Cron/Xwindows

[Brian Kelsay]

Gerald Combs wrote:

>On Fri, 24 Oct 2003, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
>
>  
>
>>As an example, and an example of the inneficiency of XWindows, I recently 
>>upgraded my system from a 500MHz, 312M system with a 16M video card to a 
>>1200MHz, 512M and Radeon 8000.  Performance of KDE on the new hardware is 
>>roughly equivalent to performance of Windows95 on the old - roughly a 3x 
>>hardware factor.
>>    
>>
>
>But KDE (and Gnome) has SKINS!  And THEEEMZ!  Even if it takes up 1150 of
>your 1200 MHz you've gotta have translucent, throbbing menus with drop
>shadows!  Your software won't be any more _usable_, but it'll be oh so
>much prettier.
>
>BTW, have you seen Jamie Zawinski's Linux usability page?  He makes a lot
>of the same points you do, but a bit more aggressively:
>
>    http://www.jwz.org/doc/linuxvideo.html
>  
>
I just read JWZ's rant and I understand his frustration and admire him 
for his willingness to just say what he thinks.  Some of the things he 
had problems with are non issues now.  The programs have been 
fixed/updated and are easier to install or come with the major distros 
or their repositories.   I would like to expand on what you and he have 
to say about themes. 
/rant
When you write a new program, the LAST THING you should worry about is 
what the F****ing themes will look like on your program.   We need to 
get to the point where there is some code these guys can drop into ANY 
new programming project and it will use WHICHEVER widget set is 
currently running.  If I open the program under KDE it should detect 
this on the fly and using the same API that everyone else uses for every 
other X-based program, it should draw itself on the screen.  But if a 
programmer doesn't have time to mess with this from the get-go, he 
should be able to drop a piece of testing window code in that just draws 
frigging gray boxes and basic gray buttons for the controls.  Really, 
the main thing is that the program do what it is supposed to.  If it is 
a DVD playing prog. then it should play friggin discs before it learns 
to edit playlists, rewrite the US Constitution or send email.  Yes, this 
is a joke about every prog. and his brother re-inventing the editor and 
slapping on email for goos measure.   What is that all about?  Did every 
CS student have to create an editor and a mail program for a class in 
the last ten years?  And now they want to show how cool there prog. is 
and how it has some feature that none other has and so it can email a 
playlist or some novel you were writing right from within itself?  I'm 
going to puke. 

If some program/editor/mailer is missing a feature you really can't live 
without or would really like to use, but that program does 95-99% of 
what it is supposed to do, then send a nice email and possibly some 
drawings of what you are thinking of to the developer of the EXISTING 
program.  I have found that most are pretty amenable and enjoy the 
input.  Check the FAQ first to see if they have attempted to do that 
feature and found out it will never work.  Anyway, my rant was about 
theming and feature set.  On with the show.

Has anyone ever tried Enlightenment?  Did you actually like it?  It 
locked up my box four times, so I gave up.  I think that's why Red Hat 
dropped development support for it too.  It never went anywhere, because 
themeboy thought it should LOOK awesome before it did its main goal, 
manage windows.  I think it might run fine if you have a 4 processor 
Pentium 4 2.4 GHz.  I'll never know.  The only neat thing I can think 
that the linux world gained from that project was transparency in 
X-windows.  OK, but not killer.  Competition  among projects/programs is 
great, but it would be nice if some people went back and trimmed their 
code bloat.  Not by code size, but by what it requires of the system 
it's running on.

Well, I can't think of anything else right now, but eating breakfast, so have a nice day.

---------------------------
Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.