[oclug]Linux too hard?

[Ben Hall]

Mike,

I've noticed a bit of this too.  While I too find the latest versions of 
both Gnome and KDE less stable than they should be. many of my lockups 
have been due to odd hardware issues.  (AGP+Athlon+NVidia, or Via+S3 
Savage4+xv)

There are a lot of rock-solid "desktop" apps for Linux too.  As a rule, 
I have found that smaller apps are often very stable.  For instance, 
I've rarely had any lock ups using the XFce desktop or its collection of 
tools.  The same goes for the Rox file manager.  Sure, it's not as 
feature-rich as Konqueror, but both Rox and XFtree (part of XFce) are a 
lot faster, and never crash on me.

Also, sticking to the releases in well-tested distros seems to help 
quite a bit.  My girlfriend's PC is running RH 8.0.  While I've noticed 
a bit of odd behaviour, for the most part both Gnome and KDE seem quite 
stable in it.  At least comparable to any Win32 machine I've used 
lately.  I'll bet that Xandros' well-tested KDE 2.2.2-based desktop is 
pretty stable too.

For me, I've found that using just a simple window manager (like xfwm or 
black/fluxbox) leads to a better performing and more stable system.  I 
think that what the Gnome and KDE people are doing is admirable, and I 
use apps from both when needed, but they do seem to be developing new 
technologies faster than they can stabalize their old stuff.

While I haven't used Evolution in some time, Mozilla's mail client works 
very well.  In fact, I'm running a custom built 1.2b, and can't remember 
the last time I had it crash on me.  Also, OpenOffice is rock-solid for 
me, as are gimp, xmms, quanta, Eclipse and most of the other tools I 
rely on day in and day out.  While these are good tools, they don't add 
up to a single "desktop."  Oh well.

Hopefully, once KDE and Gnome are brought to a level of 
"feature-completeness," they can really concentrate their efforts on 
releasing small, stability fixes instead.  Until then, you're right. 
 Linux on the desktop will probably be a little shakey.

Ben



Michael P. Soulier wrote:

>On 24/11/02 Milan Budimirovic did speaketh:
>  
>
>    I have, unfortunately, experienced a great deal of instability and bugs
>with most if not all of the "cutting edge" Linux apps in Gnome and KDE. I've
>had crashes that boot me to a login prompt. Worse, I've had many total lockups
>making the system unusable, to the point where I couldn't even login remotely
>to fix it. I've had bug after bug in software that was supposedly stable at
>1.0+ versions (can you say Evolution??). 
>
>    Gnome and KDE are, IMHO, permanently beta software. The developers never
>finish, and create a rock-solid version, before moving on to add new features.
>They use very Microsoft-like development strategies, of pouring on features
>regardless of whether or not the codebase is stable. 
>
>    Frankly, I have lost a great deal of faith in open source software over
>the last few years. Thankfully, it's all desktop related. If I drop to a
>command-line, or text mode, the majority of the tools are rock solid. That
>unfortunately doesn't do much for my arguments for Linux on the desktop. 
>
>    Mike
>
>  
>