Re: [gentoo-user] KDE? Get me out of here!

[Alan McKinnon]

On Monday 01 March 2010 22:28:42 Mick wrote:
> > My pet peeve is Desktop. I have two monitors at work and use two X
> > screens. KDE wants to create a Desktop and a Desktop-1 directory. I want
> > it to just
> >
> >  use the same set of files for both - background, icons, plasma widgets
> >  must be the same on both monitors, but actual app windows running there
> >  independent. This seems perfectly reasonable to me - e17 does it out the
> >  box - but thus far I have not found the magic voodoo spell that makes it
> >  happen.
>
> How does e17 compare in terms of resources to other WMs/DEs like *box,
> LXDE,  xface, these days?  I had a look at it when it was all the rage
> back when, but it looked too Gnomey to me at the time and I couldn't find
> a reason for preferring it over say fluxbox.

As of right now, I really couldn't say. About 6 months ago the e17 devs 
started ramping up for a release that was supposed to happen round about last 
xmas. Then Samsung and a French manufacturer of set-top boxes got in on the 
action, as a result the code changes faster than Paris Hilton changes her 
knickers. It stopped reliably building from one hour to the next ... :-)

So I switched to KDE to get some stability and haven't tried again since.

e17 has to be evaluated on it's own merits, like all other software. it's not 
"like" anything ... except perhaps e17 itself. It's claims to fame are 
twofold:

1. Themeability. If you have every written a KDE or Gnome theme engine you 
will know what a serious ball-ache it is. Code mixed in with specs mixed in 
with image files.... e17 does it a different way with .edj files. You write an 
.edc spec file in a declarative style (as in you say *what* you want, not 
*how* it is done - that's the engine's job to figure that out) and supply your 
images to be used on the widgets. Then run it through a mini-compiler to 
produce an .edj, tell the wm to use it and voila! theme applied. It's not just 
a simple "replace all those .pngs with these .pngs" to get a different set of 
colours - you change the entire look and feel of the desktop and the engine 
just knows what to do with it.

2. Configurability. Everything that can possibly be changeable is so, 
including stuff that really shouldn't be :-) It makes KDE look minimalist. 
Fortunately, a lot of the advanced stuff can be hidden in the config dialog 
which improves things.

Resources - it's hard to write a wm these days that isn't a resource hog in 
some ways. If you want transparency and composition, be prepared to sell some 
cpu to get it. Having said that, e17 runs blindingly fast on ARM mobile 
devices when configured appropriately. It's nowhere near as minimalist as 
*box, those wm's are in a class where if they suit your needs, then nothing 
else will come close, especially not e17 which is designed to showcase graphic 
effects to a large degree. *box is the polar opposite of that

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com