KDE OS

[Robert Scott]

On Friday 05 January 2007 10:53, marco marinuzzo wrote:
> - If I was a Windows user in the year 2000 I still can have a Windows 2000
> OS, still compatible with all the software around now.

In 2000 in debian I could type apt-get install gimp.

That same system in 2006 will have the gimp installed. The package management 
system has updated it to continually work with the newer systems. It's not an 
issue.

> KDE can still remain platform independent and start a project for KDE OS.
> Robert says it is difficult to maintain 15000 pieces of software but 1) A
> Desktop-only project is not so wide

You still need to package the server software because it's very common to 
develop for servers on desktop systems. Even MacOS comes with Apache, php et 
al.

> 2) There are 100000 flavour of Linux 
> already done to start with. It's not a Linux from scratch program.

Try obtaining an even remotely obscure package for an even remotely obscure 
distribution.

> A drag and drop installer and binary compatibility will cause many
> duplicate of some 100KB library? Is this a problem in the average 200 GB HD
> that every desktop user owns? It was a problem at the early stage of Unix,
> not now!

It is in a big way. It's not a disk space thing, it's a memory thing. Modern 
unix systems have VM systems that map most of a shared library into memory 
once no matter how many processes use it. Imagine a desktop with n qt apps 
each having an individual copy of qt in their memory space. Not only would it 
be a waste of memory, the mapping would have to happen on every application 
startup.

And then there is the fact that you wouldn't get automatic updates.

> I'm writing in KDE-quality because I think that package installing is the
> first problem in a Desktop environment.
> A Desktop means that an average user can use a computer. This is the goal
> of KDE and its founder.

I have converted several barely-computer-literate friends over to unix, and 
the one thing they universally like is the package management system.

You are stuck in a Windows mindset. I used to be too about 6 years ago. You 
have to let go of that before progress can be made.


robert.