11 Hour Installs on KDE?

[Chuck Swiger]

Joe Pokupec wrote:
> I installed 5.1 on 2 separate machines yesterday. After the general install
> (which included all the Ports), I went to /usr/ports/x11/kde3 and did a:
> 
> make install clean after reading tfm.
> 
> The install has been going for over 11 hours now. It's not hung up, the text
> is scrolling by... On both machines...
> 
> Is there something I should know?

X is huge and bloated.  CDE was a graphic user environment designed by a 
committee of Unix vendors: Sun had NeWS, OpenWindows, Motif/MWM and CDE choose 
the latter rather than either of the former, HP had HP/UX and that wretched 
bottom center console thing [a poor clone of the CMU 'wmc' console under 
Andrew], who else?  AIX & 'smit'?  Anyway, since then, CDE has pursued the goal 
of emulating aspects of the M$ Windows GUI.

KDE is the open source project attempting provide a familiar end-user desktop. 
Which is a much kinder way of saying they're inheriting much of the mess found 
by emulating the X/Open Group/SCO/whomever-owed CDE emulating Win 98.  Did I 
mention Qt yet?

Anyway, KDE and all of the dependencies can take a really long time to build.

[ I will not rant about X's lack of a unified imaging model and the screen vs. 
printing issue.  Or about font mechanisms, or alpha blending.  The KDE Project 
does a good job considering what it is they are working with.  Apropos: in the 
movie, "The Highlander", the apology made in Connor MacLeod's "famous duel on 
Boston Common"...? :-) ]

-- 
-Chuck