On Tue, 28 Jul 2015 09:51:08 +0100
KatolaZ <katolaz@???> wrote:

> > xfce4 can be made to look like Windows XP (panel at the bottom,
> > notifications on the right and applications on a menu on the left)
> > which almost all of my family, friends, neighbours and students are
> > familiar with. That reduces the 'unfamiliarity' of e.g. a laptop
> > handed round a meeting or an old desktop in a cafe for Web surfing.
> >
>
> I genuinely don't understand the "familiarity" argument, at all.

I think I can explain it.

> Any
> Windows XP user is able to get around with the OSX GUI in a few hours,
> and will probably master it in two days.

I've always had a lot of trouble operating Macs.

> And the OSX GUI is the
> farthest thing you can imagine from Windows XP....

I don't see it that way. IIRC OSX has a start menu, which is the major
user interface entry point of Win95/XP.

To me, things that are far from Windows XP are Windowmaker, Unity,
Gnome3, and TWM. No start menu, and in the cases of Unity and Gnome3, no
deterministic menu at all: The menu depends on past usage (you can't
make this up, folks).

>
> Isn't it that we have been too much concerned about how dumb a dumb
> user can be?

Of course we've been much to concerned about how dumb a dumb user can
be. However, in the case of window managers, not so much.

I hate Bill Gates. But I have to give him one thing: When he was
designing Win95, he had a bunch of users sit down and work, and M$
people watched. For Win95, Bill Gates came up with a UI that was pure
genius: A start menu button that said "start", and then you get walked
level by level through a menu. It's just plain obvious, and there are
no downsides. I don't know why so many window managers, and Windows
itself, walked away from that interface. You could take a newly arrived
Martian, sit him down at a Win95 (or default LXDE) computer, and he'd
just start working.


> Or is it just that GNOME, KDE & Co. ended up sucking
> really a lot in their psychotic quest to emulate other GUIs instead of
> proposing something genuinely new when they had the opportunity to do
> so?

AFAIK, KDE is still a Win95 type interface with a deterministic start
menu. I banned all KDE libraries from my computers for a completely
different reason.

Gnome is a perfect example of your observation of "sucking a really a
lot in their psychotic quest to emulate other GUIs". When Win7 came out
with that fuzzy "we know what you want" menu, Gnome switched from the
Gnome2 deterministic start menu to the Gnome3 "hey, relax, we know what
you want, just go with the flow" interface.

> The last true "revolution" in GUIs was NeXTSTEP, 25 years
> ago. What came after was just a plethora of mix-and-match of existing
> things...

If Windowmaker at all resembles NeXTStep, I'm not a fan. After a decade
of trying, Windowmaker is still unfathomable to me. Also, what's so
great about "new"? I'd prefer "good" to "new" every day of the week,
and personally, I've seen little positive or negative correllation
between "new" and "good".

But I digress: We're talking about the *default* window manager. It
should be something obvious, and Xfce configured with a start button
and taskbar is obvious. From there, you can switch to a NeXTStep type
thing, and I can switch to a modified Openbox plus dmenu. Neither of
which I'd wish on an uninitiated user.

SteveT

Steve Litt
July 2015 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21