21 Feb
2017
21 Feb
'17
7:05 a.m.
On Tue, 21 Feb 2017, Wesley Parish wrote:
I think we can lay a lot of the blame for that major
annoyance on the
two related facts:
a: there is no universal windowing system everybody adheres to, just two
major commercial ones with spin-offs for smartphones and the like;
b: a lot of Linux developers are chasing MS Windows in hope of desktop
market share and copy MS Windows features and misfeatures.
I don't disagree. But I think there is a universal system, although it
has been left to crumble to dust over the years, and having been picked up
it still needs a lot of work to be usable in the 21st century. That would
be CDE - I'm not aware of any other X Window environment that made it into
any versions of the Unix standard (iirc it's part of "Unix 93
Workstation"?)
A major irony is that MS Windows itself has chased
Linux somewhat on the
graphical user interface front - Linux was the platform of GUI redesign
for OLPC and Android, Microsoft took the bait and tried it as a desktop
in MS Win 8.0 and got slammed for it.
A tablet environment doesn't work very well on a desktop, although a
desktop environment can work reasonably well on a tablet (been there done
that; I have a Windows 10 tablet).
Setting out standards for a herd of cats is not much
of an option; the
best one could do is publish RFCs giving a list of features that have
been proven to work in practice and hope for the best.
Wesley Parish
Herd of cats sums it up nicely.
At least CUA makes a reasonable baseline, and most open-source GUI
environments and programs seem to support that, as have Windows and OS/2
since almost the beginning.
-uso.