Slashdot Eloquence and the XFree Nightmare

It’s a rare thing indeed to see an insighftul comment on the spam-bucket of the open source and “geek” world, Slashdot. It’s rarer still when someone has a disagreement within this community and can argue for more than a few lines without starting to sound like a flailing nerd in a middle school hallway fight. But some brave Slashdotter voiced his opinion on the miserable XFree/Xwindow display system that most of the Unix world (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, and optionally Mac OS X) uses to get things on the screen.

Anyone who’s ever tried to get anything more than a command line running on a Unix system knows the horrors of XWindows (and yes, it is awkwardly singular on purpose): hideously complex configuration files, graphics card setups that crash before you’ve even installed your operating system, an utter inability to detect things like a different monitor. These are the horrors of doing anything graphical in Unix, and to date only Mac OS X has gotten it right by dumping XFree as the main means of getting information on the screen while offering a very elegant and simple to install version for the diehards. I post this not to tout OS X, because I do that enough already.

I post this for anyone who has wasted hours as a user, not even a programmer, fighting with this and other anachronisms of the Unix world. To all of you: it’s broken. Walk away, because the more people dependent on and clinging to a broken system, the painfully longer that system lives and sucks away at time, money, and energy.