Gnome Development Roadmap

dfallon writes, "A GNOME development roadmap is available over on developer.gnome.org. Highlights include: a 1.2 release targeted for April, followed by another 1.X release in late summer (1.4?), which will include Nautilus, the desktop shell being worked on by Eazel, which will lead into a 2.0 release sometime in the fall. " This is, of course, subject to the mad revisions of Nat and Miguel - but it's cool to see what the future /might/ hold.

Comments

Fall = Autumn = Spring

[cehf2]

Surly it is about time that developers start using months for release dates. There is approximately 1 country in the world that uses Fall, most other Englsh speaking countries use Autumn.

And also for those people not in the northern hemisphere, they are in autumn now (or very soon), so the release date is a bit meaningless.

And of course those people in the tropics don't actually have 4 seasons, only 2, wet and dry.

Just a though, why not start using Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4?

Re:Fall = Autumn = Spring

[wfberg]

Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4 only make sense if you know what gnome.org's financial year is ;-)
--

Re:Fall = Autumn = Spring

[slashdot-terminal]

Surly it is about time that developers start using months for release dates. There is approximately 1 country in the world that uses Fall, most other Englsh speaking countries use Autumn.



What's wrong with fall? I use fall and have from the day I was born. I was born in the fall. Also it's very intuitive with things like Autumn is when the leaves "fall" and such.

And also for those people not in the northern hemisphere, they are in autumn now (or very soon), so the release date is a bit meaningless.



If it really matters that much I guess you can just calculate it. I have had to work with various monitary systems for doing conversion to my unit of currency does that make it wrong to have things like this. I think that if you have regional pages (kind of like debian has for languages and the like) that the maintainers of the pages should convert the times to the local time that the viewers of the page will be in: just a thought.

And of course those people in the tropics don't actually have 4 seasons, only 2, wet and dry.



Although you may have a rainy and dry seasons where you live that dosn't invalidate the concept of partitioning the year into 4 equal pieces in some way. I think there is (if you look at it) a slight difference between say spring rain and summer rain.
Just a though, why not start using Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4?


Well pardon me but I guess I don't do much in the financial sector or business but when do the various quarters occur?

Re:Fall = Autumn = Spring

[cehf2]

if they were to say Q3 2000, that should abviously mean July - September.

Re:Fall = Autumn = Spring

[cyber-vandal]

But there is only one country in the world that matters. Or at least that's the impression I get. They are the only superpower now you know. And their next president could be the guy that invented the internet.

Re:Fall = Autumn = Spring

[slashdot-terminal]

But there is only one country in the world that matters. Or at least that's the impression I get. They are the only superpower now you know. And their next president could be the guy that invented the internet.



The page is made in english by a webmaster who is most likely in the US. I have dates on pages I create does that make it my priority to use for example UTC or Z on all of my official dates? Maybe because of the metric system's use (or abuse) I should be using the number of seconds from 1970 (ephoc) or perhaps the number of seconds from 0 BCE.

Re:Fall = Autumn = Spring

[cyber-vandal]

You sick, sick man.........

Re:Fall = Autumn = Spring

[cyber-vandal]

Most of the USA by the looks of things.

Re:Fall = Autumn = Spring

[whoop]

Or, if you're in South Park, Colorado (US, of course) there are two seasons, Winter and July...

Hey! I'm havin a god damned honerable distinction over here.

Re:Fall = Autumn = Spring

[ksheff]

One of my favorite channels on Dish Network is the BBC. I love it. Much better than the us networks

Re:Fall = Autumn = Spring

[adraken]

Reasons: Using seasons instead of months increases the grace period for releases and thus relieves any user-inflicted pressure upon the development team to shoot for a specific month. (you get a 3 month period to shoot for instead of 1). Using seasons instead of Q1 2000, Q2 2000, etc. makes you/the project look like less of a suit-ish person/project. People can perceive things off of the tiniest off hand remark or quirk like using business-like quarters instead of seasons or something. Plus, remember October GNOME? Yes, they did use a month to denote a release date in that case.

Re:Fall = Autumn = Spring

[Anonymous Coward]

Well pardon me but I guess I don't do much in the financial sector or business but when do the various quarters occur?

Not sure what doing much in finance has to do with anything, but just to help you out..

Right, we normally divide the year into 12 months, these are January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December. The number of days in each varies a little from month to month which may make things a little complicated for you, I'm really sorry about that, just check a calendar if you're unsure. Okay, so as there are 12 months in a year and we want to get quarters (danger, math approaching) we divide them up into 4 groups each of 3 months. The first quarter (pay attention here, this is the bit you wanted to get to) runs from January to March, the second quarter runs from April to June, the third quarter runs from July to September and the fourth quarter runs from October to December.

Now, what may be confusing you is that if someone is talking about a project running from or reporting to certain dates, or a company with a certain year end, or for example a rent agreement with quarters running to particular dates then they're likely to refer to quarters in terms of those dates (I know this is SO confusing) so if your rent is paid quarterly and your first payment date is in September, they may call that the first quarter's rent even though it isn't the January to March bit! When talked about in isolation though, e.g. a press release saying "we plan to ship this product in first quarter 2001" go with the January-March, April-June, July-September, October-December thing.

You may want to print this out for future reference, I tried to avoid long words but a few may have crept in :(

HTH

Gnome and the future of the desktop

[slashdot-terminal]

Gnome is quite nice however seems rather bloated in an almost nightmarishly windowsish way. I wonder if there can be install profiles for the various desktops based on what you want or on more terms of fuzzy logic and such with things like small, modest, large, gargantuine, bloated, and then finally windows? Also seems like the apps are sometimes not playing nicely together still and that kind of scares me.

