Re: What Window Manager/Desktop Environment do you use, and why?

On Fri, 13 Jun 2025 01:26:07 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

MMUs cost extra at the time, yes, but that changed pretty quickly -
by the time the 68030 rolled out in 1987 it was built in to the CPU
(and the Mac line adopted the '030 just a year later, with the Mac
IIx.) 

 
Which, if you remember, was not exactly a cheap machine.
 
(I had an original-model Mac II on my desk in 1987. I thought it was
the most wonderful machine in the world.)

Not for the consumer market, no - though it *was* a good deal cheaper
($7.8k) than a Sun 3/60FC ($11.7k) or an HP 9000/360 ($14.4k!) than
contemporary 030-based *nix workstations (comparing across the diskless
versions. But the point was more that, had a couple early mistakes not
been made, it would've been much more feasible to incorporate memory
protection into the OS when advances in CPU design *did* make it viable
for consumer computers (and the SE/30 followed only a couple years
later - not their cheapest offering at the time, but about half the
price of a IIx...)

(And yes, the Mac II line was - apart from the last few models - quite
nice. My first computer was a IIcx my dad got secondhand from the
community college where he worked; still have fond memories of that
thing.)

But remember the transition to “32-bit clean” operation was pretty
much done by 1990, just 3 years after the original Mac II, and
involved very little change to MacOS APIs. Contrast this with the
16-to-32-bit transition in the Microsoft-compatible x86 world, which
took about a decade *after* the first 80386-based machine started
shipping.

For sure - the decision to use a natively 32-bit architecture from the
get-go paid off in the long run.

But the *nix approach of treating it as a secondary (tertiary?)
priority tends to lead to exactly what we saw in the *nix world,
historically: a handful of disparate efforts that mostly tend to
make it to "eh, good enough" and never quite achieve *niceness.* 

 
Where is there a GUI that has achieved “niceness”? It’s just that
some companies have bigger publicity budgets than others, to tell
everyone how wonderful they are. Consider Microsoft’s “Aero Glass”
effort in Vista, which the *nix world could easily match--even
outshine--at much lower hardware cost, to the point where Microsoft
had to abandon its approach and try to convince everyone that
translucency and other 3D effects weren’t all that fashionable
anyway, while we still have that available in the *nix world.

My use of "niceness" isn't meant to imply surface glitz or fancy FX;
for myself, I actually prefer *not* to have those things, and it's a
source of consternation to me when they can't be turned off. What I'm
referring to is polish in design & craftsmanship rather than straight
eye-candy - that things are both aesthetically pleasing* and well-
engineered from a UX standpoint; that they're easy on the eye, but the
visuals convey useful information; that they behave intuitively and
consistently; that the pieces fit into a unified whole.

* (Which is *not* the same thing as "flashy & computationally expensive
to render;" there can be real beauty in simplicity, but most GUI design
seems to fall squarely into either the indiscriminate-flash-'n-dazzle
or starkly-Brutalist camps.)

Which is, admittedly, hard to quantify - there's art to it as well as
science, and it's more of a "know it when I see it" thing, except that
I hardly ever see it, and mostly in approximation. Apple and the Mac
team made a real effort to achieve both aesthetic quality and usability
early on, and to communicate their design principles to third-party
developers; MS in the Win3.x era did as well, but less adroitly, and
with less success in getting third-parties to follow suit.

But despite their good points, these left things to be desired - MS's
GUI design, even after the 3.x revamp, was never as pleasing as
Apple's, and Explorer didn't *begin* to be useful as a file manager
'til Windows 95, while Apple was too eager to throw the baby out with
the bathwater wrt. keyboard/CLI functionality.

(Both systems also had their share of issues "under the hood," but
that's a separate matter.)

Meanwhile, the Unix world for the most part* never even got that far;
early X desktops were little more than window managers for arranging
terminals, and the handful of Xlib/Motif alternatives to Mac/Windows
GUI components were ugly and clunky by comparison. (Well, xfe is a more
useful file manager than pre-95 Explorer, but that's not saying much.)
And when the vendors decided to standardize, the result was CDE, which
was sort of the metaphorical equivalent of a Trabant, without the charm.

* (IRIX is pretty nearly the sole exception, as its bread & butter was
in the upper end of digital art & multimedia applications and Apple
basically owned the entire rest of that space; they *had* to compete.
Sadly, Magic Desktop never really caught on outside that ecosystem.

NeXTSTEP was also a fairly valiant attempt, but God help me do I hate
Miller columns; and the segregation of GUI-land entities from under-
lying *nix ones that drives me up the wall with OSX began at NeXT. IRIX
never 100% solved that problem either, but they didn't try to pretend
it wasn't there.)

And then the whole damn personal-computer industry got sidetracked into
an ugly and counterproductive obsession with skeumorphism in the late
'90s; and while the fad passed, the fallout lingered. That was also
just in time for tablets to take off - which *would've* been a totally
unrelated matter, if it weren't for MS's obsession with catching up to
Apple (when they and Google had already defined, surveyed, drawn up the
boundaries, and filed the damn *charter* on the space) leading them off
on a long and hilariously fruitless quest to vivisect Windows into some
kind of horrifying Fiji mermaid of a hybrid desktop/tablet OS, the end
result of which was that they forgot everything they ever *did* learn
about GUI design for personal computers. (Satya firing practically the
entire old guard *probably* didn't help.)

So, well...no, there is no specific example I can point to and go
"there, *that!*" - if there was, I'd be using it. The closest real-life
approximation I can cite is Mac System 7/7.5 - the most pleasant and
consistent GUI environment I've ever encountered - but even that has
its issues, as previously noted. Other systems exhibit good ideas of
their own (I like BeOS's treatment of tabs as an integral part of the
desktop experience, though the implementation could be less clunky,) but
"niceness" is mostly something glimpsed in frustrating little twinkles
that catch the attention and stir the heart amid a present day that is,
by and large, a great oceanic garbage heap of churning not-particularly-
niceness.

But I *don't* believe that it's some unachievable Platonic ideal; every
problem I have with extant systems seems very much like a solvable one,
if only they weren't too married to legacy considerations to adopt a
solution. If I had infinite time and/or no hobbies that were more
important to me, I suppose I could try to create such a thing myself -
but I am, tragically, a mortal with way too much on my plate as it is.