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

On Tue, 24 Jun 2025 00:13:46 -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”.

I don't care *what* people offer as a novelty geegaw as long as it
doesn't get in the way of the regular workflow. FSN is ludicrous from a
usability standpoint, but it was never anything you *had* to deal with;
compared to genuine workflow malpractice like the Office 2007 Playskool
activity-center bar or GTK3's habit of pointing file-open/save dialogs
to a nebulous liminal space where files can neither be opened nor saved
and there's nothing but links to places where the dev team thinks you
*might* like to keep files, it'd be silly to get mad over.

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.

I'm not talking about implementation details on the kernel level; I'm
talking about the way that nothing in GUI-land interacts meaningfully
with the traditional *nix toolset, and vice versa. It's a two-headed
dog sort of thing, only one dog is written in Objective-C and Swift.

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

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

Someday when I have a pile of free time and no other hobby projects
that are more important to me, sure!