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

[Cameron Patrick]

James Devenish wrote:

> 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.

:-)  I'd say that the icons in Windows XP look a lot nicer than those
on Linux desktops of the time -- although recent KDE and GNOME have
improved quite a bit in this department.  I find the default XP
"teletubby" look pretty revolting though.

> On the "plus" side, I did
> not find XP to be "slow" except when logging in/out/shutting down.

!? My experience is that XP starts up and shuts down a lot quicker
than any Linux machine I've used (and better than the most recent Macs
I've used, "recent" being the old 366MHz iMacs they have in the MCL at
UWA).  The file manager is amazingly slow when browsing SMB shares on
remote machines, even over 100Mbit networks, and seems prone to random
'pauses' accompanied by thrashing the hard drive even on local
directories.  File manager windows sometimes spontaneously decide to
hang (don't redraw, can't be dragged around the screen, etc).

But hey, it /starts/ quickly :-)

> from using Windows XP is that CDE* doesn't seem so bad after all (does
[...]
> * CDE is the "Common Desktop Environment", a dated X11 desktop system
>   used with many proprietary UNIX systems.

My (brief) experience with using CDE (on Tru64) was that, unlike
Windows, it has a decent terminal emulator -- and if you try hard
enough, you can even run bash on it instead of csh, so you have a
usable shell too :-)

Cameron.