Re: Enlightenment, WindowMaker, AfterStep

Dirk Ertner (vincent@brumfundel.b.uunet.de)
Fri, 08 May 1998 03:05:02 +0200 

Hi Mike!

>> I think, nobody is really reading my concerns ... have there ever been some
>> attempts to pull the development power of the above together?
>well e is its own thing, if you want to run e then do it I see no way
>or reason to incorporate it into any other project.

But methinks, we can learn from the suberb themes - which will really blow
back anybody winusers hairs, won't it?

>as for wm and as, well I see them as pretty much the same thing but I like
>as better because it has more features like a pager and you can bind
>mouse events.

The concrete benefits and problems are not quite the point I wanted to
point at ... it's a matter of development, I think.

>> I read again and again what is good here and there ... why can't we work
>> together in some way? 
>I think that x is going through massive changes nowadays.  I mean that with
>the new restrictive licensing and such and it may possibly even
>disapeare from linux if ggi gets established, however this may be quite
>a while.  Also the widget thing is fairly restrictive.  Xaw is everywhere
>but not feature full and pretty nasty too look at.  Qt has its special
>licensing problems which is what kde is based around.  What looks like
>the future is the gtk/gnome development and that is shaping up slowely
>but surely, and I am waiting for that to stabalize.

There's an excellent article about gui-independent development in the
recent issue of Linux Journal ... though it's not very complete, it's a
nice overview.

As far as I'm concerned, Qt and GTK are the choices to be, as Java is still
slow and not standarized enough - not even mentioning the Sun "fathership" ...

Qt: Sure, it's somehow commercial, but there is a special KDE-Version to be
available for free to everybody, as the Trolls came along to provide this.
It's controlled by a commitee of Trolls and KDEs - so it's safe and free
... ;-)

GTK: To undeveloped ... I fear somehow, that GTK will almost never really
come to great honours ... I simply see some nice OSes (like the GNU and
JAVA ones) which may be more elegant than Linux, but don't have the dev
power ... 


So what? I'm not eger to push someone into one or the other direction, but
I really think, that it's time to commit each other to KDE or GNOME in some
way ...
==========================================================

>But my final answer to why can't we work together as far as as, e, and
>windowmaker is that we have a choice once we have chosen unix.  I mean
>look at all the windowmanagers available for X.  How many wm's do you have
>for macos?  How many wm's do you have for win95?  How many wm's do you have
>for winnt?  How many wm's do you have for os2?  Get my drift.

Don't get me wrong: I love the multiplicity of wms! But as it almost became
a hobby to install different wms, I spent (to much) time configuring lots
of them ... I'd really love to stick to a "family" of wms ... something -
only an example of a thought of a vision - like a KDE with AfterStep look
and feels ... 

>> Don't drop this thread - go for it!
>if you feel like it....
Yes, I do ... I'm only worried a bit about the future - and I want AS - and
it's variants - to survive superbly ...

Vince


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