Mozilla + Gnome = rockin' desktop

[daemonc]

What I'm looking forward to is seeing how Mozilla will be intergrated into Gnome. I think that eventually the layout engine from Mozilla will be used as a component for Gnome, through Bonobo or some such thing, making possible viewing HTML or XML content in the new file manager, help browser, or any other Gnome application where it would be usefull.

Re:Mozilla + Gnome = rockin' desktop

[slashdot-terminal]

What I'm looking forward to is seeing how Mozilla will be intergrated into Gnome. I think that eventually the layout engine from Mozilla will be used as a component for Gnome, through Bonobo or some such thing, making possible viewing HTML or XML content in the new file manager, help browser, or any other Gnome application where it would be usefull.



Could someone point me out to a professional web site that uses XML in it's layout or rendering with say IE 5 (browser I just happen to be using)? I would like to see it at it's best.

Re:Mozilla + Gnome = rockin' desktop

[bigdogs]

What I'm looking forward to is seeing how Mozilla will be intergrated into Gnome.

You mean how IE was "integrated" into Lose98? No thanks.

Re:Mozilla + Gnome = rockin' desktop

[daemonc]

Well I think the big difference would be that it would be a component, not running all the time and doing stupid things like IE does in windoze. Rather than using the web browser to do things that don't require a web browser, it could be used when it was needed, and wouldn't be adding unwanted bloat. Micro$oft may have had some good ideas about some things, they just didn't care to implement them right.

Yankees make love, Brits make war?

[mangu]

Makes sense, doesn't it? "Fucking" is the result of love, "bloody" is the result of war.

Re:Yankees make love, Brits make war?

[cyber-vandal]

I thought Britain was on the winning side. Unlike the US in Vietnam, who were up against a small Asian country, not an extremely large military machine with most of the resources of mainland Europe available. Without America, I doubt that the UK would have won, but to suggest we did nothing the whole time while the Americans did all the work, is quite simply stupid. Even Hitler wanted a truce at first, rather than take us on. Now can we stop this stupid bickering and get back to the topic (yes I know a Brit started it all - thanks mate).

Re:Yankees make love, Brits make war?

[Darchmare]

Hmm, then again, we could bring up a war between England and a certain small group of ragtag guerillas occupying a few colonies on the eastern mainland of the US, circa 1776 or so. :>

- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)

Re:Yankees make love, Brits make war?

[cyber-vandal]

Vietnam, or have you forgotten. Hitler signed a treaty, because he didn't want to go up against the whole British Empire. It was Britain who declared war on Germany due to the invasion of Poland, that Hitler had promised not to do. I don't see what the USSR or China have to do with anything, as far as I know you haven't fought a war with either of them.

Re:Yankees make love, Brits make war?

[cyber-vandal]

Fair point, I'm just annoyed by clueless statements like Britain did badly in WWII, when they were the only country in Europe to successfully hold off the Germans.

Re:Yankees make love, Brits make war?

[ksheff]

Don't forget about the Korean War. In Vietnam, the N. Vietnamese were certainly being supplied by China and the USSR. In Korea, China was fighting with the North Koreas against the US and its allies.

Hitler signed a treaty to get Britain off his back. His main goal was to grab Central & Eastern Europe and the USSR. Don't forget, the Nazis were extremely anti-Communist and Russia suffered the most casualties of any nation involved in WWII. The Russian body count makes the Jewish Holocost look like a picnic. This was a factor for them to create the eastern bloc as a buffer between it and the West.

Also, just because Britain was an island, didn't mean that their land forces weren't involved. Does North Africa and Indonesia ring a bell to anyone? The Brits were fighting Germany, Italy, and Japan in those areas in addition to naval warfare in the Atlantic & Pacific and air combat over Britain itself.

Other than Singapore, I would say they did very well. The RAF defense of Britain and the British crypto work kept them alive. Georing's and Hitler's screw ups didn't hurt either (the Luftwaffe chief didn't think radar was important and his switch from attacking RAF bases to bombing London at night actually helped the RAF and solidified morale. Hitler's insistence of making the Me-262 a fighter bomber delayed its entry into service by about a year. Having a jet fighter would have certainly helped them in defending against the Allied bomber raids.).

Re:Yankees make love, Brits make war?

[whoop]

USSR or China [...], as far as I know you haven't fought a war with either of them

Except for the fifty years of cold war, including the space race. In the end, USSR was done in by a movie actor and a pope, go figure.

Re:Yankees make love, Brits make war?

[ksheff]

Fair point, I'm just annoyed by clueless statements like Britain did badly in WWII, when they were the only country in Europe to successfully hold off the Germans.

You forget that a huge portion of Germany's resources were going into its war with Russia during most of the war. Russia suffered more casaulties than any other nation in WWII. Germany was too busy fighting the Communists to commit to an invasion of Great Britain.

Re:Yankees make love, Brits make war?

[ksheff]

n fact, they were beaten --the RAF was an inch from total collapse-- but they managed to keep the enemy from discovering it. In the end the bad guys got several times the fight they'd expected in the air, lost sight of their advantages, and gave up.

Bascially, the Nazis let emotion and grandstanding get the best of them. When the Luftwaffe switched to bombing London at night in response to a minor British attack on Berlin, they lost the air war. Bombing the civilian population did nothing but piss off the British and given them time for the RAF to regroup and rebuild. As luck would have it, the guy in favor of developing long range heavy bombers for the Germans died before the war in a plane crash. They would have helped against Britain and Russia (esp Russia ... they might have been able to hit the factories moved behind the Urals).

