On Wednesday 13 June 2001 03:20, you wrote:
> Hi.
>
> On Tue, Jun 12, 2001 at 12:21:11PM -0600, Andy Kopciuch wrote:
> > As for the newbies ease of use. IMO blackbox is very specialized WM, and
> > not for a linux newbie. They would sit around on their hands for 2 hours
> > trying to figure out how to put a shortcut on the desktop. I think bb
> > caters to the crowd of linux professionals, sys-admins, and of course
> > hackers, but not to general purpose new linux folk.
>
> I d'ont know for whom BB is for, but I know why it is used in my
> company. First of all we are not linux users, we work on Sparc/Solaris
> 7. Second, we want to use a small and fast WM because we are about 20
> users on the same box with all the X servers running on it ; a much
> more sophisticated Desktop (CDE, Gnome or KDE) uses too much
> ressources. So we give a try to BB, I installed it a few weeks ago and
> users were asked to move from gnome or CDE to BB. Some did it, some
> not. The last ones stay to their old environment because of the, hmm,
> "complicated" configuration procedure of BB. None are "linux
> professionals, sys-admins [or] hackers", but their needs are
> fullfilled with BB, so they (hmm, most of them) accept to use it.
>
Although this section of my original email was taken out of context. The
original response was to the suggestion of packaging all bb components
together to make things easier for "newbies".
This only goes to prove my point *_again_*.
In your company, blackbox was chosen for a very specific purpose. ie "we want
to use a small and fast WM because ...". Well somebody made this decision
to use blackbox, and I bet it wasn't the summer student you hired who thinks
they might be interested in a computer career. NO! It was probably made by
a senior employee, who made an informed decision to use blackbox.
I won't respond to the whole Sparc/Solaris thing. It was covered in the
remaining threads of the previous emails.
I think you are still missing the major points I was making.
1. Blackbox is a Window Manager (like enlightenment, sawfish, etc). Not a
desktop environment (like KDE or GNOME). There is a difference, a very large
difference between WM and DE. One of which is an application framework.
2. Blackbox has a nice big gold star by it's name because it is very fast
and lightweight. People use bb largely because of that fact. Of course
there are other reasons too. Blackbox has a target audience, just like every
piece of software written.
3. Blackbox isn't for a beginner-average user. If it was, then why don't
you see the kids from Dawson's Creek using it to write their love poetry?
Because of important things like bb's speed. It will be used by a select
crowd. People looking for a fast lightweight WM maybe? New users of any
kind probably don't even take that into account. I'm unaware of new computer
users (be it Linux, BSD, Sun, OS/2 ...) raving about the latest release of
Blackbox. I know why, ... it's because they don't!
------------------------------------------------------
I love using Blackbox. It does exactly what I want, and what I tell it to
do. But i do realize that is why I use it. It's more than just a cool name
for a WM. If it were to morph to something else, I wouldn't want to use it
any longer.
I'll close off with a quote from the Blackbox home page:
"From the time the first line of code was written, Blackbox has evolved
around one premise, minimalism. It's not meant to be Eye Candy, nor the most
Featureful, nor the most Adorned for modelling the Widely acclaimed NeXT
interface. It is just meant to be fast. "
Andy.
