On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 10:12 PM, Michael Natterer <mitch@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Wed, 2008-02-20 at 11:34 +1030, David Gowers wrote: > > > There is no guarantee that there will be any taskbar at all. On linux, > > there are plenty of WM's that either provide a taskbar that is not > > suitable to implement your described behaviour, or no taskbar at all ( > > i use one of these myself, DWM (http://www.suckless.org/wiki/dwm)). > > IMO taskbars are a kludge, and it is a mistake for an application to > > *depend* on them for basic usability. > > To quote from that "Window Manager's" web page: > > "Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it's > pointless to > make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase small and elitist. > No novices asking stupid questions." > > I think you just disqualified yourself to say anything about > usability here. That's a straw man. There are many tiling WM's, and only two of them are written by Anselm Garbe. It's quite common for tiling WMs (eg. dwm, Ion, wmii, ratpoison, stumpwm) to not have taskbars, because they are simply unnecessary when you can see the current windows at a glance. Mainstream WM's are a window management nightmare -- by which I mean the user is constantly being called on to manage windows, to make decisions that could in most instances be made well by the computer, and the need for a task bar in such WM's just reflects this basic demand for micromanagement imposed by an overconfigurable concept of window management. It's not bad that the user can configure their WM, or even their windows -- they should only rarely be called on to configure their windows, since it's perfectly possible to treat the majority of windows in a way that Just Works. In short -- taskbars save you some of the time that your WM otherwise calls upon you to waste. _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
