Re: GNOME on NetBSD needs YOU!

[Raymond Meyer <raymond.meyer%rambler.ru@localhost>]

On Sat, 2 Sep 2006 08:11:26 +0200
"Julio M. Merino Vidal" <jmmv84%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> [ I thought I could repost this here from my blog in an aim to get to
> more people :-) ]
> 
> A few pkgsrc developers and I have been working hard for years to
> bring the GNOME Desktop to this packaging system and make it work
> under NetBSD.  We are quite happy with the current results because the
> packages are updated very frequently and everything works.  Well,
> almost.  There are still several missing details that really hurt the
> end user experience and need fixing.

I don't know about others, but personally I didn't have a favourable experience
with either GNOME or KDE. They seem to be too buggy, too slow and too bloated.
Their software also has portability problems on architectures like SPARC
Solaris, etc. I know there aren't many better alternatives, Xfce4 seems a bit
better, but it too suffers from bugs and sloppy code. Ideally what NetBSD and
everybody else need is a small and robust desktop environment, which has a
small memory footprint and good performance characteristics on older and slower
hardware. I'm still using Sun Ultra 10 @440MHz as a desktop system and it is
sufficient for most of my needs. There is no way I'm gonna throw it away just
because GNOME can't run at decent speed on it, instead I'm using ctwm.