I have a different view of X than almost anyone for several different reasons and I thought I would mention some of these for the people who haven't been exposed to my fascination with it.

1. The founders of X wanted people to build GUIs with it. Not many people actually did. Most people who did anything with it, starting in the mid to late 90's built desktops with it - desktops to mimic what Microsoft was doing on the desktop. I, on the other hand, not only built a GUI with it - I built a GUI that was specifically tailored to a particular vertical market, the point of sale market.

For me, the big deal was that I only needed one computer in a restaurant, no matter how many displays they wanted. Except for the first display that ran the program and stored data, the other computers needed a lot less memory, no application and no storage. That really made things very simple.

Another thing the founders of X wanted people to do was to build GUIs that rendered the remote display, and didn't just throw a lot of pictures out to remote users that didn't even scale, building a GUI out of a bunch of bitmaps. So my remote GUI is rendered, and there are no images and no data being sent up on the network by anybody, including the client application itself.

Thirdly, the application is written specifically to be split into two parts. And anybody who is somewhere out there at a remote display, at an X terminal, is working collaboratively with everyone else who has a window open on the same location. That's a whole lot different from 6 or 8 people who are each running their own remote desktop, and not using windows on the same application, therefore not really working together, even though they are all sharing the network's resources and none of them have a complete PC.

What X makes possible and easy is not really well understood by very many. It really makes it unnecessary for any remote users to actually need a PC. Instead of having a display that's plugged into a PC, they have displays that are plugged into a remote computer, or cluster, somewhere, and uses the network for the connection instead of a video cable. And the X terminal hardware/software requirement is the same for accessing any application, no matter how big it is, what the OS is, what the hardware is.

This thing about people working together, though, even if they don't realise it. That, to me, is the biggest deal, that and the fact that the users don't really even have computers.

And the X revival going on now - that's the best part of it.

Yes, we do use Cygwin once in a while. I don't much like running commercial X servers on Windows boxes, however, for reasons that even I don't understand well. I will say this, though, that we have had some success running X in browsers that have Javascript enabled, using WierdX. That works pretty well although the package needs a little updating.

Created as new thread #172031 titled [link|/forums/render/content/show?contentid=172031|Re: one computer in a restaurant.]

With a simple twist when compiling the kernel all the CPUs on the 10/100 network become nodes on the cluster, and the POS client application runs as a single image supercomputer. That's what openmosix does. It delivers a feature that Novell, for instance, sells for $10k, assuming you already have severak certain other licenses. It's a feature that Microsoft also is attempting to play catch up on, of course. Check out this Microsoft effort to try to keep up with what openmosix does ...

"Microsoft will sell a version of Windows for high-performance computing -- a niche in which rival Linux is blossoming -- with a first version planned for the second half of 2005.
[link|http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/windows/0,39020396,39158501,00.htm|http://news.zdnet.co...6,39158501,00.htm]