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LinuxPlanet's Year In Review
LinuxPlanet has a year-end review discussing their picks for favorite linux software in several categories, from window managers to time-wasters.
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Within the article I found that they mentioned quite a bit about kde and I thought I might respond.
There are many reasons why every kde app developer wants to get their app withing the base distrobution! First your app suddenly gets installed on (insert total kde desktops # here, some big ass number compared to said developers app downloads). Second you app then gets checked over many other developers as they are checking out the new kde app and because they are coders looking at your work they can provide good bug reports to quickly fix the problem. You application is quickly changed to conform to the rest of the desktop, making your application more pollished. The translation team will go through and convert your application to X (insert supported # of langues here) languages and you don't have to go out and find someone to do it for each language. Your Makefile etc worries are over as you no longer have to worry about then anymore (other then setting up your own Makefile.am, but if you can't do that then you still have some work to do before you should even think about going to kde's cvs) Also you can go and download just about any iso and there will now be a good chance that your app is sitting there. Now wouldn't you want to be part of this?
Second the windows manager debate page didn't have too much oomp to it. (more on this in the next paragraph) I think the major reason with this is because people don't want to think of them as seperate items, and with kde it simply comes with the desktop and works. (I am not currently up to date on gnome, but last I readup I think they are doing the same thing of a gtk based simple window manger that just works and ditched e). So other then e or some desktop that can only afford twm there isn't much to say on this.
Kmail, Konq, kword... A pattern here? Yes! The pattern is concistancy which I am surprised they didn't mention anywhere in their article (other then the corel dude, but that wasn't this type of consistancy). The applications look similar, behave similarly etc. The biggest reason I hated Netscape was how it did copy/paste differently then all the rest of my application. The reason I love Konq is similar. It does everything I need and looks the same as the rest of my applications and behaves the same. (this goes along with my own development of Kinkatta as an aim client for kde ) Things as small as that they all use the same "cut" icon in the end make life easier. You get anti-alias working for qt and suddenly all of the kde app have it, no getting it working for each app (cough mozilla cough). The like bobs_big_blue_theme? Go ahead and put it on. If you have all of 1 desktop then you don't have to worry about some apps not having it (besides xmms, but it has its own theme anyway). So I think one of the real reasons that these applications won is because not by themselves, but as a group they make something bigger and stronger.
-Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
Dennis's selection of OS/2 as "dead horse that needs to be shot one more time" was not any expression of hate for commercialized software or anything not linux.
Honestly, how many people still use OS/2? Sure, it was a good concept, and from what I hear, it worked very well. But even the people that I've talked to that used OS/2 religiously now tell me that it's being left far behind, and they can't keep on using it because of their advancing needs.
Now where's the stereotypical-linux-zealot-hate there?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I am not saying about translation. For example, word processors which cannot process their native letters (like Hiragana, Kanji, Hangul, Arab, Thai, and so on), editors which cannot edit their native letters, window managers, which cannot display their native letters on the window titles, and so on. Thus most of softwares are useless so far. Therefore, we cannot choose softwares in the viewpoint of personal preference but we have to choose softwares only because these softwares can handle our native languages.
In such world where we can use a limited subset of free softwares, there were a few remarkable softwares released this year. Vim 6.0 with multibyte encodings support (Unicode is one of such encodings), Emacs21 with locale (LC_CTYPE) sensibility, and so on.
I hope in the end of next year the "subset" of softwares which can handle multibyte characters will be increased considerably and I will be able to join this type of discussion!
It seems every time I turn around, I see a new magazine or web site running a "Best XXX" award ceremony. What's the deal?
To quote the Wolf from Pulp Fiction: "Let's not start sucking each other's dicks just yet." There's still a LONG way to go before I recommend desktop Linux to any regular PC user.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
This slimy little gunsel spends half his review sucking up to his buddies on FreeRepublic and how much he hates Richard Stallman for having the guts to point out that America stands for certain freedoms that DEP would just throw away.
Biggest time waster? DEP.
It has applications that are too slow for a 80Mhz machine.
It is exactly this sort of consistency that will help linux make inroads as a desktop system in businesses.
I spend my share of time on the help desk where I work (small office, we all do time). And I can't imagine the headaches that would arise if each user had a slightly different setup. The keyword for businesses is consistency. Everybody gets the same thing. For home use, pfft, I don't care. But if I have to remember that Joan uses a customized sawfish install while John uses Gnome with gmc instead of nautilus, multiplied by 200 users, I'll go nuts.
These users are the ones where you have to remind them which button on the toolbar is the one to check their e-mail! Got to love academia.