Parallel desktops

[Albert Cahalan]

Benjamin M. Schwartz writes:

> There have been periodic suggestions, including some by potential OLPC
> buyers, that they would be more interested if the project offered a GUI
> that more closely resembled the environments to which they are accustomed.
> ~ I strongly disagree with these people, feeling instead that Glucose is
> already a highly effective environment with a very bright future.

A middle ground could be less dreadful than either extreme.

Good: secure activity isolation, full-screen for most things,
usable window management for other things, curved corners, 3D look

Bad: icons on the desktop, bag-of-spam file management

> However, it seems that some deployments, seeing Glucose as unfamiliar,
> might instead choose Windows, which I hate to death [1].

Of course. It has long saddened me that Linux has been given a
severe disadvantage on the XO. Windows looks pretty good. :-(

Chris Ball writes:

> There's another use case, unmentioned, which is the G1G1 community.
> Some of these donors expect a laptop that follows their expectations
> about computers:  robust support for wireless access points, printing,
> office automation programs, and loading files from a filesystem without
> finding a clever way to inject them into our journal first.

Kids in Peru deserve that too.