Does Linux have an Amiga feel?

[Mrs Beanbag]

But if you are going to develop and promote an OS as a desktop OS, its not reasonable that a user should be searching to find the right OS flavour to meet their needs.

The fact it took you 6 MONTHS to find the right OS-if that doesn't scream:"Houston, we have a problem", then I don't know what does!

I think only Ubuntu is really going for that at the moment.

Mind you when people say to me "Linux isn't ready for the desktop" I roll my eyes because, well, whose desktop? I had to get a Windows 7 laptop for work lately and I absolutely hate its guts. It reboots itself without asking, even when the lid is shut! And I had apps open!

[Mrs Beanbag]

How do I get all the software to use human-readable sort in directory listings instead of plain ASCII sort?

How do I do it on Amiga? I have lots of Amiga software that behaves this way.

How do I make Alt toggle me into and out of menu context without having to press a specific menu accelerator, as it works in Windows?

How do you do it on Amiga?

How do I disable raise-on-focus in window manager Foo, if I want Amiga-style behavior?

Actually this is an option in every window manager I've used. How do you do it in Windows?

How do I apply any changes consistently when there are at least three major UI toolkits and any number of window managers and desktop environments?

Well you only ever have one window manager running at once. But the Amiga always had that problem too. The widget types that come with Intuition are very basic and not very customisable, so people made MUI and ClassAct/ReAction, and NewIcons.

The extent to which the Linux developer community has focused on mere graphical skinnability as a stand-in for real customization is symptomatic of the fact that they just don't get usability. If they did they would understand that making Linux look like something it doesn't act like is, simply, deception.

This much is true. I think the average Linux developer doesn't even see the point of usability, let alone understand it. They think you just have to make it look more like Windows and it won't scare the average user off, then throw in more special effects, because "real" users just want to use the terminal anyway.

At least Linux has a decent terminal, which is more than you can say for Windows. And you can always fall back on old fashioned text mode if your X install breaks.

[Mrs Beanbag]

And anyway, I'll give an OS a hell of a lot more slack on failure to be consistent when it's an OS that's had to be hacked into even what modernity it approaches by outside developers hooking into system calls. Linux is open-source; what's its excuse?

Pretty much the same thing, actually. It IS open source, but they're still tied to legacy stuff for the GUI like X Windows, which goes back to 1984. All the things you complain about (i.e. user interface stuff) run in user mode and have to go through that arcane monstrosity to do anything. It might not technically be "hacked" but if anything it's worse. These things don't have anything to do with the kernel.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Again, a kernel is not an OS. Linux as an OS is much more than just the kernel. But I agree: basically every problem Linux has is down to being stuck on crufty, monstrous legacy frameworks for its userland. The difference is, it didn't have to be that way. It was created from scratch as a hobby project and opened up to community involvement, not hacked into its present state as a guerilla update to a closed-source OS that was effectively abandoned twenty years ago.

It's the kernel plus some core drivers, commands and utilities. It isn't X-Windows or window managers or GUI toolkits or desktop environments. Those are extras that come bundled with distributions. You can install Linux with no GUI at all.

The decision to use X-Windows wasn't so strange back in 1991, since they were going for something Unix-like and it was an established standard, and it meant that they could run software on Unix servers remotely which was very cool then and is still very cool now. Remember Windows 3.1 came out in '92 and could do none of these things, and wasn't even fully multitasking. X Windows was one of the best GUI systems out there at the time.

The problem with X is not the speed or efficiency. The problem is the protocol transmits only visual, not semantic information. Or in other words, you don't say to the X server "I want a button here" you say "I want a grey box here with some shading and text on it, and tell me when the user clicks on it". Which means the appearance and behaviour is all the responsibility of the software at the other end of the connection. So if you are running some software natively, you can customise its look and feel, but then if you run something remotely it will run according to the settings on the remote machine. What you get is the Window Manager running locally (the X Server end), and the GUI toolkit running at the other end of the connection (the X Client end). So bye bye any hope of visual consistency, and you can forget accessibility (which nobody thought of until years later). X Windows doesn't know anything about what your on screen widgets actually do.

