Why Yellowdog?

[Eric Dunbar]

On Fri, 21 Jan 2005 07:46:25 +0000, Andrew Mason wrote:
> Aqua is simply a toolkit (?theme applied to a tool kit even?) which is what
> OSX uses.
> 
> GTK is the toolkit that Gnome and XFCE4 use and QT(from trolltech) is the
> Toolkit that KDE uses. You can pretty much make either of these toolkits look
> like Aqua and. The difference is the amount of control and the options that
> are built into your DE that make the difference. For example in KDE i can
> make it LOOK like and behave exactly the same as a windows system, or an OSX
> system (not that I would do this though =) ) but the control i have over the
> window system is still the same. i.e I can have a windows selected and raised
> as soon as I put the mouse over it, or I can position the location of the
> close buttons, I can turn off all animations or turn on only selected
> animations and options etc... 

I'm only really interested in being able to set *one* setting (the
rest is sugar coating since it doesn't really make a huge difference
in productivity/usability): I'd like to force the menu bar to always
appear at the top of screen, take it COMPLETELY out of the application
windows and have a minimum of wasted screen space. Obviously, in this
scenario I'd completely dump the "dock" (or whatever you call it in
GNOME/KDE).

Ideally I'd do this in GNOME since it's the desktop environment I like
the most, but, I'm willing to switch to KDE (or another) if that'll
give me pinned menu-bars and no more menubar-in-window nonsense.

PS Would fluxbox allow me to do this? I'm going to experiment with the
window managers (or whatever they are) installed with YDL 3.0.1 and
see if I see any hints of improved usability.

PSS Clint -- I agree with you on the dearth of novel GUI ideas. So far
I've seen little evidence of out of the box thinking in the GUIs:
they're all more-or-less Windows clones with a few snazzy add-ons. In
the early 90s I remember my first encounters with X (probably 6 or 7
;) and seeing some pretty impressive GUIs -- now why couldn't they
have had a stronger influence on GNOME or KDE :( :( :(. I see so much
potential in GNOME/KDE but, alas, it's unrealised.

Eric.