::scr A PC user speaks ...

[David Cantrell]

BTW, I didn't expect everyone to agree with me, otherwise I wouldn't have
posted.  I expect that Apple dislike many of the same things about what I
wrote as Simon does :-)

On Wed, Mar 27, 2002 at 04:10:38PM +0000, Simon Wistow wrote:

> I can count the number of times I've run X apps over the network on the
> fingers of one very large, mutant hand. But it's not that much. But I
> can see where it could be useful.

I do it all the time, so it *must* be useful :-)

For example ... due to Strangeness, not all https sites work for me at work.
So I ssh to my laptop at home and run Netscape there, displaying at work.
Or I might be lieing in bed and want to read usenet.  I choose to use Forte
Agent - a Windows app.  With the Awesome Power of X and Wine, I can run it
on $linuxbox_in_lounge and display it on my ibook in bed.

> However I'd argue that, in fact, I've used it far more than any Mac user
> would want to (although that's a difficult thing to gauge without there
> ever having been an opportunity before).

Precisely.  Cos they've never been able to do it, they don't realise how
damnably useful it can be.  I'll agree that remote GUI display is not as
useful as it used to be, in these days of cheap CPU cycles, but it's still
jolly useful.

>                                          But in general Mac users don't
> want to run apps over the network. I will come back to this later. For
> now we will assume that it is desirable and not a security nightmare
> waiting to happen and ask ...

If set up correctly it poses no security problems.  All my machines with X
are set up to only work with clients and servers on a small range of hosts,
all on my unroutable 10/8 network.  X through ssh works by pretending to
be an X server on localhost, which is of course permitted.

> ... why X? X is dead, or, at least, it should be. X is a festering pile
> of rancid dogs droppings and it's nasty to program for.

And yet it refuses to die.  Presumably because there's nothing better to
replace it.  That it is a bitch to program for I agree with, but Apple
could fix that by providing sane libraries.  That would also serve to
strongly encourage people to use their One True Widget Set instead of the
god-forsaken mess of different widgets that infests other platforms.

>                                                         Everything of
> use is a bolted on extension. The only reason we've still got X on
> Unices is because of backwards compatability and because nobody's been
> bothered to write a replacement (Berlin doesn't count).

And why has nobody been bothered to write a replacement?  IMO it's because
there's no NEED for a replacement.

> ... there seem to be two types of MacOS X users . Three. There appear to
> be three main Mac OS X users. 
> 
> 1. Those that have bought a Mac because they've heard they're easy to
> use, have been swayed by the pretty boxes ...

Errm :-)  Ooh! Cube! Shiny!

> 3. Unix people looking to escape the horribleness of the Linux desktop
> and combine an easy to use OS with a number of important apps (Office,
> Photoshop, Illustrator etc) with Unixy shell stuff.

That's me, mostly.  But I don't want to escape the "horribleness" of the
Linux desktop.  This 'ere Linux box what I'm typing this on has a desktop
which does what I want how I want it, and it does it damned quickly despite
the machine being considered hideously underpowered by modern standards.
I mean, it doesn't use any graphics acceleration.  It has only 192Mb of
RAM!  Hell, I bought it from Dixons two years ago, you can't get much more
damning than that.

I'm not even interested in Office or Photoshop and stuff.  If I want to
write a short letter, I use paper and pen.  If I want to write anything
longer, plain text or TeX is my weapon of choice.  On the rare occasions
I edit a picture, I use either the Gimp (in Linux) or Paint Shop Pro
(running under Widows 98 in VMware).  If I want to do a presentation, I'll
do it in standards-compliant HTML.  And I have no need for spreadsheets.

I bought a Mac because I wanted to run IE and to play choonz.  Oh, and
cos I wanted to see what OS X was like.  Some of you may recall that in
its initial incarnation, it disgusted me so much I dumped it for OS 9.
It is only later when I needed to do something nasty and primitive and
yucky - use a modem, something I hadn't done in years and have no idea
how to do in Linux - that I had that moment of realisation about closed
hardware platforms being a Good Thing.  It Just Worked.

> [0] For the none Unix spods round here this how the X Windowing system
> works :
> 
> You run an X-Server on the machine you want to work on. Then you run
> applications on another machine, having set a magic variable that tells
> them where the Server is. These applications are called Clients. 

And the most important bit what you left out - it is the SERVER that talks
to the screen and keyboard :-)

-- 
Grand Inquisitor Reverend David Cantrell | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

      Good advice is always certain to be ignored,
      but that's no reason not to give it            -- Agatha Christie