You are correct about the timing. I'm not as sharp on WWII dates as I used to be. I suppose they considered capturing the Soviet's oil fields and other resources more important. Oh well....

Re:Yankees make love, Brits make war?

[Alex Belits]

But the biggest reason we prevailed in the cold-war is that the inexorable dialectic of corruption undid the ideological trappings of Leninism from around their regimes and revelaed them as modern day Pharoahs.And nobody really likes slaving and dying for Pharoah.

No, people enjoy slaving and dying for President, Congress and Coca Cola-Microsoft-Ford-Monsanto-Walmart. Please, cut on the propaganda language, and talk about the facts.

Re:Yankees make love, Brits make war?

[Alex Belits]

It is ridiculous to say there is no difference between USSR and USA. Even if the commoner is slave in both, at least the USA has `bread and circuses.'

As a person, who (as opposed to most of Anonymous Cowards here) lived in both countries, I can testify that in "bread and circuses" both countries were approximately worth each other, yet in both propaganda shown the other side as something between Roman Empire, Hell (christian version) and Moon surface.

Re:Yankees make love, Brits make war?

[Alex Belits]

Beginning with The total destruction of labor as an independent political force within the revolutionary state--by the very same man, Lenin, who elevated the general strike to doomsday weapon status in the struggle against the capitalist system. Communism, not jilted --raped and murdered--at the altar by Lenin's Vanguard theory, and it's rapidly downhill from there...

And how it differs from capitalism's successful subversion of democracy and large companies emerging as the only political force that matters? This process happened with all political systems that survived for long enough to make their subversion/corruption a worthwhile effort.

Stalin, Beria and the Army purges of the 30's. We can't really blame that on Imperialism or Fascism, can we?

Stalin was a nasty and cruel dictator, but capitalism didn't save Germany from even worse things. And more relevant to the topic -- comparison of US and USSR -- US supported (and still supports) extremely oppressive governments all over the world at the extent, USSR allowed itself only with its closest neighbors that actually could be a military threat to it, like Afghanistan (not that I think that it makes things like that right).

The Cultural Revolution in China. Everybody! collect scrap iron and plant rice, the Chairman Mao way! Pyramids to Pharoah.

USSR never supported that policy. -- relationships between USSR and China after WWII for most of time were even worse than relationships between US and China.

Pol Pot's wonderful homage to Mao in Cambodia from 74-78 More pyramids, gleaming white and silent

Again -- had nothing to do with communism or USSR, or support from USSR.

After all that, could any sane man in the rank and file really believe they were fighting for a new and better way? The liberation of anyone? A new age and a "New Man"?

Communists in USSR caused enough trouble by themselves, but adding to them all bullshit that was done by people in other countries under a flag with some part of it red (most of whom neither read Marx, nor were supported by USSR) invalidates youur argument. With what was left, after WWII USSR was mildly oppressive internally and mostly conservative in international politics -- approximately the same as US.

No. It was the oldest way, a pre-historic age--literally, and the Old King. You should be among the most happy of people that it failed.

I am not happy at all. Formerly civilized country where I lived (USSR was civilized, and after living in US for seven years I have not changed my opinion about that) ceased to be civilized (at the extent that I had to leave what left of it to be able to make a living because I am a good programmer but would really suck as a mafia member), and instead of being fixed, political system was just destroyed and replaced with some mix of socialism, feudalism and criminal rule.

If you have some good ideas for subverting the GLobal Capitalist Cabal, I'm all ears.

I don't have any "plan" other than creating a situation where people who want to learn can learn, and people who don't -- starve or at least become socially and economically irrelevant. All the broken stuff in the existing system feeds on ignorance and stupidity.

Re:Fist time for this? You surely have no life.

[kuro5hin]

Nah, there's a script to do that. I don't have a link handy. But I do have one to the highly amusing Katzdot: "News for Geeks, Fluff that Matters."

Sample generated Katz headlines:
"The Hidden Music Industry, Digital Democracy and Cyber-Terrorism"
"Why Do Sexbots Feel Pain?"

--

Mozilla as a widget

[NightHwk]

I'd like to see the rendering engine of mozilla modularized to where you could build your own interface. How cool would it be to have a skinable/themable browser that supports all the latest standards?

NH

Re:Mozilla as a widget

[daemonc]

Your wish has already been answered. Mozilla is about as modular as it gets. The rendering engine can be made completely seperate from the interface, making it usable in other programs. As it is now everthing in the interface IS skinable. All the buttons, scrollbars, etc., can be changed by their skinning language based on XML, called XUL. So expect to see lots of mozilla skins in the future. The next step after that will probably be alternative interfaces to mozilla, such as a GTK interface, or maybe a more advanced skinable interface, giving you the ability to make skins like those on some of the cooler mp3 players, or maybe something even crazier.

Re:Mozilla as a widget

[adraken]

> The next step after that will probably be alternative interfaces to mozilla, such as a GTK interface

In fact, when you compile mozilla, it builds a GtkMozilla widget, so that you can link to this library and use the mozilla rendering engine as a widget, very cool. (somewhat like how Internet Explorer can be used as an ActiveX control in Windows (case in point: Winamp's minibrowser))

Default WM

[sonoffreak]

I'm thinking sawmill as it has a plethora of themes that change based on the GTK theme, it has converted a significant number of former E users, and John Harper is a coding God.

Is there another WM that someone else finds viable?

Thanks to the GNOME developers...

