Re: Struggling with Palm Pilot
On Thursday 01 January 2004 17:20, Monique Y. Herman wrote:
> Out of curiosity, why do you want to use exclusively one or the other?
> Is it an issue of space for all the libraries?
>
Its a very valid question, and I am not sure I can give you a very valid
answer other than an emotional one. Its certainly not disk space - I have
about 50Gb to play with
I originally ran a kde environment - with an attempt to use kde apps where
possible for the common look and feel (and, as a minor point, the cross app
integration) with a view to picking up programming again (25 years since I
did it as a profession) and filling in the holes where I had a need and there
was nothing that met it. Well that was 18 months/2 years ago, and apart from
a few minor patches to kmail and kate, I haven't managed to find the time to
get into it more seriously.
More recently, as UserLinux was announced and the decision taken to focus
exclusively on the Gnome environment, I wanted to take a closer look. I have
always suspected that Gnome would win out (in terms of being the desktop of
choice when Linux starts to challenge Windows on the desktop serionsly)
precisely because of the reasons given in Bruce Perens paper. To me the
argument was a bit like the VHS/Betamax war in the video recorder field, KDE
being the better technically, but loosing out because of non technical
reasons.
I had dabbled with Gnome over the period, but never really got into it. But
to contribute to the debate, I felt I had to give Gnome a serious look. In
order to do that, I have to have a working desktop which does NOT use the qt
libraries (for the reasons expounded in Bruce's paper about licences). Thats
what I am trying to do now.
My (very subjective) experience to date is that
a) The Gnome apps are less consistent and user friendly than KDE ones
b) There is an impression of better robustness (by that I mean doing the job
accurately rather than not crashing) in Gnome for non core apps
c) I can't find the essential functionality to handle high volume mailing
lists that kmail has (ie folders that purge old messages automatically) in
any GTK based app to date (i've tried evolution, thunderbird and balsa)
I aim to stick with this for another month exploring things before going with
it, or going back to KDE - and trying that bit harder to get into developing
some software again.
--
Alan Chandler
alan@chandlerfamily.org.uk
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