Windows XP vs. X11 GUIs [was: Re: [plug] [OT] Looking for cheap P4]

[James Devenish]

In message <412EC8A3.3030501 at postnewspapers.com.au>
on Fri, Aug 27, 2004 at 01:37:39PM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
> I must admit that when working on our XP box at work (TNT2, AMD Duron 
> 1GHz) I find myself thinking "Gee, I can watch the windows redraw just 
> like on a Linux X11 desktop..."

What do you mean in particular? I've had some run-ins with Windows XP
lately, and I thought it was not very polished in its user interface.
Just on a first experience (e.g. one hour), I found that the Windows XP
GUI apparatus was not very much better than anything in Debian woody.
This surprised me, because I thought XP was meant to be their flagship
consumer OS (although I now understand that XP is a bit long in the
tooth -- perhaps it is somewhat "historical" in the same way that Debian
woody is somewhat "historical").

I also thought that a lot of the bundled visual material (e.g. the
appearance of buttons, windows, etc.) was done by people who were just
filling in time before going home on Friday. On the "plus" side, I did
not find XP to be "slow" except when logging in/out/shutting down. Also,
I have always had problems with hardware support -- flakiness seems to
be the name of the game. Although folder navigation felt faster than
(say) Nautilus, I found that the interface seemed to flicker a lot (both
in terms of an apparent lack of buffering and in terms of it deciding to
move things around of screen several times before settling). The taskbar
and system tray were particularly frustrating aspects of the interface.
Also, tooltips sometimes appear /behind/ other objects, which makes them
unreadable. Also, I could not see an obvious way to "minimise"
control-panel windows. (Yes, I'm a Windows "n00b", as some people say.)
I know this sounds like a silly little rant, but my honest impression
from using Windows XP is that CDE* doesn't seem so bad after all (does
that make me mentally ill?).

* CDE is the "Common Desktop Environment", a dated X11 desktop system
  used with many proprietary UNIX systems.