[thue]

For a great desktop with even greater promise. With applets, multiple pager windows and the ability to put in a good windows maneger I find it even better than the winXX one allready, which isn't bad at all.
I can't wait to get my hands on the next version, so keep up the good work!

Now someone please moderate those trolls down and lets have a civilized discussion

Re:Thanks to the GNOME developers...

[cyber-vandal]

You could try to become a prison guard :-)

Re:screw Gnome! Hail KDE!

[treke]

Actually.... KDE is GPL. It's QT that isn't GPL.
treke

Sawmill isn't there yet.

[slothbait]

I've played with Sawmill some lately. There are some things about it that I rather like. Its nicely themeable without feeling Over The Top like Enlightenment does. Plus, the flexibility of using LISP to define commands seems promising.

But Sawmill is still young, and not as stable as one would like a default to be. Further, it is *slow*. On my box, Window Maker beats it into the ground, and I've never thought of WM as "light weight". Perhaps this is a direct result of the above mentioned LISP scripting. I'm not sure. I hope that the John Harper can speed up the code some in later versions. If it ran faster on modest hardware (another requirement of a default WM, IMHO), I'd play with it a lot more.

I'll definately be keeping an eye on Sawmill, though...

--Lenny

Re:Sawmill isn't there yet.

[z4ce]

Hmm.. you find Sawmill SLOW? I use sawmill because it was the fastest pixmap themeable wm I've used. I even thought it was faster than the non-pixmap-theme blackbox. Blackbox looks nice even w/o them though... I think sawmill would a perfect match with gnome. I've only ONCE had sawmill crash on me, and that was a good while ago with an older version.

Ian Zink

Re:Sawmill isn't there yet.

[banky]

I've never had a problem w/ Sawmill being slow: the only time I would call it that is middle-button responsiveness can SOMETIMES be noticeably painful (ie, Click - one - two - three - oh, there it is). There is also a slight delay in alt-tabbing through windows. However, the places to me that it counts - moving, resizing, flipping between virtual desktops - its never been slow for me at all.

Re:Sawmill isn't there yet.

[sonoffreak]

Is there anything odd with your configuration? Was there something in particular you found slow?

Because I personally haven't found a pixmap themeable window manager that has come close to sawmill in terms of speed and definitely not one that has come close in terms of configurability. This is also what I hear from most people who have used or do use it.

You might want to send an email to the mailing list if you find one thing or another particularly slow or if you have a problem with the implementation of somehting in particular.

Re:Sawmill isn't there yet.

[sonoffreak]

The reason the middle-button menu takes so long is that it is a seperate executable. There was a message on the mailing list (archived at http://inanna.starseed.com/sawmill/) yesterday or today. I believe there is a setting where you can make it so you only experience this once per session.

Re:Sawmill isn't there yet.

[Daniel]

Yes, there is a way to keep this to once per login:

(setq menu-program-stays-running) in ~/.sawmillrc

You should also be able to add (menu-start-process) to .sawmillrc to make the menu process start in the background as soon as Sawmill starts. Viva la memory waste! :)

Daniel

Re:Sawmill isn't there yet.

[sdr]

&gt (setq menu-program-stays-running) in~/.sawmillrc

That should be

(setq menu-program-stays-running t)

Re:Sawmill isn't there yet.

[Daniel]

Oops. Correct.

Daniel

Re:Sawmill isn't there yet.

[renoX]

And what are you expecting telepathy from a program ?
Full hand moderation ?

Could you suggest something better than /. current moderation system which would have handled correctly the above case ? (without moderating everything by hand).

GNOME Flaming

[BLarg!]

I feel for some reason compelled to address this issue, although I don't know why because it won't change anything, but oh well.

I don't understand why it is that everytime there is a post on Gnome or a post on Kde that the opposite group of zealots decides to reply to the post with their trolling and flames and whatever. What doesn't make sense is that, the reason why most of us switched to Linux (either permanently, or for use in conjunction with Windows) is because Linux gave us a lot more freedom with what we can do with our software. As of now, there exists two very good desktop environments, Gnome and Kde. Each has its pros and cons, its advantages and its problems. But since the choice is up to the user as which to use (especially since every distribution I know of distributes both Gnome and Kde), why argue over it? Personal preference isn't that big of a deal. Just because user X uses Gnome doesn't mean that you can't use Kde. And no amount of flaming will somehow stop development on one of the environments, and increase development on the other. I think it is good thing that we are presented with a choice as to which desktop to run (or none at all). This is the best competition we can get in the free software world, which is a good thing.

Of course, the other issue is that, if there is so much flaming on Gnome and Kde, why is it that people never argue over Enlightenment or Sawmill, or AfterStep and Window Maker? I'm not encouraging this, but I think that these flame sessions are getting quite childish.

To get on topic, I'm very excited with the future of Gnome and I think that with the pending 1.2, 1.4, and 2.0 releases we shall see something that will compete very nicely with Kde 2.0.

-- BLarg!

Re:GNOME Flaming

[jjoyce]

Of course, the other issue is that, if there is so much flaming on Gnome and Kde, why is it that people never argue over Enlightenment or Sawmill, or AfterStep and Window Maker? I'm not encouraging this, but I think that these flame sessions are getting quite childish.

My guess is that KDE and GNOME both aspire to be more than just window managers. They want to be your desktop environment. GNOME and KDE position themselves as free replacements to CDE and such. KDE and GNOME have also been hyped more than projects like Windowmaker (as far as I can tell). Supposedly, these two projects are what are going to bring people over from Windows. Sure.

Mankind has always dreamed of destroying the sun.

