[X-Unix] Which Window manager/Desktop Environment

[Stroller]

On Apr 17, 2005, at 2:36 pm, ~flipper wrote:
>
> I'm shopping for a new Aluminum powerbook, now, and thought I'd look 
> into converting the 667 to an open source box.
>
> 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.
> ...

You probably want to be asking,"which distro?"

The ideal distro will have a package manager which will take care of 
this for you, a package manager which is easy to use & which handles 
all the dependencies seamlessly. I mostly use Gentoo (tho' not on PPC) 
although it's not for the faint-of-heart; Mandrake is a very friendly 
distribution, and Ubuntu is very popular at the moment - I'm not sure 
if the latter supports PPC, but if it doesn't its derived from Debian, 
which does.

> 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?

No, I think you're thinking of WINE

GNOME is basically a GPL-licensed window-manager, which was developed 
because the KDE window-manager used QT widget libraries which were, at 
the time, under a non-Free license. GNOME developed their own GTK (G 
tool-kit) libraries under a GPL license.

Basically either GNOME or KDE will do you; I prefer KDE, you might find 
GNOME more Mac-like. Either can run applications using the other's 
toolkit, as long as the appropriate libraries are present. A good 
package-manager will pull in the libraries for you, so you can run 
`gfoo` under KDE or `kbar` under GNOME.

> 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?

You might be comfortable with Gentoo, then, which has the package 
manager you probably want.

Stroller.