No, the new desktop would be either KDE or GNOME at its base. For example, GNOME developers could port their HCI-based GUI design to Qt and KDE developers could add a layer of abstraction if necessary allowing the key GUI components to be swapped out.
Not gonna happen. Seriously, if the new desktop used (for example) Gnome as their base, why would KDE-developers work on it? They would look at it, and think that "We already have a working desktop. Why should we throw it away and work on their desktop instead?". Yes, they would bring along some of their technology, but in the end, they would still abandon their desktop. If KDE-developers wanted to work on Gnome, they would already be working on Gnome. But they aren't. They want to work on KDE instead. You couldn't force them to work on Gnome. If someone deciced that "we will take the best of KDE, and port it to Gnome, and work on Gnome for thereon", they would simply say "no way! I like KDE, and I will keep on working on KDE!". Same thing applies to Gnome-developers.
No, it would not work. WHy do Linux-hackers work on Linux and not *BSD? Why do FreeBSD-hackers work on FreeBSD and not on NetBSD? Before you say "but all those people cooperate quite a bit!", I can simply say that Gnome-hackers and KDE-hackers also cooperate quite a bit.
Well, the Mini wipes the floor with Epia's when it comes to performance, while the price is more or less the same. And it looks better than Epia-cases do (Well, Hush does look good, but it's uber-expensive as well)
I'm buying the Mini as well. And if OS X is not for me, I will rip it out and put Gentoo in there instead. And what are you going to do about it? Hit me in the face?
Sorry, but that case is ugly. And the system you can put there (VIA Epia) sucks ass when it comes to performance. And you can't run OS X on it.
Of course Mini is ntohign revolutionary. Small and silent PC's have been around for a while. But it is first small and silent Mac that also happens to be extremely affordable! And it offers better performance than those Epias do. If you want small size with better performance, you have to get some kind of Dothan Mini-ITX-system, but those are hard to find and they cost quite alot.
BTW, if our mentally handicapped friends out there ARE thinking about getting a Mac Mini to run Linux on, save yourself the trouble and just get a Via EPIA board and case and build your own. It'd be cheaper, smaller, and run x86 Linux out of the box.
Epias are alot slower than the Mini is. And they cost more or less the same. And they are about as big as well. In short: Mini is simply better than Epia is. Of course if you need x86, then it's a good choice. But I do not. And I do want to give OS X a try, and this seems like the best way to do it. And if I don't like it, I still have a kick-ass computer to install Linux on. I have been looking for such small computer to play around with. A win-win scenario.
Re:Apple stole the iMac Mini idea from ePC
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Mac mini Dissection
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But all the really cool stuff is closed (like Quartz and Quartz Extreme). Fact is that while the absolute core of the OS might be open, in reality the OS is closed-source.
Yes, Apple is better than MS on this respect. But no, it's still not open source like Linux is. Linux is open from top to bottom.
That 270MB is not "for a desktop". It's for SEVERAL desktops (three simulatenous desktops for three different users who are logged in on the machine), together with SEVERAL running applications, X.org, several background-services (some by Linux itself, others by the desktop) and the like. And since absolute minimium amount of RAM in PC these days is 256megs, I think that's pretty good.
But hey, if you really want to use as little as RAM as possible, how about something like Ratpoison? Or Fluxbox? Or Xfce?
My comment regarding technological differences (language, toolkit etc.) is also relevant to other things besides those two. What about other technologies? KDE uses DCOP, Gnome uses CORBA. KDE uses kparts, Gnome uses Bonobo. There are simply so much differences between the two that merging them is not really possible. And you can't really merge the developer-base and start a new project, since some developers would prefer Gnome-style, whereas other would prefer KDE-style (and these include stuff like language, toolkits, technologies, UI-design and the like). Some developers would start a new project, and we would (again) have several competing projects.
Use all the same core libraries, but have teams work on pluggable GUI components that suit their taste.
