On becoming living history

[liam_on_linux]

It is one of the oddest things in computing that stuff to me, as a big kid of heading for 60 years old but who still feels quite young and enjoys learning and exploring, that the early history of Linux – a development that came along mid-career for me – and indeed Unix, which was taking shape when I was a child, is mysterious lost ancient history now to those working in the field.

It’s not that long ago. It’s well within living memory for lots of us who are still working with it in full time employment. Want to know why this command has that weird switch? Then go look up who wrote it and ask him. (And sadly yes there’s a good chance it’s a “him”.)

Want to know why Windows command switches are one symbol and Unix ones another? Go look at the OSes the guys who wrote them ran before. They are a 2min Google away and emulators are FOSS. Just try them and you can see what they learned from.

This stuff isn’t hieroglyphics. It’s not carved on the walls of tombs deep underground.

The reason that we have Snap and Flatpak and AppImage and macOS .app is all stuff that happened since I started my first job. I was there. So were thousands of others. I watched it take shape.

But now, I write about how and why and I get shouted at by people who weren’t even born yet. It’s very odd.

To me it looks like a lot of people spend thousands of developer-hours flailing away trying to rewrite stuff that I deployed in production in my 30s and they have no idea how it’s supposed to work or what they’re trying to do. They’re failing to copy a bad copy of a poor imitation.

Want to know how KDE 6 should have been? Run Windows 95 in VirtualBox and see how the original worked! But no, instead, the team flops and flails adding 86 more wheels to a bicycle and then they wonder why people choose a poor-quality knock-off of a 2007 iPhone designed by people who don’t know why the iPhone works like that.

I am, for clarity, talking about GNOME >3. And the iPhone runs a cut down version of Mac OS X Tiger’s “Dashboard” as its main UI. 

Comments

[history_monk]

Having worked at the same place for thirty years, I usually get to explain the history before people get too confused. Since our products are DLLs, and equivalents for other OSes, we still get to work with OSes fairly raw. All of these layers that are intended to save people from having to understand anything complicated are fairly useless to us.

[symbioid]

I can't stand GNOME so much that I am doing Plasma 6 (I used pre-Plasma KDE waaaaaay back) And I was disappointed in 4 (never had a chance to try 5. It is "ok". There are some rough edges and yeah, 86 more wheels, is... a good way to put it.

But I just can't handle looking at the most boring ass desktop. And Mint's desktop is only slightly better than GNOME. I have thought about using a Tiling WM or even just an boring old stacking WM without a DE, but I'm not sure I'm that hardcore.

I'm curious what you mean about how KDE6 should have been? It seems to me that Win95 is what Cinnamon/Mate are? Is it because it's too "tweakable" - the anti-GNOME? That's what I read the wheels comment as.

I haven't really used static apps, because I prefer to just use the default package system (running CachyOS (Arch based) and it seems pretty nice. DPKG was my favorite til now. Though I imagine the world is going to be more and more going to static packaging. It certainly helps reduce dll hell.

[liam_on_linux]

It is hard to briefly summarise what I mean.

The deal is this:

Win95 was a simple elegant desktop, very much controllable with mouse or just the keyboard alone.

Everyone copies copies of Win95.

In 1996-1997 the US DOJ was threatening to split MS into separate companies. To demonstrate that its web browser, IE, was integral to its OS, Windows, MS hacked together "Active Desktop". Window content was rendered as HTML using IE and the help system became a browser.

KDE copied that, without understanding why it was how it was.

It also failed to copy the keyboard UI.

The result is a mess. Every major version since, from KDE 2 to KDE 6, made it a bigger and bigger mess.

My thesis is that the devs do not know the UI they are copying so they bolt widgets onto their widgets.

I can't stand it.

GNOME, OTOH, copies iOS, badly. It's a stripped out fragment of an accessory part of Mac OS X called Dashboard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashboard_(macOS)

... Designed for use without a keyboard or a mouse.

Result, a pretty, clean, simple UI, but deeply and profoundly crippled if you know how to drive a computer with a keyboard.

Cinnamon and MATE fake other later versions of Win9x.

Xfce at least fakes Win95, the original and the best.

But you need to know the differences between the different iterations of MS Explorer to know who is copying what:

v1: Win95

v1.1: Win NT 4

v2: Win98

v2.2: Win ME/ 2k

v2.3: XP

v3: Vista

v3.1: Win7

v4: Win8

v4.1: Win8.1

v4.2: Win10

v4.3: Win11

It has been degrading slowly since v2 appeared and rapidly since v4.