Perspective, If Not Expertise

Once upon a time, I was a Linux user who had just grad­u­ated from n00b to adven­turer.  I loved the flex­i­bil­ity pro­vided by Unix, and the free­dom pro­vided by open source soft­ware.  Min­i­mal­ist graph­i­cal user inter­faces appealed to me, before I ever dared to shed X entirely, and enlight­en­ment was the great­est thing that ever hap­pened.  In the years since then, I’ve stuck to either KDE 3 or GNOME because I absolutely love Com­piz.  I can scarcely live a week with­out the full screen zoom, color neg­a­tive tog­gle, and real-time bright­ness control.

I first tried Win­dow­Maker about three years ago, iron­i­cally run­ning the same ver­sion I’m run­ning right now.  I loved the per­for­mance, dock­apps, and the NeXT-y look.  Of course, I even­tu­ally suc­cumbed to the call of Com­piz.  Whether it’s my aging lap­top that crams a 1024×768 res­o­lu­tion into a 12 inch screen or my 24 inch mon­i­tor that dis­plays tiny pix­els at 1920×1200, I have a gen­uine need for a high qual­ity zoom.

This time I will stick with Win­dow­Maker, for­sak­ing all oth­ers, until such as time as XZoom finally dri­ves me insane.  All those giant pix­els rep­re­sent­ing the zoomed region, it’s so…2004.  Then again, the look of Win­dow­Maker is pretty much 1994.  Oh well, the pur­ple theme goes well with the Ambiance GTK style which debuted in Ubuntu 10.04.  Come to think of it, why the hell can’t the GNOME Appear­ance dia­log export the set­tings to ~/.gtkrc-2.0?  Why does GNOME con­tinue it’s march away from the beau­ti­ful sim­plic­ity of Unix? That is a rant for another time; I leave you with a screen­shot.