Moving Toward a Single Linux UI? 441
Anonymous writes "With the releases of Fedora 9, Hardy Heron and OpenSuSE 11 so close together, it's looking more than ever like an evolution to a common interface for major Linux distributions. Here's a compilation of screen shots and descriptions that make it appear to be the case. Would this be a good thing or a bad thing?" There are plenty of other options out there, of course, even considering only Linux distros that are based on Gnome and KDE, and plenty of wilder (or at least less common) desktops to choose from besides.
They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Funny)
If I wasn't such a geek, I would have interpreted in such the wrong way. :P
Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Funny)
If I wasn't such a geek, I would have interpreted in such the wrong way. :P
Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:There goes my karma (Score:5, Funny)
* ducks *
Re:There goes my karma (Score:5, Funny)
Re:There goes my karma (Score:5, Funny)
There, I said it.
Re:There goes my karma (Score:4, Funny)
Meme stacking, the new /. extreme sport (Score:4, Funny)
Re:There goes my karma (Score:5, Funny)
for (int i = 0; i < depth; i++) printf("| ");
printf("What's funny about this?\n");
karmakiller(depth+1);
}
int main() {
karmakiller(0);
}
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Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Informative)
Add this to your boot prompt in grub on the
vga=775 and get some good 160x60 loving 1280x1024.
Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Funny)
(Whenever someone walks in my office I just go "hmmm......" and act like I'm seeing something interesting, then they leave and I go back to sipping my drink and daydreaming)
Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Funny)
And haven't rebooted it once.
Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Interesting)
I prefer black on white, and I always have terminals beyond 80x25, but aside from colors and window sized, I think that the cli is _the_ UI for Linux, and it is better than any other *NIX out there in that department. Most other *NIX's have died out, but the cli for Solaris makes me type date and make sure that it really is 2008. I'm not knocking Solaris in terms of its kernel and Sun's hardware can be good (sometimes it sucks). But in 2008 if I do vi
A little more on topic, I think that it will really take a commercial company to make a GUI for any *NIX that is worthwhile. It just seems too big of a project for open source to come together and do. The best that we have to date are two windows ripoffs with the groovy option to have wiggly windows and stuff.
My rank orderings of GUIs are:
1) OS X
2) Windows
3) other
Hint. I don't use windows, and I don't see that happening for another 5-10 years. I'm a Linux/UNIX fan. I like what is under the hood, and to me it just "makes sense". For me, windows does not, under the hood nor the shiny exterior. Today, OS X is UNIX with a good GUI thrown on top. Sure, its not perfect, but I'm at home and looking at my nice OS X GUI after looking at my Gnome desktop all day at work makes my eyes feel better. I also find it ironic that of all the terminal apps I've used, OS X has the best Terminal app out there. Its also nice to have the hard stuff in Linux taken care of by the GUI in OS X.
Now the BIG difference here, is that I would not want to run OS X on all of the servers that I manage under Solaris and Linux. Why? Like Windows, the GUI is the OS.
This is really tough, but there needs to be a GUI that works with Linux that can help novices with the basics, but those GUIs can't break if a "power user" comes in and modifies the config file in a text editor and now the GUI is either broken or it screws up the config file. This is _NOT_ a trivial task to accomplish, and this is one of the reasons that a good GUI has not come to surface for Linux.
In fact, I think that the GUI experience was better like 10 years ago under Linux with things like AfterStep and WindowMaker, and Enlightenment. I even know some older *NIX folks that still use FVWM, and I liked that back in the day too. So, I dunno, maybe 2009 is the year of Linux on the desktop. However, unless an excellent GUI comes out for it, I don't think this will be the year.
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The big issue with GUIs in Linux/BSD/*Nix is that almost invariably, you'll have those one or two applications which require you to install the other one. Or to
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Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Funny)
GREEN on black, you infidel!!!
(in a pinch, 'amber' will do instead of green, but never WHITE!)
Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Funny)
Oh crap. We're forked.
Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Funny)
BLACK on black. For us paranoid security guys.
