21–30 of 32 posts
A shout out to those involved in Acorn, RISC OS, etc around the late 1980s and throughout the 1990's. Around 1992 or so, our family bought our first computer (when I was around 5 years old) which was an Acorn A3000 running (if I recall correctly) RISC OS 2 on ROM. The school I went to also had Acorn computers (including the RISC PC toward the latter half of the 1990’s). Nowadays I consider myself extraordinarily priv…
On the boot time - 2s was only realistic until you owned a hard drive! Then there was a boot sequence that was more like 15s after the drive span up, bringing new OS updates into play etc. And then you probably had some more customisations and apps, so my memory was more like a 30s boot. My cold Windows boot is faster than that now, but suffers from UI sludge for about 60s after I've logged in, so that counts as boot time too :( No post-boot sludge on RISC OS.
The save dialogue was really fiddly and needed some pro-level window management and mouse skills :) but I appreciated not having two UIs, one for loading and one different for saving.
A shout out to those involved in Acorn, RISC OS, etc around the late 1980s and throughout the 1990's. Around 1992 or so, our family bought our first computer (when I was around 5 years old) which was an Acorn A3000 running (if I recall correctly) RISC OS 2 on ROM. The school I went to also had Acorn computers (including the RISC PC toward the latter half of the 1990’s). Nowadays I consider myself extraordinarily priv…
I guess because I'm in a bit of a mood thanks to arguing with Linux Desktop evangelists lately, I'd like to point out that Rox Filer implemented exactly this file saving functionality (and many other good ideas RiscOS) on Linux. Then they built Rox Desktop around it. It was great. There were AppDirs, context-menu-only, spacial file management, drag-n-drop to save, etc. Naturally, the project's reward for trying to im…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess because I'm in a bit of a mood thanks to arguing with Linux Desktop evangelists lately, I'd like to point out that Rox Filer implemented exactly this file saving functionality (and many other good ideas RiscOS) on Linux. Then they built Rox Desktop around it. It was great. There were AppDirs, context-menu-only, spacial file management, drag-n-drop to save, etc. Naturally, the project's reward for trying to im…
I've been thinking for a while that the only way to get a decent desktop experience on Linux is going to be to start from scratch. The graphics drivers and Wayland are probably adequate. But absolutely everything from there on up - window mangers, GUI toolkits, applications, configuration tools - needs to be written from scratch by people who know what they are doing and can build all of it as a cohesive whole. This…
No-one can be bothered to fix bugs in the existing desktop environments because they are all too busy working on a rewrite that will be the new 'perfect' desktop, with its own set of annoying bugs and missing features compared to the previous revisions.
Linux needs desktops that get incrementally improved, fixing the countless minor but irritating 'paper cut' kind of bugs that hinder users. But the problem is, that kind of development work is boring, and the people who spend their free time writing open-source desktops naturally want to work on their own interesting projects instead. Reading and fixing existing code is just not fun.
This all sounds very harsh and unfair on the OSS developers, but it is just a fact of life; if you are volunteering your time and effort on a project, you probably don't want to do the boring and dull bug fixing work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess because I'm in a bit of a mood thanks to arguing with Linux Desktop evangelists lately, I'd like to point out that Rox Filer implemented exactly this file saving functionality (and many other good ideas RiscOS) on Linux. Then they built Rox Desktop around it. It was great. There were AppDirs, context-menu-only, spacial file management, drag-n-drop to save, etc. Naturally, the project's reward for trying to im…
I've been thinking for a while that the only way to get a decent desktop experience on Linux is going to be to start from scratch. The graphics drivers and Wayland are probably adequate. But absolutely everything from there on up - window mangers, GUI toolkits, applications, configuration tools - needs to be written from scratch by people who know what they are doing and can build all of it as a cohesive whole. This…
A shout out to those involved in Acorn, RISC OS, etc around the late 1980s and throughout the 1990's. Around 1992 or so, our family bought our first computer (when I was around 5 years old) which was an Acorn A3000 running (if I recall correctly) RISC OS 2 on ROM. The school I went to also had Acorn computers (including the RISC PC toward the latter half of the 1990’s). Nowadays I consider myself extraordinarily priv…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess because I'm in a bit of a mood thanks to arguing with Linux Desktop evangelists lately, I'd like to point out that Rox Filer implemented exactly this file saving functionality (and many other good ideas RiscOS) on Linux. Then they built Rox Desktop around it. It was great. There were AppDirs, context-menu-only, spacial file management, drag-n-drop to save, etc. Naturally, the project's reward for trying to im…
I've been thinking for a while that the only way to get a decent desktop experience on Linux is going to be to start from scratch. The graphics drivers and Wayland are probably adequate. But absolutely everything from there on up - window mangers, GUI toolkits, applications, configuration tools - needs to be written from scratch by people who know what they are doing and can build all of it as a cohesive whole. This…
A shout out to those involved in Acorn, RISC OS, etc around the late 1980s and throughout the 1990's. Around 1992 or so, our family bought our first computer (when I was around 5 years old) which was an Acorn A3000 running (if I recall correctly) RISC OS 2 on ROM. The school I went to also had Acorn computers (including the RISC PC toward the latter half of the 1990’s). Nowadays I consider myself extraordinarily priv…
I had a bit part writing upgrades to the PC emulator, getting Duke Nukem to run. On the boot time - 2s was only realistic until you owned a hard drive! Then there was a boot sequence that was more like 15s after the drive span up, bringing new OS updates into play etc. And then you probably had some more customisations and apps, so my memory was more like a 30s boot. My cold Windows boot is faster than that now, but…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a bit part writing upgrades to the PC emulator, getting Duke Nukem to run. On the boot time - 2s was only realistic until you owned a hard drive! Then there was a boot sequence that was more like 15s after the drive span up, bringing new OS updates into play etc. And then you probably had some more customisations and apps, so my memory was more like a 30s boot. My cold Windows boot is faster than that now, but…
Any link to your writing on the emulator and getting duke3d running? I’d at least find it interesting
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been thinking for a while that the only way to get a decent desktop experience on Linux is going to be to start from scratch. The graphics drivers and Wayland are probably adequate. But absolutely everything from there on up - window mangers, GUI toolkits, applications, configuration tools - needs to be written from scratch by people who know what they are doing and can build all of it as a cohesive whole. This…
Please, no. One of the biggest problems IMO for Linux desktops is that everyone decides to rewrite most of it from scratch. (e.g. gnome 2 -> 3, Ubuntu's varied and changeable desktop UIs, etc...) No-one can be bothered to fix bugs in the existing desktop environments because they are all too busy working on a rewrite that will be the new 'perfect' desktop, with its own set of annoying bugs and missing features compar…
Compared to contemporary DEs it flies!
The question remains if this makes sense, because countless other WMs can be made to fly also, which one could also use, and not lose that much functionality at all, given the lack of available software which would utilize anything that the old KDE3 has to offer. So one way or another, the Linux desktop experience remains ghettoish.