I think you misunderstand the role of a Window Manager in the X11 stack. It's a very specific part of the stack with a very limited role. It take no part in most of what goes on.
The problem you hare having is you have the wrong definition of GUI in your head where you are using it to mean using a window manager.
I disagree. I use GUI to mean the whole system. The WM is one very small part of that system.
A GUI has a bunch of features it needs to achieve: windowing system (window manager being an example),
No: a WM is not a windowing system. X11 is the windowing system. A window manager is simply a program runing on top of X11 which moves windows around.
menuing system, interprocess communications, widget libraries.... Running a
The menuing system is provided by the widget libraries (gkt, QT, etc). The IPC is provided by X11 for things GUI related.
window manager to manager terminals doesn't mean you are using a GUI you are just using window management.
Well, perhaps. In the erly days, that would suffice, maybe now it doesn't. Nonetheless I use more than terminals. I like terminals, but I use the GUI driver for gvim, run web browsers, sometimes Eagle Cad (most definitely a GUI), sometimes LibreOffice, the GIMP, Inkscape, etc. There's also other bits and bobs, like a notification area holding icons for messaging clients (pidgn, xchat, skype), a CPU, battery and temperature monitor, some bluetooth widget and so on.
When I said "you aren't even using a GUI". I wasn't being insulting or closed minded or anything else. I was simply saying the graphical setup you are using does not contain features required to classify it as a GUI.You are essentially in the pre GUI age where you have graphics on screen.
Fair enough, but I do believe you are mistaken however.
What do you think the GStreamer library does for Gnome? Or Kstreamer does for KDELIbs. No those components are not well separated, they are meshed together where applications are just wrappers around libraries.
They play videos? I'm not sure I understand the point. The WM itself takes no part in that role. Anything GStreamer, Kstreamer, FFMPEG etc based works just fine without even a window manager running.
You are right about Terminology. That is substantially more advanced something like 2005 in terms of OSX and clearly quite advanced for Linux datatypes. I'd have to know more but I'd agree that isn't 90s technology.
I don't think OSX has any equivalent, though I haven't been following the OSX thing. Terminology starts to seriously blur the line between the commandline and the terminal. I'm deeply impressed.
As far as 1994, in 1994 I was on 64 bit Suns switching over from SunOS to Solaris. I also used AIX sometimes. I hadn't been on 8 bit in a dozen years.
Fair enough. I had a sumer job in '94. I got to use an HP (running CDE) and occasionally an SGI. 8 bits were obsolete then, but that's mostly why I could afford one of my own.
I started using Linux in 1995 on cheap home computers and FVWM was the window manager that was most popular then.
I started a few years later with Redhat 5.2. The situation was similar.
Your setup is from that time. Look at Caldera Open Desktop or RedHat from the time periods. By 1999 KDE is mature enough as a GUI that people are building whole systems around it. More or less if you aren't using an integrated GUI you are pre-1999 i.e. 1990s type system.
I'm not sure I agree. Some of the components date to then. The styling certainly does, but a lot of the core, most of it I'd argue is more modern. I mean I could use GnomeShell and GnomeTerminal, but there wouldn't be any more integration than I currently have. As far as I can see, there's no integration missing that I'd get if I was running gnome.
The X11, freedesktop.org people have created and collated a very nice set of standards which allow X11 based programs to interoperate. This is why KDE programs work perfectly with a Gnome based WM running and why they both work fine under my system. The ICCCM, XDnD protocol, tray protocol, notification protocol etc describe these things.
Mixed paradigm languages would be things like Scala or Clojure.
Ah fair enough. I was under the impression that things like Ruby and Python allowed some degree of functional type programming.
Tizen is the full GUI/OS that includes Enlightenment. What would change is all your applications and your window manager would all be using EFL so functionality like messaging and notifications could pass between layers effectively. I was saying that Terminology is not a GUI, even Enlightenment is not a GUI but Tizen does have a GUI because it layers everything on top of EFL.
Sounds neat, though in X11 land those things (notifications etc) all work across libraries because they're defined as protocols rather than API calls.