There's another peculiarity of X Windows that is rather limiting, and that is the way you tell it that a window should have a border. It seems almost like a hack, as if Window Managers weren't invented until later, but what you do is you just open your window with the root window as the parent, and then the Window Manager gets informed and it steals it, reparents it and puts the titlebars and whatnot on it. (I know this from my experiments modifying Fluxbox.) This means your application has no control whatsoever over where your window goes. You just have faith that the window manager knows what to do with it. Which isn't usually a problem. But it means it's impossible to do "nested windows" in client areas like Windows NT has. Well, you can make them yourself, and there are toolkits with this capability, but there's no way to get the window manager to manage them.

X has instead different workspaces to keep your windows separate and grouped, so your WM typically just opens every new window on whatever workspace you're currently on. (There is a feature in the protocol to set a window's group ID but it doesn't have any defined purpose or consequences so nobody uses it.) This is a bit like the Amiga's method of using multiple screens, except in X you can't make your own workspace and put your own windows in it. You just get four* of them. And that's it.

*Well you can change that number in your settings. Fluxbox, incidentally, has away to put your windows in  preferred places, which involves identifying your windows by looking them up by title in a supplied list. Ugh.

[Mrs Beanbag]

People did know better in 1991, or if they didn't they should've. Linux could have chosen to build something better. But they don't believe in that over there, they believe that "worse is better" and crappy designs are fine as long as you get them to a working beta faster. So instead they just reimplemented the flawed system instead of trying to fix the flaws - which basically sums up the whole project.

Well I think back in 1991 and even in 1994, nobody imagined Linux as a desktop operating system for ordinary users as a direct competitor to Windows. It was intended as a Unix-substitute for enthusiasts to run on cheap consumer PCs. Using X Windows meant that existing Unix software could be ported very easily, and Motif goes back to the 1980s.

So yes, Linux could have chosen to put more emphasis on having a nice user experience for computer novices, but then it would have just been competing with Windows and would have met exactly the same fate as BeOS et al, in other words obscurity. It met a niche need, and was able to survive, and only later when it became established did this sort of thing become a concern, by which time there is already a legacy to deal with.

Wayland is long overdue in my opinion but only addresses one half of the problem. In fact, the less important half, the way I see it, they should be integrating the window manager with the toolkit, not the X server with the window manager. Also that should be a very easy thing to do. I might put it down for personal investigation, in fact. A modular toolkit system where you can add new widget types or use custom replacements, and that handles window decorations itself. Wrappers for existing toolkits to go through the new toolkit, then pull the window manager part out of Wayland, and bam, all the settings in one place.

[Mrs Beanbag]

That is a rather comical complaint to see on an Amiga forum... It is also inaccurate at best - pretty much no modern X client software is able to run on an X server from 1984, or even from 2000 - there's very little in X of today that has much to do with X of 1984 other than the core protocol.

The core protocol is kind of significant though.

From the Wayland FAQ:

The problem with X is that... it's X.  When you're an X server   there's a tremendous amount of functionality that you must support   to claim to speak the X protocol, yet nobody will ever use this.   For example, core fonts; this is the original font model that was how   your got text on the screen for the many first years of X11.  This   includes code tables, glyph rasterization and caching, XLFDs   (seriously, XLFDs!). Also, the entire core rendering API that lets   you draw stippled lines, polygons, wide arcs and many more   state-of-the-1980s style graphics primitives.  For many things we've   been able to keep the X.org server modern by adding extensions such   as XRandR, XRender and COMPOSITE and to some extent phase out less   useful extensions.  But we can't ever get rid of the core rendering   API and much other complexity that is rarely used in a modern   desktop.

http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_6

[Mrs Beanbag]

Anyway, you can make the argument that Linux was never intended to be a user-friendly desktop OS. Looking at it I'd be inclined to agree with you. (Certainly it's better as a server OS than it is as a desktop OS.) But if that's the case, they certainly shouldn't have promoted it as one.

I don't know who "they" refers to in this case. I'm not aware of anyone touting "Linux" as a user-friendly desktop OS. That's what Ubuntu and its variants try to aim for, but that's just the aim of that particular (relatively new) distribution.

Windows aimed for that explicitly in the first case, so things that came so naturally to Linux with its Unix roots, such as the multi-user network based environment, in Windows seems kind of tacked on as an afterthought. Which of course it is. Although they've got it tacked on quite well now. It's nice at the front end but if you're an advanced level user you can tell it's a bit of a mess underneath, which is kind of the polar opposite of Linux. Linux is neat underneath and a mess on the top, which is why it's so good at being a server.

One day someone will make a modern OS that is neat at both ends, that nobody can find anything to complain about, and the Universe will end.

[Mrs Beanbag]

This is inaccurate. The window manager can, and usually *does*, run exactly where your other client software runs. It is extremely rare to run the window manager tied to the X server - that most commonly happens on "second class" X environments like rootless servers Windows or similar.

I don't know what you are talking about here. I have absolutely NEVER heard of client software running through a client-side window manager. How would that even work? Every time you ran software on a different client you'd have to start another window manager on it. And then every window might look and behave differently, which would be insane!

Granted in normal desktop use the server and client are the same machine, but philosophically it's still unpleasant, and it means maintaining two different sets of settings. Having some other program on top that abstracts that process for you might make it seem neat and tidy, but it isn't.

And the X server has very minimal control over the visuals of the clients (if it behaves according to spec anyway).

That's precisely the problem. I note you didn't answer my points regarding accessibility.

And in anything resembling a "modern" X based stack, X acts as a resource arbitration and compositing mechanism and the desktop environment running on top takes care of the rest - you're attacking X as if it's the whole stack, when in reality, almost no Linux desktop has been "just X + window manager" for a decade or more.

I know this. Well let me bring another player onto the field as well if you want, wow a third completely independent set of settings, great.

Thank heavens.  There's a *reason* why most people who have experienced it hates that with a passion.

Um no, there's a *reason* why most people who have experienced the GIMP hates it with a passion, it's because it opens several windows and they spill out all over the place, not being grouped together in any way. The usual answer from the Linux crown - that's what workspaces are for. Pretty much every Windows application I've ever used uses client areas to good effect. I have not heard anyone complain about it. Likewise everyone breathed a sigh of relief when it became normal for web browsers to have tabs, which is almost the same thing only more limited.

It'd not be difficult at all to create an X extension to allow X window managers to reparent lower level windows on request of the clients, but thankfully very few people would be insane enough to try.

Oh I know, I am that insane and I did it with Fluxbox, well I made it so I could nest the windows manually, creating an X extension is rather pointless without applications that use it. I suppose there aren't many people as insane as me, though.

Of course you can make your own. Generally *applications* won't do that as it's not considered the applications place to do it, and there's no *standardized* API across window managers to do it as far as I know, and that's one thing I do miss from the Amiga. But adding more workspaces is a couple of button presses away on most Linux distro's.

Precisely my point. If you want another workspace you have to make it yourself. "A couple of button presses away" is really "changing your window manager settings" which is not something I want to do every time I open another application. I have to go into Settings - System Settings - Workspace Behaviour - then change the number of rows or columns. Yuck.

[Mrs Beanbag]

I am running out of the office now, so I can't reply to rest right now, but what you describe is simply not how X window managers work. X Window Managers connect to the X *Server* like another client, and use special commands. Clients connect to the X *Server* as well. Your client doesn't even need to know that a window manager is running.

That's exactly what I'm saying. The window manager connects to the X server. It doesn't communicate with the other clients (i.e. your applications) that use the GUI toolkits. So there is a barrier there between the toolkit and the window manager and there is no way to ensure consistency between them. Your client apps can't know anything about the window manager's settings and your window manager can't know anything about your GUI tookit's settings, unless they do happen to run on the same machine and have been programmed specially to get on with each other, but there is no guarantee of that. X windows makes no distinction regarding exactly where, physically, a client program is running, which is part of the beauty of it. The problem is that it does so in such a dumb way.

Wayland integrates the window manager with the X server. What I'm suggesting is really needed, is to integrate the toolkit with the window manager. Which currently would be very difficult to do, because X only has the concept of a top level window, and nothing else.