[rescue] tired of current GUIs / a rant about the daily

[Chase Rayfield]

Part of the issue is computer software typically also does much more work to do the same thing. On an Apple IIe etc... it was blit font from ROM to the screen memory or something of that nature when you type a letter, now there is antialiasing , subpixel font hinting, there is some extreme complexity in there these days.

Basically a SparcStation 20 *with* acceleration from the SX driver can just barely keep up with that sort of thing (NetBSD with KDE 3.5 for instance). While even a lowly SS2 will truck right along with KDE 1.x and probably 2.x.... since it doesn't have any of that.

Good example of this sort of thing is Haiku OS, which is a modern implementation of BeOS, API wise, with minor extensions including decent Posix. Yet it is slower, not slow, just slower, for having added all that (BeOS's rendering is inferior), while not having added any accelerated drivers. BeOS was fast on a PII, while these days Haiku needs something around at least a P3-P4, even though you could run it on a PII still if you have over around a gig of ram, while BeOS needed something like 32MB.

Chase