Re: stuff and the thing

[Jeff Licquia <jeff@luci.org>]

On  6 May, mike packard wrote:
> 
> Is there anyplace to reference all the dumb little errors and messages
> that pop up in your log files for sendmail, messages, etc.?  I don't know
> what a lot of them mean.

Some packages have some hints about what error messages mean in the
FAQs, HOWTOs, man pages, etc.  Other than that, you're on your own.

> Also, regarding Caldera: Did anyone else not really like using it after
> they had it installed?  I thought that the install was pretty nice.  
> However, when I rebooted I didn't even feel like I was in Linux anymore.  
> Not that graphical logins are horrible, but I couldn't figure out how to
> turn it off.  I also find KDE very uncomfortable because (like Windows)
> it's easy and convenient to configure the things they have menus for, but
> very difficult, to do what there isn't a menu for. It seems to me that
> this whole "getting Linux on the desktop" movement is doing a lot more
> "Hey we can imitate Windows." and not enough "Hey, we're so much cooler
> than windows, see!"  The whole thing (RedHat is doing this too) just
> seemed very clogged and messy.  Example: A "minimum" install from Caldera
> 2.2 installed full-blown KDE along with all its stuff and that gui login
> thingy.  
> 
> I'm interested in hearing what everyone else thinks.

This is why I prefer GNOME over KDE.  Both of them at the present
aren't much more than clones of the Windows environment (with varying
degrees of success), but GNOME, I believe, has the infrastructure in
place to blow Windows (and KDE) out of the water.  The GNOME people did
the hard work of CORBAtizing the entire system from the start (and even
wrote their own CORBA ORB when the available ones didn't cut the
mustard).  Now, they have a lot of potential to explore.  As they
explore it, I think we'll start seeing a lot of "Gee, this is really
cool!" comments about what GNOME is doing.  

As an example, their interface builder efforts are directed at using
XML as a description language.  If the right components are built into
the system, this could make for some interesting stuff.  Imagine a
Visual Basic-like tool, but instead of being forced to code in Basic
(ugh!), you could choose any language you wanted, and even mix and
match languages - low-level stuff in C, string handling in Perl,
exported object API in Python, all in the same application.  And then
imagine you could, with a single click, transform your GUI dialog boxes
into HTML forms and publish them on the Web, with the same back end
code handling everything.  Sure, it's really wild, but it's within the
realm of possibility with a lot of work.

The wild card is still how the leadership in the GNOME community handles
future growth.  They didn't do too well handling the initial release;
rather than work really hard at making it foolproof, they spent too
much time playing with new cool stuff.  We'll see if they learned from
their mistakes.

Not that I dislike KDE.  But their current project - tacking an object
model onto their existing desktop - sounds too much like Windows to me.
 I hope they do better (and I think they might, since they're open
source), but I wouldn't be surprised if the object model on KDE ends up
being as patchy and inconsistent as COM/ActiveX.

(I am being too hard on KDE.  Really, it is slicker and more polished
at this stage.  If the developers could get together and develop a
system with the spit-and-polish of KDE on top of GNOME's object model
and ORBit, then Linux would be up there with BeOS on the cool desktop
continuum.)

In the meantime, I think that even an "imitate Windows" strategy could
work well for some Linux distros.  Linux has the edge on Windows in
stability, scalability (both up and down), and management.  If it can
come close enough to Windows' vaunted ease of use while maintaining
those other advantages (and if it continues to attract applications),
then we've got a good candidate for a Windows killer.

And for the rest of us, there's still distros like Debian, which still
conducts the majority of its install with line-oriented questions,
asked one after another, and which still doesn't have X-based
management tools, and which still sports developers who write things
like "Dumb users are bad for Debian." :-)

There's my two cents' worth.  (Gee, all that verbiage and it's only
worth two cents?)



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