[ale] Best Desktop Env or Distro for Windows users?

[Joseph A. Knapka]

"F. Grant Robertson" wrote:
> 
> You know, on this subject..  Why now, like 6 years after I first installed
> RedHat 4, and many more years since the birth of Xfree, the kernel and all
> this other fabulous stuff was created.. Why do we still not have something
> universaly transparent like DDE or OLE in X that can traverse window
> managers?  K has it's thing, gnome has it's thing...  why is there not
> something at a lower level that handles this?  I can use the same font
> server across desktops, and even across variants of X but, I can't drag and
> drop..  Couldn't GPM handle this somehow?  X? Some other little doohickey
> like Xfs?
> 
> I'd love to hear some programmers that have more experience with the deeper
> workings of unix, X and window management than I do give a good explination
> of why not, and what would be involved to actually make this happen.
> 

I think the answer is that is *can* be done, but since
there is no overarching authority analogous to M$ in the
open-source world, it won't happen soon. There's simply no
way to enforce such a standard in the open-source world.
What -is- likely to happen is that whatever mechanism
attracts the largest following among developers and
users will become a de-facto standard, and may eventually
be codified as such. But that might take a while.

I say this knowing essentially nothing about X development,
incidentally. But I'd be astonished if it weren't
possible to achieve under X all of the same desktop
functionality available under Windows.

At the moment, KDE and Gnome are the 400-pound gorilla
twins of the open-source desktop. If either of them
were to document a standards-based mechanism for
inter-application interactions on the desktop (based
on something like XMLRPC or CORBA or ... - simpler the
better, IMO, so CORBA wouldn't be nice), *and that
mechanism was portable to non-KDE, non-Gnome
environments*, then I think people would latch onto
that and start using it to do the same kinds of
cool inter-app things done under Windows. But if
they each use some "proprietary" mechanism, there
is less hope. And I don't think any non-KDE, non-Gnome
project that sets out to solve that particular problem
has much of a chance without the support of at least
one of the gorillas.

Cheers,

-- Joe
  "I'd rather chew my leg off than maintain Java code, which
   sucks, 'cause I have a lot of Java code to maintain and
   the leg surgery is starting to get expensive." - Me

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