[X-Unix] Which Window manager/Desktop Environment

[John Harrold]

Sometime in April ~flipper assaulted the keyboard and produced:

| Now i remember why i trashed Fink a few years ago. Some apps only 
| work with libraries that are only compatible with Gnome or KDE, some 
| will work with both... a wrong lib install at some point can preclude 
| using a certain app, later, what a mess.

Of course, you could just install both KDE and Gnome --- assuming you have
the space.

| Most of the packages I looked at, that had XML somewhere in the 
| title, were GNOME apps. Isn't GNOME a PC on linux thing, or is that a 
| newbie myth that i subscribe to?

Gnome is a desktop environment and a development environment. While its use
has been popularized on x86 linux machines, this is in no way a limit.
Gnome is available on most platforms the major linux distros support. For
example Debian currently supports 10 different cpu architectures [1],
though there has been talk of limiting this. Now Gnome may not work on all
of them, but it will probably be available for most of those. I believe
I've also read about someone using Gnome on Solaris, so it's pretty
extendable.

Now to develop Gnome applications, I believe you just have to have all the
gnome libs installed on the development machine and an X11 server on your
desktop. Then you can compile everything on the 667 and display it on your
desktop.

| My other idea is to just load the 667 with Darwin, no GUI, and go 
| from there, but i'd stll have to place a 'bet' on one main version of 
| the management software and hope the suite of apps i find will 
| function within it. Any suggestions?
| 
| After reading all night through the documentation on a few sites, i 
| remembered back a ways, having a huge install that led to catch-22s, 
| like you can load this font package, but you'll need to trash that 
| lib, which will kill your environment manager... you know, crazy. If 
| I can do everything using java, a bit of our company's proprietary 
| stuff, and run-->cmd on a PC, then it seems all of that should be 
| easy to cobble together in the OpenSource world, no? What am i 
| missing here?

I must admit that I don't know much about Darwin, but the dependency issues
you mentioned are probably the fault of the individual packages. If you do
use a system that gives you results like that, you might want to file a bug
report to get it resolived. 

[1] http://www.debian.org/ports/

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