So the new desktop would use both GTK AND Qt? And kparts and bonobo? etc. etc. Isn't that wasted resources? And I would guess that it would make the end-result even more resource-hungry, since you would have two separate, yet functionally similar libraries/technologies running in the background. All that would make the desktop even more bloated and it would be a nightmare to maintain.
It's fully possible to accommodate diverse ideas without having two huge, separate, disconnected communities.
As for stability, I've found dozens of bugs in Kmail and Konqueror. Most don't cause a crash, but they are still annoyingly incorrect operation.
I trust you reported these on bugs.kde.org?
Re:Apple stole the iMac Mini idea from ePC
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Mac mini Dissection
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Aside from the fact most stuff has an OS X port, why would you run Linux ?
Because Linux is Open Spource, whereas OS X is not? Because with OS X you are stuck with Aqua, whereas on Linux you can choose from several different GUI's (yes, you say that OS X has "the best GUI of any UNIX", but that is really just a matter of taste)? Because OS X always behaves in certain ways (which you may not like), whereas Linux-distros offer more choice? Because Linux runs on several different architecture, whereas OS X does not?
Seriously: I find it rather surprising that some MAc-users think that "Linux-users have ZERO reason to run Linux, they will surely switch to OS X!". In reality it's not as simple as that. While OS X is nice, it's just another proprietary OS like Windows is. It may have more eye-candy that Windows does, but eye-candy is not the reason why people use Linux.
Yes, I'm buying the Mini and I am going to try our OS X.
Deal with it, while you are running a glorified 386, and a minix v2 kernel, the rest of us are going to get RISC workstations, with the latest & greatest from NeXT.
There's nothing really wrong witht he Linux-kernel. OS X might have some uber-leet whiz-bang microkernel, but that alone doesn't make it somehow "better". And come to think of it, Minix has a microkernel, as does OS X. Linux is a monolithic kernel. So it would be more accurate to say that OS X is the one with "Minix v2 kernel", and not Linux;).
And being RISC doesn't automatically make the system better either. I remember just few years ago Apple was having it's ass handed in a platter by Intel/AMD, even though they were just "glofied 386's", while Apple used RISC. How is that possible? I mean, Apple used RISC, so surely they must be better? Today Apple is competetive again, but they are not mopping the floor with those "glorified 386's". Besides, I can run Linux just fine on that uber-leet RISC-hardware;).
FWIW: I'm planning to buy the Mini. To give OS X a try. And if it's not for me, I could use another box to play around with.
No, the Mac Mini does NOT have gigabit built-in, it has 100baseT, which is going to start feeling like a 14.4 modem in just a couple years.
So, you claim that we will basically require Gigabit Ethernet in just few yeas? Funny, this workstation I'm currently on is hooked to a 10MB hub, and I can use it just fine. Yes, that includes accessing files on the server. Are you one of those who think that "Gigabit Ehternet makes my internet faster"?
100BaseT is more than enough for intended uses of the Mini. You can find gigabit in higher-end models and on servers. Mini has no real need for it.
Probably Firewire400 and USB1.1 right?
Seriously: have you even looked at the specs of the Mini? it says in plain English: "One FireWire 400 port; two USB 2.0 ports"!. Yes, the Firewire is only 400. But how many PC's have 800? How many low-end PC's have Firewire at all? How many devices/apps require Firewire 800?
If these mini macs just had even just 2 PCI slots, I'd be willing to buy one.
If the Mini had those two slots, you would just find some other flaw in it. Seriously, you cannot satisfy everyone.
The ability to change devices is the difference between a computer anyone can continue using for years, and a computer that becomes useless after 2 years because one minor component fails and there's no way to replace it.
Instead of upgrading your machine every two years, you can simply buy a new Mini every two years. End-result is more or less the same, as is the expense.
Secondly, sure, Roddenberry deserves credit for his casting choices, but let's be honest here, we were talking 1966, not 1866, it was an accomplishment but not an unheralded one. By this time the country was well past the bland, white picket world of the 50's.
Well, the first on-screen interracial kiss happened in Star Trek... So yes, I would say that the show, and it's creator were pretty damn progressive and what they did was something that was simply not done before.
