[rescue] Never thought I'd ask this

[Phil Stracchino]

Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> On Mon, 22 Oct 2007, Mike Hebel wrote:
> When I last used FreeBSD as my desktop at work (that was, right up until
> I got tired of the whine of that Dell's fan and brought a Mac from
> home), I had a window manager that whose source was less than 16
> kilobytes.  The developer[0] has a goal of getting it down to 10k.

Nice.  :)

> That 16k got me infinite[1] virtual desktops, window placement and
> management, and a lot of speed.  I don't understand how metacity can be
> nearly five hundred times as large (not counting the fleet of libraries
> it requires), and give me a lot less in functionality, but a lot more in
> pointless eye candy.

But, but, but ....  it's all ABOUT the pointless eye candy!

> Furthermore, I don't understand how the entire desktop[2] environment
> can follow the same design principle (do less, look arguably prettier)
> and gain real traction.  It's not like the file manager is as good as
> Explorer, or even the brain-damaged Finder.  It's not like the widgets
> are very efficient--GNOME makes everything feel like a cramped 14" CRT.
> It's not like the apps are -fast-.  All that XPM skinning and CORBA and
> desktop-announcement-bus crap makes even KDE and XFCE (for all their C++
> baggage) sprint ahead.

Amen to that.  fvwm FTW.

> I mean -come on-, even Microsoft does themes better!  How does this
> GNOME crap hold onto a userbase?

fiik.  My best guess is people who want to be running Linux, but really
really in their heart of hearts actually want to be running Windows.

> [2] How big is GNOME now, anyway?  >500MB?

Don't ask.


-- 
        Phil Stracchino                CDK#2
 Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
 phil.stracchino at speakeasy.net   alaric at caerllewys.net
 Landline: 603-429-0220           Mobile: 603-320-5438
        It's not the years, it's the mileage.