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Off-Topic: Original GUI GoalsOff-Topic: Original GUI GoalsPosted May 19, 2004 14:58 UTC (Wed) by doodaddy (guest, #10649)Parent article: The Spatial Way You guys/gals have covered my complaints about the current Gnome, so I thought I'd mention my secret complaint against Gnome and KDE that I've had for a while. It seemed originally that both desktops were simple, thin *desktop* layers -- a little more than MWM. They had features such as a "start" menu or a control panel. And my secret hope was that old 486 systems would run quickly with a fully functionaL OS and desktop. To me, this is part of the Unix way and would be a boon to companies everywhere. It would break the Wintel monopoly. But then "they" started following Windows down the bulky COM, DLL applet path. I'm not sure, in 15 years of using desktops, that I have ever used, or seen anybody having used, or ever felt the need to use, a word processor page inside of a web browser. Or a lame semi-editable visio diagram inside a spread sheet (after double-clicking, waiting thirty seconds, and having my menus re-arranged). As a matter of fact, when these things load by accident I am more irritated than pleasantly surprised. It's a very expensive hack, IMO. (As a programmer, I have never felt the need to write a web applet as a loadable DLL what-not either.) It is double-ironic that they are dumbing down the interface for beginners when the cores of these toolkits have power I can't find a use for as a professional. And I think this proves they have lost any direction. Again, keeping things simpler would have been a more Unix way and it would have been more prepared for a changing user base. By putting a general purpose "active widget" system in place, both Gnome and KDE have made their tools slow to load and slow to use. And these "more than desktop" systems are so entangled in themselves that they are not very interoperable, easy to program for, or supportable. To me, they have both gone way past "The Unix Way." Therefore, the "competition" between them is pointless despite what people say. The Intel portion of the Wintel monopoly is safe as we must continue on the faster-chip treadmill. I hope someone branches off an old copy of Gnome or KDE -- back before the active widget fad -- and works on simplifying the libraries and updating the desktop alone.
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Off-Topic: Original GUI Goals Posted May 19, 2004 16:36 UTC (Wed) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link] Try XFce4. It's light, simple, and looks nice.
Off-Topic: Original GUI Goals Posted May 19, 2004 19:34 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Try XFce4. It's light, simple, and looks nice. Alas, even XFce has become tainted and follows stupid Windoze-inspired GUI design ideas. I'm coasting along on the excellent XFCE 3.8.18 with no plans to upgrade.
Off-Topic: Original GUI Goals Posted May 19, 2004 20:35 UTC (Wed) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] Alas, even XFce has become tainted and follows stupid Windoze-inspired GUI design ideas. I'm coasting along on the excellent XFCE 3.8.18 with no plans to upgrade.Yeah, 4.x was a disappointment in some ways. I like the way you can toggle the "desktop" menu in 3.x without moving the mouse. In 4.x the menu gets mapped under the pointer, instead of next to it, so you have to move the mouse a wee bit to cancel it. A half dozen small changes like this make 4.x somewhat irritating to use.
Off-Topic: Original GUI Goals Posted May 19, 2004 20:40 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] Bah.people who cant cope with twm should just keep the computer unplugged. Sorry.. the urge to be a slashdotter was too much. In general, and not the post I am replying to, the fact is that this discussion is very much how people's brains work and assuming everyone's brain works the same way. When people dont agree with that or make a different decision.. it becomes a holy war.
Off-Topic: Original GUI Goals Posted May 19, 2004 18:03 UTC (Wed) by mrshiny (subscriber, #4266) [Link] You may have never seen a word-processor embedded in a browser, but my company actually makes products that use that exact technology (we do document automation software). It's very useful to be able to embed a word processor. I'm not sure if you don't really have a contradiction: you want to see the "Unix way" but you don't want people embedding apps in other apps. In a GUI world, wouldn't the Unix way be to re-use an app that someone else wrote, in order to make your app do more? You may complain about the implementation of OLE in Windows, or its equivalent technologies in KDE/Gnome, but the concepts are very powerful and the impelmentation can be useful.Some programmers will get it wrong, and overdo the embedding thing, but in general it's a good idea. Conceptually, there's no reason why a document has to be opened in a different window when you're browsing the web. A JPEG opens inline, why can't a PDF or Word doc? (Security flaws inherent in opening a word doc don't apply to this discussion, since I'm talking about the concept of an embedded doc, not the poor MS implementation).
Off-Topic: Original GUI Goals Posted May 20, 2004 15:37 UTC (Thu) by doodaddy (guest, #10649) [Link] I have seen a word doc in a browser, and you make a good point that uses can be made of this feature. I guess my point is that I don't see the strong connection between this kind of stuff and a desktop. I've got to take all of Gnome (or KDE) or none. They aren't really "desktops" but exclusive, expensive programming uber-environments. They each have an entire stack of (heavy) libraries, except that you can't interchange the layers of the stack. That is what I mean by violating the Unix Way.I wish a particular interprocess tool or two had calcified before desktops were built on top of them. (No one seems to like Corba.) In the meantime, Gnome and KDE suck up all the media oxygen for the "desktop wars" when they are too similar in the grand scheme of things to be worth the discussion. And the final choice of desktop will mean the final choice of a whole stack of libraries. I'd rather see the battle of *desktops* be somewhere else. That is all.
Off-Topic: Original GUI Goals Posted May 19, 2004 21:06 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link] I've never embedded a spreadsheet in my text document either -- probablybecause OpenOffice's writer already can calculate stuff in a table. In fact, I never use a spreadsheet, always writer... But I really like being able to have KDE's advanced text editor in a browser window to type my comments in, and have it spell-checked automatically. And when I was writing an application for linguists to create interlinear text using Python and PyKDE, I was immensely glad I could just embed a html widget. And when browsing or googling, I'm kind of pleased that the occasional pdf doc appears in my browser window. I like having powerful backends, libraries, inter-process thingies -- even though I never saw the sense in the com-linked excel-sheet in a Word doc (heck, Word still cannot handle a few pics in a document, according to a review I recently read).
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