Re: I've thought better of Linux

cstacy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Christopher C. Stacy) writes:

>Robert Uhl <eadmund42@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>> What would you propose--that every nation in the world outlaw
>> working on any desktop environment other than FooDesk?
>
>It's just interesting that, so far, the collective
>efforts of the entire open software community have
>been unable to get even one of them to actually work.

That's because until recently (i.e., a couple years ago, with
KDE/Gnome), noone has actually tried. I would think that most people
(myself included) do not use fully equipped desktop environments, but
more simplistic window-manager-only solutions, that just manage the
dozen or so applications they have been using for years. And that
works pretty well, imho. In fact, it works so well, that I've always
preferred that to Windows.

When the "open source community" (for whatever nebulous value thereof)
wanted to introduce a "desktop environment", they made the mistake of
trying to retrofit the look&feel of other operating systems on top of
Linux (Unix). In the case of KDE, despite the name, it was a mix of
Windows95 and OS/2. In the case of Gnome, it is currently some kind of
studied-by-screenshots Macintosh.
Both are now bloated monstrosities that fail to provide the look&feel
and functionality of the originals they strived to copy. Everytime a
new feature appears in Windows, or on the Macintosh, it is (badly)
copied and put, with little or no thinking, into the desktop
environment. The net result is, that neither long-time X11 users, nor
migrators from Windows or Mac can feel at home. Had they created
something unique from start, something that didn't try and pretend
that it itself is the operating system and no Unix is under the hood,
I'm sure it would've worked out a lot better.

And then there's the bugs. I've used Gnome for a while, mostly for
evalutation if I can put it on someone else's desktop (I opted for
KDE, then) and followed its development thereafter. Gnome 1.4 wasn't
quite as bad but every release of Gnome2 has been horribly buggy. I'm
not talking about a Gnome game crashing every now and then (although
that happens, of course). The thing is designed for end users. How
should an end user cope with Gnome crapping into the gconf registry,
because nautilus crashes in some wicked way, and that then disables
the ability to log back in. Or you can log in again, and all the icons
(or nautilus itself) is gone. You'll have to run a shell (how would
the end user do that, when the desktop is more or less frozen?) and
delete the respective Gnome directories from his homedir manually,
taking care that no important data is lost. I've seen this several
times, and other rather disillusionizing fuckups, like nautilus
blocking the entire Gnome part of the desktop when it's waiting on
some kind of network timeout (hello, is this Win 3.1?) To deal with
these kind of problems, potentially debug and workaround them, is out
of scope for the target audience, namely unsophisticated end users.

In this light, it's little surprising that the only halfway
well-working desktop environments I've seen on X11, namely Openlook
and CDE, were commercial offers. And yes, they could be used by
unsophisticated end users, without crashing and locking up all the
time.

mkb.
.

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