Hello folks. I initially didn't want to take part in tis ridiculous flame war, but looking how it becomes basically a lynch, I decided to at least state my personal opinion (if anybody cares).
Just to show what position I'm talking from: I use tweaked Xubuntu on both my desktopand laptop compuers, as well as on about 200 workstations at work at my university -- I take care for them and make sure everything works for the students. I never managed to contribute to Xubuntu in code or artwork (although I made several attempts), mostly due to problems with organizing my time, but I'm active on the #xubuntu support channel and I try to help the users in there. That's pretty much all my relation to Xubuntu. For me this distrubution was always a solid, simple and comfortable tool -- something perfect to work on, without unnecessary bells and whistles, but also without the need to manually configure everything. As I mentioned, I do change some things -- uninstall unneeded applications and services, sometimes install alternative appslications, change the configuration -- but the changes are different for every use case, I don't think it would be possible to make them in the distribution in a way that would fit all of my installations -- not to mention installations of other Xubuntu users. You can only go so far with being lightweight and efficient and still remain general enough to support a considerably big user base. Further improvements are achieved by tweaking your installation to be more specific, more precisely tuned to the particular case. Xubuntu allows this by leaving wiggle room and allowing you to remove and replace applicatons without much hassle -- the replacements are also usually well configured and work out of the box -- you just have to install them. If you want to be rally, really lightweight and efficient, then just changing the applications won't really give you much improvement. I always find it funny how people recommend disabling the text console login prompts "to save memory", for example -- it saves maybe hundred bytes. The real gains are in tweaking the kernel and init scripts -- something that Xubuntu cannot do, as it relies on Ubuntu for this. You can do it yourself, or, if you don't know how and are only arguing about it so that others do it for you -- you can use a distribution where that kind of tweaking is made simple for the users -- like Gentoo. Last, but not least, I recently see a lot of GNOME bashing, and really, really primitive "fear, uncertanity and doubt". I don't know where it comes from, but it's not amusing. Really, complaining about applications that have "gnome" in their name is rather silly when they don't really use many gnome libraries and are in fact fast. I had this user at #xubuntu that kept complaining that the network monitor applet needs to be rewritten for Xubuntu -- asked why, all he could say is "because it's a GNOME application". Checking it with ldd shows that the only GNOME-specific library it uses is gnome-keyring. He also claimed it's slow, which is a pretty silly claim for an application that is merely a graphical interface for dealing with network -- network is usually much slower that any program could be. I bet that just renaming all the "GNOME apps" would make those users happy -- although I don't advice it. There are some bloated applications in Xubuntu that make it hard to use on older hardware -- but surprisingly, nobody opposes against their inclusion. For example, Firefox, a huge memory hog, was welcomed with open arms. To sum up, I think that Xubuntu is doing an excellent job and I'm not against using GNOME (or other) applications where it makes sense. I also think that including them in Xubuntu gives an additional pressure to make them even lighter -- which is something that everybody benefits, not just the Xubuntu community. I find this whole "holy war" ridiculous and unfair. -- Radomir `The Sheep' Dopieralski <http://sheep.art.pl> Meden agan. -- xubuntu-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/xubuntu-devel
