Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 16:35:56 -0700 From: Damien Tougas <damien@tougas.net> To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: GUIs are flawed Message-ID: <20000129163556.A69961@tougas.net>
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One of the beauties of Unix, and one the many reasons that it is so powerful is the power and flexibility that one has in a command line shell. This is somthing that Microsoft and Apple and KDE and GNOME will never equal in a GUI interface. It seems that in order to get any sort of power with a GUI, it gets incredibly bloated. Take a look at Windows 2000 and how many millions of lines of code that they have created just to compete with Unix. I think that KDE and GNOME are great in some respects, but at the same time, I think that they are just going to wind up as bloated and buggy as windows if they keep increasing the complexity of their software. The larger that these projects become, the more difficult the will be to maintain. Don't get me wrong, I think that GUIs defenitely have their advantages, but I also think that perhaps there needs to be a paradigm shift in the way that they are designed in order to sustain future development. Why can't someone create a GUI framework that works more like a command line? -- Small programs/applets that are easy to maintain on their own, but which can be plugged together by the user at will to accomlish the task at hand. Something like this would be great for the open source community because it could be divided into small manageable chunks, while at the same time have incredible power and stablility. Right now, it seems like there are small chunks of code contributed by many, but it also seems like they are either stand alone programs or programming libraries. I have played with KDE a bit, and while it does have some nice features, it really is not all that great. If I want to change the mode on one file, that is not too difficult in kfm, but as soon as I want to change the mode of several, it's back to the command line. Now why couldn't they have created a small program/applet (like chmod) to do this? And allow me to pipe the output from their 'find' applet to the 'chmod' applet? Now that to me would be powerful. More powerful than integrating a web browser into the file manager as far as I'm concerned. I am not complaining, I am just voicing my ideas. If I knew how to program, I might be able to contribute some of these to the community. Anyways, I have lots to say on this subject, but I'll spare you the rest. In the meantime, I guess it's back to the command line. -- Damien Tougas, P.Eng. Phone: (780)434-5889 Fax: (780)434-5889 E-mail: damien@tougas.net http://www.tougas.net To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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