[H-GEN] Desktop wars ..... (no not really)

[Greg Black]

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On 2003-07-05, David Seikel wrote:
>  --- Jay <johannes at paradise.net.nz> wrote: 
> > On Sat, 05 Jul 2003 09:53, Sandra Milne wrote:
> > > I can't remember the last time something crashed in KDE for me. I get
> > > lots of crashes in windows, but very few in KDE 3.1 .... maybe I am
> > > just lucky or maybe I choose my applications carefully enough that I'm 
> > > using relatively stable programs.
> > 
> > I don't think it's just luck. I use the full set of KDE 3.1.2 compiled
> > from cvs with gcc 3.2 on my little notebook. I have not had anything bad
> > happening 
> 
> In further support of KDE, I have used the KDE that is installed with SuSE
> since I started using SuSE a couple of years ago.  In the early days, KDE
> had some faults, but instability wasn't one of them.  Now, they seemed to
> have ironed out the quirks, it all just works.

You lot must have better karma than I do.  I've tried recent[1]
packages of KDE (and GNOME, for that matter) on both Debian and
FreeBSD and have seen literally dozens of core files appear just
while playing with the desktop setup/configuration tools over a
few days of initial setup.  This doesn't inspire me at all, and
certainly means that I can't possibly risk inflicting these
things on my customers.

They can sort of cope with Mozilla and OpenOffice crashing once
or twice a day, although they find it puzzling that these things
do crash so often when the software that I write for them has
never crashed, despite getting much heavier daily use and being
in use for very many years.

I'll continue to look at both GNOME and KDE (with a leaning to
the former because of licensing preferences) over the next few
years in the hope that they might eventually be suitable for
daily use in an office environment.

Cheers, Greg

[1] Recent means in the last couple of weeks for Debian and
    about six months for FreeBSD.

-- 
Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> <http://www.gbch.net/gjb.html>
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