Could you PC loving Aholes go home?

[Iggy]

If you can honestly look at a modern PC motherboard and associated components and not see 2 decades worth of accumulated cleverness in the component parts and their interconnections then there's no point in me even trying to point any out. You simply don't, or won't appreciate it. Which is your prerogative.

My first experience of a PC was a typical, cost-reduced 8086 green screen affair. The one I am typing on couldn't be further from it. The *only* thing it has in common is a subset the instruction set the processor uses.

Wow, you had a "real" PC.
My first experience was soldering together a 6800 based system.
Man the circuit boards were crude.
Even unpopulated, a current circuit board is a complex thing of beauty with about 90% of its secrets hidden in its inner layers.
That's why it always cracks me up when someone discusses "making boards".

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Though my current computer is sufficiently fast, I cannot but think that it needs a lot of power to drive current OS'es.
As BeOS showed, there can be a full pre-emptive multitasking OS with a GUI that is really fast on the PC.
So I'm very curious of what they make of Wayland as the only resource-hungry aspect of Linux is the x-windows system.

[commodorejohn]

If you can honestly look at a modern PC motherboard  and associated components and not see 2 decades worth of accumulated  cleverness in the component parts and their interconnections then  there's no point in me even trying to point any out. You simply don't,  or won't appreciate it. Which is your prerogative.

That's not an answer to the question, that's you telling me that I don't  want an answer to the question, and I'll be the decider of my  own motivations, thank you. If I wasn't interested in hearing your view on it, I certainly wouldn't have wasted my time asking.

So I'm very curious of what they make of Wayland as the only resource-hungry aspect of Linux is the x-windows system.

Wayland has some good ideas at the core, and yes, XWindows is ripe for replacement. Problem is, as far as I've read it sounds like they're betting everything on GPU acceleration, which is only good if you have working GPU acceleration. In Linux, that depends largely on what exact core of whose basic architecture your GPU uses, and the open-source driver projects for even the big names in video cards are pretty scattershot in their support.

Wayland claims that'll be taken care of by a software fallback layer. Ideally that would mean no worse performance than a non-compositing window manager, which would be pretty fine. Unfortunately, what they're planning to do is run the compositing window manager through the Mesa software renderer. Which, if you've ever used it for anything more complex than a spinning-teapot demo, is a sluggish agony. So if your laptop has an unsupported chipset, the question will be whether or not the pain of maintaining and using X is worse than the pain of using Wayland on a software emulation of hardware acceleration.

[Karlos]

That's not an answer to the question, that's you telling me that I don't  want an answer to the question, and I'll be the decider of my  own motivations, thank you. If I wasn't interested in hearing your view on it, I certainly wouldn't have wasted my time asking.

Your question seemed rhetorical. For your consideration, first I'll submit the GPU. First there was the dumb, often segmented framebuffer. Then there was some fixed 2D functionality in EGA and VGA (that few people ever explored). Then there was the fixed function 3D accelerator. Which became ever more powerful until eventually, multiple texture pipelines just wasn't enough and T&L was added. Then shaders and before you know it, the massively parallel turing-complete high-performance processing cluster that is the modern GPU was born. Virtually all of these represent different eras in graphics processing technology and were the result of numerous innovations over the previous era. And it's still going on. It's just that most people simply don't appreciate what is changing at the machine level behind their APIs. Instead, they see prettier graphics but don't realize the revolutions in hardware that have enabled it.

You can pick any component in your typical PC and see the same development. Many times, there's a complete shift in the way things work in order to overcome some fundamental limitation. In the distant past, people would laugh at the notion of using serial interfaces between system components on a mainboard (with a few esoteric transputer systems excluded). Then, as bus speeds reach a certain level, people realised that shovelling increasingly wide machine words around parallel tracks on a motherboard is both space inefficient and prone to error as the speed goes up. Simply put, the length of individual tracks becomes problematic for signal propagation. Revising everything to use multiple high speed serial links and point-to-point transfer, instead of wide transfers is an extremely clever solution that we would have scoffed at 20 years ago.

To think of all these changes as mere evolution of the same old 8086 architecture (ie, nothing new, just faster) is nothing short of disingenuous. It takes a lot to deliver all that brute force and a lot of changes to keep delivering it.

I'd say the only thing that hasn't really kept up is the software. For example, we now have many-core systems capable of dramatic throughput but lots of applications with poor concurrency support, incapable of realizing their potential. OK, sometimes that's just the way it goes as not everything can be parallelised, but we're still lagging behind in terms of how we go about designing software for such scalability in the first place.

[Iggy]

...the only resource-hungry aspect of Linux is the x-windows system.

From what perspective?
CPU load?

Because, in that regard it would be one of the largest drags.

But depending on what you're doing, Linux based systems can have a lot of other resource hungry drags.

[Matt_H]

Does this really matter?  I can't think of any programs I use on a daily basis that don't pull my desktop resolution.

Games, VMWare, other emulators. I wouldn't mind so much if not for the fact that when flipping back to the desktop, all of my windows and icons have been squished and repositioned to fit the resolution of the program I was just running. And it's slow as hell.

Besides, I much prefer running a somewhat low-res desktop with high-res programs opening on their own screen. Left Amiga+M is instantaneous and depends only on the monitor resyncing. On Windows, try Alt+Tabbing to PowerPoint after you've been working in another program for a while and see how long it takes. Try Alt+Tabbing back from a game to look at another window - if it even lets you.

Oh, on a related matter, my usual old chestnut: the ability to have the active window not be the frontmost one - how the Windows/Mac/Linux world hasn't gotten to this one yet is mind-boggling.

Amiga: We still got it (in some areas)

[Iggy]

Amiga: We still got it (in some areas)

And that's if you just sift through the left over decayed parts.
We could still own it all!

[TheBilgeRat]

Games, VMWare, other emulators. I wouldn't mind so much if not for the fact that when flipping back to the desktop, all of my windows and icons have been squished and repositioned to fit the resolution of the program I was just running. And it's slow as hell.

weird.  I don't get this behavior when I quit out of some game that changes the screen res.

Besides, I much prefer running a somewhat low-res desktop with high-res programs opening on their own screen. Left Amiga+M is instantaneous and depends only on the monitor resyncing. On Windows, try Alt+Tabbing to PowerPoint after you've been working in another program for a while and see how long it takes. Try Alt+Tabbing back from a game to look at another window - if it even lets you.

I don't think I do that at all.

Oh, on a related matter, my usual old chestnut: the ability to have the active window not be the frontmost one - how the Windows/Mac/Linux world hasn't gotten to this one yet is mind-boggling.

Amiga: We still got it (in some areas)

Well, on the linux side, you can make your windows do whatever the hell you want to.  If you want focus to be explicit, you can set it that way.  Also, I have always hated active window not being in the forefront.

[Thorham]

Cause PCs, even developed by brute force, still aren't that great.

Nothing wrong with PCs. Cheap and fast. Don't care how they work, as long as they do what I want, and that they do Are they boring? Sure. Does it matter? No

[Matt_H]

weird.  I don't get this behavior when I quit out of some game that changes the screen res.



I don't think I do that at all.

You're one lucky ducky!
I don't think it's ever *not* happened to me.

Well, on the linux side, you can make your windows do whatever the hell you want to.  If you want focus to be explicit, you can set it that way.  Also, I have always hated active window not being in the forefront.

I was not aware of this. Which window manager lets you do this (in case I ever put another Linux box together)?

[TheBilgeRat]

I was not aware of this. Which window manager lets you do this (in case I ever put another Linux box together)?

I think this is what you may be after.

http://bertrandbenoit.blogspot.com/2011/09/change-window-behavior-to-prevent-focus.html

  Granted, I don't muck around with windowing behavior (the GUI is really just there to let me run non-console programs...half the time I work in DWM), but in most modern OSes they call it "focus" and most DEs have ways of mucking about with it.

[Bamiga2002]

My PC is only a low-life bitch slave.

[Matt_H]

I think this is what you may be after.

http://bertrandbenoit.blogspot.com/2011/09/change-window-behavior-to-prevent-focus.html

  Granted, I don't muck around with windowing behavior (the GUI is really just there to let me run non-console programs...half the time I work in DWM), but in most modern OSes they call it "focus" and most DEs have ways of mucking about with it.

Thanks. I think the behavior in that article is slightly different from what I'd like to see, but I'll keep it bookmarked for future reference.

[vidarh]

Besides, I much prefer running a somewhat low-res desktop with high-res programs opening on their own screen.

Scalable fonts. There's just no reason to subject your eyes to low resolution any more.

Left Amiga+M is instantaneous and depends only on the monitor resyncing. On Windows, try Alt+Tabbing to PowerPoint after you've been working in another program for a while and see how long it takes. Try Alt+Tabbing back from a game to look at another window - if it even lets you.

Maybe on Windows, but these days on my Linux laptop, switching between apps is instantaneous, even with a relatively anaemic integrated Intel GPU.

Oh, on a related matter, my usual old chestnut: the ability to have the active window not be the frontmost one - how the Windows/Mac/Linux world hasn't gotten to this one yet is mind-boggling.

They have. A large number of Linux windows managers have been able to support this since the mid 90's (inclduding "AmiWM" which tries to make X Windows look like AmigaOS), it's just not popular with users and so pretty much none ship with it enabled by default, and it's a "dying" option.

[vidarh]

x86/x64 based PCs can display to multiple monitors at their optimum or differing resolutions.  It's a bit of a moot point in 2012 with full Hi Def digital displays. The operating system supports what is needed.  Screens were cool in the 80's but they were really a feature gimic rather than anything productive or useful.  IMO.

I loved screens for how it saved screen real estate, and I've got my desktop and laptop set up to run most stuff maximized and switch between them with a key combo just like I used to on my Amiga. With recent Ubuntu introducing a global menu too, it's slowly getting there

But the multi-resolution aspect of it is pretty moot today, I agree.

[commodorejohn]

Scalable fonts. There's just no reason to subject your eyes to low resolution any more.

I like lower resolutions, myself.