Slackware? (Score:5, Informative)
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Probably a bit of both (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess that if we're keen on getting more people into Linux, then some commonality across the major distros might be a good thing. On the other hand, it's not so great for the smaller distros if we get a kind of monolithic Linux which dominates the market and means that people are less willing to try something different.
Still, there'll always be enough of us who want to use things because they're different - and because they are better at doing exactly what we want rather than being more generic, suit-everyone tools.
Re:Probably a bit of both (Score:5, Interesting)
I hardly think it would stifle innovation (open licenses are so important in all of this). But it might make people think a little more carefully before innovating. That is, there will be yet greater emphasis on integration and interoperability with the other available applications.
And if anything, the need for lightweight desktops and specialized linux distributions is growing with the accumulation of older computers and the advance of the second and third worlds to the computer age.
Multiple UI is probably a good thing. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm convinced that 'competition' between KDE and Gnome has only help to improve the quality of both interfaces. Furthermore, having Xfce, KDE, Gnome, etc, gives the user choices not just in the colour, but in the actual design and philosophy behind the UI. In other words, there is plenty of room to try out new and exiting idea that would be difficult would there be a single, monopolistic desktop UI.
My $0.02 CAD.
Re:Multiple UI is probably a good thing. (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, I agree with you that Gnome vs. KDE probably has improved both a lot. But there is no denying that it also holds back some types of application development. I don't know the answer, but just try to enjoy the ride.
Re:Multiple UI is probably a good thing. (Score:4, Informative)
How thin are you talking? KDE 3.5 runs pretty good on my K6-3/333MHz laptop with 384MB of RAM, and it's actually fast on my Eee PC at 630MHz.
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The UIs are not the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
What matters far more is standardising the way the distros handle other things so that HowTos, installation scripts/instructions for printers etc can be written once without a whole lot of "On Ubuntu do this, on Fedora do that" stuff. Things that would help a lot:
*Pick one printer handling mechanism.
*Pick one package manager.
*Standardise one one usb/udev/pam.
*Pick one wireless management policy. Hide madwifi/ndiswrapper etc.
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Re:The UIs are not the problem (Score:5, Informative)
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> I'm all for choice.
and this:
> True, that can make it a challenge for Linux
> adoption,
are somewhat contradictory statements, which makes me impressed with your willingness to not make bold biased statements with little merit or grounding in reality.
The "right" answer depends on your goals, and there's probably more than one right answer.
UI maturity (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why hamper the performance of a decent Linux based system with a processor hogging gui?
vim+gcc is a powerful combination, and doesn't benefit from a gui one jot, or even 0.5 of a jot.
Re:UI maturity (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:UI maturity (Score:5, Funny)
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Yeah, well I've been using it as my main OS for 5 years! At least, according to my resume, which I carefully prepared according to the job description.
UI choice (Score:4, Interesting)
My main bone of contention with X11 is that it's not being developed seriously as a GUI interface for modern machines. It seems that most of the development is going into code cleanups (important), bugfixes (important) and other maintenance functions. But that's just it - this is all maintenance stuff. The tree needed the reorganization, the code needed to be more modular, etc - nobody is disputing that. On the other hand, threading is overdue and secure X11 channels are insanely overdue. The configuration file changes make things simpler, but it makes it harder to maximise the use of the monitor and graphics cards, even though it's easier (and safer) for the "standard" modes. Simplification is good, but any loss of capability is a regression.
The console is good - and fast - for many tasks, and with the introduction of framebuffers some time back, is capable of many of the tasks people had to use GUIs for in the past. To make the best use of it, though, you really need GNU Screen, and Screen just isn't being maintained that much any more. Really, with framebuffer support and other graphics features for consoles being considered, some of the features of Screen might have to be moved into the kernel in order to function correctly.
I don't use the option of serial-port consoles, so I'm not sure how capable those are these days. PCs are not in the same league as minicomputers or mainframes, so I doubt anybody is looking to hook up a couple of hundred VT220 terminals any time soon, but it is an interface and the underlying code for a terminal is independent of where that terminal is physically located. It should make no difference to Linux whether you are using the local keyboard/screen, a terminal on the end of a serial cable, or indeed a terminal on the end of a USB line.
