Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Linux GUI

Author:Nicholas Riley
Posted:3/4/1999; 7:50:40 AM
Topic:DHTML MTTF!
Msg #:3532 (In response to 3530)
Prev/Next:3531 / 3533

Try sitting a Windows user down in front of a Linux machine with a spreadsheet and an emailer and ask them to do some work.

There are Windows-lookalike GUIs for Linux. KDE is pretty good about this, GNOME tries to be different. And StarOffice does an almost too-good job of emulating Windows and Office's look and feel.

Personally there's stuff I like about all three GUIs. I like the way in Linux/X you can point at a window and not bring it to the front; copy and paste with the mouse; the way you can choose where to place a window as it opens, or have it automatically place so the windows tile on your screen. On Windows I like the way it's easy to tile applications on the desktop, or expand a window to the full size of the screen. On the Mac I like a lot of stuff, probably more than the other two, but probably my biggest complaint is having to move/resize/move/resize windows 8 million times before I get them right.

So conformance can be a good thing, but it's hard to innovate that way. If Linux just picks up Microsoft's GUI verbatim then your average user may not see a reason to switch. If it picks one, or a few, consistent GUI standards and associated toolkits as seems to be happening with GNOME, that's a good thing.

--Nicholas

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