23 Oct
2018
23 Oct
'18
2:09 p.m.
Grant Taylor wrote:
There's also the
Afterstep/Window Maker crowd, open-source
reimplementations of the NEXTSTEP desktop environment, which predates
even Windows 3.x. Win95 was certainly very influential in the design
and refinement of many other desktop environments going forward, but
it's not the be-all and end-all of anything.
*Every* Unix desktop out there draws on Win95.
Nope. That's simply not true.
The following three vast families of window managers / desktops prove
(to my satisfaction) that your statement is wrong.
? Common Desktop Environment (a.k.a. CDE) and it's ilk.
? The various *Box window managers / desktop environments.
? Motif window manager and it's ilk.
They are all significantly different from each other and from Windows's
Explorer interface, first publicly debuting with Windows 95. Liam Proven
wrote:
How many graphical Unix desktops are sold or distributed in the world
today that are not Linux? Excluding Mac OS X as I specifically address
that point, I think.
Now, I can point to 3 living (FSVO "living") descendants of those OSes:
* CDE is now FOSS
(It had a conceptual re-implementation, the XForms Common Environment,
XFCE. Here's a screenshot:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Xfce3.jpg
Note, it has now moved to a Windows-like model)
AFAIK no current or historical full-function general-purpose Linux
offers CDE as a desktop choice.
* NeXTstep inspired GNUstep
http://www.gnustep.org/
(and LiteStep but that's now dead)
No current or historical full-function general-purpose Linux offers
GNUstep as a desktop choice.
* Risc OS inspired the ROX Desktop:
http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/
Again, no current or historical full-function general-purpose Linux
offers ROX as a desktop choice. BeOS used the Windows model.
Kinda-sorta-not-really. BeOS (like just about everything post-1995)
takes cues from Win95, but its roots are in classic Mac OS and it
definitely hews closer to that in most respects, despite the absence
of a global menu bar.
Outside of Apple, I think it is fair to say that no
new OS or desktop
environment since 1995 has used anything other than the Win95 model.
Haiku says hi.
Or would, if they could spare the time from trying to
awkwardly kludge Linux development models into a BeOS world.
The fact that there are a small handful of clones of
the Apple Mac OS
X GUI doesn't really invalidate this point.
This "aside from the things
that don't match up with my argument, my
argument is flawless!" line of reasoning is novel.
24 Oct
24 Oct
6:47 a.m.
On Tue, 23 Oct 2018 at 20:09, John Ames <commodorejohn at gmail.com> wrote:
There's also the Afterstep/Window Maker crowd,
open-source
reimplementations of the NEXTSTEP desktop environment, which predates
even Windows 3.x.
That sort of echoes my point, really, I think.
As I said, it's ludicrous to counter my claim that Win95 influenced
basically _every_ desktop after it by pointing out that it didn't
influence ones written before it.
And to be more specific:
* AfterStep -- last new release 2008; last minor update 2013. Effectively dead.
* LiteStep -- not updated since some time around 2011-2014, if then.
Effectively dead.
* Window Maker -- alive, but just a WM, not a desktop.
GNUstep is very much alive, with a tiny user community, but as I said,
I am not aware of any distro bundling a complete current version even
for you to custom-install yourself. Nothing offers it as an option in
place of GNOME, KDE etc., or ever has, TTBOMK.
I personally think that's criminal and tragic, but hey.
Win95 was certainly very influential in the design
and refinement of many other desktop environments going forward, but
it's not the be-all and end-all of anything.
Definitely not claiming it is. In fact my thesis is the reverse: that
we _need_ more variety but we aren't getting it, because to anyone
under about 35, there are only 2 desktops: the "traditional" one,
which means Win95-esque, and the "weird" Mac one.
But this is kind of a questionable standard to begin
with, because the
whole point in the Freenix world is choice. No distributions offer
those as default options during the install process, but all of them
(aside from CDE, which only just went open-source a couple years ago
and is still in the process of being cleaned up and forward-ported to
modern *nixen) are available in the repositories for most major
distributions, and all of them are still actively updated.
Please correct me if I am wrong. As I said, I am not aware of *any*
current distro of any OS that offers even current packages of GNUstep
*or* the complete ROX environment as a DIY option.
Or CDE come to that, but I hope it comes back!
Kinda-sorta-not-really. BeOS (like just about
everything post-1995)
takes cues from Win95, but its roots are in classic Mac OS and it
definitely hews closer to that in most respects, despite the absence
of a global menu bar.