You can't have it both ways. Want to have the convenience of living in a city? then you have to live in a city. Do you expect them to shut down all streetlights so you could watch the skies?
However, if you REALLY want to watch the skies with no light-pollution, is there something stopping you from living in such a place where it's possible? Or is it just that you want it all, with zero effort from your part?
If the Lapland is the best you can come off with then it is just one samll confirmation of how difficult it is to watch a clean sky.
Well, I live in suburbs of Helsinki, so there's quite a bit of lights in here. And I do not expect them to reduce illumination just to satisfy my whims. But for example back home in the countryside I had to drive just 2 kilometers to be surrounded by total darkness. And yet, my home was not actually in the middle of nowhere. And even here I can experience total darkness just by driving few kilometers.
If you want clear skies, you CAN arrange it. But if you expect to watch the skies in downtown Manhattan or something, think again.
Re:GNOME team seems more aggressive than the KDE t
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I don't see what Mandrake starting as a Red Hat fork has to do with this?
it just shows that from the start, their purpose was to bring KDE to the desktop, since Red Hat was not delivering. It has been commonly accepted that Mandrake is a KDE-centric distro, and the fact that they also happen to offer Gnome does not, IMO, change that fact.
A KDE-distro would ship with with KDE configuration tools.
Mandrake doesn't ship with "Gnome configuration-tools", they ship with GTK configuration-tools. GTK does not equal Gnome. Why do they ship with GTK-tools and not Qt (for example)? Go ask them. Maybe their tools are closed-source (I honestly don't know), and if they wanted to use Qt for them, they would have had to buy a commercial license. But that doesn't IMO reduce their focus on KDE.
Re:GNOME team seems more aggressive than the KDE t
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Mandrake started as a fork of Red Hat with KDE added. And KDE seems to be their preferred desktop. But hey, if we wollow your logic in determining what is the preferred desktop of the distro, then we are left with just one Gnome-distro in the top-9, since fedora offers KDE as well.
And what does Mandrakes use of GTK have to do with their desktop of choice? Or do you think that GTK == Gnome?
Re:GNOME team seems more aggressive than the KDE t
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they default to KDE. If Mandrake is neutral, the Fedora is neutral as well.
Re:GNOME team seems more aggressive than the KDE t
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Well, Mandrake offers Gnome as well, but defaults to KDE. If you consider Mandrake to be neutral, then you should also consider Fedora to be neutral as well (they default to Gnome, but offer KDE as well). So we are left with just one Gnome-focused distro (Ubuntu).
there are PLENTY of places to view the sky if you really want to. I could always go to Lapland. Or any other remote location not that far off. Really, it's not THAT hard! But I guess people just want to get a clear view of the sky without having to leave their homes in the city. Can't help you there buddy!
The really pathetic thing is that GNOME and KDE today are pretty much duplicate efforts. This situation has become a terrible waste of community resources.
Not really. Gnome is written in C, KDE is written in C++. Gnome uses GTK+, KDE uses Qt. What makes you think that Gnome-hackers would be good KDE-hackers, or vice versa? I mean, the two are technologically quite different. And what makes you think that Gnome-hackers would even want to work on KDE, or KDE hackers on Gnome? Each group has created a desktop according to their vision of what the desktop should be like. And they apparently have quite different visions. How exactly would you merge those two? And if you did, large part of the developers would spin off and start their own desktop-project, and you would be right back where you started!
Right now Gnome and KDE provide each other some good competition. having one big project with no competition is not necessarily a good thing. Just look at what happened with Xfree! it stagnated for years. and users had no real alternative to it. If Gnome-guys start to rest on their laurels, KDE-guys would annihilate them. And if KDE-guys started doing the same, Gnome-guys would wipe the floor with them. So they can't afford to be lazy.
That being said, KDE needs some serious improvement in few performance areas and the stability of apps under its umbrella. Kmail and Konqueror come to mind first.
