[conspire] Ubuntu

[Rick Moen]

Bill Stoye <skiffworks at earthlink.net> wrote:

> I did look at what would be installed to get K3b(with Synaptic); it
> required a whole lot of KDE stuff, 13 or 14 packages including base KDE,
> lib's and it's menu. I may succumb to having to do it; if only I could
> figure out how to use 'eroaster' but for some reason, I hit a wall,
> nothing I attempt with it works. ?? 

I'm just revisiting this thread from the newsgroup side.  (It's really
nice to be able to respond to any article in the news spool, from any
date, not just to prior mailing list posts posted since you joined the
mailing list that you haven't yet deleted.)

So, this will be in part my chance to gripe about software religion --
while at the same time qualifying that by saying that of course such
religionists are welcome to go to their preferred hells in their own
choice of handbaskets.

Anyhow, we were talking about Ubuntu and its omission of K3B.  This is
significant because K3B is easily, far and away the most-advanced
graphical front-end tool on *ix for burning CDRs and DVDs -- being both
nicely designed and capable of talking both to cdrecord and the
dvd+rw-tools package.  Thus, it's able to handle DVD+R(W) format,
DVD-R(W) format, and all types of CDR -- in a way that pretty much any
user can handle.

And yet, Ubuntu Linux, which aims to be an excellent naive-user desktop
distribution, has chosen to omit the clearly best tool for the job.
Why?  Because it hews to the wrong software religion:  It relies on a bunch
of the kdelibs and Qt, rather than a gaggle of GNOME libraries and GTK+.

I can only imagine how they would justify this omission if I were to
bring it up -- because I lack the patience and tact to conduct that
conversation with them.  I suspect they'd say "But K3B doesn't comply
with our Human Interface Guidelines policy document."  You can imagine
my opinion about that:  In my view, that and $1.25 will get you a ride
on Muni.

Or they might say "But all of those KDE libs take up a lot of room!"
This from a GNOME desktop distribution, which is not exactly svelte -- 
and with an intended target audience of people with 40GB+ hard drives.

So, you can say that I take a rather dim view of that omission, and see
it as one of the many sorts of GNOME brain damage that typifies such
efforts.  And, if I were in your shoes, I would not struggle along eith
eroaster, nautilus, or gcombust:  If you're happy with K3B, install it.
If a distribution poses bullshit obstacles in the way of your installing
and using the best available tools, then it's the distribution that has
a problem, not you.

My opinion; yours for a small fee and disclaimer of reverse-engineering
rights.  ;->

-- 
Cheers,
Rick Moen                                Bu^so^stopu min per kulero.  
rick at linuxmafia.com