[vox-tech] DE flame war.

[Karsten M. Self]

on Sun, Mar 06, 2005 at 01:18:21PM -0800, Troy Arnold (troy-vox at zenux.net) wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 06, 2005 at 12:31:11PM -0500, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> > 
> > Any compelling reason to use Gnome instead of KDE?
> 
> Sure:
> Think about what happened to Galeon when the gnome project got its
> grubby little usability hands on it.  

You can follow some of that discussion on the galeon-user list.  I'm a
subscriber and participant.

To its credit:  Galeon has recovered much of the functionality lost in
the 1.2 => 1.3 transition.

To its debit:  the Galeon dev team remain largely deaf to criticisms,
exhibiting all classic signs of GNOMEitis[1].  A classic current example
is tab navigation.  The current tab widget doesn't allow scrolling of
the tab *bar* without also cycling tabs themselves.  It's as if
scrolling, say, the thumbnails display in a PDF viewer jumped you
through the document itself.  Response:  "This is GtkNotebook
behaviour".

Um....

...if the widget / widget set does _the wrong thing_ then either change
the widget, write a replacement, or use a different widget set.

Mind:  "We'd like to fix that but don't have the time ATM" would be an
acceptable answer.  The problem is Crispin's so brain-locked he can't
even see the problem.


I wrote a laundry list of issues, desirable features, and general notes
on Galeon (and browsers in general) to the list this February, response
from Crispin Flowerday (primary Galeon dev):

    http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=10885824

The dev response was slightly, but not overall, encouraging.


What Galeon could very much use is an alternate dev team.  I'm not
there in my coding skills, but would strongly encourage anyone who has
ability and interest.


Peace.


--------------------
Notes:

1.  Essentially a tight loop of circular reasoning:

     1. GNOME is designed for the naive user.

     2. Naive users are not qualified to comment on design decisions.

     3. Experienced/technical user are not the target demographic, and
        any input is dismissed.

    I can't recommend my own brief compendium, Jeff Waugh in his own
    words, an agony in seven fits, strongly enough:

        http://zgp.org/pipermail/linux-elitists/2004-January/008588.html

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself at ix.netcom.com>        http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
 What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
    First come first served.
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