X Could Learn a Lot from Vista, Windows 7

http://www.osnews.com/story/21999/Editorial_X_Could_Learn_a_Lot_from_Vista_Windows_7

by iamelgringo • 17 years ago

52 80 17 years ago

acg• 17 years ago

One of those articles where the author has a preference and justifies it because something on the other platform doesn't work well. Then does the dramatic the-whole-stack-is-wrong routine making the other system look next to godly. Then the comments turn into a battle of who's opinion matters more and why.

No real content apart from perhaps a few bug reports.

VBprogrammer• 17 years ago

An article complaining about a single failure mode, which I personally have never experienced, and how that makes all of Linux completely unusable. I have to wonder, if the author is happy with Windows and its gold plated video stack why does he feel the need to try Ubuntu?

derefr• 17 years ago

A comment—complaining about an article that complains about a specific X in Y, and compares it to a better X in Z—suggesting that the poster use Z instead of Y. (I have a theory that this template covers about 10% of IT-related blog post replies by weight.) I have to wonder, haven't you ever used something that's better in almost every way, but worse in one important one? You don't spend time writing a blog post about Y's failures unless you love Y, and want it to get better (or are getting paid by Z, but that's only applicable to very well-known bloggers.)

apotheon16• 17 years ago

That's only relevant to the discussion at hand if the person in question actually seems to believe that Y is better than Z in all ways except one. Instead, he appears to believe that Z is better than Y in all ways, period, and uses Y just to have reasons to complain.

planckscnst3• 17 years ago

But it's not a single failure mode. Indeed, any time the X server crashes, every open X app is lost.

jacquesm7• 17 years ago

Right, and every time Microsoft Windows crashes you lose all your applications as well.

Sorry, but Vista does not solve that problem, I don't have any experience with windows 7 so I can't comment on that.

All I know is that even if I do something simple on a windows box it requires a reboot. Which pretty much happens every couple of days when you really work a lot with windows, which will reset the counter but will not count as a 'crash'.

mgunes5• 17 years ago

You don't know that the majority of the X drivers for high-performance hardware are closed source and proprietary, and are developed independently of X, at times going in conflicting directions with it (take the NVIDIA proprietary driver), you completely disregard the huge amount of work that's been going into modernizing X and the free software video drivers in the last five years, and demonstrate a disinterest in where the problems actually are and just demand that they be fixed, and top it all with nonsense weasel words such as "Microsoft has shown us how it's done, now all the X world needs to do is follow" (Shown what? Where is the code?) and expect to be taken seriously? Sorry, the standards for what passes as good criticism have surely gone down, but not that much.

This is unmistakable web forum pseudo-technicalism: rant about your pet bug, dress it up with some technical jargon as if you had an idea about what's actually going on under the hood, flat out refuse to get educated on it, "support" it with some other unrelated issue (here, Evolution), add a comparison to $OTHER_OS, and there you have it.

idlewords• 17 years ago

The guy's tone may be somewhat shrill, but that doesn't make his argument bogus.

With all due respect to the X developers, it's nearly 2010. It seems reasonable to demand that resizing a window not crash every open app.

pohl• 17 years ago

The one thing that makes the argument bogus is its false premise, best illustrated by this sentence: "Let's take a look at operating systems with a modern, advanced, and robust graphics stack: Windows Vista and Windows 7."

Isn't there something conspicuously missing from that list?

While Windows 7 may be better than its predecessor Vista, which itself was a step forward in graphics architecture, why conclude that X needs to learn from them in particular?

I mean: if Thom Holwerda's thesis is "X.org, start your photocopiers," he could find better inspiration.

apotheon16• 17 years ago

"Crash every other app"? Tell us what distribution you're using. I want to avoid it.

astine2• 17 years ago

I could not agree more. However, I've used Linux and the X stack for a while now, that has never happened to me. I've had applications killed that way, but never a whole X server.

tsuraan3• 17 years ago

I think he understands that X will crash sometimes (he admits that Aero does), but what he wants is to not lose his running apps. I don't think that's unreasonable or whiny. Separating out a state representation server that's stable from the rendering server that's pretty likely to crash would be cool. It could also allow for *nix users to have something like RDP, which is one of the _very_ few things I actually admire about windows.

