Date: Tue, 4 Aug 1998 14:57:03 +0200 (MESZ) From: Rainer M Duffner <Rainer.Duffner@konstanz.netsurf.de> To: Joey Garcia <bear@pacificnet.net> Cc: newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Graphical Shell (my ideas) Message-ID: <Marcel-1.46-0804125703-d07Zsav@duffner.konstanz.netsurf.de> In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.19980803214436.0069d360@pacificnet.net>
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On Tue 04 Aug, Joey Garcia wrote:
>
> Hey all!
>
> The other day I was at work doing my thing, and waiting for 4:30 to come
> (going home time). Well, I was thinking about Unix, Graphics, and Unix
> GUI's. I was thinking....okay, there's a Bourne shell, C shell, Korn
> shell, etc. Why wasn't a graphical shell created? A Graph Shell perhaps?
CDE -Common Desktop Environment
(Commercial, Motif-based, resource-hog)
It provides access to the 54 most often used Unix-commands via a GUI.
It's not that bad - you can do some pretty nice things and it is rather
nicely laid out - if you have a reasonably new Workstation and
reasonably much memory (>>64MB...).
(That didn't stop the people here from installing it on 7 year old HP-UX
'Workstations' with 32MB RAM, together with HP-UX10.20)
IMO, a shell is a shell and a GUI is a GUI.
You can't have both in one ('two in one') 'thingy'.
I am writing this on a computer that has the best and fastest GUI on
planet ever - but the OS doesn't have a (real, powerful) shell (and some
other - for today's users almost unbelievable - constraints that make it
really difficult to use in certain occasions).
--I like it nevertheless as it is very productive.
Free Unix has had enough attempts for nifty 'Window-Managers', that
accumulated many features, much functionality and clever tricks.
But what-ever window-manger you write and however clever the GUI you
create is: it is useless without the support of a huge number of
applications specifically written for this specific window-manager.
Instead of writing the fifteenth clone to fvwm, people had better
started on _real_ problems.
As of now, KDE seems to cure some of the shortcomings and ommitions of 5
years free Unix development (at last).
cheers,
Rainer
[partly inspired by JKH's 'freshmeat' editorial recently....]
--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
|Rainer Duffner, E-Mail: duffner@fh-konstanz.de |
| & Rainer.Duffner@konstanz.netsurf.de |
|Fachhochschule Konstanz, Germany |
|"What's a Network ?" - Bill Gates, early 1980s |
| WWW:http://www-stud.fh-konstanz.de/~duffner |
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