"serious" improvement? I haven't seen any problems with KDE's performance or stability. I did a comparison to Gnome few months ago (I believe it was Gnome 2.6 back then), and the performance was more or less comparable. Gnome started up few seconds faster (which doesn't really matter in the end, since you only start it up once), but it was a bit slower on some other things. All in all, the two were more or less comparable.
On my computer, Konqueror and Kontact appear more or less instantly after I start them. Well, Kontact shows the splash-screen for a second or two, and then it's up 'n running. And I haven't been able to make it crash yet. And, as far as performance is concerned, 3.4 should (Again) be quite a bit faster than the previous version was. And 3.3 was faster than 3.2 was. I like that trend quite a bit.
Seriously, it seems to be fashinable to whine how "KDE is slow! It hogs memory!" with very little facts to back those claims up. On my computer, RAM-consumtion seems to be about 140-150MB, and that's with fully functional KDE-session running with several apps (Konqueror and Kontact notably) and services (Kwallet, Kopete etc.). I really think that's not too bad, and this is a 64bit machine, where the memory-consumption is a bit higher than on 32bit machines.
I have seen the RAM-consumption climb to something like 270MB. But that was after prolonged use of the desktop, with several apps and several KDE-sessions running in the background. Again: more than reasonable.
Re:GNOME team seems more aggressive than the KDE t
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Of those, 1, 3, 4, 6 are KDE-distros (Slackware has excellent KDE-support, so you might want to add it there), while 2 and 7 are Gnome-focused. Rest (Gentoo, Debian and Slackware (unless you put it in KDE-camp)) are desktop-agnostic.
No, but the comment bunched Adam and Eve in with creation, they had kids, hence oral culture of recording history.
Such history can radically change it contents even after few generations. How can it be trusted? Hell, even the Bible has changed over time due to different intrepetations and translations!
A lot of it IS a historical account!
Some of it is, perhaps. But that doesn't mean that we should blindy believe everything that it says. Was tower of Babel real? Did God really create flying animals before he created land-animals?
But if their point of view was that God sent an angel, told them to do something, they did it and what was promised happened then isn't that exactly the evidence of God's work that you'd like to see?
No, that is not evidence of God or his work. I have seen zero evidence that suggests that Angels (or God for that matter) are real.
What really is the point here is that people don't realise that and so don't ever question it.
Well it IS called "evolutionary _theory_". And it'c constantly tweaked as new evidence is uncovered. So I don't think that people believe that it's set in stone and that it's absolute truth. It merely reflects the evidence that we have gathered to date.
See Answers in Genesis for some theory
The way I see creationism is this: In normal scientific process, you gather evidence, and you then come up with a theory that explains the evidence. In creationism they first came up by a theory (as told by the Bible) and they then try to come up with evidence that supports that theory.
Why is it that available evidence seems to support evolution instead of creationism by a factor of 50:1 (my guesstimate)?
I think that bit was passed down through an oral culture before being written down (I think Moses recorded a lot of it).
Was Moses there to see the Creation?
But the point I was making was that there are loads of eye witness accounts of stuff God's done (see pretty much any page in the Bible) hence why people believe God exists.
Just because there are some things in the Bible that has some sort of connection to historical events, does not mean that everything in there is true. How do you know that some of the stuff in the Bible REALLY took place? How can you be sure that the things in Bible were not invented by two guys after they drank some bad wine? What evidence do you have of Gods work, or God in general? No, Bible (or anything in it) can't be used as proof, since that would be circular reasoning.
Yes, evolution is theory. And no-one is disputing that. Hell, many of the things in science are theories. Creationism is not even a theory. It is a wild guess with no evidence to back it up. Just because theory of evolution might have some things that are not 100% understood yet, does not mean that the entire theory is therefore invalid.
Astronomers now say that the universe is finite, but it doesn't matter even if it were infinite, because we're only talking about this one particular solar system.
