[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: A radical idea
From:       Seth Nickell <snickell () stanford ! edu>
Date:       2001-11-14 0:25:48
[Download RAW message or body]

On Tue, 2001-11-13 at 14:48, Alistair Davidson wrote:
> Seth Nickell wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 2001-11-13 at 09:54, Jim Conner wrote:
> > 
> > No, it would be a new operating system. KDE & GNOME will only be able to
> > attain a certain level of usability without starting to make demands and
> > changes to the underlying architecture. It is misguided to believe that
> > you can form a usable system on top of any given architecture without
> > either changing that architecture or radically hiding it. Once you've
> > started doing the level of "hiding" that I think is going to eventually
> > be necessary (or else we should accept that neither KDE nor GNOME will
> > be competitive with commercial environments), you might as well ditch
> > the underlying architecture altogether if its not willing to change.
> 
> 
> While to an extent this makes sense, the cost of backwards-compatibility is 
> potentially enormous.

see MacOS/X (n).

The benefits outweight the costs assuming the population size is large
enough (its not clear to me that the Linux-desktop population is, but
we'd like it to be). Changing the filesystem structure on well
maintained codebases using auto* is actually rather simple. I can only
speak of GNOME applications with any knowledge, but I was able to create
rather different (and in my opinion more comprehensible) structure using
--bin-dir and company during compilation. A few applications make funny
assumptions and would need changes at the sourcecode level, but the task
isn't that large. GNOME runs on MacOS/X with minor porting, MacOS/X
having a very different directory structure among other things.

-Seth

_______________________________________________
kde-usability mailing list
kde-usability@mail.kde.org
http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-usability

[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]