On Fri, Feb 22, 2002 at 02:49:49PM +0100, Iggy Drougge wrote:

> IMNSHO, a GUI shouldn't require machines running at several hundred MHz. It's
> just a very basic system service, not a killer app in itself.

The GUI, sure, but that's not really the bottleneck for things like
KDE.  The window manager itself is plenty fast, even with toys added.
The problem is mostly in the individual applications, and the rather
poor C++ program startup times.

In any case, there are a good number of useful things that simply require
a lot of horsepower.

If you take photos, you are going to be hard pressed to do much with
them unless you have enough power to handle multi-megabyte images of
24-bit or better color.

People also want that kind of quality even in the window manager, so
you end up with a system like Apple's where each image on the screen is
a full N-bit color image.  There's just no way to support that sort of
thing without a lot of horsepower.

I liked the SGI I used with all the management stuff in 8-bit color
and only things you needed to take up a lot of space did so, but that's
evidently not what everyone else likes.

-- 
UNIX/Perl/C/Pizza__________________________________shannon@widomaker.com