Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

Trackbacks

No trackback.

Trackbacks are closed.

Comments

Thursday 1 November 2007 18:32, by pel :: #

I see your point (of course) but.. er.. what about terminal servers? :)

Thursday 1 November 2007 18:38, by El Anonimato es Cojonudo :: #

You may not like what Petreley has to say, but he provides a very insightful prognosis of the state of the free software desktop and of its strengths vis-a-vis proprietary operating systems.

I suspect that you do not like the fact that he recommends people and distributors to switch to KDE. Well, I concur that that is the only sane way forward. Gnome is a waste of development resources and is so far behind technologically that there simply is no contest, even when most distributions are paying overwhelming attention to Gnome. If most free software developers really believed in a meritocracy-driven system, they would be able to do an objective assessment of what qt4 and kde4 will bring to the free software desktop and would like reach the same conclusion that Petreley has, were it not for the fact that too many egos and livelihoods get in the way of objective analysis.

Thursday 1 November 2007 19:16, by hub :: #

@El Anonimato es Cojonudo: it has nothing to do with his choice of desktop. It has all to do with his lousy arguments in general. I only have ONE side: Free Software (and common sense).

@pel: you always need an exception to confirm the rule. Terminal server is the corner case, and clearly not the general one.

Thursday 1 November 2007 19:37, by James Henstridge :: site :: #

You'd use GNOME to run the GUI server configuration tools of course.

Thursday 1 November 2007 23:30, by Kyle Ambroff :: site :: #

I 100% agree with you! I was a Linux Journal subscriber for years, but after reading the first issue with Petreley as editor in cheif, I not only flet that the magazine's quality had suffered greatly, but felt personally attacked and insulted after reading his rant at the back page. I cancelled my subscription that day.

Friday 2 November 2007 02:18, by pabs :: #

After working in the RHEL-infected world, I've found that RedHat servers often have GNOME installed. Sometimes it actually comes in handy, mainly for the higher amount of text that can fit in a gnome terminal compared with a linux console.

Friday 2 November 2007 04:50, by Anon :: #

To be honest I disagree with you. There are cases where GUI can be usefull on the server. Perhaps not enterprise servers with heavy load, but for small organizations or even private homes running either Gnome or KDE can be helpful. If it can reduce the complexity for the admin... I would suggest at least that a unexperienced admin tweaking config files are a hell of a lot more dangerous than one clicking the graphical configuration dialog :p

Friday 2 November 2007 05:38, by fraggle :: site :: #

Aside from the fact that there's no reason you can't run a server with a GUI for configuring it, I think it's rather baseless to claim that Gnome is more "lightweight" than KDE. Don't get me wrong, I run Gnome myself because I prefer it, but I don't think there's really much difference in resource usage between the two. If there is a reason to use Gnome, it is its simplicity and attention to detail that make it more attractive; its resource usage is irrelevant.

I've heard this myth that Gnome is the "lightweight alternative" repeated many times now. Isn't that the point of Xfce, not Gnome?

If there is some significant resource usage difference between Gnome/KDE and someone can prove me wrong, I welcome it.

Friday 2 November 2007 07:12, by Dany Chouinard :: site :: #

Am I the only one avoiding at all cost to work directly on the console?

I have to be in great deal of trouble to actually site in the server room.

Through SSH I used to run redhat related GUI tools once a while without (much) trouble. I dont see why one would like to have a GUI running on an actual server. And we're not talking about virtual server yet (peoples are not running services on hosts server anymore, isn't it?).

Friday 2 November 2007 08:41, by Bille :: #

@fraggle: Here's a benchmark produced by one of my colleagues. Note that Lubos has gone to some lengths to discover and use fair and accurate ways to measure resource usage, so although he is not an independent observer, his methods are accurate and honest.

Footprint:
ktown.kde.org/~seli/memor...
Method:
ktown.kde.org/~seli/memor...

Friday 2 November 2007 08:45, by Chris Cunningham :: site :: #

GNOME gets its supposed reputation for being lightweight for the same reason Firefox did back in the days when it was basically just Mozilla with most of the buttons stripped off: because UI bloat creates a psychological feeling of slowness. Of course Petreley hasn't actually used GNOME since 1999, so that's not where he got the line from: he pulled it from his ass, like most everything else he says about the desktop.

- Chris

Friday 2 November 2007 09:29, by Arangel :: site :: #

Canceled my subscription to LJ too after Peterly came on board. The guy needs to get his head examined.

Friday 2 November 2007 17:37, by Nate :: #

It's not about him recommending GNOME over KDE -- fair enough, we all have our own opinions. It's about him clumsily throwing in the word 'server'. What's that about? The vast majority of servers run headless, and for those which do need a GUI, the config tools tend to be distro-specific.

What Apache, Sendmail and MySQL config tools does GNOME ship with? GNOME cannot be 'better' for servers because it's a simply a desktop envionment. You can argue that SUSE is better because of YaST, or Fedora/RHEL is better because of its own set of config tools. But to compare GNOME and KDE for server usage is insane.

And when we're talking 'lightweight', both desktops are quite memory-hungry. By Petreley's reasoning, Xfce would be the best desktop environment for servers (it still makes no sense!), or even IceWM or TWM!

Clearly Petreley has confused configuration tools with desktop environments. Bit of a shame for someone with (supposedly) a lot of experience...!

Friday 2 November 2007 17:45, by T :: #

I just read the article an hour before I hit your blog. I think you took his quote quite a lot out of context and it indeed looks bad now. But the original makes a lot of sense.

So, before you start calling names, maybe you should consider that actually most servers *do* have some sort of gui installed. And quite a few even an X11 server running. I could have turned the argument around where you should try managing a couple of server rooms before you make claims about the usability of a light-weight window-manager on the server ;)

ps. you also overlooed the obvious managing a server using gui tools installed on the server using X-forwarding where you still need gnome (aka gtk) installed on the server.

Friday 2 November 2007 18:17, by hub :: #

@T: I have managed un*x-based servers by the dozen (these where mostly Solaris boxes), and I was actually horrified when a vendor was requiring me to use a GUI to do obvious stuff including installing. The X server was running in my Linux laptop. Note there is a difference between running a desktop environment and ponctually running an X11 program displayed remotely.

Saturday 3 November 2007 08:56, by T :: #

> Note there is a difference between running a desktop environment and ponctually running
> an X11 program displayed remotely.

Yes, thats clear. You need something like GTK on the server to run your installer apps.
But the rest of your post just proves the point that you actually do need gui libs/etc on your server. Just because *you* don't run X on the server doesn't invalidate any of the other points made.

* a server typically needs X11 (installed!)
* if you don't want to use any GUI, then use the toolkit that is so stripped down that its barely usable.
* Be a bit better then TWM etc, since they are juts painful.

Post a comment

Comments are closed.