Your computers and this hot weather

some of it looked as though it might be useful to others

Mine wouldn’t be. Everything I do is heavily customised, so my applications are only useful to me, aren’t intuitive (I’m a command line heavy user) and are poorly documented.

given that it’s free. Don’t be shy.

None of my gear is on RO. If I do create something useful, I probably will just give it away.

only useful to me, aren’t intuitive […] and are poorly documented.

Sounds a lot like Linux once you leave the pointy-clicky part.

and are poorly documented

Yes. That’s something one does have to do something about. Mine weren’t documented at all until I decided to release them into the wild. (Documenting them also encouraged and helped me clean up the filth a bit…)

The documentation is still minimalist, but I’m generally of the opinion that that’s for the best.

None of my gear is on RO.

Ah. All mine is – well, everything I’ve written in the last 25 years, anyway.

Sounds a lot like Linux

I cant stand Linux. It’s a terrible OS.

What’s wrong with Linux?

What’s wrong with Linux?

Nothing…

…if it’s 1979 and your only way of talking to the machine is a teletype where you’re charged by the character.

What’s wrong with Linux?

I actually liked Linux 15 years ago and used Red Hat 7 heavily. (not to be confused with RHEL 7) Over the past decade, it abandoned unix philosophies (which itself isn’t bad. Not everything has to be unix-like), took a kitchen sink approach to OS distributions became bloated and security plummeted.

And, like far too many other things, it’s jumped on the “let’s reinvent the UI every release” bandwagon.

“let’s reinvent the UI every release” bandwagon.

That’s just given me a great idea! Why don’t we write a RISC OS style Window Manager for Linux? :—P

I have Linux on my laptop at work and my personal laptop (because RISC OS doesn’t do WiFi yet and doesn’t run on old x86 machines!). Use Linux for our servers too. Quite happy with that… find RISC OS is slowly taking more and more of my computing time though! Its the only OS that actually makes me feel happy/contented. No idea why.

Its the only OS that actually makes me feel happy/contented.

That’s OpenBSD for me.

That’s just given me a great idea! Why don’t we write a RISC OS style Window Manager for Linux? :—P

Another one? ROX has been around for some years.

Another one? ROX has been around for some years.

Isn’t that the Linux way, though? Why use something that exists when one could just reinvent the wheel over and over

Well, there must be some reason why there’s like half a dozen window managers, a dozen (or so) distributions, and…

Well, there must be some reason why there’s like half a dozen window managers, a dozen (or so) distributions, and…

You’re only off by an order of magnitude or two :)

The reasons are pretty simple. It’s fun and the architecture of the graphics stack is abstracted enough that you can write a window manager without having to write everything else (this isn’t RISC OS where the multi tasking of the OS is also in the GUI).

Here’s a pic of one of the window managers I occasionally hack on, you may spot some influence from round here.

Now to port the RISC iX GUI… :P

And, like far too many other things, it’s jumped on the “let’s reinvent the UI every release” bandwagon.

That’s definitely a problem with the big desktops like GNOME or KDE, but not so much of a problem with the other desktops like XFCE or LXDE, or if you set up your own desktop using a window manager combined with some other utilities.

I personally use XFCE. I’ve been using it since 2011, and it hasn’t really changed at all since then. Before that I was using GNOME 2, which I stopped using because it got replaced by GNOME 3 which was completely different and not very nice.

XFCE, LXDE, Gnome and KDE are all super bloated. Some more than others. This is why I prefer fvwm or cwm since they’re actually light, and not fake claims of light (like XFCE/LXDE)

When the Wimp tells you there’s a redraw, you’re supposed to ask for rectangles (parts of your window that need to be drawn) until there are no more. If you ignore your redraw request, does the Wimp cache this for later? I don’t think so.

IIRC, it pretty much locks up. You can get away with not responding to a Window Redraw Request for a while, but as soon as you try to call any Wimp SWI which isn’t Wimp_RedrawWindow things will go badly wrong. That is, the Wimp won’t let you do anything else with it that isn’t redrawing your window until you’ve finished the redraw.

It might even end up triggering a panic redraw (easiest way to fix confusion – get everything to redraw everything).

It can buffer some (256?) rectangles before panicking.

That is, the Wimp won’t let you do anything else with it that isn’t redrawing your window until you’ve finished the redraw.

Do you actually have to do some redrawing, or just go round the Redraw loop until there are no more rectangles the Wimp wants you to redraw?

Duplicate removed.

I think it would suffice to just whizz around the redraw loop. I’ve done that myself when wanting to test a behaviour of something before the redraw code was ready, so I just called GetRectangle until the Wimp was happy, and nothing blew up.