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The Definite Desktop Environment Comparison
Gentu writes "OSNews posted a very long and interesting comparison between the most popular desktop environments today: Windows XP Luna, Mac OS X Aqua, BeOS/Zeta and Unix's KDE and Gnome. Some of the points in the article can be thought to be 'subjective', but overall many good points are made and it seems that there is room for improvement for all DEs."
Little room for improvments. HA! That's a laugh!
i claim this first post in the name of fear factory! they should be together still. indeed. or something. this is frivilous and dumb...when others do it. muha!
- cornjchob
Warwarwarwarwarwarwarwarwarwarwarwarwarawr, wait, oooh, trendy desktop environment!
Is it just me, or did someone else find it kind of ironic that the first paragraph of a "definitive" survey talks about what wasn't covered?
If the dock were more customizable, the ability to have single-left-clickable appleting from the dock, and a few other minor gripes, I'd be happy. As it is, I hide the dock for as long as possible, unless I absolutely need it.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
No one dare criticize GNOME! It makes RMS cry when you bad mouth things.
My desktop is called "framebuffer console". And I don't need no stinkin' mouse!
Well, at least they possibly used a spellchecker...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I don't think you will ever have a DE that doesn't have some room for improvement. Its nice to see a comparison like this though.
CitrusTV (http://www.citrustv.net): the Nation's Oldest & Largest Entirely Student-Run Television Station
Great article, good read. IMO none of the XFree desktops can be compared to Windows or Mac OS X. Not yet at least.
That shoudl read "Today most popular Desktop Environments, and BeOS/Zeta"
fancy schmancy windows, startmenus and clippies?
DosShell is all I need.
Final Rating:
Windows XP 8.55
MacOSX 8.33
BeOS 8.22
KDE 6.72
Gnome 6.61
[subjective....gee...what was your first clue? Maybe the list of target OSs, perhaps? Since when is KDE/GNOME an OS?]
Sorry, but I just can't agree that OS X's GUI is more "in your face eye candy" than Windows' is. This criticism from people is something I will never understand. For me (and I'll admit to being a Mac person), the whole article showed a Windows bias.
Granted, some people are just turned off by the genie effect and the pulsating of default buttons. But, for crying out loud, The XP GUI is the most garish set of colors. It looks like the artwork of the mentally ill.
The old Windows GUI was a bit staid, but at least looked business-like. How this mad, psychedelic fantasy of color can continue to sit on the desktops of businesses everywhere is beyond me. It's unprofessional!
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
Sorry, but this is just plain wrong. My two main environments right now are MacOS X and KDE. I have never ever ever had KDE crash on me. MacOS X crashes a lot.
He criticizes Konqueror's stability. I agree. Konqeuror has crashed on me many many times, and it seems very buggy (at least the version I've used). This not the fault of KDE. Who cares? You can mix and match Mozilla/Konq/Galeon with KDE/Gnome/whatever. If you don't like a particular app, don't use it. It has nothing to do with the quality of the desktop environment.
Another problem is that Gnome and KDE are changing so quickly, so they're moving targets when you try to evaluate them. The version of Gnome I tried was waaaaaaaaaaay too slow on my machine. But that was 6 months ago! Things change quickly in the OSS world.
Find free books.
Could it be that XP won because MS dumps millions into research and development of interfaces? Nah thats not it. Nothing to see, keep on moving.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Another example of why more Mac users are on anti-depressants than the rest of us. She does a very good review and I find OS X to be more processor intensive and slower than XP, comparing OS X and Windows XP. I find no problems with XP and I must say, Windows XP is by far the most stable and best OS microsoft has ever released. But alas, a Windows vs. OS X war is one no one will ever win.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Let's see:
1) A very usable, nice-looking GUI
2) All the functionality of Unix/Linux
I know there is a 'emulate XP' effort for Linux, but there should really be one to emulate OS X. It gets rid of the two main failings of OS X:
1) Not open
2) Pricey
smd4985
No consideration is given to the cost of any of the OS's? What percent does one pay for the OS vs. the hardware now? That ratio goes up every year with Windows. What's it is now for Windows XP Professional box? 30%?
Flexibility for Linux (KDE/Gnome) a 7? What is more flexible than an open source operating system?
Chew: You Nexus, huh? I design your eyes.
Roy: Chew, if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes.
Some things were a bit unfair, such as the slowness of OSX. Yeah, the desktop hardware sucks right now. But I'm not sure you should judge the environment on the fact that Macintoshes are on average about half as fast as Intel machines. That'll change in September with the 970 machines.
Also in usability, a lot depends upon what you are used to. Since most people are used to Windows that is unsurprisingly what most people value. Don't get me wrong. There is something to be said for that. But it then emphasizes status quo at the expense of innovation.
I think all OSes and environments have pluses and minuses. I prefer OSX but find many things that drive me batty. (Open/Save dialogs, the poor multithreading in the Finder, Column view) On the other hand I prefer the Apple approach of making things intuitive and simple rather than Microsoft's approach of hand holding and wizards.
I think both have their pluses and minuses. Certainly the fact that Windows runs on cheaper and faster hardware recommends it right now. However as an overall environment OSX has matured very nicely. I actually went and paid the price premium for a Mac for my home. (Using XP for my development at work) It is sad that most comparisons are as superficial and unhelpful as this one was.
No, Rush Limbaugh's got the first one of his life.
cool does that animated bg come for xp? link pls!
The article claims that Mac OS X has vector (resolution independant) icons. This is incorrect. Mac OS X uses 128 x 128 pixel icons, which are scaled to the requested size.
The only desktop environment i can think of with vector based icons is SGI's "Indigo Magic" or "IRIX Interactive Desktop".
Hey, but you can make this cool animated background on an Aqua desktop where the current Iraqi body count is displayed via a CNN web search...
Cool! Is there a KDE version?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
you can make this cool animated background on an Aqua desktop where the current Iraqi body count is displayed via a CNN web search There is another background coming out soon that displays how many miles per Iraqi life (mpI) your SUV gets.
The correct location of the article my fellow AC cites.
Please do not confuse X11 (the protocol and environment) with XFree86 (the popular free implementation). Have you ever used X on IRIX?
MacOS X has probably the most in-your-face eye candy of all the DEs compared here.
... And don't get me started on shockingly bright colors. Both the start menu and the close button could stand to be a little more muted in Windows, while on OS X the only really bright non-blue parts are the window close-minimize-maximize widgets, which are shaded and not quite as bright. Everything else is a shade of white, which again is much less in-your-face. In other words, the Aqua theme focuses on white and light blue, while Luna just splashes a bright blue all over the screen. How exactly is Luna less pervasive than Aqua?
:-)
Aqua is more in-your-face than Luna? I just don't get that. In all honesty, I find the OS X interface to be far less glaring than XP's. The default Luna and Aqua themes are both focused on blue, but Aqua's blue is more muted and is far less noticeable during regular usage of the OS. Right now, on this OS X screen (and not counting application icons in the Dock), the only blue things are the Apple logo in the top left, the scroll bar, and the widgets for dropdown menus. On the XP machine beside me, the title bar of the Mozilla window is blue, the scrollbars are blue, the taskbar is blue, and the outline of the windows are blue. That's an order of magnitude more bright blue pixels on the screen
Let the flames commence.
-- shayborg
Yes, if you use any environment for long enough, it will become natural. But that doesn't give it high usability. Daily annoyances are the speech bubbles that keep popping up without rhyme or reason from the icon bars, the ever changing ways in which icons rearrange and present themselves in Explorer, the inconsistent and confusing presentation of the file system (sometimes the Desktop is at the root, sometimes "My Computer" is, sometimes it's the "C:\" drive), to an absolutely hare-brained arrangement of the control panel and administrative tools (just you try to locate the disk partitioning tools on XP home edition).
And if that is not enough, there are so many options and backwards compatibility settings and versions of programs that Windows doesn't even achieve the one thing he lauds it for: consistency. Programs follow conventions and looks from Windows 95 to XP, and the zillions of options mean that one XP desktop may behave completely differently from the next.
Among this set of choices, Macintosh OS X clearly is the usability winner, if not for any other reason, simply because Apple essentially started from scratch and removed a lot of useless junk.
Not that I'm in love with microsoft, but I'm getting a certain "OMG, she picked windows!" *stunned silence* vibe from this thread.
-Exit
Windows XP wins. DUH! Linux is for geeks, beos is for nobody, Mac OS is for actors, XP is for people.
This is a brilliant piece of fiction...
XP winning over OSX - Ahahahahaha
This thing is priceless people... XP rated *better* than OSX - give me a break! Hahahahaha.
I refer you all here which is slightly less *stupidly ignorantly biased*.
Just one more time... Hahahahaha.
-Nex
This sig has been deprecated.
From the article:
The best usability I get is from Windows XP... The user environment does what I expect it to do at any time. 95% of the applications carry out user-interactivity actions exactly like another Windows app would do it... It is just the 'standard', we like it or not.
Ok, this bugs me. The author is basing usability on what he's used to, not necessarily what is most usable. I can't dispute the fact that Windows apps tend to be consistent -- consistency is one of the most important components of usability). But if something is consistently crappy, it's still crappy. Just because someone is trained on one interface and is used to it doesn't make it highly usable from an objective point of view.
It reminds me of a story about a lady who always cut the ends off of the ham before she baked it. One day her kid asked her why she did it. She answered, "because that's the way my mother always did it." She got curious about it though, so she called her mother. Her mother said that she cut off the ends of the ham because that's the way she used to do it. So the lady called her mother's mother, who told her that she cut off the ends of the ham because it wouldn't fit in the pan otherwise.
All that to say that just because you're used to something doesn't mean it is the best way to do it.
47% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Contrast comments on KDE such as "extremely loose on details" and you'll see this type of comment throughout the review.
