FOSDEM: The Wayland display server

Posted Feb 22, 2012 10:32 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185)
In reply to: FOSDEM: The Wayland display server by khim
Parent article: FOSDEM: The Wayland display server

The big problem on Windows and OSX is that if the application is unresponsive for whatever reason, and that happens and will happen, you cannot move the window anymore or use the buttons to close the window since all that is handled by the application.

I had my IDE being unmovable on Windows only this morning while it was reparsing a big project. I've had Safari unmovable, unclosable on OSX.

FOSDEM: The Wayland display server

Posted Feb 22, 2012 11:04 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Actually Windows7 after few second of unresponsiveness will draw it's own controls and these can be used to kill the program.

But these are rare cases. More obnoxious is the fact that you can not move window when popup is opened - and you often want to do that exactly to fill the information in popup (not that this happens with Chrome on Linux, too).

It's all about tradeoffs. MacOS/Windows (and apparently their users) value uniformity significantly higher then raw power of the interface while traditionally Unix/Linux valued the ability to create what you want from small independent components. The problem here lies in the fact that this increases not just power but the complexity for end user - and this leaves 99% of them in the dust. That, in turn, creates vicious cycle: with so few users ISVs and hardware companies abandon the platform and eventually these "empowered users" start to leave it because they grow tired of constant fight with the faults in the platform.

I think the Unix/Linux GUI finally follows in footsteps of other, more mature industries: early cars had a lot interesting and different "UI concepts", but today they all are abandoned. I'm pretty sure people bemoaned this development back then similarly to how today they bemoaned poorer and poorer support for FFM.