Re: How to install XFCE on CentOS 8?

[Stephen John Smoogen <smooge@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 25 Feb 2021 at 09:13, J Martin Rushton via CentOS <centos@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

>
>
> On 25/02/2021 13:37, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
>
> I was recently looking at Raymond's book "The Art of UNIX Programming"
> from 2003.  He, along with contributors Thompson (inventor of UNIX),
> Kernigham (C and AWK), Korn and others of that callibre, espouse
> creating "little tools" that do one job reliably and well.  The likes of
> Gnome or systemd certainly would never fit into this philosophy.  I
> really think we have lost a lot of maintainability and ease of
> management over the last 20 years as applications are stretched to do
> ever more.
>

Maybe but everytime someone says "I think these are too complex" they then
turn around and say "but I really need this to do this one more thing."
Also the complexity of tools is generational. The oldschool 1970's Unix
people were screaming that the 1980's software was too complex because
various flags had been added to central commands. The 1980's people
complained that even early Linux was too complex because it had so much
more software that depended on each other. And so forth.

In the X11 world, there were as many people saying FVWM was way too complex
when twm was all you needed and it was making software too hard to build.
BUT could you get twm to work on our new monitor which has a different view
screen feature that made the fonts look like crap.

The counter argument I heard from a 1970's Unix era person was "Software
gets more complicated over time as we find that more problems need to be
solved. You either keep up with it, or get out of software." He was working
in software until his death a short while ago in his 80's.


> --
> J Martin Rushton MBCS
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-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
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