[GTALUG] Favorite desktop manager?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Evan Leibovitch via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| In FOSS, developers write stuff that scratches their own itches, which is
| why we have such a proliferation of window managers (and editors, and
| source control, and languages, etc.) Yet stuff that is end-user-centric
| that doesn't scratch any geek itches tends to go unserved or underserved in
| FOSS, while proprietary solutions prevail because they scratch developer
| itches with money. Just imagine if a small fraction of the talent used to
| re-invent all these window managers had put its attention to giving Linux a
| single fully-functional PDF editor.

You can't push a rope.

If you want to work on boring stuff, go ahead.

If you want someone else to work on boring stuff, you've got a few
tools.  Money is the obvious one in our society.  That's why most
Linux developers work as employees.

Could it be that the boring stuff of which you are thinking doesn't
actually matter?  Or is it a lack of imagination on the part of
existing funders?

Mapping seems like a lot of boring stuff.  Yet Open Streetmaps has
done a great job.  One element of motivation for that drudgery seems
like "gamification".

Ditto Wikipedia.

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One great thing about scratching itches is that the programmer has a
great insight into a user's needs.  And without a large userbase,
radical changes are a lot easier.

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Editing PDF seems like a repudiation of the purpose of PDF.

In the open-source world, one would edit whatever was upstream of the
PDF in question.

Annotation is probably already handled by FireFox and by evince.

I don't know what you actually want.  What aspects of a PDF document
do you wish to modify?  I imagine that a general editor, like one in a
word processor, is impossible due structure not being represented in PDF.