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On Thursday, September 26, 2002, at 01:51 PM, Kyle Faber wrote:
> Interesting that this statement would be on the list when there are
> still a
> few kicks left in the "OE6 doesn't handle signatures" debate of the
> last few
> days. The main complaint in that thread was that because Microsoft
> "invented" their own standards and didn't go with someone else's, they
> were
> bad. Now Red Hat wants to standardize a desktop, help everyone work
> well
> together, and the first in line to bash our "commercial" leader is ...
> *ominous drum roll* the linux community itself.
First of all, there is a difference between communication standards and
interface "standards". The former is necessary for getting any work
done on a computer (you do want to share the result, right?), while the
latter arguably makes it easier for the user to learn a system.
Second, Red Hat "standardized" the desktop by making some questionable
decisions. As an experienced user, I prefer Mandrake's approach of
unifying the menus of every window manager. They simplified things by
organizing them in a thoughtful manner. Red Hat's approach was to
simplify by taking away menu options. While I can certainly see how
that might help the new user "decide" which applications to run, it is
almost guaranteed to get some people upset. To use YABS(*), it would
be like selling me a Porsche, but only presenting me with the gas pedal
(while keeping the rest of the car hidden in the garage). Someone may
be led to believe that they are using the "KDE Desktop", when in fact
they are barely using a subset of it.
* Yet Another Bad Simile
PS: After all of that writing, you remembered to close the <rant> tag.
I'm impressed! ;-)
- --
Voltage Spike
,,,
(. .)
- --ooO-(_)-Ooo--
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