I don't know enough about X to have any idea how much effort that would take, and from being on the X list for the past year, I know that a suggestion like that would be ignored without having code to back it up, but I still don't think it's a bad idea.

_pi3• 17 years ago

>It could also allow for *nix users to have something like RDP, which is one of the _very_ few things I actually admire about windows.

I HATE RDP. X.org was created to be net capable, you can do full desktop and window forwarding, we don't need this functionality it exists! (Especially because X.org window forwarding doesn't take screenshots)

apotheon16• 17 years ago

I agree -- it would be nice if X didn't take the state for most of my apps with it when it crashed (not that it crashes with any regularity).

On the other hand, the guy's complaints regarding X crashing and comparisons to Aero are apples and oranges, from what I can see (though I wasn't there to read error messages, so of course there's no way to be sure). It seems like his problem with X crashing was one of the GUI itself crashing, in its entirety, whereas Aero crashed when there was specifically a driver issue not directly related to Aero itself.

Aero is able to get around it by having a secondary "legacy" GUI system to back it up, and by having multiple drivers so a "lesser" driver can kick in. X has lesser drivers available to it, but there's no backup GUI system to back it up.

Now, imagine that the fundamental interface between the kernel and the GUI actually crashed (sorry about the hand-wavy way I phrased that -- since Unix/Linux systems and MS Windows systems do it differently, I can't get more specific). What would Unix with X do? Well, it'd fall back to the command line.

What would MS Windows with Aero do? It would fall back to whatever passes for a blue screen of death in the Windows 7 world, because MS Windows basically doesn't have an OS without the GUI. The command line interface is part of the damned GUI in MS Windows.

I'm not saying X is perfect. It does indeed need a lot of fixing. I actually think we'd be better of replacing it from scratch, if we could get everyone on board. I do not, however, think that MS Windows is the model to use. In fact, I think that on a good day, MS Windows is only nearly as good as X. In short, X and the MS Windows GUI stack both suck, but at least the way X works with the OS is marginally less stupid than the way MS Windows works with its GUI systems.

noonespecial• 17 years ago

If you want an RDP like thing for X, try nomachine.

http://www.nomachine.com/

Its free and more or less duplicates RDP on *nix. It even allows multiple persistent sessions.

pj2• 17 years ago

No offense to you personally, but your thoughts here are exactly why Linux won't take over the consumer pc market.

People don't want ot learn what's going on under the hood. I cringe at the thought, but they may not have the aptitude to comprehend it even if the did want to learn it.

Microsoft treats their consumers like their consumers don't know anything about computers. Most of them don't. Linux users are geniuses compared to most computer users and they are very curious. They also know enough about the technology by going through the ranks that they are apologetic about problems that occur. "Oh it's just a bug, here let me restart."

Microsoft on the other hand writes an OS for any PC and any user. Any hardware combination and an almost infinite set of software installed and perhaps running simultaneously.

I don't think people really give them enough credit for this enormous accomplishment. nix is written for the experts who know how to use the tool correctly. Try building a tool for people who know nothing about the tool or what it can do, the power it has, or how to not make mistakes with it. It's really* hard.

*nix expects its users to know how to use it.

patio11• 17 years ago

Microsoft treats their consumers like their consumers don't know anything about computers. Most of them don't.

In the same sense that Delta provides plane flights for people who don't know anything about basic preventative aircraft maintenance, the lazy ignorant bastards.

The computer is not an end goal. The software is not an end goal. Knowing arcane trivia about the difference between the kernel and userspace is not the end goal. The end goal is get your work done better and faster so you can turn off the machine and punch out for the day. Microsoft gets that in a way that few OSS writers do.

