windows 8 - tiles, tiling style

[ceti331]

I actually think the windows 8 tiled launcher screen is pretty interesting, i think it makes the title-bars / dropdown menu look comes across as being primitive now. (i've never, ever liked the look of windows/gtk dropdown menu under each titlebar.. glad ubuntu has globalmenu).
IMO M$'s idea of making a tile a cross between a launcher and a desktop widget is actually a really good idea.

Has anyone tried to setup a linux to look a bit like this? I guess there are various options, I suppose the real tiled window managers could possibly be a good starting point.. probably capable of quite a bit more than the snap type behaviour we've seen in the videos

when I was personally messing with tiling WM's the thought had struck my mind ages ago that individual programs could be re-worked to show something a bit more intelligent when they're squashed into a small screen area (switch off toolbars, just show summary..)

i suppose gnome-shell has gone that way a bit (dedicated launcher screen..)
is this entirely a touchscreen phenomenon i.e. instead of a fiddly little menu the imputus is to use the entire screen as a menu

Do any of the linux UI's use the swipe-from-edge gesture that win8 and QNX have pioneered.. i think this is pretty good too, a great way of decluttering a screen

linux has always been great at 'eye candy' and it would be good to see one setup to look state of the art on a touchtablet :)

[scottbomb]

As long as they leave on the tablets, I'm cool with it. But if MS insists on replacing the start menu with metro on the desktop version of Windows 8, they will lose this customer and I will go 100% linux. Windows 7 was their best OS ever but windows 8 looks like it's about to flop Win ME-style. I'm sure there will be a few who like it though, as there is with ubuntu unity. For each his own I guess but at least with linux I have a choice (now using xfce).

[Copper Bezel]

@ ceti - it's not just a UI shell, though. All those updating live tiles depend on having apps written to support them, so the whole DE would have to be tailored to that style of interaction.

With that said, although I haven't played with it extensively, some spins of Android Honeycomb are similar in design.

KDE's Plasma Active (http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active) project, a relatively new initiative, is intended to be precisely this, by the way, a UI and a set of apps designed to bring mobile flexibility to a conventional desktop OS, but it's just getting started. Still not as pretty as Windows 8, though. = (