Finally, another mention, "It doesn't matter whose bug it is. The point is that it is there." Bravo! This is exactly the kind of attitude that those of us in the industry need to remember. When it comes to coding, yes, its important whose bug it is. If you're a VAR like redhat, your job is to make sure that the end user doesn't have to be a developer as well.
And for those anti-MS folk who also critique their use of usability experts, always remember, "The best usability I get is from Windows XP. This is the only reason I keep WinXP still as my main operating system."
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
I find XP left in it's default state to be fairly sluggish. XP itself isn't sluggish, but with all those fancy eye candy options it feels like it. Sure, having the menu you clicked on fade in and out looks cool for about 30 seconds, but after that it's just annoying. Same goes with basically all the eye candy Microsoft has thrown into their desktop since Windows 95. I'm guessing he has all that stuff turned off like I do?
After going through the answers given they still have yet to list my favorite. My good old fashioned metal monstrosity that has enough support to hold two 21 inch monitors, a 40 pound computer, a pyramid of pepsi cans and it doubles as a step when i need to turn on my air conditioner. On top of all that i got it at a government surplus store for $20 about 10 years ago.
It's a myth that Mac OS X has any advantage here over either X11 or Windows. X11 has support for all those features, including VSYNC (which has been in there since the mid-1980's). X11, in fact, has support for pretty much exactly the Mac OS X graphics model through DisplayPostscript.
The reason why these features are not used much in Gnome and KDE (or XP, for that matter) are partly historical and partly technical. Technically, it is not clear whether they are even desirable at this point. In particular, while the Mac does a few things like dragging windows around really well, on most normal graphics tasks, it is quite slow and consumes a lot of resources.
Basically, this guy's review is essentially a reiteration of common pre-conceptions: "XP is usable", "OS X is technically superior", and "Gnome/KDE is just third rate". Well, that's not news. It's also wrong.
It will drop a T1 to its knees.
War - what a joke.
Slaughter more like it.
It wasnt called a war with the original military action in the gulf (you remember - with dady) - it has taken us 12 years to be able to call what is about to happen a war and not break out laughing.
Glad i am not an Iraqi mummy. Cant believe you americans let these criminals wrestle power. I guess I cant talk - we all live in a democracy and I didnt even vote at the last election
It's the QWERTY keyboard: "I've always done it this way"
I've used both extensively, and KDE wipes the floor with XP. You say I'm lying? Let's do a feature comparison then, shall we?
.NET style.
t ml
1. Which DE comes with tabbed browsing and popup window suppression in its web browser?
KDE
2. Which DE has a file manager that lets you right click on a directory and open up a terminal right in that directory?
KDE
3. Which DE has multiple desktop abilities out of the box?
KDE
4. Which DE comes with an office suite?
KDE
5. Which DE comes with a download manager?
KDE (3.1 comes with kget which integrates with konqueror)
6. Which DE comes with source code and its own professional IDE -- all for free?
KDE
7. Which DE pisses you off with product activation?
XP
'nuff said
Oh, and don't use Keramik, it sucks, use something like the new
Screenshot of my desktop:
http://www.insanebaboon.netfirms.com/desktop2.h
- Windows XP running under VPC on Max OS X is best. Gee, not a choice from the original article? How rude.
- BE OS, since it is no longer supported, runs best on the Wayback machine, so it runs best in my dreams..it merits second place. Every OS in my dreams is perfect, BTW.
- KDE and GNOME, since I can tweak them as much as I want, and they are actually sitting on some un-mentioned Linux OS, get third, and any issues with them are my own fault, since how they are set up is more up to me than any of the others
Some review, eh? Makes as much sense as comparing take-out with homemade, and frozen foods with greenhouse veggies. It's a load, folks, and only designed to start flame-wars and bring eyeballs to a webpage. Anyone thinking there is meat to that article is one deck short of a Carnival Cruise.Personally I prefer KDE 3.1 over anything. It, I find is the easiest to customise. Of course my argument is as valid as the articles since it is based entirely on personal preference
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
These are just some observations.
First of all, Gnome does have a menu editor. It just isn't where Windows users would expect for it to be. He clearly announced that Windows was his primary desktop, so that's probably why it was tough to find. Nautilus can open up "applications:///", which will point to the apps menu. You can right click and add folders or shortcuts. Most distributions should have the option listed in the control panel or something else. If RedHat doesn't have it, perhaps they should be to blame.
GTK2 is faster for many of us. I suppose that the results are dependant upon a proper system config. Same with Matacity. With proper drivers, mine draws perfectly fast.
In terms of stability, Gnome 2 as a whole seems more stable than XP, in my opinion, due to not being reliant on the kernel the way Windows is. But it isn't without its faults. The taskbar tools crash at times, but the crash recovery is very good when it does. If a tool dies, the panel fixes it, and everything is fine. Windows still has a nasty habit of losing icons in the tray if it recovers.
I'm not too sure that I feel his "I dislike GTK+ and C" comment is very valid either. It sounds rather biased, actually.
OK, so it costs $97 for a copy of Jaguar from Amazon. You won't get any arguments from me that 10.0 and 10.1 were beta releases, but it's here for real now.
So, what should it cost? Seriously, I hear people complain but I don't hear the alternatives, except rants about dumping their hardware unit (most of the company).
Back when a IIci cost $6K, upgrades for life were taken for granted. But people spoke, they wanted cheaper hardware, so out went the pre-purchased upgrades.
So, what would you charge for it if you wrote it?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Next sentences should be 'This paper is what I like and what I don't like. There is no nothing scientific about my ratings in any way'.
>> However, KDE and Gnome support vector icons,
>> while GTK+ 2.x does a better job on
>> non-flickering of applications than QT does
>> (however not as good of a job that MacOSX does).
>> Rating: Windows XP 8, MacOSX 10, KDE 7.5, BeOS
>> 8.5, Gnome 7.5.
I have to agree with the common sentiment that this is clearly an opinion column, and not a fact sheet.
But as I was discussing earlier under another headline, does technical merit really count for anything? People will use what they like best, which is not necessarily the best tool for any particular job. Let them have their preferences. If they want to write about it, that's fine too.
But passing opinions off as fact and hoping for some extra banner impressions is not fine.
Kush meer in toches.
oh yes, and don't forget the AMERICAN SUPPLY HOUSE, the American Type Culture Collection of Manassas, Va., who sold Iraq the biological agents that may or may not currently exist in their arsenal, with US GOVERNMENT APPROVAL, as reported in the March 16 NYT.
Sorry to cloud this issue with facts. So, what exactly was sold to Iraq by this US FIRM? Well, bacillus anthracis (causes anthrax), clostridium perfringens, clostridium botulinum, brucella abortus, clostridium tetani, bacillus megaterium, bacillus subtilis, bacillus cereus, brucella melitensis, franciscella tularensis, corynebacterium diptheria, and bacillus licheniformis.
There's more than enough blame to go around here, without gang banging the French. Let's just leave that to dubya.
Eugenia is a chick, fer chissakes. I guess dolls can use linux, but by they way you sexist /.ers are talking, you'd think a babe could never get the hang of it.
Have some sensitivity for the weaker sex already.
I know you were kidding, but here's "my take" :-)
DosShell sucked a lot, 1dir was kinda usable, Norton commander sucked somewhat and the two windows made it unusable on 80-column DOS screens.
The king was and will always be XTree. It was incredbly powerful, easy-to-use and consistent.
To this day Windows Explorer hasn't even come close.
Too bad the Johnson guy got sick. I hope he gets again in good shape. We need his magic in Linux.
Also, he did a good thing with XTree... maybe he deserved more.
OK, I'm not here to advertise for KDE, and I am in no way affiliated with KDE. With that said, I love KDE 3.1
KDE 3 was nice, but it still lacked some things. With 3.1, I feel like I'm in a clean, visually appealing, fast(yes fast in X) desktop environment. Some people say that the visual appearance of a desktop environment is not important, but considering that I have to look at it for at least 1/2 of my day, I'd prefer it looked inviting. I'd like to hear what other people have to say about this or Gnome.
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
Not to belabour this discussion with facts, but wasn't Iraq an American ally i the seventies?
Gnome's Nautilus also allows for vector based SVG icons, though they are not the default set.
It's definitive, not definite.
No, they're definitely desktop environments.
Hear, hear!
I think subjective says it all for this article. I can't comment on the other DEs, as I have been using KDE more or less exclusivly for the past 3 to 4 years and I've not used gnome after my initial trial of it when I ditched windows, BUT....
After getting used to KDE I find that windows (98/2000) is unusable. The author seemed to be intimidated by the level of functionality of KDE. I strongly disagree with the criticism of konqueror, I find it to be the best file manager, file viewer, browser and more than any others I have used.
There are still issues with both KDE and konqueror, but 3.2 promises to fix many of these and the speed of development of KDE is truly astounding. They have gone from 2.0 to 3.1 in the same time span it took windows to go from 95 to 98, anyone who has used KDE over that period will know what I mean.
If KDE has no idea about psychology then I have no psychology.
this is all the world needs, another which one is better article.
Just a thought.
As for KDE, well, Konqueror is just not stable.
Bullshit. Plain simple.
there's no place like ~
Every dog has his day, and George Bushs' day is coming soon... at a war crimes tribunal.
They definitely didn't check the grammar.
Beos is dead.
I like DRDOS 3. The best desktop ever. Want mouse support? load mouse.com
Ok...I can't say for sure about Gnome, but I take issue with
some of his KDE Problems
Specifically I take issues when he be dissing Konq
I have got to Say Konq is by far the best file manager I have ever used.
It is Extemely easy to use, and Configure, it is also has way more functionality then any other File Manager I have ever used.
quit simply it is DA SHIT!
