[ltp] Debian on a 380D

[Victor Wagner]

On Tue, 23 Oct 2001, Tod Harter wrote:

> From: Tod Harter <tharter@rhombus.net>
> Subject: Re: [ltp] Debian on a 380D
> X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.2]
>
> I was just really disturbed by Debian's attitude towards certain software,
> namely KDE. It didn't leave me with a good feeling that they were putting

Note that this attitude is already changed. And I rather disappointed by
this change. In my opinion KDE and Gnome are too much Windows-like
to be productive.

Gnome is partially exused by pure openness, which gives theoretical
possibility to fix broken things (alas, only theoretical - many-many
man years are needed to fix all the design flaws in gtk, and first they
have to be admitted tto be design flaws). Kde with dependencyu  on
proprietary GUI library is worse. Especially becouse it seems that
some KDE developers seems to misunderstand Qt i18n (which is unneccessary
complicated).


> user's real needs ahead of some philosophical/political agenda. The only
> other thing is Debian seems to always be way behind in updating packages. Its
> a two-edged sword, but that is one great thing about Mandrake, esp for us KDE
> users out there, they are always close to the current edge of development.

It is rather bad that software is in such a poor state now that user
has to be on the current edge of development just to get away from
show-stopper bugs. I'd rather prefer situation when I can use same
good old software for years until my requirements change and I would
really need to learn something new. Alas, it is virtually impossible.

Anyway, if you want to be at the current edge, Debian have testing and
even unstable for you. I'd say that later is not for users, but for
very adventurous developers, but former is good enough for any
non-critical system.

> I think ALSA is the way to go for sound. It is quite superior to OSS quality
> wise, and I couldn't get OSS to reliably support my 380D's sound chip anyhow.
> It would just randomly stop working in KDE. Not sure if it was really an OSS
> problem, but ALSA fixed it...

It may be. And Debian excellent module-building system is quite
good for things like tpctl or alsa which have to be in your running
kernel, but do not fit in the standard kernel source tree.

-- 
Victor Wagner			vitus@ice.ru
Chief Technical Officer		Office:7-(095)-748-53-88
Communiware.Net 		Home: 7-(095)-135-46-61
http://www.communiware.net      http://www.ice.ru/~vitus


----- The Linux ThinkPad mailing list -----
The linux-thinkpad mailing list home page is at:
http://www.bm-soft.com/~bm/tp_mailing.html