Linked by Guillaume Maillard on Thu 10th Oct 2002 05:44 UTC
Being a BeOS user (a purely desktop system) and because I code under Linux, I see XFree86 (v4.1 on my machine) as a user and as a developper. And this is where the problem lies. My Gnome or KDE desktops are slow in comparison with other operating systems, but XFree86, the 'engine' behind these desktops, proves me that it's not. Let's look at what I have in front of me: a dual Pentium III at 933Mhz with 512MB of memory, a Radeon 32 AIW, a modified Mandrake 8.0 powered by kernel 2.4.18.
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Amiga had an 8Mhz CPU, with special chips to accelerate blitting, and a typical Amiga window size, might be, for example, 500x150 at 2 bitplanes. And then, while it was quite responsive considering the hardware, it was by no means "instant". The Amiga graphics system (Intuition) was incredible for its time, but it's no miracle, and my system (RedHat 8.0 with a low-latency patch, on a 2.53Ghz, GeForce 4 Ti4200 with nVidia drivers, can, not suprisingly, outperform it. Perhaps it doesn't outperform it by as much as the jump in hardware would suggest. But, even under X-Windows with GNOME and KDE piled on top, and huge (for example, maybe about 1000x800x32 bitplanes) windows, my windows will glide effortlessly, and artifact-freely around my X-Windows desktop, with instant response. Web pages snap so quickly into my browser (especially under Konqueror!) that I occasionally wonder what's taking it so long, not realizing immediately that the page has loaded and displayed before I even moved the focus of my eyes from the address bar back to the contents of the web-browser window. I'm all for a faster X-Windows, but at this point it would merely be to reduce X-Window's CPU usage so that other software might be able to use it, not to speed up the visual speed.
Erik
Erik