🚀 go-pugleaf

I tried to post this a couple days back but the nntp server
was seriously hosed and I dont think it got out, so here
goes again....

I posted recently about a problem I was having with netinfo.  Several
people kindly sent me mail about how to fix it, unhappily, none
of their suggestions worked.  I've just spent about two hours
bouncing my NeXT up and down with various things tried to fix
netinfo and to absolutely no avail.  

One person suggested that I delete the current netinfo directories
and replace them with the default ones in /usr/template/client/etc...
Seemed reasonable enough, but when I do this, the machine wont
boot.  Happily I can get in with a single user boot and replace
the netinfo directories with a backup copy of the old (and
broken) ones.  

So, since next doesnt seem to care much about their users,
I get stuck with a broken netinfo.  

This is about it for me.  I like NeXT for some things, but
for others, it really is pretty awful.   I used to be able
to recommend (cautiously) NeXTs to people, from now on,
forget it.   

Why??   Two basic reasons.  First is NeXT is nonstandard
and doesnt seem to be getting enough market share to make
it a reasonable alternative to anything.  Second, NeXT is
afflicted with the "if we dont want to do it that way, nobody
should want it.  We know best."  attitude.  

3.0 on my machine is substantially slower than 2.1 
(though prettier).

Then, netinfo is seriously broken and there seems no
way to fix it - and natually enough, NeXT doesnt tell
what the format of the netinfo database is so i cant
repair it by hand.  (I'm going 

I still cant easily change titles on a terminal window (yes, 
I do know how to do it, but its not _easy_), or colors
(if I want to make my screen into angry fruit salad, its
none of anyone elses business). 

Icon went away as did a couple of demos that I rather liked
and sometimes used to show people the machine, and to illustrate
some stuff I've been working on.  I actually used Icon a
lot to convert things from color to monochrome.  Yes, I
did figure out how to do that with the printer menu, which
is a much nicer way, but it took a hell of a long time to
find that.

Too many apps require mouse handling to do things and keyboard
equivalents are often quite clumsy.  I can change some of them,
but sometimes there is no equivalent.  For example, I'd like
mail to scroll down in the text window without using the mouse.

I need to use X windows, actually bought co-x-ist (or whatever
the thing is called) and found that it was far too slow for
any real use. 

Doing graphics that set pixels on the screen is not easy - it
takes far too much boilerplate - and not easy boilerplate at
that - to get something that just plots points.  I do this
a lot and still havent found the perfect way to do it.  Compared
with X windows, in which I've got a file with all the
boilerplate in it and just need to copy that and make a
few changes (work of a couple minutes), its a major pain.

I dont like click-to-type and had that patch to the window
manager installed in 2.0,2.1, but it never worked quite
right and has now gone away.  If anyone has a copy of it
for 3.0, I'd appreciate it.  Just because someone at NeXT
likes to click on a window and have it pop up and sit on
the front of the screen doesnt mean that everyone likes it.
(Another example of the "NeXT Knows Best" attitude.)

Neither Edit nor Emacs have multiple windows under nextstep.
at this point one of the major reasons why i use X is to get
to epoch which allows me to do that.  

There doesnt seem any NeXT step library for other machines
so I can set up remote applications - to let other machines
with more muscle do the heavy work and to let my slab sit and
just run the windows.

And on and on... (there is lots more...)

So, I can no longer recommend NeXT to anyone.  In fact, 
I now must discourage people from NeXT's.  Too bad, as
in many ways it has promise.

--
jefu <=> Jeff Putnam - New Mexico Tech <=> jefu@nmt.edu 
"Overturn the dominant paradigm"