KDE 4: the ultimate business desktop? (Computerworld)

KDE 4: the ultimate business desktop? (Computerworld)

Posted Dec 19, 2006 12:02 UTC (Tue) by fergal (subscriber, #602)
In reply to: KDE 4: the ultimate business desktop? (Computerworld) by fergal
Parent article: KDE 4: the ultimate business desktop? (Computerworld)

Gah! Accidentally posted the comment above which got rewritten to:

You could equally say that managing files and directories is not the job of your desktop. They still need to be managed whichever desktop you are running, or even with none at all.

There are 3 interpretations I can think of for "manage" here. One is deciding the names and logical locations (what file in what dir). That's not done by the desktop, that's done by me. The other is managing how the files are stored on disk. Again, that's not done by the desktop (there is no Kext3 or Gext3 thank god). The final interpretation is managing communication between me and the filesytem but this is managing in a very loose sense. Basically giving me a nice interface into the system that does all the work.

That's exactly what the desktop should do, it should give me an interface into the system that does the work. It should not be doing the work itself.

And of course it's not the desktop environment's job to display available wireless networks;

Display and configure is fine (by configure I mean alter the stored configuration and possibly request it to be made current). Managing my network interfaces is not my desktop's job.

nor to provide a button to shut down or hibernate the computer.

KDE doesn't run my shutdown scripts, it shuts itself down and then tells init to shut down my computer. It's an interface to a more general system that is desktop-agnostic. Similarly for hibernation. There is no khibernate or ghibernate, nor should there be.

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