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From: klee@daisy.UUCP (Ken Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.news,comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: is NeWS loosing the battle?
Message-ID: <1342@daisy.UUCP>
Date: 7 Jul 88 17:26:22 GMT
Reply-To: klee@daisy.UUCP (Ken Lee)
Organization: Daisy Systems Corp., Mountain View, Ca.
Lines: 27

There seem to be at least 2 very different sets of workstation users out
there.  Each has very different needs.

Academic users tend to write small, interesting programs.  For them,
NeWS is superior because it is more elegant and theoretically powerful.
Note that Sun only had to add a small number of features to graft X onto
the NeWS server for the X/NeWS merge.  Adding NeWS to an X server would
have been a major overhaul.  See the paper in the last USENIX
proceedings for details.

Industrial users, like myself, prefer X.  It is much more complete
(e.g., lots of toolkits and window managers), more robust, and, most
importantly, is (or soon will be) available for almost every engineering
workstation.  All the manufacturers are supporting X to some degree.
We do lose some functionality, but X is more than powerful enough for
most current applications programs.

The competition between the 2 systems is, of course, good.  Future
window systems will include the best features from both (if the lawyers
don't interfere).  The X/NeWS merge is still too kludgey for most
people, but it may mature into a very nice system.  Stay tuned.

Ken
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