Desktop innovation? Future of the desktop?

[Richmond Mathewson]

  On 07/04/2010 09:40, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
> There's real innovation, for better or worse, going on in Linux desktops in
> the last year or two.  KDE4 made an effort to redefine the desktop metaphor,
> its probably just about usable now, and now Gnome from a different starting
> point.  Its a bit lost on me, perhaps its a matter of age.  Simplicity and
> bareness become more attractive, not just in computing, and I find a lot to
> be said for OpenBox in desktop, or WMII.  But its very much a minority view.
>
> Gnome and KDE are a lot freer to take risks than either MS or Apple, and
> they are taking advantage of that.  I don't know that you would like the
> latest KDE, but its worth looking at as an example of innovation in this
> area.

To be honest, I find that the Mac desktop, the Windows desktop, and
all the Linux desktops "out there" are always 75% of what I would have
liked.

 From my personal point of view I like GNOME (as it stands = 2.3) as it can
be hacked about in all sorts of ways to get 99% of what I feel comfortable
using.

Apart from a whole slew of things I dislike about Windows, the fact that
the desktop is a "one size fits all" really gets my goat.

I don't dislike Mac, but, again, the lack of hackability of the desktop
is a bu**er.

In an ideal world (Ha, Ha,Ha!) I would probably have some sort of
hacked GNOME floating around on top of Mac OS X.

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Bi*chy bit follows . . .
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As Open Source 'alternatives' have matured I have moved to using
them almost exclusively on my PPC Mac.

Sooner or later (Please, please, a lot later) this machine will go
'pop' and I will have to rob the bank to get a new machine.

The MAIN reason I would keep with Macintosh is that RunRev
for Linux looks as though it is "dying a death"; and in its present
incarnation is a very poor second to its Windows and Macintosh
cousins.
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The same goes for RunRev: the standard GUI is 85% for me (the
glaring white of the Menubar and the Tool palette really annoy me); so
I always fiddle around with a new install until I arrive at something that
serves my needs. The first thing I do is change the background colour
of the Menubar and the Tool palette to a charcoal-grey; then I start
adding little buttons to make the Menubar move off-screen and back,
park the Tool palette somewhere other than its default poz, and so
on. It always gives me great pleasure to do this, and I always think
appreciatively of the folk in Edinburgh for giving us a GUI we CAN
mess about with (well, except for RevMedia) . . .  :)

At present, my Ubuntu "rig" (i.e. my production machine rather than
the ones that run in my school) has GNOME with Avast Window Navigator
(looks like the Mac Dock before it went "all 3D"). I have fiddled with
Nautilus so that my Home folder and the Rubbish Bin are visible on
the desktop. ALL my windows have a textured, charcoal-grey
background.

http://andregarzia.on-rev.com/richmond/STUFF/RichmondDT.png

This is the desktop that suits me; it may very well not suit anybody else;
but that is the beauty of an open system - one can hack it about to suit
one's needs. The whole world has suffered for far too long from
"One-size-fits-all" solutions; religious tyranny, political tyranny
and, now, desktop tyranny. I have always felt there is something about
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates that is vaguely familiar, and now I know
what it is; it is the paternalistic smile of the person who KNOWS what
is right for everybody else and is setting out to make sure we take
our medicine: pack your bags and head for the hills!

GNOME shell; a.k.a the soon-to-be GNOME 3 strikes me as a different
75% to the current GNOME. The only reason I would really get excited
about this sort of thing would be if there were evidence that it were
more hackable/personalisable than GNOME 2.

The one and only time I got excited about a Desktop was when I saw
one for the first time running on a BBC micro computer. After the jolly
command-line interfaces before that any GUI will do: Hey, I feel a
musical about computer interfaces coming on - imagine Steve Jobs
and Bill Gates wearing matching Austrian Dirndles rushing panting
up the Geisburg on a lovely sunny day in a field heavily populated
with late 1980s personal computers and then, as the camera pans
towards them, they burst into that show-stopping number:

"Any GUI will do!"

Ok, Ok, I'll stop.