Re:UI choice (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever heard of XCB (replaces Xlib and is asynchronous to make multithreading easier, and provides an xlib implementation on top of XCB to ease porting), Gallium3D (a new graphics stack that'll be easier to port and work much more like modern video cards, includes software fallbacks for everything), Composite (which should make it easy to make a panning window manager), XRandR 1.2 (greatly improved the hotplug-ability of X), Glucose (experiment to attempt to accelerate X rendering operations using X11, haven't heard much from this one lately), and several other projects?
Basically there is work going on in Xorg that you're wanting, it just takes time (thanks to the state of massive bitrot it'd developed into during the age of XFree). Many of the projects (like Composite, XCB, XRandR, and AIGLX) are just becoming mature (look at all the craze over compiz/beryl/compizfusion thanks to Composite+AIGLX), but the more fundamental changes need more time (like Gallium3D and the TTM Memeory Manager for video cards) before people can really see the fruits of their labor, and for others no one will really notice the new abilities until some crafty developer finds some way to do something nifty with them (like XCB).
mod me down, but picking just one would be great (Score:3, Interesting)
I know, choice is good. So is focusing your efforts on making one usable product that people can standardize on. Don't even think of it as a product, think of it as a protocol. HTTP won out over Gopher, and the first is everywhere and makes all kinds of apps able to talk to each other; the second is a (fondly, for me) remembered also ran. And that's a good thing.
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Re:mod me down, but picking just one would be grea (Score:5, Insightful)
I know, choice is good. So is focusing your efforts on making one usable product that people can standardize on.
What you can do, however, is work on standards and interoperability of protocols that underly the environments. You know, like Freedesktop [freedesktop.org] do. That means common standards for inter-application communication (from cut and paste to DBUS), standards for how applications expose themselves to menus, standards for syustem trays, and so on. This effort is still ongoing, but the end result is that GNOME, KDE and Xfce can share application menus, system trays, clipboards, icon themes, and more. With other things like the GTK-Qt theme [kde-look.org] and the QtGTK Style [trolltech.com], we're steadily heading toward the point where applications will be able to slot in seamlessly competing desktops.
So in some sense what you want is being done, but it is not going to involve one desktop to rule them all. For that you need dictatorial control from on high to simply say what is "right". You won't get that in FOSS; it's just not how it works. If you want that you need something like Apple or Microsoft, and the consequences that come with such choices (although, to be honest, I'm not sure they offer models [bla.st] of perfect consistency [arstechnica.com] either).
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Various pieces are often turned into libraries which are intended to work on both. Wrappers are often written so that you don't have to think about it -- I can check one little checkbox and all my gtk apps will use a qt theme, so if I wasn't a tech, I wouldn't even know Firefox wasn't a KDE app.
In order to do this, though, you have to understand just what it is you want to standar
Re:mod me down, but picking just one would be grea (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree that standards and interoperability between DEs are important, but I think that trying to corral people into the DE of someone-or-other's choice is self-defeating, trying as it does to work directly against human nature. I favour the encouragement of collaboration between the DEs seen in projects like freedesktop.org. Nobody can make this desktop divide go away, so instead of undertaking mad social engineering projects I think that we should embrace diversity in a pragmatic way, trying to smooth over the bumps where possible but also reap the benefits (and there are some!) where we can.
Re:mod me down, but picking just one would be grea (Score:4, Informative)
I believe having 2 major environments is best. People always have disagreements on how things should be done, with two major environments it's easier to try your different options, and often times one will win (like DBUS being based on DCOP), or things where people don't really disagree on anything a single standard is formed (icon theme naming). A major rearchitecturing like KDE4 probably wouldn't have been easy to convince people to attempt if everything relied on it. During KDE4.0's development KDE 3.5 was still being developed in a mostly bugfix mode, but it'd likely have caused a fork with a single environment which might have taken years to end (look how long GTK 1 apps have stuck around... XMMS was only recently killed off).
