Scrap manned space exploration entirely for the next half century and use the money to build lots and lots of unmanned probes instead. For work in earth orbit, build better telepresence systems.
What I've learned so far is that the functional separation seems to based on the "conceptual boundaries" established by the window(s). This appears to have led to the establishment of three major components on X desktops:
If you like to componentize your GUI that way, you can. But X11 doesn't care. Traditionally, X11 has a window manager, which also does some limited things with the desktop, and applications would use lots of different widget set. X11 is really more like Macintosh Quartz or Windows GDI, with a wide range of choices for GUIs built on top of it.
Many commercial X11 applications (bank terminals, etc.) use the X11 server completely differently.
Further confusing the issue is the use of a single term to refer to all of these components in aggregate. For example, "GNOME" typically refers collectively to the Widget Toolkit, the Window Manager, and the Desktop Manager.
It's basically an attempt to bring a Windows view of the world to the UNIX environment. Technically, I don't think it's the best approach. However, environments like Gnome and KDE give Windows refugees a warm and fuzzy feeling.
You might well want to consider weaning yourself off Gnome or KDE--give window managers like IceWM or blackbox a try.
You missed the "or" part of the "either... or...". Either of the two alternatives was unpalatable to Sun.
And this wasn't exactly a surprise: people have been pointing out that KDE wasn't going to be very attractive to companies like Sun or IBM since the beginnings of the KDE project. If KDE wants to get back into this game, KDE should really aggressively pursue an LGPL clone of Qt. It's not that hard to do.
I can see your users cringing every time you bring up an xterm on the local machine.
An xterm requires less resources to start up thatn a Perl CGI script. If your users cringe when an xterm starts up, you have a seriously underpowered web server.
I don't know where this "X11 is big and slow" myth comes from. Come on, use your head. On an 8Mbyte 68k-based UNIX workstation--you know, less power than a low-end Palm--X11 was kind sluggish--around 20 years ago. Machines have gotten more than 100 times more powerful since then--running X11 isn't even noticeable.
Of course, you can make X11 big and slow by letting it allocate huge bitmaps. But that's not X11's fault--any graphics application can do that under any window system.
As for security, use "xauth" and/or only allow local connections (you can still tunnel through "ssh"): the result is pretty much bulletproof.
Eat this: now, five years using Linux, where four working with it in a regular basis, configuring and maintaining among other thing file servers, web servers, Firewall with ipchains / iptables, mail and proxy.
So? You are just a beginner using UNIX/Linux, then. It's no wonder that you still don't feel entirely comfortable with it. It takes about 10 years of intensive work to become an expert at anything that's reasonably complex; UNIX/Linux system management and programming is no exception.
Read some Unix history and see why it failed, and why Windows took over. You'll notice some similiraties with your kind of behavior;
UNIX hasn't failed--it's one of the biggest and longest running success stories in the industry. As the saying goes, UNIX is user-friendly, it just picks its friends carefully.
and you'll see how crappy Linux GUI is (Windows also is crappy);
The primary Linux user interface is the command line: that's its strength, and that's why people use it. Windows has nothing comparable, and that's why people like myself don't like using Windows.
Linux GUI sucks, and all OSS developers do is to copy Windows "look'n feel", and therefore the same mistakes.
The copying goes both ways: much of the Windows UI is derived from old IBM interface standards and from old research GUI toolkits and environments. In any case, OSS developers emulate Windows "look and feel" because that's what Windows users moving to Linux want, not because it's "good".
You seem to think that there is some magic GUI somewhere that makes even difficult operations on computers easy to do. There isn't. There is Windows-style GUIs, which manage to get clueless people through difficult operations, very tediously. And then there are UNIX-style GUIs, which are nearly unusable for non-experts but are quite efficient for people who know what they are doing. Linux at least gives you a choice: Gnome and KDE try to clone the Windows GUIs, while the UNIX stuff also exists. And that's not bad.
Re:I'll have to see the bandwidth tests first.
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but Citrix can do what X can using less resources so who cares
No, it can't. First of all, Citrix lacks many of the inter-client communication features of X11. But even just in terms of performance, Citrix uses less bandwidth out of the box, but it uses more CPU and has higher latency. On a LAN, that's a bad tradeoff.
So I guess X has an excuse for being a network hog.
