laughing at Windows 10 for adding a feature Linux had for years
I just discovered that Windows 10 (which, like most people, I'm regrettably required to use at work) offers multiple desktops a la Linux--the first Windows OS to do so. Well, well, look who's late to the party.
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Well, to be perfectly fair, Windows since day-one used a fundamentally different strategy to provide windowing. Linux uses a client-server strategy, even when both the "client" and the "server" are running on the same machine. Windows, on the other hand, uses bitmaps. Which is why Windows' "remote access" clients are considerably more cumbersome and less efficient. (Just look at the source code of the various Linux clients to see what I'm talking about.)
And, to be even more "perfectly fair," the strategy chosen by the Windows engineers at that time was actually defensible. But Microsoft has been obliged to live with it ever since. |
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But Microsoft ripping off features is nothing new. They do it all the time. Remember how Zune was going to be the next iPod? |
Steve Jobs (RIP ...) said it best about the very earliest version of Windows: "all they did was to rip off the Macintosh." :D
But nevertheless, here we are. At the present end-point of several very different technology strategies. (And, let the record show that Apple completely abandoned(!) its original "Macintosh" platform and successfully(!!) rebuilt the whole thing around Unix.®) Miraculously, all of them are still making paying customers happy and thus paying our bills. ("Sssshhhh!!" Please don't tell them how we actually do it!) ;) |
Legally it is ok to copy the look and feel of another program as long as the actual code is different.
Apple did the same thing since the first real actual consumer product with a GUI was developed by Xerox. Jobs also hired away some of the engineers that worked on the project at Xerox which probably helped some too. And the first idea of a GUI was dreamed up by Douglas Engelbart in the 1960's... |
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Multiple desktops is useless feature anyway. Learn to use minimize all, etc. I tried it for a while under linux but it doesn't make things easier, and very few people actually use it. (or am I wrong?)
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I disagree with enigma9o7. I find multiple desktops very useful to my workflow. I can have one set of applications for a particular task on one desktop, etc., and switch between tasks without having hunt for the relevant application(s) in a taskbar.
Choice is good. |
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Now a lot of time has gone by since Steve Jobs' death and Apple has long since dropped any effort in usability and efficiency. Instead they are chasing "engagement" which measures success by how long a person has to dork around with the interface, regardless of whether anything gets done or not. In fact, efficiency runs counter to engagement. If one is done in a click or two and can move on, less time is spent. As for the multiple desktops now being part of legacy operating systems, the annoying part is that what's left of the trade press are all acting like it is a new feature rather than pointing out that M$ is late to the game again and has always sucked. Given the current trajectory, it will always continue to suck. |
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Edit: Not necessarily 'useless' but a novelty for most users. |
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I almost always use at least two these days, though since I am usually working with multiple monitors these days, the number of virtual desktops stays low. In the old days, during a busy week, I could often keep 7 or 8 out of 9 occupied with various key projects and their subtasks.
I think that the desktops might be one of those things that people are no longer shown and thus don't know about and therefore don't use so much, mostly because of the mind rot which early M$ Windows exposure causes and the resulting limited expectations for the software and its usability. |
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https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/90/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histor...user_interface |
The thread title needs some work. Laughing at an OS is every bit as futile laughing at your toaster - or going outside and laughing at some brick walls or lamp posts...
"Linux" doesn't have that feature, as Linux is a kernel - it doesn't implement features such as multiple desktops. Some window managers or desktop environments may have that feature. I just managed to find the feature in Windows 10 - I don't have a use for it and never have had a use for it in KDE, gnome, XFCE, etc, etc, either. With gnome being a dodgy Apple rip off, originally developed by a self confessed Apple fanboi (who now works for MS), and KDE and a few others, essentially aping the Windows desktop paradigm, focusing on MS adopting a feature which is arguably little used, seems a bit of a misfire.... |
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Actually, I believe that virtual desktops were available as an add-on to Windows quite early (XP?) — you could download a patch from Microsoft — but hardly anyone knew about them and they couldn't be incorporated into the system because they made a lot of existing software crash.
I can't imagine doing without them. I presume those distros which don't set them up by default are a manifestation of the dumbing-down practiced to protect ex Windows users from getting confused, poor things! |
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It was third-party software rather than a Microsoft patch, though presumably there had to be some form of Windows-level support for the tool to work - and it worked well - I never had any issues with crashes. (I also remember being confused that, despite whatever Linux-based OS/DE I was trying back then having native support, the functionality wasn't anywhere as good as what I was using in Windows.) These days, I've got enough screens and don't often need to jump between contexts on a single system, so I rarely use virtual desktops for any OS, but that doesn't make it useless. |
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Just for kicks today I added another desktop to my Win10 install, booted Ubuntu 20.04 in WSL (Windows Sub-system for Linux) 2, and ran an xfce-4 desktop in an x server. Fun for a while switching back and forth but not really a necessity - for me at least. :) |
That's an interesting use of virtual desktops. A different desktop environment in each. I don't think we can do that in linux, and if we can, it'd be a waste of resources imo. But if I was running windows as primary OS, that sounds like really cool use of it. And windows never good for resource usage anyway, one of the main reasons some people (i.e me) use linux in the first place, so if I were runnig windows it'd be on some newfangled computer with tons of memory and cpu anyway (I'll no longer suffer using it on older PC now that I'm aware of linux, lightning fast even on machines a decade old...)
