Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 06:32:28 -0600 (CST) From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: "Albert D. Cahalan" <acahalan@cs.uml.edu> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: OT: non-Unix history (Was: FreeBSD vs linux) Message-ID: <14957.31196.939559.889627@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <100370249@toto.iv>
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Albert D. Cahalan <acahalan@cs.uml.edu> types: > David Kelly writes: > > [--snip--] > >> On Sun, Jan 21, 2001 at 08:54:58PM -0600, David Kelly wrote: > > >>> The majority of Linux users are also Windows users and wear > >>> Microsoft-colored glasses no matter how much they badmouth > >>> Microsoft. They continue to build their new land with a > >>> Microsoft tint. This may not be a bad thing, only time will tell. > > What I mean by "Microsoft tint" is prefaced by "Microsoft-colored > > glasses". Users who know only of Windows bitch when an OS doesn't do > > everything the way they are used to. When configuring a foreign system, > > or writing code for it, they design the user interface after the > > Microsoft model. And use Microsoft terminology to document. And then > > complain about how much they hate Microsoft. > The GNOME+Gtk desktop looks like OS/2 and Motif. NeXT-like themes > are very common. The usual title bar buttons are actually useful, > and hey, Motif was quite a Windows 3.1 rip-off anyway. I think you've got that backwards - or maybe sideways. Remember, MS & IBM produced OS/2 in a partnership; it was supposed to be the next OS after DOS. MS screwed IBM by not actually supporting OS/2 the way they had agreed upon, and doing Windows internally. Motif, on the other hand, was produced by a consortium that included IBM, and was specifically designed to look like OS/2 - which IBM owned, so it wasn't a ripoff. I don't remember if the GUI design went from OS/2 -> Windows or the other way, but it's sort of moot; MS had rights to both in either case. Of course, MS stole the Windows UI from Apple (only they did a miserable job of implementing it), who stole it (if you ask Xerox) or licensed it (if you ask Apple) from Xerox. > It is stupid to invent a gratuitously incompatible user interface. Which was why Motif looked like OS/2. That your users could move between PC's running OS/2 and Unix boxes running Motif with no training. On the other hand, there's no such thing as "gratuitously incompatible user interfaces". All those changes are *improvements* - just ask the authors! If you want to argue that one of the reasons that Unix failed on the desktop was that X allowed the users to run arbitrarily strange window managers, and most of those window managers allowed configuration to an extent that would require major rewrites of MacOS or Windows, I won't argue. I would claim that the kernel APIs being different were more of a reason, but that's just me. <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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