shiny desktop, anyone?

[Steve Hill]

On Mon, 28 May 2007, Valent Turkovic wrote:

> I can only share one comment of my apple osx friend who was an ex
> windows user after installing Fedora 6:
>
> "This looks like windows 98."

Of course then you showed him Beryl, right? :)

That said, I was under the impression that an aweful lot of Windows people 
switch XP back to the "classic interface" - i.e. something that looks just 
like Win98?

I saw Vista with Aero for the first time a couple of weeks ago - maybe 
I've just been spoilt by Beryl, but my first thought was "It's just XP but 
with transparent bits and slightly different window decoration".  I've not 
yet worked out why people are raving about Aero, it just doesn't seem 
anything special to me.

> And when I looked it from his perspective I saw he was right. Don't
> get me wrong I love Fedora theme... but when windows looks like osx I
> think Fedora needs also a little polish to make it shine...

I consider the default Fedora settings to be quite plain and basic - they 
get the job done but they don't make you go "Ooooooh".  The first thing I 
do with my Fedora machines when they get installed is switch window 
manager and copy my customised settings onto the system.  However, that's 
the power of Linux - you _can_ customise it, and what's right for one 
person isn't right for another.

There is a limit to how far the defaults can go though - for example, 
starting Compiz or Beryl by default would certainly make things shiny, but 
there are just so many driver problems associated with them.

-- 

  - Steve
    xmpp:steve at nexusuk.org   sip:steve at nexusuk.org   http://www.nexusuk.org/

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence