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From: mh@roger.imsd.contel.com (Mike Hoegeman)
Subject: Re: Openwin or X11R4
Message-ID: <1991Jun3.200112.17129@wlbr.imsd.contel.com>
Keywords: OpenWin X11R4
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Organization: Contel FSD, Westlake Village, CA
References: <1991May29.144727.5008@javelin.sim.es.com> <1991Jun01.232522.786@shawn.uucp>
Date: Mon, 3 Jun 91 20:01:12 GMT

In article <1991Jun01.232522.786@shawn.uucp> root@shawn.uucp (0000-Admin(0000)) writes:
>bgeer@javelin.sim.es.com (Bob Geer) writes:
>
>>So, I'm tempted to "off" openwin & load up a "generic" X11R4 & Motif
>>into a more typical directory layout -- /usr/bin/X11, etc.  Anyone got
>>comments on this plan -- good, bad, indifferent?
>
>The virgin X11R4 from MIT is infinitely superior to OpenWindows, both in
>performance, portability, and quality.  You can certainly put Motif in,
>but the 'twm' window manager that comes free with the MIT stuff is also
>not bad...perhaps a good intermin solution while saving money to buy
>Motif...
>
>>Thanks in advance...Bob
>
>Mark Jeghers

Infinitely ?? Give me a break. You probably have valid reasons on why
you prefer the MIT X over xnews . You list none of them however.  You
merely state it is "infintely superior". What a crock. I 've used both
on a sun 4/370 and on various sparc workstations and it is not
infinitely worse. 

    Yes it does use more memory. 

    Yes it is slower on 8 meg and less machines but the difference is
    somewhat less than infinite. 

About Portability.  I have doubts about your claim that the MIT server
is more portable. That people run it on more machines there is no
doubt. But is it more portable? I suspect you cannot even make an
informed opinion on that. I apologize in advance in you have the source
and have made an informed comparison but I doubt it.

You do have to fiddle around with symbolic links at times for X source
that uses hardcoded path names and the set of fonts avaiable between
the two are not the same so sometimes you have to convert fonts from
one to the other. You may put these under the category of portability I
suppose but in the case of the symbolic links needed this is a strike
against the MIT server if anything. The font issue is no big deal (for
me at least you mileage may vary on this)

Now what about quality?  How to measure it is difficult task at best.
I'll just leave it at the fact that I have found the openwindows
(xnews) server in my own personal use just as robust as the MIT
server.  It also has NeWS built into it which I *love* having. It is
display PostScript done _right_.

I'm not trying to give any kind of "proof" that xnews is "better" than
MIT X but simply stating that I have access to both and prefer xnews
over the MIT server and given some reasons why. xnews is certainly not
orders of magnitude worse than the MIT server in any respect and there
is a lot to be said in favor of it. 

I suspect that you just don't like the fact that xnews source is not
free and that the MIT server source is. This seems to offend you deeply
and thus xnews is trash and MIT X is God's gift to windowdom.
