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Window manager variety

Window manager variety

Posted Apr 18, 2012 22:33 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Window manager variety by kleptog
Parent article: LFCS 2012: X and Wayland

Your definition of progress is kinda strange: tiling window managers were tried and explicitly rejected! And it happened decades ago! They were tried and rejected before X Window System was born!

Tiling window managers were invented before anything else: remember that both Xerox Star (in 1981, no less) and Windows 1.0 (in 1985) employed tiling window managers! They were neat, but people rejected them.

Today they are in position similar to other old rejected technologies (such as Acme or FFM): some old-timers still use them and even few newcomers are choosing them but most users don't know about them and don't want to know about them.


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Window manager variety

Posted Apr 19, 2012 0:14 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

> but most users don't know about them and don't want to know about them.

and therefor (according to you) such choices should be eliminated so that NOBODY is able to use them.

By that logic Linux itself should never have been created, the iPhone should never have been created, nothing new should ever be created because everyone is perfectly happy with what they have.

Window manager variety

Posted Apr 19, 2012 17:47 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

and therefor (according to you) such choices should be eliminated so that NOBODY is able to use them.

Probably. It really depends on the popularity of said things.

By that logic Linux itself should never have been created, the iPhone should never have been created, nothing new should ever be created because everyone is perfectly happy with what they have.

This is strange conclusion: we don't know if something will stick or not unless we'll try. Any new creation starts from one user and grows from there. Or not. If it becomes large enough then it gets enough resources to survive, if not then it's time to finish it.

Linux succeeded: it basically killed Unix and took it's niche, iPhone succeeded, too: it (along with Android) killed RIM and Symbian and took it's niche, webOS failed (and it's now time to write it off).

This is just a natural selection. It was not as troublesome 10, 20, or 100 years ago: markets grew, population grew, pool of knowledgeable workers grew, it was possible to keep both old and new things alive. Today… there are just not enough people to do that: if you want to continue to create something new then you must be ready to weed out something old, too.

Window manager variety

Posted Apr 19, 2012 13:14 UTC (Thu) by renox (subscriber, #23785) [Link]

> Your definition of progress is kinda strange: tiling window managers were tried and explicitly rejected!

Your own definition of progress is weird too..
At the time most users had small screen, so the situation is different now, plus small difference in implementation can make big difference in end-user acceptance.
And "progress" is not something predictable!

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