X sucks (was: Re: Ware Ware Wizardjin)

[Chris Siebenmann]

root at NEXTSERVER.CS.STTHOMAS.EDU (Max Tardiveau) writes:
| This is obviously a matter of opinion. While I agree with you that
| windowing systems take a large amount of power, I would argue that
| it is not too much. I like having nice graphics on my workstation,
| and I like to have responsive windows. 

 How many people prefer nice graphics to more responsiveness? Given X
cpu horsepower, it must be divided between responsiveness and pretty
pictures somehow. Personally, I'd happily trade some of the pretty
pictures for faster performance (especially application startup). X11
insists that I take most of the overhead for potential pretty pictures
even if I never use them, which is annoyingly obnoxious.

| And, like most people, I use only a small portion of the processing
| power of my workstations (show me a Sparcstation that's 100% busy 100%
| of the time. There are probably a few, but not a whole lot).

 Peak available CPU is also important -- probably more important than
sustained CPU in terms of user satisfaction (when my machine dies
during a compile I really notice -- far more than I notice the constant
overhead various daemons take). I suspect, although I have no numbers
to back this up, that most workstations have low CPU demands most of
the time, but with very high peaks (more or less 100% utilization) when
things do peak.

--
	"This will be dynamically handled, possibly correctly, in 4.1."
		- Dan Davison on streams configuration in SunOS 4.0
cks at hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu	           ...!{utgpu,utzoo,watmath}!utgpu!cks