[conspire] Ubuntu

[Daniel Gimpelevich]

Apparently the Ubuntu people are not entirely lost on the irony of
omitting k3b, as evidenced by their HOWTO page:
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/support/documentation/howto/helpcenterhowto.2004-10-05.2946111988

On Mon, 11 Oct 2004 12:44:27 -0700, Rick Moen wrote:

> 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.  ;->