[PLUG] Ubuntu Dapper Drake Officially Delayed

[sofar]

On Mon, 27 Mar 2006 12:51:23 -0800, "Michael M." <nixlists at writemoore.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-03-27 at 06:24 -0800, Rich Shepard wrote:
> 
>> >> Xfce is good, however gnome for a new user is where it's at,
>>
>>  Let me comment on the embedded quote first. I believe the assumption in
>> stating that "gnome for a new user is where it's at" comes from believing
>> that everyone who defenestrates wants a desktop that looks just like Winduhs,
>> 'cause anything different is too difficult to understand. To this I say,
>> "feh!." I did not like fvwm2 because it looked too much like Winduhs. That's
>> also what I don't like about Gnome and KDE (in addition to their bloat).
> 
> Interesting discussion, for me.  My assumption has been that people who
> prefer a DE to a WM tend to choose one based upon the apps they prefer
> -- i.e, like Konqueror, k3b, Kmail, use KDE; like Nautilus,
> Epiphany/Galeon, Gaim, Evolution, use Gnome.  

I'm gonna write some stuff down as I see it - no offense taken ;^). I'm an Xfce fan and
supporter for over years now and hope I can provide some insights on "why Xfce"...


this is partially a wrong statement here - gaim is not a GNOME application, and so
is *the* killer app firefox (thunderbird/mozilla). 

Gtk+-2 is a powerfull toolkit with a reasonable small footprint (ha, right?). This has
spurred development to used it and made a lot of users happy - firefox and openoffice
are the 2 biggest and most important killer apps. They require no gnome support and
work perfectly on an empty box with "just" Xorg and gtk+-2.

Now, I didn't say that these are necessarily lightweight but if you drop GNOME on
top of this (gnome-vfs2 and all that it drags along) then the lightweight desktop idea is obliterated. That
makes a lot of people unhappy - as they see no need to upgrade their 1ghz PIII's with
nvidia gforce2 MX440's - it's perfectly capable of running all those apps, and does a
really good job at it even.

they don't want that.

> Basically, I thought "it's
> the apps, stupid."  That's why I've always wondered what XFCE brought to
> the table, in it's capacity as a DE rather than a WM.  Once you've
> decided not to use KDE or Gnome, it's not clear to me what extra benefit
> you get from using XFCE vs. any of Blackbox, fvwm, Afterstep, IceWM,

we first of all Xfce is a desktop with some structure - especially the later versions and
4.4 tops it with really good integration. On top of that most of it is modeled
around freedesktop.org's standards and thus offers really good integration
with apps that want some form of gnome or kde interaction (which kde does
really badly - take dnd support for instance).

> etc.  That's not to say I don't think there's any good reason to use
> XFCE, just that I don't understand how it being a lightweight desktop
> environment makes it more useful or desirable than the others being
> lightweight (to varying degrees) window managers.  This may be because
> my assumptions are incorrect.
> 
> I would have said, contrary to your characterization of the assumptions
> made about new users, that the reason new users are directed to KDE or
> Gnome is because those include a complete set of native apps for most
> common desktop tasks.  

gnome and desktop have tried to take over the desktop like a virus - they have
a lot of people and fought really hard to conquer the virtual "market" around it.
Apps like epiphany, galeon, konqueror, kmail etc are an example of how _BAD_
open source can be at collaboration.

Xfce's standpoint is different - it aims to be a desktop environment, but not the
-entire- desktop and certainly not all applications. Xfce leaves the choice to you
whether you want to install mozilla or firefox or.... but still gives you a (4.4) a
file manager that gets all the work done and can be operated by your
mother-in-law ;^)

> The heavyweight DE's have ready-made answers to
> the common questions that new users have:  how do I send email?, how do
> I listen to music?, how do I change my background image?, etc.  What's
> more, the answers are more-or-less integrated, so that you can email a
> file with Evolution from Nautilus with a right-click, for example.

if they would have adhered to the freedesktop.org "desktop file" standard then you 
would have been able to send files directly from Xfce's 4.4 file manager as well!

Here you see what exactly is the problem - it's not Xfce who is stifling innovation
by being the odd one out, but KDE by not integrating with other desktop
environments - driving app developers to madness because they need to
merge kde/gnome related bugfixes to keep their desktop-neutral applications
supported or working.

> A window manager does not provide these answers; from what I can tell,
> XFCE provides some of the answers, but not as complete a set as provided
> by KDE or Gnome.  Maybe the degree of integration is the same, though?

Xfce is not a window manager - it's a desktop environment. It includes 'xfwm4'
which is a window manager just like metacity, kwin or others. You can run
Xfce with Compiz for instance - without problems.

> But distros can, of course, set up their installations to provide what a
> DE like XFCE or even a window manager does not.  I was looking over the
> project page for Xubuntu yesterday.  It was interesting to see the notes
> about what default apps they're considering for inclusion.  (Xubuntu
> uses XFCE as the DE.  See: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Xubuntu ,
> specifically the "Proposed Packages" section.)  Damn Small Linux is
> another good example.  Since it has to be small, it uses Fluxbox as the
> WM and selects some apps for common tasks, like web browsing, that
> Fluxbox doesn't provide.  Last time I checked, VectorLinux also used
> Fluxbox by default.

This is a misconception perhaps - Xfce is lightweight compared to KDE and
GNOME, but if you compare it to enlightenment this doesn't hold anymore. fluxbox
en openbox are not lightweight - they are *minimalistic* - a whole different
range. Consider mozilla -> balsa -> /usr/bin/mail... :^)

Cheers,

Auke