RE: Some perspective from the cheap seats...

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected] 
> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Alan Cox
> Sent: Friday, March 21, 2003 7:38 AM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: [forum] Some perspective from the cheap seats...
> 
> > Yes, I agree entirely with that. Network transparency is 
> > nice sometimes, but not really essential for the day to day
> > use of desktop computing. The 
> 
> Large numbers of my employers customers would disagree with 
> you. For some things the desktop approach is right, but for
> many things it is not. The lack of a sane client-server
> architecture in Windows distorted the market heavily.

Someone please explain this, since there was tons of client-server in the
market before Windows came along (e.g. Sun diskless workstations, etc).
Maybe Windows distorted the market because Microsoft delivered what people
actually wanted at a price they were willing to pay. I'm talking about what
they did to BECOME a monopoly - not the abusive stuff they've done since
they became a monopoly. Think back to the late 80's, pre-Win31 days.
Microsoft wasn't any kind of monopoly then, in the enterprise. Sun, IBM, HP,
etc were.

> 
> I'd ask a different question with my general networking hat 
> on. Bandwidth is rising pretty much exponentially to many users.
> Latency is nearly a constant and in some cases (cable/ADSL) has
> increased. On that background the question becomes "Is the X model
> wrong for remote computing due to round trip times". VNC for
> example significantly outperforms X (with compress) for remote
> use of Gnome on 802.11b

Yes, I agree. I should have stated my initial point more clearly. Not that
people don't want remote access, but when they do, they want to remote the
entire desktop - VNC, Citrix, Windows Terminal Server, etc. The idea of
being able to remote individual windows isn't relevent to the vast majority
of desktop users. So the paradigm really needs to be inverted -
direct-rendered desktop, with remotability.

> 
> > first step IMHO is to simply implement a 2D direct rendering
> > system to increase performance. Whether X needs to go or
> > whether it can be reinvented to support 2D direct rendering
> > is a different question.
> 
> DirectFB + XDirectFB ?

Direct-rendered X has been tried before (Sun did it first, I think - there
were also some XFree86-based experiments a number of years ago). IIRC, it
hasn't been hugely successful or maintainable. I think there's going to need
to be an X12 to address this.

As for putting my money where my mouth is, it isn't going to happen; I'm
happy in the world I live in.

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