stubbornness in converting

[pepto]

hey.  i'm a longstanding mac user, and an elitist one at that, and i 'need' a distro of linux for my AMD box.. but i'm so firmly set against the entire windows interface, with great personal spite reserved for the instance based taskbar and stunted integration of the file system into the operating system..

what i need is a linux flavour with a minimal amount of microsoft influence (menus inside windows, taskbar, grouped boxes on windows).. because, honestly, anything ass-backwards like that makes me want to retch violently.

any help?  danke.

ps: listen to reggae.

[lazygamer]

Not qualified to help you, but most distros have a similar interface because they use either KDE or GNOME. Both of these are rather Windows like, but vastly improved+alot more customizable. There are other things though, like Evil Entity is susposed to be less Microsoft-ish.

[TheQuirk]

Fluxbox is tabbed and fast. Or you can try WindowMaker or Blackbox. They're all different, and most of them are included with most Distros. And if they aren't, you can download thme (They're usually less then a megabyte or two).

[pkd_lives]

It sounds more like you are anti-gui. All the distros have GUI of some descripition, as far as I know. But you can choose to not use a GUI. The graphical interfaces are far more customizable, and ALL of them are superior to M$ style windows in behaviour. I have not seen them use that awful taskbar idea, and everything to do with the filesystem is an improvement, so far as I can tell, I'm still learning. The point of Linux is there is an otion. It seems everything has a choice. In Linux, the GUI is exactly that and interface to  the commands of the operating system. Unlike M$ Windows, where they have made the basic error of trying to make the GUI the operating system (I mean hello...every heard of Lisa, now that was a failure).

Depends on your skills as to which one you go for, but as you can get them free or cheap I would suggest you experiment.

And as for being stubborn in converting, you use a Mac, and that is good. You just need to realise your x86 can run as stable as your Mac, without having to get any special M$ only training.

[ October 12, 2002: Message edited by: pkd ]

[ October 12, 2002: Message edited by: pkd ]

[rtgwbmsr]

KDE and GNOME are window managers. If you don't like how they look, get another window manager. IceWM and Enlightenment are cool. You can also theme the window manager to look like your Mac.

Check out this thread to see how different Linux can look:
http://forum.fuckmicrosoft.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=7&t=000285

Cable modem recommended!
EDIT- Page 5 of that thread has a pic of Enlightenment on Red Hat

[ October 12, 2002: Message edited by: The_Muffin_Man/B0b ]

[heljy]

quote:KDE and GNOME are window managers. If you don't like how they look, get another window manager. IceWM and Enlightenment are cool. You can also theme the window manager to look like your Mac.

Well, from what I understand, I think KDE and GNOME are desktop environment, not window managers. And you can run any other kind of window manger (iceWM, Enlightenment, etc) on top of them.

Right now, I am using iceWM and have tried blackbox(really cool). Englightenment is also something that alot of ppl are using and I have seen really cool settings that some of my friends have using enlightenment.

[Calum]

i agree. if you like macs but hate windows, enlightenment should be your first stop. not because it is like mac but because it is really stylish and is totally unlike windows. if you want a veriety you could then move on and try XFce or WindowMaker, which are both very not-windows like and are both very easy to use.

[Master of Reality]

quote:Originally posted by pepto:
hey.  i'm a longstanding mac user, and an elitist one at that, and i 'need' a distro of linux for my AMD box.. but i'm so firmly set against the entire windows interface, with great personal spite reserved for the instance based taskbar and stunted integration of the file system into the operating system..

what i need is a linux flavour with a minimal amount of microsoft influence (menus inside windows, taskbar, grouped boxes on windows).. because, honestly, anything ass-backwards like that makes me want to retch violently.

any help?  danke.

ps: listen to reggae.

use KDE. You can put a bar thing like the mac at the top of the screen and make KDE look just like a mac pretty easily.

[pepto]

guess i'll try mandrake.  i'll know in 10 hours, or whenever this damn download finishes. pacific bell/ SBC stinks.  they don't offer upload speeds higher than 384kbps anyway.

[pepto]

my gui gripes.  i'm not anti gui.  i'm anti stupid.

you know, as a mac user, i've always been vexed at people who would close a window and then think the application closed.  when, of course, it lurks quietly, consuming memory.  Also, at users who couldn't figure out that each disk mounted had it's own desktop folder, and that files on that desktop would disappear when the disk was unmounted (say if the floppy it was on ejects).  

i guess that's why microsoft insists on 'my computer' instead of individual drives represented on the desktop.

but what confuses me most is how windows will launch multiple 'instances' of a program, from the same code, and how windows will visually represent a folder or an application or a document in the same manner in the taskbar.  it's also a cop out for microsoft to implement grouping of 'similar' instances on the windows taskbar into one instance and suggest to use the 'close group' command in order to clean up your desktop.  just bad ideas.  :confused: