Gnome replaces Unity

[rikona]

On Sun, 15 Oct 2017 18:13:53 +0200
Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.  

and even earlier-
early mouse-related experiments at SRI International: late 1960s
Xerox Alto:  1973
various Lisp Machine hacks: late 1970s
Steve Jobs reeeeally liked the Alto interface:  1979 :-)

> 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.
>