Re: console vs X (was Re: SDL vs GGI)

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

Cubesoft wrote:

> I agree.  This is true with any soft/hardware holy war.  Why has there
> to be ONE right way.  Some people like advantages in one thing, and some
> like afvantages in others.

Yes - I agree in principle - but in this case, I'm completely at a loss
to see any measurable advantage to using the dumb console at all.

People seem to have some nebulous idea that X consumes excessive amounts
of "resources" without being able to tell me what they mean by that word
(RAM, Disk, CPU, power supply voltage - what?)...and then you see a wild
claim that 20% of these mythical "resources" are consumed...still no
indication
of what that resource actually is.

Then claims of unreliability so extreme as to make it unusable - which
clashes
with the experience of people who actually do use it and find it 100%
reliable
(once installed).

When I ask WHY the console is preferable, I get assertions that the font
is
nicer (silly! there are HUNDREDS of X fonts out there - I can't believe
that
none of them are better than the one font that happens to come in your
video
card)...people tell me that they reserve the right to use the console
(fair
enough) or that it's easier to program (so is a programmable calculator
- but
I still wouldn't write video games on one)!

> This is true for the vi(which I use) vs Emacs, BSD vs Linux,
> KDE vs GNOME vs CDE vs Whatever else.

Absolutely. These holy wars are insoluable - but usually because there
is some concrete advantage to each side over the other.  In this
specific
case, I can't see ANY advantages to the console approach!  Well, I
probably won't - so maybe I should just stop trying to understand.
 
...but I really would like to know what resource X is hogging 20% of...
oh - wait! I know!  It occupies 20% of the 'man' pages! ...no,
actually...
that's an underestimate!


> The only times I ahve had an improer shutdown is from X also.  I have not succesfully gotten the
> StarOffice to install.  I have narrowed it down to If itm gains focus, Bye Bye machine.

Hmmm - it was auto-installed by SuSE on my machine - no problems there.
 
> Other stuff has crashed X.  Sometimes I haven;t even been able to load it.  Sometimes I have had
> font server problems, or problems with it using the incorrect video server.  Also, Somehow a lib
> needed by WindowMaker got corrupted, I think.  So it couldn't load, so I had to install BlackBox
> to do anything until, which helped me narrow it down to a bad package.

Huh!  That's *so* odd. I install packages at a rate of about one a *day*
and I don't recall any taking out X...lot's of them plain don't work -
but
that's another story.
 
> Also
> CPU: 133
> RAM: 48
> hard Drive: 1 Gb, 8 Gb
> Video:  S3 Virge DX

Ugh!  S3 Virge is a truly terrible piece of junk!
Carmack describes it as a 3D decelerator because it runs
Quake slower than software alone!

Still - it doesn't sound like that could be the cause of your
grief. I used to run X on my 32Mib RAM, 100MHz 486 - it worked
OK.

-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
sjbaker1@airmail.net (home)  http://www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker
sjbaker@hti.com      (work)