Reviewed it as of v4 and v5. Was a big fan. I have a full boxed copy
of v5, a naughty copy of Zeta, and a machine running a recent Haiku
nightly on bare metal (which I must update to Beta 1.)
I am _very_ aware of BeOS. BeOS was my favourite x86 OS of all time.
Drag the panel to the bottom of the screen, and then you can see how
Tracker is a Win95 clone. The default part-length top-right position
conceals this, but it is all the same.
Haiku says hi. Or would, if they could spare the time
from trying to
awkwardly kludge Linux development models into a BeOS world.
I must admit I am surprised at how "Linuxy" Haiku feels now, but that
does mean it has a healthier software base through the Depot than BeOS
itself ever had.
This "aside from the things that don't match
up with my argument, my
argument is flawless!" line of reasoning is novel.
:-D
I laid out my case 5-6y ago in the article I linked:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for_linux_de…
(single-page print view)
In a way I think it's a microcosm of the general OS world.
In the late '70s and early '80s there were lots of incompatible micros.
By the mid '80s, and for about a decade, this started to settle down
into 3 broad camps -- well, 2 and an outlier.
[1] Conservative x86-based machines, conforming to the IBM
compatibility standard (but several OSes & UIs)
[2] more experimental Motorola 680x0 machines (Mac, ST, Amiga)
[3] and Acorn, doing its own thing.
By the mid-'90s, finally, the Wintel camp caught up with the Mac camp,
and the non-Mac 68k machines died off.
Acorn gave up soon after and then it was a 2-horse race:
IBM-compatibles versus Macs.
Apple had undergone a schism, Jobs went off, founded NeXT, made a
futuristic Unix that discarded a lot of traditional stuff like X.11,
C/C++, config in text files, etc. Then it merged back in, all the
MacOS/Copland/Pink/Taligent stuff was tossed out, and a few years
later, Apple is an x86-based UNIX vendor.
Apple has resisted the PC trends for a long long time. It ploughs its
own furrow, always has.
Linux has thrived because it _embraced_ them. Unlike the BSDs, it uses
Windows-style disk partitioning, it embraces Windows file formats,
talks happily over the network to Windows boxes (using client software
configured with Windows-INI-format config files), runs Windows apps
with some reasonable competence. It's always been the minority player
in the Windows world and it embraces that.
BSD comes from a pre-PC, pre-DOS/Windows world and only reluctantly
works with Windows-style hardware and software.
So Linux has also absorbed Windows-style desktops, eschewing the older
generation of non-Windows-influenced Linux desktops.
Come to think of it, most Linux users I know are Windows converts.
Very few are Mac converts -- once you go Mac, you can't go back,
apparently.
Old Unix hands praise BSD's "conceptual uniformity" and the way it
"feels more integrated" in ways that are completely imperceptible to
Linux folk.
Since my formative IT experiences were outside of the Unix world --
CP/M, VAX/VMS, Acorn RISC OS and finally OS/2 -- I come from a
different tradition and I'm still not really comfortable in Unixland.
--
Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 - ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
9:45 a.m.
On 24/10/2018, Liam Proven via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote (in part):
[...]
Come to think of it, most Linux users I know are
Windows converts.
Very few are Mac converts -- once you go Mac, you can't go back,
apparently.
Why would you? (Mac is certified POSIX and works very nicely with Sun
mice and UNIX keyboards. #6-)
N.
9:55 a.m.
On 10/24/18 9:45 AM, Nemo via cctalk wrote:
On 24/10/2018, Liam Proven via cctalk <cctalk at
classiccmp.org> wrote (in part):
[...]
I have used Apple computers since the earliest days.? Apple ][,
Lisa, Mac and to this day I have a Mac laptop.? I have? used
Windows since the days of 3.1, including WfW 3.11 and all the
followons? up thru Windows 10.? And during all this time I have
also used Unix/Linux.? Care to guess which one is my most used
class of OSes?? :-) (I have used other OSes during this time, but
none of them fit into this discussion.? Always, the right tool for
the job in my choices.? Guess which one meets that requirement
the most times!)
bill
Come to think of it, most Linux users I know are
Windows converts.
Very few are Mac converts -- once you go Mac, you can't go back,
apparently.
Why would you? (Mac is certified POSIX and works very nicely with
Sun
mice and UNIX keyboards. #6-)
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bill.gunshannon＠hotmail.com -
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cym224＠gmail.com -
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