Re:GNOME Flaming

[Fat Lenny]

There should really be a comprehensive document of /. traditions -- the main categories of articles that draw the most trolling are:

• Desktop environments (KDE/GNOME)
• Operating systems (WinNT/2K, Linux, Solaris, *BSD)
• Interpreted languages (PHP, Python, Tcl, Perl)
• JonKatz (the main reason I have an account is to filter out his articles)
• Duplicate articles (especially when one gets pulled)

The list goes on, but that's enough for now..

--

Re:GNOME Flaming

[N1KO]

Choice is good when its a choice like "i choose to have a desktop environment" or "i choose to have only a window manager". Choice is bad when all the programs you use behave in a different way. On the console you can type "man x" and you will get the manual for x. You can type "x --help" and you will get a brief description of how to call program x. Instead, in graphical interfaces on linux there is never a standard way of doing things and programs even look different. This problem existed before KDE and GNOME, but the fact that there are two different desktop environments doesn't help much.

Re:GNOME Flaming

[RickHunter]

Finally, a post that talks some sense. Its not about which Desktop Manager, KDE or GNOME is going to dominate. For how long have csh and bash co-existed? One's not going to win, they're both probably going to be fairly widely used, and each one's going to provide a different set of features.

-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.

Let's have the KDE v. Gnome debate one more time.

[pete-classic]

I have a general question, and then some personal observations.

First, isn't the religious reason for Gnome the fact that QT is not GPL, and KDE needs QT? Maybe I fundamentally misunderstand the situation, but couldn't the effort that created Gnome have created a GPL work-alike to QT? In fact, as I recall, the KDE developers could not even VIEW the QT source when KDE was originally written, so mimicking the documented interface and functionality of QT should have been trivial (from a design standpoint. I am not trying to minimize the amount of work involved.)

This is not a troll. I intend this as a serious question. I am sure that there is a perfectly valid answer, that is why I am asking.

With the above aside:

In my personal experience KDE is slow on a slow system, and fast on a fast system. On the other hand, Gnome is S-L-O-W on a slow system, and slow on a fast system. As a matter of taste, I prefer KDE's less "frilly" appearance, and find it nice to use. Gnome is not bad, but I don't see what the performance penalty is buying me.

The general response to this question is "Gnome is not slow for me." If this is true for you, perhaps you have some configuration hints you can share. I don't have any benchmarks to back up my impression that Gnome is (considerably) slower than KDE on the same hardware, but a lot of people agree that it is a dog, and I don't think that it is just a conspiracy to get people on a slippery slope of using non-free (lebre) software (in this case QT.)

The short version: Why should I run Gnome instead of KDE, assuming that I don't care about QT licensing quibbles? What do I gain for the (possibly only perceived) poor performance of Gnome.

(To disclaim again, I am posting these questions in good faith.)

-Peter

Gnome Office

[Skeezix]

Does anyone have any insight into how Gnome Office fits into the picture? Will this be released along with the 2.0 release of Gnome? I realize that the various components of the office suite are available now, but they currently do not integrate very well. Bonobo and Gnome Print are both key technologies to the office suite, but neither have yet been released as part of the 1.X development platform. Aside from Gnumeric, which nicely demonstrates these technologies, have the other elements of the Office suite made strides to integrate?

I'd also like to encourage the Gnome hackers to seriously consider working on an IDE similar to KDevlop. That is simply an amazing piece of work. You have all the documentation and tools necessary to rapidly create KDE applications...and it's very easy to use and intuitive. I know that Gnome has Glade and gIDE and there has been talk of integrating the two, but somehow that doesn't seem like the answer. I think Glade should be integrated into an IDE, but gIDE is no KDevelop, no offense to the author(s). A very functional IDE that even new hackers could use, would go a long way to getting further involvment int the gnome project.
----

Re:Gnome Office

[BLarg!]

The one thing I would love to see come out (either as part of a Gnome Office release or on its own) is AbiWord. I like the 0.x releases of it, but it isn't just up to par yet with the other available choices. I agree that Gnome does need a solid Gtk+ based IDE, something that I've been looking for a while and (well other then gIDE) doesn't exist. We still have to keep in mind yet that Gnome isn't completely done yet (in terms of Gnome itself and outside Gnome applications). The first stable release was almost a year ago (correct me if I'm wrong), and since then only two apps do I know of really seem stable, Gimp and Gnumeric. Of course, Gimp predates Gnome and it is why Gtk+ was spawned. Hopefully with the release of Gnome 2.0 later this year, we will a slew of nice applications to accompany it.

-- BLarg!

Re:Gnome Office

[Romen]

As one of the many AbiWord developers, I feel called upon to discuss the apparent misconception that AbiWord is part of the Gnome Office. Currently, the Gnome Office consists of Gnumeric, which has been developed by the Gnome team, and additional applictions developed by outsiders, such as AbiWord. AbiWord is NOT just a Gnome, or even just a Linux, application. We run on Win32, BeOS, QNX and soon Macintosh. These are not addon ports, the are integral parts of what AbiWord is. If you have specific concerns with AbiWord, we would appreciate hearing from you. We realize that all is not yet perfect, but we think that we do what we do well.
Sam TH

Re:Gnome Office

[BLarg!]

I knew that AbiWord wasn't being developed by the Gnome team, but I assume that it is being included in Gnome Office. It did, however, slip me for a moment that it has multiple ports too. I have yet to try out the win32 version, but when it turns 1.0 and runs real nice, I'll probably run it on any NT machine I use. With what I've seen of it so far, it is looking really good so keep up the good work!

-- BLarg!

