[geeks] galeon Doesn't Suck that much....

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

> > That requires GNOME, which requires approximately half of the source code
> > available on the world-wide-web.  Galleon is nice, but GNOME is quite
> > evil.
> 
> I honestly don't know how much effort it would be to gather up all the
> required parts and build them (I've only build galeon with NetBSD
> pkgsrc, where everything "just works" :-), but I do think you're
> exaggerating far beyond all reason.

Well, yes, "half the source code available on the world-wide-web" is an
exaggeration.  It still requires -far- more software components than I'm
willing to download and compile -just- to browse the web.

> For one, GNOME is far from evil -- it's much better written than
> anything in KDE, and much smaller too.

Non sequitor.  Just because it's better than $foo doesn't mean that it
doesn't still suck, overall.  

> Casual observation suggests GNOME+GTK is one of the best free GUI
> application development environments around on any system these days.

GTK is fine; in fact, from playing with it over the last few hours, I've
come to like it.  GNOME is bloated and suffering from featuritis.

> Galeon, even with mozilla's rendering engine in it, is much smaller than
> konqueror.

Yes, but if I'm going to have to run one of those two bloated desktop
environments, I'm going to run KDE, since I like it's design better.

> Konqueror also requires Qt, which is a horribly poorly implemented huge
> mess of graphics crap in C++:

Pretty-much anything implemented in C++ drifts towards a
poorly-implemented huge mess.  Pity most of the "professional" software
houses out there are stuck on it.  But, as far as crapulous messes go, Qt
is about as nice as you're going to get in C++.

You have to admit, though, KParts is pretty sweet.  Even if it is a
scab-encrusted hack written in C++.

> So galeon apparently starts out at less than half the size of knonqueror....

Which is probably due to all the dynamic binding that's incurred due to
compilation in C++.  You've got your binary-level link tables, then your
inheritance-based virtual function link tables, and there's so much crap
involved in just calling a member function that it's not even funny.

But, I hadn't realized the difference was that large.  Does Galeon load
another instance of itself for each window?

> Though probably all the KDE code is better bundled than that needed for
> galeon,

Which means a lot to me.  Being able to download 8 or 9 tarballs, all of
which are available at one FTP server is a hell of a lot more convenient
than my last GNOME-building experience (which, admittedly, was a while
ago).

> there's one heck of a lot more to build than for all of galeon
> (including the Mozilla parts), and it takes a lot more grinding to build
> than galeon (including all the Mozilla parts and underlying libraries)
> even for just the minimum necessary to run konqueror.

Really, in all honestly, they're both crap.  It's just that if I have to
pick one, I've had better luck working with KDE.  As it is, I'm still
using Indigo Magic on the Octane, and OpenLook on the U10.  I may switch
to GNUstep on both, as it's finally looking ready for prime-time.

--Jonathan