Lennart Poettering: BSD Isn't Relevant Anymore

[Joshua Isom]

On 7/18/2011 8:05 AM, perryh at pluto.rain.com wrote:
> Joshua Isom<jrisom at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> On 7/17/2011 6:16 PM, Mario Lobo wrote:
>>> On Sunday 17 July 2011 10:13:13 C. Bergstr??m wrote:
>>>> I hope gnome does [go Linux-only]..   Maybe then more
>>>> people would forget about it and focus on making KDE better ;)
> ...
>> What about enlightenment?
>
> For us old-timers :)
>
> What's the advantage of any of these "desktop environments" (Gnome,
> KDE, enlightenment, Xfce) over ordinary X11 with (say) FVWM2 or TWM?
> Certainly there are some useful apps that, for better or worse, are
> built with gtk or the KDE toolkit, but what does the full-blown
> environment really contribute (other than bloat)?

Desktop options are why linux has grown so well.  If gnome and KDE 
didn't exist, linux wouldn't have gotten the market share it did. 
Desktop environments are a foot in the door technique for server 
environments.  Windows clearly isn't the best server, especially older 
versions, but it's popular because desktop Windows is popular.  The 
"server" editions of linux distributions are almost mirrors of their 
desktops, gui and all.