Mark Hammond writes:
Agreed. However, XPFE works fine here IMO.
cgw> "Here" means on MS-Win, right? Maybe that's why our perceptions are cgw> so different.
Correct. Although I have run it under Linux a few times, I wouldnt really know LAF issues if I tripped over them there ;-)
Mark.
It's certainly true that the lack of a consistent look and feel for Linux apps has been somewhat of a problem historically. However, with the emergence of Gnome, it seems that there is finally some convergence. (Althought people in the KDE/Qt camp will certainly not agree!) Gnome is gathering momentum, especially now that Sun has joined the Gnome Foundation. With outfits like Eazel, Helix Code, etc, turning out high-quality products, things are moving fast in the Gnome/Gtk+ world and it seems clear to me that this will be the major desktop platform for Unix machines in the upcoming decade. Back in my former life, when I was still worrying about Windows, the company I worked for bought into a commerical x-platform GUI toolkit called Galaxy (I mentioned this earlier). Galaxy re-implemented all the native widgets, kind of like XPFE does. One issue with this was that MS seemed to change something about the widgets in every release - e.g. the Galaxy filechooser looked like Windows 3.1, then Win95 came out and Galaxy had to play catch-up. Once Galaxy had the Win95 LAF, Win98 came out. Now I hear there's something called Windows ME. Have they changed the look-and-feel again? Seems to me like all the widget-reimplementors are doomed to playing eternal catch-up. OK, enough off-topic rambling (for now), -C