Re:Gnome Office

[Compuser]

I tried AbiWord at work on winNT.
It had more functionality than
notepad but was not at all stable
or reliable. It did weird shit with
cut and paste operations and then
on a whim rearranged the order of
paragraphs in my letter. For now I am
back to notepad.

Re:Gnome Office

[Romen]

Well, I don't use the Win32 version, but I have never experienced the sorts of problems you described. There have been some cut and paste bugs (and there still are), but I can't diagnose "weird shit" that well. As for rearranging paragraphs, I have never heard of a bug like that. If you have more info, we would be very grateful.
As a side note, of course it is less stable than notepad. I have never, ever seen pico crash either, but I don't write papers using it. AbiWord is not just a text editor, it is a full-featured word processor.

Sam TH

Re:Gnome Office

[Compuser]

The version of AbiWord I was trying was 0.7.7
It messed up fonts and inserted a paragraph
twice, once where it was supposed to go and once
at the end of the document.
After some more manipulations, it did rearrange
paragraphs on its own. Some paragraphs even got
deleted, some had their fonts change again.
I am sorry that I did not submit a bug report,
although honestly I had no time to see if this
could be reproduced.
I just fired up that version of AbiWord again
and tried cutting and pasting and immediately
I saw saw that when I paste, some portions of
text become invisible and to make them reappear I
need to select blank space where the words would
be.

Re:Gnome Office

[Romen]

For your cut and paste problems, this is one that I remember. Currently, if you paste the same text multiple times, some of the display of the previously pasted text dissapears momentarily. However, the text is not actually deleted, and on my machine it reappears almost immediately. We are attempting to fix this bug currently. This bug is number 735 in Bugzilla.
Sam TH
AbiWord Developer


Sam TH

Re:Let's have the KDE v. Gnome debate one more tim

[whoop]

The people that worked on Harmony (some left when Qt2's QPL was blessed to work on KDE) couldn't look at the Qt1 source since they were mimicking it. As for KDE, there isn't any contamination issue looking at Qt's source. Many bugs are found in Qt by the core KDE developers. Their heavy pounding on it has made it better.

But more importantly, KDE is hated for (1) it's use of Qt and that whole license stuff, (2) it's use of C++, seen as the most evil language you can write in, and most importantly (3) it's target of new users who were moving from Windows, aka newbies.

(1) has become moot with the free license now, but many people haven't gotten the message and will just hate Qt/Troll Tech forever. As for (2), C is a horrible language to mock objects like Gtk+ does. Some complain about the use of moc, preparsing the headers. I would complain just as much at Gtk's use of mock-inheritance and all. C++ works and it's a heck of a lot easier to program in for something like this. ;) Finally, for (3), well there's little you can do to change the mind of those that just want Linux to remain for the brightest among us.

Re:What? A development plan?

[whoop]

Come now, at least the AC before you was intelligent enough to give examples for his argument (take any news piece from Miguel in the early days). You, are much more the troll in this thread.

Re:Let's have the KDE v. Gnome debate one more tim

[Daniel]

I haven't used KDE, and I'm not interested in getting you to switch at the moment. However, I am curious why Gnome is so slow for you, just because it doesn't seem that bad to me :-) There are two big things that can make Gnome look slow:

-> Pixmap themes. Pixmap themes suck. In particular, they suck memory. Big-time. Evidently imlib or the GTK+ pixmap engine (one or the other) leaks like a sieve, and it's even worse than a memory leak, because what it leaked is X pixmaps. This means that your X server memory usage has a tendency to grow without bound if you use pixmap themes heavily. Also, pixmap themes get redrawn way too many times (this is really a problem for GTK+ in general I think, but particularly painful when using a pixmap theme), and are very very slow in general.

-> gmc. This is probably the most useful thing about Gnome, especially for newbies. It would be nice, therefore, if it wasn't a horrible hack of porting a serial, text-based interface into a graphical, asynchronous environment. This is a large part (IMO) of why everyone wants Nautilus. gmc is not only unstable, buggy, and prone to randomly grabbing the X server and not letting go (last I checked), but it `feels' very slow. This is due to the fact that it's designed on a one-operation-at-a-time basis, so even the UI (redrawing windows, responding to clicks, etc) gets short shrift while it's running.

I use the ThinIce GTK+ theme and get decent performance (I also don't use gmc, and mainly stick the panel on the side of the screen for the CD player, pager, clock, and ICQ client)

Daniel

The Gnome website is excellent

[profi]

I am not a Gnome user (yet), but I have to admit that the website rocks. It's an impressive one-stop source for all kinds of Gnome related projects, including a Slashdot-like discussion area and an awesome web interface to the 'live' CVS tree that provides hyperlinked cross references inside the source files!

It's a good model to follow, and other open source projects should definitely take note.

Re:Let's have the KDE v. Gnome debate one more tim

[drew]

having used both to varying degrees, you should use gnome(kde) if you have an aesthetic or functional preference of gnome(kde) over kde(gnome).

no other reason. (assuming, as you said, that you don't get into the whole license issue) both of them do more or less the same thing, although each has little strengths that the other lacks. for example, i prefer the gnoe panel to the kde panel, but i refuse to use the gnome filemanager. kfm on the otherhand make a good basic file/web browser when i don't need javascript or https. so i use the gnome panel with kfm. or sometimes i get sick of one or both of them and go back to using a plain vanilla windowmanager (if you can call enlightenment plain) until the next version comes out. so if youve tried both, and decide that one works better for you, stick to that one. but if you have the time, you should still check out new releases form "the other side" every now and then. i gave up on the gnome panel a long time ago for example, but now with their "tasty yellow banana" release, i decided to tried it out again and was very impressed.