KC8ZKF• 17 years ago

Apple has made an easy to use Unix, in part by making the important decision not to use X.

chancho• 17 years ago

This tired, false Microsoft / Linux dichotomy completely misses the point. Microsoft's customers are computer users. Linux doesn't really have "customers" in any normal sense of the word, but if it did, they would be developers, and the product that Linux provides is a platform that can be molded. Whether or not the unruly horde of Linux developers will ever produce something as polished as Microsoft remains to be seen, but your argument against Linux is a bit like saying Wikipedia will never overtake Britannica because people want to _read_ an encyclopedia, they don't want to _write_ one (duh!)

astine2• 17 years ago

Microsoft on the other hand writes an OS for any PC and any user. Any hardware combination and an almost infinite set of software installed and perhaps running simultaneously.

Strictly speaking, that's not true. Microsoft doesn't generally write an OS that is compatible with hardware; hardware manufacturers make hardware that is compatible with Microsoft. Microsoft may do what it can to make their job easier, but so does X.org.

So, while it may be true that this is a blocker for Linux in the consumer pc market, and it may be true that Linux won't ever become a major player in the desktop market, It's not the X.org or Linux developers' fault that that is the case; it's the market's, and statements like "X.org has a lot to learn fro Vista and Windows 7," are really unfair.

mgunes5• 17 years ago

I'm at peace with the notion that non-technical users aren't interested in and shouldn't have to learn what's under the hood.

However, the author of this article is not a non-technical computer user, despite his claim to be one; if you're aware that VLC has "output modules", one of which is "XVideo", by the standards of the masses you're a geek, period. Claiming to be "just a user", and at the same time spouting various kinds of technicalities that "just a user" would have no idea about is actually another symptom of the web forum pseudo-technicalism that has infected "IT website" articles in this vein.

*nix is a technological paradigm that allows certain possibilities, the most prominent of which has historically been building "by geeks, for geeks" operating systems. In years of reading through discussions similar to this one, I have yet to see a convincing argument for why it can't possibly be used to build systems for non-geeks to use as well. And along those years, Apple provided very strong argument, if not solid proof, for the opposite, in the form of OSX.

nailer4• 17 years ago

Your post hasn't addressed the point of the article, which is that drivers should be able to fail without destroying the users unsaved work.

Great, some X drivers suck. That's no excuse for losing data.

I'm also saddened that a post asking 'where is the code' as if that's a prerequisite to having an opinion on software is being nodded up on Hacker News.

Do you by chance also have an opinion on politics? Have you drafted a bill to support these opinions? No, I didn't think so.

mgunes5• 17 years ago

No, the point of the article is that "X is old and bloated, and that's why it crashes when I'm resizing a video, so it should be deprecated". And that's not sound technical reasoning, and is factually inaccurate.

Windows graphics drivers that suck can also make you lose data. And neither Microsoft, nor your computer vendor can prevent you from installing drivers that suck, and losing data as a consequence. The same goes with X: if you use a closed-source binary blob that the X developers cannot diagnose, fix or improve, that simply doesn't work with XVideo in a composited environment, you can't blame X for the data you lost. Or would you blame Microsoft for the data you lost because of a crappy graphics driver that they didn't ship or lead you to use?

As for "Where is the code?", my point was: without access to any in-depth technicality about how the Windows graphics stack actually manages to isolate crashes (assuming that it's actually a merit of it), claiming that Microsoft has "shown" how it should be done and all X needs to do is follow is rather off the mark. Microsoft may have implemented a high-quality graphics stack that's more stable than X, at least in certain scenarios. That doesn't mean that they have illustrated how it's done in a technical sense, or that their techniques are actually applicable to X, which has an entirely different architecture.

planckscnst3• 17 years ago

He clearly has no idea what he's talking about, but he does have two points.

1) Resizing a window shouldn't cause a crash - this is true, but very specific to his setup; most users will not experience the behavior he saw here.

2) If X crashes (which it inevitably does from time to time), it should not also kill every app you have going. This one is a huge huge problem.

jacquesm7• 17 years ago

I've been using X for about 5 years straight now, before that other versions of it (mostly SGI stuff).

