carroll@snail.CS.UIUC.EDU (02/04/88)
I disagree. I have used both layers and SunView quite a bit, and SunView is far superior in both utility and power. Some of the reasons are: 1. You can telnet out of a SV window. Telnet hangs in a layer. 2. You can have about as many SV windows as you want. Only 6 layers. 3. You may belittle speed, but waiting 7 or 10 minutes for layer program to load is very irritating. 4. Being able to icon-ify windows in SV is wonderful...I can put things that that I don't need all the time in little icons, and grab them when they are useful. 5. "toolplaces" in SV : this lets me set up my windows the way I want, without having to calculate screen positions. 6. When you exit a shell in a SV window, the window closes. In layers, it just sits there, unusable. 7. Support programs. The SunView support is vastly superior, such as the icon editor, font editor, mail, etc. Overall, SunView is just so much better integrated that it is far more useable. And I don't know about your version of layers, but ours is chock full of bugs, particularly ones that cause layers to become confused where the output of a layer goes. (Equipment : 3b2/310, SysVR3, DMD/5620 vs. Sun 3/50, 4.2BSD)
csg@pyramid.pyramid.com (Carl S. Gutekunst) (02/07/88)
In article <5400018@snail> carroll@snail.CS.UIUC.EDU writes: > I disagree. I have used both layers and SunView quite a bit, and >SunView is far superior in both utility and power. Some of the reasons are: > > [Lists seven reasons why he doesn't like layers] You're comparing current SunView with four-year-old layers. (Yes, I know you are running SVR3. The SVR3 layers package is ancient and missing all the DMD utilties. You want the SVR2 option tape.) All the reasons you listed except for two (folding windows into icons, and closing the last shell in a window) are either bugs/misfeatures long since fixed, or trivially easy to implement. Toolplaces, for example, isn't provided in the standard layers package. Frank- ly I never felt the need for it on the 630; but it would be useful on a 5620. It would take me about 2 minutes to write a shell script to do it.... You did bring out an important point: support for layers is terrible. I could not blame anyone who avoided it like the plague, unless they buy it in source, or buy from a responsible vendor (not AT&T). Rather than starting window wars :-), we can discuss this offline if you like. <csg>