Microsoft-Paul Allen

[Liam Proven]

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_desktop_fail/

(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.

-- 
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