Compaiting Konq to any other File Manager is like Comparing Google to HotBot.
but he had some good points about the rest of KDE
-The default K Menu Is confusing
-Window Redraw are slow
-the eye candy on the default theme needs to be toned down.
but what can you say....he found windows easier to use
Is his Default DE Windows because its easier to use?
or
Does he Find Windows easier to Use because its his default DE?
I know why I have KDE running....do you know why you run your Desktop Environment?
--meh--
Cant believe you americans let these criminals wrestle power.
Don't blame us. Blame the UN. We should have gone in there and taken out that criminal 12 years ago.
A lot of people mentioned that the above article was very subjective and outright biased. I think there is no surprise there. DE preferences is a very subjective thing (again this was said here before).
But with all that biasness (uhm... can I use this word?) and subjectiveness. I did not like that the author failed to cover some areas that I value above many and I belive a lot of people would appreciate too.
In addition to stability. How about submitting bug report/feature request and actually seeing in a few months seeing things fixed/changed?
[Rating --] KDE - 9.5, GNOME - 9.5, BeOS - 0 (I know I'm not being fair here but it was the author who brought it) WinXP, MacOS X -- uh I don't know how to put it in numbers but it's not very big ones.
Appearence. How about making your own theme/look/feel or leeching on creations of others?
[Rating --] KDE - 8, GNOME - 9.5, BeOS - ??, MacOS X, WinXP -- well your guess is as good as mine.
I know some people might say that a lot of those themes are halfassed. I'd be the first to agree. But there is also a lot of cool stuff out there.
You people feel free to put your own ratings. But we all know... It's all very subjective :) .
- Back off man. I am a scientist
Clearly this is the point of this article.
This
My school has OS X machines now, and I was happy - finally, a real terminal instead of MacSSH to access my Linux box at home to check on my uptime. Then we have the delete key ... it doesn't work! It's horrible, resorting to backspace, which means scrolling all the way to the end and then over-hitting right arrow, then left arrow, then eventually backspace and erased ... which leads me to my next problem: no mouse support in the terminal! Talk about your out of date UIs...
--windows xp/2000 pros:
:P I really *really* like the MacOS widget that resizes windows exactly as big as they need to be, no more no less. I wish windows and/or linux had this functionality...highly consistent interface from app to app.
:P
its a happy medium; it's GUI is not quite as dumbed down as a Mac (pre-OSX) that you'd *need* the mouse to do everything, but for grandma its plenty simple (so long as grandma doesn't have admin privs and messes with c:\windows). Keyboard shortcuts are fairly consistent across the board, default widgets are fairly well thought out (with one exxception, see macOS commments below). Fairly zippy wrt to speed/responsiveness. Reasonably stable. Bboatloads of apps available.
--win xp/2000 cons:
not Free. Not highly configurable GUI (at least, not without 3rd party apps). lots of dumbass developers who don't use default OS widgets and create confusion in the app's UI (see: Windows Media Player 9).
--MacOs pros:
Since my experience has been mostly in a biology lab where we have tons of legacy apps that run only on MacOS classic, this is where most of my Mac experience lies. Not that many pros, really
--MacOS cons:
ridiculously unstable, no protected memory, no preemptive multitasking. next to impossible keyboard navigation of filesystem, making mouse a necessity. System extensions are IMO worse than dll hell in windows, I support Mac and Windows computers in the lab and windows machines are by far easier to handle. I could go on and on bitching about MacOS classic....dunno about OSX, will try it some day when DNA Strider and OpenLab are ported to OSX and our lab upgrades our mac hardware
--GNNU/Linux systems pros (both GNOME and LINUX):
Free as in speech and beer. Highly configurable. boatloads of apps. more or less free community support.
--cons:
support is only free if your time is worthless. many things that you install yourself (i.e. did not come packaged with distro) almost never work out of the box and require mucking around with (also see first point). Inconsistent interface from app to app (emacs vs vi, anyone?) From my perspective, no hardware support for scientific hardware (e.g. high speed CCD cameras, digital frame grabbers, automatic confocal microscopes, high resolution image analysis, etc etc.....in other words, its a great system if you are a hacker but if you want to get REAL work done you'll spend too much time trying to get it to work. People would rather put up with a crappy OS and get things done.
Personally, from an end user's point of view I wouldn't mind if Linux developers developed only for RedHat Linux and RedHat decided to stick with either GNOME or KDe and stuck with it. At least then there would be no confusion and things would be consistent. I also wouldn't mind if they packaged their distro by picking one tool for one type of job and ditch all the redundant apps. While cutting down on choice, at least nonhacker people could get things to actually *work* and not have to muck around too much...
NO CARRIER
What is the worse part about this article?
It's biased and illinformed, which seems to be a trend of Eugenia's
Whats the worst thing about osnews.com?
Eugenia's constant biased, illinformed bullshit.
When OSX on a 1ghz G4 feels slower than WinXP on a 1ghz P3, you know OSX is slow, and it's not the hardware's fault.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
You have got to be trolling me.. can we not continue on with our normal lives? Serious question. There's a war about to happen. That doesn't mean we're going to drop everything and go watch CNN or something.
My Journal - 1,337 fans and countin
I didn't find it ironic. I find it ironic that you managed to get a positive mod when your entire post was about an error on your reading.
It's funny how a Mac user would find this article (which rated XP higher) would prefer this article over the xvsxp.com article (which rate OS X higher). Did you ever think that maybe you are just a little biased? I know I am because I felt that the other article sucked and this one was pretty good.
what's up with them in windows?
combo boxes STILL suck.
the rows of tabs that flip and change position are the single most unnerving UI element ever conceived. you click one element and the entire geography of the context you're in flips. what was stable a millisecond ago is now reorded.
it's like a battle axe poised against the very wiring of your short term memory.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I suppose the UN led by the French will come to get him?
While I'm not a software developer, I was under the impression that almost all of these complaints about fixed sized dialog boxes, windows, and controls extending off the edges of the screen were due to poor programming practices.
I fail to see how they're really the fault of Windows itself. (Granted, they could probably incorporate some sort of bounds checking or limitations, so such poor coding would be disallowed.) Still, I think it's more of a case of them giving developers all the tools they need to generate fixed *or* variable size boxes and controls - and said developers making poor decisions.
I remember, for example, in older verisons of the Cakewalk MIDI sequencer, selecting "use large fonts" under your video settings in Windows '9x would cause text not to fit inside the grids drawn on the screen. That was corrected eventually in later updates to the software.
Are we really that self-absorbed? /.ers can do a damn thing about it. The people of the U.S. can't even pick our own president anymore; what do you expect us to do about this "war"?
Yes. Reality is a cold, scary place right now, and none of us
0 1 - just my two bits
...every time Eugenia writes an article.
Of course there is room for improvement and improvement should be pursued, but they are all good enough that the quality of the interface isn't going to be the reason for booting one OS vs. another (obviously KDE vs. GNOME is more of a pure choice since all the same apps can run).
On my Commodore 64, I can drag documents on the little printer icon and have them print. Pretty neat huh?
And it runs in 64k.
Actually, today that post is ON topic in whatever forum at whatever time it is posted.
This guy is a microsoft lover. They haven't done anything new to their interface since Windows 95. ooooo they just got themes in Win XP and won't be getting multiple desktops until Longhorn comes out. Sure agree that beos was a step in the right direction and sad to see it go. Don't dis KDE and Gnome!
That'll change in September with the 970 machines.
Uh, riiiight. So we'll have a 1.8 Ghz PPC processor, meanwhile the Pentium will be at 4 Ghz (Okay, maybe 3.8), not to mention the 64-bit Althons and such. Apple is losing this game. IBM just doesn't have the money to devote like Intel does and Motorola stopped playing the desktop processor game many years ago.
OS X is just slow. It's not about the processor speed. You're talking about a system with too many layers. Mach kernel? Mach was never known for it's speed. Layer BSD on top? Uh, sure. Layer Carbon on top of that? Hmmmm. Layer Aqua on top of that? What the hell? Ugh.
And don't get me started on Objective-C. A nice language, yes, but dynamically binding major OS applications and libraries is incredibly slow. I know they attempt to fix this by pre-binding (you know, that incredibly slow and long lasting "optimizing system" garbage) but it's still slow.
I'm sorry, I'm changing a quote here to match the topic (change the GUI to programming languages).
GUI's are like sexual positions.... Some are more exciting than others, some are more difficult, some are unusual, few have tried them all, and everyone has a favorite.
On the computers I help the needy with, (low end pentiums (4/8/16/24/32 ram) that people donate to me), Window Maker and XFCE work great. There is not a big learning curve to help these people use computers in a productive way. Gnome/KDE can't be run on these systems, but the latest kernel can. Go figure.
My only wish is that the Open Office group starts trying to optimize thier code soon for these low end computers. C++ is not your friend on a low end pentium. Hell, it's not even a friend to my AMD K6-2/550/128mb RAM.
And BTW, is anyone else interested in helping the low income people in thier community? Computers are a great place to start in helping out in your inner cities.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
You know, this (the parent) is at -1, but should be at +3.
It's true. Eugenia's articles are so incredibly biased it's not funny. BeOS is dead Eugenia, deal with it. Stop taking your frustrations out on Linux. KDE isn't perfect. Neither is XP, which you seem to spring a woody (yeah, I know Eugenia's nominally female) over every time you mention it.
I thought you quit OSNews a while ago. May I suggest more actively quitting?
Yeah, the desktop hardware sucks right now. But I'm not sure you should judge the environment on the fact that Macintoshes are on average about half as fast as Intel machines.
It's the OS. Ever use MacOS 9? It's much faster.
I've got WinXP on my PIII 850MHz and on my Athlon XP2000. One is a lot faster in games, Photoshop and compressing Divx, they both feel about the same just browsing around the UI.
