[KLUG Advocacy] To GUI or not to GUI. [was Linux Outpacing Macintosh On Desktops]

[Adam Williams]

>>Sounds very similar to the way I run things.  I'm too much of a gamer to 
>>>run anything but Windows on the desktop, but I have a house server that 
>>>runs Linux.  It's a much older machine, that I don't think would run 
>>>Windows XP, but Linux handles it just fine.  Runs Samba,Apache, DHCP, 
>>>DNS, a webcam (when I get USB working again, but that's another story), 
>>>and a DDNS client with no problem.  Makes a serious argument for NOT 
>>>having a GUI on a server, I think.
>>There is an argument for GUI-less servers, but typically not on large
>>servers that neophytes must attend to.  The advantage of Linux is that
>>the server can have a GUI,  but it is only running when you need it. 
>>xVNC, XDMCP, or just startx.  There are many ways to have your cake and
>>eat it too.
>Ok, I guess a slightly better version of  my statement would be "a 
>serious argument against running Windows on a server".  There's no way 
>to separate what Windows bloat is related to having the GUI and what is 
>just sloppy coding, but I'm sure the GUI uses quite a bit of resources. 
>And of course, you can't turn it off.  While I've given up trying to 

It is an interesting historical note that up through NT 3.51 their was a
HAL and the GUI didn't run as a kernel (they call it ring 0) process. 
But performance was terrible given the hardware of the day and the very
young (and thus non-optimal) code base.  They did away with allot of
these "unix-isms" in NT4 to buy performance as the UNIX workstations
were pounding them on the benchmarks.  Putting video back into kernel
space attributed a great deal to the instability of NT4 as video drivers
are very difficult chunks of software to write.

It is also interesting that there is pressure to integrate video
operations from X11 into the Linux kernel for performance reasons. 
Hmmm....  Trading stability and modularity for a few more polygons in
your game of Quake may seem like a good idea to some people.  I'm not
one of them.  But it is open source!  So I just exorcise those
"features" from my system.

>use SuSE as my server OS, I have to admit I did like how their managment 
>tool Yast2 handled things.  At launch it would detect the existence or 
>absence of XWindows and run different versions of the program.  You 
>could even run the server at runlevel 3 and launch Yast2 from a remote 
>machine that had an X Server.  I assume that's one of the ways to have 
>and eat your cake?  

Definitely.

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