On Thu, 2006-05-04 at 22:26 +0100, Peter Onion wrote:
On Wed, 2006-05-03 at 22:29 -0500, Mark H. Harris wrote:
On Wednesday 03 May 2006 21:43, kai wrote:
I can very easily see the tide slowly turning from one of emphatic support of KDE to that of simple maintenance.
I am amazed at some of the comments on this thread. Ok, basics... Linux is not Winblows... the desktop is *not* tied to the OS in Linux... the desktop is *not* tied to the distribution in Linux... Suse doesn't support the KDE desktop, the KDE community supports the KDE desktop... If Suse ever ships without KDE (and it won't anytime soon) I will add the KDE desktop myself.
Could it be that the problem here is that these days an increasing percentage of Linux users are unable to do this sort of thing ? If they are converts from the Windblows world are they dependent on the features/facilities/packages provided "out of the box" and thus inexperienced in building things from sources ?
I wonder how many of the contributors to this thread have ever built KDE or GNOME from the sources ? I have not had to build GNOME from source for a couple of years now.
I've never built a desktop from source. When confronted with a problem, I will spend hours trying to solve it using the tools available in the desktop and will only reluctantly move to the CLI. (I prefer Gnome but this would apply to KDE as well.) I'm not the typical new user, having spent most of my career dealing with computers, networks, and telecommunications. However, my thought is that if I'm going to recommend that typical users switch to Linux, the desktop should be as easy to use as possible. Fortunately, this is aided by the fact that most (all?) KDE apps can be run from Gnome and vice versa. As long as that holds, the choice between KDE and Gnome should remain as a user choice. Donald D. Henson, Managing Director West El Paso Information Network The "Non-Initiation of Force Principle" Rules