Re: [TCLUG:4564] Updates gnome rpms

[John R Sheets <dusk@smsi-roman.com>]

Neal Tovsen wrote:
> 
> May I ask why you favor gnome over KDE? I really like KDE but haven't tried
> gnome. What would I gain? They're not mutually exclusive, right? I've heard
> that gnome isn't as stable...

Off the top of my head....

1) Gnome is Window Manager-agnostic.  A number of popular WM's
are (or are working toward) GNOME compliance, which includes
session management support, plus a number of extended WM hints
that allow GNOME to interact more intimately with the WM. 
Enlightenment, SCWM, iceWM, and a few others (WindowMaker? fvwm?
blackbox?) support these hints.  For KDE, you are pretty much
stuck with kwm if you want to use all of KDE's power.  (Correct
me if I'm misrepresenting KDE...It's been awhile since I've
checked up on it.)

2) Pixmap theming support, although that's more of a GTK+/QT
issue than GNOME/KDE.

3) More language bindings, e.g. python, C, C++, Perl, TOM, Guile,
Objective-C, etc.  This is mainly useful if you're a developer
who doesn't want to be stuck in C++.

4) You can embed live applications (applets) into the panel
(which is not really a task bar...you can use the gnome-pager
with a GNOME-compliant WM for that).  For example, there's a mail
notify applet, a little modem-dialer app, a drive mount tool, a
CD player...even a couple games.

5) Anti-aliased drawing canvas, capable of arbitrary rotations,
etc.

6) Supports 17 native languages, FWIW.

...and that's without mentioning the licensing issues at all. 
Errr....

Anyway, to address your other concerns, you should be able to
have both of them installed on your system, and should be able to
run apps from both simultaneously, although obviously you can't
run two WM's at the same time.

And as far as the stability is concerned, that's mainly due to
the frenetic pace of development.  Previous to the 1.0 release
last week, GNOME was a moving target.  Now, things will settle
down.  It's already quite stable.  A few minor bugs still exist
in the file manager and the panel, but those should be ironed out
pretty quick here.  After that, development will shift away from
the core components, and into increasing the number and quality
of GNOME applications.

John