[blag-whereto] Desktop

Homer blag at slated.org
Sun Mar 1 19:16:36 GMT 2009


Verily I say unto thee, that renilgh at riseup.net spake thusly:

> But here's my question: Since we discussed that a change from GNOME
> to KDE might be an option due to the increasing amount of Mono apps
> in GNOME, I wonder which DE I should introduce people to. Especially
> if someones not very computer-literate it might be a bit confusing to
> give them one system (advertising it as superior to mswin) and
> replace it a few month later.

That's tricky, since you cannot know what DE somebody else will like.
Perhaps you could install a selection (Gnome, KDE, OpenBox, LXDE, XFCE),
then use switchdesk to demonstrate each.

I have my own preferences, of course, which would be KDE4, but that is
quite a radical paradigm shift in desktops, which even some KDE3 users
find overwhelming. Ultimately Gnome is probably the "safest" choice,
even if I personally have my reservations for idealistic reasons.

> I have been a GNOME (well, mereley GTK + Openbox) user since I
> started using GNU/Linux

Same here, and I will continue to be, until I upgrade to BLAG110K
(BLAG's default DE won't change though).

> After reading in the WP articles about both Mono and KDE my initial 
> suspicion turned out to be reasonable. The licenses of Mono and QT
> are quite similiar if not nearly the same 
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(toolkit)#License 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)#License. Additionally QT
> (Trolltech) was recently acquired by Nokia. So is it reasonable to
> use any of the two as a standard DE?

Both QT and Mono are dual-licensed, but it isn't the license which
concerns me, it's the copyright owners. AFAICT Nokia is not a threat to
GNU/Linux, unlike Microsoft which is the self-declared enemy of Free
Software, a multiple-convicted monopolist, and practises the most
immoral business methods in the industry ... by an order of magnitude.
IMHO it is neither prudent nor ethical to do anything which supports
Microsoft, especially something which promotes their quasi-standards.

> I personally would go with Enlightenment

I really like E17, but AFAIK quite a bit of it is BSD licensed. This
isn't a huge problem though, even if it's somewhat less than ideal.

> Would be great to have some more input on that topic, maybe we can 
> discuss it in-depth on thursday.

I'll be there, hopefully with some very good news.

-- 
K.
http://slated.org

.----
| "Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It
|  is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." ~ William
|  Pitt the Younger
`----

Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.25.11-60.fc8
 19:16:35 up 116 days,  2:59,  4 users,  load average: 0.76, 0.62, 0.56



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