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