Re: Win vs. UNIX usability (Was: Re: gnome-terminal idea)

[Tim Moore <tmoore tembel org>]

Steve Luzynski wrote:
> 
> Tim Moore wrote:
> > Agreed. However the Motif save panel *is* pretty poor. For that matter, so
> > is the GTK+ one. Frankly the nicest one I've seen on Unix is the KDE one.
> > The nicest one *not* for Unix seems to be Apple's Navigation Services API
> > which will appear in Mac OS 8.5. This is still unreleased, though, so I've
> > only seen screenshots and descriptions.
> 
> Motif is pretty shabby in general. One of those things that it would be
> nice to see die. I Haven't seen the MacOS panel - you have an URL to go
> look at?

Afraid not. I was looking for one when I posted the original message,
but couldn't find one. It was a long time ago that I saw it -- I've been
ignoring Mac OS for the past six months :-)

> > Perhaps the reason Windows 98 has such a great installer is because they
> > know most people are probably going to need to use it every two weeks! :-)
> 
> You've gotten one to run that long? Wow, I've gone back to 95 where I
> *have* to run Win32 to get some more time between reloads.

Well, actually I ignore Windows, too.
 
> > properties for GNOME MDI :-) other apps don't respond until they're
> > restarted. But what really gets me is that you can't change the color
> > depth or resolution of your screen without restarting the X server. I was
> > outraged when I first used Windows 95 and it required a reboot after a
> > resolution change, but requiring a restart in the X server isn't much
> > better because it basically boils down to the same thing: an interruption
> > of my work. Furthermore, many users just won't be able to do it, either
> > because it's totally non-obvious how to, or because they don't have root
> > access. I mean, Mac OS just *does* it, and BeOS even lets me assign
> > different resolutions/depths to different *virtual desktops* fergodsake! I
> > guess this would require changing X, but someone really should!
> 
> That is an awesome feature. Was great for developing web pages - you can
> just drag the *same* instance of your browser from a 640*480*8bpp visual
> all the way up to a 1280*1024*32bpp visual and see how it looks in each
> one. Too bad they probably started too late to really get any serious
> momentum built. A person can only function for so long in an OS with no
> word processor, no news reader, no web browser that understands
> scripting or java, etc.

The lack of apps didn't bother me as much as the lack of quality in what
was there. The OS is great, and the Tracker is pretty good, too, but I
found myself rebooting too many times to do things I couldn't under
BeOS. Finally, the mail_daemon broke with my ISPs mail server due to a
very poor implementation of SMTP on Be's part, so I stopped using it :-(
There are still a lot of things I miss about it, though. 

Tim