Rasterman defumigation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone else noticed that Gnome(Red Hat) has defumigated themselves of everything that Rasterman had touched?

• Imlib replaced by gdk-pixbuf
• esound no longer a requirement
• enlightenment replaced with Sawmill
• anything else I missed?

Coincidence?
Raster might create beautiful innovative eye candy but I've looked at his code and it exactly matches what others have said, "what a mess". Well Raster is a rock star of the Linux world, but are Open Source rockstars a good thing? Hmmm, what is VA going to do when Enlightenment is not included on the next release of RedHat? That will be a sticky situation.

Re:Rasterman defumigation?

[BLarg!]

Esound isn't a requirement, as far as I know, because as more pci sound cards come out with drivers that allow multiple '/dev/dsp's to be used, there really isn't a reason for it.

Enlightenment is being replaced with Sawmill because Sawmill is simpler in terms of features (many of Enlightenment's are included in Gnome) and seems to have a much simpler but powerful configuration system. Although my understanding is Enlightenment was never a part of Gnome. I just thought that Linux distributions always included it as the default gnome window manager.

The only thing is why replace Imlib with gdk-pixbuf? I thought that Imlib did its job well. Does anyone know why they decided to do this?

-- BLarg!

Re:Rasterman defumigation?

[AT]

Enlightenment is still the default window manager in the Redhat 6.2 beta. I'm sure that if it is retired as the default, it will still be part of the distribution for a long time to come.

Despite the fact it has grotty code, it pretty much revived the whole window manager scene and showed people X could look nice. Widget set themes either directly or indirectly owe their existance to E and Raster. I remember 1995 when fvwm and Xaw were king, and I thank Raster for getting us past that.

That said, imlib was fundamentally flawed something had to be done. It probably could have been fixed, but the GNOME developers chose to reimplement the functionality. Reimplementation is not always bad -- lessons learned the first time can be fixed. From what I've heard, esound has (or had) some pretty serious problems; perhaps they are being worked on, or replaced.

Remember VA Linux makes its money selling hardware for Linux. Anything that makes Linux better is good for VA; whether it is Raster's code or someone elses doesn't matter. They probably pay Raster to do what he has done: trailblaze some interesting ideas that make Linux more appealing, visually or otherwise.

Re:Rasterman defumigation?

[adraken]

> The only thing is why replace Imlib with gdk-pixbuf? I thought that Imlib did its job well. Does anyone know why they decided to do this?

(forgive me if this is a repeat, something bad happened and I'm not sure if it was posted)

imlib was not designed for the purposes which gnome delegated it for, it provided suboptimal performance and had some memory leak problems... (which are now fixed, but nevertheless, injured the reputation of GNOME). gdk-pixbuf is being designed by GNOME people for taks which are important to running gnome (quick and light loading/displaying of small pixmaps with antialiasing and alpha transparency).

Re:Rasterman defumigation?

[AT]

why replace Imlib with gdk-pixbuf?

There were problems with imlib's memory management, it could only render to a X Pixmap and not a Drawable, the API for transformations on an image was limited and not extensible. I believe imlib also had problems with alpha blending.

Re:Rasterman defumigation?

[jallen02]

lol if you took the time to read some of rastermans work.. in there he explains that this was basically his first real attempt at serious programming..

Re:Rasterman defumigation?

[itp]

...had some memory leak problems... (which are now fixed, but nevertheless, injured the reputation of GNOME)...

Still has, actually. There are serious flaws in imlib's image caching, but you can't turn that off without making the pixmap theme even slower...

--
Ian Peters

Re:Rasterman defumigation?

[bero-rh]

Removing the esound requirement is definitely a good thing - removes the requirement to install esound (and everything it depends on, such as libaudiofile) on computers that don't have soundcards.

Window managers are still the user's choice. Anyone who prefers enlightenment can use it.

Re:Rasterman defumigation?

[Pascal Q. Porcupine]

Hey, wow, that's pretty damned cool... I'm going to have to start running it. (If you've ever seen my desktop you know I'm into odd color schemes which I find pleasing to the eye and have the nice side-effect of making it difficult for others to look over my shoulder without getting a headache :)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Re:Rasterman defumigation?

[gkatsi]

I can only tell you about imlib.
It duplicates functionality included in other parts of gnome. So it doesn't really matter whether it had bugs: these can be fixed. But I don't think that raster would go along with removing functionality from it, since he wrote it to be used in places where gnome isn't necessarily available.
So the main complaint was duplicated functionality, I think.

Re:Rasterman defumigation?

[mechTel]

There is an extensive article concerning the replacement of imlib by gdkPixbuf on the Gnome Website
http://developer.gn ome.org/feature/current/html/gdk-pixbuf.html

Re:Rasterman defumigation?

[mmarker]

Being one who did some of the early work on the replacement, I'll throw in my reasons. ;)

One reason why gdk-pixbuf came to be was to easily stuff RGB data into a gdkrgb/libart framework. Imlib wasn't really the easy way to to do this. Also, imlib had a "wonderful" alpha channel hack (basically, one bit alpha using magenta). Since we wanted to support a real alpha channel, this wasn't a great idea.

Second was the whole cache issue. It leaked like a sieve. Which leads to reason #3...

...the imlib code is a frightening mess. Look at the XPM loader for starters (io-xpm.c is one function...and well over 60 lines long, and indented a few(!!) times). At first, I tried to do some maintence, but it quickly became next to impossible to do. So, I bit the bullet and started from scratch.

