February 23, 2010

Monodevelop, following the river

Mono is a free implementation of .Net standard for Windows, GNU/Linux and some other platforms. Is compatible with .Net and has called my attention since its creation, I just needed the motivation of Miguel de Icaza to get into this.

As I'm not a .Net developer, I wanted to learn it using C#, that looks like Java, but I wanted to start with Mono because of the portability feature, applications can run in different environments, and that's a lot. Almost all distributions support or provide Mono packages, and it has beautiful IDE called MonoDevelop, that might not be as complete as Visual Studio, but I really like it.



I tried with desktop applications, that handle files and some XML processing and I have to say that is really interesting to see an application (binary) run in different environments without extra compilations.

After many years of work, Ximian team and the community have make it, it works, and it has a very promisory future, I can't wait to see what they will do next.

Links:

February 11, 2010

Slackware 13 and KDE

There have been many comments around the Slackware community about the decision replacing KDE 3 for the new KDE 4 desktop environment. In my point of view, those comments (some of them very offensive) are justified, KDE 4 seems to be in a beta state, is not as stable as KDE 3 was. The new look has removed many options from its predecessor, and has introduced a widget-based environment to the user experience:


That's not bad at all, I would say, innovation always have critics, and I think that KDE 4 is the way to go. But I'm not sure if putting it in the 'stable' release of Slackware is correct. Many Slackware users are upset because of this, but let me point why I still love Slackware:
  • Slackware is not only a desktop environment, is a system.
  • If you don't like KDE 4, you can use XFCE or install GNOME.
  • If you really like Slackware, is not because of his desktop, is because of his philosophy.
  • System configuration, services, kernel, etc. Are still the same as in previous releases, if you are a user, you have to know something about these issues.
The extremely useful KDE3:

But I have to be honest, I don't really think that KDE 4 is ready for a stable release in Slackware, Slackware is a great system, that's why I use it. It's very stable and simple, you don't have treat with non-standard configuration files or idiotic wizards.

I really love Slackware, but not all users do the same things with his system. I'm a developer, not a desktop user, but even in those cases Slackware rocks!.