Re: Hating desktops (was Re: I hate the Finder more each day)

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From: David Champion
Subject: Re: Hating desktops (was Re: I hate the Finder more each day)
Date: 18:37 on 05 Sep 2003
* On 2003.09.05, in <20030905100007.A15128@xxxxxx.xxxxxxxx.xx.xx>,
*	"David Cantrell" <david@xxxxxxxx.xxx.xx> wrote:
> 
> I hate Sun, because they are dropping Openlook to replace it with Gnome.

I can't stand Openlook. I was glad to see it go. Fewer stupid Openlook
toolkit apps to sleaze around on my fine desktop and make it look bad.
But it was already gone, even before Gnome arrived. Sun couldn't pull
together a production schedule on Gnome to make it show up in time for
an even transition from OL/CDE to Gnome; they had instead to first
deprecate OL, then phase it out to CDE, then deprecate CDE to Gnome. Lame.

There's something I hate about this shift, though. Some of the little
utility apps were nice to have, even if they were written as OL apps. I
think especially of audiocontrol. Hey, a good idea, having a program to
control your levels and channels. It was alright, as openlook apps go.
Or maybe it just filled a void, without being completely evil.

But when they took out Openlook, they took out audiocontrol. Didn't
rewrite it in Gtk, or CDE or Athena. No, they rewrote in Java, as
"sdtaudiocontrol". It takes a good 30 seconds to load and run on my
500 MHz IIi. And then it's godawful slow to use, too. And I have to
keep a bleeding JVM loaded for as long as I might want to adjust audio
settings, or else go for another quart of coffee while I wait for it to
load next time around. They rewrote it all in Java. Boneheads. Idiots.
Jesus Xrist, McNealy, have some courage to admit you were wrong.

I don't have time or talent to fix everything, but that had to be
remedied. So I wrote more software that you're welcome to hate, if
you also hate sdtaudiocontrol.

http://home.uchicago.edu/~dgc/sw/audioctl-0.1.tar.gz

It wasn't enough to keep me from slowly, ever so slowly, swallowing my
pride and switching to a Mac for my desktop needs, though. (And there's
a lot of pride to swallow, where Macs and I meet.) It's not the best
desktop I've ever had, but since Apple bought back the family, it's the
closest I'll ever get again.

Which leads to all the things I hate about MacOS, just for not being
OpenStep. I'll hold onto those for a while longer, but I think Java
might figure into them, too.

-- 
 -D.    dgc@xxxxxxxx.xxx
 University of Chicago > NSIT > VDN > ENSS > ENSA > You are here
 .  .  .  .  .  .  .
 always line up dots
There's stuff above here

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