LPC: Life after X
LPC: Life after X
Posted Nov 8, 2010 14:17 UTC (Mon) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861)In reply to: LPC: Life after X by dgm
Parent article: LPC: Life after X
> close our selves in our small ivory tower and wait until the world
> goes away.
The question is, build what's needed by WHOM?
You've had many, many people (myself included) state that what the users (us) want and need is the equivalent of today's network transparency features that X provides.
Yet many people here seem perfectly happy to ignore and pooh-pooh the users who really matter (those that we already have!) in some quest to obtain users that we don't have (those that use, and almost certainly will continue to use, Macs and Windows systems).
Ivory tower dwellers are people too!
Posted Nov 9, 2010 15:57 UTC (Tue)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (1 responses)
Well, paying customers, obviously. Someone must pay for the development of the new hardware and software - and "he who pays the piper calls the tune". Sure. And there are many, many people who care about z80 programming on TI-84. Should we now think about z80 compatibility when we write USB drivers? Huh? Where have you got this idea? Fact: most Linux users don't care about network transparency at all. Proof: more then 50 million Android phones were sold till now. There are less then 1.5 billions PCs in the world today so if we assume 3% of them are using Linux (typical estimate) we'll find out that there are more Android users then desktop Linux users. "Traditional Linux users" who care about network transparency and other such things are fast becoming minority - and this is exactly why we are talking about "life after X" today. We can, of course, say that we only care about ourselves and say that Android, ChromeOS, MeeGo and other such things are "not Linux" and "we don't care" - but it'll only mean that Linux will be left in dust and non-Linux (based on the same kernel!) will replace it.
Posted Nov 12, 2010 0:40 UTC (Fri)
by jmorris42 (guest, #2203)
[Link]
Who cares. Seriously, counting Android as Linux users is as crazy as counting OS X users as UNIX, in both cases the *NIX underpinnings are only used as a hardware abstraction to host an alien environment to the typical Linux/GNU/X we typically call "Linux" as a shorthand. More power to em and all, but lets not make Apples to Oranges comparisions.
> "Traditional Linux users" who care about network transparency
Well take yer asses off and do your clone of all the bad ideas the existing userbase fled screaming from. It is Free Software after all. Here is a clue: Most of us came to *NIX because we saw the benefits and could also see the horrid mess the DOS/Windows world was. Why do we now want to toss one of the most wonderful ideas in computing to become more like the mass market drones? The network is the computer, the computer is the network. It isn't just a marketing slogan for some of us.
Besides, I never understood why suddenly everything needs to be rendered client side as bitmaps. Extend X to give it the mechanisms to support things it can't currently do and make sure they can run over the wire. Why can't X do the modern font tricks, compositing or whatever over the wire? Why isn't the default scalable SVG artwork? Isn't it normally sufficient to note that Apple does something enough to end an argument? Well they do Display Postscript (ok, they had to modernize the terminology to Display PDF) on OS X so obviously the idea is still mainstream, right?
Is it good that Linux is finally getting the last chunk of device support and taking over mode setting and general driving of the video hardware? Of course. Is it good that makes it easier for upstarts to experiment with new display systems? Of course! Might this someday lead to replacement for X? Perhaps. But any replacement has to be able to do the things X does if the target is a general computing environment instead of embedded. We have decades of existing apps and little desire to toss em all and start over. If we wanted to do that we could all just ditch the whole stack and go run Haiku or something.
Posted Nov 11, 2010 10:09 UTC (Thu)
by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
[Link]
By us, of course! I'm sorry, because I'm going to introduce a little bit of FUD, but I think it's a healthy dose:
The problem is not that we are not well served by what we currently have. The problem is that most computer users out there are not. And as a consequence those people select other operating systems. Why should we care? Because marginal platforms can only survive thus far. Yes, there are still people writing code for the C64 and the Amiga, but they are few and mostly irrelevant, except for themselves. Do you want to see Linux there? I certainly don't.
So, It's OUR need to appeal to as many users as we can, and serve them well in as many use cases as we can, to ensure our own survival. Specialization and immobilism will be death for the platform.
WHOM is right :-)
The question is, build what's needed by WHOM?
You've had many, many people (myself included) state that what the users (us) want and need is the equivalent of today's network transparency features that X provides.
Yet many people here seem perfectly happy to ignore and pooh-pooh the users who really matter (those that we already have!) in some quest to obtain users that we don't have (those that use, and almost certainly will continue to use, Macs and Windows systems).
WHOM is right :-)
> and other such things are fast becoming minority
LPC: Life after X