Re: New windows

[Paul Seelig <pseelig@mail.Uni-Mainz.de>]

cdysthe@bigfoot.com (Christian Dysthe) writes:

> Then I see that the big hype these days is KDE and Gnome. I have tried them
> both and felt I was taking one step back towards what I left. I just do not
> undetstand why the Linux community are working against a wm "standard" that is
> not based on what seems truly unique and well layed out: The nextish look.
> Instead I am again presented with the taskbar and popup menus that hasn't
> really changed for years. Is this to conquer new users, or is it becuase Linux
> users "secretly" have missed the look and feel of MS Windows?
>
There is the common misconception coined by the very term "Linux
community", that the Linux users are a somewhat homogeneous crowd and
you simply fell for that.  The Linux crowd is IMHO by far the most
heterogeneous bunch of computer users imageinable and this refelects
in various aspects regarding choice of programs and GUI's used by each
individuum.  Doesn't this sound familiar? Like in: Some like Emacs,
some prefer XEmacs to Emacs, other like vi and despise either Emacs,
and yet someone other prefers vim or nvi over vi?  The same goes for
GUI's.  While i actually agree to your observations i'm rather happy
about the fact that all these choices are actually there. This is a
very good thing.

Apart from the way a desktop looks and functions it's pretty much the
same whether i use XEmacs under WMaker, KDE, GNOME or good old FVWM
(apart from the fact that Wmaker and FVWM leave one some RAM for
running the actually used application).  We don't work with a desktop
or desktop environment but with full blown programs like in my case
XEmacs for getting our work done, right?

The main interest in the KDE/GNOME stuff lies actually in the fact
that they provide more or less a framework for easier application
development.  And both will only start to be really interesting in the
Unix world when actual applications like KOffice, Gnumeric or AbiWord
become available as actual release versions.  But for this we still
have to wait quite some more.  In the mean time let all those kids
play their desktop war games as if it was a DOOM death match... ;-)
 
> And in Debian Windowmaker is presented as: "Yet another Windowmanager" when it
> is actually GNOME and KDE that to me feels and looks like "yet another..."
> 
ACK. :-)
                                  Cheers, P. *8^)
-- 
   --------- Paul Seelig <pseelig@goofy.zdv.uni-mainz.de> -----------
   African Music Archive - Institute for Ethnology and Africa Studies
   Johannes Gutenberg-University   -  Forum 6  -  55099 Mainz/Germany
   ------------------- http://ntama.uni-mainz.de --------------------