Unlike WinXP, OS X is a beast on hardware it should run much faster on.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
What do you think those applications do? Are they easy to use? Wouldn't just about every user be able to figure out what they are and how you use them?
With Linux Notepad is called VI and in the 4 years I've used Linux I still haven't figured out how to use it. So the first thing I do is install Nano, which I know to do because I've installed Debian (which I uninstalled because the tulip driver that came with it at the time was not compatible with my Linksys ethernet card, which requires the tulip driver, but like a different tulip driver). Of course I need to install Ncurses first because Nano wont install without it. But my system comes with Ncurses, its fairly common. But its the wrong version. So before I edit I install both.
Seems like a lot of work just because the average distribution doesn't think like a light load computer user.
Simple, useful applications like Nano (based on my old good friend, Pico!) are fairly common. It shouldn't be THAT difficult to put together a short list of basic applications that would define the base Linux operating system. Name them SANELY (Nano sounds cute, but it needs to sound something like what it is). Include command line applications and X applications. KISS, but cover your bases. Not with extra apps, just look at Windows if you need to know what your average new user needs. Plan on something going wrong, "you don't need Nano, VidConfigureX will configure that for you!" just doesn't cut it.
Linux configuration is getting pretty close to standardized, why does every distribution contain a custom tool set? I'd like to learn this once and I cant see a good technical reason that I can't. Make one skinnable, so distros can make it fit nicely into their vision, but make it consistent.
Adopt a single installation scheme. Everyone knows VISE and it does the trick. Custom packaging is great, their will always be someone smarter out their with a better way. But I'm a big fan of the Loki installer, because it works and because it looks good and makes me feel like I know what's going on. Those things are important.
I don't think any single thing I've mentioned doesn't already exist. I just doesn't exist in any one place. That's ironic because where talking about market penetration without even talking advantage of what we've already got.
Give me a basic distro with what I've mentioned above. Add a package management system like portage and unite Gnome and KDE and you've got a desktop revolution.
Until then its just boys and toys.
Quack, quack.
Wait. That's me.
Hmmm..Gotta find the bathroom here in BOB's 'house'...hmm...where...not it..this? grrr.....damnit!!!
I now see why BOB failed.
I love it! That's a killer! Hahahahahaha!
--sdem
BWAA HAA
From your post...
"The XP GUI is the most garish set of colors. It looks like the artwork of the mentally ill."
As someone who is mentally ill, I find your statement insulting. Even without my medication I could do a much better job than the color scheme of XP.
Note: Before I'm attacked for joking about mental illness, check the site below my name. I've personally been through the hell of mental treason. Therefore, I'm allowed to use my condition to insult Microsoft. Thank you.
My legal education, in nifty podcast format
Also the magnification effect (if you have it turned on) is quite nice when you are running a lot of apps on OSX. I hardly ever quit apps (ram is cheap) and it means you can end up with 20~30 apps sitting in the dock. However with the magnification effect you can still see and click on the icons in your dock.
Go out and get sailing!
Yeah, we gave him a bunch of bio and chemo warfare equipment and samples. Thats how we "know" he has WMD. Hell, we're the ones that put him in power. You know, one of those puppet govs that are supposed to be US friendly? Well, the puppet decided to pull his own strings, much to the dislike of the puppetmaster.
The fact that the icons magnify as you get closer help you to accurately click it, instead of clicking-ever-so-close-but-not-on-it like I end up doing often in Window's taskbar.
AC comments get piped to
Can someone explain to me how the desktop from BeOS 6 of yesteryear is one of the most popular desktops today. This sounds like another case of the very biased Eugenia Loli-Queru spreading her lust for the BeOS of old...
Choose wisely you must...
What's really sad is a 1GHz G4 is actually 1.5x-2x faster than a 1GHz P3.
I really wish people would understand clock speed has nothing to do with how fast a processor can perform a given task. It is as absurd as measuring car performance by engine displacement or RPM.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
I think if this guy were to compare cars, he would've done it commenting mostly on how easy one could open doors and the luggage compartment.
How can you rate "usability" of desktops with such vastly different capabilities, available on imcompatible operating systems ? For example I go absolutely nuts when I can't make at least 6 virtual workspaces, or when I am forced to use the mouse to do anything remotely important. Unless you're absolutely new to computers and have no restrictions on the OS you can use, relative merits of these desktops wouldn't make any difference. And in any case you're better off picking an OS that would give you a choice of WMs to work with.
No, but I used X on Solaris on an old SPARC-Station running SunOS 2.x (I don't remember the exact version.) The experience was unpleasant.
Playschool?
KFG
Anyone who has visited OSNews more than twice knows that Eugenia has an unhealthy infatuation with Windows XP (it used to be with BeOS, but perhaps she has finally come to grips with the fact that BeOS is dead).
I usually skip over any "definitive" or "unbiased" OS reviews from Eugenia since the outcome is always: Linux sucks; OS X is okay but still sucks; XP has some minor flaws, but they pale in comparison to how absolutely dreamy XP is.
Anyway, I found the article ill-informed and very biased and a far cry from definitive (more like diminutive). It must have been a slow news day at OSNews.
Jeesh... Leave it up to the slashdot comunity to attack the author for his review becase the X11/XFree86 based DE's came in last. Maybe just once you might look at the review, and think to yourselves... So thats why linux still isn't accepted as a Desktop Enviroment. Yes, its great for servers, and nerds and geeks. No, it will never work for the average user who like to point and click install, or drag and drop. When the vast majority of the world is wrong, its time to reconsider if you are actually right.
Don't waste time... procrastinate now!
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
OS X is okay but still sucks; XP has some minor flaws, but they pale in comparison to how absolutely dreamy XP is.
....
how exactly does this work???
GOD DAMNIT , MODERATE ME!
pardon? mr anonymous coward?
I've been using nautilus for a week, it's my first in the linux world and I like it.
.NET is raising quit a few eyebrows, makes the change much more tolerable if you think of implications).
My biggest compliant right now would be the non-standardized links and a limited panel arrangement (stacking verticaly has it's advantages). After I get the transparent terminal working the way I want I'll set up my right-click menu (windows I had everything off of my right-click) and start playing with pie charts and sliding panels.
On another note the software packages that come with RH are jaw dropping with little work.
The transition from a 5 year windows user to Redhat is quit painless, other than lossing battlefield 1942 (but for modding
With XML and other future standards of data storage and organization, the OS is devolving into a commodity had by desire instead of function. The imagination of the altruistic programer and the true hacker for profit (rightly so) have enhanced all major 'GUI Environments'. People that have convinced you that default isn't good enough and taking advantage of open source commonalty in that sales pitch.
We will all have preferences in style, function and initial capability. As long as the information that preference in system can generate is cross compatible, the form and feedback can be left up to human desire instead of program requirements. In the end, the only reason we are stabbing our fingers around is to get some sort of understandable response back from a cold, inanimate object. If you can design an input system that limits that interaction and produces the same or more work, I'll be using it. That's why my #1 interface to a computer is the CLI.
As I always say, "Strive for Utopia, but deal with today".
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
HaHa.. Bill Gates can beat up Linus Torvalds!!
yup...
My first -1 as AC...
Well Windows is heavily coordinate based -- and it encourages. Dialog boxes (for example) are defined as resources with sizes and locations all strictly defined in pixel coordinates.
The Windows API doesn't have inbuilt support for layout management. MFC doesn't have inbuilt support for layoutmanagement. And Windows Forms, even though it is relatively new, has such poor support (compared to Swing and other toolkits) that one has to wonder if the developer responsible had a computer science degree.
It's ofcourse, possible to write wrapper toolkits that support advanced layout management on windows. My point was that Windows doesn't natively support it and Microsoft doesn't encourage it (their own products don't use layout management).
You forgot the most annoying bit: the "KDE and GNOME should do what I want, or else I'll flame them" bit.
The article started being incorrect with the friggen *title.*
But at least it followed its own advice and maintained consistency from there on out.
So at least it has *that* going for it.
KFG
Can Slashdot please stop posting every single OSNews post? Is there a reason why this even gets a mention?
One person's opinion about desktop environments.
Whoopy fucking do.
Pick any slashdotter, and I'm sure they can give you a better "comparison" than this drivel.
Oh, it might be a bit subjective...
"I like what I know and I like what I like. If you disagree, you're a moron. I'm perfect so anything I say is objective."
I'm the urban spaceman babe, but here comes the twist... I don't exist
Look and Feel: Windows XP 8.0, MacOSX 9.0, KDE 6.5, BeOS 7.0, Gnome 6.5.
Usability: Windows XP 9, MacOSX 8.5, KDE 6.5, BeOS 8.5, Gnome 7.
Consistency, Integration, Flexibility: Windows XP 7, MacOSX 7, KDE 8, BeOS 7, Gnome 7.5.
Speed, Stability and Bugs: Windows XP 9.5, MacOSX 9, KDE 7, BeOS 7.5, Gnome 8.
Technology, Programming Framework: Windows XP 8, MacOSX 10, KDE 7.5, BeOS 8.5, Gnome 7.5.
Final Rating:
Windows XP 8.55
MacOSX 8.33
BeOS 8.22
KDE 6.72
Gnome 6.61
Don't blame the UN, blame us. We whipped up the opposition to challenge Saddam and then at the last minute got cold feet and left them to be slaughtered. The truth is that US foreign policy has always preferred pliant dictators to unpredictable democracies. Bush Sr. thought he would be better off with a chastened Hussein than with a fragmented, chaotic power vacuum. Probably he was right, but to now blame all that on the UN is ridiculous historical revisionism.
Amen brother. I can't believe they're talking about cancelling NCAA tournament. What, so we can watch an endless stream of moronic pundits on CNN, beating to death the five seconds' worth of actual information which the Pentagon will release each day? Give me a break.
