I do use linux professionally - not in spreadsheet and regular office stuff but neither on the server side. Keep an open mind, it's the least you can do when you are getting free stuff made by people who work on it as a hobby. >Personally, I'll stick to wm2 or FVWM with some of my personal customizations. >That, coupled wtih the fact that public open source development tends to move much more slowly than private development could very likely kill GNOME's chances as a desktop environment contender.Īctually, I think Opensource progresses extremely quickly, compare the main desktop environments to what they were a couple of years ago. how long will it take to port abiword to bonobo? A long time, if the developers even bother. I know that bonobo is in GNOME 1.4, but it's not everywhere e.g. Sure, it may be easy in python, but most GNOME code is in C. Bonobo is a fine example of how to make something very complicated. Finally, it's not only difficult to port your original program to GNOME 2, to take advantage of the new technologies you have to spend even more time doing nothing but figuring out. If they find any bad API's, they will have no chance to change it. Then some people will wait until GNOME 2 is out before doing their porting. It's going to be difficult for many programs to be ported to GNOME 2, many people will just not bother.
