Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2001 00:43:05 -0600 From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: home pc use Message-ID: <15356.40569.368644.379314@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <9743207@toto.iv>
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Ok, I can't resist... Anthony Atkielski <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com> types: > Gary writes: > > It doesn't have lots of useful stuff on it. > Neither does a GUI, unless you count icons, title bars, and frames with shading > and highlights and milky sparkling opalescence. My window manager doesn't have any of those things. For which I am thankful. It's been a *long* time since anything on that list but frames have been on my desktop. > > It doesn't have the right one inch of the > > screen showing info on CPU, memory, or other > > info that can be displayed. Mines on the left, monitoring my workstation and the goat on my home network. I also keep a graphical mixer there so I can mute the stereo that's being piped through the speakers if the phone rings or I want to play a pcm file. You know, most of that information also shows up in the mode line in the emacs that usually - but not always - occupies the right-hand half of my screen. > It doesn't have a clock to tell me what the clock next to the monitor is telling > me, either, nor does it have an animated cursor shaped like a sneaker-wearing > daemon. It's also missing a cute doggie or R2 D2 clone that appears and gives > me answers to questions I haven't asked whenever I do anything that the > environment isn't expecting. Houses have clocks everywhere these days. I've had terminals that included them in the 25th line. If the one for the goat quits ticking, it means I've got problems... > > It doesn't have a column of buttons in that > > one inch which show me most of my running > > applications and allow me to switch between them. > I usually don't run more than one application, but I suppose that's a drawback. My dealings with Windows makes me suspect that that is true of many users. The UI and many of the applications seem to be downright hostile towards running more than one application at a time. I haven't looked at anything more recent than 98se, though, so things may have improved. > > It doesn't have a little map in that one > > inch which allows me to notice instantly which > > of several "desktops" I'm currently using and > > to switch between them. > That one inch sure seems to cover a lot of ground! Doesn't sound like that much more than Windows tries to cram into a task bar to me - except that windows doesn't support multiple desktops. > > Anthony, you are REALLY going to kick yourself > > when you learn to compromise in your Windows vs. > > Unix mentality and stop restricting yourself to > > ONLY a command line in FreeBSD. > I'm not restricting myself to a command line. I just haven't seen a GUI thus > far that is worth the time and trouble. Almost everything I do is text-based, > and I can just open multiple ssh sessions on my Windows machine if I want to do > several things at once. If you're only going to run one application at a time and most/all of them are text based, there's no point in it. Personally, I use a window manager because I like having an editor - which is character based, but supports the mouse - and a couple of xterms around all the time. I could do this with screen or xemacs on the console, and but I couldn't have different sized fonts in them windows that way, and I couldn't have that 1" of system status information that I like so much. <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Q: How do you make the gods laugh? A: Tell them your plans. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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