[2003 may 19]
What is with the current trend of turning Linux systems into Windows
lookalikes? The two popular desktops (Gnome and KDE) seem to be doing
everything they can to blindly emulate Windows. This wouldn't be so
bad, if it weren't for the fact that they're emulating all the bad
parts too: applications are bloated and require a zillion libraries to
run (and you'd better have the right versions of all those libraries).
I'd love to try out Gnumeric (an open source spreadsheet), but it
requires a whole bunch of Gnome-related libraries that I don't feel
like installing. Why does it require all this junk? What does this
stuff add to Gnumeric? For that matter, what do Gnome and KDE do for
me (other than looking kind of pretty - if you happen to think
Windows-ish desktops look pretty)? OpenOffice is a huge pig. It
takes longer (much longer) to start up on my 1.5 GHz Athlon Linux box
than MS Word does on my 566 MHz Windows Pentium III laptop. That's
just plain embarrassing.
There are a few bright points in this onslaught of bloatware. Mozilla is splitting into separate pieces for the browser and mail reader. (Why were they ever combined into one application? Did this make some kind of sense to someone?) The email system-level software (not including mail readers) field still provides lots of nice tools.
What happened to the Unix philosophy? Build a set of small, efficient tools, each of which does only one job and does it well. If I wanted a Windows box, I'd go buy one. Unix (including Linux) is not Windows - let's keep it that way.