Vertical taskbars and operating systems and desktops, etc.

[Liam Proven]

On Tue, 11 Sep 2018 at 01:47, Little Girl <littlergirl at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I just want a perfect beefburger that's made exactly the way I like
> it.

That makes me very sad.

I fear that what you are saying is probably typical of many people,
and it's why anything even slightly different is dying out.

There's nothing wrong with a burger, but like I said, if I had to eat
nothing but burgers ever again, I might kill myself out of despair.

I want variety. Variety is the spice of life. I want different food, I
want to wear different clothes sometimes, listen to different music,
and I want different computer with different OSes and different
desktops once in a while.

Using the same thing all the time is *boring*.

> You might want to go exploring a bit more deeply in your area, and if
> all you find is Burger Kings and McDonald's, then you'll want to
> venture a bit further out. There are all kinds of interesting
> restaurants out there.

*That's my point.*

But you're saying that all you want is a burger and you will not even
consider eating anything else than burgers made just your way.

> This is Budgie we're talking about, right? Ubuntu Budgie has a start
> menu and a task bar (what I call a panel) at the top. It also has a
> dock on the left.

OK. I must not have noticed it, and I've deleted the VM and the ISO
now. Ah well.

Panels aren't the same as taskbars. Neither are menu bars. Controls
that you click on windows aren't "icons", they're buttons. Words
matter.

> I just messed around with it a bit more while looking at it again to
> make sure we were talking about the same thing and it turns out you
> can't use "Copy to..." or "Move to..." from the desktop, but you can
> from anywhere else and also to the desktop. Interesting.

*Shrug* Like I said, these are such trivial features to me, I didn't
even notice.

> I'd say the annoying thing is that they changed a few things just to
> be different, I guess,

Well, yes.

>  and they disrupt the work-flow for anyone
> who's used to a traditional way of doing things.

No, no, hang on. I think they were trying to do something better, not
just different for the sake of it.

It's not "traditional". It's a copyright, patented Microsoft-only way
of doing things, which happens to have been copied by the Linux world.

OS/2 didn't use it. Neither Classic MacOS nor OS X use it. DR GEM
didn't use it. CDE as used by everyone from DEC to Sun didn't use it.
SGI IRIX didn't use it. Amigas and STs and Archimedes didn't use it.
Neither did NeXT. Oberon and its descendant A2/Bluebottle doesn't.

It's not a given. It's not just how desktops work.

It's one particular way. And the Linux versions don't even copy it
_well_. They copy only the default layout and most can't cope with the
simple change caused by dragging the taskbar to one side.

It's not some normal, natural, eternal order of things. It's an
artifact of the Linux people having no imagination and copying MS.

> For instance, Save
> is usually an icon on the left side of the toolbar or a menu entry
> inside the furthest left menu in most desktops (at least ones I've
> used). In this case, they made it a text entry toward the right side
> of the toolbar, which is not where I'd go looking for it.

Moves around a lot in my experience.

> They also put the icon you click to quit an application on the left,
> which is something I also feel disrupts the traditional work-flow.

This is a trivial implementation detail and can usually be moved.

Ubuntu moved it because it put the status indicators at top right, and
made it possible to merge the title bar of maximised windows into the
top panel. So if the close/maximise/minimise controls stayed there,
they'd mix in with the notification icons, as they do on GNOME 3 if
you use a "pixel saver" addin.

So Ubuntu moved 'em to the side Apple happen to use.

Later they switched to GNOME 3 and moved 'em back. Big deal. I rarely
use 'em anyway -- I use keystrokes. It's quicker.

Anyway, on all these environments, they can be moved to either side
with a trivial couple of clicks in a tweak tool. The location is
_really_ nothing to get excited about.

> They may yet mature into something appealing.

I doubt it, given their similarity. I think some will die out and a
huge amount of duplicated work will be wasted.

> I can tell, just by looking at it, that it would annoy me unless I
> had the power to configure it to undo the things I can see that I'd
> instantly dislike about it.

No, you can't decide that. I am telling you that you can't. You have
to try it to know.

You are being offered a plate of pasta and because it's not a burger,
you're refusing to try it.

Not everything is a burger. Some things that are nothing like burgers
are _better than burgers_. Shock horror.

Apple got to be the first $1Tn dollar company in the world selling an
OS with that UI and very limited customisability.

It's not just because they're fashionable. It genuinely works extremely well.

Do not dismiss it because it does not look familiar. Give them some
respect and credibility. They didn't change it just to be different.
macOS is derived from NeXTstep, a 1987 OS, with changes to resemble
the classic Mac system, a 1984 OS with a lot of inspiration from
LisaOS, a 1981 OS.

3 teams of the most brilliant programmers the world has ever known
built those 3 OSes.

You do _not_ get to dismiss it with "the controls aren't where I like"
without even trying it.

> >What? You mean window buttons? They're the same as Unity.
>
> Yes, and Unity is horrendous, too. I never used it and never would.

It was and is the best Linux desktop I have ever used, and I have used
a lot more of them than you have.

I am not saying that my opinion trumps yours. I'm just saying that you
can't judge something you have never tried.

You dismiss is because it is _different_. There are good reasons for
that, which for those of us with the flexibility to change our habits,
and who are willing to drop our preconceptions, we found better.

You appear to be younger than me. By rights you should be telling me
off for being old, inflexible and hidebound, not the other way round!

> When I mentioned the placement of the icons on the title bar, I was
> referring to the red, yellow, and green icons in the upper left
> corner of the open window in that screenshot. I assume those are the
> window controls for minimizing, maximizing, and closing it.

Those are not icons, they are buttons. Please use the standard terms,
it's easier for everyone.

> I would
> find having them on the left disorienting and would rather have them
> on the right.

No you wouldn't. Within 1 or 2 dozen hours you would not even notice.

> >> the fact that the menu items are up in the panel,
>
> >What? It doesn't have "panels". And the menu bar being up there is
> >from 1984 and is the most tried-and-tested GUI design in the world.
> >Nothing older survives.
> >
> >I'm not saying it should be to anyone's taste, but it _works_.
>
> Using the same image from the Wikipedia link above:
>
> The menu bar, as you call it, is the thing at the top that looks like
> a panel to me. At any rate, every program you open has its menu items
> up in that menu bar/panel. I find that disorienting and would rather
> have them at the top of the actual program window.

It's not a panel. A panel is a customisable, relocatable object that
holds controls to start and switch between apps. The Mac's menu bar
does none of that.

It's also the oldest commercial mass-market GUI in the world, with a
37 year history. You don't magically get the right to refer to it
using different terms from GUIs invented 20 years later.

> You do and others might, but I really don't. I'm content with the
> traditional desktop and am only unhappy with it when developers
> decide to change it for change's sake or for some other reason.

It's *not* traditional. It's _one_ model, of many, and others are as
good or better.

Stop dismissing what you have never tried.

I'm just going to delete the rest of this, because there's no point
arguing over preferences.

I am dismayed to find someone so very close-minded that they will not
even try things slightly different from what they know. It's very
saddening and makes me angry and I do not want to shout.

-- 
Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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