Gnome replaces Unity

[Karl Auer]

On Sun, 2017-10-15 at 16:21 +0200, Xen wrote:
> You can't create something good if your biggest concern is to not be 
> like something else.

"Bad artists imitate, good artists borrow, great artists steal".
Picasso, I think.

Microsoft Windows imitated X Windows right from the start (as did
several others including Amiga), and so did Apple in almost all major
respects.

This followed on from DOS imitating parts of CP/M and parts of Unix. In
almost every important aspect they screwed it up, starting with the
pointless decision to use a backslash instead of a slash as a path
separator and going downhill from there. A lot of design "decisions" in
DOS look to me as if they stemmed from simply misunderstanding what the
thing they were trying to copy really did. Their environment handling
in DOS was crap, their shell was crap, their scripting was crap. It
took TWENTY YEARS for them to produce a new shell, and then IT was crap
too! The first several versions of Windows didn't multi-task! Windows
is still aggressively one-user-at-a-time, which I suppose is a
marginally better than the single-user system they sold for so long.

Not much from Microsoft or Apple (or in X), but there *has* been real
innovation in user interfaces. It couldn't get a foothold for various
reasons - BeOS, NeXT and so on, not to mention fringe stuff like the
Smalltalk VM. Niklaus Wirth's Oberon was in actual production use at
the ETHZ for several years, for all I know it still is - it is very,
very weird. Unity was an innovation, and the entire phone/tablet world
is innovation (or was). People are still working out how touch screens
should work.

Regards, K.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer
http://twitter.com/kauer389

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