Re: Why not?

[Liam O'Toole <liam.p.otoole@gmail.com>]

On Wed, 12 Jul 2006 08:19:07 -0500
"Cybe R. Wizard" <cybe_r_wizard@earthlink.net> wrote:

> In the Great Book it has Been Written that on Wed, 12 Jul 2006
> 06:44:44 -0500 John Hasler <jhasler@debian.org> didst appear within
> my Magick Viewing Screen and, being somewhat pleasantly supplicatory,
> did polemicize thusly:
> 
> > Change the default to KDE and an equal number of people will
> > complain that it isn't Gnome (I use neither).  Perhaps it could be
> > made easier to switch, but I see no reason to change the default.
> > Don't forget that many new users have never heard of KDE, Gnome, or
> > a desktop manager.
> 
> What a shame, too, because using various WMs is such a treat.
> 
> So,here's the reason for the subject change; why not have an easier
> way to switch between DEs such as is found in most WMs?  It's dead
> easy to switch between WMs because there is a menu entry for it.
> For KDE and GNOME /not/ to have that availability looks suspiciously
> like an attempt to tie-in new users to one or the other.
> 
> Cybe R. Wizard

KDE and GNOME are end-to-end application frameworks. It just doesn't
make sense to switch between them on-the-fly as one would switch between
window managers. A KDE user, for example, might read her mail using
kmail and surf the web using konqueror. One wouldn't usually want to
interrupt these activities in the course of a switch.

Switching the window managers bundled with the desktop environments is
another matter. One could, say, have metacity take over from kwin in
your KDE session. But again, it's not something that the user would
normally want to do: the whole point of using a desktop environment is
to avail of a set of consistent software components rather than to adopt
a mix-and-match approach.

-- 

Liam