Re: The State of GNOME

[Richard Hult <rhult hem2 passagen se>]

Ok, this was a looong posting, I'm only replying to small parts of it.

> Another classic example is gtop. A simple utility, you might think. Allows
> me to check out the CPU usage of the processes running on my machine. Yet
> when I fire up gtop, it sucks up 11% of my CPU. There's no such thing as
> immature code to destroy performance.

How often does it refresh? If I refresh a plain text version of top
about once each second, it takes 8-10% of cpu usage. Try lowering the
refresh rate. I think that's possible, I dont have gtop here to
try, though.

> And where is Enlightenment? Methinks someone needs to tell Rasterman to
> get it done so that we can have a new stable release to look at. GNOME
> isn't going to pull it off if the only Window Manager that works properly
> with it [but not always] is icewm.

What's wrong with icewm? And Window Maker? And what's wrong with
enlightenment? It's been very stable the last couple of months. At
least here. Besides, it seems like fvwm2 is getting gnome support soon.

> Stop moaning and do something, I hear you say. At this late stage, bug
> reports seem to be going unnoticed, and pleas for fixes and new features
> are being ignored.

I dont know where that came from. It seems as the core developers are
fixing bugs as fast as anyone could. The last couple of weeks, more than
a zillion bugs has been fixed. (or something close to that ;)

> The only way to find out is to start afresh. And after a whole year's
> effort, who wants to?

I don't understand why there would be any need to start all over again?
If GNOME's underlying architecture (gtk/glib, orbit, gnome-libs etc)
was totally broken and no thought had gone into it, then it might have
been needed. But that's not the case, is it?

> I'm considering the writing of a Slashdot editorial about this topic in
> the coming week [and perhaps a review of KDE 1.1 to go with it], and
> anyone's [constructive] input would be greatly appreciated.

Yeah, go ahead and start a flame war, that's exactly what everyone
needs ;)

Just my two euro cents,
Richard