Xerox PARC effectively created the paradigm of the GUI (Graphical User Interface) in the 1970s, with overlapping windows, icons, menus, and everything else a computer user today would easily recognize.But, it wasn't until the '90s that this design would really be put through the crucible of real-world users.Sure, Windows 1.0 was released at the end of 1985.
However, it was in the ’90s that the GUI became truly ubiquitous.Apple may have sold millions of Macs with GUIs by then, but that's just a drop in the bucket compared to the PC explosion of the '90s.One of the earliest installable distros, MCC Interim Linux, was released in 1992.
So the Linux community joined the desktop race just as graphical computing was bursting into the mainstream, figuring out what a Unix-style GUI for ordinary PC users should look like.Some of the design decisions the Unix and Linux desktop communities preserved, refined, and popularized in the '90s were so good that they would eventually show up in mainstream operating systems by Microsoft and Apple, and to this day they haven't fundamentally been improved upon.Virtual desktops were baked in almost from the start Apple and Microsoft took years to catch up Close My first personal encounter with virtual desktops was on Linux in the mid-2000s, and when I got a Linux netbook for college, it became killer feature of the OS for me.
It was the only way to make practical and efficient use of that tiny 10.1-inch 600p display.Virtual desktops have been baked into Linux/X11 almost from the start, but that's because the concept already existed in professional and workstation operating systems that predate Linuz Torvalds’ kernel.So it's not that Linux "invented" the virtual desktop, but that the community decided to keep this feature for everyone, even regular desktop users.
Robert Nation talks about working with "virtual desktop stuff" while building Fvwm (the venerable X11 window manager) and this feature was built on quickly as the '90s progressed.Fvwm doesn't just create multiple numbered desktops as we mostly understand virtual desktops today.It actually breaks each desktop into a grid of "pages" each representing a desktop-sized viewport.
You can therefore have a single desktop much larger than just what can fit on your screen.That sounds daunting, right? But the FvwmPager module acts as a visual map so you can see exactly which desktop and which page has the app you're looking for.The window manager could remember rules for individual applications And don't forget, memory was scarce back then Fvwm's "Style" feature can identify windows by attributes and automatically apply placement and behavior rules to them.
For example, should that window start on a specific desktop? Should it be sticky? Always stay on top? Does it show its title bar? That's just a smidgen of the possible attributes that can be used to assign rules to individual windows.Of course, these are largely features you'll find in the current Fvwm 3, but this idea isn't a modern Linux thing alone.In KDE's 1999 changelog (from version 1.0 to 1.1), it mentions "kstart" which lets you set whether an app is "sticky" (visible on all desktops) or would launch on a specific virtual desktop.
The desktop environment and window manager weren't the same thing It's actually the most logical approach when you think about it This is a great example of how two OSes, such as Linux and Windows, can the same when it comes to their interfaces, but actually work nothing alike under the hood.The X11 architecture is actually designed to leave window management to a separate component.So this means you can exchange that component for something else without changing the underlying system.
In KDE's April 1998 Beta 4 release notes, it's pointed out that KDE isn't just a window manager, and, in fact, users could keep using their favorite window manager instead of the one KDE provides.In other words, your panel, file manager, applications, control center, and window manager don't necessarily have to come from one indivisible shell.Windows and macOS don't expose their system window manager/compositor as an ordinary replaceable desktop component in the way X11 traditionally did.
However, the modern switch to Wayland has largely done away with this particular kind of modularity.The compositor, display server, and window-management roles are integrated rather than independently swappable.Is that a step backward? There are plenty of heated debates about the rise of Wayland to this day.
They did it right the first time “It's hard to overstate how incredible it is that the Unix and Linux desktop communities could make (or preserve) such forward-looking design decisions that would only really reach their full potential decades later.Sometimes this was true foresight, and sometimes just a happy accident.Whatever desktop OS you use today, there's a good chance you're using ideas that the Unix and Linux desktop communities were experimenting with, refining, and normalizing decades ago.
Personally, I was honestly surprised that some of these features were so early.I only started playing with Linux in the late '90s, and so I think of these features as the 2000s experience.Turns out there was plenty of runway before that point.
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