Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/02/16

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Subject: Re: [Leica] LUG OT: Computer Platform Stability
From: Pete Su <psu_13@yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2001 20:37:56 -0800 (PST)

X11 is an unusable mess. They've been hacking on the thing since the late 1980s
and there still isn't as single window manager for the system that is as usable
as MacOS from 1984.

Also, thanks to innovations like X11 and netscape, a single X11 app can crash
and take the whole server down with it, which is pretty much like crashing
windows back to the DOS prompt, or a blue screen or whatever. So the vaunted
UNIX protected memory scheme is useless.

I like OS bigot wars as much as anyone, and UNIX has a lot going for it in the
server world, and I use it every day for development, but for normal desktop
use by normal people, the UNIX people have been dreaming for 20 years that they
could build something better than Windows or MacOS for normal people, but it
will never happen. UNIX is for progrmamers, and it always will be.

MacOS wasn't built orginally built with protected memory because the CPU in the
original mac did not have hardware memory protection. Unfortunately, many
critical apps came to depend on the fact that this protection was not there, so
there was no practical way to put it in without sacrificing either
compatibility or performance.

Windows 98 and such has similar problems, but MS got some help from Intel on
the hardware side, and Win95 and 98 are actually semi-protected.

Windows NT has a memory protection scheme much like UNIX, and is fairly robust.

If there is one lesson in software it is that there is no silver bullet. Free
software does many things well, but it is no more a silver bullet than anything
else.  Personally, if it would support my laptop, I'd rather use BSD than Linux
anyway. The linux internals really suck. But most people don't care, because
they work just well enough. But don't delude yourself into thinking it's some
magic piece of software beauty. It's a miracle it works at all, really.

End of ramble.


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