Actually, I'd just like milkdrop. Good stuff.
However, this all-blue default color on XP is kind of 60's psychedelic, it gets on my eyes soon enough.
Dude, it's the BSoD. I know it seems profoundly clear under the influence but you will have your doubts later. Get some sleep.
Seriously, this article was a Windoze love in. How can anyone who likes XP diss KDE and QT as "clunky"? Oh wait, he snears at all the interfaces but BeOS, which he does not use, and XP which he praises to the stars: Best interface, "most logical" and then he describes how prety he thinks it is. If that's not enough to make you sick try this:
The best usability I get is from Windows XP. This is the only reason I keep WinXP still as my main operating system. ... I found that the best DE on integration (see: the DE that requires you LESS to open a terminal window) is Windows, hands down. Everything can be configured with a GUI and when there is not a preference panel for something, there is always the registry, even when you want to enable the most weird hacks on applications found or your system. ... Windows XP would be my second best regarding UI responsiveness. It is already very responsive, a huge (and I mean HUGE) improvement on multitasking/multithreading over the Win9x codebase, but it is not as good as in BeOS. The user can get a lot of freezing ... I found Windows XP and MacOSX to be the most stable environments ... Technology: Windows and X11 don't have many of these cool features, in fact X11 is the least powerful of all. [then give XP highest numerical rating!] ... For Windows, well, MFCs, .NET and Win32 are really powerful APIs which let you do the same thing in many different ways ... Final Rating: Windows XP 8.55 MacOSX 8.33 BeOS 8.22 KDE 6.72 Gnome 6.61
Shallow useless gloss. All the virtues of all other systems are cited as faults and all of XPs faults are smothed over or even listed as virtues in the most disgusting and self contradictory manner possible. What distro did he use to get all of those awful KDE and Gnome crashes? Why is it that my experiences don't match his? Hmmmm. If he likes BeOS so advanced, why does it not score highest? Why include it at all? "I include the BeOS in this comparison not because I consider it an OS with a bright future ..." Oh, I know, because not many people are familiar with it or will bother to try it so he thinks he can troll at will. Has this dope ever worked with another OS as his "main system"? Has he ever gotten away from the default settings in KDE or Gnome or done anything to match those leet windoze registry hacks he brags about? Poop, X can be tortured into anything but something makes me think he would have praised M$'s offerings regardless of what they were. What a whore.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
No, dialog boxes are defined in dialog coordinates, which are relative values that are translated to pixels based on the current screen resolution and font size. I agree, this is not layout management, but it's sure as hell not hardcoded pixel coordinates.
Microsoft doesn't believe in layout management mainly because their programming styles haven't really changed since Windows 3.0, or at least Windows 95. Their style is mostly fixed, non-resizeable modal dialogs (which they should be flogged for - overuse of modal dialogs is evil evil evil), so they don't really need it anyway. Truth be told, aside from the resizing, I'd rather design dialogs in the Dialog Editor (or whatever they call it now) than on the fly with Tk/wxWindows/whatever. Yes, I've done it in all three.
What if life is just a side effect of some other process and God has no idea we exist?
Yeah, "organic" is a good word. Everything in OS X seems to have a purpose.
.. it's icon jumps up and down, and it even appears when the dock is hidden! Would MS ever think of that? No, they probably just throw up a dialog and a make honking sound whenever they need your attention.
I personally have a philosophy that nothing in a computer should just "appear". For instance, windows should fade or slide in, new pages and views should make themselves appear slowly somehow, etc. In the "old days" this happened because computers were so slow. These days, things just pop up or change and if you were looking down, you miss it.
Apple has done some of this in their UI.. windows themselves don't fade in or jump around, but dialogs elegantly slide in and apps bounce in the dock when they start, etc.
Actually, the coolest thing is when an app needs to get your attention
You realize that the majority of americans are for a war with Iraq? You are the minority and he will remain in office as long as he doesn't do anything stupid.
Speaking of usable / user interfaces, what's with the story icon? A bar of soap with a serial cable just doesn't quite scream "GUI" to me.
Unless it's supposed to be a chunky old mouse. Which would almost barely make sense, except it still really doesn't look like it. Perhaps a bad representation of a bad idea. arg.
--- this comment is presented in WIDE SCREEN STEREO!!!
I'd rather design dialogs in the Dialog Editor (or whatever they call it now) than on the fly with Tk/wxWindows/whatever.
Have you seen the Netbeans UI designer? It does drag'n'drop with full layout management support suprisingly well.
I'd rather just define the general layout of my form rather than sit there fidgetting with pixel locations (VB style).
Oh, and I forgot to mention...
HTML has non-trivial layout management support and Microsoft have had *no* problems designing a good GUI designer for it (Frontpage).
Every empire so far has fallen.
It's best not to piss off too many countries with our violent imperialist antics becuase, well, paybacks a bitch, in case you didn't notice on sept 11th.
Sooner or later America will weaken and then the rest of the world can offer a big fat fuck you.
and then the stupid sheeple like yourself will go around acting shocked saying why do they hate us?
Gee i just don't fucking know!
I expect less then 5000 dead.
It's the principle and motive I find offensive. Being limited by laws and agreements is something everybody has to tolerate.
This irrational behaviour is worrysome and the implications are far reaching.
The one main thing I really hate about OSX and macs in general is that when you click the X in the top right it should close the program completly. Why would you have a close button like that and not actually close and remove the program from memory. Espically if it is just one instance of the program. If you aren't really thinking about it, it is very easy to have a ton of stuff loaded in memory which you then have to go make two clicks to exit. Bah. Also, they need to have a better ability to open a program and have a one click ability to make the program go full screen. Having to drag everything out to full screen gets quite annoying. Luckily it's just my wife that uses mac's for the most part (graphic design) and I get to use my windows and linux boxes that are much more intuitive. Oh, and to those who complain about the color scheme of XP luna well all you have to do is select the silver color scheme and you have the best looking version of windows around. Very "professional." Significantly more so than a dock at the bottom that pops up with 8 icons and whatnot that bounce around. KDE and Windows just are more usable with a docking bar that shows what you actually have open and an idea of what it is you are looking at. A little black arrow under an icon in OSX of a program that might be closed yet still loaded in memory is just not helpful in the least.
In case you where fooled by the government i have to remind you bin laden is still at large and al-qaeda still has thousands of operatives all around the world...
Oh well have fun with the orange alert and the knowledge that the rest of the world ain't gonna help ya.
Oh ya and the people of afghanistan being brutalized by the warlords who have returned to power in post-taliban afghanistan really thank you so much for bringing democracy! it really made a big fucking difference! YA!
Oh ya that's right the McNews is pretending afghanistan went away...
I wonder if when Korean War II starts if the media will pretend the newly destroyed Iraq doesn't exist either...
I haven't seen Netbeans, but it sounds interesting. Personally, I'd rather lay my dialog out exactly the way I want it to, by dragging around controls and resizing them, rather than diddle around with window.below and layout.add(item, left, top,...) or whatever and hope it comes out the way I intended.
What if life is just a side effect of some other process and God has no idea we exist?
See that's nothing like my experience. I've got two machines I spend most of my time on at home. A 2x 1Ghz G4 PowerMac (Quicksilver model so PC133 RAM with that) and a 1.2Ghz Athlon box, also with same RAM and amount. I find the Mac to be quicker. Not like I've done a bunch of benchmarks or anything this is merely my opinion.
OS's are Jaguar (10.2.4) on the Mac and XP Pro on the Athlon. The only thing that stands out between the two is the Mac has a GF4 Titanium and the Athlon is using my older GF2 Ultra card. I don't game on the PC so I can't say what the fps difference would be between the two. Just in day to day use I prefer the speed of the Mac.
When I was running 10.1 then yeah, I feel like it was behind the PC (especially since the PC was running Win2k then)
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
You mean less than 5000 Americans dead.
The UN has put the expected Iraqi civilian casualities at 250,000 people. But their lives don't matter to Americans, after all, they're only Arabs.
Operation "Shock and Awe" plans to rain 800,000 pounds of cruise missiles onto the densely populated city of Baghdad. This is a war crime.
It's true :-( But when you get to the current set of desktops, a dual 1.25 GHz is silky smooth in the Finder. Of course, it should run *real well* on any G4.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Serious question, what is wrong with windows that formatting a floppy brings everything to a screeching halt? Its annoying as all get out.
this is a list of personal impressions without any real reference or affirmation, it is really FUD based on what this person is more used to.
Personaly i find a pain the double click of window and I am usin kde with SUSE from SUSE 6.1 and I have
always found KDE to be as stable or more stable than window XP and I really hate when window freeze doing
some application SUSE do not notice. I agree that the options on KDE are quite a lot
Oh..wait. XP got the highest rating... Well, there must be some kind of bias going on here...
Trust me. This is an inactive account. Regardless of what the
KDE3.1 is wonderful. Mine locks up. Can't figure it out. Have to use the magic SysRq key to reset my pc.
I have reverted to KDE 3.0.5a which is a big step backwards. I didn't think so, when upgrading to 3.1, but the two look real different!
What about HTML?
Have you tried Frontpage or Dreamweaver?
Don't you think the layout system of HTML is better than the absolute layout system you're used to?
BTW, IIRC, Netbeans allows you to modify the layout constraints of a component using the component's property box rather than the container's.
... actually I stopped reading when he started complaining about the lack of keyboard support in OS X. This person apparently has not spent enough time on the platform to learn about full keyboard access. His ramblings about ALT keys and so on leave me thinking ... what? I'm trusting this person to tell me what a useable system is? When he apparently hasn't used OS X for more than a day or two? When his main reason for liking Windows is that he's used to it? No thanks.
simon
home page
I really wish people would understand clock speed has nothing to do with how fast a processor can perform a given task.
