The ``equivalent'' of Windows is the graphic system X11. Unlike Windows or
the Mac, X11 wasn't designed for ease of use or to look good, but just to
provide graphic facilities to UNIX workstations. These are the main
differences:
- while Windows looks and feels the same all over the world, X11
doesn't: it's much more configurable. X11's overall look is given by a key
component called ``window manager''; there are many you can choose from. The
most common are
fvwm, basic but nice and memory efficient,
fvwm2-95 and The Next Level that give X11 a Windows 95--like
taste, plus several others. Some look really beautiful;
- your window manager can be configured so as a window acts as in, er,
Windows: you click on it and it comes to foreground. Another possibility is
that it comes to foreground when the mouse is located on it. This feature
(``focus'') and many others can be altered by editing one or more
configuration files. Read the docs of your window manager;
- X applications are written using special libraries (``widget sets'');
as several are available, applications look different. The most basic ones
are those that use the Athena widgets (2--D look;
xdvi, xman,
xcalc); others use Motif (netscape), others still use Tcl/Tk,
XForms, Qt and what have you. Some---not all---of these libraries provide
roughly the same look and feel as Windows;
- so much for the look of X11, but what about the feel? Unfortunately,
all applications behave differently. For instance, if you select a line of
text using the mouse and press BACKSPACE, you'd expect the line to
disappear, right? This doesn't work with Athena--based apps, but it does
with Motif, Qt, and Tcl/Tk ones;
- scrollbars, resizing, and iconisation: these, too, depend on the
window manager and the widget set. Too many different things to
mention here, just a couple of points. When using Athena--based apps the
scrollbars are better moved with the central button. If you don't have a
three--button mouse, try pressing the two buttons together;
- applications don't have an icon by default, but they can have many.
It depends on the window manager. The desktop is called ``root window'', and
you can change its appearance with apps like
xsetroot or
xloadimage;
- the clipboard can only contain text, and behaves strange. Once you've
selected text, it's already copied to the clipboard: move elsewhere and
press the central button. There's an application,
xclipboard, that
provides for multiple clipboard buffers;
- drag and drop is an option, and is only available if you use X
applications that support it.
To save memory, it's better to use applications that use the same libraries,
but this is difficult to do in practice. There's a project called the K
Desktop Environment that aims at making X11 look and behave as coherently as
Windows; it's currently in early beta stage but, believe me, it's awesome.
It's going to put Windows' interface to shame. Point your browser to
http://www.kde.org.