I guess Microsoft doing cool things these days. Already heard about wsl/wsl2 but didnt know you could run a desktop environment in a seperate virtual desktop. Very cool Microsoft, good on ya! |
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It seems everybody's trying to create the perfect Remote Desktop (or at least Remote Application) experience (Google Stadia, Nvidia GeForce NOW, Windows 365 Cloud PC), while the developers of the various Linux Desktop Environments are busy making sure Linux won't be able to compete in that space. |
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The valid point is that under X, clients have access to server events even when the client window is not in focus. That means client A can read keystrokes you're typing into client B, which is completely unnecessary and possibly a security issue, if you run untrusted applications (which people do). But in any desktop environment, some information is shared between all clients/applications, because that's the entire idea of the environment. For instance, did you know that if you copy some text in a document you're working on, every single active application on your computer, including any web pages that are currently open, can access that text and do with it whatever it wants? *scary music* Because of course they can; that's the entire point of having a clipboard. That's not a security issue, that's the clipboard doing what it's supposed to do. Quote:
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(For instance, the Wayland developers' default response to critics pointing out the lack of network transparency seems to be "duh, just use VNC.") |
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I read your post and wanted to disagree with you... But I can't because you're right. Quote:
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There are indeed some issues with the design of X. For historical reasons, confidentiality was not considered when the protocol was originally designed, and likewise no-one thought about the possibility of malicious clients connecting to the X server. The article referenced earlier in this thread made a big deal of X clients having access to all keyboard events. But surely, if a malicious application is actually running on your system, you have bigger problems than just the possibility of it snooping on your keystrokes. So how about instead of simply running the application on your system and having it connect to the X server, you run it inside a virtualized/containerized environment? Now the hypervisor can easily filter X events (or anything else, really), and as a bonus the application has very limited access to local storage. This would have been unthinkable in the 1970s and 1980s, but is easily achievable with any consumer-grade PC today. We're currently on version 11, revision 7 of the X protocol (X11R7). Should it be further improved upon? Certainly. I'd even agree that sufficient redesign is warranted that one should seriously consider sacrificing at least some backwards compatibility and bumping the major version number. But I really don't think getting rid of network transparency is a good idea. |
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https://archive.org/details/powertoys https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/wind...on-windows-xp/ I'm not sure about on Vista or 7 - and even on XP it wasn't as 'seamless' as modern virtual desktops (e.g. in xfce or macOS) - the start menu/start bar still behaved as a system global if I remember right (this thread seems to confirm this: https://www.vistax64.com/threads/mul...desktops.3953/), and as DavidMcCann points out, it could cause things to crash (if I remember right running any Direct3D application in a window with DeskMan.exe running was playing with fire)). I'm sure there were third party applications that did this a lot better - I remember a few names like 'Display Fusion,' 'UltraMon,' and 'Window Blinds' but I couldn't point to any of them as specifically offering this functionality or not. Some quick web searching indicates that, as broughtonp suspected, the underlying API has been there, there's just not been much userland implementation (beyond the Microsoft 'Power Toys' tools) - see here: https://www.howtogeek.com/195962/unl...icrosoft-tool/ |
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As for saying Linux is a kernel...https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...eh-4175671773/ . You're not the only "Linux is a kernel" nitpicker on LQ. |
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Your argument is about "Linux" / GNU/Linux nomenclature - that "Linux" has never had this feature either - it has been a feature of various window managers and desktops. Those window managers and desktops are not specific to Linux. |
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--- wrong thread ---
Edit: Accidental posting. Ignore me.
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Please, let us remind ourselves that, long after folks like "Steve Jobs" and "Xerox" realized the importance of "GUIs," the only thing that remained, at that point, was: "a single desktop." Well, when the issue of "remoteness" began to show its ugly head, different teams did different things.
Apparently, "the Unix (thus: Linux) teams" had already hit upon the idea of "client/server." That the user-side client would be able to re-create the necessary graphics upon orders by the server. Well, the Windows teams instead resorted to "bitmaps." |
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I still bear the scars. Millennials laugh at me for clicking "save" so often. |
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They laugh at you? And? I would laugh at millennials, except that they're not funny. |
The Taskbar being in the middle. We already were able to do that. Weather in the TaskBar. I have seen someone do that in Arch Linux.
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I don't want to rant, but, isn't copying someone _else's_ ideas and making money off it, called intellectual property theft in the US ?
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Oh, Steve Jobs many times derisively said that "Windows just copied the Macintosh." But the reality is that no one has an exclusive on a good idea.
Each development team, faced with the same problem, chose a different solution ... and then, actually made it work :eek: for many millions of people. So it goes. |
[QUOTE=sundialsvcs;6302725]Oh, Steve Jobs many times derisively said that "Windows just copied the Macintosh."
He usually included the observation that M$ couldn't even copy either well or quickly. |
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