Exactly...

Posted Apr 5, 2012 21:27 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

I'm running firefox right now with no "system tray" or "notification system".

Right. It's your choice. But that means that web sites can not use them, too. Amusingly, they can on Firefox on Android.

Sure, video and sound are nice, but even the six packages you listed are enough for many web browsers

Web browser without YouTube? Trashcan is over there.

office suites

Which can not use sound effect in presentations? Trashcan is over there.

email clients

Which can not notify you about new mail? Which can not open links in web browser? Is this a joke? Even GMail can do both (in Chrome, anyway).

IM programs

Without tray integration? Possible but ugly and inconvenient. More of the crap.

newsreaders

The same as with mail. Well, notifications are less important here. This one may actually be usable… if you'll forget that a lot of news today include video links. Out.

terminals

How will you terminal do the expected beep when BEL is received?

calculators

Well… that one is possible. I'm not all that sure why we'll want to have bazillion calculators.

You can write development tools, network utilities, databases, window managers and crypto utilities all without stepping outside the LSB requirements.

IOW: you can write some not desktop-related things. Yes. Probably. How is it related to desktop? On server RHEL rules, LSB is not needed there.

Just because you cannot write Linux applications, and assume that your target systems are all iPods, does not mean that LSB is useless.

It's useless on server (because it's not really needed there) and it's useless on desktop (it allows you to create program which can only excite someone who spent last dozen of years in coma), so what's the point? Where can you use it?