More Political Stuff

[Sean Middleditch <sean middleditch iname com>]

OK, I have a(nother) question for GNOME developers:

Lately, after the formation of the GNOME Foundation, a lot of stuff from
KDE people has come out bad mouthing GNOME.  I mean, its almost funny...
"GNOME started a project to kill KDE.  All Miquel does is bad mouth
KDE."  And its the exact same thing they're doing.

But they bring up some good points.  Some of the stuff they criticize is
a bit legitimate.  Like  The 10 million dependencies for GNOME.  These
will be gone for the most part in GNOME 2.0, right?

Also the issue with StarOffice.  I've used StarOffice a couple times,
along with ApplixWare, and my God did they ever suck horribly.  Is
StarOffice REALLY going to be the official GNOME desktop?  Why can't we
develop our own software?  We have Gnumeric, and AbiWord could be great
too if it got worked on more (its development seems Gods-awful slow to
me).  We have Dia, and GIMP, etc.  What true point is there to using
StarOffice?  I mean, options are nice, but there needs to be one
official office suite, and I honestly think GNOME needs its own, not a
borrowed office suite that isn't that good to begin with.  Porting the
code to GNOME-libs and bonobo would probably take more time than just
writing our own: I know I find development a hell of a lot easier than
porting code to new API's.

Finally, the speed.  GNOME does seem a lot less responsive than KDE (I
use KDE because no SDL games work properly on my machine when I run
SawFish, and no one on either the Sawfish or SDL team seems to care at
all).  When all the 10 million libraries get nice and assimilated, will
this speed up?  Also, gnome-libs and gnome-core does have a lot of cruft
for backwards-compatibility sake.  Will GNOME 2.0 strip all the crap,
since it wont need to be backwards compatible anyways?

OK, um, ya.
Have a nice day.

Sean Middleditch