do not realise, or
choose to ignore, is that there is a *very big* set of applications which
have *nothing whatsoever* to do with desktop users or mobile phones -
industrial control systems, traffic control systems, military systems, all
sorts of applications.
These non-desktop, non-mobile phone systems have completely different
requirements, and for many of them the facilities that X-Windows provides
are extremely useful, if not essential.
This isn't the first time you produce strawman arguments like this one. I
don't know why you keep doing it, surely it must be obvious from reading the
list that most people here are not concerned with what the average consumer
needs or wants, or with what is a commercial success in the consumer arena.
What becomes a "commercial success" according to your definition (sold to
millions of average consumers) depends very little on technical merit and
very much on marketing, trends, perceived coolness, what celebrities do, and
so on. There is a huge area of applications outside of that world where
technical merit is actually important. On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 02:23:44AM +0100, Liam
Proven wrote:
>>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. >>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;-) 
2:22 p.m.
New subject: Devs should be testing on slow machines - Re: What, versions of Linux (or UNIX) are good on old 486 boxes?
It was thus said that the Great Liam Proven once stated:
I personally am not so concerned with the little nooks and crannies
that have been left behind -- except that I like to own and play with
some of the vintage computers that I can now acquire for no money.
Which is why I'm on this list.
But I am. One little nook that seems to have been overlooked by the
mainstream computer industry is Synthesis OS, written back in the early 90s.
It could run Unix software *faster* than Unix, on the same hardware [1],
even though it was the furthest thing from Unix you could imagine. The best
explanation is "Just In Time compilation of the kernel" [2], which is even
more impressive when you consider it was written in assembly.
The thesis describing it [3] is mindblowing, and I keep reminding myself
to write the author to see if I could get a copy of the source code, just to
see how it worked.
But while JITs have become popular for languages (and by extension, user
code), no one seems to have picked it up for operating systems, which is a
shame since it seems the concept is just ripe for solving the C10M problem
[4].
-spc (And by "run Unix software faster than Unix," I mean, by an order of
magnitude faster ... )
[1] 68030 based systems.
[2] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SynthesisOs
[3] http://valerieaurora.org/synthesis/SynthesisOS/
[4] http://c10m.robertgraham.com/p/manifesto.html
8:12 a.m.
New subject: Devs should be testing on slow machines - Re: What, versions of Linux (or UNIX) are good on old 486 boxes?
On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 7:44 AM, Jonas Otter <jonas at otter.se> wrote:
Consider: the most popular desktop Unix by an order of magnitude (or
That's not entirely true... it does have X11 support, and I know it
works
to the extent that you can tunnel Xwindows from a remote machine to the OS
X desktop... not sure about the other way around (using a native X11
application) since I haven't had need to do that. It does have a few X apps
(Xeyes, Xterm,etc). I don't think they are installed by default anymore,
but they were in there as of Leopard.
I will say that using X11 remotely on anything but a really fast network
connection is painful though unless you're only using xterms or very simple
GUI apps. If it's really intensive sometimes I will Remote Desktop to my
work Windows 7 PC and run an X client from there.
2) is Mac OS X. It's outsold all other
commercial Unix variants put
together.
No X.11 and no networkable GUI.
8:30 a.m.
New subject: Devs should be testing on slow machines - Re: What, versions of Linux (or UNIX) are good on old 486 boxes?
On 21 June 2013 16:12, Geoffrey Oltmans <oltmansg at gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 7:44 AM, Jonas Otter <jonas
at otter.se> wrote:
It has an optional install, X11.app, which is a rootless X server
implemented as an Aqua app, rendering window contents via Quartz into
OS X windows - it does not include a window manager.
So yes, you can run X.11 apps on OS X, but OS X's native GUI is not
X-based and not X-compatible.
By comparison, there is ChoX11 for RISC OS, which translates X API
calls to RISC OS API calls and so allows X apps to run natively on the
RISC OS desktop, without an actual X server being involved at all:
http://www.riscos.info/index.php/ChoX11
The point of this comparison being:
* Being able to run X apps doesn't mean being based on X
* Being compatible with X does not mean having an X server
* X can be implemented as a layer on top of other GUIs
* This is comparable to how both Wayland and Mir plan to implement X support
Consider: the most popular desktop Unix by an order of magnitude (or
That's not entirely true... it does have X11 support, and I know it
works
to the extent that you can tunnel Xwindows from a remote machine to the OS
X desktop... not sure about the other way around (using a native X11
application) since I haven't had need to do that. It does have a few X apps
(Xeyes, Xterm,etc). I don't think they are installed by default anymore,
but they were in there as of Leopard. 2) is Mac OS X. It's outsold all other
commercial Unix variants put
together.
No X.11 and no networkable GUI.
I will say that using X11 remotely on anything but a
really fast network
connection is painful though unless you're only using xterms or very simple
GUI apps. If it's really intensive sometimes I will Remote Desktop to my
work Windows 7 PC and run an X client from there.
Interesting - thanks.
Yes, I've been impressed myself by how well things like Rdesktop work
these days. I know whole offices full of people on thin clients
running entirely via remote-desktop sessions /over the public
internet./ It is actually entirely viable now.
--
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
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participants (4)
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jonas＠otter.se -
lproven＠gmail.com -
oltmansg＠gmail.com -
spc＠conman.org