Window Controls on the Right Side

[Dale Amon]

On Fri, May 15, 2015 at 01:14:45PM +0100, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> Ah yes, the days when much design was done by engineers and managers
> who shrugged and communicated in their settings dialogs, "We don't
> know how to design software. Why don't you have a go?" And when, as a
> result, people were often -- justifiably! -- afraid of breaking their
> computer by accidentally changing settings that shouldn't have existed
> in the first place. People are willing to pay for the privilege of not
> making decisions like those.

And this is precisely the reason I have trouble with some of the
'modern' UI's. I *am* an engineer and I'm perfectly willing to let
'granny go suck eggs'. I prefer all of my global config to be in 
ascii files in /etc that I edit with emacs or else with a tool
that simply does what I would have done in emacs but in the UI.

The beauty of Unix is that it is (was?) available to be learned. 
You start at the bottom; everything is in a man page and everything
is editable. No corner of the system is hidden or obfuscated. It
is one of the things we laugh about with Microsoft products: they
are impenetrable even to the expert; most fixes are 'black magic'
which even the experts can't explain because they are just 
incantations discovered at great effort or passed on within 
high priced courses.

Unix frees you. It allows anyone to understand and *control* their
world.

Some people want systems for the lazy minded. I prefer systems that
expose their innards and teach.