Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types [LWN.net]

Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types

Posted Nov 8, 2011 10:58 UTC (Tue) by slashdot (guest, #22014)
In reply to: Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types by ebassi
Parent article: Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types

Windows 95, 98, Me, NT 4, 2000, XP, Vista and 7 share the same basic desktop UI paradigm, consisting in a bar at the bottom, containing from left to right:
1. A start button, which opens a menu allowing access to programs
2. Optionally, a launcher bar
3. A window list
4. Notification icons
5. A clock

Since Windows has the most market share, this is the UI that most people expect to be there, and that Microsoft hasn't apparently found a better alternative to in 15 years.

The only significant additions have been:
1. Windows Vista: added a search box in the start menu
2. Windows 7: the window list only shows a single icon for an application, and clicking it opens a menu with the title and window preview for each window of the application; also, you can "pin" applications, allowing quick launch functionality
3. Windows Vista/7 (not sure which): the user can ask to put some notification icons in a sub-menu

More in general, the 3D-requiring "Aero" window decoration/management style has been added in Windows Vista, which adds some candy, a 3D version of alt-tab and some mechanisms to snap Windows to the edge and put thumbnails in alt-tab and taskbar menus.

Note that, unlike GNOME, Microsoft allows users to turn off all of those changes, and in general in Windows 7 you can easily get almost the same look & feel that Windows 95 had.

And this all works fine without 3D acceleration (or with Aero turned off), and UI behavior (and even appearance) is not significantly affected by turning it off.

There is already free software to do all of this with minimal configuration, it just needs to be made the default, and whoever is in charge of GNOME needs to stop being crazy.

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Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types

Posted Nov 9, 2011 17:33 UTC (Wed) by dashesy (guest, #74652) [Link]

Using Windows 7 task-bar tweaker I can get almost the same look and feel XP had, all but the over-shiny active taskbar buttons.
I agree it is a bit easier to have a sane (classic?) Windows desktop, but at the end it was a tweak that also exists and is getting improved for GNOME3.
At least there is a chance we keep having a classic DM, thanks to FOSS. For Windows their marketing has the ultimate power to dictate their view and may throw a bone to power users just to keep them thankful.