"Desktops" breaking network transparency (was: Mapping kids' requirements to Linux)

From: Rick Moen (rick_at_linuxmafia.com)
Date: 06/29/05 

Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 15:16:59 -0400

In the earlier incarnation of this thread, on May 27, I responded to
felmon <noone@nowhere.edu>:

---<begin snip>---

> I'm wondering too about the complaint about KDE. I am very comfortable
> with it (though I still miss a thing or two I used to have under
> OS/2); what's an example of its being too Windows-like or losing
> functionality?

Looking from a Unix-centric perspective, one of the grievous flaws of
both the KDE and GNOME application suites is that they have frequently
broken "network transparency". I'll explain that term:

The X Window System ("X", "X11") is, as you probably know, a
fundamentally networked, client-server system (where the "server" is the
X engine, which serves up to "client" applications its ability to render
output on some user's output device such as a monitor/console). The X
server's output console is thus inherently capable of rendering client
applications running locally as well as those running on other hosts,
elsewhere.

X thus is supposed to _not_ assume that all windows are local. KDE and
GNOME apps and libraries have, at numerous points in their history, made
rather stupid assumptions to the contrary, causing functionality
breakage that's annoying to those of us who're used to properly written
window managers that get it right. (Sorry, I can't cite detailed
examples, mostly because I'm one of those fossils who think Window Maker
is about as complex a graphical environment as I ever want to see, and
that others tend to be too much in my face.)

---<end snip>---

David Golden of the Irish Linux Users' Group has managed to detail the
problem succinctly:

 From: David Golden <david.golden@unison.ie>
 To: ilug@linux.ie
 Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 19:51:31 +0100
 Subject: Re: [ILUG] braun's choice?

On Wednesday 29 June 2005 17:36, Braun Brelin wrote:

> I was rather amused actually. I was thinking of asking another
> question on the list about GNOME vs. KDE to see if I could spark
> another long flamewar.

Bah. Neither approach the professionalism of classic X desktops.

Okay, in most respects they do, but one thing really annoys me about
both KDE and GNOME, the way they still don't handle applications running
from different machines and home directories properly at all. They make
the assumption time and again that all the apps on the screen are
running on the one display with prefs in the one home directory. If I
wanted that, I could get a fucking Macincrap.

Older X applications used the xrdb so that UI configuration was a
property of the display. All your resource db supporting apps could look
just how you wanted them no matter which host they were running from.

Then 10000 Windows-developer-weenies apparently jumped ship to Linux,
bringing an incoherent mess of files stuck in the home directory and
slagged off xrdb while completely missing the point of it, so we have
things like the unadulterated horror of GConf. A few did eventually
grasp what xrdb brought, and I acknowledge that xrdb would need heavy
tweaking bordering on rearchitecting for "modern" preference datatypes,
but they really threw the baby out with the bathwater by forsaking its
core ideal of dynamic, server-brokered preferences.

P.S. See "man Xaw" for an interesting hack: you can now specify the
vector drawing commands used to draw a widget in the "displayList" xrdb
resource of an Athena widget...

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