Kiddies...(Was Re: [Sunhelp] wow.)

[patl at Phoenix.Volant.ORG]

On 15-Aug-00 at 01:59, Brian Scanlan (singer at redbrick.dcu.ie) wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 14, 2000 at 11:57:03AM -0400, Chris Petersen wrote:
> > At least there seems to be a touch of the Openstep type stuff there...But
> > anybody's window manager project that mentions Windows 98 as much as
> > GNOME's UI pages do is an immediate turnoff in my book.
> 
> Gnome's not a window manager, the window manager that "ships" with the
> HelixCode Gnome desktop is "Sawmill". Despite the kneejerk "Ugh, Windows
> sucks" reaction that most (certainly around here) suffer from, there were
> some good ideas in Windows that MS fscked up that the Gnome folk reckon
> are a good plan.

It should also be pointed out that GNOME tools tend to follow the
GNU philosophy that the user should be able to configure things to
their own tastes.  It probably wouldn't be too difficult to configure
the GNOME panel to very closely resemble the look and feel of the CDE
panel.  (Although the technique for adding things to the panel would
change.  But this is one of the places where GNOME is a clear win over
CDE - there are easy and obvious methods to customize the panel from
the GUI.)

Also, gnome apps tend to be written in GTK which gives the user a
pervasive theme-ability.  Add the configurability of Enlightenment,
Sawmill, ICEwm and other modern X11 window managers; and you wind
up with a system you can easily tailor to an extent that Win* users
only get with a few individual apps like WinAmp.


I use CDE on my SPARC/Solaris machine and GNOME on my FreeBSD machines.
I only recently switched from ICEwm to Sawmill, and have to say that
there are a few things about Sawmill that I don't care for.  But it's
a new window manager, still under heavy development; so I expect that
to change in the next few months.

When I first started using GNOME, there were a few things that I
definately preferred about CDE.  But as GNOME has matured, and I
have gotten used to it, I find my opinions are changing.  I find
myself missing some of the GNOME features when using CDE.



-Pat