[KLUG Advocacy] Windows Longhorn (was GEEK JEOPARDY 15 DAYS)

[Mike Williams]

moved to advocacy because this is getting off-topic.

>On Mon, 2004-10-11 at 13:19, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
>  
>
>>>> > They are doing the
>>>> > transparency thing and animated and bouncing icon stuff like in OS X.
>>>      
>>>
>>> 
>>> This is progress?  First thing every power user will do is turn that
>>> crap off.
>>> 
>>
Lets just hope you'll still be able to turn that crap off.  You can 
barely turn off the MS Office's annoying paperclip, you can't turn off 
the little flying pieces of paper when you copy a large file, etc. etc.  
At least with the current versions you can turn off the "transitions" 
from the task bar menus.  This is why Linux or Unix is a much more 
efficient server platform than Windows: you can turn off the GUI, which 
a server doesn't need anyway.

>>    
>>
>I like the bit that says, "Longhorn will require 3D video hardware..."
>This is an IMPROVEMENT? Bad enough Red Hat's configuration tools demand
>both a running X Server and Gnome. SuSE does it right by automatically
>dropping back to ncurses for text-only terminals (okay, maybe it doesn't
>work well on print-only consoles). An 'improvement' that demands the
>latest, greatest, and most superfluous hardware ain't THAT much of an
>improvement, I say.
>
>  
>
I've heard some who actually like the idea.  Something about replacing 
the task bar of open programs with a stack of semi-transparent ones that 
seem to angle into the screen so you can look between them and see the 
one you want.  I still think it's a silly idea, though.  A monitor is a 
2-dimensional display medium, and any attempt to pretend it's a 
3-dimensional one is likely to confuse more than it will help.  The only 
"advantage" that I believe will actually be an advantage is that you 
will have a 3-d API to the desktop, so you'll be able to run a 3-d game 
windowed without the huge performance hit this currently involves.