Now that it's starting to appear like the major rearchitecturing of KDE4 is paying off, the Gnome/GTK camp have begun discussing a GTK3 that breaks binary compatibility. The Gnome camp and the KDE camp are constantly competing with each other, yet at the same time working together (generally under the banner of FreeDesktop.Org). It's really the best of both worlds, as they try to one-up each other, but there's no problem for a dev from one camp to go up to a dev in the other and ask about how they implemented something, or how they worked around certain problems with the implementation. A monopoly is a bad thing, regardless of whether it's a giant corporation behind it, or a free software project (this is one of my criticisms with Mozilla... they've mostly had a monopoly on the Linux desktop so have been prone to neglect it... now with WebKit becoming very popular people have a choice and Mozilla has proper motivation to improve Gecko's modularity and Firefox's integration and performance).
Re:mod me down, but picking just one would be grea (Score:5, Funny)
"wilder" desktops to choose from (Score:4, Funny)
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Enlightenment was the only reason I ever brought up a Linux machine at home. I was perfectly content with the BSD machines I had access to.
http://www.plig.org/xwinman/screenshots/enlightenment.jpg [plig.org]
that's the shot that made me "fall in love."
I mean, GNOME is
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When this happens... (Score:4, Funny)
Lets face it, linux users love choice. And since they're more likely than not to be fanboys (c'mon, everyone knows a linux convert is preachy about his newfound OS), then they're probably also fanboys about UI.
Fanboys can... (Score:2)
Mandriva & Slackware (Score:4, Informative)
In any case, let's place bets if the thread degenerates into KDE vs. Gnome... ug!
twm for me (Score:5, Insightful)
I would not recommend my environment for anyone but myself. I've been with my wife since 1996 and she has NEVER been able to figure out how to do anything when sitting down at my Linux desktop. If I open a mozilla window for her she can just stay in there and be fine. But anything else, forget it.
The first thing I do when I install a modern Linux distribution is turn off all of the services that support Gnome and KDE programs. D-Bus, avahi, etc, etc, there are tons of them and they all just choke up the system when you are not running Gnome or KDE (and even if you do, but at that point they are a necessary evil). It's getting harder and harder to install new Linux distributions and manage to clean out all of the desktop related stuff that they install and run. All I want is X11, twm, mozilla/firefox, emacs, xterm, and a few other odds and ends. It annoys me when I install programs like ImageMagick and they require libgnome. Why? I don't run Gnome, why should the program require it? But I am being pretty curmudgeonly here. Aside from the minor annoyance of having to have libraries on my system that I "shouldn't need" (to continue to live in the early 1990's), there's really no harm in it.
I keep telling myself that someday I will have to suck it up and start using Gnome or KDE. But that day never seems to come because I don't *need* those things, and they never work seamlessly enough anyway to make them worth my while. I know that eventually I will *have to* because no Linux distribution will support my ancient way of working someday. But until that time comes I am unlikely to change.
Re:twm for me (Score:5, Funny)
Your 35 and you haven't lived at all~
Re:twm for me (Score:5, Insightful)
Does it matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're using Ubuntu, Fedora or Suse, then there's a possibility that you're an average Joe and you use your computer for general things like web surfing, email, word processing, perhaps even movies or managing your music collection. Or, you use it at work and only care about its general productivity applications. If you're this person, then a uniform interface across distros isn't a big deal. If you can point, click, and drag, then you probably won't ask for much more than that.
If you're a "power user" on any *nix distro (be it the three above or any others) and you like to customize every aspect of your kernel, desktop environment, and everything in between, then you'll already know which environment is your favorite and you're going to set it up the way you want it, anyway. So it doesn't really matter what the distro has by default.
So whatever a distro has by default really shouldn't matter, be it varied or vanilla.
What is this about anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
Convergence (Score:4, Insightful)
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That's an emergent property of FOSS. It's basically evolution by intelligent design AND natural selection, if that makes any sense. You've got a bunch of different codes. The best become the most popular in their niche, the rest don't. That's the "natural selection" bit.
