Re: I wrote about the new GSDE package on the Register

[Liam Proven]

On Fri, 7 Jul 2023 at 11:37, Xavier Brochard <xavier@alternatif.org> wrote:
>
> Very nice presentation, thanks.

Thank you! I am glad you liked it.

> You've said in a previous paper thet there were really 2 desktop
> paradigm on Linux, though many were invented.

That is not really what I was getting at, no.

What I was saying was that almost all Linux desktops are
re-implementations of the Windows 95 desktop. There are a couple that
are not, but they are still informed by it and borrow design elements
from it, while just trying to do something different enough to not get
sued.

GNOME 3 is a confusing mess, to me. I do not see a coherent overall plan here.

Unity is fairly straightforwardly inspired by Mac OS X.

I've seen screenshots of the betas of GNOME 3 and the team seemed to
borrow a lot from Unity, but it's 2nd hand -- GNOME 3 is not a take on
the Mac OS X desktop itself. It's a de novo effort, with sime
inspiration from Unity, and a lot from various mobile phones but
notably iOS and early Android, with a strange set of keyboard controls
assembled without much knowledge of how existing GUI keyboard controls
worked.

So, no, not really that there are 2 designs.

There are:
* a bunch of Win9x rip-offs
* one Mac OS X rip-off (but using many more Windows keyboard controls
(for clarity: a *good* thing!)
* one confused mess which is sort of a mobile phone rip off
... and some very niche offerings, like Lomiri, which are not really
complete enough to judge.

All totally IMHO, of course!

> In this regard, how did
> you feel with GSDE ? was it consistent as a desktop paradigm?

If Unity is a Mac OS X ripoff, then GSDE is a NeXTstep ripoff. :-)

(With deep affection and respect here, for all 3!)

As such... NeXTstep was quite coherent and whole. I do not know it
well, I just admire it from afar. I find it weird and disorienting,
but mostly quite coherent.

GSDE is a good strong attempt to put the GNUstep bits together and
integrate them. It has some issues -- context menus appearing
offscreen, the wrong menu tree being shown and so on -- but it works
surprisingly well for a v1.0 product.

> how did
> you feel with the scrollbars on the right and the menu on the left

It works fairly well, for me.

> (Steve Jobs thought that scrollbars on the left were more consistent) ?

There is a good argument for that, but we're all used to something
different now.

Does that help?

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