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Desktop interfaces in the olden days versus today. have we moved in the right direction?

Windows `95 installation disks.

The olden days of computing were dominated by the massive Microsoft corporation, they bought their DOS operating system from IBM, and copied the mouse and icons interface from the Xerox Star operating system from 1981. Nowadays the Ubuntu distribution is copying the Macintosh OSX interface to create the Unity interface. But that is not very popular, considering that the Cinnamon desktop offers a superior desktop experience that is far more customisable than any Macintosh OSX ripoff like Unity. The first impressions of the Windows `95 interface was one of surprise as I had only used the Windows 3.11 interface before then. The BeOS desktop is an example of a simplistic desktop interface that is actually nice to use. The Windows 8 RTM release is still featuring the infamous Metro interface that uses a tiled HTML5 interface instead of booting straight into a Windows 7 desktop with Aero. But if you use Linux Mint 13 or Fedora 17 with the Cinnamon desktop interface, you avoid all of the problems and your desktop will be very usable and stylish indeed.

Windows 8 RTM desktop screenshot.

This posting about the KDE 4.8.3 desktop has some lovely links telling you how to style your KDE 4.8 desktop to look exactly like Windows 7. The kubuntu-desktop package has great flexibility and may be re-designed to look any way you wish. If you are running the Fedora 17 distribution, the su -c “yum install cinnamon” command will install a lovely desktop environment if you do not like the Gnome 3 desktop. Here is a nice video of the Cinnamon desktop on my Fedora 17 machine: http://www.securitronlinux.com/bejiitaswrath/a-look-at-the-linux-mint-cinnamon-desktop-on-fedora-core-17/. The Cinnamon desktop has a familiar Windows styled taskbar and with the Muffin window manager, you may use many Compiz styled effects, such as moving the mouse to a hot-spot to show previews of all windows on the desktop. It truly is an amazing desktop with some amazing themes.

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