Of Linus, KDE, and mouse buttons

[Robert Brockway]

On Sat, 29 Mar 2008, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:

> Normally I like to control my environment.  Perhaps too much.

I insist on complete control of my environment.  Well the computer 
environment - I'm still working on controlling the weather.

> In the case of desktop environments, I've found the choices so
> unexciting and the victories so ephemeral, that I've abdicated.  I use
> whatever was handed me by the distro.

I use fvwm everywhere.  Every few years I review the alternatives to see 
if anything better is available.  Still using fvwm after 14 years.  I 
have reworked my fvwm config a few times though.

Interestingly when I migrated from Australia to Canada I cast off a bunch 
of old habits including major changes to my fvwm config and changing my 
default shell :)

> My main GUI application is xterm.  I'm not even willing to accept

Ditto.  I'm typing this from pine in an xterm.  Gotta upgrade to alpine...

> substitutes since all that I've tried have been missing xterm
> features that I'm accustomed to.  My text editing, mail reading,
> downloading, and general administration are done within xterm.

IMHO the alternatives never had anything extra that made it worth 
switching either.

> I'm *not* proud of this.  I'd like someone to give me a Royal Road to

I am :)

> rewarding GUI usage.  I've just found that succeeding desktops have
> not made my life much better and effort expended exploring them has
> not paid off.  Almost all advances in my GUI experiences over the last
> 25 years can be ascribed to improvement in hardware:
> - screen size(640x400 => 2560x1600),
> - video controller capability (1b/p => 32b/p, lots faster),
> - CPU speed (8MHz => 2000MHz x 2),
> - RAM capacity (1MiB => 3GiB))

I agree 100%.  Two thoughts come to mind:

1.  GUIs are still substantially based on the original Xerox designs.

It seems to me that a bit of original thinking is occuring in this area of 
late.  About time too.

2.  Maybe the claim of the GUI as being the ideal computer interface has 
been a bit over-stated.

> I'd actually love a someone to explain to me why I should care.  I'd
> like to find out about some GUI facilities that would improve my life
> significantly.  Oh, and I'd like these features to have some
> longevity.

A GUI feature which has been very practially useful to me is network 
transparency in X.  I've used it regularly since 1994.  I use it to solve 
problems and get real work done all the time.  It is a much over-looked 
feature of X.  Several other graphical systems have a similar facility but 
they are even less used than the one in X.

Cheers,

Rob

-- 
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine..."
 	-- RFC 1925 "The Twelve Networking Truths"
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