Timer slack for slacker developers

Posted Oct 18, 2011 16:08 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Timer slack for slacker developers by jcm
Parent article: Timer slack for slacker developers

Quite so. The pretty stuff is very pretty but every new bit of it seems to break something old that Just Worked until now, because nobody uses network transparency / nobody cares about power consumption / nobody cares about video playback / nobody cares about focus-follows-mouse / nobody cares about any older X extensions / ...

(OK, that *was* excessively cynical.)

Timer slack for slacker developers

Posted Oct 18, 2011 17:08 UTC (Tue) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (2 responses)

Can be summarized as "I want a UNIX workstation and not a pretty desktop". I don't mean to sound offensive but I actively do not want any of that other stuff. I just want a 1980s style X11 workstation that works exactly as it always did, with X forwarding just working, and none of this 3D stuff. Sure, having extensions to play games is nice and all, but I don't need to rotate my desktop on a cube or have wobbly windows. I used to think I do, but that's before I realized I'd rather have a super boring UI that is set in stone. I want to do something and it always works just like it always did.

Timer slack for slacker developers

Posted Oct 18, 2011 23:16 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I have similar goals, but I'd like Wayland so that I could (do what is essentially) moving *windows* between X servers instead of having windows rooted in the $DISPLAY they started with. The xpra tool can sort of do it, but it's still rooted to some other display and AFAICT doesn't really give the full power of, say, XMonad (happy to be wrong though) over the xpra windows. Combine this with per-application freeze and thaw that came up a few weeks ago that works between different machines and I can migrate a running system to another machine :) .

Timer slack for slacker developers

Posted Oct 20, 2011 22:30 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I'd describe that as "I want a Unix workstation and not *just* a pretty desktop". The pretty is all right, but only if it doesn't break other stuff on its way. "Pretty" is less important than "works".

(But I know we are weird this way. Emacs versus vi is one thing, but most people would look at both of those and run screaming back to their pretty Eclipse. Actually, no, most people would run screaming back to Word, which is neither pretty nor functional...)