YDL Future

[Ted Goranson]

Let me preface this by saying that I am personally interested in the 
future of PPC CBE; I will be buying a PS3 just to experiment with the 
YDL-supported development stuff. And my company will almost certainly 
enter into a strategic partnership with some CBE partner, possibly 
TerraSoft.

That said, I have to give up on the YDL 5 for Apple. The PPC machine 
I run Linux on is a trusty Pismo. It isn't my main machine, but the 
one I feel most comfortable with when creative. I had YDL 4 on it and 
was quite happy except for the fact that TerraSoft sort of abandoned 
ship on the RPMs. YDL 4 had no sound support on that machine, but it 
didn't matter to me at all. Everything else just worked.

What I expected with v5 was much the same experience, plus perhaps a 
few extra refinements. I also expected KDE to be available as an 
option, though I was willing to give E17 a try. And if all went well, 
I was prepared to buy a YDL.net account to have access to the 
expected RPMs for both the Pismo personally and the company PS3.

But I will be erasing v5 from my disk, going back to v4 and getting 
someone here to build the PPC RPMs I need.

Why?

- v5 doesn't support sleep. If you close the Pismo, the machine locks 
in a way that while it doesn't ever wake, it uses battery. v4 just 
worked. This alone makes v5 unusable for me.

- the installer is a mess. You have no options whatever. You simply 
install what TerraSoft thinks you should have and use the add/remove 
facility afterward to adjust. The only problem is that "remove" of 
even the most trivial thing is likely to remove something else 
important, forcing you to, well, start the entire process over.

- the Emacs (which you have to add) has almost none of the packages 
from that ecosphere.

- KDE is an option. But don't be fooled. Its not the full KDE, what 
KDE considers its core suite. This is Koffice (word processor, 
spreadsheet, presenter, database, and slew of other stuff) and 
Kontact (mail, calendar, contacts, notes, news, sync). It looks like 
most but not all of Kontact is included, but NONE of Koffice.

I should note here that if you use KDE at all, the reason probably is 
because the apps integrate so wonderfully with each other, Konqueror 
(the unique file manager/web browser combination) and the development 
suite. Also, if you are a Mac user, KDE allows you to place the 
menubar at the top where it belongs and also to rearrange the window 
widgets to be where Mac users expect them to be.

So having KDE without the core apps plus Konquerer, well, it just 
ain't KDE. Not even close. YDL 5 has neither Konqueror nor any piece 
of Koffice. Someone might miss the point here and respond that I just 
use the Microsoft Office clone, OpenOffice.

No thanks. Not only does Kword integrate better, it is the ONLY 
framebased text editor in the open source world. Its a big 
difference, just by itself. But look how each frame can be a 
component from another KDE app. I would even have used it under E17, 
but that's not possible. No Scribus either, so no high end page 
layout.

So here's what I propose to do personally. I'll probably do the whole 
bit with TerraSoft on the CBE. But for my loved Pismo, I'll go back 
to v4 and pay someone to teach me Konstruct, or go with custom 
building every week or so.

-Ted



-- 
__________
Ted Goranson
Sirius-Beta