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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: What Window Manager/Desktop Environment do you use, and why?
Date: Sat, 21 Jun 2025 07:12:21 -0000 (UTC)
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On Fri, 20 Jun 2025 10:37:03 -0700, John Ames wrote:

> Meanwhile, the Unix world for the most part* never even got that far;
> early X desktops were little more than window managers for arranging
> terminals, and the handful of Xlib/Motif alternatives to Mac/Windows
> GUI components were ugly and clunky by comparison. (Well, xfe is a more
> useful file manager than pre-95 Explorer, but that's not saying much.)
> And when the vendors decided to standardize, the result was CDE, which
> was sort of the metaphorical equivalent of a Trabant, without the charm.

Interesting, because it was CDE/MOTIF that pioneered the idea of multiple 
virtual desktops. Which, if you remember, was commonplace in the *nix/
Linux world for many years, before Microsoft and Apple discovered it and 
tried retrofitting it (badly) onto their own GUIs.

> * (IRIX is pretty nearly the sole exception, as its bread & butter was
> in the upper end of digital art & multimedia applications ...

But SGI were precisely an example of the sort of “flashy & computationally 
expensive to render” thing you were criticizing, were they not? They did a 
full animated 3D desktop, with 3D-rendered icons flying around all over 
the place, just because they could.

> NeXTSTEP was also a fairly valiant attempt, but God help me do I hate
> Miller columns; and the segregation of GUI-land entities from under-
> lying *nix ones that drives me up the wall with OSX began at NeXT.

Is that supposed to be different from the idea that functionality should 
be available in scriptable/command line tools, with the GUI mostly just a 
front end to those tools? Because that is a great way to organize things.

> And then the whole damn personal-computer industry got sidetracked into
> an ugly and counterproductive obsession with skeumorphism in the late
> '90s ...

This is why, in the *nix world, we treasure our modularity, and kept the 
separate layering of the whole X11 system, even while it seemed clunky 
compared to the tight integration of GUI and OS kernel that Apple and 
Microsoft (and others, like Be as well, I think) were going for. And 
history has proven that *nix approach to be the right way to do things.

Remember the “Unix philosophy” (perhaps nowadays better retitled the “Linx 
philosophy” these days): the kernel and the userland core should 
concentrate on providing mechanisms, not policy; let the users/admins use 
those mechanisms however they like, to implement whatever policies they 
like.

And that goes for the GUI as well.