Why is there no Gnome 1 in ports?

K

kpedersen

Hello,

With the arrival of Gnome 3 not too far into the distance, I was wondering if the port of gnome 2 is also going to drift into oblivion like I assume Gnome 1 did.

Since the components of Gnome 1 no longer change, would it not seem like a good idea to keep this version available to users? How much maintainance would be involved? AFAIK Gnome 1 is much simpler than gnome2 and so shouldn't pose too much of a problem to keep compatible with FreeBSD releases / snapshots.

As an aside, does anyone have an idea of how long KDE 3 is going to remain in the ports collection?

I am trying to get some slightly less technical users to be comfortable using FreeBSD and it is going to be quite hard if everything keeps changing for them :/.
As far as they are concerned (and I concur), change is an unproductive inconvenience. I also strongly believe that if new computers didn't come with (and require) latest versions of Windows, most casual computer users would still be running Windows 95 lol.

Best Regards,

Karsten
 
The trouble with old software is that you can't just leave it alone. It has to be maintained so that it keeps working with the ever-changing libraries and systems it depends on. Few people want to do that work.

If you're looking for simplicity and the same old user interface, consider Windows-like window managers like x11-wm/icewm.
 
kpedersen said:
Hello,

With the arrival of Gnome 3 not too far into the distance, I was wondering if the port of gnome 2 is also going to drift into oblivion like I assume Gnome 1 did.

Since the components of Gnome 1 no longer change, would it not seem like a good idea to keep this version available to users? How much maintainance would be involved? AFAIK Gnome 1 is much simpler than gnome2 and so shouldn't pose too much of a problem to keep compatible with FreeBSD releases / snapshots.

As an aside, does anyone have an idea of how long KDE 3 is going to remain in the ports collection?

I am trying to get some slightly less technical users to be comfortable using FreeBSD and it is going to be quite hard if everything keeps changing for them :/.
As far as they are concerned (and I concur), change is an unproductive inconvenience. I also strongly believe that if new computers didn't come with (and require) latest versions of Windows, most casual computer users would still be running Windows 95 lol.

Best Regards,

Karsten
Click to expand...

Both Gnome2 and GTK2 will be maintained for at least few years, but as most projects migrate their code, support for them will be dropped eventually.
 
Gnome 1.x was removed in July 2003, Gnome2 was added in May 2002. As you can see there was some overlap where both were available.
 
kpedersen said:
As an aside, does anyone have an idea of how long KDE 3 is going to remain in the ports collection?
Click to expand...

kde 3 is starting to demonstrate its age. BROKEN tags has already started appearing, but thanks to an user and to a last effort in kde@ we're fixing a couple of them. but more will come, and kde@ won't be able to maintain it. so, unless someone comes out to fix problems, it will stay in ports until it builds
 
avilla@,

Ah ok. Thanks. I do imagine with the complexity of KDE it must be hard to maintain. Though I do find it a shame because KDE 3.5 is probably the last full desktop environment that FreeBSD may have that works on older machines (until the rise of OpenCDE of course :p).

When this does happen and KDE 3.5 (and gnome 2) is obliterated I am going to see if it is possible to have a separate /usr/local (/usr/oldlocal) which has everything required to run KDE 3.5 from an old port snapshot. (The fact that Xorg is a port and not in base could be a problem for this but we shall see). It should make for an interesting project.

Best Regards,
 
woomia said:
Gnome3...hurl.
Click to expand...

Thank you for your insightful addition to this thread.

After playing with Gnome3/Gnome Shell, I've realized the screenshots only scratch the surface, and I can see a lot of potential there -- especially compared with what Ubuntu is doing with Unity.

Thing is, these are all matters of opinion, and the beauty of Gnome3 is that you can keep it looking pretty close to Gnome2, but gain all the advantages of the notification and gtk3 changes. Lucky you.
 
outZider said:
Thank you for your insightful addition to this thread.
Click to expand...

Lol. We all understand the point woomia was trying to get across ;)

outZider said:
Thing is, these are all matters of opinion
Click to expand...
Opinions are fine, but my issue is that soon (in about 1 year?) gnome will not be available to many users because it simply wont run unless we buy and run a "gamers machine". For example, KDE4 will barely run on a thinkpad which IMO is the industry standard machine.

outZider said:
the beauty of Gnome3 is that you can keep it looking pretty close to Gnome2, but gain all the advantages of the notification and gtk3 changes. Lucky you.
Click to expand...

