Most of the modern terms these days have GPU acceleration too.
DESQview did not do any memory management of its own, and it did not use graphics. It was entirely local and had no networking. It was famously fast. It was a DOS multitasker so it managed DOS tasks, meaning multiple slots of 640kB. On a 386 with 4MB of RAM you could have 6 full-size DOS VMs with a bit left over.
If you were a power user you could still have say a big 1-2-3 spreadsheet in EMS plus a few DOS VMs.
DESQview delegated memory management to QEMM386, and QEMM386 did not do swapping. It didn't need to.
DESQview/X was a totally different product, with a full GUI, so much bigger and slower -- and it added an optional extension that added full virtual memory with swapping to disk.
I am wondering if you are mixing up DESQview (small, fast, local) with DV/x (big, complicated, networked, had optional VM)?
Or indeed DV/x with something else altogether? OS/2 maybe?
Because if it was swapping, it wasn't DESQview, not in any normal sane config anyway. It might be possible to add DV/x VM to plain old DESQview but I never heard of anyone doing that.
magazine page 97
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1986-10/page/n108/...
And with exception of command.com, most have had good CLI shells, without having to pretend being a teletype, like UNIX ones.
Amiga DOS with REXX was great, Oberon REPL, Smalltalk Transcript, Interlisp-D REPL, Xerox Star Mesa XDE,....
It can't just be pretty.
However, from my perspective, the extensive need to drag windows around and resize them is a habit of windows environment. So, perhaps, this is for the mouse what tmux and Neovim are for the keyboard.
In tmux, the window layouts I need are fixed sets of 2x2 panes, with some predefined ways of resizing them and toggling full-screen. With effective tools like telescope and nvim, the need to line all windows up disapears, because the switching is so efficient and I have more of a mental picture than a visual one of what's available. For example, no need for the file tree commonly to the left in most IDEs.
Setting up an efficient terminal environment is overwhelming. I do it as a hobby and enjoy the tinkering. Thanks to GPT the process is quicker. But I spent a lot of time just setting up a basic environment.
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/7263/better-desktop-z...
Probably it would be possible to zoom one window at once as a shell extension.
ssh vtm@netxs.online
That domain is dead now
When I said "zooming" I was thinking of the white tethers attached to each window which would pull them back into a centre bundle. You can see what I mean here: https://changelog.com/news/a-textbased-desktop-environment-i... at the bottom left, the lines going off to a single point.
actually, by zooming out, I can still see the tethers on the windows. The ssh version was quite mind-blowing back when...
I already have a Linux machine, but yes this looks like a nice addition;)
what use is a text-based desktop environment, if it requires a graphical interface and cannot run in a tty?
Still doesn't make a lot of sense, but I like it. :-D
Its not hard.