Nicholas Wourms wrote: Tho I can't quite understand > what this driving desire for a rootless X server is all about? To my > death, I'll never understand why people like the explorer window manager > over the X alternatives. I mean c'mon people, Windows Explorer as a > window manager sucks. Why would you want it to manage your X > applications?
Maybe *you* prefer KDE, OpenStep, whatever over Windows but that doesn't mean *everybody* does. As a window manager, Windows does perfectly well for me: I can move my windows around, I can resize them, minimize them and even maximize them. I like the taskbar (and everybody does since now every desktop system has it), I like the systray, I like the quicklaunch bar and the Start menu is as much a mess in Windows than in KDE. Now, having an alternative would be nice, that's for sure. As my boss is fond of saying: "two is better than one". If you want to remove Windows Explorer, go check Shellfront (http://shellfront.org/). But you will never see Notepad running in an X window. Cygwin works *on top of* Windows, not the other way around. Cygwin *add* a unix layer to Windows, it doesn't *replace* Windows. If you really want that, if you really want your All-X desktop, go install Linux and run your Windows applications using Wine. > I don't know about most people, but I like the current way > X works, in fact I like the full screen even better. Why do you think windowing systems took over most software applications? I like being able to see the content of two applications at the same time. Like for instance when I follow a tutorial on a web browser on how to create a map for Quake. Or when I want to use a complex funtion in my program, I want to be able to see MSDN at the same time I use my code. Now, if I use vi/emacs/whatever in X, I can't see any of those broswer/msdn windows at the same time if the application if fullscreen. What's worse, if the browser/msdn is the active application and I want to activate a X application, I first have to click on the X button in the taskbar to activate XWin, then I have to activate the X application itself. If I can see each X application with its own button in my taskbar, and when I click on it I have this X app showing *next to* instead of *on top of* my Visual Studio window, I would be far more happy. > In fact I wish there > was a way to do the opposite of running X in rootless mode. If there were > only a way to get windows binaries to pop up inside X, then I could just > ditch this crummy explorer windows manager and use X full time. See my comment above about Linux and Wine. Jehan
