[cumbria_lug] Lurking too long.

[Adam Pigg]

On Thursday 23 February 2006 13:15, Dave Murphy wrote:
> Ian Linwood wrote:
> > For it to take off, we need a Linux (mmm, I mean integrated) GUI....
>
> To what benefit? What would an integrated GUI provide that the current
> offerings don't?
>
> > Lets face it folks, if you are not IT competent - it's a NON STARTER.
>
> Considering my kids and wife are at home as much in GNOME as they are in
> XP, I'd argue against that.
>
> > OK, we've stumbled along with xwindow, Gnome, KDE, Xorg. But are they
> > getting anywhere?
>
> Have you tried GNOME recently? I can't vouch for KDE (Adam feel free to
> step in here), but it is getting really good and with some of the new
> stuff coming (NLD's customisations, compiz etc.) it can only get better.
> Re-inventing the GUI now would be a terrible mistake, and kill a lot of
> momentum.
>
Ok, i'll step in.

I wasnt going to reply as the original mail looked most like a troll designed 
to provoke a response on the mailing list (maybe not a bad goal)

The only way i can vounch for KDE/lnux desktops is that i use it exclusively, 
my wife manages fine with konqueror, my mum manages to update her website 
using quanta, and my kids use xfce and gcompris (xfce because its a 500mhz 
machine, but it runs beautifully).


> > I'm going to kill my XP box. But it's not Linux that I'm going for -
> > Solaris 10 will be my friend.
>
> No surprise there with you!
>
> > Solid, Stable, Reliable. free (note lower case)
>
> I can happily say the same thing about my Ubuntu box, except it's Free
> (not uppper case).
>
> > The only thing that, IMO, could compete, are the BSD's. My fav would be
> > OpenBSD, but unfortunately, the guy who runs that show is a prick.
>
> How is *BSD or Solaris really that different from Linux? They're both
> using window managers on top of X so what are you getting (apart from
> less hardware support, and less availability of packages  - neither of
> which can be construed as "pluses") from switching. If you want an
> integrated GUI, why aren't you switching to BeOS? (Apart from the minor
> detail that it's dead). Unless you can provide some constructive
> arguments for your decision, it (to me) smacks of a bad case of "Linux
> isn't 733t enough anymore".
>
I agree here.  I dont see how any of the systems mentioned have a different 
desktop experience than with a linux box.  All you get is crappy harware 
support.  I'd probably say that with the way linux X is moving at the moment, 
most distros will have a very eye candy friendly desktop in the next few 
months. What bizarre about this is the direction the top 3 distros are going 
(feel free to redefine top 3 though)

Suse/Novell - Xgl - First to market but with something that was never meant to 
be a user product

Redhad/Fedors- Aigl - A more interim solution than Xgl and less of a step 
change, probably because they dont like that Xgl was developed in house.

Mandriva - Xegl - The next step after Xgl, not ready yet, but is supposed to 
be the end-user version of Xgl.

I dont know if this is going to cause a rift between the distros, but im sure 
everything will continue to work just fine, after all, its just X and the 
apps are built on the toolkits.

That reminds me, isnt X amazing!!  We're talking about a 20 year old 
technology that is flexible enough to have new stuff added all the time, be 
fully 3d hardware accelerated and still be backwards compatible.

Anyway, thats my bit.
> Cheers,