Of course chances of life appearing on this particular solar-system and on this particular planet, are really, really really small. But, we have billions of solar-systems on this galaxy alone, and we have billions of galaxies, ad we have had something like 15 billion years of time. Odds are that on few of those life did appear. It just happens that this solar-system is one of them. To us, it seems like we have beated incredible odds by just being here. And on small scale, we did. But on universal scale, the odds are not that small. Hell, I think that given the number of solar-systems and the amount of time, the possibility of life appearing in the universe is about 99.999999999%.
Except that the Bible is a record of things that God has done with eye witness accounts.
There were eye-witnesses present when God created the Earth, animals, and Adam and Eve?
Re:If you need to Kompile it yourself...
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KDE 3.4 goes Beta
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My comment was more about Linux being user friendly, and not about the nuts and bolts.
If Gentoo wasn't user-friendly, I wouldn't use it. You might not consider it to be user-friendly, but you are not me.
From all the rabid Gentoo users (and you guys are fanatical - you're like the Rush Limbaughs or Al Frankens of the Linux world)
We are almost as fanatical as the rabid anti-Gentoo crowd that seems to gather in to places like Slashdot;). Seriously, it doesn't seem to take much to be labeled as "Gentoo-fanatic". If someone says "I have [insert name of brand new software-release here] already running on my Fedora-machine", nobody gives a damn. But if someone says the exact same thing, only substituting "Fedora" with "Gentoo", you will get half a dozen morons calling the original poster a "Gentoo-fanatic".
it seems you spend more time with -emerge or recompiling the latest packages, instead of just using your computers.
Well, you are wrong. It takes just few minutes to get info about the latest versions (emerge sync) and it takes few seconds to type in the required commands to start the update-process (emerge -u world). After that, I'm free to do something else. This might come as a shock to you, but I'm in no way required to stare at the output of the compile-process while the software gets compiled. But hey, if multitasking goes beyong your skillset, that really is your problem, and not Gentoo-users problem.
I like to have my OS just give me the shit I want - web browser, MP3 playback, IM, an editor or two, RDP into my Windows servers, ssh to my Unix/Linux clients, stuff like that.
Funny, I have all that on my Gentoo-machine. I must be doing something wrong! Maybe I should recompile everything, and then spend the next 15-20 hours staring at the screen as it compiles? I guess that's what all Gentoo-users do, right?
Right now, BeatrIX Linux does that for me.
Good for you! And Gentoo does it for me. Who are you to say that my personal choice for the distro I use is somehow "wrong"?
Whichever Linux you use, good for you. If you like it, you like it.
And I like it. It's you who seems to have serious problems accepting the fact that some Linux-users actually prefer Gentoo over the alternatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Not gonna happen. Seriously, if the new desktop used (for example) Gnome as their base, why would KDE-developers work on it? They would look at it, and think that "We already have a working desktop. Why should we throw it away and work on their desktop instead?". Yes, they would bring along some of their technology, but in the end, they would still abandon their desktop. If KDE-developers wanted to work on Gnome, they would already be working on Gnome. But they aren't. They want to work on KDE instead. You couldn't force them to work on Gnome. If someone deciced that "we will take the best of KDE, and port it to Gnome, and work on Gnome for thereon", they would simply say "no way! I like KDE, and I will keep on working on KDE!". Same thing applies to Gnome-developers.
No, it would not work. WHy do Linux-hackers work on Linux and not *BSD? Why do FreeBSD-hackers work on FreeBSD and not on NetBSD? Before you say "but all those people cooperate quite a bit!", I can simply say that Gnome-hackers and KDE-hackers also cooperate quite a bit.
Well, the Mini wipes the floor with Epia's when it comes to performance, while the price is more or less the same. And it looks better than Epia-cases do (Well, Hush does look good, but it's uber-expensive as well)
I'm buying the Mini as well. And if OS X is not for me, I will rip it out and put Gentoo in there instead. And what are you going to do about it? Hit me in the face?
Sorry, but that case is ugly. And the system you can put there (VIA Epia) sucks ass when it comes to performance. And you can't run OS X on it.