>>>>>>>>
Actually, it has a great deal to do with how fast a processor can perform a given task.
Performance = Efficiency * Clock_Speed
It's linear in both terms. Doubling clock-speed is just as good as doubling efficiency. However, doubling efficiency is much, much, much, harder to do than doubling clock speed. As for a 1GHz G4 being 2x faster, yea right. It's not even *theoretically* 2x faster. If you take a look at real benchmarks (try the ArsTechnica thread) you'll see that it's rarely better than 20 or 30% faster at a give clock speed.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
You're comparing a dual processor machine to a single processor machine. Dual processor machines are known for being much more responsive, regardless of clock speed.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
"That'll change in September with the 970 machines."
PPC 970 won't be available until 2004, I promise you. Additionally, P4s can already outperform the predicted specfp scores that IBM gave.
The author did pick up on a MacOS characteristic that I have not seen widely discussed and is likely to influence most user experience: the slowness of immediate feedback. Good on her. On the other hand, I am struck that the author does not recognize the visual precedent of the default XP theme, which appears to be plastic children's toys.
As to achieving a productive and pleasant GUI user experience on Linux... Knowlegeable people who would never in a million years attempt design of an operating system internal without careful thought and study seem to be convinced that they can dream up a GUI without either. If one is convinced there is no commonality in UI experience--that it is all a matter of taste--then why not the designer's taste? In practice, though, there are commonalities in user experience. I believe it is important, here, to pay attention to the ancient distinction between architecture and building; if it's architecture worth living in, it is built with attention to the people who live in it, not just the designer and builders.
you seem to believe that an american invasion can stop atrocities. I wish I were as optimistic as you.
I agree, I spent 3 years in School for Graphic Design, the computers all macs of course (OS 9.xx) and at least half the people in there, even ones that have macs at home, just click the (x) and think they've closed the program, then complain that they don't have any memory left for iTunes.
PS - I may be the only one, but the 'Olive' colour theme is the best by far. Doesn't screem as much as the blue, and not as jocky as the silver.Perhaps, but I was talking about interfaces for dialog boxes. For a dialog that's not going to be resized, specifying coordinates, as long as you don't have to do it by hand, is the way to go. I agree, if you want to be able to resize the window, you need something better. HTML by itself isn't a good tool for precisely positioning things, unless you wanted to use stylesheets, but I think putting that into a window manager would be kinda overkill.
My experience with layout systems has been that they work great if you have three or four things in them, but after that, if you want any kind of layout, you have to put everything in subframes and it gets to be a real mess. I suppose a GUI would have helped, but I don't remember there being one in Tk, and the wxWindows project I worked on already had everything laid out by hand.
What if life is just a side effect of some other process and God has no idea we exist?
don't get me started on that OSX dock. that bulging stuff is awful. on the plus side, it took me 15 seconds to figure out how to turn it off.
"Stand up" to the U.N? Holy fuck, what a way to look at it! If the U.S has no respect for international law and diplomocy, why should anyone else? Expect China to annex Taiwan this decade, and the India - Pakistan conflict to escalate. As for Isreal, well one more land grab against those pesky Arabs won't be a problem, will it?
Strange. I wouldn't expect Photoshop to quit just because I closed a picture file any more than I'd expect my finishing developing a photo to cause my darkroom to vanish. Nor would I expect my developing two pictures simultaneously to cause my darkroom to multiply and become two darkrooms. Nor would I expect my entire house to become a darkroom merely because I've begun developing a picture. My intuition must be broken.
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
There are some interesting things happening with window managers, which cannot happen on other platforms due to Xs lack of interface policy. It would have been interesting if the author had looked at the following:
FluxBox
Ion
PekWM
TreeWM
WindowLab
Next time maybe...
For what it's worth, when people say things like "Well OS X is cool, it's just the hardware" or "But you can buy 3 button mice if you want", her normal reply is something along the lines of: Apple sell an integrated whole, so you can't judge the OS apart from the hardware, if the defaults are wrong then it sucks.
In this case obviously the comparison was between DEs, but you can't buy MacOS without buying a Mac, so her position still holds I think.
Does anybody else find it amusing that most posters to Slashdot appear to think Eugenia is a man? :)
Worst part about teaching is that it encourages derivative work. Show some creativity people. Keep your knowledge to yourself and don't let other people build on and improve it. If you show other people how you do things, you are stealing their creativity, since the time they spend learning your shit is time they should be spending making up their own shit. It's no different from you throwing a brick through a store window and stealing their creativity right off the shelves. Well except for the broken glass and stuff.
With all the freedom of choice X11 has offered me, I have been thinking about what my ideal user interface would be. For me, efficiency is the deciding factor, and looks come second (by which I mean they _do_ matter).
I have pretty much settled on WindowMaker as my winning^H^H^H^Hdow manager. I still try other wms now and then, but usually I go back to Window Maker before the day is over. It's the dock that makes WIndow Maker so good (but why for goodness' sake must we double click???). Double click a dock icon to bring all the applications windows forward or start the app if it wasn't running yet. One hotkey lets you hide all windows belonging to an application; an excellent way to keep the desktop organized. I move the icons for less frequently used applications, as well as icons I don't want to see to the paperclip and set it to autocollapse.
One feature that would increase efficiency is something I have seen in KDE's BeOS theme. Window titles do not span the entire width of the window, and when moved over another window title, rearrange their position so that they basically become tabs which can be used to select among several windows in the same position. This makes sure window titles are always (at least partially) visible (so you don't miss alerts sent to you by changing window titles) and windows never get completely occluded by other windows.
If there is any window manager that sports both a dock and tabbable windows, and for the reast is lean and fast, please let me know as I am probably going to love it.
---
"Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest
of your life."
-- Michael Sinz
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Not only does OS X have reasonable keyboard navigation options in preferences as others have pointed out, but if you really want power-user keyboard navigation check out this utility launchbar. It pretty much does everything under the sun; I don't use it myself but I played with it and it's insane; for people who like to avoid the mouse at all costs this is the thing for you.
'nuff said
The author didn't say that a KDE or Gnome wasn't as good as XP and Slashdot gets the usual 'XP is totally unusable' posts.
KDE IS good, but how many of you actually use XP? It is solid, consistent, can be themed/skinned and to be dead honest, if it was so bad why do Linux lovers spend half their time trying to emulate the look and feel of it? Answer: Becuase it IS good.
Well that's a neat little story, but the users don't come from some land where there are no DEs to think about. The Windows DE has been carefully tested on all levels of user, and, apparently, what you get is deemed to be the most acceptable. Now, you can go off on some paranoid theory about Bill inflicting some horrible DE paradigm on the world, but that would be silly commercially, wouldn't it?
In other words, Windows is easy to use, and slick, because it makes commercial sense to be that way. If you start selling cars with the foot pedals in a different order to C B A (it has been done), let me know how you go, I'll gladly insure you. For a price.
I think all this fuss about DEs is overrated - most important work is done by typing text into boxes. Like this. (apologies in advance to any graphical people out there.)
Is it just me or is this important to other people too? Do left handed people feel differently? One thing I can't stand about Windows and about most WMs I've used with X11 is having the damn icons default to sit on the left side of the desktop. It's even sillier when windows open to the upper left, immediately covering all icons the first time you open a window. Having these things on the right makes more sense to me. (Also I like having the hard drives listed there rather than the confusing "My Computer." Another windows UI peeve for me -- if that thing is my computer what the hell is all this other stuff on the desktop?)
KDE should lose the 'hook to window edge' feature because people will think the UI is jerky? how stupid does he think people are? a good 4 seconds of shifting windows about will reveal method in the madness, i think. scraping the barrel of points to make... sorry, i only read to the end of the second page then gave up.
As I read it, Alan's post was not mocking the original poster, but guys who puff out their chests and claim bragging rights over uptime on their home machines. You know, like sarcasm.
The translation
I'm not going to go on, all of Eugenia articles are like this. Stating opinions as if they were facts does not make them facts. "The buttons are overwhelming" is not the same as "the temparature of the solution was 26 degrees". None of this is helpful - I (as a random member of the computing community) do not care what Eugenia's preferences for colour, widget style and theme are. I care whether these environments can be made to work the way I want them to. I (as the adminstrator for other desktops) care whether these environments have the ability to make my users happier; if their particular preferences can be accommodated.
This brings me to what these sorts of reviews should focus on... absolutes only. e.g.
features of WinXP: themeable, log multiple users on simultaneously, clean fonts, ability to choose classic style or luna
features of KDE: virtual desktops, themeable, transparent menus, adjustable levels of eye candy, full featured keyboard shortcut editors
etc.
Writing those lists just now I noticed how hard it is to keep my own opinions out of it, but it can be done and a journalist should certainly be doing that. If a personal opinion were required, it would be preferable that a third party was used as the source of opinions as we are more likely to hear a balanced view than the rantings of one particular user.
In such a subjective area - more care must be taken to remain objective. It is not sufficient to simply write at the top of the article "I realise this is subjective but...."; I'm sure what she meant, as a professional journalist, was "I realise this is subjective so I have taken the following steps to minimize any influence my own opinions may have on this review"
This is a difficult task, articles such as these must by definition include some element of opinion; comments like "The menus were slow to respond" are acceptable even though "slow" is a subjective term; but one I would be willing to allow under the assumption that an experienced computer used could assign fuzzy terms like "slow" and "fast" with the same skill that we can all use terms like "hot" and "cold". This is not an excuse to decend into the completely unquantifiable "I want my UI pixel perfect".
All these environments will gain equally from a more balanced review process and as such we will all gain.
</rant>
Carpe Daemon
If you don't like it, change it. No commercial software is required.
