Re: [Fwd: Re: SEUL: Re: What's the diff to SEUL ?]

[Erik Walthinsen <omega@omegacs.net>]

> yes, same thing for Gnome & all other desktop managers...

How do you support this claim?

GNOME, to the best of my knowledge, is a collection of the following:

1) libGDK layer, sits on top of Xlib
2) libGTK toolkit, sits on top of GDK and does widgets and soon CORBA
3) a bunch of applications that sit on top of GTK

KDE appears, on the other hand, to do the following (roughly):

1) libkde (?) sits on top of Xlib
2) KFM *process* sits on top of libkde and provides services
3) applications cooperate between KFM and libkde

As has been pointed out on this list and others, KFM is the SPF (single point 
of failure).  Being a process with a single set of resources, which is used in 
some kind of catastrophically blocking mode by *all* KDE-compliant
applications, if it fails, *ALL* of KDE dies with it.

GNOME, on the other hand, provides *libraries*, which have their own data
space for every application, may even be threaded (I dunno), and maintains 
independent, non-blocking, semi-stateless connections to the X server and 
anything else it communicates with.  With the addition of CORBA, this will be 
even more the case.

It seems to me, just from listening to the random salient technical bits that 
have been spotted in this debate, that KDE's architecture is almost the same 
as Windoze.  Windoze has a few basic pieces (most notably the "kernel"), 
which are implemented as processes (or the doze analog).  Any single process
that must provide services to a number of clients, each of which can 
theoretically wedge and possibly cascade the failure to the single process, 
is inherently unstable.

If someone is willing to write up a detailed technical report on the
differences between KDE and GNOME, I'll put it up on our site.

     Erik Walthinsen <omega@seul.org> - SEUL Project system architect
        __
       /  \                SEUL: Simple End-User Linux -
      |    | M E G A            Creating a Linux distribution
      _\  /_                         for the home or office user