Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!geneva.rutgers.edu!hedrick From: hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) Newsgroups: comp.windows.news Subject: Re: News or X? Message-ID: Date: 9 Jun 89 20:24:44 GMT References: <286@shrike.AUSTIN.LOCKHEED.COM> Distribution: usa Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 30 We've been looking at NeWS vs X at Rutgers. I agree with other comments here that it depends upon your needs. Here's my preliminary conclusion from a users' point of view. X seems to be sufficient for standard applications. It's got a good terminal emulator, Emacs support, clock, dbx interface, all that standard stuff. For many users this is enough. We think a well-tuned pure X is bound to perform better on small machines than X11/NeWS. So we're guessing the 3/50 users, and possibly people on other system whose needs are minimal, will stick with a pure X. Lots of people here like NeWS from the point of view of writing applications and tweaking the way the window system works. We also have people who use it simply because they've been able to make psview work for previewing documents. (This doesn't work in general of course. The first person to write a workstation Postscript that is truly compatible with a Laserwrite will get some sort of netwide standing ovation.) I expect X11/NeWS to be the normal window system on Sparcstations. I expect our 3/60's (which are generally 8MB) to be split between the MIT X server and X11/NeWS. What I'm hoping is that when Sun submits Sunview2 to the MIT X consortium, part of what they submit will be an OPENLOOK-style window manager for the MIT X server. If they do this, then we'll be able to get compatible user interfaces on both small machines that have to run pure X and bigger ones that can run the full X11/NeWS. Then the only difference will be whether NeWS applications can be run. Apparently the standard Sun applications (shelltool, clock, and all that stuff) will be done in Sunview2 rather than NeWS, so they should work even on systems running pure X.