[Info-vax] OpenVMS graphics - once more

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-03-12 14:57:55 +0000, fhsjvl at gmail.com said:

> This is all very regrettable to me because I am an ardent proponent of 
> VMS on the desktop.

Yeah; I used to use the DECwindows desktop.   It won't be easy to 
convince me to return to DECwindows as a daily desktop, either.  For 
reasons well beyond the graphics device and driver support, not the 
least of which is application support and file format support, I just 
can't see all that much use of DECwindows for myself, nor for other new 
users, nor for very many new applications.

I definitely can see some uses, such as development work, or for use as 
dedicated control and status displays and related processing.  But I'd 
wager that these environments are a pretty small businesses.   There 
are undoubtedly a few critical businesses here that really need 
DECwindows available, but — strictly for general day-to-day OpenVMS 
desktop usage, and not as some sort of dedicated control system or a 
development-related application or such — it's the rest of the 
application stack that's a (much) bigger problem for (most) folks that 
might otherwise consider it.

Yes, other folks — one posts here quite often — don't want to or don't 
have to deal with other file formats or with multimedia, and don't need 
nor use the same sorts of tools, so DECwindows and OpenVMS can still 
work as a desktop.  For some folks.

Many of the usual sorts of remote displays where I would have once 
considered or used X for have been subsumed into web front ends — some 
of which can be rather more embedded than might be obvious to many of 
the users, both in terms of the viewing applications, and in terms of 
the embedded web servers — or subsumed into applications that 
communicate with the servers while managing the display using local 
display mechanisms and interfaces.

Then there's that X has generally become little more than an RPC for 
most of its recent remote-graphics usage, and not really a particularly 
effective one.  Related: <http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/1680>



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