ugh.book

7

The X-Windows

Disaster

How to Make a 50-MIPS Workstation Run

Like a 4.77MHz IBM PC

If the designers of X Windows built cars, there would be no fewer

than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which fol-

lowed the same principles—but you’d be able to shift gears with your

car stereo. Useful feature, that.

—Marcus J. Ranum

Digital Equipment Corporation

X Windows is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of

political compromises, entangled alliances, marketing hype, and just plain

greed. X Windows is to memory as Ronald Reagan was to money. Years of

“Voodoo Ergonomics” have resulted in an unprecedented memory deficit

of gargantuan proportions. Divisive dependencies, distributed deadlocks,

and partisan protocols have tightened gridlocks, aggravated race condi-

tions, and promulgated double standards.

X has had its share of $5,000 toilet seats—like Sun’s Open Look clock

tool, which gobbles up 1.4 megabytes of real memory! If you sacrificed all

the RAM from 22 Commodore 64s to clock tool, it still wouldn’t have

enough to tell you the time. Even the vanilla X11R4 “xclock” utility con-

sumes 656K to run. And X’s memory usage is increasing.