The ``equivalent'' of Windows is the graphic system X Window System. 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
does not: it's much more configurable. X11's overall look is given by a key
component called ``window manager'', of which you have a wide choice:
fvwm, basic but nice and memory efficient, fvwm2-95,
Afterstep, WindowMaker, Enlightenment, and many more. The w.m.
is usually invoked from .xinitrc;
your w.m. can be configured so as a window acts as under, er,
Windows: you click on it and it comes to foreground. Another possibility is
that it comes to foreground when the mouse moves over it (``focus''). Also,
the placement of windows on the screen can be automatic or interactive: if a
strange frame appears instead of your program, left click where you want
it to appear;
most features can be tailored editing one or more
configuration files. Read the docs of your w.m.: the configuration
file can be .fvwmrc, .fvwm2rc95, .steprc, etc. A sample
configuration file is typically found in
/etc/X11/window-manager-name/system.window-manager-name;
X11 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, Gtk, and what have you. Nearly all of these libraries
provide roughly the same look and feel as Windows;
the feel, unfortunately, can be incoherent. 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 other widget sets;
how scrollbars and resizing work depends on the w.m. and the widget
set. Tip: if you find that the scrollbars don't behave as you would expect,
try using the central button or the two buttons together to move them;
applications don't have an icon by default, but they can have many.
Most w.m. feature a menu you recall by clicking on the desktop
(``root window''); needless to say, the menu can be tailored. To
change the root window appearance, use 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 to paste it. There's an application,
xclipboard, that provides for multiple clipboard buffers;
drag and drop is an option, and is only available if you use X11
applications and/or w.m. that support it.
To save memory, one should use applications that use the same libraries,
but this is difficult to do in practice.
There are projects that aim at making X11 look and behave as
coherently as Windows. Gnome,
http://www.gnome.org
and KDE,
http://www.kde.org, are awesome. Give them a
try: you won't regret your Windows desktop anymore.
