KDE-Forum.org

Hmmm... the "steep learning curve"

That's not really a great way to compare things.

First of all, anyone new to any operating system (including windows) will be faced with a learning curve. And for most users, it's pretty steep as they will need to grasp whole new ideas that are not really common to them.

Second, people already familiar with any operating system will find it much more easy to switch to another operating system. It takes a while to get comfortable though.

Third, "steep" depends from person to person. Some people learn faster than others, so the "steep learning curve" is a very general comment.



As for the integration of KDE and Apache.
Why would this be a problem on Linux and not on Windows?

A person setting up a webserver and doesn't know how to use a command line should not even think about setting up a webserver. (Well, that's my opinion of course).
This does not mean that a GUI configuration tool is not nice to have of course.

This GUI config tool should be written by the people who wrote that software, or a 3rd party, not KDE. I don't think it's possible for the KDE developers to maintain a configuration panel for every software that's around.

What KDE can do is provide a nice API to write such a configuration window/program/applet/... in a very short time. And hope/ask those other projects to make use of it, or wait for a 3rd party to maintain such a thing.


In other words:
in my opinion, having a gui config for something doesn't mean it's integrated well or not. Integration, to me, means that different programs know how to communicate with eachother. And as far as I know, hundreds if not thousands of programs on linux know how to communicate with a webserver like Apache

ps: Isn't it possible to configure Apache via a webbrowser (webpage) somehow? I never used Appache, so I don't know.

Quoted

Originally posted by tbscope
As for the integration of KDE and Apache.
Why would this be a problem on Linux and not on Windows?

I agree.
Windows definitely doesn't have a GUI for every possible service it can run.

And the steep lurning curve wasn't related to the KDE desktop inthe lab's setup, but to the idea that using the commandline required more learning effort than using GUI tools.

Given the respective GUI tools it would be comparable.

I think if the only problems the lab setup had were configuring system level resources throught KDE GUIs, then this is a very positive review of KDE as it means that none or only few of the KDE related things were worth mentioning as differences.

Cheers,
_

Quoted

Originally posted by Burz
FWIW, the demonstration was a bit dishonest in that it ignored webmin and specific Linux distros which supply GUI-based config tools. But they did stress their belief that moving between distros is difficult (probably for this reason).

I think people in KDE and (*cough*) Gnome could put pressure on Apache and others to provide APIs to manage the configuration of these subsystems.

I think webmin is better than a configuration program in KDE. If you have a configuration module, users might think that X is needed to run an apache server, or users might install X because of the configuration module. AFAIK, for servers with only apache, it is better to not install an X server (X contains many lines of code => X contains (many) bugs => more chance to have a critical bug).

Webmin does work on a server with X (in - for example - Konqueror) and on a server without X (another computer in the network, or a text-based browser), so it leaves all options open.

Quoted

Originally posted by Burz
I think MS is showing that Apache cares flop-all for GUI users

Yes, very likely. Apache is a web server which usually doensn't run on machines GUI libraries installed, actually often they don't even have graphics cards.

But I guess any company doing Apache based products could offer administration GUIs, just like other service providers to for their services.
Very likely they already do.

Quoted

I think people in KDE and (*cough*) Gnome could put pressure on Apache and others to provide APIs to manage the configuration of these subsystems.

I don't think Apache could be pressured to do this by anyone, maybe persuaded by sheer user demand, but definitely not by unrelated projects.

And while an API would probably be nice, an application for a single service, i.e. a fixed number of configuration files/options could be written with just the knowledge about those files.

Anyway. My original point still stands that the lack of a Apache service GUI is not something that makes KDE look bad, as I doubt Windows has one even for IIS without installing it along IIS and that is a product of the same company.

Cheers,
_