Instead of sexual reproduction/mutation enabling variation among different
The article is a carier of misinformation (Score:2)
For a long time most distros have had some kind of 'server' install to avoid this, infact I think it's always been that way.. the entire piece is just rubbish fluff.
It is a necessity to have a common GUI (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It is a necessity to have a common GUI (Score:5, Informative)
In the meantime GNOME and KDE both have Human Interface Guideline documents that spell out how applications should work to be consistent, and, oddly enough, most applications for the respective desktops hew to them rather well. You can certainly expect a more consistent environment than Windows apparently is these days (even if you stick to MS software)!
UI contracts go far deeper than visual guidelines. (Score:4, Insightful)
But a number of important things stay the same. For example, in any document-based application, Alt,F,S and Ctrl-S both give you Save. Always. Everywhere. Now, I've never used IE7 (I'm currently using Opera on Ubuntu...), and from your screenshot it doesn't seem to have a menubar. I don't know whether it just doesn't have a menubar, or whether it's hidden by default. But somehow I can be pretty certain that, whichever the answer is, pressing Alt,F,S will still give me save.
To be fair, Gnome now does this just as well as Windows. All the standard Gnome apps conform to the same guidelines. So let's look at a related area: well-defined boundaries in keyboard shortcuts. For example: in Evolution, check mail is F9; but Compiz uses F9 for its widget-gadget-dashboard thing by default. Problem: if you turn on 'extra effects' in Compiz, every time you check mail, you get your screen taken over by a moded widget overly
Now, why does this happen? F9 is check mail in Evolution because that's what Windows uses; and F9 is Dashboard in Compiz because that's what Mac OS uses. In Windows, F? keys on their own are per-application shortcuts. On a mac, F? keys on their own are system-wide shortcuts. On Linux, there is no one dictated standard, so everyone picks whichever convention they prefer, and you get conflicts.
Having well-defined app/system keyboard chord boundaries is a lot less sexy that mandating the colour of all applications toolbars, to be sure. But, as a UI contract, it's the more important of the two.
UI in the middle (Score:4, Interesting)
"Major" Linux dists is the key word (Score:5, Insightful)
A common UI for Linux would suck, because not everyone wants the same thing. If there's a common UI, then that means a bunch of people are going to lose something.
A common UI for "major Linux distributions" is probably a good thing, since even though not everyone wants the same thing, a vast majority are happy to settle for the same thing even if it doesn't fit them well (ever heard of "Windows"?). Those people are the most likely to use "major Linux distributions" and those same people are probably the ones you're most likely to end up having to talk to on the phone. "Click on the foot or gear icon, and then..." Talking grandma through an UI that you know (because you're used to talking people through that one, even if you don't use it daily yourself) is easier than talking her through one of a hundred UIs that you vaguely remember having tried out for a couple days two years ago.
It's about time (Score:5, Insightful)
Unification of the UI throughout all apps and windows is a must. You just simply cannot hit a moving target. Get a solid base foundation built and then have at all of the niche and one-off app and distros you want.
My personal dream day is when a major distro finally comes out with one look, one of each type of app which is as polished and unified as possible, and one window manager. No more ridiculous things in the kernel like IBM PS2 micro channel controller drivers or similar outdated garbage (yes I know they are modularized but still). Give me streamlined, solid, stable, fast, and straightforward.
My only hope right now is that a company like ASUS will continue on their way and accomplish it that way. Which is something I never thought I would say. Lets stop playing games and stupid idealistic crap and make Linux a true contender. Right now as sad as it is to say OS X has matched my wishlist for Linux in a few years as apposed to the past 13 I've spent with Linux.
But... but... (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe we can work out a compromise - like one UI every 100 square kilometers. The monitors could then be made really big and attached to blimps. Would that be acceptable?
Dumb idea (Score:4, Insightful)
You're going to have a hard time convincing those working on FVWM, XFCE, Fluxbox, and all the other non-KDE/GNOME desktop environments that a universal paint color has been decided upon and that they should all just roll over and accept it.
gKDE (Score:4, Insightful)
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But yes, you are right that Vista effects very much pale in comparison to Compiz. And I bet the Compiz team was a tiny fraction of the size of whatever the MS team was...
