Call to arms! A new GUI for Linux

[Christopher Browne]

> I forsee a system that won't dovetail too closely with KDE and Gnome;
> from the site you'll get the idea that applications will have to be
> written specifically for it; modified even if only slightly to behave
> according to my system's spec. The result will break certain benefits
> of Linux, and trade it in for a stable, predictable and _consistent_
> user experience.

The latest iteration of interoperability changes is the introduction of
DCOP, which is a lightweight IPC scheme that, if it develops onwards,
can allow better communication between GNOME and KDE apps.

A major thing that Windows has at this point that Linux doesn't is the
notion of being able to script control of applications using VBA.

If we step BACK ten years, this sort of thing was common in various
environments:

 --> Users in mainframe environments could script control of
     plenty-o-stuff _including the internals of text editors_,
     in REXX.

 --> Users of Amigas could write scripts in AREXX (which, perhaps
     coincidentally, is a REXX variation) to control their applications.

 --> I had, pointed out to me, today, a window manager called treewm
     which has the interesting feature that its behaviour is all
     scriptable, and scripts can inject WM commands through a FIFO.

This sort of thing was _supposed_ to be one of the major features of
GNOME; that's where the whole "RMS against Tcl" war came from, when
Guile was to become The Way To Script Gnome.  (I'm not sure Guile was
the right answer, but even in retrospect, nothing else that was an
alternative at the time was a better answer...)
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