As I keep saying: if you want low-bandwidth X, use the low-bandwidth version of the X protocol (LBX, DXPC).
Seeing as how VNC sucks ass going over my crappy Verizon(tm) DSL and using Word via Citrix over it is still very usable, I find that statement very hard to believe
I use VNC over DSL frequently and have used it even at ISDN speeds: it works reasonably well. But you have to choose the correct depth and compression. The short answer is: for dial-up, use TightVNC and reduce your bit depth.
Of course, X11 works fine even at dial-up speeds, in particular if you use the low-bandwidth versions.
Anybody who's used Metaframe for any length of time would laugh at that statement.
Windows users laugh at lots of things they don't comprehend.
Try getting a PC laptop from Best Buy, or anywhere else, without getting Windows with it: you can do it, but you greatly limit the range of machines you can choose from. And for desktop PCs, if you shop around, you often pay less for a PC that's on sale and comes with Windows pre-installed than for one that comes without an OS. I choose machines by whether I like the hardware and whether the price is right; whether it does or doesn't come with Windows is irrelevant since I don't use it anyway.
Then Windows XP is way ahead of anything similiar in the Linux world. It makes u get the job done easier than Linux.
Maybe it gets your jobs done easier than Linux. That may be because your jobs are different or because you just don't understand Linux very well.
Geeky whinning. End users don't care about those things. Thinking like this: "everything is perfect, we are superior" is what will make Linux continue to be the 1% part of the desktop market pie chart.
There are lots of different kinds of end-users. I'm happy to be in the 1% of end-users for which Linux is the right choice. I really don't care whether you, your mother, or your dog runs Windows.
Same could be said of the overwhelming majority of open source products - they merely copied someone else's already successful software.
Sure, and I didn't dispute that. But there is actually also plenty of open source innovation: many computer science research results are first released in open source form.
And much of what open source developers now copy from Microsoft and Apple is stuff that Microsoft and Apple actually first copied from earlier generations of open source software.
Not trying to troll, but Microsoft has done a little innovating - take Visual Basic, for example. Unless I'm mistaken, VB was the first programming tool which allowed programmers to build applications with a click and drag GUI interface.
Not by a long shot. Visual GUI builders have been around for decades, long before VB even existed (VB was first released in 1991, and charitably traces its roots back to 1988). X11 toolkits had them before then. The Xerox and Lisp machines had them. Smalltalk-80 had them (in fact, VB really seems like a very poor imitation of Smalltalk). They really trace their roots back to Sketchpad in the 1960's. And whether they are a good idea is also quite debatable.
The Microsoft hit squad will probably moderate this down as a "Troll" as well, but I really do challenge you: try to come up with a single significant area where Microsoft invented something new and different.
The thing that pushes ppl to Linux and Open Source is the price.
No, it isn't. Most people who run Linux have already paid for Windows when they bought their machine, and they still choose to run Linux.
Who would want use and a disgruntled OS if they may get nice box, nice gradient buttons, stylish consistent GUI for a reasonable price?
Because a bit of eye candy isn't what most computer use is about: it's about getting work done.
Maybe it forces OSS software to evolve from merely copying proprietary functionalities to actually improve users' life in order to make a differentiation.
Linux is plenty differentiated. Its built-in POSIX support, package management, kernel features, and network transparent window system alone make it vastly different from Windows, and vastly superior in many applications.
The fact is, Microsoft could probably still make some changes internally that would allow them to profit off of Windows if it sold for almost nothing, and THEN what would open source have to bank on? Moral righteousness? HAH. That'll sell.
Most people already pay for Windows for each of their machines, whether they want to or not. I certainly have a Windows license for each of the dozen PCs that I have, and only one of them actually runs Windows.
So, your notion that people use open source because they have to pay for Windows flies in the face of reality. People use open source software because it simply works better for them.
Depressing for Microsoft, isn't it, that people throw Windows away even though it is pre-installed and they have actually been forced to pay for it and wouldn't incur any additional costs by just using it.
At first, MS's main advantage was price, but gradually they innovated(*)
Microsoft has not innovated once in their company's history: every single major product and major piece of functionality in their systems has been done by other companies and research labs before. Microsoft's usual MO is to either buy the competitor, or hire away the key developers from their competitors and create their own clone, which is then pushed out through their monopolistic distribution channels.
