Quotes of the week

Posted May 23, 2011 17:15 UTC (Mon) by i3839 (guest, #31386)
In reply to: Quotes of the week by mjg59
Parent article: Quotes of the week

You did it by discrediting "lightweight" alternatives in general, which I disagreed with. Even though it is too often true that people starting leightweight versions of something don't fully understand the problem, usually they actually do understand the case better than the original bloatware authors. And case a) happens more often than you think, because writing software is all about managing complexity and many people are bad at that.

As for this particular LightDM situation, I'd argue that depending on the DM doing anything at all other than logging in and starting something else is bad design.

If Gnome wants a session, it should start one itself. It's not up to something not Gnome to do it for Gnome.

> one of the reasons gdm starts a local gnome session is that it wants
> gnome-power-manager to be there to handle power policy.

This is a really good example of really bad design. Basically it means that gdb is not really a DM, but part of Gnome. Fine, you're running Gnome, but don't pretend you're not. So starting Gdm only makes sense if you want to run Gnome. It doesn't make any sense when starting something else. So it's not a display manager, it turned into a Gnome manager.

Why this madness?

> Closing the lid of my laptop should suspend the system regardless of
> whether it's logged in or not.

Ah, is this it? But closing the lid of my laptop should suspend the system regardless of whether it's running a DM or not either, so you're just moving the problem. If you want to run gnome-power-manager you should start it at system boot. Starting it with gdm is just pushing it onto people who didn't ask for it, just like starting dbus and gconfd automatically is just annoying and bad behaviour.

> And now how about accessibility preferences?

It is not the DM's task to handle any preferences! What if the DM is used to start an IDE/WM it doesn't know about? Again, this should be handled at a lower level, not in the DM. The DM might not be started at all. If there is an agreed on standard way of setting them, the DM can of course provide an interface to set them, but it is feature creep.

What happened to the good old UNIX philosophy of running independent programs who have one clear purpose? It seems it died in the kitchen sink approach of "solving" all problems.

But you're right that choosing something because it's more lightweight is a bad reason on its own, the main incentive should be that the other one is crap.

Ubuntu is so not lightweight on its own, that them bothering about the DM is kinda funny.

Quotes of the week

Posted May 23, 2011 17:28 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (4 responses)

"I'd argue that depending on the DM doing anything at all other than logging in and starting something else is bad design."

Yet people expect their computers to do more than that. They expect to be able to adjust the brightness at the login screen. They expect the machine to go to sleep if the lid is closed at the login screen. They expect to be able to use a screen reader. They expect their colour profile to be correct. They don't expect there to be a set of gratuitous differences between the running OS and the login environment.

You can argue that all of these things should be handled at a lower level, but that lower level doesn't exist. The abstraction of mechanism and policy at pretty much every layer of the OS means that the only stage where you have an overview of the current system state is in a graphical session.

The only real case where a lightweight solution is preferable to a heavyweight one is when the heavyweight one provides functionality that's completely unnecessary in the relevant use case. That's not the situation here. GDM provides a significant range of functionality that's relevant and appropriate to the task of getting users logged into Gnome. LightDM doesn't, and nor does it provide any approach for solving these problems elsewhere.

Quotes of the week

Posted May 24, 2011 16:08 UTC (Tue) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (2 responses)

>The only real case where a lightweight solution is preferable to a heavyweight one is when the heavyweight one provides functionality that's completely unnecessary in the relevant use case.

All of the features you have described are of exactly zero value to me, so you appear to be making a strong case for the use of LightDM. At the same time, you seem to be arguing that there's no reason for LightDM to exist - that doesn't make a great deal of sense.

Quotes of the week

Posted May 24, 2011 16:33 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

I've never argued that LightDM shouldn't exist. I've argued that it being lightweight isn't a reason for Ubuntu to adopt it instead of gdm, since Ubuntu has users who do value those features.

Quotes of the week

Posted May 24, 2011 16:52 UTC (Tue) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

>I've never argued that LightDM shouldn't exist. I've argued that it being lightweight isn't a reason for Ubuntu to adopt it instead of gdm, since Ubuntu has users who do value those features.

Okay, that wasn't very clear since only the opening paragraph of your post mentions Ubuntu and the rest of it reads like a list of why you think LightDM is bad, per se.

Quotes of the week

Posted May 24, 2011 19:59 UTC (Tue) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]

A lot of the code which is in Gnome now probably ought to be moved outside of Gnome. For example, I use Xfce. As a result, I can't use NetworkManager. (Yes, there are a hacks to make this possible, but not good ones.) But what does networking have to do with drawing pretty windows on the screen? Nothing.

It's not really about being heavyweight or lightweight, but just about structuring the code properly. It's also about structuring the social responsibilities properly. The same people who are good at designing user interfaces may not be so good at figuring out color profiles or managing ACPI events. Why should these things be combined?