On 06/28/2012 07:13 AM, E. Liddell wrote:
> Actually, at least one minimalistic udev replacement is out there already:
> 
> http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Mdev
> 
> Yes, I know, we Gentoo types are weird.  I'm not sure how much
> freedesktop.org has to mess things up before mdev becomes a
> preferred option, but I'm starting to think they're getting there.
> 

  You look across the board at the "progress" and I began to wonder just how
much has been 'lost' to progress. kde3, Qt3, gnome 2, hal, udev, Quanta+, now
gimp 2.8[1] and the list goes on and on. Good working applications that met
their need well, abandoned well before any well thought out replacement was in
place and ready for end-use. I understand the need to innovate and the need to
change, but change for "change's" sake has never been a good thing.

  One of the pivotal, and correct, arguments against the adoption of open-source
for a personal or business desktop -- is you cannot rely on what works being
here next month, much less next year. The cost for business and governments to
"re-train" for the next greatest desktop or to "re-tool" and implement the next
greatest "backend" (to whatever) simply prevents adoption of Linux in most cases.

  Can you imagine the chaos to business if they had adopted kde 3.5 only to have
4.0 forced on them in May/June 2008? It's 2012 and that desktop still struggles
for usability. Gnome3 almost as bad a transition.

  You think about the work we do to keep up with all the next gee-whiz ideas of
the dependency packages and imagine business trying to justify keeping 50
million people/boxes on the same page.

  I think if open-source has learned nothing else, it has learned how NOT to
manage a desktop transition in the kde4/qt4 experience. Though gnome3 does bring
that into question.

  That's why projects like TDE are so important. The provide the long term
stability for a very usable desktop as a choice that makes sense to everyone,
including business and government.

  Yes, windowmaker and fluxbox have been around forever, but just try to teach a
secretary to use them and try to justify managing and installing all of the
helper apps required just to provide the basic functionality that something like
TDE provides. It just can't be done economically.

  In my mind this is the very reason we have for putting the effort into TDE and
doing it right. Open-source can make a fantastic desktop and provide a valid
alternative to the proprietary offerings, but only if people can rely on it
being here tomorrow and working the way it did last month, last year, etc.. I am
an open-source advocate, but I do take note of the value that stability provides
every time I see xp boot. All lessons we do well to learn.

footnotes:

[1] this is more about the idiotic open/save/import/export dialog changes that
forces and intermediate save in .xcf. Another great example of 10 years of
progress developing a flexible open/save dialog tossed out the window on the
seeming whim of a couple of people.

-- 
David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.