[geeks] Google announces Google Chrome OS

[Phil Stracchino]

gsm at mendelson.com wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 09, 2009 at 10:10:37AM -0500, Michael Parson wrote:
>> I don't know that I ever thought of the earlier Red Hat releases as
>> seriously attempting to be desktop-ready.  As I recall, the first real
>> effort to make a desktop friendly Linux was Caldera Desktop Linux, which
>> was based off Red Hat (2.something, IIRC), but at the time, RH was still
>> shipping stuff like FVWM as it's default window manager, maybe it was
>> that horrible mangling that wound up getting bundled as 'fvwm95', which
>> had a Windows-style 'Start' button.  Back then, I was still jumping back
>> and forth between FVWM 1.x and tvtwm.
> 
> What window manager was there in 1995? KDE and GNOME did not exist, 
> CDE was a commercial product. According to the Wikipedia, FVWM existed
> before then, but I don't remember it being in Slackware.


fvwm, twm, mwm, among others ... haven't looked up to see whether
wmaker, gnustep, and blackbox existed then, and I don't remember.  I'm
pretty sure enlightenment came along later, and I know sawfish and
metacity did.


But you're asking the wrong question, I think.  KDE and Gnome are NOT
window managers.  They are desktop environments.  (Gnome in particular
is a desktop environment that has metastasized almost throughout the
OS.)  KDE, I think, has its own associated kwm window manager; Gnome has
used at least half a dozen different window managers as its "official"
window manager during its history.  I think currently it uses metacity;
I remember when it used sawfish, and it flirted with enlightenment once,
but I don't remember what came before sawfish or in between sawfish and
metacity.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.