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Showing posts from August, 2012

We must preserve the past for the criticism of the future

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A long time ago, when 64mb were a huge amount of RAM, there used to be that GUI environment named 'OpenWindows', evolved from SunView and from some research at Xerox.  In its time (early 90's), it was liked by many (SUN people, mostly, I guess) and despised by others because it was deemed 'too heavy' when compared to other window managers (fvwm, twm, etc...).Read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openwindows. Why is all this relevant today? In late 2011, some small parts of the full OpenWindows DeskSet were ported to Linux (yes, ported). This included the libdeskset library, and one of its most popular apps: The File Manager. It's still relevant today because, in these 2012 times of metacity and RHEL6 desktops, the OWacomp desktop still feels 'snappier' than many other 'bundled' desktop environments. I agree that GNOME or KDE have come a long way but whatever the 'theme', they just don't feel as 'snappy'