Am Saturday 28 July 2012 19:41:28 schrieb Steven D'Aprano:
> Dexter Filmore wrote:
> > Well, I've been telling for years now that we were better off with one
> > desktop that has the flexibility to adapt to everyone's needs.
>
> I can't imagine when it was that "we were better off with one desktop". Was
> it perhaps in the days of the Windows 95 desktop? Or the Apple Mac System 6
> Finder?
>
> > Be lightweight without graphical mumbo jumbo if desired, be all the
> > visual monster with tons of effects, be as simple as a task bar and
> > systray, be a full blown cornucopia of gadgets if somebody prefer that.
>
> So what you are actually saying is that this one desktop should actually
> be... a hundred different desktops, only all in one code base.
>
> I'm guessing that you're not a programmer or an engineer, are you?
>
> Configuration choices increase the complexity of a program exponentially.
> One desktop capable of being all things to all people, as you suggest,
> would be a thousand times more complicated than 100 desktops which each
> focus on one small segment of the users. That means a thousand times
> bigger, a thousand times more development time, and a thousand times more
> bugs.
>
OSS people tend to brag how OSS is superior due to the massive number of
developers at the bazar. Yet the all are spread over a million projects.
Some form and become stronger, evolve, most don't. If I had a buck for every
interesting approach that never got beyond 0.0.5 I'd need a bag to carry
them.
> Desktops of the complexity of KDE or Gnome are, in my opinion, already at
> the edge of being too complex to be maintained successfully. With so many
> combinations of configuration options, there is no possible way that every
> combination has been fully tested and is bug free. The best we can hope for
> is that the most commonly used combinations are bug free, and that any bugs
> are buried in combinations that nobody uses.
>
> > Make it configurable from simply to rocket science, from 486 to i7 but
> > have ONE API. Offer developers a safe base.
>
> While you're wishing, don't forget to ask for a flying pony that craps
> rainbows.
Yeah, one of my wiches being that people do not take every single fscking word
100% literally and think in the idea, not in absolutes. If you resign at
striving for an utopia you resign at "new ideas" already.
>
>
> [...]
>
> > Desktop Environment developers reinvent the wheel over and over again.
> > My favorite picture viewer is GThumb. It's GTK so it looks a wee bit
> > different from qt/kde no matter how much I adapt themes and engines.
> > It's gui bahviour is gtk and I can't do much about it.
> > I do *not* have a choice if I want to stick with that program. (Unless I
> > port it to qt myself. Some choice.)
>
> But it *is* a choice, and the only reasonable choice. Why should the GThumb
> programmer spend hundreds of hours, perhaps thousands of hours, trying to
> adapt his program to every imaginable toolkit?
>
> If *you* want to turn GThumb into a qt app, then *you* can do the work, or
> pay somebody to do it for you.
There goes the "free" train, as all the years before, been there.
>
>
> [...]
>
> > What we don't need is NOT a more powerful desktop, what we need are more
> > powerful *programs*.
>
> The desktop is a program. Many programs. Are you saying that they *don't*
> need to be more powerful? Who decides which programs are allowed to be more
> powerful and which are not?
Don't know what you're on about here.
>
> I think the KDE 4 developers made an incredible boneheaded mistake in the
> way they abandoned KDE 3 and started a new project from scratch. I think
> that the new functionality they created is mostly unnecessary and mostly
> unusable. (If I thought the opposite, I would be using KDE 4.) But it was
> their right to make that mistake, and who knows, next time they might
> actually get it right.
Yeah well next time we might all be dead.
>
>
> [...]
>
> > What we need is not a better desktop, that's like saying we need a better
> > hammer.
> > There is nothing to improve about hammers. The one I get in a hardware
> > shop has been perfected to its purpose.
>
> And which hammer would that be?
>
> Tack hammer.
> Ball-peen hammer.
> Cross-peen hammer.
> Sledgehammer.
> Drilling hammer.
> Bush hammer.
> Claw hammer.
> Framing hammer.
> Geologist's hammer.
> Lump or mash hammer.
> Rubber mallet.
> Copper or lead mallet.
> Wooden mallet.
> Dead blow hammer.
> Soft-faced hammer.
> Stonemason's hammer.
> Tinner's hammer.
> Dog-head hammer.
>
>
> It never ceases to amuse me when people use the hammer as an analogy for
> why we only need one tool for some purpose.
>
It never ceases to puzzle me how people take analogies into real life and
expect the crowd to cheer about them being smug.
Have fun driving in nails with a bush hammer.
> > Leave the desktops alone. All we need to organize our programs is a
> > taskbar, launchers and a systray. If at all.
>
> Maybe that's all *you* need.
See above.
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