Daphne Preston-Kendal
I was once mildly mocked by someone in an online chat because I use https://hypercritical.co/front-and-center/. The criticism was that this ‘simple window manager feature’ costs $5.
I would like to sit that person down in front of a Linux box and ask them to get themselves this feature there. I will inform them, xkcd 951-style, when the amount of time they spent on it vs paying $5 for an app to do it means they are working for less than minimum wage.
Daphne Preston-Kendal
The tendency is to assume that software freedom is meaningful in the sense that you can actually do anything you want with your computer, when the reality is more like you *could* do anything with it – if you had the time, the skill, and the inclination
(This is connected to why I think taking Unix and C as the basis of our free OSes has actually been counterproductive to users’ ability to meaningfully make use of software freedom)
Daphne Preston-Kendal
So it’s an obscure feature that probably very few people want. My options:
1. spend the time to implement it myself
2. file a bug an hope somebody thinks it worth their time; wait in the meanwhile, and expect that someone will probably close it as ‘not planned’ because it’s so weird
3. live without it
4. pay someone to develop it for me
When the cost is only $5, I’ll take number 4 thanks
Daphne Preston-Kendal
This behaviour is weird enough that Apple *completely* dropped it with Mac OS X, not even providing an option for the old way, despite a significant user base that was used to it.
If there’s anything weird here, it’s that the market for this feature is even large enough that selling it for $5 is even a vaguely viable business model. By the time it came out in 2020, the functionality had been gone for nearly 20 years already.
Daphne Preston-Kendal
And sure, maybe the point was that if standard window managers did support it, it would be gratis.
But the fact is they don’t. This is a pretty niche feature request, bringing back behaviour that was roundly mocked in the original Mac OS where it comes from. (e.g. Joel Spolsky https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/24/user-interface-design-for-programmers/#:~:text=Sit%20down%20at%20a%20Macintosh – Front and Center at least fixes the bug where clicking a window brought its application forward, but not the window itself)
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