Sounds a bit like a ZUI:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

My personal favourite is A2/Bluebottle, based on the Oberon OS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

(BTW I wrote the article at the top of the post...)

Hi. :-)

A part?! It's only about 500 words long. It's a short! :-(

No I do not mention XNS. Has Linux _ever_ supported XNS? Not that I'm aware of.

Hi there. I wrote the article. Did you actually read it?

Because I specifically mentioned AppleTalk, as well as IPX/SPX.

Wrong.

It means Apple paid for *testing*, and it passed.

FWIW multiple Linux distro vendors have paid for testing as well, and the distros passed, which means that *Linux is a UNIX*.

Currently only Huawei's distro, but previously others passed too.

https://www.opengroup.org/open...

Yeah, no. Bootloaders or Kickstarter or Toolkit in ROM doesn't count.

I *used* an Amiga with a single floppy, and multiple Macs with a single floppy. It was a nightmare. Even copying a largish file from 1 disk to another could take a dozen swaps.

On an ST or an Archie, it was very much more pleasant, because no code needed to be loaded into RAM: it was already there, in the memory map, in ROM.

The difference, for me, is that the Archie had a pleasant multicolour GUI that ran in hi-res mode in full colour, with multitasking, whereas the ST had either very low-res colour or hi-res black-and-white. If you had the special, expensive monitor, that is.

I don't agree with a single sentence of that, but I can see that you are keen to re-enact 35+ year old platform wars.

I am not.

So, yeah, not even going to try to engage with any of this mid-1980s platform-boosterism.

I have an Amiga, but I only got one this century, and not being a gamer, I never found all that much interest in it. It's a nice little vintage computer, and I have a CF card and interface to put in it to replace its elderly 400MB IDE hard disk, and I hope to get it running AmigaOS 3.9 and maybe even get it on my home network.

I have an ST, too, and a Sinclair QL. I try to be even-handed in these things. They all had their own strengths, and their own weaknesses too.

For instance, Amigas, like Macs of that era, were a nightmare to use with a single floppy drive. Two floppy drives was a workable minimum, and ideally a hard disk.

Whereas when I used an ST in the early 1990s, I found it perfectly usable with one floppy, because like the Archimedes, the OS was in ROM, meaning very little disk swapping was needed.

Broken link.

Um. It is not hard. You download it, you write it to a card, you put the card into the Pi, and you turn the Pi on.

That is about it.

The IP owners, RISC OS Developments, have a distro especially for the Pi and aimed at RISC OS newbies. It's called RISC OS Direct and it's here:

https://www.riscosdev.com/dire...

It requests a 16GB card, but I installed a fresh copy as part of the research for this article and it seems to be only an 8GB image. So an 8GB card should be fine.

Write it with `dd` on Linux, and when it complains that there's not enough space, Ctrl+C out of it and you should be good to go.

> were sever things.

* several things

Oops.

[Author of the linked article here]

For me, there were sever things.

The ST and Amiga were games machines, from companies whose previous 8-bit ranges had been very strong in games. They had the same mainstream CISC CPU, a solid choice but not blazing fast. The Amiga had amazingly capable supporting chips for amazing hardware-accelerated games graphics and sound, but very lacklustre mediocre programming languages. So the programming languages that took off were 3rd party add-ons, so not standard, meaning rivalry, no interop, etc.

On the Amiga and ST, development was intended to be done by pros, on different machines.

Acorn's previous hit was the BBC Micro, an educational computer, very strong in programming languages, with a structured BASIC that had named procedures and inline assembler.

So the Archimedes range was designed as a programmer's computer, with a screaming fast CPU (but no fancy chipset), an integrated state-of-the-art BASIC supporting local variables, so you could write recursive procedures etc., a GUI code editor bundled, plus graphics and sound editors _right there in the ROM_.

ST and Amiga owners were expected to play games written by professional software companies.

Archimedes owners were expected to write their own programs, and the OS came with all the tools you needed to do that. This predates the rise of the C language, and even compiled languages in general. To fit the OS into ROM chips, it was hand-coded in assembly language by a team of 7, 4 of whom I interviewed on Zoom on Monday night:

https://rougol.jellybaby.net/m...

So the app format is just a folder, with plain text files (a script, some BASIC if you want, some bitmap graphics for icons etc.) and all the tools to make them are part of the OS. You didn't need to buy anything extra. Obviously you could, lots of it in time, but it wasn't essential. You got the best interpreted language in the business, which was also an assembler, you got a monitor, you got editors to write code or draw or paint graphics, play or record music, and all right there in the ROM, accessible instantly, without disk swapping, on a single-floppy machine.

The OS did not _load_ from ROM: it _ran_ from ROM. So, all the RAM is user RAM. A 1MB machine had 1MB of user RAM, because the OS is in ROM that's right there in the memory map.

When you turn on an Android phone, it boots from ROM, meaning it loads the OS from ROM into RAM and *then*, after gigs of code have been transferred, it starts executing.

When you turn on an Archimedes, the code starts executing immediately. It's like a PC whose BIOS (or UEFI) is a complete multitasking GUI OS, so once the POST is done, that is it: you're at the desktop and ready to go.

At the point in the power on sequence when a PC _begins to load the OS_, the Archie was ready to use.

Now, to be fair, this had downsides. Acorn _should_ have stressed games more: the hardware was more than capable. The software division wrote the OS so they had no time left to do apps as well, so the 3rd party app market came later than it did for Atari and Commodore.

Ah, I see what you mean.

My question is: what is the difference between them? Is there anything any one of the desktops can do that the others can't?

Cinnamon is 3D composited, so it has a nice scaled-window overview feature. Pretty but hardly compelling.

MATE is far more customisable, with multiple panels and things... but then, so is Xfce. And Xfce can do vertical taskbars, which MATE can't do well at all. In fact I'm not aware of anything significant MATE can do that Xfce can't. Lock items onto panels? That's about all I can think of.

So the bigger question is: what are the functional advantages given to the user by this additional choice? What do they get in return that they wouldn't have? Is it possible that if the development effort that went into those 3 different but very similar desktops had all gone into one, that one would be more complete and functional?

For instance, none of the three is very accessible by visually-impaired users with a screenreader. That's a big omission, IMHO.

ISTM that desktops such as Unity, Enlightenment, even Pantheon, deliver quite different experiences that some people might prefer. (Me personally, I prefer Unity. It's quite Mac-like, and I am fond of Macs. I'm typing on a Mac right now.)

But I don't think Cinnamon, plus MATE, plus Xfce, delivers that sort of choice. They are all Win95-style taskbar-and-start-menu desktops, overall very similar.

Don't get me wrong. I think they're all decent desktops. I prefer any of 'em to GNOME or to KDE. My personal favourite of the 3 is Xfce, in fact.

But I feel this is an illusion of choice, not really broadening people's options.

It's almost certainly long gone and was in 2006-2007 when MS made the threats, as I said in 2013:

https://www.theregister.com/Pr...

Doesn't matter now. Thus, Cinnamon, MATE etc.

But the damage was done, and that is all MS needed. Before: everyone used GNOME 2, everyone was OK with it, and KDE was sidelined.

After: Unity, GNOME 3, GNOME 2 killed off, SUSE signs a deal but switches to GNOME 3 anyway.

Job's a good one: before, harmony. After, chaos and discord.

Something that doesn't look like Win95.

So...

* no taskbar with buttons for open windows
* no start menu thing in the corner with a hierarchical list of apps
* no system tray with the clock and status icons in a special area

And so on.

A panel with buttons for *apps* is OK. Next had that, Acorn had that, CDE had that.

A panel with status icons in it is OK. Classic MacOS had that, but Apple once sued Digital Research for pull-down menus in it, so if you're playing it extra careful, avoid those.

[Article author here]

Yeah, really. See the comment upthread about how Steam only supports GNOME, for instance.

And FWIW, I can't stand GNOME and I prefer Xfce too.

Flipside of the same coin: if you want paid support for Ubuntu, the company only supports the primary version. That means GNOME. You can't get paid support for any of the remixes.

RHEL or a rebuild? GNOME only. No option of any other desktop.

SLE desktop? GNOME only. No choices, no packages of anything else.

Hi. I wrote the original article.

It doesn't say that at all. Are you thinking of a different one?

I also wrote this last month:
https://www.theregister.com/20...

It is more like what you said. Is that what you were thinking of?

If so, you're still misinterpreting it.