Microsoft-Paul Allen

[John Ames]

> Grant Taylor wrote:
>> *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.
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.

>> 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.
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.


> 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.