GNOME: The imperialism of X11

[zAchAry]

I'm trying to use as less as GNOME as I can, I'll not let this TradeMark (this is what I truly think about GNOME) to take over my system. the less GNOME (as a text) I see, the better.

for instance:
Fluxbox and gnome-settings-daemon
Fluxbox and gnome-settings-daemon (SOLVED)

or:

Downloads

Airconfig is not complete, and therefore has never been formally released.
Actually, at this point, it's in a stalled state of development. Since
NetworkManager 0.7 actually looks pretty decent as compared to 0.6, I may
rewrite Airconfig to be a NM 0.7 frontend (since nm-applet appears to require
gnome-panel for some strange reason). However, if you want to play around with
bleeding-edge, possibly-broken code, you can download the latest-and-greatest
from the Git repository.
Using a command-line 'git' client, this will fetch the sources for you:

Code: Select all

git clone git://git.xfce.org/kelnos/airconfig

If I'll write what I really think about the GNOME project, I might go to jail


I'm also:
Not drinking CocaCola for nine years.
Not smoking.
Not getting out of control when drinking at parties.
Not watching Israeli propaganda TV for seven years.
Not reading Israeli Newspaper (physical newspaper and web) for five years.
Not listening to Israeli radio for four years.

NEVER joined to the Israeli army, which can be a nightmare, messing up with the n*zi-like people who are threatening to put you up in jail and stuff of this sort.

Trying not to be a slave.
Trying to change wherever I can.

Changing in this case is not using GNOME, to protest against their stupid policies to sh*t the word GNOME wherever they can, even when it is completely unnecessary, just for the cause of gaining more and more popularity, and I really don't care that it is "their" project, because the bloated application they have ARE STOPPING AND SLOWING progress with other projects that can/could (exist/not-yet-exist) provide a much more efficient applications without pulling out useless libraries.

To be honest: I'm very satisfied from the GNOME (vanilla) desktop, from how things are working so smoothly and almost flawlessly and are, in fact, what Microsoft Windows are declaring that their system does, but, practically, it isn't, Microsoft fails (not that big news) and GNOME, without hyping too much are wining where Microsoft failed.

But NOT everyone can afford that bloated desktop!
There are some poor people in this world with old PCs...

example: wow, software really is fast... sort of / Arch Linux Forums

GNOME is trying to imperialize (in other word imperialism) the Unix/X11 desktop, which is rude!
GNOME can go and stick it!

I'm not gonna use GHex or Meld or any other GNOME product that an alternative is available for use.

Boycott is another form of having the power to change


Don't take it personally , post you opinion with a smiley

[Akuna]

Hmmm... you get so worked up sometimes, don't you?
Personally I am for open mindedness & tolerance, even if a bit anarchic & selfish... I'll explain:

I feel everyone should be free to do what they damn well please so long as they don't impose their views on others. I lived for some length of time on 3 different continents, under various so-called dictatorship and/or so-called democracies & with time, I learned to understand & respect various & contradictory cultures & viewpoints.

Even if it is true that 'Evil flourishes when good man do nothing", the problem comes with defining good & bad with certitude. What I have seen concretely is that many 'crusaders' with the ultimate 'good' in mind usually inflict a lot of 'bad' & often make a mess of things. That is not to even considering the many rotters who hide their evil agenda behind a lovely & politically correct activism which boasts of lofty goals only to screw you with more ease.

Could be cynicism that sometimes comes with age...

Having said that, I do however immensely respect sincere people who truly stand up for what they believe & in so doing succeed in paving the path with better things for the rest of us. RMS comes to mind even with his bitty share of extremism.

Pretty ideas like freedom & the like can easily be corrupted & deviated. I tend to trust real people more. If a person is decent, I will tend to trust & appreciate that person, no matter what his country, religion, political, sexual or software preferences are. On the other hand, if a person is a creep, then even if he uses the right software & profess many pretty ideas, he is still a creep!

Conclusion: Live & let live. Notice that living does not exclude a burning passion for what you do while letting live involves the respect of others passion even if they are at the antipodes of yours.

[zAchAry]

Hmmm... you get so worked up sometimes, don't you?

You bet!

Even if it is true that 'Evil flourishes when good man do nothing", the problem comes with defining good & bad with certitude. What I have seen concretely is that many 'crusaders' with the ultimate 'good' in mind usually inflict a lot of 'bad' & often make a mess of things. That is not to even considering the many rotters who hide their evil agenda behind a lovely & politically correct activism which boasts of lofty goals only to screw you with more ease.

I completely agree.

Conclusion: Live & let live. Notice that living does not exclude a burning passion for what you do while letting live involves the respect of others passion even if they are at the antipodes of yours.

Thank you for giving to my post legitimacy


--- Can anyone criticize the first post in this thread? I always love (not like) to be criticized, criticism is always improving myself!
--- An other opinion, to my post, is desperately needed!

[Akuna]

Thank you for giving to my post legitimacy ]

Just wanted to answer in one place to all your many activists posts.

