Introduction, questions

[John Richard Moser]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1



Emil Oppeln-Bronikowski wrote:
> John Richard Moser wrote:
> 
>> Hundreds of people work on GNOME, thousands of people use GNOME.
> 
> 
>  Same things go for KDE. Should Jonathan or Andreas post ,,Die GTK,
> die'' here? Are you aware of Code of Conduct?
> 

*shrug* I've had to deal with KDE users that are like that.  Doesn't
really bother me.

I actually liked KDE because it was flashy; then about 3 months into
using KDE 3.2 I started becoming physically ill due to a bad
psychological reaction to the bubbly keramik theme.  So out went that.
Recovery was followed by noticing that I was using 500M of physcial ram
(out of 768; the rest was disk cache) and something like 600-700 megs of
swap.  So I closed all running programs and stayed in KDE, and freed
about 100 megs of memory in total.  Logging out and logging back in
fixed it but eh, 3 days of uptime later. . .

I couldn't support KDE on less than 2 gigs of physical RAM, and couldn't
stand the lack of integration with the other 99% of GUI apps, so I
ditched it.  The experience gave me two major insights:

1.  KDE has problems that can be fixed, such as poor UI rules, ugly
themes, and memory leaks/excessive memory usage.
2.  KDE has problems that can't be fixed easily, mainly that it uses a
different toolkit and thus visually integrates poorly with the vast
majority of Linux GUI applications

(1) can be fixed.  (2) would require a LOT of work; and people
occasionally rewrite applications (gnomemeeting threatened to do this,
no idea if they actually did) for Qt or ever KDE.  Running KDE apps in
something NOT KDE brings up several copies of kdeinit; running Qt apps
just results in something with a UI that doesn't integrate well,
including dialogs that look vastly different from the other programs.

While I can handle this, it annoys me.  I recognize that this can
potentially cause less experienced users problems, because they'll
suddenly get something different and wonder wtf is going on.  Thus, as
KDE is different and diversity is a bad thing on this field, I dislike
it and recognize its existence as a legitimate threat to progress.

>  Ubuntu is not only about a toolkit and DE. It's about different aproach
> to the Linux community and software development, at least in my eyes.
> That is why I like it. You *can* change your DE anytime with apt-get,
> you can't change community.
> 
>  And community should have a good example from *above*, from
> *developers*. Developers should avoid sensless flames about other people
> work.
> 

I'm not an ubuntu developer, nor am I hijacking the Ubuntu community and
forcing them to align to my opinions.  My opinions are my own, and part
of a properly functioning community is the recognition that some
peoples' beliefs are different from your own.

I could have tried to be "nicer" and said that KDE is just "different"
and there are "considerations," but what does this accomplished?  Should
we censor anything that says that something may in fact be "bad" and
something else may be "good," even if it happens to be true, just
because some people don't want to hear it?  (for the record, as I said
above, KDE itself isn't inherantly bad; it's the split it causes between
the UI of various programs).

It may look like a small issue to you.  Consider if you will teaching a
user how to use Linux where various toolkits are used in a diversified
environment of Qt, GTK+, Gnome 1.2 dialogs, Gnome 2.4 dialogs, Gnome 2.8
dialogs, etc.  Consider perhaps the following:

"In Qt2 programs, the file selection dialogs look a lot like Windows 95
dialogs.  In Qt3 and KDE 3.2, there was the addition of specific
locations.  Gnome 2.2 dialogs list folders in one pane and files in the
other; whereas Gnome 2.4 dialogs add a few buttons to access / and
$HOME.  Gnome 2.6 dialogs are more common these days and allow multiple
locations to be specified and added to the left for shortcuts.  Gnome
2.8 dialogs supply a minimal amount of information to the user for quick
access to $HOME when saving and quick and easy advanced browsing when
saving and loading."

<User> . . . buh?

A mixed UI environment is in general bad.  Don't get me wrong, I also
don't like how Gnome2 progresses through varied dialogs and the
programmers sometimes have to recode for them; the dialogs should use
the same ABI whenever possible so that the UI automatically conforms to
the new model (and there should be a configuration option to change the
UI mode so that i.e. I can have Gnome 2.4 style dialogs).

This is easier to deal with though; stepping up through Qt versions and
KDE versions is impossible binarily (you need a recompile); and
cross-executing (executing with GTK+ or Qt in the same program) or
cross-porting will always require more work programmer side.

Anyway, thus is my rant.

>  I'm sorry for this rant. Hope I don't get banned from #ubuntu-love. :-)
> 

- --
All content of all messages exchanged herein are left in the
Public Domain, unless otherwise explicitly stated.

    Creative brains are a valuable, limited resource. They shouldn't be
    wasted on re-inventing the wheel when there are so many fascinating
    new problems waiting out there.
                                                 -- Eric Steven Raymond
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.5 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFCHUF3hDd4aOud5P8RAuUFAJ0YS0RrCa6f3a325a4sKgJl3pl1DACeN4/m
FrUQ/Ij2Rw22jo3WrQJKa+M=
=222I
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----