I just had a look at the Windows 7 features and didn't see anything that suggests the Linux world has lost the UI war. It is probably true that the eye candy looks more polished on OS X/Vista/7 than on anything the Linux world has to offer. (In fact, this is what lured me into the Mac world for a while.) That also shouldn't be surprising because this is how commercial OS producers lure the gullible to buy their product. For example, it seems cool that I can wiggle a window in Windows 7 to hide all the others or that I can drag a window to the edge to make it use up half the screen. But the reality of efficient computer use looks different. I can't see a good use for the first feature in every-day use, and if I want windows side by side, chances are I don't want an even split and I want more than two windows tiled on my screen. What I'm looking for in my desktop environment isn't eye candy but efficiency. Above all, this means that I want to be able to customize my desktop for a workflow that suits me. In more concrete terms, the three major things I appreciate in my linux desktop and which Windows cannot give me are: * Tiling window management and customized keyboard shortcuts for pretty much everything I can dream of. I don't want to touch the mouse unless I deal with a graphics program. * Command line for almost everything. Nobody can convince me that cp fileA dirB/dirC/dirD is less efficient than opening dirB/dirC/dirD in an explorer window and dragging fileA there. * Scripting for all the recurring tasks. This is extremely easy using shell scripts/perl/ruby/python/... I could try that under Windows, too, but the DOS command prompt simply feels like something that was never really meant to be used. I realize that this will not convince the computer-illiterate average user to prefer linux over windows, but I sure am glad that Linux gives me the choice to use an eye-candy-free desktop that works the way I think a computer should work, on modest hardware. I know that this is easy to be interpreted as another windows-vs-linux flame, and I admit that I am certainly very biased on this subject. However, it simply irks me that almost every time Apple/Microsoft come out with the newest eye candy, we weep that we don't have it instead of focusing on the advantages our linux boxes give us. Cheers, Norbert
