Window Manager
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| gstrock Mar 08, 2010 7:54 PM EDT |
I couldn't agree with you more. I hate the window manager in MS OS products. I like to overlap my windows. In particular when web programming, I'll plop an xterm with emacs running on the server in it, right in the middle of my browser. When I'm just getting the php application going I don't need to see the whole browser window. I want to be able to click on the browser's refresh page button without the browser raising and obscuring my xterm. This is impossible to do with an MS OS product. |
| Sander_Marechal Mar 09, 2010 4:11 AM EDT |
I don't ever move windows again. I'm using AwesomeWM and I have tweaked the h*ll out of it. Everything now goes where it should go automagically. I love programmable WMs :-) |
| phsolide Mar 09, 2010 9:09 AM EDT |
The lack of a window manager is only a small part of the "Choice but no choice" koan that is Microsoft Windows, no? Suppose you wanted to use a word processor. Oh, there's marvelous selection (probably, must say, I haven't really looked, but people assure me that Windows has everything) but 90% or more of the population use "Word", don't even recognize that it has problems, and won't even consider anything else. Same situation with "Outlook", "IE", "Excel", "PowerPoint", etc etc etc. There is lots of choice, but effectively, there's no choice. A weird situation to find oneself in. |
| Sander_Marechal Mar 09, 2010 9:19 AM EDT |
At least in the office suite department there is coice available. There are a ton of closed and open source office suites available for Windows. Eventually it will take off, just like Firefox did. But in window managers there is simply no choice on Windows. |
| bigg Mar 09, 2010 10:18 AM EDT |
> But in window managers there is simply no choice on Windows. I believe (but may be confused) that part of the Microsoft agreement with DOJ allows them to force everybody to use the same window manager. |
| gus3 Mar 09, 2010 10:32 AM EDT |
Quoting:I love programmable WMs :-)Sawfish FTW! Sawfish is written in a custom LISP dialect. If you want to edit your .sawfishrc, be prepared to wade through the parens. |
| PaulFerris Mar 09, 2010 1:17 PM EDT |
Most of the Window managers for Linux have the pager concept. I've been stuck using Cygwin in the past 5 years or so due to the corporate nature of my work (Cygwin, for those not in the know, is a useful operating system which has a very fat, buggy device-driver layer, provided by the device manufacturer and sanctioned by the corporate desktop support teams that have provided my hardware). All window managers are the same to me mostly -- they exist to allow me to open dozens (sometimes hundreds) of terminal windows. And no, this isn't due to anything "arcane" -- it is due to the nature of my work. As an infrastructure development kind of guy, I need command-line access because to click on several hundred dialog boxes to get my job done is not only impossible -- it's pretty much unthinkable. Find me a dialog box that can anticpate my thoughts when it comes to managing enterprise operating systems -- I dare you. My needs involve hundreds of dimensions and no 2D interface can suffice. God bless you if you need to simply browse somewhere to open a file -- I need far more depth of dimension, thought and creativity than anything pre-compiled can provide. This, among other many FOSS facets is why Linux is and will be for the foreseeable future embedded as a choice for the enterprise. Proprietary operating systems for the masses will be around for a long time as well. They obviously provide some semblance of value for some people and I understand the choices that lead some people to use them. But never let these same people tell you that their reality is superior because of the lack of choice Scott has highlighted here. They speak out of ignorance -- ignorance for the joy of choice, ignorance of the kind of work you're doing and finally just plain ignorance of the efficiency gained by using something so simple and secure as GNU/Linux. Linux for the Masses? My mom and dad run Ubuntu and consider it far superior to their Windows computers. They have a choice -- they can boot into Windows anytime -- and they are not computer whizzes at all. I suspect if more people had this same choice they would make similar decisions. |
| tuxchick Mar 09, 2010 1:28 PM EDT |
What I always wonder, why does it cost so many billions to develop the various Windowses, when all they do is get fatter but not more functional? Do they heat the Redmond campus by burning paper money? |
| gus3 Mar 09, 2010 1:56 PM EDT |
The newer bloat is for compatibility with the older bloat. |
| Bob_Robertson Mar 09, 2010 2:39 PM EDT |
TC, Microsoft has to build everything. Kernel, UI, application support. The Linux environment of distributed development means that some money is spent on the kernel, some on X, some on GNU, etc etc. It would be interesting to see, if developer time could be somehow "monetized", what a Linux system costs compared to Windows. I don't mean the silly "how much would it take to recreate Linux", that's just wishful thinking. Each release of a Linux distribution doesn't use all code written from scratch, neither does a new release of Windows. So let's see. The 2.6.34 release used, what did I read today, 836 developers and 4,000 lines added? How does that compare to core Windows developers at Microsoft? |
| tuxchick Mar 09, 2010 3:23 PM EDT |
Bob, I think that sort of measurement would have to count middle managers, program managers, marketing managers, and various other meddlers and parasites to come up with a realistic headcount for Windows development. Even with all that, I doubt that any single commercial, proprietary company can compete with the sheer numbers of contributors that the FOSS development model brings together. Even when you take UI, applications, and everything else into account Linux is still the runaway bang for buck winner. I like to trot out the example of my most fattest Linux installation, Ubuntu Studio with gillions of apps of all kinds, several different desktop environments and window managers, a complete build environment, couple of kernel source trees, all kinds of networking and troubleshooting utilities, etc etc and it adds up to about 6.5 GB. Windows 7 is around 13GB, depending which "version" you install, version in Windowsland meaning 'which version of crippled Windows did you pay too much for'. And that is with no apps. OK, you still get Minesweeper, Notepad, and Solitaire. And a nice screenshot app. And a built-in "firewall", which I am sure it is "trustworthy". |
| tracyanne Mar 09, 2010 5:11 PM EDT |
@TC, I've managed to get my Ubuntu (with the Ubuntu Studio packages added later, both Sound and Graphics dev packages) plus a bunch of Games, to 10.5 Gig, it's still smaller than a standard Windows 7 install, though. |
| PaulFerris Mar 09, 2010 5:44 PM EDT |
Tuxxy, I think the issue is a complicated mix of span of control, code scale and misguided resource management. I don't have a window into Microsoft but as it has been around for a few decades now I'm certain that there is a ton of political interference internally as to who owns what. This (I'm guessing, but likely right) hampers any kind of playful development that might go on with the codebase that exists in various forms as XP, Vista or 7. On top of this dimension is the problem of scale -- the code base is bloated, massive and wildly intertwined. Recent improvements in Windows have gone toward decoupling the GUI from the underpinnings of the OS (hard to imagine for those of us that are Linux/Unix heads). Basically, they made a strategic blunder a long time ago assuming that someone would be there to click on things -- this is part of the 2 dimensional desktop paradigm that continues to not just limit their technology, but the overall vision that the company continues to execute upon as a basic paradigm. Micro Soft says a lot -- it says "I'm a company that makes software for PCs" -- with the underlying assumptions (For one user, on a hard drive, not dependent upon networking, and so on). Yeah, I know those are generalizations, but the fact remains that when you compare their efforts and developments they're still things that only look rosy in desktop-colored-glasses. Finally, the fact is that as a monetary entity, someone has to "manage" the "resources" at Microsoft and make the developers accountable to tasks that ultimately go toward someone making cash due to the effort. These are all serious limitations. In comparison, the Linux code base (there isn't really such a thing -- the collection of GNU and various other licensed packages that make up, say, Ubuntu I will refer to here as "the Linux code base") is made up of comparatively tiny projects that can be independently toyed with, improved, bug-fixed and so on without seriously hampering the functionality of the overall "solution". This means that Linus can hack out some kernel changes in a night and be reasonably certain that the overall impact isn't going to be severe. It would be unthinkable for him to change say, an ethernet driver module and find that the GIMP was suddenly broken -- yet we see this kind of intertwined nonsense all the time in Windows land. The code base has reasonable lines of control (via the various distribution managers). The long-term effects are now noticeable. The various GNU/Linux distributions have continued to evolve, are reasonably secure, and (in my very humble opinion) comparatively higher quality in the features that they provide. That's today. Who knows what kind of gap will exist on these fronts tomorrow. There's really no going back for Microsoft -- there's only starting over and attempting to do something similar on the development front. I wouldn't hold your breath -- I don't think they could stomach the