Re: More Political Stuff

[Ali Abdin <aliabdin aucegypt edu>]

* Havoc Pennington (hp@redhat.com) wrote at 17:41 on 25/08/00:
> > 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.
> > 
> 
> All we are doing with StarOffice is working with Sun to develop a new
> office suite, using the best code from existing GNOME Office apps and
> also StarOffice. Probably we will end up using most of StarPresent,
> for example, but Gnumeric may replace StarCalc. This is all still up
> in the air and is a technical issue to be resolved by the GNOME Office
> and Sun hackers.

The press release didn't come out 'too good' but thats too be expected. Sun's
press released implied that StarOffice would REPLACE GNOME Office. That is not
true. The two codebases would sort of 'merge'. For example - currently there
is no _RELEASED_ 'presentation' program (yes, there is achtung and MagicPoint
but as far as I know they are not ready yet). It might make sense to adopt
StarPresenter then. But everyone is still waiting for Sun to make its code
release - so please have patience (they are in the process of removing all
the code that they can not release (due to licensing issues)).

Some projects can also 'co-exist' - For example I consider AbiWord to be a
nice 'light' word processor. StarWord (or whatever it is called) would be much
bigger/powerful.

StarOffice will not be the same as it currently is. For example they will switch
to the Gtk+ widget set and make it Bonobized.

Also please remembr that GNOME Office is really just 'magic pixie dust'. It is
really just the GNOME hackers saying 'this is a good app - it should be in
GNOME Office'. Just because it is no longer part of GNOME Office, it does not
mean you can not use it. It also does not mean that people will stop hacking
on it.
 
> > 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?  
> 
> This is all too vague. GNOME doesn't seem slow to me; what are the
> things you find slow, specifically? Are you using pixmap themes and
> other such stuff, or the default theme? How much memory/CPU do you
> have?

Pixmap theme will greatly slow down the responsivness. Oh - and I remember a
long while back that Owen Taylor was working on a 'no-flicker' branch of Gtk+
(flickering causes the Gtk widgets to look/feel slow). 

It also really depends on your computer - If you have 32MB of RAM - GNOME will
be slow. To be honest - I find GNOME to be very responsive as it curretly is
(and I have only 64MB RAM and use a Pixmap theme). 

The only real 'slowness' that I feel is with the startup times of some
applications - and even then it is not noticeable (except for Evolution and
Nautilus - but they are development apps)

> Re: the SDL/Sawfish problem, just send in bug reports, and someone
> will fix it eventually. John Harper is typically pretty responsive if
> he can reproduce the problem (try mailing him a Loki game maybe ;-)

Sorry, but SDL and Sawfish work perfectly together for me. I've played an SDL
version of clanbomber just fine.

> > 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?
> > 
> 
> It will strip things few people are using.

A lot of the old stuff will be moved into a 'libcompat' library. 

Regards,
Ali