Matthew Garrett

Sometimes I enjoy your posts, but this one was stupid (really, like: not intelligent). It's one thing to argue about LightDM vs GDM vs KDM but it's another to make stupid claims:

'To a first approximation, when someone says "Lightweight" what they mean is "I don't understand the problems that the alternative solves".'

I've seen people change from a simple ascii based table to an xml based table format and then wonder why the filesize jumped up and free bandwidth dopped down. What does that have to do with your post? Well, sometimes "bloat" means simply that: more features than I need, and takeing more resources than I want.

All you write about "bloat" beeing just features that the others will implement as well
is only true under the assumption that it is not "bloat" but features. But all you write in your post about these features are unbacked claims. The only topic you go into detail is power management, and let me tell you (as most other commenters have): you are wrong here. Consistency is not possible. Never.

From your comments it seems that you think "consistent" means that is is configurable through gsettings. Everything else you claimed that could be "consistent" is simply not possible. Not with many users having possibly many different policies.

And if you come up again with this "Lightdm requires you to have different policies. How is that anything other than technically inferior?" Let me tell you that ascii table parsers don't have XPAth implementations. Just sayin.

I'm not claiming that GDM is bloated or LightDM will not be bloated in the future, all I'm saying is that your post is stupid. Maybe not as stupid as some other recent posts of people bashing Ubuntu, making lists of software features like "developers use bzr: bad, developers use git: great", but it's close.

Still: I'm looking forward to read an intelligent post of you, maybe about *technical* problems of [x]DM, at least if you take the time to come up with good arguments. Because writing such a blog post without good arguments is a ridiculous idea.