X Windows succeeded because all other options on Unix or Unix-like workstations were fundamentally awful, whereas X was just plain awful. This is because everyone who's designed a GUI environment or toolikt for Unix was fundamentally clueless, or in the case of X, plain clueless. I don't doubt that X works, but so did the Pinto.
Anyone stating otherwise should examine what portion of the desktop market is held by X-Windows-based systems. Those of us who need to get work done use Macs or PCs. Others who like to fiddle endlessly with window managers, desktop themes, wiggly titlebars, floating eyeballs and incompatible applications can continue using X systems.
I wish it were otherwise. I wish that X had been designed better to start with. Instead we had inane and dumbass declarations like "mechanism not policy", on the supposed notion that somehow magically beautiful toolkits will evolve and the world of Unix finally will be set right. So much darwinism, so little evolution. Now, almost twenty years later, we have the declared winners, Gnome and KDE (aka the Monitor and Merrimac of Linux desktops), both incomplete, backward-looking and non-pioneering environments.
The only useful solution would be for either Apple or Microsoft to port their environments to Linux. Given what kind of a mess most MS code must be in, the only market-viable candidate is Apple. Quartz already has all the unix microkernel underpinnings anyway.
Come to think of it, if Apple were to just port MacOS X to x86 platforms, we could solve this whole Linux desktop misery thing once and for all. Of course that would eliminate Linux, but oh well, much worse things have happened to computing already and we've all survived.
In fact, probably millions of software jobs can be attributed to really crummy system designs that required all sorts of patches and workarounds in order to become useful. If those systems had been built right to start with, most of us would be laboring elsewhere and otherwise.
Perhaps I should stop myself before I cause an economic collapse......anon...
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X Windows succeeded because all other options on Unix or Unix-like workstations were fundamentally awful, whereas X was just plain awful. This is because everyone who's designed a GUI environment or toolikt for Unix was fundamentally clueless, or in the case of X, plain clueless. I don't doubt that X works, but so did the Pinto.
...anon...
Anyone stating otherwise should examine what portion of the desktop market is held by X-Windows-based systems. Those of us who need to get work done use Macs or PCs. Others who like to fiddle endlessly with window managers, desktop themes, wiggly titlebars, floating eyeballs and incompatible applications can continue using X systems.
I wish it were otherwise. I wish that X had been designed better to start with. Instead we had inane and dumbass declarations like "mechanism not policy", on the supposed notion that somehow magically beautiful toolkits will evolve and the world of Unix finally will be set right. So much darwinism, so little evolution. Now, almost twenty years later, we have the declared winners, Gnome and KDE (aka the Monitor and Merrimac of Linux desktops), both incomplete, backward-looking and non-pioneering environments.
The only useful solution would be for either Apple or Microsoft to port their environments to Linux. Given what kind of a mess most MS code must be in, the only market-viable candidate is Apple. Quartz already has all the unix microkernel underpinnings anyway.
Come to think of it, if Apple were to just port MacOS X to x86 platforms, we could solve this whole Linux desktop misery thing once and for all. Of course that would eliminate Linux, but oh well, much worse things have happened to computing already and we've all survived.
In fact, probably millions of software jobs can be attributed to really crummy system designs that required all sorts of patches and workarounds in order to become useful. If those systems had been built right to start with, most of us would be laboring elsewhere and otherwise.
Perhaps I should stop myself before I cause an economic collapse...