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> Same with KDE and Gnome applications. In Windows, the default is for apps to be WIn32 based, so by default stuff uses the same user interface... and it's actually a pretty good one. There's about forty dozen different sorta compatible development environments, so it's not 100%, but even for really wacked apps it's mostly right. Even Firefox knows about Win32 printers, for example. In Mac OS X, the default is for apps to be Aqua based, so by default stuff uses the same user interface, and it's an OK one... even if the keyboard navigation is kind of wonky it's consistently so. And there's only two main toolkits and they tarck each other, so it's a lot closer to 100% than Windows. In UNIX (Linux, BSD, commercial UNIX other than Mac OS X) the default is for apps to be X11 based, and the standard X11 user interface was a pretty awful one, and the winner of the commercial GUI wars is also pretty bad, AND it's forked at least once, plus there's half a dozen academic UI standards, and two major and at least a couple of minor contenders for the open source user interface standard, and a lot of developers who think they know better (no, they don't), so by default any arbitrary application has maybe a 25% chance of actually following the same user interface as your desktop. Printers? If an app lets me save as Postscript so I can feed it to my Ghostscript printer hack I feel like I'm ahead ofthe game. I suppose if I didn't hate Gnome and KDE both and was willing to spend the time to switch to Gnome or KDE (because that's what you have to do, pick one and stick with it) I could eventually resolve a lot of these problems... but that ain't going to happen. > > And that, say, with a media player, I can skip back and forth > > between tracks using the special back/forward buttons on my keyboard. > That's because there's some driver for your keyboard. Probably because > your keyboard was made by Microsoft, or by Logitech, who pay Microsoft. Um, no, there's actually a standard for this. USB system control. Keyboards that follow it even work on Mac OS X, at leats for media control... I'm using a DELL keyboard on my Mac and it just works.There's stuff above here
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