They are both clean, easy to use and well thought through. Gnome and BeOS remains to be my favourite desktops. Might have worked in the past, but not anymore. But you would think that they could come up with a better concept than the dock.Īlso, the “one menu bar” concept doesn’t really translate well to a 24″ monitor. I know, Apple wants to be different, and they would never switch to a regular task bar. It looks really simple and cool, but in actual use it’s much more complex and frustrating than the competitors. The dock, while being a trademark of OSX, is a very good example of that. It seems to me that they wanted it to look simple to use, but forgot to actually make it simple to use. The window and file management in OSX feels like it’s from the stonage. Well, I’ve never gotten used to it really. I switched from Ubuntu to MacOS X for the apps (media production mostly) and even though I’ve disliked parts of Aqua when using it before I though it would be just a matter of getting used to it. But there’s also a lot of stuff that *is* available somewhere else, and has been for a while, a fact which Microsoft will never acknowledge.) I’m not trying to say that Microsoft never genuinely innovate - of course they do, and there’s some good stuff in Vista that’s not available anywhere else. Features in other people’s software don’t exist until MS copies them, when suddenly they’re “revolutionary”. Aren’t Microsoft smart! Well yes, if you ignore the fact it’s existed in Firefox for a good few years now (and in Opera before that, probably).Īll innovation, ever, is done by Microsoft. A wonderful, innovative new feature in IE7 that will save you lots of messing about. Or, similarly, the search box next to the address bar. But do you think they’d ever say “we know people really liked this feature in Firefox, so we implemented it too”? Of course not! Now it’s trumpeted as one of the major advances in IE7. For a long time, Microsoft swore blind that people didn’t want tabbed browsing. The best example of this is tabbed browsing. If Microsoft released a docking programme, it would be “brand new” and “a revolutionary UI advance” and so forth - with no mention of Apple whatsoever. I think it’s to do with the fact that Linux/open-source people are almost always willing to acknowledge when something has been done before, whereas Microsoft never do so.įor example, this project basically says, “the dock in MacOS is cool, so here’s a version of it for KDE”. And FWIW, Apple is prone to borrowing working ideas wherever they can find them, as well, though their own userbase tends to hype them up as uniquely innovative far more often than the parent company does. I do think there’s a problem when you try and spin it as innovative and a unique creation after shamelessly copying something, particularly when you have thousands of engineers at your disposal working with a budget equivalent to the GDP of a mid-sized country. Software by it’s nature evolves and advances by building upon the work and ideas of others, patents be damned. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with evaluating alternative products and emulating those things that you think work well and avoiding those that don’t, it’s just common sense. OSS frequently recycles and reinterprets as part of the development process. Linux developers rarely have an issue with attributing the origin of an idea or implementation. If someone in the Linux community does it, then it’s cool. I’m just curios: If Microsoft does anything remotely like Apple we’re flamed unmercifully. (It is getting harder to find top-quality parts without LED’s, glowing this/that, or viciously bright blue power lights, that drives me up the tree, even if easily fixed). of any and all other OS’s – it helps with migration to a *nix/opensource platform and allows you a variety to mix/match.Įven if you don’t agree with that point, though, programs such as kxdocker aren’t sapping the open source community of either its base of contributers or starving it of its top programmers, it’s a splash in the sea if you will.įew will want a cheap generic beige PC, but not everyone wants a lexan-covered Vegas strip either. One choice is going to be what’s popular, indeed I fully support the cloning of look/feel/etc. The flexibility of an open-source community allows, though, for people who do enjoy the slickity look of the Mac interface, as well as more (or less) traditional interfaces for the rest of us. I followed that part of what you’re saying as well and I do agree in-so-much as half the time I use a terminal to run programs, lol.
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