Re: More Political Stuff

[Sean Middleditch <sean middleditch iname com>]

> * 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)).
> 

OK, I see.  I guess I was horibly mislead, then.  Not replacing Gnome
Office with StarOffice makes me feel much better.

> 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.
> 

Hmm.. having to have two word-processors installed for the average user
is a bit overkill.  I get irritated when Linux distros start shipping
more than one CD of ust binaries... it shouldn't be needed.

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

Still, it will take a LOT to make it not suck.  Just making it a bonobo
component doesn't really mean StarOffice gets better, it just means
developers have the option to embed "suck" into their apps...

> 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.
>  

I understand this.  But what about the new user?  I've heard from a lot
of Windows people who've tried Linux/UNIX that they hate the office
tools they had to use... referring primarily to StarOffice and
Applixware.  The only one I see them like is WordPerfect Office, but my
Gods did they screw up by using WineLib... it was a serious waste of
$100, I'll tell you that...

These new users don't want nice alternatives, they want the standard to
be the best.

> > > 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). 
> 

Hey, that sounds nice.  Maybe that would help a bit.

> 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). 
> 

PII 450 + 128MB of RAM.  That's not the problem, trust me.

> 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)
> 

It's noticable right after you switch out of KDE.

> > 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.
> 

It's the full-screen apps with OpenGL: UT, Heretic II, etc.  I don't
know anyone else who had this problem, but none-the-less, there IS a
problem.

EMU10K1 driver had an odd problem that only 3 people ever reported
having (me being one of them, lucky me) but it was found to be a problem
in the driver and was fixed.

> > > 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. 
> 

Hmm.. I thought there would be a GNOME 1.x and GNOME 2.x, incompatible
development platforms?  That's what I read anyways... Nice thing about
asking on this mailing list is I get live answers.  ^,^

> Regards,
> Ali