Although I respect your youthful engagement, I also wanted to point out that you should totally avoid pointing fingers at any particular nationalities, be it your own, as you regularly tend to do in some of your posts.

Remember, Salix is not a political, religious or whatever biased forum. Our common passion for our preferred distro is supposed to breach our differences.

That is actually the beauty of the Open Source movement: different folks from different countries, cultures, social background, sex, religion, politics & whatnot... cooperating freely & willingly on a cooperative project for the ultimate good of all.

Let's major on what unites us, not what divides us.

[Shador]

--- Can anyone criticize the first post in this thread? I always love (not like) to be criticized, criticism is always improving myself!
--- An other opinion, to my post, is desperately needed!

I don't think I can give you this. Anyway.

I never looked at GNOME the way you do as monopoly. And although I've first wondered about what a weird opinion you present here, I decided to just move on and let it be.

That's because, I believe greatly in the points Akuna pointed out like acceptance, open-mindedness and liberty (of mind). Something I was tought by my environment, I guess, being quite lonely with my oppositionel decision to use Linux. One of the things I learned to HATE that way is when somebody speaks offensively about my opinions/believes/whatever. Everybody is free to criticize/oppose/... my opinion as long as he still accepts my position. That differentiation is narrow but I tend to draw the line between "bad" and "shit". Discussing differently only ends up in a flame war and that's something else I do HATE, as it only means destructiveness, war, hurt feelings, ...


But again more back to your topic. I also do DISLIKE any sort of monopoly, because I believe that it destroy diversity, offers solutions only for a limited amount of people, leads to poor quality, high prices and probably a lot more bad consequences I currently don't recall.
This dislike of mine is also one reason, why I oppose monopolies like Microsoft or increasingly Apple. Did you ever see people freely buy pretty much the same clothes, from the same company, just in different colors? I've got 3 of those so called POD devices prefixed with that 'i' character in my family.

That's why I thought, hm, maybe you're right, just another such monopoly.
But I think it's different. Another thing I've learnt by FOSS is that standardization is needed especially in the software world which is all about communications. I'm talking about open, freely accessible standards.

Why so? Did you ever try to boot Windows without M$'s bootloader software? It won't work. That's because nobody knows their boot protocol and it wasn't reverse engineered yet. When booting Windows with Grub, Lilo, ... you're just so called "chainloading" the native M$ bootloader, which will then boot Windows. This means with multiple Windows installation you've got a two-level menu. One to select Windows and one to select the Windows installation.
Just one example. Let's have a look at the opposite where something actually works. I guess the best example is the internet, more precisely the TCP/IP protocol. It also could be looked upon as monopoly and it does have alternatives. But if everybody invented his own protocol, the whole communication wouldn't work, even more protocols at that level of the networking stack would greatly increase the effort needed. To come from a example out of my world to a more worldly view , it's the same as with languages. While the diversity is great it limits the possibilities to communicate with other people depending on the amount of spoken languages.


What does this mean for Gnome? I look upon Gnome as an effort to standardize software, which is in my eyes not necessarily bad as long as it is a constantly revised, consensual process in open dialog. Standardization is human in my eyes. Most humans would call it compromise, for mathematicians it's the least common denominator.

Alternatives to a certain extent are great, but sometimes one has to decide for one or a couple of solutions and to then prevent monopoly an open approach is in my opinion the only way. Especially as bad open solutions tend to live and improve themselves. That's what actually is great about.

Finally imagine there would be even more desktop environment, even more window toolkits. How much space would it take to install one single application, if every application shipped with its own window toolkit and thus its own unique bunch of libraries and dependencies. Maybe every application should ship it's own Linux kernel? Why should one kernel have a monopoly?

[pwatk]

It could be worse...

[JRD]

I just want to say that's why Freedesktop.org exists. To help making standards on the desktop.

I don't agree with all that was said by zAchAry but I want to point out that it's not GNOME who wants to spread everywhere on the desktop. It's some developpers who build against some gnome libraries for no other reason that they only know one way to do some thing. Thus some small software which should depends on quite nothing, depends on some big libraries (it's not a GNOME-centric problem in fact) for technically no reason.

So the problem here, are the Ghex and Meld developpers, not the GNOME libraries. I like/prefer GTK, but I rather seem to start thinking Qt could be better (in a developper and dependancies way) as it provide a big bunch of fetaures in the API and so developpers that use Qt don't seem to need to depends on other libs. GTK devs seems to need others libs. But I'm not a GTK nor a Qt developper by the way…

But that is a wide debate. Still, it was interresting to read these posts ^_^

[lmello]

Even if it is true that 'Evil flourishes when good man do nothing", the problem comes with defining good & bad with certitude. What I have seen concretely is that many 'crusaders' with the ultimate 'good' in mind usually inflict a lot of 'bad' & often make a mess of things. That is not to even considering the many rotters who hide their evil agenda behind a lovely & politically correct activism which boasts of lofty goals only to screw you with more ease.

I completely agree.

So do I.