[ILUG] braun's choice?

[David Golden]

On Wednesday 29 June 2005 17:36, Braun Brelin wrote:
> I was rather amused actually.  I was thinking of asking another
> question on the list about Gnome vs. KDE to see if I could spark
> another long flamewar.
>

Bah. Neither approach the professionalism of classic X desktops.

Okay, in most respects they do, but one thing really annoys
me about both KDE and GNOME, the way they still don't handle
applications running from different machines and home directories
properly at all.  They make the assumption time and again that
all the apps on the screen are running on the one display with prefs
in the one home directory. If I wanted that, I could get a fucking 
Macincrap.

Older X applications used the xrdb so that UI configuration
was a property of the display. All your resource db supporting apps
could look just how you wanted them no matter which host they
were running from.

Then 10000 windows-developer-weenies apparently jumped ship to linux, 
bringing an incoherent mess of files stuck in the home directory and 
slagged off xrdb while completely missing the point of it, so we have 
things like the  unadulterated horror of GConf.  A few did eventually 
grasp what xrdb brought, and I acknowledge that xrdb would need heavy 
tweaking bordering on rearchitecting for "modern" preference datatypes, 
but they really threw the baby out with the bathwater by forsaking its 
core ideal of dynamic, server-brokered preferences.

P.S. See "man Xaw" for an interesting hack: you can now specify the
vector drawing commands used to draw a widget in the "displayList" xrdb 
resource of an athena widget...