I'm running a sci-fi-esque shiny black theme right now, and it works perfectly. It even replaced the huge Start menu button with one that's much more manageable.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
So about 10 minutes ago, I finished loading and setting up Red Hat 8 in the larger partition on my disk. Then I clicked on "wheel mouse" for my wheel mouse (it had detected it as a 3-button mouse), and it went completely whacko -- the mouse wouldn't work at all, and I was in root - - I haven't had this much raw power since DOS!
I LOVE IT!!!
But I guess that dual-booting until I have a faint clue about what I'm doing wasn't such a bad idea...
Now back to tinkering . . .
Think, write, think, edit, think...then post.
I understand that G4s (and Athlons, to a lesser extent) are generally faster than a Pentium of the same clock speed. That's why it's sad when OSX on a computer with faster hardware is slower than WinXP.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
"That'll change in September with the 970 machines."
Maybe, and once *again* the poor Mac owners will have to shell out *more* money. And still probably not keep up.
It is really sad that you keep feeding the beast that is Apple, because all it does is punish you for it.
Personally I much prefer overall the Windows XP experience with a close second the ones of MacOSX and BeOS. In fact, a DE that could have the best values found on these three operating systems, plus the power of Unix underneath, would make my utopian desktop environment. But there isn't such a DE ...
He rates Mac OS X among his favorites, but then wishes one of them had "Unix underneath" -- duh, it does! Did this seem odd to anyone else?
(For the record, I'm a Penguinista rather than a Mac fan.)
Right-click on My Computer, left-click Properties, Hardware, Device manager.
I have the Desktop toolbar enabled on that taskbar thing next to the start button to get to it more easily. I also make it twice the normal height. I really prefer it over KDE's panel set up this way. What I still miss though is to have a kind of start menu when I (right-)click on the desktop.
the US and UK gave saddam plenty of weaponry . the CIA gave his party plenty of support.
Any desktop enviroment that does not let you push (lower) a window down on the window stack is fundamentally crippled.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Though I understand the need for something like a taskbar, the way Apple and MS have implemented it is completey wrong. It's too space-consuming, ugly, and especially in Windows, barely functional. WindowMaker's dock handles this in a much cleaner and intuitive fashion, and I can't overstate how much easier multiple desktops make life-an idea neither Apple or MS have caught on to yet.
THE GOOD HUMOR MAN CAN ONLY BE PUSHED SO FAR
Bart Simpson on chalkboard in episode 2F18
I don't trust any Definitive Comparison that includes the word "ain't"...
International Law?? LOL!!!
The resolution 1441 or whatever says that if Saddam did not disarm then there would be war! It's been TWELVE YEARS!! Saddam is in violation, not the US! The US is just enforcing what was decided YEARS ago, just because other countries are too timid to enforce the laws THEY make doesn't make the US wrong...
He should try XPDE environment: http://www.xpde.com/
They recently released version 0.3. Today the site is forbiden - Microsoft acting ?
Worst review I've ever read; the reviewer is obviously out of their league, writing completely off the cuff. Its hard to tell if there was any proper balancing done.. what machines weere used for each OS? But more to point.. they seam to just like some thigns about an OS, so the whole shbang must be good..
:P
ie: Why even go into mentijoning MFC? Its not really necessary. But by going in and saying MFC is good and useful and well designe.d. obviously ha sno clue about design.
Aqua frameworks.. you mean using Objective C, a language no one wants to touch?
Sure, Windows apps measure up to standard.. Windows *is* the standard afterall. So thats a meaningless and stupid comment. And Windows is well designed and laid out? Despite the fact every single usability test as turne dout negative?
This shows an obvious "I've used it, I'm famliiar with it, it must be logical" bias; it is *not* well designed, but it *is* standard.. so you know how to use it. That doesn't make it good.
God, thats a truly awful review that just annoyed me for the rest of the day.
Windows has its points, but make them fair or we'll just puke
If you look at the article, there are more than a few points where he talks about the environments, heaping inordinate amounts of praise on one relative to the others, but then ranks them in a different order. In other words, the one he gives the highest praise is not always ranked the highest.
Um... what gives? What metric is he using to rank these environments, if the best one (by his definitions anyway) does not come out on top?
Call me when I can run OSX on a $500 computer. At least Windows doesn't run on a proprietary hardware platform.
Well said!!
It's long more interesting than the crap article from that troll called eugenia-loli
You had me when you called BeOS "popular" :-)
I think you better re-read the UN resolution 1441 and stop believing everything you hear from government controlled media.
I think you meant to say bloatloads?
Every comment on this story (that I have found) automatically assumed the author was a man, when in fact, it was Eugenia. Just thought that was interesting...
"When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won..." ~ Mohandas K. Gandhi
Yeah, right. Like you even have something that resembles a life.
Bravo! You should run for the office of the president of the United States of America!
All I have to say about Windows Compatability is - try hitting Crtl-f in Outlook.
I diden't read it all.. just red that line about gnome:
"What I dislike though is the default Application menu bar on the top of the screen."
I mean... i also dislike my console when it says "fuck you" after i typed "fuck you" into it...
Instead of a silly c:\windoze\users\me\desktop\my_documents which sometimes gets written to and sometimes not depending on what program you are running, you have a home directory that everything writes to because you don't normally have permision to write elswhere. /home/me, that's me. I could mount a whole 100 gig hard drive to be /home and then another 100 gig drive as /home/me, no problem, 100 gigs for me and 100 gigs for my friends. Did I mention that each file and directory has individual read/write/execute flags for each group user/group/world, that can be set recursively?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
This whole "which DE is the best" type of discussion is indeed very subjective. My favourite desktop environment is the good old CDE. It does everything I need it to do. I also like its simplicity and stability. CDE doesn't have any eye candy but I can live with it.
I have no idea, it doesn't make any sense to me either. You will have to ask Eugenia.
- Windows XP's Luna interface is not the most pretty one. But it is the most logically designed one. Its widgets are well defined, while special care have been taken to the way things work in a way most people expect or are accustomed to.
It's all because windos has ruled the desktop market for a long time.. There is *NOTHING* to do with the OS itself!
- Gnome is a bit faster than KDE.
The UI of gnome2.2 is obviously slower the UI of KDE3.1.. If you don't believe me, compile or run something that eats all CPU resource in the background, then resize windows under GNOME and KDE, to see how much time they take to redraw windows.
- KDE's performance on loading its apps is worse.
It doesn't matter. In KDE3, just use "kshell" to launch KDE apps. It is *far* faster than launching apps in gnome2. Because kshell just calls kdeinit to fork and load the main DSO of the app (most of KDE3 apps exist as DSOs, the executables are just wrappers).
The biggest problem is that she is using the wrong criteria for desktop analysis. And as other posters have mentioned the review is full of personal bias.
She uses The Look and Feel, Usability, Consistency, Integration, Flexibility, Speed, Stability and Bugs, Technology, Programming Framework.
What about Security? Leaving this out for me draws question to validity the whole analysis.
What about Value? ($$ vs what you get)
And lock-in.
What about Hardware Support?
Gnome runs on many platforms unsupported by Windows etc.
Specific problems:
Programming Framework
- This has to be the most misinformed section. There are dozens of apis that work in Linux. Both gnome and kde can use XML to define layouts.
What about wxWindows, FOX, PyQt, wXRuby, Java?
There are so may interfaces for programming I think the majority of programmers if they have worked with both would prefer the flexability, code availability and cost of GTK and secondly QT.
The Look and Feel
"I don't like keramik"
-Ok change it
-different distros change them
Which distros did you look at Xandros? Lindows? Mandrake 9.1?
"Gnome widgets are plain"
-so fix them
Usability
"problem I have with KDE is its extreme bloat."
-pick a distro without it - knoppix
Consistency
She talks about applications not desktop. If this is truly a desktop review than no applications
would be mentioned.
Integration
She doesn't want to have to open a terminal app. Well she doesn't to edit a configuration
file. The registry is much more confusing the configuration files
as there is no space for comments.
"no GUI on configuring printers/scanners/other hardware"
-mandrake
-knoppix both have one
This has to do with the 'idear' (say: concept) that in MacOSX every document has a window and that every application has a menubar. closing a window means closing a document, not quit application.
In some OSes(like WinXP) this is done differently by showing a application window and inside this window many more windows for the documents... closing a inner windows closes a document, closing the outer most window will close the application. Basicly there is not much difference between the two, except that in (without any application window) MacOSX the two different 'commands' have different methodes, while with a thay are nearly the same under WinXP and others.
I guess this is up to preference: To be Tool Orientated(TO) or Document Orientated(DO). However, I think that apple uses the metalic look when there is no document view to giv, because the use is TO. Safari would have to open a new window every time you visit a new webpage to be DO hence the TO style and metalic look.
But I find the choice not always logical
What I cannot create, I do not understand
ok, Eugenia has 5 different categories where she scored each of the 5 DEs:
-Look and Feel: Windows XP 8.0, MacOSX 9.0, KDE 6.5, BeOS 7.0, Gnome 6.5.
-Usability: Windows XP 9, MacOSX 8.5, KDE 6.5, BeOS 8.5, Gnome 7.
-Consistency, Integration, Flexibility: Windows XP 7, MacOSX 7, KDE 8, BeOS 7, Gnome 7.5.
-Speed, Stability and Bugs: Windows XP 9.5, MacOSX 9, KDE 7, BeOS 7.5, Gnome 8.
-Technology, Programming Framework: Windows XP 8, MacOSX 10, KDE 7.5, BeOS 8.5, Gnome 7.5.
