Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2001 06:21:00 +0100 From: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com> To: "Mike Meyer" <mwm@mired.org> Cc: <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Feeding the Troll (Was: freebsd as a desktop ?) Message-ID: <01c101c17895$a2691360$0a00000a@atkielski.com> References: <15365.11290.211107.464324@guru.mired.org><006101c17854$c6aa2570$0a00000a@atkielski.com><3C0574C4.3040001@verizon.net><016e01c17889$23dfd990$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <15365.48855.19705.7956@guru.mired.org>
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Mike writes: > You're asserting something that over a decade > and a half of experience says is false. A decade and a half of _your_ experience, perhaps. > If I told you the sky was green, wouldn't you > ask for something to back that up if it had > been blue every time you looked up for the last > 15 years, and was blue when you checked a few minutes > ago? You're welcome to disbelieve me, if you wish. > Both of these statements are false. When UNIX was designed, dumb terminals were all anyone had. There were no "desktop environments." It was optimally designed for highly-interactive terminal sessions in large numbers, with completely independent users. It does that extremely well. Remember, this was all a decade and a half before _your_ decade and a half of experience even started. > As you've already noted, Unix provides a *minimal* > multi-user environment. Minimal compared to Multics, but still orders of magnitude superior to that provided by Windows. > While it's true that Unix can be tuned to run > in the kind of environment you describe ... It doesn't have to be tuned to do that; the system is designed for it. Why else would every process have its own effective user ID, if the intent were not to enhance multiuser environments? You certainly don't need that on a single-user system. > SGI has the most complex GUI I've ever run > into, and they didn't require hardware dependency. How many hardware platforms were supported? > They *do* require a well-defined API that > makes it possible to access the hardware > efficiently - but that's a completely different > animal. Is it? Sounds like just splitting out part of the system to a hardware-dependent set of components to me. > I didn't say it was as good a desktop as Windows, > I said that it's been perfectly adequate for > heavy desktop use, based on the better part of > two decades of doing that ... I have no quarrel with this statement. > I have no experience with Windows as a server, > so I don't make any claims about it. Consumer versions of Windows are so useless as servers that I don't even recommend trying them in such environments as experiments, much less as production systems. However, the NT-based versions of Windows make pretty good servers, _if_ you are in a homogenous, Windows-desktop-based environment. Additionally, NT servers are very secure intrinsically. Nevertheless, none of the Windows servers can compare to UNIX for efficiency and cost-effectiveness, nor can they compare to UNIX in terms of architectural adaptation to the server task. FreeBSD and all other flavors of UNIX blow away Windows in this respect. > I'm mildly amused by the fact that Unix is considered > a "small, light-weight OS" these days, having dealt > with systems that provided a faster desktop environment > than Unix on hardware that cost about 10% of what > a good Unix box did. In the olden days, UNIX and the hardware it ran on had 90% margins, and it was expensive to build to begin with. UNIX was a heavyweight in those days (although still stripped in comparison with its ancestor, Multics, or other proprietary systems like MVS). Today, the same horsepower that cost millions back then costs a few hundred dollars and will sit on your desk, and since the core of UNIX has not really changed, it now runs like greased lightning on virtually any system on which you care to install it. I'm quite certain my little desktop PC running UNIX here would support 200 timesharing users or more very easily--it has a thousand times the processing power of UNIX hardware thirty years ago, and at least 1000 times as much memory, and hundreds of times as much mass storage space. So UNIX hasn't really gotten smaller or more efficient, but hardware has gotten bigger, and now UNIX is incredibly compact and efficient compared with other operating systems. I'm amazed when I see how long something like a Windows XP takes to do anything or even boot on modern hardware. This is hardware that can execute a _billion_ instructions per second, and it still takes _seconds_ for the system to do anything. Ever calculate how much processing that really represents? Just what is the OS doing that burns all this horsepower? The mind boggles. FreeBSD, in contrast, seems to do just about everything instantaneously. Only operations involving heavy disk I/O seem to take perceptible time, and that is because disks have increased only slightly in speed over time (unlike memory and processor). > In other words, my typical usage patterns for > Unix workstations qualify as "heavy desktop use", > and Unix handles them perfectly adequately, > doing everythiong I call upon it to do. Yes. However, if you were choosing new systems for the same purpose, Windows would probably be a better choice, unless you had UNIX-specific applications that were essential to your purpose. > You seem to be contradicting yourself. No. See above. > Because you might want to let more than one person > use the computer, and have a little security > between them? It's not a single-user system then. > It may mean you're using a Saturn V for a signal > flare. In the context of multiuser support on a desktop, this is true, for UNIX. It provides far more capability in this domain than any desktop user is ever likely to require. Fortunately, since it is such a lean OS, this is not much overhead, although it does impose other technical constraints. > Running vi on a Cray means that all that > nice, fast array processing hardware Seymour put > into them is going unused, but I can assure you > from first-hand experience that vi runs just fine > on a Cray. It should, with teraflops available to process the interrupts produced by every single keystroke on your terminal. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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