On Thu, Dec 06, 2001 at 08:51:14AM -0500, Aaron Traas wrote: > Windows apps, particularly older ones, were designed to be usable at > 640x480. I believe X started on Solaris, or at least first caught on > there, and I believe the default then was 1152x864, because at 8BPP, it > fit in 1 MB of video RAM. The first Windows 3.x machines ran almost > exclusively at 640x480, as PC graphics cards really couldn't stand up to > workstation frame buffer devices back then. > > X apps *are* generally bigger, and even those that are resizable do not > take into consideration the way the layout shrinks at really small > screen sizes. Most of the WM's use very thick titlebars, KDE and GNOME > by default have very thick panels at the bottom, etc. X at less than > 1024x768 is extremely painful. >
Interesting history there. Though I regularly run X at 640x480 on old PCs, and its not at all painful. Some apps are problematic though, e.g. the preferences window in Netscape 4.7 and KDE 2.2 new configure-the- desktop-guide. Browsing with netscape in 640x480 with a good font on a 14" monitor is actually quite nice, IMHO. /Hans Ekbrand
