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From: Lars Hofhansl <lhofhans@indiana.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: X-windows quality
Date: Mon, 20 Jan 1997 22:22:01 -0600
Organization: Indiana University
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firesign wrote:
> 
> I'm not sure if this is a good forum for X-winodws concerns, but here
> goes...
> I've been toying with FreeBSD for a week or two now, and I'm a bit
> concerned with the graphic quality of X-windows. I'm using an 800x600
> display, and it is setup for a nice little S3 card. So far, I'm
> completely non-plussed by the graphic quality of X. I know it does
> colour, but the whole thing looks so chunky, almost like an old PC
> running ega. Maybe I just need to be weaned of 95/NT/NeXT type stuff,
> but I expected a better looking interface.
> 
> Am I completely blind ? please educate me...

First of all X-Windows is just a sever serving low-level requests like
"draw a line from (0,0) to (10,10)" and a library for clients
to actually communicate with the server.
(it's acutally a whole bunch more - networking etc - but you get
the idea...)

The windowmanager (the program who draws the borders and handles
around the other clients) is also "only" a client program.

You propably started the TWM-windowmanager which indeed looks a
little bit chunky. You can try getting fvwm (or any derivate
fvwm-95, afterstep etc.), and use this as your window manager.
That means, you can change the appearance of your desktop by just
running a different windowmanager.

If want to write applications yourself I'd suggets TCL/TK, which is
a nice toolkit to write GUI-X-application (recently it even runs under
32bit-windows).

	Lars