Great so now I can have a really slow Gnome 2 :p
And there wont be any advantages.. because it wont run!

I am not against Gnome 3... but I have an issue with losing access to a usable Desktop Environment for "normal" computers.
 
kpedersen said:
Opinions are fine, but my issue is that soon (in about 1 year?) gnome will not be available to many users because it simply wont run unless we buy and run a "gamers machine". For example, KDE4 will barely run on a thinkpad which IMO is the industry standard machine.
Click to expand...

Absolute, complete, and utter bollocks!

KDE4 runs perfectly fine on:
  • a 5+-year-old laptop (single-core 2.8 GHz P4 Celeron with 512 MB RAM and Ati RADEON 7000 graphics)
  • a 3-ish year-old no-name desktop (single-core w/HT 3.0 GHz P4 with 2 GB RAM and onboard Intel graphics)
  • a 2-ish year-old Asus eeePC 1005HA palmtop (single-core w/HT 1.6 GHz Atom with 1 GB RAM and onboard Intel graphics)
  • a 1-year-old no-name desktop (single-core 2.6 GHz AMD Sempron with 2 GB RAM and nVidia 6100 onboard graphics)

The newer desktop is my work desktop, running Kubuntu 10.10 with KDE 4.6. I spend 7 hours a day in front of this thing.

The older desktop is our server at home, and also my desktop, running FreeBSD with ZFS and KDE 4.5.

The laptop is my media machine, using an NFSv4 mount to the ZFS box to access media files, running Ubuntu 9.something with KDE 4.4. We watch full-screen Xvid files on there everyday, with the odd bit of youtube watching, and MP3 listening via Clementine.

The palmtop is my work and school portable machine, running Arch Linux with KDE 4.6, and is used for everything from writing papers, to testing wireless networks, to playing Flash-based games, to surfing the web, to watching movies/shows on road trips, to pretty much everything you can think of.

The desktops use the normal plasma shell with various desktop effects enabled, the portables use the plasma-netbook shell with desktop effects disabled.

Anyone who says you need a skookum multi-core system with gobs of RAM and speedy SSD disks and whatever else to run KDE4 is just flat out lying through their teeth. Doesn't matter which OS, CPU, or graphics card is powering it.

All it takes is 30 minutes of configuring the software to match the hardware capabilities, same as with any OS or desktop environment, be it GNOME, KDE, Windows, MacOS X, etc.

I am not against Gnome 3... but I have an issue with losing access to a usable Desktop Environment for "normal" computers.
Click to expand...

Unless you consider "normal" to be a P2 system, all the DEs are perfectly usable. Even GNOME3 and KDE4.
 
There is no way that KDE4 will ever run fine on a typical 5 year old laptop lol. Most KDE4 linux distros suggest 1GB+ ram simply because 512 is not enough for the massive KDE4.

Even on a year old thinkpad (core 1 duo) it is sluggish and awkward.

Gnome 2 takes around 15 seconds to log in completely which is simply not acceptable.

Plus when KDE5 comes out, and KDE4 is unsupported and removed from the ports collection... Will you then say that KDE5 works perfectly on your (now 7 years old) laptop?

Hopefully it will run well because KDE5 will be the only choice you have for a full desktop environment. That or Gnome 4 which will also be bloated as hell :p

I just don't feel that unix/linux is preparing itself for being used on older hardware whilst still maintaining a usable desktop environment. Purely because the software grows so fast and no-one has time to maintain the old stuff (which is understandable)

Also, why not consider a P2 to be a normal system? FreeBSD runs well on it. Xorg runs well on it. Windows XP runs well on it and KDE 3.5 runs well on it.

Actually, I just bought a thinkpad 765d (166MHZ). I rekon it should just about work with Gnome 1. Which unfortunately is not in ports :/
 
No problem running KDE 4.6 on an kinda old Athlon XP 2500+ with 512 MB RAM. Except of course I follow the pre-set options (like let Nepomuk index files in background) and let it animate each single "This is a button" balloon additionally using plenty of background services to auto-find the network printer on a static IP.

And - if you're not happy with it - use something else, you've the choice :)
 
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