Vertical taskbars on MATE

[Liam Proven]

On Sun, 26 Aug 2018 at 05:04, Little Girl <littlergirl at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hey there,

Hi. :-)

> >BeOS was a proprietary commercial OS and the company sadly failed
> >about 15-20 years ago.
> >
> >There was a freeware eval edition of BeOS 5, and you could run that
> >under a VM.
>
> Thanks. Ordinarily I'd check it out, but if it's no longer being
> developed, it's probably best not to.

BeOS is dead, yes.

However, if you have hardware old enough to run it, it is instructive
to play with it for a few hours.

As I said before: 20y ago, on (for example) a 133MHz single-core
Pentium with 128MB of RAM, it booted faster and was more responsive
than the machine I'm typing on -- a quad-core Retina iMac with 24GB of
RAM and an SSD.

Almost nobody who is only used to 21st century computers realises how
vastly bloated and underperforming modern OSes are.

Another example: the QNX Demo Disk.

http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html

A complete multitasking desktop, plus an Internet stack, and a web
browser, on a single bootable 1.4MB floppy.

No install. Boots from RAM.

Ubuntu can no longer even fit onto a single 650MB CD.

But a functional desktop OS, web-capable, can be fit into under 2 megabytes.

As for BeOS... it sort of lives on.

Be was sold to Access. Be tech made it into PalmOS 6.

https://www.palmsource.com/palmos/cobalt.html

Sadly, no Palm devices with PalmOS 6 ever shipped.

It remains the property of Access: https://www.access-company.com/

However, the beta of BeOS 6 "Zeta" leaked, was completed and shipped.

Here's a nice in-depth look with history and context:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2005/08/zeta-1-0/

It even made it to v1.5:

http://www.osnews.com/story/17518/Review_Zeta_1_5/

Also:

https://www.geek.com/xyzcomputing/yellowtab-zeta-os-version-10-571320/

It's out there if you want a look.

Haiku is alive and well and about to ship beta 1:

https://www.haiku-os.org/

This works surprisingly well -- I have a nightly build on a spare
machine. Wifi, web browsers, the lot.

IMHO it is the most complete and polished FOSS desktop OS out there
after the FOSS Unixes. Haiku is far ahead of Plan 9/Minix/NetBSD and
stuff like that. Personally I rate it ahead of FreeBSD / TrueOS but
others' mileage may vary there.

For a real feel, try it on hardware, not in a VM.

It is very pleasant to use, but far far slower and less responsive
than the proprietary original. Still a lightweight OS today, though.

> That kind of makes you wonder why they went under. Hopefully some of
> their developers have come over to the Ubuntu team.

No. But one designed the journalling filesystem in Mac OS X, and
co-designed the new Apple Filesystem.

It is far _far_ behind the original Be FS though.

> The advantage to that is that each of them goes in a different
> direction, and we get to pick which direction we like. If there were
> fewer of them, we'd have fewer choices despite their ability to
> develop faster.

I would agree if that were happening, but it isn't. They're all
flogging the same dead horse, the Win95 model.

GNOME 3 is a bit different but as discussed it alienates many users.

Budgie is slightly different but it just goes to a vast amount of work
to duplicate what you could do in half an hour of customising Xfce or
MATE.

Elementary OS are doing something slightly different, but not by much.

The developers of both chose to re-invent the wheel instead of seeing
what was out there.

E.g. Elementary reproduces a Mac OS X-like look and feel.

Mac OS X developed from NeXTstep. There's an existing FOSS recreation
of NeXTstep:

http://gnustep.org/

Elementary could be 5-10 years ahead of where it is now if it had
started with GNUstep as its base. I am sure they never even heard of
it, though.

Another innovative desktop I like is ROX:

http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/

No Linux distro includes either GNUstep or ROX, sadly, nor ever has.

> I agree. We have that, to some degree, by choosing different desktops
> to log into, but since each has very certain hooks into system
> components, you end up with a lot of excess software when you add
> desktops. A cleaner way of doing it would be nice.

Yes.

> Yep, I just tried it again and that one has a normal desktop. The
> reason I rejected it was because the trash can't be put onto the
> panel, which is a deal-breaker for me.

Ah, yes, I remember now. I don't know -- that isn't something I want.

> It was definitely Xfce, but it looks like they've fixed it. I just
> tried the latest version of Xubuntu and was able to create files and
> folders on the desktop. That's definitely going to be kept as a
> fall-back desktop for me now in case MATE falls over in the future.

Yep. As I said, both LXDE and Xfce can do that. I've never seen a
version of either that could not.

> Although that makes sense and since we definitely have more screen
> real estate to give up for vertical bars than horizontal ones, I'm
> wondering how long it would take to overcome years of habit and
> muscle memory formed by accessing a horizontal bar thousands or
> millions (or more) times.

I persuaded a few colleagues to try at my last full-time job before I
left the UK.

Just before the company downsized, they refreshed their desktop fleet.
They also fired the IT guy and outsourced it.

There was a pile of old PCs and screens in the corner.

I pulled an old LCD out of the pile and hooked it to my PC's unused
VGA port as a 2nd screen. I didn't have admin rights, but for that you
don't need them.

I now had a big wide desktop, and I put the taskbar on the left.

My colleagues marvelled. Never had they seen this sorcery.

I could have 20+ apps open with readable-sized taskbar buttons. They
were amazed.

Some copied me. Some kept it, some didn't.

But a few weeks later, everyone in the office had a 2nd screen on
their computer. :-D

Quite a few of 'em didn't understand how window-management works and
could not get the hang of moving windows on to the 2nd monitor. Having
it sitting there empty embarrassed them so some disconnected them
again.

This is why iPads took off, of course.

Honestly, it takes no more than a day or 2 to get used to a taskbar on
the side. Just do it full time and you'll get used to it. Don't
weaken. It's not hard.

> No need. I have more than one copy of Windows (10 and otherwise) here
> for work.

Right. So try it. It works on every version of Windows since Windows 95 v1.0.

Actually, it worked in the betas before that -- I ran the later ones. :-)

> I didn't realize Windows offered it as well. This is something I had
> never explored until our recent experimentation with it in here.

It's been there for about 24 years. :-)

> I suspect the same thing. There's a lot obviously wrong with it the
> moment you set it up and start trying things, which they would have
> noticed if they'd messed around with it.

Exactly.

-- 
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