[Lazarus] The future of desktop

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Michael Schnell wrote:
> On 11/30/2013 01:44 PM, vfclists . wrote:
>>
>> The 'desktop' for Delphi developers where many FreePascal  come from 
>> basically means Microsoft.
> AFAIK, the mother of the Desktop is X11, which IIRC was invented by 
> Xerox (for headless Unix boxes).

The mother of the /desktop/, i.e. with printer and trash icons 
displayed, is the Xerox Star, but X is a completely distinct 
lower-level. If you want to compare Xerox's desktop ideas with anything 
then you should be going directly to KDE and Gnome, and leaving X out of it.

X came from MIT, which  means that in principle at least it inherited 
from some of the very earliest multiuser work while Xerox was more 
oriented towards singleuser workstations (some of which were physically 
big, as I understand it their Artificial Intelligence Workstation was a 
full 19" rack).

> Using the siblings of same, we now have KDE and GNOME (and several more) 
> in Linux.

Careful there, I think you're at risk of mixing layers again. Qt and GTK 
are normally implemented on top of X11, although Qt also has a fairly 
wide selection of other substrates. GTK is also being forced in that 
direction since a number of players- particularly Ubuntu- are 
experimenting with graphical subsystems which provide roughly the same 
services as X11 but are designed from the ground up with a different 
emphasis (e.g. single-user with no provision for serialising the API 
over the LAN or a pipe).

> So IMHO Microsoft was a copycat (as always) but very successful (as 
> always).

But reminding people who are devoted to their products of that 
particular point is not always helpful :-)

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]