I've had exactly one crash. In all that time. This machine is on 24x7 and on average has 10-15 (large) windows open on two screens (soon to be 4).

X is absolutely rock solid in my experience, but as with all anecdotal evidence that doesn't mean much.

When you start playing around with custom window managers and all kinds of other esoterics I don't doubt that it is possible to crash X (the time I did it it was when I tried to set up an X server across 4 displays on 4 different computers, http://pics.ww.com/v/jacques/projects/screen/dscf1072.jpg.ht... ).

I was pissed off but I was really asking for it.

windsurfer• 17 years ago

I tried to set up an X server across 4 displays on 4 different computers

Maybe Vista 7 should learn a few things from X...

thras6• 17 years ago

Try turning on Compiz. You'll see some crashing.

wglb• 17 years ago

I routinely operate with 50 open, often as many as 100. Never had an X crash in the two years been with this setup.

christopherolah• 17 years ago

Seconded. X has only crashed once or twice in the last 3 years of me using it.

This may be anecdotal evidence, but then again so is the article.

chanux• 17 years ago

Ok I'll reply in a USERs point of view.

I installed ubuntu 9.04 on my HP mini-note 2133 (not a quad-core 4GB powerhouse). I don't use evolution but everything else run perfect for me. I too installed VLC and it plays videos well enough (some minor problems when jumping forward while watching HD).

It never crashed on me. Oh wait.. it crashed 3 times after I installed conky. First time it just happened. I made it happen the second time to check, third time to cofirm.

Yeah X.org some times pisses me off but gimme a reason why I should complain? It gave me all these things for free & there should be lot's of people working to improve it.

I honor the effort of everyone who made this free OS (all the tools together) possible. I don't blame at little problems, I just point them out. I contribute when I can.

GeneralMaximus• 17 years ago

Does anyone here know how OSX's Quartz handles stuff? Apple say it's "based on PDF technology". Does that mean my entire screen is a big PDF file?

jws• 17 years ago

PDF was developed as the best small API rendering system from the decades of Postscript experience that preceded it.

The API and the way you think about drawing in OS X match the concepts of PDF. There is a "display PDF" ability, but down at the nuts and bolts level it is just similar concepts.

jawngee2• 17 years ago

And the winner is ... OS X.

I use Ubuntu on a laptop when I'm at home (rarely) couch surfing. It's miserable. Slow redraws, down syndrom-ish user interfaces, the whole thing feels and acts cheap.

While the X protocol has certain awesome advantages, it's a miserable choice for desktop. I get and appreciate the network transparency of it all, but shit, VNC is often faster for me than forwarding X over SSH.

Are there alternatives? I dunno, but graphics drivers, displays and plumbing are distinct advantages for both Windows and OS X when it comes to desktop interaction.

apotheon16• 17 years ago

> I use Ubuntu on a laptop when I'm at home (rarely) couch surfing. It's miserable. Slow redraws, down syndrom-ish user interfaces, the whole thing feels and acts cheap.

Why are you using Ubuntu, then? I suspect it's more your choice of distribution and GUI environment that's at fault for your unsatisfying user experience than anything inherent to Linux or X. On FreeBSD with AHWM (instead of Ubuntu with GNOME), I don't have such issues at all. The only stuff that's slow is waiting for Firefox, OO.o, and the GIMP to open the first time I open each of them after starting the computer. On the rare occasion that I use MS Windows, by contrast, I tend to spend a lot of time waiting.

I can't stand GNOME and KDE (especially KDE 4). The sitting around and waiting for stuff to happen is far too reminiscent of MS Windows for my taste.

> I get and appreciate the network transparency of it all, but shit, VNC is often faster for me than forwarding X over SSH.

Are you using SSH compression? I mean, sure, X over SSH is slow across the Internet, even with compression, but then MS Windows Remote Desktop is no blazing-fast, realtime operation under those circumstances, either.

