Re: GNOME and the GUI

[Nick Mathewson <nickm@mit.edu>]

 [snip: discussing gnome]
>I like the idea of Raster working on themes for it.  The kid is a
>graphics geneous.  It was enlightenment that I was giving the most
>consideration for the main GUI.  I think it would impress a first time
>user to the point of climax (figuritively speaking - I think) =)  I was
>trying to compile the DR 13 version a bit ago but keep getting some tsv
>something or other error in the main function.

Though I love E, I think we might want something a bit more conservative
for our UI.  Keep in mind that SEUL is likely to have interest in the
business world as well as in the home market.

At the very least, we should make the default theme something slightly 
more... umm... conservative than the theme with which E currently ships.
We might also want to invest some time (should we choose E) in determining
whether it can be made to work well with resource-strapped machines.  I
haven't tried to do it myself, but I can't bring myself to hope that E
currently looks very pretty at 8bpp, or that it leaves much space left over
in the colormap.  

This is not meant as an argument against E, but rather as a suggestion for a
possible area of development should we choose E. Raster's main focus seems to
be in making his windowmanager look staggeringly beautiful on mid- to high-end
machines with good graphics cards.  IMO, whatever WM we choose should
run acceptably well on, say, a 486/66 at 8bpp, 640x480.)

I'd be interested in seeing to what degree E and Gnome integrate in the 
future.

 [snip]
>What do you think of using another GUI, temporarily, until gnome is
>ready for all out deployment?  Ofcourse we should include gnome at all
>stages until that point, but not as a primary GUI.  From what I see,
>some of the programs in gnome are stable and could enhance whichever
>interface we use temporarily until the changeover.

I think I'd like to know what you mean by GUI in this context.  Do you mean
a toolkit, an application suite, a windowmanager, an application-launcher...?

Clearly, we'd be foolish to lock ourselves into a single toolkit.  Though
Gtk has great power and still-greater potential, any sytem which can't
run Tk applications is IMNSHO broken.  

Similarly, though an application suite is provides us with great potential,
I don't think this is properly conceived of as a UI issue -- unless we
decide to embrace that suite's UI principles as our own.

I do, however, think that our choice of an application-launcher/windowmanager
is essential.  Though we ought to provide a variety of such windowmanagers
for the 'power user', a simple, elegant, usable system would be best for
a default environment.

The reason I bring this up is that "Gnome's GUI" could be used to refer to 
any one of a toolkit (Gtk), an application suite, a set of GUI principles (see
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~aklikins/gnome/style.html). According to the first
paragraph of the first page of http://www.gnome.org, "GNOME is Window Manager
independent."  So even choosing Gnome will leave us with our WM decision
left to make.

-- 
Nick