21 Feb
2017
21 Feb
'17
6:12 a.m.
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.
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.
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
Quoting Steve Nickolas <usotsuki(a)buric.co>:
"I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand Sor,
Method for Guitar
"A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel
Goldwyn
On Mon, 20 Feb 2017, Steve Johnson wrote:
<snip>
In terms of following the Unix philosophy, the
widow managers on Linux
are getting more bizarre by the year. Hitting a
key at random by
mistake can cause windows to disappear, screens of unknown utility to
appear, everything to disappear, etc. Setting
options to try to
achieve
some kind of consistency is totally different in
each system. Etc.
etc.  There seems to be no larger organizing principle at work...
Which is probably truer than you realize.
-uso.