Date: Sun, 26 Apr 1998 13:00:42 -0700 From: Studded <Studded@san.rr.com> To: "Maximiliano A. Eschoyez" <meschoyez@ubp.edu.ar> Cc: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: KDE Message-ID: <3543926A.9F8A4EDC@san.rr.com> References: <19980425152512194.AAA218.270@webmail>
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Maximiliano A. Eschoyez wrote: > * Why people under UNIX-like OS try to emulate a MS 'Operative > System' * We don't necessarily. :) > Well, Who am I? > > I'm Maxi, a student of Telecomunications (engineer) [I'm trying > to learn english because here, Argentina, we speak spanish, so > excuse my errors] Bienvenidos amigo. :) Many people have posted lots of good advice for helping you to learn FreeBSD, so I won't cover that topic again. I do want to talk about the idea of KDE emulating Windows. I am searching for a window manager that I really like, and haven't found one that has everything I want yet. I am currently trying KDE, so I read up on it quite a bit. What the developer claims (and I have no reason to doubt him) is that he has never seen the Windows 95 interface, so he is not trying to emulate it. In fact, KDE looks a lot more like OS/2 than it looks like Windows 95. There is another important point here though. There is a big difference between the *user interface* and the *operating system*. In Windows 95, the operating system is still (mostly) DOS. There is a more sophisticated user interface and a slightly more sophisticated application starting/scheduling engine when compared to Windows 3.1, but the operating system itself is still basically DOS. (Windows NT is a whole different story, but I digress.) However, in spite of all of Windows' faults in its various incarnations, the user interface is pretty good. In fact, Windows 95's user interface borrowed a lot of ideas from macintosh and several ideas from OS/2 and came up with a fairly good mix. The fact that the operating system crashes on a fairly regular basis is a whole different pot of beans. :) Now that memory and disk space are both pretty cheap, there is no reason not to put a more friendly face on the power of unix for the desktop user. It is still important to know the command line, and I use it every day. But you also can't deny that it is easier to be productive when you can have many projects (command line or otherwise) instantly available to you at the same time with just a few clicks of the mouse. This is the reason that emacs became very popular in the unix world as a user interface (in addition to its other functions) long before it became possible to run X on almost every desktop. Having a good graphical user interface doesn't pollute the beauty of unix, it makes it accessible to a whole new group of people. I think that's a good thing. :) As David Greenman said recently (and I'm paraphrasing a bit :), it's not FreeBSD vs. the rest of the world, it's free software vs. those who would try to force us into their model so that they can profit from our misery. Hasta luego, Doug -- *** Chief Operations Officer, DALnet IRC network *** *** Proud designer and maintainer of the world's largest Internet *** Relay Chat server with 5,328 simultaneous connections. *** Try spider.dal.net on ports 6662-4 (Powered by FreeBSD) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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