Kaiwai Gardiner wrote: > On Sun, 2008-05-25 at 17:22 +0530, Moinak Ghosh wrote: > >> On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 3:39 PM, Peter Tribble <peter.tribble at gmail.com> >> wrote: >> >>> On 5/24/08, Moinak Ghosh <moinakg at gmail.com> wrote: >>> >>>> On Sat, May 24, 2008 at 3:04 AM, Rich Teer <rich.teer at rite-group.com> >>>> wrote: >>>> >>>>> On Fri, 23 May 2008, Peter Tribble wrote: >>>>> >>>>> >>>>>> The one thing I still miss (after trying again to remove /usr/dt/bin >>>>>> from my path) is 'sdtimage -snapshot', for which I've still to find >>>>>> a satisfactory replacement. >>>>>> >>>>> AGreed; GNOME's snapshot tool is somewhat wanting, especially in the >>>>> area of snapshots of random screen areas. >>>>> >>>>> >>>>>> http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/desktop-discuss/2007-February/008966.html >>>>>> >>>> You can use GIMP or Ksnapshot for that. I have rarely if ever used >>>> the GNOME snapshot tool. >>>> >>> sdtimage starts up in significantly less than a second, even from cold. >>> A cold start of gimp is in the 10-20s range; even a warm start is well >>> over 5 seconds before you can actually think about what you're going >>> to do. >>> >>> The gimp solution is fine if you're wanting to end up in gimp, but otherwise >>> is far too slow. >>> >> gimp --no-fonts --no-data will speed up gimp loading quite a bit. >> >> >>> ksnapshot is definitely a possible solution, but presumes you have KDE, >>> which isn't always the case. >>> >> True. I use KDE all the time. >> > > I'd use KDE but the currently available binaries are terribly out of > date. I mean, come on, 3.5.9 is out already in Linux land and yet, no > builds for Solaris yet. > > Matthew > > _______________________________________________ > desktop-discuss mailing list > desktop-discuss at opensolaris.org > So true. But even the "unstable" 3.4.x ports (Lol, outdated and still marked unstable) are terribly buggy, slower and worse integrated. KDE is tied to the hip with Linux and they don't seem to mind making everyone else jump through hoops. We can blame Trolltech and Sun equally for this. KDE is a much better desktop than GNOME, even back in 2000 it probably was better, there's just too many kludges from the GTK+ toolkit which I find is being used outside the scope of original design. Things that bother me about (Open)Solaris mainly stem from lack of reliable options, KDE is one of those things that is just horridly supported, barely working, and extremely dated, and due to this I refuse to run it when on (Open)Solaris though I do prefer it. Stuck between a rock and a hard case, I encounter tons of bugs with GNOME the same and it's supposed to be supported and current, which it pretty much is. I fallback to more simple WM's because KDE and GNOME fail so hard on the Solaris platform.
KDE4 is terrible, preschoolers if they could design interfaces would do better. They call it streamlined when it's extremely lacking in functionality, it's actually regressed to the point where GNOME is more advanced, then the bugs and bad integration and fact it's marked stable when it's hardly that. The state of X11 window managers and X11 itself is pathetic, it's no wonder so many people who have used UNIX systems in the past gave it up, bought Macs or just continued using their Windows system, albeit more permanently. I think the way the windowing system is architected makes no sense for common use, most people care about direct access, it's what they're used to. X11 abstracts things and exponentially increases complexity, and in addition it alone is probably the main problem with the UNIX desktop experience. Too many toolkits for X11, too many licenses, too many badly engineered applications which don't integrate, and too many extremists on all sides of the fractured X11 desktop war claiming their WM is better, they all are horrid and so is X11. James
