Re: GNUstep version number(s) (was: Re: GNUstep article (was: Re:gnustep compared to other toolkits))

[M. Grabert]

On Wed, 27 Jun 2001, Laurent Julliard wrote:

> I fully agree with you Dennis. I came to GNUstep my self a couple of
> weeks ago after years spent on KDE and Gnome. I'm very skeptical about
> the evolution of both : KDE is really heavy and Gnome is flaky. Plus
> they lack conciseness and simplicity.

I agree with you in some other way:
I also think that the evolution of both KDE and GNOME will slow down
in the next years. One reason is, that there is no real competition
anymore. For the first years of GNOME and KDE, developers were quite
enthusiastic and there was some kind of hype, but not know anymore.
Another reason is that many new features require to completly redesign
some libraries (e.g. unicode support for GNOME) which slows down the
development and is annoying for both developers and users.
Moreover both KDE and GNOME are quite usuable now, and many people
got used to their bugs/missing features/odd behaviors. My feeling
is that GNOME/KDE are like Windows 95 in that way. The main
improvements of Windows >95 are in stability and in the integration
of apps like IE into the OS. I don't think that KDE is getting faster in
the future, nor GNOME is getting homogenous.

> I think there is a real opportunity for GNUstep here. Make it easy,
> simple and elegant.

of course! but since the GUI developed since the last days of NeXT,
we should make enhancements to the Workdesk. E.G. fully integration
of internet services (ftp, http) to the GNUstep GUI etc.
Moreover themes and nifty feature is what people want.
 
> Your idea of splitting things in 2 (Users and
> Developers) is the right one. And by the way this is exactly how NeXT
> originally bundled NeXTstep... 2 CDs for 2 different audiences. And
> having a global version that covers both is definitely a plus like KDE
> does.

good idea. But since compiling and installing a app for GNUstep is
quite simple, most users will install both packages, anyway! ;)

> On the chapter of Window manager, although I agree that most of us here
> would probably like to choose our Window manager, imposing Linux on the
> desktop is primarily a matter of making things 1) simple stupid and 2)
> repeatable.So if we think that there is a good enough GNUstep compliant
> Window manager, then we should also make it part of the user bundle.
> Whether you use the default one or another one is your choice then.

i fully agree with you!

> Let's make GNUstep the turn-key desktop environment for Linux.

this is going to be a VERY hard job!

> My .01 Euro :-)

just 0.1 euro ? it's less than 1 cent! Moreover small Euro-money is
also called cent, so ...

just my 2 (euro-)cents ;)