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

On Mon, 23 Jun 2025 14:29:02 -0700, John Ames wrote:

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.

I used it on DEC Alphas for a few years (after being a Mac man before),
and I didn’t find that at all. It was much cleaner in its layout than
Windows 3.x, or even Windows 9x, for that matter.

This was the point where Apple was trying to incorporate greyscale
backgrounds into (old) MacOS, to keep up with the fashion among the rest
of the computing world. They even toyed with some theming functionality in
beta versions of MacOS 8.5, but all that was removed before release.

(Though the pre-release themes could still be found, and installed on the
release system, if you knew where to find them, and were brave enough ...)

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

>
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

But the 3D interface did ship, did it not. Sun was also showing off their
“Project Looking Glass”.

And then there was Windows Vista ...

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.

OSX is not. That GUI is very much bound into the kernel -- contrary to the
modularity tradition of *nix systems.

Given the origin of OSX in NextSTEP, I suspect NeXTSTEP had it bound in as
well. Which is why a separate port (OpenSTEP) was needed to work on
conventional X11-based *nix GUIs.

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.

Sun had at least some GUI apps (the ones with names ending in “tool”, as I
recall) that were primarily front ends onto command-line/scriptable
programs. E.g. “mailtool” was a GUI on top of mail functions that were
also accessible via the command line. That fits in better with the
modularity idea.

That modularity idea did somewhat get pushed into the shadows during the
1990s. But it survives and thrives today.

Sun also created a high-level IPC system, specifically oriented towards
use in GUI sessions, called “ToolTalk”. Kind of an answer to Apple’s
AppleScript/AppleEvents. Today we have D-Bus on *nix systems, or at least
those that subscribe to FreeDesktop.org conventions.

I used to be an AppleScript enthusiast, but gradually realized how clunky
it was as I got exposed to alternatives.

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.

The idea that the GUI should be a separate modular, replaceable layer
lives on in the open-source *nix world. And it demonstrates its
superiority and versatility over the weld-it-into-the kernel approach that
Apple and Microsoft have both taken.

Certainly it *works,* but it could be done much better.

Tell us, or show us, how you would do it.