Only recently has Microsoft even attempted to innovate themselves, by creating MSR. But, so far, that has born no significant fruits.
(*)Rather than freaking out and writing posts about 'M$' and so on, why not go outside and get some fresh air?
I don't think I'm "freaking out". But why do you put gratuitous and erroneous Microsoft propaganda into your posts?
Re:I'll have to see the bandwidth tests first.
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Umm... no. It is not. You can even watch a video in Media Player, with sound, over Citrix. If anything, they're about equal in performance.
Remoting a video application is an idiotic basis for comparing the performance of network transparent graphics operations because it is so heavily dominated by the bitmaps that are being shipped around; it tells you nothing at all about how well the protocol is designed.
Also, Citrix doesn't even begin to address many of the issues that come up with network transparent window systems. Citrix is really more like VNC than a principled way of making applications network transparent. And between Citrix and VNC, VNC is by far the more impressive hack.
Microsoft engages in all sorts of sleazy business tactics, and they produce poor quality software to boot, but they generally doesn't use patent lawsuits to get their way. In fact, there would be little legally wrong with Microsoft's business tactics if Microsoft didn't have the majority market share in several market segments.
If you just institute properly designed volume-based charges, then sites that get compromised by worms will pay for the actual cost they impose on the rest of the Internet. I guarantee you that after they get presented with their first $100k bill, most administrators will get a bit more careful about patching their IIS or MSSQL servers.
Sorry, but that's not a reliable number. Some web sites see over 90% IE usage. You can easily up your IE prevalence by making your site work worse with non-IE browsers. The actual percentage of users who use IE as their primary browser is different from the percentage of users who use IE to reach specific web sites. A good guess is that it probably doesn't quite reach 90%. (This message is actually being posted from IE, but IE is not my primary browser, nor is Windows my primary OS.)
Or didn't you notice how the Enterprise and its shuttles on Star Trek don't seem to have any toilets either? Maybe it works like the food replicators in reverse, or maybe everybody just wears Depends.
I'd assume this is a troll, but maybe it's just youthful exuberance? Please.
I actually use X11, OS X, and Windows daily, so I have a basis for comparison. I've also done actual benchmarks. A good X11 server rocks in terms of performance and stability.
Re:I'll have to see the bandwidth tests first.
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When Citrix Metaframe uses 1/10th the bandwidth of X11, the onus is completely on you to justify that statement.
Easy: overall performance of a network transparent window system is not just determined by bandwidth usage. X11 deliberately was not optimized for bandwidth usage, it was optimized for overall performance, subject to the constraint of being able to run over a LAN. That is, X11 was optimized for how fast stuff actually renders on the screen and how much CPU it takes to do so (CPU is less of a concern these days, but it was a really big deal when X11 was designed and still matters on some X11 clients and servers).
So, yes, X11 uses more bandwidth than Citrix, but its overall performance over a LAN is better than that of Citrix. And that is still the case today.
If you want low bandwidth versions of X11, you can use LBX (low-bandwidth X) or dxpc (differential X protocol compression).
X11 is not a window system, it's a network protocol. That's its strength. XFree86 is a reference implementation.
Likewise, we don't need another network audio codebase, we need a good network audio protocol. It looks like MAS provides that. As a bonus, you also get a reference implementation.
It already exists: it's called "xclipboard". It's just an X11 application. You can also use a reasonable X11 text editor to keep and translate selections.
It's actually quite predictable what X11 applications do when transferring information via clipboards and selections. It's just a bit confusing because there are several different mechanisms, and different GUIs rely on different ones. If you run applications designed for different environments, things may seem confusing.
When I work from home, I do so *entirely* out of an ssh-forwarded X connection, including, but not limited to, multiple XEmacs sessions, terminals and occasionally a remote Mozilla. The *only* problems I have encountered involved XEmacs doing silly things with the cut-buffer and pausing momentarily.
You can improve things further by using LBX (low-bandwidth X), by running "lbxproxy".
It does some X protocol aware compression. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, it caches some server information that applications commonly re-request over and over again unnecessarily.
Basically, all you need to do is:
$ lbxproxy &
$ export DISPLAY=:63
$ xterm&
Re:I'll have to see the bandwidth tests first.
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· Score: 1
X11 needs a new protocol.