> displays and plumbing

I'm not sure what you mean by that.

trezor• 17 years ago

I mean, sure, X over SSH is slow across the Internet, even with compression, but then MS Windows Remote Desktop is no blazing-fast, realtime operation under those circumstances, either.

Actually it is. I can work with remote desktop sessions over a cellphone link without having too much latency issues.

Remote Desktop is definitely a result of good engineering. Add support for local drives, printers, clipboards, USB devices etc and it's one of those very neat things which makes me love working with multiple Windows servers remotely.

jawngee2• 17 years ago

No I'm talking about using X on our Gigabit internal ethernet network (mostly using Virt-Manager to manage our farm of Xen slices). Shit is slow.

I've tried both Gnome and KDE, I've also tried some alternates. They all suck in comparison to Windows and OS X.

mgunes5• 17 years ago

Blaming the X architecture for slow drawing and windowing operations is a common mistake. Most of the latency that's introduced into operations that affect the user's perception of GUI "speed" is introduced by toolkits and inadequate 2D acceleration by the driver infrastructure, not the X protocol. It's true that the experience is poor on many configurations, but the upside is that there have been great advances on fixing these issues in the recent years (check out the new "flicker-free" GTK for an example).

aero142• 17 years ago

I run Ubuntu almost exclusively now because it is the most usable operating system for me. From years of running XP I can tell you that it did not handle driver crashes well and I lost all my files when it crashed. I have used Vista and I know that I have to restart it very frequently because of driver issues. I really hope that Microsoft has made a significant technical investment in Windows 7 and I hope that they have made the kernel more robust when dealing with crashes, but I assume that was a lot of work and really expensive to develop. It is kind of ridiculous to say that Linux is crap because it doesn't have a very advanced feature from an OS that isn't even available to the general public yet. As a Linux user, I can tell you that Microsoft has a few things to learn from others as well. It is called competition and it is what makes things get better, and there is plenty of room for improvement all around.

intellectronica• 17 years ago

It's a bit hard to comment on this article, because much of it is, in fact, true. I do have two problems with it, though:

1. Windows 7, which is indeed a great product - very polished and with a very advanced graphics stack, nevertheless has problems. I've been running it as a secondary OS for some things for a while, and it definitely exhibited problems, in particular with video playback. Media Player crashed, requiring me to reboot before I can play video again, the desktop manager crashed many times, making it impossible to do simple file operations without restarting and driver management was often very difficult and problematic. Idealizing W7 (or Vista, or OS X) does nothing to advance the state of Linux or computing in general.

2. Sure, it's absolutely fine for users to complain about low quality software, but if you want to make a difference and improve things (and presumably, if you bother to write an article about this, you do) the more effective way to do that is not to vent your anger and start a flame war, but actually deal with the real problems. Are Evolution, Totem, VLC or X.org buggy? Help identify the bugs and report them to the projects, so that they have a chance to fix them. When the fix is out, help testing it. You don't need to be a nerd or a geek or a dork or anything to do that - just a good citizen. It takes relatively little of your time, and you'll know you've actually done something to improve things, which will benefit you and the rest of the world in the future. That's not something you can do with W7 ot Vista, and that's where the power of the free software community lies.

Complaining is so easy, and can sometimes feel fun (in a very immature and destructive way), but if you're not prepared to do anything to improve the situation, don't expect it to improve itself.

thenduks• 17 years ago

I'm not sure... I've never had a windows display driver crash and simply restart ('showing aero basic for a few seconds'). Seems to me that this usually results in a blue screen.

While I'm obviously not OK with X crashing and taking running apps with it (doesn't happen to me running arch+xmonad), it's still better than a bluescreen. Anything I was running in screen is fine, firefox will re-open my tabs, etc.

known• 17 years ago

Users do not run X. They run Applications. Hence it is rational to compare Usability, Performance and Functionality of GNOME/KDE/FOSS Applications with Microsoft Applications.

zandorg• 17 years ago

I played DVDs fine in Xine under SUSE. I think in this case, that he's not doing it right by using VLC.

X Could Learn a Lot from Vista, Windows 7

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