Thus spake Duncan on Wed, Jul 19, 2006 at 03:47:24AM CDT
> Lindsay Haisley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted
> > Oh well. I guess I'm just going to have to bite the bullet, blow away
> > my old gnome config altogether, and rebuild it from scratch. That
> > generally gets the job done.
>
> I'm not a GNOME user (I /vastly/ prefer the configurability of KDE, which
> actually treats me as if I have some intelligence in the choices it
> offers, but that's just me), but regardless of the DE one chooses, I
> always shudder when I see someone talking about blowing away hours worth
> of configuration and customization.
Years ago I used to leap-frog between KDE and Gnome, when one came out with a
new upgrade that had more nice stuff. The thing I really like about Gnome is
the really rich creativity of a lot of the design and Gnome apps. There are
some really _nice_ touches. Galeon, which I believe was originally designed as
the 'official' Gnome browser, is a flat-out killer app! - without a doubt the
most versatile browser I've ever used. The tradeoff that I've seen is that
Gnome under-the-hood configuration is complex, not well documented, and short
on fault tolerance.
KDE seems to be more solid, but it offers fewer choices. KDE upgrades in
Gentoo are slotted, so I can run both 3.4 and 3.5, and switch back and forth as
needed. It's a more 'conservative' DE, but it seems to be very well
integrated. I have both on my current desktop box, but only use KDE when Gnome
is broken, as it is now. It's good to have a really solid backup DE to use
when one is trying to repair the other one :-)
In addition to the dev community culture, I think there are technical reasons
for this difference. Gnome is built on glib, GObject, and friends. The glib
API is an attempt to re-invent object oriented programming in a non-OO
programming environment, and it's imperfect at best, and problem prone from
what I see. KDE is built with C++, and in spite of the fact that Mr.
Stroustrup thinks it's out of hand, it's still a well developed, very standard
OO programming environment.
> So anyway, there's no reason why you should need to blow away your entire
> GNOME config just to fix a problem with the panels. The problem can
> almost certainly be traced to an individual file, and even to and
> individual section or sections and an individual line or lines within that
> file.
I'll probably manage to salvage more than I expect. John Laliberte, who is a
Gnome dev, has kindly offered to help me on the #gentoo-desktop freenode IRC
channel and I'm going to take him up on the offer.
I've found, over the years since 1982 or so when I started working with IT,
that sometimes one loses what seems like an ungodly amount of work through a
crash, a hardware failure, or some other unintended event. In such cases, I've
found 2 things to be true:
1. The loss, and the difficulty of recovery, always look worse at first glance
than turns out to be the case.
2. If I _do_ have to completely redo something from virtual bare metal up, the
result is usually better than the work it replaced.
--
Lindsay Haisley | "Fighting against human | PGP public key
FMP Computer Services | creativity is like | available at
512-259-1190 | trying to eradicate | <http://pubkeys.fmp.com>
http://www.fmp.com | dandelions" |
| (Pamela Jones) |
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