Originally Posted by
Neal Clayton
do distros still advertise X as network capable despite not having the bandwidth even now on most networks to support it with modern desktop graphics? (nevermind 20 years ago...)
it's a flawed design, it was flawed from day one. why have a client/server model when literally no one uses them separately?
they started with a stated goal of emulating Windows, but without simple standards for oh...i dunno....inconsequential things like....what the mouse buttons do. then they went back and tried to reverse engineer a set of standards based on what a few X apps that popped up were doing.
and how many distros have stopped shipping gnome entirely? i know slackware did. i'd be surprised if others haven't done so since then, that was a few years ago. fun fact: it is impossible to compile gnome and all of its dependencies from scratch without fixing bugs yourself. there are dependency loops and broken components galore. they have always been broken, the distros have been carrying them for years. why? because KDE was built on a set of libraries that were not free, and only in the past year have been LGPL permissible (so that you could write non GPL software with KDE's libs).
so gnome took KDE's license restrictions as an excuse to not fix much for over a decade. and KDE took gnome's broken'ness as an excuse to continue to not allow use of the QT libs in non GPL software until 2010.
it's like two schoolyard bullies arguing in reverse...
"i suck"
"no i suck, you don't suck nearly as much as me"
if there were a book written about how not to develop a GUI, it would be the history of X, KDE, and gnome. it's such a mess apple wouldn't even bother stealing it, they bought a UI from Sun to modify into Quartz.