Tue, 31 Mar 2009
Is Ekiga Doomed?
I am more-or-less happy user of ekiga. However, with the latest GNOME release (or two), I am not sure about its future. The new GNOME contains a new instant messaging and voice-over-IP application, Empathy.
I have not tested Empathy yet, but the list of supported protocols look impressive. I wonder how complete this support is, however (like GPG in Jabber/XMPP, SIP call redirection, SIP from behind of NAT using STUN or proxy, etc). I am trying hard not to be a skeptic, but maybe ekiga will join the following list of doomed applications:
- GDM 2.1x
- The rewrite of GDM in Fedora 8 (not sure about version numbers now) took away most of the options (such as the X server command line, automatic login for single-user systems, XDMCP(!)), most of the features are not restored even now, year and half later.
- Sawmill/Sawfish
- It has been deprecated in favor of Metacity, which still cannot do such a simple thing like sending a window to the different workspace using
Ctrl+Alt+Rightand return back by releasing bothAltandRight, and pressing theLeftkey while still holding theCtrlkey. Metacity still requires theCtrlkey to be released first. - Galeon
- Has been deprecated in favor of Epiphany, which still plays catch up
with Galeon feature set (even with its
epiphany-extensionspackage, and despite of the fact the development of Galeon has been dormant for several years now).
I could probably name several other projects. May be this is a trend in GNOME: replace the existing full-featured apps with half-retarded new ones, just because you do not agree with architectural decisions of previous developers, or because (in the GDM case) you need one more feature (fast user switching) which is hard to do in the present code base. And then promise to implement all other features users are used to, and fail to fulfill the promise in several years. In the meantime, get your code merged to the GNOME code base, kicking the previous full-featured application out of it, making the life of its developers harder, and thus cause the development of it to slowly die off.
9 replies for this story:
Vasek Stodulka wrote:
I personally like switching from complicated apps to simple alternatives - maybe because I'm getting more dumb with my age. :-) I must agree that GDM is a mistake, but with other apps I don't have problem with. I'm sympatizing with you, but the development of the world goes on. Five years earlier every application doubled the amount of options with every major version, and if not, then everyone said: "They are in troubles, look at their new version - it has no new functions." Now I feel the situation has changed and people want simple apps, and there are two ways of doing this - first is symplifying the apps - but seriously - is there a developer able to cut some features? Nope. And the second is adoption of brand new simple app. Look at Firefox vs Chrome - five years later, noboby will know what Firefox was, maybe some of us will remember it as "the ughly BIG Netscape successor".
Dr wrote: scklss
"Code complexity is the mother of bloated, hard to use, and totally inconsistent software. With complex code, problems are solved in suboptimal ways, valuable resources are endlessly tied up, performance slows to a halt, and vulnerabilities become a commonplace. The only solution is to scrap the entire project and rewrite it from scratch." http://suckless.org/
Milan Zamazal wrote:
I can also observe that GNOME gets worse and worse. I reinstalled my system completely more than a month ago and I can see there is *no* package containing "gnome" in its name on my computer now. What could demonstrate better that GNOME is completely useless to me? This is not that GNOME applications get more simple, they get more stupid. As for VOIP clients, I use hw phones at home/office and I use Twinkle on my laptop (I switched from Ekiga long time ago). GDM got replaced by KDM, Sawfish by Ratpoison and then StumpWM (I've heard Xmonad may be a good alternative to those who prefer Haskell over Lisp), Galeon by Firefox and then Conkeror. Generally, I tend to switch to applications which are simpler in some sense while being more powerful than their alternatives.
thingie wrote:
I wonder how would you replace libvte (Gnome) based terminals like gnome-terminal. xterm is out of the question, urxvt can't handle agressive resizing that xmonad does (well, it can, but badly), konsole is just a crap (KDE 4 version), and what other options are there? While Gnome itself isn't very good DE, I find its applications like evince or gnome-terminal as the most stable and best options currently available, and it doesn't change.
Yenya wrote: Re: thingie
I absolutely agree. There is nothing which can at least remotely match libvte and evince (and possibly some other apps). GNOME is definitely the "lesser evil" :-)
Matěj wrote: Re: ekiga
I think part of the problem is ekiga 3.* which is really unfortunate piece of ... (don't want to use s-word). With ekiga 2.* I used to have at least some level of success, but what's in Fedora since F-10 (inclusive) in unbearable. Hopefully it will get better, but it is not there yet (by far). Oh well. So currently it is hardware SIP-client for me (which sucks, because I don't have headphones for that).
Pathconf wrote:
I'm using FVWM for long time, have several years old configuration which I'm dragging with me from computer to computer and I'm happy. If FVWM isn't in the repositories of the distribution, I just download it and compile it. I've made countless attempts to switch to something else, but always realize the said thing would need to emulate FVWM at least for my configuration and it simply doesn't have those features. I have always big part of GNOME installed as dependencies to those few programs I'm using, so it's just lying around on the disk doing nothing. It's just another battle between setting up the thing one wants and working with what has been set up for him/her.
Pathconf wrote:
I'm using FVWM for long time, have several years old configuration which I'm dragging with me from computer to computer and I'm happy. If FVWM isn't in the repositories of the distribution, I just download it and compile it. I've made countless attempts to switch to something else, but always realize the said thing would need to emulate FVWM at least for my configuration and it simply doesn't have those features. I have always big part of GNOME installed as dependencies to those few programs I'm using, so it's just lying around on the disk doing nothing. It's just another battle between setting up the thing one wants and working with what has been set up for him/her.
Pathconf wrote:
I'm using FVWM for long time, have several years old configuration which I'm dragging with me from computer to computer and I'm happy. If FVWM isn't in the repositories of the distribution, I just download it and compile it. I've made countless attempts to switch to something else, but always realize the said thing would need to emulate FVWM at least for my configuration and it simply doesn't have those features. I have always big part of GNOME installed as dependencies to those few programs I'm using, so it's just lying around on the disk doing nothing. It's just another battle between setting up the thing one wants and working with what has been set up for him/her.