On Sat, Jun 10, 2006 at 09:16:39AM +0100, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Sat, 2006-06-10 at 07:27 +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
It's been possible for a long time. Greetings from GNUstep, which shares a common ancestor with OSX. www.gnustep.org
Foundations aside, I think Gnome now has more in common with OSX in terms of look and feel than gnustep, even down to some of the administration panels. In fact with Gnome if you installed the compiz Dock plugin, put a quicklaunch icon for the hard drive in the top right of the screen that lead to an applications folder containing symlinks to some whatever software you want to run. Then you have created a user environment that any Mac head would instantly find their way around (although not necessarily administer)
Bing - wrong. Don't suppose that you've noticed that OS X has it's menu bar *always* located across the top of the screen for the current app, then? Gnome doesn't do that, Gnome apps don't do that. For that matter, niether do GNUstep apps, but the consistency is there, menu appears in the bottom left, IIRC. If someone was really bored they could make the GNUstep libraries work very similar to Aqua... then you'd really have a 'drop in' replacement - ish.
OSX is considered easy to use because as long as you stay within the confines of what Apple intended you to do with it, then it is fairly easy. However stray too far outside those or start wanting too do something a little unusual and it is actually harder work than Linux. However for the majority of users this would be considered a easy to use OS because they will never be in that situation.
Personally I found OS X to get in my way far too often, expect me to like large icons, and provides an awful terminal by default. But then, I'm not much of a person for whizzy flash bang interfaces, I like simple, clean unobtrusive window management that "just works" (tm), I like to get between windows in a predictable manner - this is why I use ion3, I know what to expect, and a new xterm is only an F2 away.
Cheers,