Am 15.09.2013 01:35, schrieb Nick Sabalausky:
On Sat, 14 Sep 2013 17:38:52 +0200
"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructiona...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Saturday, 14 September 2013 at 06:57:23 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
Windows and most of the other distros at the time offered: the
ability to install a bare minimum system that could still
function without *requiring* X11
oh god X11 was too brutally slow to use on an older computer
anyway. Windows 95 was actually fast.
An interesting anecdote.
At the begining of my UNIX days, it was a pleasure to use the usual set
of APIs, which tend to be less convoluted than on Windows.
Then I started looking into X11 programming with Xlib and Motif, and
could not believe that they managed to make it even more complex than
any other desktop graphics programming API!
On those days, Gtk and Qt were still to be born and framebuffer
applications running with setuid coded in svgalib were the way to go
for graphics coding on Linux distributions.
My first introduction to Linux was around 2001 with Mandrake and Red
Hat (the two main "newbie-friendly" distros at the time). I couldn't
believe how insanely sllloooooow Nautilus was compared to Win98 and
Win2k on the same hardware.
Plus, the X11 installation kept completely destroying itself for no
apparent reason. One day, a few weeks after the most recent
from-scratch OS installation, X would just simply decide not to start.
And I never could manage to fix it without yet another OS
re-installation.
That, plus the constant tinkering, the awful state of pre-apt/yum
packages, and the attitudes of many Linux users at the time left me
swearing off Linux and running back to Windows until several years
later when I finally gave it another try with "This new Ubuntu thing
everyone seems to be talking about."
Boy have things improved. Not perfect, granted, but far better than I
had ever expected.
While true, this experience is easy to replicate in 2013 with the wrong
laptop, sadly.
Actually though now there's the whole qemu/kvm virtualization
stuff who's potential I really don't think has been fully
explored.
I feel exactly the same way. EVen though I've never been a
big VM-language fan, machine virtualization rocks. (Aside from Intel's
deliberate marginalization of it for anything but high-end.)
I like vm languages, if the implementation offers a proper jit. :)
As for virtualization, I have also became a big fan and no longer dual boot.
--
Paulo