transparency of development in public, for one, and for another, their PR people have so deeply provided inane and insipid anti-open-source sound bytes in such amazing quantity that the public lambasting would be hard to imagine. The game is over anyway. Will Microsoft still be around in 20 years? -- I'd bet serious money that they will be. You can still buy a fax machine today, for the same reasons I'm certain you'll be able to buy Windows-equipped PCs tomorrow. But the real excitement will be things like the extensions of the Internet -- google applications, for example, and the integration of nanotechnology or biotech. I'm saying I don't see them ever getting past the desktop and all of the lame limitations that their constrained world-view (like a mental prison) has built for them. Oh, and I'll bet the X-box will still be viable too. Probably just as profitable as today -- nothing earth-shattering, in other words. Someone want to speculate on Zune? :) I digress. At the end of the day they're still a company that makes boxes of software for PCs. Getting them to think outside of these boxes is probably going to take another company (with a completely different name). Google (there's a name that doesn't mean "software in a box for PCs) is a nice example there of what Microsoft could have been if it had truly embraced the Internet, but it didn't. It's amazing to me to be still talking about these same limitations fully a decade on into the game. I don't think it's a stretch, in other words, to say we'll be saying very similar things in 2020. -=FeriCyde=- |
| Bob_Robertson Mar 09, 2010 6:01 PM EDT |
TC, I couldn't agree more that by any rational measure of bang for the buck F/OSS is going to come out way, way ahead. Just trying to compare apples to apples, as it were. Usually, the comparison is more like comparing apples to iconic pillars. Like comparing the "cost" of unpaid developers to paid "software professionals". So I want to give some kind of monetary representation of the code submitted, even if it does end up being extraordinarily higher results for the cost due to the reduced bureaucracy in OpenSource development compared to what Joel on Software says about the nearly impossible levels of bureaucratic and management overhead put on Microsoft developers themselves. |
| dinotrac Mar 09, 2010 6:37 PM EDT |
TC and Paulie -- If you haven't seen this yet, you should: http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c... A gift from your fellow Microsoft-tsk-tsker in arms. |
| Bob_Robertson Mar 09, 2010 7:53 PM EDT |
Too bad they turned off anonymous comments. |
| tuxchick Mar 10, 2010 1:01 AM EDT |
dino, that's a classic. Imagine, changing a simple menu cascades all the way back to the kernel. Is that genius in action or what. Paulie, there is a reason that kernel changes do not break applications, or at least are not supposed to-- Linus has a firm rule against kernel changes breaking userspace: http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/10/4/327 "If you need to break something, you create a new interface, and try to translate between the two, and maybe you deprecate the old one so that it can be removed once it's not in use any more. If you can't see that this is how a kernel should work, you're missing the point of having a kernel in the first place." Quoting: the code base is bloated, massive and wildly intertwined. Totally, like Bamixed spaghetti. And their Prime Directive is lock-in, their Secondary Directive is inertia, and their Tertiary Directive is HAHAHAA The Fools Are Still Buying It!!! Google is just a newer robber baron with better tools for privacy invasion and abuse. |
| Steven_Rosenber Mar 10, 2010 1:29 AM EDT |
I predict that Microsoft will start over with a totally new OS at some point in the next 10 years, with all the legacy Windows bits running in a VM. |
| Sander_Marechal Mar 10, 2010 3:51 AM EDT |
Quoting:dino, that's a classic. Imagine, changing a simple menu cascades all the way back to the kernel. Is that genius in action or what. While the article highlights some bad things, it's not quite so bad as you put it TC. The kernel is definitely involved, just as it is in the Linux world. For example, the team may have suggested to merge Suspend and Hibernate into one (where you suspend first, then hibernate after a certain amount of time). But if the kernel doesn't support it (or they tried to make it work but failed) then the menu needs to be redesigned. Last time I checked my Linux box also had seven entries in the shutdown menu (lock screen, log out, switch user, suspend, hibernate, restart, shut down). |
| dinotrac Mar 10, 2010 8:43 AM EDT |
Gee guys -- Interesting comments, but they betray the entrenched geekiness of a site like LXer. The big Kawow!!! is that 43 people had a say in the development of a simple freakin' menu. No wonder Vista ended up a bloated mass of pig droppings. |
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