Window dressings - a maddog story (Was: Any Opinions on SuSE 10.0 vs other Distros)

[Neil Joseph Schelly]

On Thursday 22 December 2005 11:53 am, Jon maddog Hall wrote:
> The winner was a very nice desktop, and Marc Ewing was going to use it as
> the next Red Hat default desktop.  I told him "no", since what Red Hat
> really wanted to do was get Windows users over, and Windows users wanted
> something that was familiar to them.  Unix users could create any type of
> desktop they wanted.

I never really looked at it that way - good perspective.  I think that's 
probably why I've always been with KDE.  At first, it looked a lot like 
Windows, but now my desktops confuse others because I put little 
icon/taskbars of varying and dynamic lengths around the screen (or screens, 
gotta love xinerama) in places that make sense to me most.  It's a nice 
evolution that you can only really do with an X desktop environment.

I relate it back to the days of Windows 3.1, where I couldn't stand the 
Program Manager, so I had a heavily customized PCTools desktop as my shell, 
with virtual desktops and desktop menus, and all sorts of cool stuff.  I 
remember wondering why more people didn't design better desktop shells for 
Windows after that - never really did find a good reason not to, but I guess 
PCTools never really took off in Windows 3.1 anyway.
-N