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

On Sat, 21 Jun 2025 07:12:21 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

Interesting, because it was CDE/MOTIF that pioneered the idea of
multiple virtual desktops. Which, if you remember, was commonplace in
the *nix/ Linux world for many years, before Microsoft and Apple
discovered it and tried retrofitting it (badly) onto their own GUIs.

Per Wiki "virtual desktops" were independently invented by a couple
parties in the mid-'80s and were introduced to the broader *nix world by
swm in '89, well before CDE rolled out. Certainly CDE may have helped
to popularize it.

(No argument about the quality of MS/Apple's implementations, though.)

The larger point, however, was that compared to classic MacOS or even
Win3.x, CDE was clunky and awkward and made no obvious case for itself.
The Trabant comparison was a cheeky way to sum up the whole East Bloc
aesthetic of the thing: "Sie möchten eine GUI? Hier ist eine GUI. Nein,
es besteht kein Bedarf für eine bessere GUI."

But SGI were precisely an example of the sort of “flashy &
computationally expensive to render” thing you were criticizing, were
they not? They did a full animated 3D desktop, with 3D-rendered icons
flying around all over the place, just because they could.

As a novelty, yes (3D hardware was their big thing, what can you say.)
But I don't think anybody seriously meant that to be more than a proof-
of-concept - the normal IRIX desktop environment had nothing to do with
it, being a nicely-implemented but entirely conventional WIMP GUI based
around a modified mwm: http://toastytech.com/guis/irix.html

NeXTSTEP was also a fairly valiant attempt, but God help me do I
hate Miller columns; and the segregation of GUI-land entities from
underlying *nix ones that drives me up the wall with OSX began at
NeXT. 

 
Is that supposed to be different from the idea that functionality
should be available in scriptable/command line tools, with the GUI
mostly just a front end to those tools? Because that is a great way
to organize things.

Yes, that's a different thing; perhaps I could've been clearer. What
I'm referring to is the way that NeXTSTEP/OSX is just sort of this
entirely different thing plopped on top of an underlying *nix system.
Sure, BSD-land is *there* and files are more or less files (assuming
that the formats are standard,) but there's little commonality between
them: GUI-land applications are written in a different language with a
different set of APIs and mostly don't interact with BSD-land stuff at
all beyond the under-the-hood stuff that implements the XYZ Kit/Cocoa
API layer. It's neither fish nor fowl.

And history has proven that *nix approach to be the right way to do
things.

I wouldn't agree that it has, at least wrt. integration of a GUI layer
into operating-system design. Certainly it *works,* but it could be
done much better.