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.

Comments

And Sawfish?

[oasisbob]

What? They made *two* categories for window managers and time-wasters? After spending six hours trying to get Sawfish to work right, I would put them in the same group...

I demand a recount!

[Tsar]

I am shocked, shocked, so see that /. wasn't voted Favorite Time-Waster.

TANJ!

KDE biased

[IceFox]

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

Re:Dangerous...

[ThatComputerGuy]

I dunno dude, these weirdos may have a different interpretation of "slower machines" than you and I.

dep's quote: "I admit that this is on a low-end machine, an Athlon 1.2-gig with 768 megs of memory and a G-400 vid card with a paltry 32 megs."

i18n

[kubota]

For non-Latin-script-language speakers and, especially, multibyte-language speakers, many softwares which cannot handle their native languages are useless.

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!

What's with all the "award" shows?

[dimator]

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.