Question about Linux UI "portability"


I rather like OS X and wish I could rip the UI right off and stick it on anything. Elementry is ok but it doent have those little touches that make it so smoothe. Unity however has those little touches. :) Thats all. Hopefully for CS in college I can make the portable UI I've always wanted. Ill port it to P2 if all goes well :D
 
I rather like OS X and wish I could rip the UI right off and stick it on anything.
Ever since the first screenshots of Aqua were released back in 2000 or so people have been copying the bitmaps and tried to "stick" the appearance of OSX to other... things... but appearance does not make OSX, which is...

Elementry is ok but it doent have those little touches that make it so smoothe. Unity however has those little touches. :) Thats all.
..exactly what you are talking about, however you seem to have realized that the shell of OSX is far more than just "a binary called Finder and pretty bitmaps".

I believe most OSX-fans would not say Unity is there yet. Rather, within the first few minutes they start wondering why something in Ubuntu is so "illogical". If you understand the programs it consists of and how they work, seen, for example, gnome evolve, the illogical becomes logical and many aspects in OSX become an excercise in frustration. And also, many aspects of Unity become eyebrow rising "faults".

Hopefully for CS in college I can make the portable UI I've always wanted. Ill port it to P2 if all goes well :D
You'll spend quite a bit of time to get to the state where Unity is now and the places you end up modifying will probably not be limited to just the core "UI" in the end (and modify you will, because writing your own widget library would be a pretty huge undertaking...). But this is not to say you (along with likeminded people) could not do it, quite the contrary. It is inevitable that as the people who have "always" (which is just a few short years in this context...) used Androids, OSXs, Windows8s and Ubuntus start rolling their own, the mechanisms and ways of working of those UIs start "leaking" all over the place.

After all, it happened to the window+desktop+startmenu-combination too. When a generation of people comes who have learned to "expect" something, they will eventually bolt it in place. But if you have a different background and manage without something, even have adapted to use computers efficiently without something, you kind of end up viewing that something as a gadget - after all, you never needed one in those "goode olde days...".

Then a new generation will come along and they'll have used "UI - The Next Iteration" from the start and you shout "IT'S A STUPID GIMMICK!!!" in the forums :p .
 
Lol! it is a stupid gimmick tho. There is absolutely no need for it. And yet it makes a computing experience so much more pleasurable. And ya I couldnt do it on my own, but hopefully I can find others that have that as an interest with me.
 
it just occured to me. Did ppl resist when Xorg et al. came out? "no no no CLI is all you need, dont waste the processing power" ???
 
it just occured to me. Did ppl resist when Xorg et al. came out? "no no no CLI is all you need, dont waste the processing power" ???
That's entirely likely...

There will always be someone around that resists change...

EDIT: There are still people that swear by commandline for everything. (I agree commandline is very powerful and especially useful for scripting tasks etc...)

Sometimes things are easier to do in a GUI and sometimes quicker to do in commandline > if you know what you are doing.
 
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my favorite way of doing things is the DOS to Windows 1 - 3 method. You boot to DOS and run the Windows executable. That way you only use the GUI when you need it.
 
it just occured to me. Did ppl resist when Xorg et al. came out? "no no no CLI is all you need, dont waste the processing power" ???
That's entirely likely...

There will always be someone around that resists change...
Likely? You kidding me? Was there ever...

As someone who's .xinitrc is in it's entirety to this day can be summarized as: "insert-wm-here & xterm"... Look, it's not me resisting the change, I embrace change, it's change resisting me!!!

:p

But seriously what drove me, for example, to use X in Linux at all during the early days was Mosaic. Later Netscape. What else was there that would have offered an advantage? Xv? Matlab plots? I can't even remember that well anymore what I used... all I know is the programs that existed were quite crude even compared to Windows 3.1 (the practically only alternative).

And it wasn't XOrg those days, XOrg came later... And OSF/Motif was something you bought if you wanted it. I didn't use a Window manager, actually. Not using one caused some problems (popups etc.). I had a neat setup where ALT-F7 was the browser. ALT-F1 was my "own work". ALT-F2 was irc... etc.

And you know, my usage of dwm reflects this setup a lot to this day. The advantage it offers is stuff like copypaste between terminals and... well... copypaste between terminals...

It worked back then, it works now.

Whenever I start computing, for example coding, I head over to such a setup. OSX and Windows are "apprunners" for me, they are not a computing environment for me. They are the place where I can run software I buy and they are the OS I boot to be "compatible with everyone".

EDIT: There are still people that swear by commandline for everything. (I agree commandline is very powerful and especially useful for scripting tasks etc...)

Sometimes things are easier to do in a GUI and sometimes quicker to do in commandline > if you know what you are doing.
When it comes to computing related tasks (as opposed to making music, making movies, making images, making <insert-a-non-computer-related-hobby-here>) a command line is almost always faster provided you know the spells in advance. These days the problems stem from programs assuming no-one wants to use the command line for things. This is especially true for large companies like Microsoft, who have only recently introduced, for example, the obviously needed capability to remove programs via command line (now at last possible via PowerShell). And then made things like that such a pain-in-the-butt that you have to have good reason to want to do it... Both Windows and OSX programs pretty much assume you want to use a mouse. Linux offers some minor relief from that. Nothing annoys me more than having to lift my hands from the keyboard to click an "OK" popping up.

But there is a lot of genuine "not getting it" involved in "overvaluing" the command line. One prime example is the Apple full text indexing introduced in MacOSXWasIt4or5Can'tRemember. Spotlight thingy. Since that was introduced I practically stopped using the OSX search completely. I tried to use it initially. Partially because when I use OSX or Windows, I try to be "pure" with them and not mess too much with the working environment. But there were things I did not like in Spotlight and I can't honestly even remember what they were anymore. Lack of control was one for sure. Another one was that I always knew roughly where to look. I do not loose files very deep. Instead, a good old "find . -exec grep -H texttofind \{} \; | less" is something that comes from my spine in a flow.

And since there's always a terminallike thing on whatever computer I use open, it is also quite universal...

I remember spending quite a few hours trying to make Windows and OSX into what I like, then basically just giving up and leaving that to the one environment that bends: Linux. So, using Windows or OSX is like driving a mate's car: Can be done, must be done to get the drunken dude home. But you don't actually enjoy it really, it just needs to be done? It's not your car.
 
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I drive a '99 Mazda Miata 10ae!!! And I love it. And as far as OS X the only "bending" I need to do would be easily solved by opensourcity. mimor tweaks would fix any problems I have with it. But sadly that will never happen.
 
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