[TUHS] Mach for i386 / Mt Xinu or other

[Steve Nickolas]

On Tue, 21 Feb 2017, Wesley Parish wrote:

> I think we can lay a lot of the blame for that major annoyance on the 
> two related facts:
> a: there is no universal windowing system everybody adheres to, just two 
> major commercial ones with spin-offs for smartphones and the like;
> b: a lot of Linux developers are chasing MS Windows in hope of desktop 
> market share and copy MS Windows features and misfeatures.

I don't disagree.  But I think there is a universal system, although it 
has been left to crumble to dust over the years, and having been picked up 
it still needs a lot of work to be usable in the 21st century.  That would 
be CDE - I'm not aware of any other X Window environment that made it into 
any versions of the Unix standard (iirc it's part of "Unix 93 
Workstation"?)

> A major irony is that MS Windows itself has chased Linux somewhat on the 
> graphical user interface front - Linux was the platform of GUI redesign 
> for OLPC and Android, Microsoft took the bait and tried it as a desktop 
> in MS Win 8.0 and got slammed for it.

A tablet environment doesn't work very well on a desktop, although a 
desktop environment can work reasonably well on a tablet (been there done 
that; I have a Windows 10 tablet).

> Setting out standards for a herd of cats is not much of an option; the 
> best one could do is publish RFCs giving a list of features that have 
> been proven to work in practice and hope for the best.
>
> Wesley Parish

Herd of cats sums it up nicely.

At least CUA makes a reasonable baseline, and most open-source GUI 
environments and programs seem to support that, as have Windows and OS/2 
since almost the beginning.

-uso.