Re: [Hampshire] mmv & wildcard expansion in bash

john lewis wrote:
> This is my real beef about kde or gnome - it is impossible to
> install selected apps without getting all the 'dross' or at least not
> when using aptitude to install the debian packages if they are
> truly dependant on one another.

Every X app needs a toolkit layer and KDE or Gnome are vastly better than the
alternatives. You can't have anything significantly smaller without a severe
reduction in functionality over KDE and Gnome[1]. Perhaps a lot of that
functionality is transparent to the user, but don't be hasty to dismiss the
massive amount of behind the scenes wiring required to make GUI applications at
contemporary standards.

Besides, the code set of packages required to run apps in one toolkit or the
other is really quite small. KDE apps, for example, only really require kdelibs
and qt. The other packages give you the "desktop". Some apps may depend on bits
of that desktop environment; many do not.

In future, thanks to the work of freedesktop.org, it seems likely that KDE and
Gnome will share more libraries and services, which will help interoperability
as well as memory use and disk size. As that happens, services which you may
think of as dross will become cheaper and more fundamental.

> Gimp is about the only app I have installed knowing it required
> gnome libs but there isn't much in the way of an alternative.

Krita is at a usable state and I would recommend it over the GIMP, because the
GIMP's UI is dreadful.

Dan

[1] Admittedly, some English-speakers may not care about i18n.