Final Rating:
Windows XP 8.55
MacOSX 8.33
BeOS 8.22
KDE 6.72
Gnome 6.61
however, how does she arrive at the "Fianl Rating"?
if she took the average for each DE, her math is wrong and the outcome is different.
averaging the 5 categories together reveals:
OSX 8.33
XP 8.30
BEOS 7.70
Gnome 7.30
KDE 7.10
so how did XP win again??
the history of the world
Trying to blame OSX's performance on the hardware is a crock of bullshit. Mac hardwware is as good, if not better, than is PC hardware. Mac computers may not have as high a clock-setting, but their top-line versions still run just as fast as the top-line versions of Intel/AMD, because they are more efficient processors (less cycles per instruction required, other various factors). Why do you think that the MIPS processors used on SGI systems are vastly superior to Intel/AMD chips, even though they run at slower clock-rates?
If you're going to try to make some comparison between two vastly different CPU architectures, then you need to use a real standard, like GFLOPS. Not that I'd expect someone who's so stupid that he doens't know that a 600MHz Apple computer != a 600MHz Intel computer to have even heard of GFLOPS.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Actually, making programs with Apple's Cocao and the GNUstep standard is said to be a real joy by anyone who's done it, and they rely on Objective-C, which is inherently better than C++, providing full OO with just a few additions over C.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Erm, this isn't a "war". This is a large, powerful and arrogant country launching an assault on a small, crumbling one.
Get real, Americans. You won't be building shelters to hide from missiles.
This isn't a war, in any sense of the word.
Actually, it's retarded to measure computer performance by either efficiency or clock-speed, or some calculated measure. If you want to compare how well two different processors can perform, you use FLOPS (floating point operations per second), or in the modern era GFLOPS (giga FLOPS).
Furthermore, as any intelligent analysis will show you -- namely, a benchmark -- different CPU's are better at performing different tasks.
You should also note that if you really want the best processors, AMD, Intel, Motorolla, and even MIPS may all be the wrong place to look. Processors being developed for gaming systems -- such as the PS2, which has 6 GFLOPS/sec performance -- are by far superior, and selling at alower price. This, however, will only be useful to the computer world if GCC develops options to compile for such processors.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Back in the Win95 days I used Borland Delphi to build UI. I like them lot better than MS tools. One of the advantage is it support layout management.
The underlying issue, however, is really what are you analyzing. Are you analyzing operating systems to decide which to purchase? Then yes, you ought to compare whole systems. Further you have to compare whole systems as oriented towards a specific tastk. Most OS comparisons are not doing that. If you are just looking at how operating systems do things to see the pluses and minuses of each then I think hardware is fairly beside the point.
So I agree with you, but would simply say that what you want then is not an OS comparison but a system comparison. In which case you really ought to compare a Macintosh system with something like a Dell system.
As for those claiming this huge speed increase over Intel chips at similar clock speeds. Well a lot of that is Apple FUD to deal with Motorola falling down on the job. Unfortunately it came back and bit them in the butt due to some aspects of OSX. Certainly it is slower in some aspects of the OS - that's why you can notice a large difference between Sys9 and OSX. Some of that is due to "perception" because OSX actually multitasks well. In Sys9 one process could "hog" the CPU giving the perception of greater speed. Some of it is due to aqua doing more than Sys9 does. Some of it is due to the difficulty of accelerating all those 3D graphics as opposed to the 2D widgets in XP and Sys9. So there certainly are some valid points.
However in an XP vs. OSX comparison you often are comparing XP systems that have systems that have SPEC scores about double that of the Macintosh system. (Or worse) Apple tried to deal with this using dual CPUs. I love dual CPUs, but it really doesn't accelerating individual tasks that well. You see them come into their own when you have lots of background tasks.
So to me, except perhaps on the laptop, OSX will only truly come into its own with the new 970 systems this fall. Don't get me wrong. I have a dual 867 system and love it. I find that for most of the tasks I actually *do* it is as fast as my 800 MHz P4 system. And for most tasks I actually do I don't see a huge different between a 800 MHz P4 system and my dual Athalon 2400+. For some tasks (games, graphics) the Athalon thoroughly trounces OSX. Further there are some aspects of OSX where the additional speed would be most welcome.
Cocoa and Obj-C are very nice. There are some flaws, but I'll not go into them. The bigger limitation is that Visual Studio is considerably superior to the Project Builder / Interface Builder combo that Apple offers. C# does RAD considerably better. Debugging logic is easier in Visual Studio. Some argue that Obj-C is better than either Java/C# or even C++. In some ways yes. In other ways no. For some things I really love C++. Further for the type of programs I do, I need the portability (and readibility by other employees) that C++ offers over Obj-C.
Maybe my numbers were a bit off but in actual use where the overall system design will affect performance Apple systems at a given clock speed are faster than typical PCs at the same clock speed.
I will agree that the fastest Intel CPUs are far faster than the fastest Motorola processors. Perhaps Apple made a mistake in deciding not to buy PowerPC chips from IBM. (The latest IBM CPUs do quite well compared to Intel processors)
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
The only problem is that PCs are typically 2 - 3x the clock speed of Macintoshes. Further the PCs are typically cheaper. Compare the price of a 1 GHz G4 based PowerMac to that of a 3 GHz P4 based Dell, for instance.
you seem to think that a linux distro equals a desktop.
You also seem to be thinking that your wants are universal.
Many many many people are using linux on secondary computers or servers or embedded devices or whatever where it would be foolish to provide desktop functionality.
Many many many people who use a linux distro simply want a machine that will compile, run perl, run apache, or whatever - just like a Unix system they're used to. Imposing VISE on them, removing vi (freaking learn it, it isn't that hard!), whatever - ugh. Bad Idea(TM).
There will never be One True Distro to rule them all. That is a Good Thing(TM). In my experience, the desktop/win manager of choice has been a flavor of the year. In 97, fvwm95 got a lot of press, to the great ire of those who still used fvwm and twm. Before that, there was bitching over which X server to use - Metro X or Xfree. Later, in 99, Enlightenment was the next big thing. Or windowmanager/afterstep/gnustep/whatever NeXT clone.. Gnome and KDE ruled the day in 00 and 01, and lately the fluxbox/blackbox/whatever-box has gotten attention (coming full circle right back to minimal window managers). Who knows what it will be in 2005?
It is off by default. I think it is a smart move, one problem when you get a lot of items on a dock or task bar is the 'click zone' for each item becomes very small. On Windows I avoid this by having the task bar on the left hand side of the desktop, dual monitors helps. On the mac the items might be tiny (can end up with 40~50 items in the dock) and it is difficult to tell which item I am looking at. Especially web pages etc which are minimised to the dock.
Go out and get sailing!
My box at work was w2k with office XP. It had none of those features for me. I could not set them, and those who knew better would not. The file permision jazz was a GUI joke and I doubt that it was part of the file system. All I ever saw was the dumbo c: nightmare with d: and e: and the desktop was the root directory and all that other confusing mubmo jumbo that programs have to work around and CLI did not fill in the blanks or auto complete. Given the rate and method of adoption of reasonable file manipulation by M$, I doubt they will ever have a reasonable system until they go over to free software and abandon the mess they have made.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Cheaper is only better if the system provides better performance on the applications you are trying to run.
I have a 200Mhz Ultra 1 that will totaly whip my 2Ghz Athlon on disk I/O and multitasking. Why? The Sun has SCSI disks, a much better bus and memory architecture, and the Ultra Sparc processor is much better than x86 processors at context switches.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
I think I've supported my original claim quite well, honestly. Here's the thing: The average user doesn't really differentiate between the UI and the rest of the OS. To him/her, it's all one and the same thing. Really, I don't see how you could say it shouldn't be that way, either? A GUI should integrate with the underlying OS as seamlessly as possible, since it's simply a different way of allowing user interaction with the OS.
Perhaps part of the problem is that so many Linux users are also software programmers. Programmers like to nit-pick the details. (EG. That nasty problem you see with the background colors getting all screwed up whenever you run freeciv isn't the fault of your UI. It's just an xfree86 issue, pal!) Well, sure, that's correct - but the user simply runs his/her app in KDE or Gnome, sees the problems, and decides the whole interface is inferior.
As long as UI's like KDE or Gnome are built on top of xfree86, they'll suffer from any problems inherent in xfree86. Mac OSX, as we can see, got around most of these deficiencies, and maybe much of that is because they didn't run on top of xfree86. They simply let you install X11 to run on top of Aqua!
As for my point on XP fading in/out, I concur that like/dislike of the effect itself is subjective. I brought it up simply because KDE and interfaces like Enlightenment w/Gnome have tried to do similar special effects, and I believe with much worse results.
What does that have to do with anything? My point is that X, being a multi-vendor standard, varies in quality from system to system. Some might be less than optimal, like XFree or your SunOS X. Some may be excellent, like the IRIX X server. It all depends, and it DOESN'T merit throwing out the baby with the bath.
Inaccuracies and over-generalisations are fine in conversations with non-geeks, but you made a very specific claim, which means you have to have very specific arguments. If I said, "Ford cars suck, I always get stuck in a traffic jam whenever I'm in one", you'd point out I was being dumb, and you'd be right. This is the same thing.
Well, sure, that's correct - but the user simply runs his/her app in KDE or Gnome, sees the problems, and decides the whole interface is inferior.
That's fine. When you make strongly worded assertions about the quality of their work, expect people to hold you to a higher degree of accuracy than some random user.
As long as UI's like KDE or Gnome are built on top of xfree86, they'll suffer from any problems inherent in xfree86.
You're confusing X and XFree.
Mac OSX, as we can see, got around most of these deficiencies, and maybe much of that is because they didn't run on top of xfree86.
No, it has nothing to do with X or XFree, it's because MacOS is a) very new, b) controlled by a central organisation. They provide one widget toolkit (in reality 3, but they all look the same) and Mac apps are expected to use that. For historical reasons, the same is not true on Linux - that's more to do with politics than X.