[techtalk] Bunch of odd messages

[Caitlyn M. Martin]

Hi, Bob,

> I first tried Gnome when Red Hat announced they were using it as the X
> desktop in their distribution and supporting the development of Gnome.
> I thought they were premature, like everybody else.

I'd say that was an accurate assessment.  As I said before, it is
*very* promising, and it continues to improve every time I play with it.
There are a lot of things I do like about Gnome.

> It's been quite some time.  Has it improved?

IMHO, yes, it has improved a whole bunch.  It's much more stable than it
was.  Some of the apps for it (Gnumeric, the spreadsheet, immediately comes
to mind) have come a very long way, and are actually very nice right now.
Others, like gedit and gftp, are still quite broken, at least as of a month
or two ago when I last downloaded the latest and greatest.

I still find the Gnome/Enlightenment combo to be the most resource intensive
I've seen, and therefore quite slow or even unusable on older systems.  I
suppose with another window manager, Gnome might be acceptable in those
situations.

I wouldn't say it's bad, but as Conni pointed out, it still seems to crash
now and again, and KDE doesn't, which is why I made my choice.   I tend to
hit my systems rather hard, as in I have a whole lot going on at once most
of the time, so I tend to stress things more than many.  I suspect, given a
little more time to get things polished, though, Gnome will be quite
excellent.

> Is there an objective case study somewhere?

I haven't seen one, and opinions seem to vary widely.

> I'm not terribly partisan about X desktops

Me neither, and I have never understood the "GNOME-KDE wars", as Kelly
called them.  To me, having more good choices out there only strengthens
Linux' appeal, and is a very good thing.

> and in fact I prefer Lesstif.  But it's not convenient for me to change
> desktops
> right now (KDE is what I'm using).

Well, I can do it at boot time, and I have a number of different WMs and
desktop combos in my boot menu now.  I honestly kind of like running
Enlightenment with kfm and kpanel on top of it.  It is an incredibly pretty
and customizable combination.  On older, slower machines, AfterStep is still
my choice, and it's improved with time, too.  I still run kde/kwm most
because... well, I don't really have a good reason, other than it works
well, but so do other things.  It's just comfortable for me, I guess, and
I like a lot of KDE's apps and applets.  I still change off when the mood
takes me, though :)

FWIW, I may be a whole lot more prejudiced towards KDE2 if certain promises
and/or wish list items  come to pass  They are talking about bi-directional
support, and lack of decent support for Hebrew in Linux is the very last
reason I have a Windows box at all.  If bidi is included for everything on
the desktop, and eventually for widgets as well, I could see it incorporated
into KMail and KOffice.  If Gnome does not follow suit, that would make KDE
and it's apps the only real choice for folks who need support for Arabic,
Thai, Hebrew, Yiddish, and any other languages written from right to left.
For millions of people, that is *huge*.

Take care,
Caity



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