Of course Mini is ntohign revolutionary. Small and silent PC's have been around for a while. But it is first small and silent Mac that also happens to be extremely affordable! And it offers better performance than those Epias do. If you want small size with better performance, you have to get some kind of Dothan Mini-ITX-system, but those are hard to find and they cost quite alot.
Epias are alot slower than the Mini is. And they cost more or less the same. And they are about as big as well. In short: Mini is simply better than Epia is. Of course if you need x86, then it's a good choice. But I do not. And I do want to give OS X a try, and this seems like the best way to do it. And if I don't like it, I still have a kick-ass computer to install Linux on. I have been looking for such small computer to play around with. A win-win scenario.
But all the really cool stuff is closed (like Quartz and Quartz Extreme). Fact is that while the absolute core of the OS might be open, in reality the OS is closed-source.
Yes, Apple is better than MS on this respect. But no, it's still not open source like Linux is. Linux is open from top to bottom.
That 270MB is not "for a desktop". It's for SEVERAL desktops (three simulatenous desktops for three different users who are logged in on the machine), together with SEVERAL running applications, X.org, several background-services (some by Linux itself, others by the desktop) and the like. And since absolute minimium amount of RAM in PC these days is 256megs, I think that's pretty good.
But hey, if you really want to use as little as RAM as possible, how about something like Ratpoison? Or Fluxbox? Or Xfce?
So the new desktop would use both GTK AND Qt? And kparts and bonobo? etc. etc. Isn't that wasted resources? And I would guess that it would make the end-result even more resource-hungry, since you would have two separate, yet functionally similar libraries/technologies running in the background. All that would make the desktop even more bloated and it would be a nightmare to maintain.
Well, they are not THAT disconnected...
I trust you reported these on bugs.kde.org?
Because Linux is Open Spource, whereas OS X is not? Because with OS X you are stuck with Aqua, whereas on Linux you can choose from several different GUI's (yes, you say that OS X has "the best GUI of any UNIX", but that is really just a matter of taste)? Because OS X always behaves in certain ways (which you may not like), whereas Linux-distros offer more choice? Because Linux runs on several different architecture, whereas OS X does not?
Seriously: I find it rather surprising that some MAc-users think that "Linux-users have ZERO reason to run Linux, they will surely switch to OS X!". In reality it's not as simple as that. While OS X is nice, it's just another proprietary OS like Windows is. It may have more eye-candy that Windows does, but eye-candy is not the reason why people use Linux.
Yes, I'm buying the Mini and I am going to try our OS X.
There's nothing really wrong witht he Linux-kernel. OS X might have some uber-leet whiz-bang microkernel, but that alone doesn't make it somehow "better". And come to think of it, Minix has a microkernel, as does OS X. Linux is a monolithic kernel. So it would be more accurate to say that OS X is the one with "Minix v2 kernel", and not Linux
And being RISC doesn't automatically make the system better either. I remember just few years ago Apple was having it's ass handed in a platter by Intel/AMD, even though they were just "glofied 386's", while Apple used RISC. How is that possible? I mean, Apple used RISC, so surely they must be better? Today Apple is competetive again, but they are not mopping the floor with those "glorified 386's". Besides, I can run Linux just fine on that uber-leet RISC-hardware
FWIW: I'm planning to buy the Mini. To give OS X a try. And if it's not for me, I could use another box to play around with.
So, you claim that we will basically require Gigabit Ethernet in just few yeas? Funny, this workstation I'm currently on is hooked to a 10MB hub, and I can use it just fine. Yes, that includes accessing files on the server. Are you one of those who think that "Gigabit Ehternet makes my internet faster"?
100BaseT is more than enough for intended uses of the Mini. You can find gigabit in higher-end models and on servers. Mini has no real need for it.
Seriously: have you even looked at the specs of the Mini? it says in plain English: "One FireWire 400 port; two USB 2.0 ports"!. Yes, the Firewire is only 400. But how many PC's have 800? How many low-end PC's have Firewire at all? How many devices/apps require Firewire 800?