No, it doesn't. The X11 protocol is the most efficient protocol for local and LAN usage around. It is, however, not a protocol designed for slow links (LBX is).
If you want to do a test try running the XMMS gui across the network via X11.
Then XMMS is a poorly designed X11 application. There are plenty of those around. In fact, there are very popular toolkits for X11 that are bandwidth hogs. But that's because the toolkits don't use X11 properly, not because there is anything wrong with X11. No protocol improvements can reduce bandwidth when an toolkit's or application's idea of a GUI is to ship lots of bouncing bitmaps around.
At any rate, this is a good step forward--hopefully we'll see more X-based apps improved as to stability and speed (X isn't the speediest thing in the world).
You're kidding, right? The most stable and efficient window system servers around are X11-based. MS Windows and (in particular) OS X are flaky and sluggish in comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
Scrap manned space exploration entirely for the next half century and use the money to build lots and lots of unmanned probes instead. For work in earth orbit, build better telepresence systems.
Yes (with UNIX, more with computers).
Linux is not that complex,
Linux isn't complex. But being able to build something complex out of it requires lots of experience.
Only geeks and sysadmins. But wait: the world's population is not only composed by them.
No, but the non-geeks and non-sysadmins can go out an spend money on Windows or MacOS.
In the real world ppl use computers to get the job done. And Unix GUI sucks.
All GUIs suck. That's why Linux/UNIX doesn't rely on GUIs. Thankfully, that makes one successful environment that doesn't.
There's no magic, just techniques that OSS developers seems do ignore.
Gnome and KDE pay as much attention to good GUI design as Windows and Windows apps do, with roughly the same results.
If you like to componentize your GUI that way, you can. But X11 doesn't care. Traditionally, X11 has a window manager, which also does some limited things with the desktop, and applications would use lots of different widget set. X11 is really more like Macintosh Quartz or Windows GDI, with a wide range of choices for GUIs built on top of it.
Many commercial X11 applications (bank terminals, etc.) use the X11 server completely differently.
Further confusing the issue is the use of a single term to refer to all of these components in aggregate. For example, "GNOME" typically refers collectively to the Widget Toolkit, the Window Manager, and the Desktop Manager.
It's basically an attempt to bring a Windows view of the world to the UNIX environment. Technically, I don't think it's the best approach. However, environments like Gnome and KDE give Windows refugees a warm and fuzzy feeling.
You might well want to consider weaning yourself off Gnome or KDE--give window managers like IceWM or blackbox a try.
And this wasn't exactly a surprise: people have been pointing out that KDE wasn't going to be very attractive to companies like Sun or IBM since the beginnings of the KDE project. If KDE wants to get back into this game, KDE should really aggressively pursue an LGPL clone of Qt. It's not that hard to do.
An xterm requires less resources to start up thatn a Perl CGI script. If your users cringe when an xterm starts up, you have a seriously underpowered web server.
I don't know where this "X11 is big and slow" myth comes from. Come on, use your head. On an 8Mbyte 68k-based UNIX workstation--you know, less power than a low-end Palm--X11 was kind sluggish--around 20 years ago. Machines have gotten more than 100 times more powerful since then--running X11 isn't even noticeable.
Of course, you can make X11 big and slow by letting it allocate huge bitmaps. But that's not X11's fault--any graphics application can do that under any window system.
As for security, use "xauth" and/or only allow local connections (you can still tunnel through "ssh"): the result is pretty much bulletproof.
So? You are just a beginner using UNIX/Linux, then. It's no wonder that you still don't feel entirely comfortable with it. It takes about 10 years of intensive work to become an expert at anything that's reasonably complex; UNIX/Linux system management and programming is no exception.
Read some Unix history and see why it failed, and why Windows took over. You'll notice some similiraties with your kind of behavior;
UNIX hasn't failed--it's one of the biggest and longest running success stories in the industry. As the saying goes, UNIX is user-friendly, it just picks its friends carefully.
and you'll see how crappy Linux GUI is (Windows also is crappy);
The primary Linux user interface is the command line: that's its strength, and that's why people use it. Windows has nothing comparable, and that's why people like myself don't like using Windows.
Linux GUI sucks, and all OSS developers do is to copy Windows "look'n feel", and therefore the same mistakes.
