On Mon, 2006-11-20 at 23:49 +0000, Kevin Donnelly wrote:
With free systems, there is no one-to-one link imposed on you. You can choose to deal with the kernel through a number of GUIs, depending on your own personal preference. Given the work involved in creating a GUI, the number of alternatives is not infinite, but it is considerable: KDE, GNOME, GNUstep, XFCE, IceWM, e17, etc. So you can decide that you want all your customer-facing staff to be age forty, female, matronly-looking, blue-rinsed, or age 50, male, solemn, grey-haired, or teenagers, sloppily-dressed, tending to drop things and fall asleep at inopportune moments, etc, etc. You can even mix-and-match within certain limits.
The above may or may not be helpful as an analogy, but it is rather amusing to speculate on what the different window managers would look like if they were people ....
GNOME is a well-meaning liberal bureaucrat in an neat, but slightly dull, suit with a firm belief in accessibility, standards and disclosure. They speak with a modest tone, with exacting grammar with polite and formal words. KDE wears a shorts jacket and jeans over expensive t-shirt. Their longish hair is thinning and they drive a sports-car. They're the quintessential hip engineering kid that made it to the big time. Their speech is both commercial and technical, and desires success in both fields. XFCE is a straggly latter day punk with a need for speed. XFCE has a notable lack of body fat, and likewise their clothing consists of a t-shirt that somehow managed to hand of its back and threadbare jeans. Their speech is 'leet and their concerns are entirely based around two words: "faster" and "more". Enlightenment wears colourful clothes, and has more pockets than a magician. He's often found with his friend Mac.... and so on ;-) All the best, Lev -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org