[Gllug] Debian

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Wed, 2003-10-22 at 10:47, will wrote:

> So, what exactly do people consider to be the problems with KDE and 
> Gnome and what errors have they replicated from other platforms?  I am 
> not defending them, just curious, no-one seems to have pointed out what 
> exactly they consider to be bad about them.
> 
> (KDE user at work, fluxbox user on laptop at home)

When I stated using X as a desktop, the best thing about it was the
choice of window managers. They all offered far more control than MS
Windows does:-

1/ Window stacking order decoupled from window focus
2/ Sloppy focus
3/ Virtual desktops (arranged in an arbitrary 2d grid, with mousing
between them possible.
4/ A bare environment - it was up to me to add whatever applets I wanted
to the root window, showing stuff like mail, time, etc.
5/ Network transparency

Gnome and KDE work very hard to undermine all of those features, in
order to cater for escapees from Windows, who've never thought about
anything else, and don't understand the separation between windowing
system, window manager, and toolkit.

I went through fvwm, afterstep and WindowMaker, and finally settled on
Enlightenment (which I'm still using). Enlightenment used to be regarded
as the memory hog among window managers. It looks so modest compared to
Gnome that it's not even funny. Nautilus looks pretty, but it's an
absolute resource hog.

<rant>
My other *major* gripe is that when I used to install an application,
say xfoo, it would have maybe one system wide config file, it
/etc/xfoo.conf, and I'd get a ~/.xfoo file or directory which would hold
the rest. Now, I get a mess. Some stuff in ~/.xfoo, some in ~/.gnome,
hidden in various subdirs, some in ~/.gnome_private, and then a random
amount of stuff in gconf, hidden Kibo only knows where, to access which
I need to run gconfd, which doesn't work properly over NFS. Oh yes, and
it's all in XML, which means I need everything linked against libxml2,
which chews more memory, and is unreadably verbose, and pretty much
uneditable in any sane way. Microsoft's registry was always a complete
pain on Windows, and gconf, though it uses "standards", is every bit as
bad.

Oh, and a side point - kill(1) used to work fine, but Gnome programs are
sufficiently weird that they have to provide their own "kill" type
scripts (killev, oaf-slay) so that it's possible to actually exterminate
them when they go wrong.
</rant>

Mike.

P.S. These complaints may (or may not) apply equally to KDE, but I don't
know it well enough to comment.



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