Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Gnome, KDE and the legacy stuff

Author:Eric Kidd
Posted:3/4/1999; 1:22:17 PM
Topic:DHTML MTTF!
Msg #:3572 (In response to 3530)
Prev/Next:3571 / 3573

Well, I just downloaded Gnome 1.0 today. By rights, it should have been called Gnome 1.0pre1--I can still find a few warts if I look for them. Nonetheless, Gnome 1.0 is an impressive performance, especially when combined with Enlightenment. There's a great "panel" (sort of like a souped-up taskbar), a spiffy file manager, a spreadsheet, and more addictive games than should ever ship with any computer.

A week ago, I showed a neophyte computer user how to use Gnome 0.99.8. He was amazingly enthusiastic--the Gnumeric spreadsheet suited his modest needs, and the calendar app made him drool. Now he wants to buy an Intel machine just to run RedHat 6.0 when it ships. My friends and I think he might be a bit too enthusiastic, but he's convinced--he says he could use the desktop today, provided somebody helped him set it up. I'll give him a "Linux desktop in a Window" using VNC <http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/> and he can spend the next few months using those Linux apps from his Mac before buying anything. What a win!

KDE 1.1 looked pretty good, too, but it wasn't to my taste. And Dave is right--KDE applications have a slightly different menu layout than Gnome applications, even though the two will co-exist nicely from a technical perspective. There's all those "legacy" Unix applications--Motif, CDE, Xaw and who knows what else. I think the right approach is to ignore the legacy[1] stuff (which is a virtual tower of Babel) and work on making Gnome and KDE play nicely.

Still, my desktop looks really gorgeous this morning, and I can find almost all of the knobs without digging into text files. Give us five years, and we'll have hundreds of fun new toys. Richard Stallman started writing GCC and Emacs fifteen years ago, so the free software community is no stranger to long term plans. See you then, if all goes well!

Cheers, Eric

[1] "Legacy" is a word you use to say, "All that software is really old. It's still useful, but it has problems, and fixing it would require more time and effort than we want to invest." If your business runs on black & white HyperCard stacks, you probably consider them legacy software.

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