Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 20th Feb 2007 09:59 UTC
What is wrong with KDE 3.x? What is wrong with GNOME 2.8+? These seem to be the two questions arising from the recent revival of Linus vs. GNOME spat. We all know the history; Linus called the GNOME guys 'interface nazis' and advised Linux users to use KDE, which resulted in the longest comment thread on OSNews ever. That kind of fizzled out, only to be brought to light again by Linus submitting a few patches to make GNOME behave more like he wants it to behave.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
"Well, have you ever looked at the configuration directory of Gnome in your home directory?
Does the zillion xml files in there look to you like human readable and managable?"
Please can we drop this one. GConf is entirely unlike the windows registry, and files have nothing to do with it. The reason is that GConf can use any storage system. All GConf is essentially, is a method for storing and retrieving settings (and some related things, notifying changes and whatever.) You can store the data in a database, or flat files if you really want. XML is simply the best way to do it that's been tried so far.
And as for human manageability, you might want an xml editor to make it at easier, but you can definitely do it if you want, and it's not so much harder than some of the stranger things in /etc/.
"It's been a recent trend of GTK applications to start using Gnome components and therefore forcing users to install Gnome"
No. No one is forcing you to use anything, and you haven't refuted that at all. If you want a gnome app, then true, you might need some gnome components for it. But you could equally just not use that app.
In more general terms, the gap between a gnome app and a gtk one is shrinking all the time. A gnome app is becoming just one that uses services that are usually found on a gnome system. I have no idea if this applies to KDE (I guess less so as they have less control of their toolkit?) but as KDE picks up dbus and gstreamer to varying extents, the barriers are blurring to say the least.
"But there are quite a few examples of former GTK only apps suddenly requiring Gnome. Abiword I think could be another example."
Another? Well, abiword runs fine without gnome. It's on the olpc laptop for one.
"it'll be soon pointless to run any other desktop or WM because in order to use any popular apps you'll have to have both KDE and Gnome installed anyway"
To run gnome apps you need libgnome, ok, but not a lot else that is "gnome only." You might need gconf, dbus, gstreamer, any number of any things, but these aren't a desktop environment. You certainly don't have to install extra gnome applications you don't want.