> From: PDML [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Larry Colen > > One of my big peeves is making the user interface an intrinsic part of > the operating system. There's no need for it. You should be able to > run a UI on whatever OS you want, whether it's Windows 7, 8 or XP, or > for that matter Linux or OSX. >
You're talking about 2 different things there. One is whether or not the UI is an instrinsic part of the OS, and in each of the example OSes it is not - they are all fat kernel OSs, and don't actually need the standard UI in order to operate the computer. Server versions of operating systems run without a UI in unattended data centres and expect you to remote in if you want to control them Two is whether or not a UI can run on different OSes. In principle, any UI that's built on X can do that, and any UI that takes a similar approach of having an abstraction layer (like X) between the OS and the UI can do the same thing, but people have to provide the abstraction layers. In the case of Windows I don't think there are any, so you can't just take the Windows UI and stick it on top of Plan 9, for example, but I bet it could be done. Windows, at least the pro versions, comes with a POSIX subsystem so you can run native UNIX on a Windows kernel, without the Windows susbsystem (this is probably not very clear, but it's only an email). This means that you can run X, which in turn means you can run any of the UIs that run on X. B -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
