Re: The rough edges ...

[Michael Perry <mperry basin com>]

On  8 Mar, Gerald Gutierrez wrote:
> 
> Okay.
> 
> For four days I've tried to make GNOME my desktop environment and have to
> admit that I liked what I saw. It saddens me to say, however, that a
> number of drawbacks have caused me to revert back to KDE. To those who
> care about the success of GNOME I thought I'd share some of what I
> perceive to be the rough edges of GNOME 1.0 in the hopes those who aren't
> aware of them are made so and eliminate them for the next release. I will
> likely be unintentionally upsetting some people in this message; to those
> people please evaluate my thoughts objectively through the eyes of a
> hacker as well as of a potential newcomer to a non-Windows world.
> 
Just a few counterpoints for the sake of discussion and good debate.  I
was involved with gnome only at the 99.8 level so I am a rank novice at
this stuff.  My approach was to also use GNOME as a desktop environment
from which to build additional gtk/gnome applications which are
becoming increasingly well-done.  I would be remiss to not mention that
Gnotepad+ and a few others are extremely well done in my view.  Another
one that I enjoy quite a bit is Xchat.  It seems to be a stable and
well done application that has a rich feature set.  A few others that I
place quite highly on my list would be electric eyes and the entire
suite of games.  I do like all the games; especially yahtzee and the
mahjongg game. The AisleRiot game is a masterpiece with all the
offerings.

What I am getting around to saying is that there is no news client and
I do not think that there has to be necessarily. I use slrn because it
fits my way of doing things.  I use tkrat because I enjoy it.  I use
GNOME because I feel that it offers some great applications along with
a lot of fun exploring.  If there are rough edges, so be it.  There are
rough edges in everything.  I used kde so will not comment; other than
to say I do not use kde anymore.

I downloaded the 1.0.1 rpms and have enjoyed myself quite a bit
experimenting with GNOME and windowmaker.  I think GNOME does not have
to duplicate every application for the sake of saying, "yeah, there is
this gnome aware application".  It seems to this novice that the whole
message is that the technology is enabling and it enables us to use
whatever tools we want and then it supplements others and then offers a
nice mix for us to consider. 

For that and many other things, I would like to tell the GNOME
developers thanks.  I think you all did a magnificent job.

-- 
Michael Perry
mperry@basin.com
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