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From: mouse@LARRY.MCRCIM.MCGILL.EDU (der Mouse)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re:  Non-Unix X clients?
Message-ID: <9005050543.AA24840@Larry.McRCIM.McGill.EDU>
Date: 5 May 90 05:43:47 GMT
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 48

> In theory, X provides a framework to mix clients distributed from
> many diverse hardware/software platforms on a single desktop.  In
> practice, almost all the clients I know are programs that run on Unix
> or were ported from Unix clients.

Me too - but that doesn't prove anything; the same is true (in my case,
at least) if we don't restrict the discussion to X programs.

> For an X user on a potent Unix workstation, the advantages of using X
> over a framebuffer based window system with necessarily local
> clients, are fairly subtle.

Not for me.  I use X instead of Suntools on a Sun, for example, simply
because I can get the look&feel[%] I want from X but not from Suntools.
(From what little I know of sunwindows, this is primarily a
documentation problem, but it's no less real for that.)  Network
transparency is (just) a nice side benefit.

[%] I don't like the term, but it's annoyingly accurate for what I want
    to say.

> On the other hand X consumes more resources and has generally poorer
> performance on local clients than those running on a framebuffer
> based window system.

But if comparable clients are not available?  I had to write my own
clients to get the environment I wanted under X.  I would have done the
same with sunwindows, except that there is no documentation I could
find for the low levels necessary, and X came along before I got fed up
enough to go grubbing around and figuring things out on my own.

> So now to the question.  Is there a signficant set of X-clients that
> run somewhere other than a Unix platform, that offer applications not
> otherwise available on Unix?

Either "yes but it doesn't mean anything" or "no", because if a client
shows up for some other windowing system that's worth having, someone
will soon port it to UNIX (or clone it, if its supplier is being too
pigheaded about source to make a port practical).  (The reason for the
first answer I mentioned is that I can reinterpret the wording of your
question to get a slightly different question.)

But that's all my opinion; what do I know anyway...

					der Mouse

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