[ale] Slackware to drop Gnome?

[Michael D. Hirsch]

On Mon, 2004-10-11 at 11:41, John Wells wrote:
> Michael D. Hirsch said:
> > GNOME doesn't have a real office suite and KDE does.  Abiword/gnumeric
> > do not work well together.  OOo is not a GNOME app.  Koffice is a
> > completely integrated set of applications with a much better UI than
> > OOo.  If only it didn't crash so much...:-(
> 
> I don't really understand the logic there.  With something like OOo
> available, why should you care that Gnome doesn't have its own "native"
> office software?  OOo is the best office suite available for Linux,
> period.  Why go through the effort to create another suite instead of
> leveraging what's already there?

IMHO the only way that OOo is "best" is in it's Microsoft
compatibility.  It's feature set is pretty good, too, though I don't
need most of that, usually.  OOo has crappy drag-n-drop support, for a
start.  I find the UI pretty unintuitive in many ways.  The file finder
is horrible.  It's a huge memory hog.  It is horribly slow to start up. 
I do hope we can leverage it into a good suite.  It would be nice if
their MSOffice import filters were reusable.  I know that there is a
project to make it a better KDE citizen, which I hope succeeds.

> > GNOME doesn't really have a browser, either, and KDE does.
> 
> Ummm... http://www.gnome.org/projects/epiphany/
> 
> > Mozilla
> > isn't GNOME and the GNOME one isn't complete.  Konqueror is fast and
> > lightweight, and lets me browse filesystems, http, ftp, sftp, smb, etc
> > all in one place.  It does a nice job handling all kinds of plugins and
> > embedded viewers.
> 
> So does GNOME.  Try typing "sftp://hostname" or "smb://hostname" in the
> "Location: " box in Nautilus.

Cool.  I think I'd heard about this.  When my wife was using GNOME we
had a lot of troubles with Nautilus.  I hope it is still being worked on
cause it showed a lot of promise.

> > And because of the way KDE works, all applications can handle remote
> > filesystems.  From my kate editor I can read/save files on ftp sites, or
> > over sftp.  We do so much sftping around here and I can usually move
> > files faster than anyone else because of KDE.  (There are some really
> > cool libraries out that that leverage KDE and user file systems to
> > enable all applications to do this.  The coolest use I've seen is the
> > "gmail file system" which lets you mount your gmail account and execute
> > files from it.  I gotta try it.)
> 
> Nice.  Not sure if GNOME does this or not.  Can't imagine it'd be a lot of
> work, since Nautilus already supports browsing, etc.

I don't think it does.  I don't believe that you can, say, attach a file
from an sftp server in an email in evolution.  In fact, the file browser
doesn't even have a place to enter the URL.

> > Is that enough?  Maybe it is time to have the GNOME vs. KDE shootout at
> > some ALE meeting.  Any volunteers?
> 
> Ha...not for me.  In fact, after receiving your email this morning, I
> rebooted my session into KDE with the intent of trying it for a week.
> 
> I lasted around 30 minutes.
> 
> I just find GNOME to be a cleaner, more pleasing desktop experience.  KDE
> seems ugly to me.  I suppose it's because I've been with GNOME for so
> long, but KDE just doesn't jive.  I want to like it, but can't :)

I can relate.  Just like me, now, only backwards.  :-)

Michael