Xref: utzoo comp.windows.news:595 comp.windows.x:4171 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!sgi!daisy!klee 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 -- uucp: {atari, nsc, pyramid, imagen, uunet}!daisy!klee arpanet: atari!daisy!klee@ames.arc.nasa.gov STOP CONTRA AID - BOYCOTT COCAINE