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That is not "Ubuntu has them", that is "Linux has them".... Beryl and Compiz have been used in plenty of other distros for a loooong time.
First: Beryl is dead, long live the Compiz merge.
Second: Does Mandriva use them as the default, "integrated" or not?
Ubuntu is big, and popular, and distributed by Dell. What does Mandriva have that Ubuntu doesn't?
But more importantly, I think it is quicker and cleaner to simply talk about a distro, without mentioning Linux. It won't piss off RMS quite as much, as we are clearly talking about a distribution and a derivative work -- it's Ubuntu, not Ubuntu/Gnu/Linux. And it'll avoid people making embarrassin
Re:From TFA ... page/slide 8 ... (Score:5, Informative)
Rather than potentially BREAKING the GUI on a significant number of machines, the last SEVERAL releases of Mandriva have it ready to use and integrated with one click on "3-D desktop". Having it as the "default" isn't necessarily a good thing, nor does it make it the sole domain of Ubuntu.
Mandriva has been around before there was an Ubuntu. It is just as or more pretty, powerful, flexible, stable, easy to use, and polished. It was distributed on HP's and several other hardware vendors long before Ubuntu was offered on Dell. Unlike Ubuntu, a single Mandriva DVD can install a default KDE or Gnome or combined (or other) system... they don't seem to have the need to have separate Gnomedriva and KDEdriva distro versions. Of the people I know that use both (*untu and Mandriva) regularly, they all tend to like Mandriva better. That doesn't mean that Ubuntu isn't wildly popular nor deserving of praise. But people should not feed it credit and sole spotlight for things common to other if not many distros.
Every time I see ANY article/posting refering to something that applies to all Linux distros under a single distro name, it is almost always Ubuntu users who do it. It is tiring, arrogant, and insulting to users and developers of other distros.
Keep in mind that you are the one trying to turn this thread into an Ubuntu vs. Mandriva thread. My point was that you should not use the term "Ubuntu" instead of "Linux distros" when it is something that really refers to many, most, or all distros.
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That Ubuntu user base does't know this things is to be expected (since most are new and just assume that everything is Ubuntu, even the kernel is Ubuntu) but on an article...
Re:Precisly the missing part of Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
Why should I learn Gnome or KDE if I already know Aqua, or vice versa?
The best solution would be an interface definition standard that lets you use KDE on Windows, Mac or Linux with no installation or configuration necessary - just download your profile from a server or USB key.
Oh, yeah, and I'd like a pony too, as long as I'm wishing on pipe dreams...
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There is a limit to the degree this is possible, of course. Aqua relies on more than just a proprietary widget toolkit; its components are also tailored to the proprietary configuration backends of the OS for which it was designed. The popular Linux desktop environments tend to be easily adapted to other more similar Unixes like Solaris or BSDs, but would not work well on Windows, which features a fundamentally different design.
Re:Precisly the missing part of Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
But actually, we do have something like that -- it's called X. The problem is, of course, that Windows and OS X both threw away decades of work and started from scratch, so you can't just write an X window manager and expect it to work anywhere but Linux. (Or BSD. Or OpenDarwin. Or Plan9. Or Solaris. Or Cygwin. Or...)
Personally, I think the better solution would be a common runtime -- either high level (think Java, or the Web/AJAX) or low level (think x86_64 + Linux + X.org) -- so that I can customize my environment as much as I want, and then run the apps I want in that environment. Much more flexible when I can actually write brand-new window-managing software than try to create a common spec for configuring existing window managers.
Re:Precisly the missing part of Linux (Score:5, Informative)
MS released the first version of Windows in 1986, and previews of NexStep (which is the foundation for OS X) began in 1986 too, so development work on both was pretty much concurrent with the original MIT version of X (1984, with X11 appearing in 1987). It's not therefore correct to say that either threw away decades of work.
