Re: kde vs gnome

From: Kirk Job-Sluder (kirk_at_eyegor.jobsluder.net)
Date: 10/13/03 

Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2003 20:47:39 GMT

Michel Talon <talon@lpthe.jussieu.fr> wrote:
> Kirk Job-Sluder <kirk@eyegor.jobsluder.net> wrote:
> Yes, you are right. By the way the KDE window manager by itself is
> no more intrusive than icewm. So there is no big win changing the
> manager once KDE runs, except if you want to run ion, but then you can
> as well attach 2 VT100s at the serial ports.

Gee, are you really interested in discussion or just throwing out
badly informed bombastic statements with little grounding in reality.

Of course, vt100 terminals don't run X, and therefore can't run X
applications such as OpenOffice, Mozilla, or the graphical features of
R. What ion does provide me is a stable framework for running X
applications that minimizes the desktop clutter and automatically
maximizes applications to the full screen size.

But that is the basic point. Having that framework chugging in the
background is great if you make heavy use of kde applications. If you
don't make heavy use of kde applications, the kinit process is
unnecessary bloat.

> I am not confusing the roles of window manager and desktop managers at
> all, on the contrary i am claiming that graphical unix boxes need
> a desktop manager and not a window manager, be it gnome or kde, i
> don't care. Servers don't need X at all. I am claiming that insisting
> on window managers is completely missing the point. Of course window
> managers are designed to manage windows, but what Microsoft has
> demonstrated is that managing windows is far insufficient. You may
> contest this opinion, but look, why is it that most major Linux distros
> will install KDE or Gnome (or both) without further discussion? Why
> is it that FreeBSD has FreeBSD-KDE and FreeBSD-Gnome teams to be able
> to offer recent versions of these tools? And most brutally, why is it
> that 90% of desktop users remain attached to Windows? For me it is
> clear, it is because people want full desktops environments and
> not minimalistic things like we had ten years ago on Unix boxes.

So far, I have not found that minimalist window managers are
insufficient for my day to day work flow of communicating with other
people (using mozilla and occasionally mutt), writing software for
discourse analysis (using Python, mysql and vim) and writing a
dissertation (using OpenOffice). So I'm seriously wondering where
this is so insufficient.

But my point in posting a list of my experiences with several different
window systems is not to say that KDE and Gnome are "crap" but to point
out that there are a wide variety of alternatives out there. KDE is a
good thing, in spite of my annoyances with resource usage, error
messages, and problems with the latest upgrade. I agree that KDE, Gnome
or Xfce4 should be the default desktop environment for new users,
although I prefer Xfce4 for obvious reasons.

A final point, arguing that the choice of %90 of desktop users says
something "brutal" about a particular software package is a basic
logical fallacy that does not need to be refuted in detail other than to
point out that the ports tree contains a wide variety of software that
is of particular use to only a few people. I think the primary
debate here is one of philosophy rather than software. I see the wide
variety of GUI interfaces for Unix and think "Viva la difference!"
There are so many different ways to solve a problem that I don't see
a need to slam a different approach unless the software really is crap. 

-- 
Kirk Job-Sluder
http://www.jobsluder.net/~kirk/

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