Re: [iPAQ] Re: Re: [QPE-devel] Feedback for QPE on X11

Kervin wrote:

> X can also be a compatibility API. Lots of X apps out there, lots of
> people know how to use X base toolkits.

This is sort of tangential to the original question, since I haven't
tried QPE or Opie, but I thought it might be worthwhile feedback anyway.
Take with as much salt as necessary.

For what it's worth, I bought an iPAQ (and before that an Agenda,
R.I.P.) specifically *because* it ran X. If I were to get a Zaurus (which
I might do some day, because of the integrated CF slot and keyboard),
the first thing I would do (as I did with the iPAQ) would be to wipe it
and install Familiar. The thing is, I care a lot about being able to
run the same stuff, the same code, on my desktop as on my PDA - that's
the appeal for me of a Linux-based PDA. And with QPE or a Zaurus, well,
I can run the same console apps, but they're not generally so easy to
use with a stylus. :-) But under Familiar (and with the luxury of 64Mb
RAM and 32Mb flash), I can run most of what I care about both places.
And I can run them on either CPU against either display - when I'm at
my desk, I do lots of ssh'ing to my iPAQ and running X apps on the iPAQ
against the desktop's display.

The stuff I use all day every day happens to be Tcl/Tk apps, and those
run fine on the Agenda. I suppose in theory it would be possible to
port Tk to Qt-embedded (as it's been ported to Mac and Windows), but I
still wouldn't be able to run stuff on the iPAQ against my desktop.

I'm sure the QPE apps, and the Zaurus apps, are way nicer in terms of
PDA functionality than what I have (and have written) under Familiar.
But I don't really care, because the more similar my desktop and PDA
platforms are to each other, the more seamlessly I can move my data
between them, and that matters a lot to me. I already have the apps
I care about for the desktop, and having X on the iPAQ means that with
just a little tweaking for screen size, I have them on the iPAQ as well.

I suppose I might feel differently if I were a KDE user using and writing
C++/Qt apps; in that case I would probably feel like rebuilding for
Qt-embedded wasn't that big of a hurdle. But for me developing Tcl/Tk
apps, and for Python/Gtk programmers, X is a big win. Having left PalmOS,
I'm not going to use a PDA that *isn't* X-based until/unless I'm no
longer using X on the desktop, and I don't see that happening in the
foreseeable future.

(On the Agenda, extremely limited memory, a slow processor, and a tiny
screen meant that in practical terms I couldn't easily port apps from
the desktop to the PDA, but I could go the other way and build all the
Agenda's apps for the desktop and use them there, so sharing data
between the platforms was still an order of magnitude more seamless
than with a Palm.)

-j.

-- 
Jay Sekora             http://www.aq.org/~js/            js@aq.org
                                                         AIM: jayaq
`No! There are no significant bugs in our released software that any
significant number of users want fixed.' - Bill Gates, in an interview
with the German weekly _Focus_, seen at http://www.cantrip.org/nobugs.html