The copying goes both ways: much of the Windows UI is derived from old IBM interface standards and from old research GUI toolkits and environments. In any case, OSS developers emulate Windows "look and feel" because that's what Windows users moving to Linux want, not because it's "good".
You seem to think that there is some magic GUI somewhere that makes even difficult operations on computers easy to do. There isn't. There is Windows-style GUIs, which manage to get clueless people through difficult operations, very tediously. And then there are UNIX-style GUIs, which are nearly unusable for non-experts but are quite efficient for people who know what they are doing. Linux at least gives you a choice: Gnome and KDE try to clone the Windows GUIs, while the UNIX stuff also exists. And that's not bad.
No, it can't. First of all, Citrix lacks many of the inter-client communication features of X11. But even just in terms of performance, Citrix uses less bandwidth out of the box, but it uses more CPU and has higher latency. On a LAN, that's a bad tradeoff.
So I guess X has an excuse for being a network hog.
As I keep saying: if you want low-bandwidth X, use the low-bandwidth version of the X protocol (LBX, DXPC).
Seeing as how VNC sucks ass going over my crappy Verizon(tm) DSL and using Word via Citrix over it is still very usable, I find that statement very hard to believe
I use VNC over DSL frequently and have used it even at ISDN speeds: it works reasonably well. But you have to choose the correct depth and compression. The short answer is: for dial-up, use TightVNC and reduce your bit depth.
Of course, X11 works fine even at dial-up speeds, in particular if you use the low-bandwidth versions.
Anybody who's used Metaframe for any length of time would laugh at that statement.
Windows users laugh at lots of things they don't comprehend.
Try getting a PC laptop from Best Buy, or anywhere else, without getting Windows with it: you can do it, but you greatly limit the range of machines you can choose from. And for desktop PCs, if you shop around, you often pay less for a PC that's on sale and comes with Windows pre-installed than for one that comes without an OS. I choose machines by whether I like the hardware and whether the price is right; whether it does or doesn't come with Windows is irrelevant since I don't use it anyway.
Maybe it gets your jobs done easier than Linux. That may be because your jobs are different or because you just don't understand Linux very well.
Geeky whinning. End users don't care about those things. Thinking like this: "everything is perfect, we are superior" is what will make Linux continue to be the 1% part of the desktop market pie chart.
There are lots of different kinds of end-users. I'm happy to be in the 1% of end-users for which Linux is the right choice. I really don't care whether you, your mother, or your dog runs Windows.
Sure, and I didn't dispute that. But there is actually also plenty of open source innovation: many computer science research results are first released in open source form.
And much of what open source developers now copy from Microsoft and Apple is stuff that Microsoft and Apple actually first copied from earlier generations of open source software.
Not trying to troll, but Microsoft has done a little innovating - take Visual Basic, for example. Unless I'm mistaken, VB was the first programming tool which allowed programmers to build applications with a click and drag GUI interface.
Not by a long shot. Visual GUI builders have been around for decades, long before VB even existed (VB was first released in 1991, and charitably traces its roots back to 1988). X11 toolkits had them before then. The Xerox and Lisp machines had them. Smalltalk-80 had them (in fact, VB really seems like a very poor imitation of Smalltalk). They really trace their roots back to Sketchpad in the 1960's. And whether they are a good idea is also quite debatable.
The Microsoft hit squad will probably moderate this down as a "Troll" as well, but I really do challenge you: try to come up with a single significant area where Microsoft invented something new and different.
No, it isn't. Most people who run Linux have already paid for Windows when they bought their machine, and they still choose to run Linux.
Who would want use and a disgruntled OS if they may get nice box, nice gradient buttons, stylish consistent GUI for a reasonable price?
Because a bit of eye candy isn't what most computer use is about: it's about getting work done.
Maybe it forces OSS software to evolve from merely copying proprietary functionalities to actually improve users' life in order to make a differentiation.
Linux is plenty differentiated. Its built-in POSIX support, package management, kernel features, and network transparent window system alone make it vastly different from Windows, and vastly superior in many applications.
Most people already pay for Windows for each of their machines, whether they want to or not. I certainly have a Windows license for each of the dozen PCs that I have, and only one of them actually runs Windows.
So, your notion that people use open source because they have to pay for Windows flies in the face of reality. People use open source software because it simply works better for them.
Depressing for Microsoft, isn't it, that people throw Windows away even though it is pre-installed and they have actually been forced to pay for it and wouldn't incur any additional costs by just using it.
