Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2001 08:03:06 +0100 From: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com> To: "Mike Meyer" <mwm@mired.org> Cc: "Randall Hamilton" <nitedog@silly.pikachu.org>, "GB Clark II" <gclarkii@vsservices.com>, "Mike Meyer" <mwm@mired.org>, <chat@FreeBSD.ORG>, <smorton@acm.org> Subject: Re: Feeding the Troll (Was: freebsd as a desktop ?) Message-ID: <021101c178a3$e6203f80$0a00000a@atkielski.com> References: <15365.11290.211107.464324@guru.mired.org><006101c17854$c6aa2570$0a00000a@atkielski.com><3C0574C4.3040001@verizon.net><016e01c17889$23dfd990$0a00000a@atkielski.com><3C05BD9D.4000909@verizon.net><01c601c17896$12bbf560$0a00000a@atkielski.com><15365.48855.19705.7956@guru.mired.org><01c101c17895$a2691360$0a00000a@atkielski.com><01112817112006.13219@prime.vsservices.com><016301c17888$c1be3cc0$0a00000a@atkielski.com><000901c17892$28e1ce90$0301a8c0@nitedog><01bc01c17892$f2dea380$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <15365.54859.140475.279838@guru.mired.org>
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Mike writes: > People come along every so often saying "If > you want to take over the desktop, you need > to ...". I don't want it to take over the > desktop ... People who say that have often never seen any other kind of computer besides a desktop PC. Out of sight, out of mind. Some people don't know that servers exist, just as some people incorrectly believe that mainframes are a thing of the past, even as they read their electric bills and tax returns, which were processed and printed by mainframes. > That's the major problem I see with Unix - > the major distributions have concentrated on > trying to take over the desktop, so it's a major > PITA to set them up as a server, or doing something > slightly unusual. You mean Linux, I presume? Linux was written by a student geek for other student geeks, then was seized upon by clueless marketroids and media people and made into a sort of deity to counter Microsoft's antichrist. As I've said before, I suspect that most people using and promoting Linux had never heard of UNIX at all before Linus came along with his school project, and so in their eyes, a good operating system = a Windows-like operating system. Most Linux users just want Windows without Microsoft, or they just want a machine to play with. You can't mean FreeBSD, in any case, since it doesn't install any kind of desktop by default (thank goodness!--if it did, I wouldn't be running FreeBSD). > In other words, in trying to compete with Windows, > they're adding all the problems I have with Windows. Exactly. And there is no way to get around that. If you want Windows functionality, you get all the Windows complexity and instability that go with it. This is why I've only briefly looked at X servers on UNIX. They make too much of a mess, and it's easy to see that they very rapidly complexify and destabilize the machine until it looks just like a clone of Windows. I already have Windows; I don't need another wannabe running next to it. > Yup. How much experience do you have with Unix > as a desktop? Virtually none. Most of my exposure to UNIX has been command-line interfaces only, which I tend to prefer with multiuser systems accessed remotely. > But not that provided by *your* choice of desktop > environments, Windows NT. I'm not sure what you mean. > Yup. That's called a "driver". Drivers are parts of the OS in certain ways, despite claims to the contrary. It's just that they aren't usually written with the rest of the OS, and they tend to be buggy and unreliable. But since they must be _trusted_ by the OS, they effectively are part of the OS, from the standpoint of things like reliability. A system that crashes because of a bad driver is no more up and running than a system that crashes because of a kernel failure. > Actually, you forgot the single most important > resource for supporting hundreds of users - I/O > throughput - but it's probably got that as well. For support of dumb terminals, I'm sure it would suffice. I don't know how well it would support X terminals, as I'm not sure how much additional overhead X clients impose on the system. > It was sort of boggling to compute the values > for those things, and realize that the pizza box > and a couple of shoeboxes had more of everything > important than the two refrigerators it replaced. Yes. What worries me is that software seems to be moving in exactly the opposite direction, and at nearly the same speed. > That's why I didn't bother looking at Windows NT. Ah ... big mistake. Windows NT and the consumer versions of Windows are completely different operating systems. For some reason, Microsoft has never wanted to make that clear. > How many home systems really are single-user > computers? Almost all of them. > Most of the ones I'm familiar with are used by > everyone in the family. Does each person log in as a different user? > I pushed my old system - dual PII/Xeons@450MHz with > 2MB of cache, with multiple scsi controllers and no > IDE at all - to the point of being unresponsive to > keystrokes on the console. All by my little old > lonesome. On UNIX? What were you running? And more specifically: Were you running an X server? > There are no floating point variables in vi, so all > those teraflops are commpletely wasted. Nah ... the machine cycles are just used for tens of Tips instead. > In fact, the reason it was a tad slower than > the VAX was because it took most of a dozen > integer instructions for it to convert a byte > pointer to a word address and then get the byte > you wanted out of the word in question. The VAX did that in one > instruction. You're sure that was the reason? To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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