On 15 Apr 2003, Mike Hearn wrote:
In fact, once we do Wine 1.0, people may decide to build a desktop environment around it. I think this is very exciting possibility, and I think we can even beat KDE and GNOME despite their big lead. I don't even think it's that much work (we need a panel, a file browser, and a control panel), we will have a lot more apps than they do, and we'll have far better binary compatibility.
Eurgh. My god. Please tell me you're kidding or have been drinking. We put so much work into Wine to run the applications, not because we think Windows is perfect and should be copied to the last detail. Anyway, there is already XPde which is copying XP to the last pixel.
No, I'm not kidding nor drinking. WIND has nothing to do with copying the XP UI. As I was explaining in my message, we can have our UI look like BlueCurve or what have you. WIND is all about the API. And yeah, the Windows API is not perfect, but there's no perfect API. And thing is, 99% of programmers out there know Win32, not GKT+. And I think the Win32 API is not that bad that it should be dropped, given the investment level that the human race has put into it. Quite frankly, I think the Win32 API si not that bad for UI tasks, it certainly proved to work OK for so many years. And if you want to talk about ugly, you should start with GTK, not Wine :) Not to mention the fact that I think our widgets are better, more polished, and I think more featureful.
But the big thing is that we'll have better binary compatibility than glibc had, a programming API known to *many* people, and a large set of apps aldready written. Look at SF, you'll see that the top downloads are by a huge margin apps that run on Windows.