If the Mini had those two slots, you would just find some other flaw in it. Seriously, you cannot satisfy everyone.
Instead of upgrading your machine every two years, you can simply buy a new Mini every two years. End-result is more or less the same, as is the expense.
Well, the first on-screen interracial kiss happened in Star Trek... So yes, I would say that the show, and it's creator were pretty damn progressive and what they did was something that was simply not done before.
However, if you REALLY want to watch the skies with no light-pollution, is there something stopping you from living in such a place where it's possible? Or is it just that you want it all, with zero effort from your part?
it just shows that from the start, their purpose was to bring KDE to the desktop, since Red Hat was not delivering. It has been commonly accepted that Mandrake is a KDE-centric distro, and the fact that they also happen to offer Gnome does not, IMO, change that fact.
Mandrake doesn't ship with "Gnome configuration-tools", they ship with GTK configuration-tools. GTK does not equal Gnome. Why do they ship with GTK-tools and not Qt (for example)? Go ask them. Maybe their tools are closed-source (I honestly don't know), and if they wanted to use Qt for them, they would have had to buy a commercial license. But that doesn't IMO reduce their focus on KDE.
Mandrake started as a fork of Red Hat with KDE added. And KDE seems to be their preferred desktop. But hey, if we wollow your logic in determining what is the preferred desktop of the distro, then we are left with just one Gnome-distro in the top-9, since fedora offers KDE as well.
And what does Mandrakes use of GTK have to do with their desktop of choice? Or do you think that GTK == Gnome?
they default to KDE. If Mandrake is neutral, the Fedora is neutral as well.
Well, Mandrake offers Gnome as well, but defaults to KDE. If you consider Mandrake to be neutral, then you should also consider Fedora to be neutral as well (they default to Gnome, but offer KDE as well). So we are left with just one Gnome-focused distro (Ubuntu).
there are PLENTY of places to view the sky if you really want to. I could always go to Lapland. Or any other remote location not that far off. Really, it's not THAT hard! But I guess people just want to get a clear view of the sky without having to leave their homes in the city. Can't help you there buddy!
Not really. Gnome is written in C, KDE is written in C++. Gnome uses GTK+, KDE uses Qt. What makes you think that Gnome-hackers would be good KDE-hackers, or vice versa? I mean, the two are technologically quite different. And what makes you think that Gnome-hackers would even want to work on KDE, or KDE hackers on Gnome? Each group has created a desktop according to their vision of what the desktop should be like. And they apparently have quite different visions. How exactly would you merge those two? And if you did, large part of the developers would spin off and start their own desktop-project, and you would be right back where you started!
Right now Gnome and KDE provide each other some good competition. having one big project with no competition is not necessarily a good thing. Just look at what happened with Xfree! it stagnated for years. and users had no real alternative to it. If Gnome-guys start to rest on their laurels, KDE-guys would annihilate them. And if KDE-guys started doing the same, Gnome-guys would wipe the floor with them. So they can't afford to be lazy.
"serious" improvement? I haven't seen any problems with KDE's performance or stability. I did a comparison to Gnome few months ago (I believe it was Gnome 2.6 back then), and the performance was more or less comparable. Gnome started up few seconds faster (which doesn't really matter in the end, since you only start it up once), but it was a bit slower on some other things. All in all, the two were more or less comparable.
On my computer, Konqueror and Kontact appear more or less instantly after I start them. Well, Kontact shows the splash-screen for a second or two, and then it's up 'n running. And I haven't been able to make it crash yet. And, as far as performance is concerned, 3.4 should (Again) be quite a bit faster than the previous version was. And 3.3 was faster than 3.2 was. I like that trend quite a bit.
Seriously, it seems to be fashinable to whine how "KDE is slow! It hogs memory!" with very little facts to back those claims up. On my computer, RAM-consumtion seems to be about 140-150MB, and that's with fully functional KDE-session running with several apps (Konqueror and Kontact notably) and services (Kwallet, Kopete etc.). I really think that's not too bad, and this is a 64bit machine, where the memory-consumption is a bit higher than on 32bit machines.
