Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2001 22:51:35 -0600 From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com> Cc: <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Feeding the Troll (Was: freebsd as a desktop ?) Message-ID: <15365.48855.19705.7956@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <006101c17854$c6aa2570$0a00000a@atkielski.com> References: <15365.11290.211107.464324@guru.mired.org> <006101c17854$c6aa2570$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <3C0574C4.3040001@verizon.net> <016e01c17889$23dfd990$0a00000a@atkielski.com>
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Anthony Atkielski <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com> types: > Mike writes: > > You've said this before, but haven't done > > anything to demonstrate it. > I'm surprised that you think it requires demonstration. You're asserting something that over a decade and a half of experience says is false. 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? > UNIX was designed to > service hundreds of users sitting in front of dumb terminals; it was not > designed to drive a single resource-intensive GUI on dedicated hardware for a > single user. UNIX architecture puts a huge emphasis on multiple, independent > users and processes, and very little emphasis on the kind of close integration > and hardware dependency that a complex GUI requires. These characteristics make > for an excellent timesharing system or server, but they also make for a poor > desktop environment. Both of these statements are false. As you've already noted, Unix provides a *minimal* multi-user environment. While it's true that Unix can be tuned to run in the kind of environment you describe, it can also be tuned to handle a single user. There's no huge emphasis on those things - they're just features of the system. SGI has the most complex GUI I've ever run into, and they didn't require hardware dependency. They *do* require a well-defined API that makes it possible to access the hardware efficiently - but that's a completely different animal. > If you believe that UNIX is as good a desktop as Windows, then logically you > must also believe that Windows is as good a server as UNIX. An extension of > this logic leads to the conclusion that the operating systems are essentially > identical--but that obviously is not the reality. 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, and watching and helping others do that. I will say that when I finally moved to mass market hardware for home use in 1998, I evaluted the available versions of Windows and found them wanting. Mostly, there didn't seem to be any choice in GUIs, and the environment being sold for home use wasn't stable enough for me to be happy. Your "logic" is so flawed I'll suggest you take a math class in logic. The statemnts that follow the word "logically" are straw men, having no relation to anything I ever said or ever expect to say. I have no experience with Windows as a server, so I don't make any claims about it. I generally take the word of people who do, but would want to verify it myself before spending money on it. > It's interesting to see how hard people will try to prove or at least argue that > their pet operating systems are the best for all purposes, or even adequate for > all purposes. I've never seen an operating system that can do it all, and I > expect that I never will. I've never claimed that Unix - in any form - would fill all niches. I can think of several that it sucks at. 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. FWIW, at the time Windows was a niche market, competing with other things that bolted multitasking onto Windows. > > Quite to the contrary, every time someone has > > asked me to work on Win 9x or Macs - through the > > mid 90s - they crashed regularly under my > > normal usage patterns. That convinced me that, > > if anything, those operating systems aren't > > suitable for "heave desktop use". > Heavy desktop use requires NT and its descendants. Windows 9x and the Mac are > for occasional, non-critical desktop use, for precisely the reasons you cite. 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. You seem to be contradicting yourself. > Perhaps you can explain the utility of a multiuser environment for a single-user > desktop graphics workstation. Because you might want to let more than one person use the computer, and have a little security between them? Of course, that a system has an unused capability in some role doesn't mean it can't fill that role adequately. It may mean you're using a Saturn V for a signal flare. 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 was a tad faster on the dual-processer Ultrix box in the next room, but it was perfectly adequate for the job. The fact that there was a bunch of expensive hardware going unused while it was doing so in no way detracted from it's adequacy at running vi. > > There are many reasons that Windows is the > > dominant force on the desktop today but they > > have everything to do with marketing and > > economics and very little to do with operating > > system design. > That is a common misconception, held dear and defended by those with axes to > grind or religions to defend. Microsoft wanted the desktop GUI market and went > after it. Most UNIX vendors did not. I don't see those two statements as being contradictory. Yes, MS wanted the desktop market and went after it. Going after a market is *marketing*. Once MS decides they want a market, they'll keep building products until they find one that actually sells into it. It took three tries with Windows. At leaste two with WinCE. Bill Gates stood on a stage and said that Windows NT wasn't stable enough for real world server use, but claimed that that the latest offering was. It's actually a bit frightening when I think about it. None of this has anything with system design. <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Q: How do you make the gods laugh? A: Tell them your plans. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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