Microsoft has not innovated once in their company's history: every single major product and major piece of functionality in their systems has been done by other companies and research labs before. Microsoft's usual MO is to either buy the competitor, or hire away the key developers from their competitors and create their own clone, which is then pushed out through their monopolistic distribution channels.
Only recently has Microsoft even attempted to innovate themselves, by creating MSR. But, so far, that has born no significant fruits.
(*)Rather than freaking out and writing posts about 'M$' and so on, why not go outside and get some fresh air?
I don't think I'm "freaking out". But why do you put gratuitous and erroneous Microsoft propaganda into your posts?
Remoting a video application is an idiotic basis for comparing the performance of network transparent graphics operations because it is so heavily dominated by the bitmaps that are being shipped around; it tells you nothing at all about how well the protocol is designed.
Also, Citrix doesn't even begin to address many of the issues that come up with network transparent window systems. Citrix is really more like VNC than a principled way of making applications network transparent. And between Citrix and VNC, VNC is by far the more impressive hack.
Microsoft engages in all sorts of sleazy business tactics, and they produce poor quality software to boot, but they generally doesn't use patent lawsuits to get their way. In fact, there would be little legally wrong with Microsoft's business tactics if Microsoft didn't have the majority market share in several market segments.
If you just institute properly designed volume-based charges, then sites that get compromised by worms will pay for the actual cost they impose on the rest of the Internet. I guarantee you that after they get presented with their first $100k bill, most administrators will get a bit more careful about patching their IIS or MSSQL servers.
Sorry, but that's not a reliable number. Some web sites see over 90% IE usage. You can easily up your IE prevalence by making your site work worse with non-IE browsers. The actual percentage of users who use IE as their primary browser is different from the percentage of users who use IE to reach specific web sites. A good guess is that it probably doesn't quite reach 90%. (This message is actually being posted from IE, but IE is not my primary browser, nor is Windows my primary OS.)
Or didn't you notice how the Enterprise and its shuttles on Star Trek don't seem to have any toilets either? Maybe it works like the food replicators in reverse, or maybe everybody just wears Depends.
I actually use X11, OS X, and Windows daily, so I have a basis for comparison. I've also done actual benchmarks. A good X11 server rocks in terms of performance and stability.
Easy: overall performance of a network transparent window system is not just determined by bandwidth usage. X11 deliberately was not optimized for bandwidth usage, it was optimized for overall performance, subject to the constraint of being able to run over a LAN. That is, X11 was optimized for how fast stuff actually renders on the screen and how much CPU it takes to do so (CPU is less of a concern these days, but it was a really big deal when X11 was designed and still matters on some X11 clients and servers).
So, yes, X11 uses more bandwidth than Citrix, but its overall performance over a LAN is better than that of Citrix. And that is still the case today.
If you want low bandwidth versions of X11, you can use LBX (low-bandwidth X) or dxpc (differential X protocol compression).
Likewise, we don't need another network audio codebase, we need a good network audio protocol. It looks like MAS provides that. As a bonus, you also get a reference implementation.
It's actually quite predictable what X11 applications do when transferring information via clipboards and selections. It's just a bit confusing because there are several different mechanisms, and different GUIs rely on different ones. If you run applications designed for different environments, things may seem confusing.
You can improve things further by using LBX (low-bandwidth X), by running "lbxproxy".
It does some X protocol aware compression. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, it caches some server information that applications commonly re-request over and over again unnecessarily.
Basically, all you need to do is:
$ lbxproxy &
$ export DISPLAY=:63
$ xterm&
No, it doesn't. The X11 protocol is the most efficient protocol for local and LAN usage around. It is, however, not a protocol designed for slow links (LBX is).
If you want to do a test try running the XMMS gui across the network via X11.
Then XMMS is a poorly designed X11 application. There are plenty of those around. In fact, there are very popular toolkits for X11 that are bandwidth hogs. But that's because the toolkits don't use X11 properly, not because there is anything wrong with X11. No protocol improvements can reduce bandwidth when an toolkit's or application's idea of a GUI is to ship lots of bouncing bitmaps around.
You're kidding, right? The most stable and efficient window system servers around are X11-based. MS Windows and (in particular) OS X are flaky and sluggish in comparison.