I have seen the RAM-consumption climb to something like 270MB. But that was after prolonged use of the desktop, with several apps and several KDE-sessions running in the background. Again: more than reasonable.
Well, the list goes like this:
1 Mandrakelinux
2 Fedora
3 SUSE
4 MEPIS
5 Debian
6 KNOPPIX
7 Ubuntu
8 Gentoo
9 Slackware
Of those, 1, 3, 4, 6 are KDE-distros (Slackware has excellent KDE-support, so you might want to add it there), while 2 and 7 are Gnome-focused. Rest (Gentoo, Debian and Slackware (unless you put it in KDE-camp)) are desktop-agnostic.
So, what were you saying again?
Such history can radically change it contents even after few generations. How can it be trusted? Hell, even the Bible has changed over time due to different intrepetations and translations!
Some of it is, perhaps. But that doesn't mean that we should blindy believe everything that it says. Was tower of Babel real? Did God really create flying animals before he created land-animals?
No, that is not evidence of God or his work. I have seen zero evidence that suggests that Angels (or God for that matter) are real.
Well it IS called "evolutionary _theory_". And it'c constantly tweaked as new evidence is uncovered. So I don't think that people believe that it's set in stone and that it's absolute truth. It merely reflects the evidence that we have gathered to date.
The way I see creationism is this: In normal scientific process, you gather evidence, and you then come up with a theory that explains the evidence. In creationism they first came up by a theory (as told by the Bible) and they then try to come up with evidence that supports that theory.
Why is it that available evidence seems to support evolution instead of creationism by a factor of 50:1 (my guesstimate)?
Was Moses there to see the Creation?
Just because there are some things in the Bible that has some sort of connection to historical events, does not mean that everything in there is true. How do you know that some of the stuff in the Bible REALLY took place? How can you be sure that the things in Bible were not invented by two guys after they drank some bad wine? What evidence do you have of Gods work, or God in general? No, Bible (or anything in it) can't be used as proof, since that would be circular reasoning.
Yes, evolution is theory. And no-one is disputing that. Hell, many of the things in science are theories. Creationism is not even a theory. It is a wild guess with no evidence to back it up. Just because theory of evolution might have some things that are not 100% understood yet, does not mean that the entire theory is therefore invalid.
So, where did God come from? I would assume He is pretty complex being, so someone must have created Him, right?
Of course chances of life appearing on this particular solar-system and on this particular planet, are really, really really small. But, we have billions of solar-systems on this galaxy alone, and we have billions of galaxies, ad we have had something like 15 billion years of time. Odds are that on few of those life did appear. It just happens that this solar-system is one of them. To us, it seems like we have beated incredible odds by just being here. And on small scale, we did. But on universal scale, the odds are not that small. Hell, I think that given the number of solar-systems and the amount of time, the possibility of life appearing in the universe is about 99.999999999%.
There were eye-witnesses present when God created the Earth, animals, and Adam and Eve?
If Gentoo wasn't user-friendly, I wouldn't use it. You might not consider it to be user-friendly, but you are not me.
We are almost as fanatical as the rabid anti-Gentoo crowd that seems to gather in to places like Slashdot
Well, you are wrong. It takes just few minutes to get info about the latest versions (emerge sync) and it takes few seconds to type in the required commands to start the update-process (emerge -u world). After that, I'm free to do something else. This might come as a shock to you, but I'm in no way required to stare at the output of the compile-process while the software gets compiled. But hey, if multitasking goes beyong your skillset, that really is your problem, and not Gentoo-users problem.
Funny, I have all that on my Gentoo-machine. I must be doing something wrong! Maybe I should recompile everything, and then spend the next 15-20 hours staring at the screen as it compiles? I guess that's what all Gentoo-users do, right?
Good for you! And Gentoo does it for me. Who are you to say that my personal choice for the distro I use is somehow "wrong"?
And I like it. It's you who seems to have serious problems accepting the fact that some Linux-users actually prefer Gentoo over the alternatives.