The general direction of the Linux desktop

[bmarkus]

Regarding Xfce direction, Jannis Pohlmann, a core Xfce developer wrote just recently on the Xfce mailing list:


"Is being a lightweight desktop environment still a goal?

Yes, I'd say so. Perhaps not ultra-lightweight but in the foreseeable future the thing we call Xfce will remain a small number of components with a realistic set of dependencies and I don't think there's any reason to be concerned about bloat in Xfce.

Actually, I'd go as far as to say that 4.6 didn't introduce any additional bloat compared to 4.4 except maybe for GStreamer. In 4.8, the mixer is no longer a core component (which makes sense in the light of pulseaudio being adopted by distributions). 4.8 will have a new dependency on GIO (ThunarVFS will be dropped for that). GVfs (which has a few GNOME dependencies) will be completely optional. Besides that, our increasing use of D-Bus could be seen as a "slow-downer" of Xfce but it also ensures loose coupling, flexibility and a nice overall architecture.

I'm sure that there's a lot of room for speed and memory optimizations without the need to sacrifice the maintainability of our codebase. But people have to accept that we're just a small team consisting of half a dozen core developers working on Xfce in their free time. For this situation to improve there would have to be more participants in the development and/or systematic funding.

And hey, we're using git now, so please start cloning our repositories and work on fixes and play with new ideas!"

[curaga]

Also, the quality was much better than a downloaded version. 

Now, that's the placebo in effect How can the same file be better streamed?

Or, maybe youtube showed the high-quality version, but you downloaded the low-quality one?

[jpeters]

Also, the quality was much better than a downloaded version.  

Now, that's the placebo in effect How can the same file be better streamed?

Or, maybe youtube showed the high-quality version, but you downloaded the low-quality one?

One is using flashplayer, the other xine. I did better with youtube-dl. The high-quality  download from keepvid.com had audio problems. Although it might be nice to save youtube videos, flashplayer saves to cache while it's playing, so there's no wait. Looking at videos is now a basic browser function that's well beyond looking at youtube videos.  ( my short youtube download was 5M ) 

[^thehatsrule^]

I've found downloading the .flv/other(?) can be sufficient at times (sometimes better too, for video accel with some other player).  Assuming the download is done in order, typically players can also start playing it.  If one prefers a player embedded in the browser, I think there's alternatives such as mplayerplug-in.

Does (another) flash thread need to be started..?