
X Could Learn a Lot from Vista, Windows 7 - iamelgringo
http://www.osnews.com/story/21999/Editorial_X_Could_Learn_a_Lot_from_Vista_Windows_7
======
mgunes
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.

~~~
pj
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.

~~~
KC8ZKF
Apple has made an easy to use Unix, in part by making the important decision
_not to use X_.

~~~
_pi
Apple also overhauled most of the *NIX kernel and made proprietary graphical
tools and closed off the supported hardware. All of which contribute to the
ease of use and keep the solidity.

------
intellectronica
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.

------
planckscnst
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.

~~~
jacquesm
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...](http://pics.ww.com/v/jacques/projects/screen/dscf1072.jpg.html?g2_imageViewsIndex=1)
).

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

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

~~~
dhimes
I use Compiz all the time, and I have no problems with crashes. I like the
effects, but there is one that is very helpful: alt+mousescroll allows me to
change the transparency of the selected window. As I don't have multiple
monitors, I find this very convenient when coding (or any other task where I
have to refer to information in another window).

I also like "rolling the windows up" like a window shade (available on some
themes. I dunno...I just do!

~~~
apotheon
That's the first time I've ever run across something Compiz does that would
actually be useful to me over a non-compositing window manager.

------
acg
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
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?

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

~~~
jacquesm
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'.

~~~
planckscnst
Yeah, but I didn't say when Linux crashes, I said when the X server crashes.
When the equivalent happens in Windows, well, if you read the article, you
know what happens.

~~~
jacquesm
For those rare cases when a windows display driver crash will not take the
whole machine with it (usually by freezing or bluescreening) you might get out
of it that way.

But for the majority of those cases you'll have very little choice but to
reach for the power button and keep it pressed for 10 very long seconds.

Again, this is anecdotal, but I have _never_ seen windows recover from any
kind of crash in a graceful way.

There are several layers to this stuff, hardware, driver, display server,
window manager + applications.

If any layer 'below' your application crashes you're lucky to keep your data
(whatever the operating system). Now, I don't do the things the author refers
to (switching screen modes to full screen and back and stuff like that), which
might easily be why I never see these issues and for him they are common.

But to suggest that in windows (where the lines between the layers are much
more blurry than they should be) is 'crash proof' in any way shape or measure
has me chuckling a bit.

My linux machines (servers & desktops) go down when:

\- the power fails

\- I have to move

\- I upgrade kernels

\- hardware failures (mostly disks, occasionally a power supply or a memory
bank)

Other than that they're on, up & running 24x7 year after year.

~~~
thras
My graphics driver crashed on Vista just yesterday. The screen flashed and I
got a nice pop-up in the bottom right corner telling me that the display
driver just had to be restarted.

How many machines are you running Vista on, anyway?

Now, I have lots of Linux crash stories. But I run a lot more Linux servers
than you do, so of course I would.

~~~
jacquesm
I'm happy to hear you run lots more linux servers than I do, as I said before,
it is all anecdotal evidence, and so should be taken with a lump of salt.

We have exactly _one_ machine running vista here, it's fairly new and it has
crashed more than all our linux machines combined.

So, just out of curiosity, how many linux machines do you have ?

~~~
thras
A few dozen.

I won't tell you guys how to troubleshoot your crashing Vista machine, but the
OS isn't at all the first place I'd look to find the problem.

Most Vista boxes don't ever crash. Mine certainly don't. On the server side of
things (Windows Server versus RHEL, say) my impression is that Microsoft
outcompetes Redhat on stability. Just not on cost.

~~~
jacquesm
You should have checked my profile I guess before you made your claim ;)

Anyway, a few dozen is pretty good, more than most people have.

I figured you were owner of a large outfit that runs thousands of machines.

That's when you start to get interesting statistics.

~~~
thras
Hmm. I just have a lot of trouble believing that you run lots and lots of
machines and yet have never seen a kernel crash.

~~~
jacquesm
Well, maybe we're just lucky but I don't think that is it.

We strip the kernels down to the minimum we need on machine installation and
we always try to find out what caused a problem.

On top of that a buddy of mine wrote a piece of software he calls 'flame',
which is used to manage 300 machines.

Sure, occasionally one of those will go down. But post-mortem analysis will
invariably point to some piece of hardware that broke. Either a cpu, a memory
chip or a drive hanging on by a hair. I think the trick to managing large
numbers of servers and not being in reboot hell all the time is to find a
recipe and to stick to it, and good quality monitoring tools to give you an
early warning.

And if you are running on cheap non-ecc motherboards for servers that really
is asking for it.

I like to sleep well :)

The last crash that I remember was in February this year, a faulty memory chip
that had been registering complaints for a while in the mcelog (but due to a
human error we missed it). We had just upgraded a machine that was already in
production and we did not burn in the machine out of service. Stupid
mistake...

We burn in our new machines religiously and we only use top quality hardware.
Still, during the burn-in phase we have a good 10% hardware failures.

But once the machines pass burn in - and we really give them hell - they
perform pretty good.

Since we're in anecdotal territory anyway, once during the burn in testing of
an ethernet switch over the weekend we came back to the office on monday
morning to find the test frozen.

The switch was no longer passing data in or out. A reboot would not revive it.

We opened it up to find a crack running straight down the middle of one of the
chips... so much for that particular brand of router :)

------
chanux
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.

------
aero142
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.

------
jawngee
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.

~~~
apotheon
> 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.

~~~
jawngee
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.

~~~
apotheon
Holy crap. If X forwarding over SSH is that slow on an internal Gb network,
either network congestion is crazy-high, or you're doing something wrong. At
least, that's my guess, based on my experience with X over SSH, since "shit is
_not_ slow" on my 10/100 network.

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

In my experience, KDE (pre-4.0) and GNOME are marginally better than MS
Windows, and slightly worse than MacOS X -- but most of the rest of window
managers are significantly better than both MacOS X and MS Windows. Then
again, if you're specifically speaking of some kind of interaction between
your window manager and X forwarding, I really don't know, since I've never
actually tried using KDE or GNOME in concert with X forwarding over SSH.

------
thenduks
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
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.

------
GeneralMaximus
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
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.

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

