Multiple program instances or multiple log ins?

[lesmikesell at gmail.com (Les Mikesell)]

On Wed, 2005-12-28 at 00:47, Robert Moskowitz wrote:

> > > > > Oh, in a Un*x world I would not move them out of the user's home
> > > > > directory.  Just organize better by identity within home.
> > > >
> > > >But why fight the native multiuser design with a workaround that
> > > >you had to use elsewhere?  Just give every identity its own home.
> > >
> > > This is another thing I am looking at.  But I would have to be logged
> > > into all of them pretty much at once.
> > >
> > > Un*x has always supported this.  But gnome seems to be weak on this.
> >
> >You can use the same approach you'd use for an account on a
> >different machine:
> >  ssh -Y user@locahost programname
> >although you lose a bit of machine efficiency as a tradeoff
> >for not having to deal with special cases.
> 
> oh, sneaky.  I WILL have to try that....

I think I'd call it elegant simplicity instead of sneaky.  Long
ago there was a lot of discussion of the concept of
'orthgonality' in unix tools, with the idea being that
things should work the same way regardless of context
so that learning them once will serve you in many
circumstances.  (For example if you understand vi, you'll note
that there are only a couple of exceptions to the 'count, range,
action' scheme of commands - where count and range are optional).
That idea seems to have gotten lost in the GUI flavor-of-the-day
world where everyone thinks their context-sensitive system is
better than anything else and you should forget everything you
knew last week and learn a million special cases instead.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx