would it help Linux's growth if...

[TechBoyJK]

someone wrote an xwindows system that looked like windows? And it could run a DOS terminal, and it ran WINE seamlessly in the background.

 

[drag]

somebody has already done it.

🙂

Of course X windows and the various window managers and desktops you have a almost infinate variations of GUI setups, so what I use is 100x much better then anything coming from Windows, because it's optimized specificly for my tastes and uses. Key combos, window placement etc etc et.

Fun to play around with.

 

[TechBoyJK]

Originally posted by: drag
somebody has already done it.

🙂

Of course X windows and the various window managers and desktops you have a almost infinate variations of GUI setups, so what I use is 100x much better then anything coming from Windows, because it's optimized specificly for my tastes and uses. Key combos, window placement etc etc et.

Fun to play around with.

they did a good job, after looking at the screenshots

 

[n0cmonkey]

XFCE is pretty close, and even I like it.

 

[drag]

Yep. and it's not just the look. They tried to get key combos, window behavior and other little things as close as they could get it to Windows.

 

[TechBoyJK]

i noticed a pic of the registry editor. what does the registry have to do with linux, and what did they convert to make it needed or there to begin with???

 

[drag]

Well, I know GNOME project uses something similar to the registry for holding configurations settings for much of it's GUI.

It's not realy like the registry, I beleive the information is kept in the form of xml-based (think so) configuration files, which are esentially ascii plain text files vs the binary strings and keys that make up the windows registry.

For your user configurations all the config files are stored in .filename files and directories in your user's home folder. That way everything is in your home folder and their isn't any need to give your users rights out side of that. The rest of the OS can be completely read-only (well that + the executable rights for programs)

The . before the filename makes the file "hidden" so that it's out of the way for normal use. "ls" won't show it, but "ls -a" will.

That way it's nice because if any program geeks out and writes a unusable configuration you simply delete it's file or folder and it is regenerated with default settings next time you start it up.

There are a few usefull things you can do by editing the Gnome's registry-like settings, like turning off "spatial mode" (which I am a fan of), and making "explorer mode" the default for nautilus.

Mozilla/Firefox has something similar were you can edit it's special configs by typing about:config

Anyways, most "gnome" apps don't use the gnome "registry" very much, most programmers prefer to use their own .dirname or .filename type configurations. But it's fun to mess around with if your a tweaker, worst thing that can happen is that you would have to delete the .gconf directory, which I think is were it's stored (not completely sure).


I am pretty sure that's what the "registry editor" is for, gconf, but I'd never messed with it so I am not completely sure.


edit:

here is a page for gconf.

They make a distinction between "user preferences" and "configurations". This is for "user preferences" only. System wide configurations, of course, are stored inside the /etc/ directory, and rarely inside some of the subdirectories in /usr/ and /var/. Which are completely unaccessable to users.

So you can freak out on gconf all you want, and not worry about it screwing up anything outside of your user preference's, so it's not like Windows were one false move will render your system unusable.

 

[TechBoyJK]

I wonder how much overhead this has...... CLI performance vs. desktop performance and how it performs next to a KDE desktop or GNOME, etc.

 

[drag]

probably not much more or less then anything else. Just another window manager out of dozens.

 

[TechBoyJK]

n/m

 

[TechBoyJK]

could I run that desktop manager (xpde) on openbsd?