It's a bit of a rant, because I've been feeling a little victimised lately , but I thought it may be of some interest to a few people here. So:

Linux copying Windows - The dids, shoulds & coulds

An excellent article ; It mentions the reason for my unfetterd hAt for KDE and Gnome spot on!("Cloning" the Windows-look&feel)

The problem, however, is that most who have been using computers in recent times, and are candidates for switching over to Linux, are comfortable only with the style of the Windows GUI.

Er, KDE bears only superficial resemblance to Windows. Very superficial, at that.

IMHO KDE is far more Mac-like than Windows-like. Konqueror reminds me of a tabbed finder (what finder would have been like were it tabbed), and not the limiting piece of crud file manager bundled into Windows 95 through Vista.

Gnome - well, it's slightly more Windows-like where file management is concerned. I USED to like Nautilus, but find it WAY too limiting and cumbersome. In fact when I use Nautilus I think it's every bit as bad as Windows Explorer. Ugh!

Have you noticed the patterns in car design?? One year, Mercedes comes out with a new twist on taillights, and then it spreads....If you're more my age--remember fins??

Designers--creative people--are often copycats.....not because they are too lazy to make their own creations, but because they see or hear something that is appealing and they want to incorporate it in their work. SW developers are no different.

Look at modern GUI systems and list the ways in which they are fundamentally different.

Now--from the user viewpoint, there are certain standards that I EXPECT:
I want right-click to give me some of the more obvious choices
I want to click on a window to make it active
I want the configuration menu to have some title that I am used to--eg "preferences"

Cars--no different: PULLING on the wiper lever squirts water on the windshield. Please don't make it PUSH just to be different...

Bottom line:
make it simple and intuitive
keep it in line with whatever de-facto standards are extant
give me OPTIONs if I don't liek the standard
above all else--don't confuse me: Don't make me try to figure out how to use some new thing that is only there because you thought it was clever.

Ahh again a very good article. I've read the others on your website and enjoyed them.
Good job!
++

Good article, but does it mention the 1984 Macintosh? Does it mention the Xerox work that preceded this, or the Whirlwind machine that first introduced us to the light-pen?

Microsoft Windows is often viewed, by this generation of computer users, as "the only thing there ever was," because to you, it is. (Unless you encountered a Macintosh.) If I showed you a "card saw" and described the wonderful travails of cutting the remnants of a shredded 80-column punched-card out of a card reader, or told you just what a wonderful confetti the little punched-out holes make, you'd look at me very strangely indeed. You didn't encounter Unix, or anything else, when a 24x80 character character-only screen (or a DecWriter or a teletype) was de rigeur. Nonetheless, Windows is an engineering product of those times, albeit several short generations removed. And, while I intend neither to further reveal my age nor to wax poetic about "those days," it's true that your perspective about such things are a product of what you have to compare it with ... and if "what you have to compare it with" is Microsoft Windows, you really don't have much to compare. You don't even get to see how good Microsoft Windows is, because "it's all that you know." It's your base-line.

Linux, in my estimation, isn't "apeing Windows." All of them are building on foundations that are, comparatively speaking, very old. And all of them are trying to ... improve the user-experience. Microsoft has poured huge amounts of effort into making a complex operating-system so easy to administer that, after a manner of speaking, your grandmother can do it .. and she does! Their work was not seminal; was not the first; was not the last. It was an engineering product of its time, and it still is. Engineering is like that.

To the extent that Linux supplants Windows, it will do so gradually, on its own. Most likely the two will coexist for many years, as competing computer-software systems have co-existed since the days of .. oh .. MVS and DOS(/360) .. RSTS/E and VMS .. DG Eclipse and VAX .. Linux, like Unix, "has its warts, too." There are some aspects of Windows that are "astonishingly better than" what Linux/Unix still does -- at least in some engineers' opinions -- because the Windows folks looked at those techniques, thought they stunk, and tried to improve upon them. It's a constant process of trying to make things better. Twenty years hence, what we are doing today will be regarded -- by your children -- as just as "archaic," so be prepared.

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(Puts his soapbox away, swallows another tablet of Geritol, shuffles off to watch reruns of Lawrence Welk) ...