The thing that old-time Unix people recognise as "Unix" is the user interface that consists almost entirely of programming languages. Shells, text processors, and so on. Lots of data in human-readable text files, processed with those tools, and with custom ones you write for yourself.
For nearly thirty years, I worked that way, on all kinds of Unixes (HP, Sun, DEC, AIX, Irix, Linux, and macOS), using Xterms displayed by a good X server on a Windows machine. This was pretty good: I had the Windows that the company insisted I use, but it didn't get in the way of work. Then the company didn't want to pay for X servers any more, and the old one can't do SSH.
So now I VNC to a Linux machine (Currently Rocky 8.10) and use a Linux desktop there. It's not good. I basically don't like GUIs, but if I turn Windows down hard, it's usable. macOS is determined to entertain me in ways that just annoy me. The desktop I'm presented with on Linux has not been polished. It is crude and clunky, and terrible at window management. It seems to have been designed by someone who had been told about GUIs, but took all the wrong lessons from that, making using the GUI the thing you have to concentrate on, getting in the way of working.
It appears that if you have a multiplicity of GUIs, you get a lot of half-arsed ones. If a commercial organisation puts a lot of work into polishing one, it can at least be less crude.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2025-07-08 06:23 pm (UTC)For nearly thirty years, I worked that way, on all kinds of Unixes (HP, Sun, DEC, AIX, Irix, Linux, and macOS), using Xterms displayed by a good X server on a Windows machine. This was pretty good: I had the Windows that the company insisted I use, but it didn't get in the way of work. Then the company didn't want to pay for X servers any more, and the old one can't do SSH.
So now I VNC to a Linux machine (Currently Rocky 8.10) and use a Linux desktop there. It's not good. I basically don't like GUIs, but if I turn Windows down hard, it's usable. macOS is determined to entertain me in ways that just annoy me. The desktop I'm presented with on Linux has not been polished. It is crude and clunky, and terrible at window management. It seems to have been designed by someone who had been told about GUIs, but took all the wrong lessons from that, making using the GUI the thing you have to concentrate on, getting in the way of working.
It appears that if you have a multiplicity of GUIs, you get a lot of half-arsed ones. If a commercial organisation puts a lot of work into polishing one, it can at least be less crude.