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It can, but not everything plays nicely. As on major example, Firefox won't put its menu bar at the top of the screen. An inconsistency with a major application like that renders putting the menu bar at the top of the screen pretty futile. Hopefully Firefox 3 fixes that. KDE also by default puts a border on maximised windows, which puts the scroll bar a couple of pixels away from the edge of the scr
Re:Precisly the missing part of Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
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There is nothing inherently wrong with the tools and UI available in Linux distros when compared to MacOS. It is just a matter of the lack of a centralized compa
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Anyway, if you run a KDE environment and use ONLY KDE applications (or Gnome and used ONLY Gnome applications), things look, feel, react very consistently and pretty seamlessly and with a modern look and feel.
Exactly, I don't see how this is so major in Linux. In Windows just about every app has a different look and feel to it, some resembling Windows 9X, others XP, others Vista some others even seem to be more at home on the Mac while yet others seem to be totally original. With Linux, most anything starting with a "g" will look just fine on Gnome and just about that starts with a "k" will be good on KDE. About the only OS that everything seems to flow together like how everyone thinks Linux should would b
X *is* the thing that's wrong with modern Linux... (Score:3, Informative)
... But you have to respect that Linux distros can do what they do and still remain with the very flexible and well-known X, all the while remaining completely open.
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There is nothing inherently wrong with the tools and UI available in Linux distros when compared to MacOS.
Yes there is. You've just cited one example: X. It may be "very well known" and theoretically flexible, but good compared to a modern windowing system like Quartz it ain't. Ever tried to set up dual monitors on Linux? (Using the nVidia binary driver settings utility is cheating.). Compare that with the experience on a Mac, or Windows.
(If your answer to that is "Yes, and it was relatively easy, because it was within the last year and so since XRandr 1.2 was released, and I have xrandr-supporting dri
Re:Precisly the missing part of Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Precisly the missing part of Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
But what about X11? Well, these days, if you're using GNOME, or KDE, or Xfce, and applications written for those environments (which is to say most modern applications for X11 desktops) then you only have two toolkits, which can be themed so they render using the theme of the other (using either GTK-Qt theme, or QtGTK Style), and has consistent cut and paste that works across (and between) them all. Yes, you can get some Xlib applications if you hunt around, but then you can get ugly Tk applications on Windows if you hunt around (or X11 applications on the Mac). The reality is that, these days, the Linux desktop really isn't that much more inconsistent that Apple or Microsoft. Actually, I would go so far as to say that it is actually more consistent than what MS is currently producing.
Re:Not one - just a default one (Score:5, Insightful)
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In the whole KDE vs GNOME thing, I lean very heavily in favor of KDE 3.5 and would choose it over GNOME in any situation.
Yet I would much sooner use GNOME than KDE 4, as things stand.
Re:Winners and losers (Score:5, Informative)
This is temporary, and is a common complaint about KDE 4.0. The idea with KDE 4.0 was to ship what they had to encourage further application development. There are lots of changes to KDE, including using a new version of QT (the underlying toolkit).
The basics are there, but customizeability, as you noted, is lacking. From what I understand, that flexibility (especially in terms of the main panel) will return with KDE 4.1, to be released this July.
KDE 4.0 isn't for everybody. After reading about some of these limitations, I decided to wait until KDE 4.1 before upgrading my Kubuntu laptop's KDE version. As I understand it, KDE 4.1 will bring applications like the PIM framework up to speed, and I should be able to make my desktop look and work like I'm used to with KDE 3.5 (a substantial alteration from the default).
KDE hasn't abandoned the philosophy of a very flexible user interface, it's just taking time to re-implement the features in the serious overhaul that is KDE 4. I can wait.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Look at something lighter like Puppy or Damn Small Linux.
Re:The one feature common to all now - bloat and s (Score:3, Insightful)
Well there you have it - you *cannot* have a quick, streamlined system that also has a modern, good looking desktop. That means no matter what you do, todays modern Linux distribution won't work as it was meant to work on a Pentium II.
Contrary to what early Linux supporters were bragging about, once you add the bling that makes the system easy to use and attractive to new users (and you *have* to add it to attract new and novice users so there's no escaping it), all that work invested in having a top-notc