Re: [gtk-list] Re: Announce : new irc client

[ari <sumone mindspring com>]

At 04:50 PM 5/9/98 +0300, on Mike Flouris, I found the following,
shamelessly residing in my mailbox:

...

>Well,I just want to say something here. Linux has a lot of
>news/mail readers, irc clients, ftp clients, WWW clients, etc.
>What Linux machines (and generally Unix machines) do not have :
>
>1. Multimedia applications (players, development apps etc.) I
>am talking about programs like Macromedia Director, etc ...
>
>2. Games (and most of all Network Games). Linux can run on the
>same machine with Winblows but we there are many awesome games
>one can play in Win*ows, and in Linux ???
>
>In my opinion it's not that difficult to write a simple nice
>game in GTK. Perhaps easier than writing an IRC client that
>supports Perl !!!
>
>I do not have the time to contribute into this, but I don't like
>to see so much programming time thrown away, like the 6 or 7
>IRC clients ...
>

  News clients.

tin, by all means, is a great news client.  i love it.  it has no gui.  a
lot of people like gui's.  a lot of people don't like tin.

knews.  It's usable.  it uses a gui.  it's extremely simple.  it doesn't
have a whole heck of a lot of functionality.  it's rather ugly.  most
people don't like ugly programs.  most people like programs with a lot of
functionality.  most people don't like knews.

krn.  it's part of kde.  it uses a gui.  it's got a semi-nice looking
interface, as little as i like qt.  it forces you to read any mail you
select.  i, for one, hate that.  true, it's being worked on, but it is
rather unstable if your newsgroup has thousands of postings.  it is way too
similar to microsoft's news readers for my preferences.



   irc clients.

many text based clients hover around (most of them based on ircII) which
are by all means some of the best.  some people don't like text-based clients.

i have yet to see a good, powerful X irc client.  TkIRC comes the closest
to this, as it has the gui feel but the functionality of ircII (being an
ircII front-end), but as it is written in tk, it takes up more cpu than i
would willingly allocate to an irc client.


There are many mail clients, news clients, irc clients, and yes, even games
and multimedia applications, made for linux.  The problem is that they are
not developed as far as they should be.  People who like multimedia
applications will say there are not enough multimedia apps.  people who
like irc will say there are not enough irc clients.  people who like
newsgroups will say there are not enough news clients.  people who like
games will say there are not enough games.

Is it logical to argue that a game is not a game unless it is like quake or
doom (which are both available for linux, btw), but no one would need a
mail client any better than ML or elm, and no one would need a news client
with more features than knews or krn?

It's a matter of preference.  Treat it as such.  Don't condemn people for
writing applications that they consider useful and you don't.  Make a
suggestion and wait, or write it yourself.

That's all i have to say.

thank you.

ari