Gnome replaces Unity

[Liam Proven]

On 15 October 2017 at 16:55, Karl Auer <kauer at biplane.com.au> wrote:

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

Oh, very good. :-)

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

Apple Lisa: 1983.
Apple Mac: 1984,
MS Windows 1.0: 1985.
X.11: 1987.


> 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.

Command switches uses a forward slash. So, when directories were
introduced in MS-DOS 2, they had to use something else.

Classic MacOS didn't have the concept of "paths" as such, but when
they were occasionally visible, it used colons...

Hard Disk:Documents:Letters:Note to Bob about the boat

Acorn MOS and RISC OS used full stops:

ADFS::4:$.Docs.Letters.Note to Bob about the boat

I have no strong feelings about "right" and "wrong" here. It's just different.

> 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.

Sometimes, yes.

> Their environment handling
> in DOS was crap, their shell was crap,

I always preferred the shell by far to anything on Unix.

Yes, really.

The Unix shells are for programmers. The NT one is for sysadmins. I
was a sysadmin. It made doing what I needed easier than it was on
Unix.

> their scripting was crap. It
> took TWENTY YEARS for them to produce a new shell, and then IT was crap
> too!

Didn't seem to stop 'em making a lot of money...

> The first several versions of Windows didn't multi-task!

Neither did MacOS 1-6 or GEM. It was normal then.

> 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.

Pretty much, yes.

But then most interactive computers have been single-user for decades now.

> 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.

True.

> 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.

Yes it is weird. :-)

I'm trying to learn it. I am considering whether it's viable to port
it to run natively on the Raspberry Pi. Seems an ideal fit to me.

> Unity was an innovation, and the entire phone/tablet world
> is innovation (or was). People are still working out how touch screens
> should work.

Yup.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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