And I give "mad props" to the GIMP and gtk crew, through allowing me and the other gdk-pixbuf hackers to use some of the GIMP plugins and gdk code to write the loaders. I like this free software thing.

As for esound, it seems like the maintainer has slid off the face of the planet. So, if anyone has pointers to docs for the latest ALSA API, I'd appreciate it (haven't found anything on the ALSA webiste :( )

Re:screw Gnome! Hail KDE!

[daemonc]

Thanks for clarifying the licence thing. I had heard that the QT toolkit had it's own restrictive licence, assumed that KDE had that licence also. Anyways, i did not intend to spread the flame war, i should have posted that comment as a question rather than assuming.

Re:Let's have the KDE v. Gnome debate one more tim

[John-D]

>The short version: Why should I run Gnome instead of KDE...?

OTOH, why should I run either? I, for one, love WindowMaker, with the Dock and it's right-click menu, plus xterm. for the record, i have tried Gnome, and found it annoying that i had to run Enlightenment, which i found even more annoying. i also tried KDE, but found it much too windows - like.

Listen carefully.

[Forge]

I have a general question, and then some personal observations.

I'll try to help.

First, isn't the religious reason for Gnome the fact that QT is not GPL, and KDE needs QT?

Yes. But most Gnome developers won't even discus that these days.

Maybe I fundamentally misunderstand the situation, but couldn't the effort that created Gnome have created a GPL work-alike to QT?

Yeah. That's what team KDE said. In fact there was an attempt to do just that in a project called "Harmony". As soon as Troll Tech announced that QT-2.0 would be under an OSS / Free Software license called QPL the developers on that project quit and went to work on KDE.

In fact, as I recall, the KDE developers could not even VIEW the QT source when KDE was originally written,

This is incorrect. They could view the QT source all they wanted but they couldn't distribute modifications.

Gnome is not bad, but I don't see what the performance penalty is buying me.

A desktop interface is very much a matter of preference. There are people out there who prefer FVWM2 for reasons other than performance. Try them all and use whatever you like. There is no need to worry about benefits that don't affect you.

The general response to this question is "Gnome is not slow for me." If this is true for you, perhaps you have some configuration hints you can share.

Get a faster machine. After you get a really fast box there really isn't any need to worry about the performance of the desktop.

The short version: Why should I run Gnome instead of KDE, assuming that I don't care about QT licensing quibbles?

Why not just use whatever works for you ? If Gnome doesn't like your machine or the way you configure it so just use KDE and stop fretting. It's not like the KDE desktop will stop you from using the Gnome apps or vise versa.

What do I gain for the (possibly only perceived) poor performance of Gnome.

At the very least Gnome has a far better FreeCell program. Better even than the Windows 9x version.

(To disclaim again, I am posting these questions in good faith.)

That won't stop them from moderating us both into oblivion. :)

Re:Listen carefully.

[bmetz]

Get a faster machine. After you get a really fast box there really isn't any need to worry about the performance of the desktop. Bzzt, unacceptable. Try again. I know the last person who said this got moderated down to zero, but I totally agree: if one (x) is slower on your machine than another (x), then it's the (x)'s fault, not your machine's fault. Think third world, think poor college student. Not everyone can just wait until they have enough money to buy another computer. Most people have to deal with what they have right now for at least a few years. If you're gonna take the attitude "well if your machine can't handle our desktop, then we don't want you," then you're just driving that user into Microsoft's welcoming arms.

Re:Listen carefully.

[pete-classic]

I have already made a general reply, but . . .

As far as the machine speed is concerned, I find Gnome unusable on a Pentium 100 with some crappy S3 video. Now I admit that this is a pretty lame "workstation."

On the other hand, I find Gnome slow (that is, not "snappy" like KDE) on a PII 400 (running at 448 on a 112mhz FSB) with 128 meg RAM on a LVD drive, with a TNT video card (running the very nice Nvidia provided Xserver.) I hope this qualifies as a "fast box." One of the main points of my post was that on a box that runs KDE "fast" Gnome feels "slow." The question I posed was "what do I gain." Anything can theoretically be made fast by throwing enough hardware at it.

Finally, paraphrasing my general reply, I do use what works for me. I am just interested in others experience and viewpoints on why things are the way they are.

Thanks for replying ;-)

-Peter

Re:Listen carefully.

[IntlHarvester]

Look at it this way -- you can buy a new P3/K7 system for less than a $1000, a Celeron/K6 system for even less. Every computer you can think of will be 'obsolete' in the Windows world in a year or two, if it isn't already. When Gnome 2.0 ships, my PII-400 will look pretty pathetic next to the 1.2Ghz chips that will be available.

You might disagree with the philosophy, but it makes perfect sence to develop software that takes lots of CPU cycles and puts them to a useful purpose. By the time your thing ships, nobody will tell the difference. If it runs too slow for you, use something else (KDE is fine on my P133, AfterStep flies).

As for driving slow machines users and the third world into Microsofts arms -- Hah! Microsoft doesn't want them either. If anything, Linux is going to grow as fully functional Pentium computers are flushed from corporate desktops to prepare for Windows 2000.

The great thing about Linux/Unix is that there a gazillion window managers for all sorts of machines, there's lots of choice, you can even have a fully functional console only environment. Bitching about one particular system's philosophy is pretty pointless. Just run something else, or dive in and see what you can fix.
--

Re:Listen carefully.

[Forge]

The fact is you asked how to make Gnome go fast. More hardware is what works. Personally; I am a pore person in a 3rd world country so I really can't afford some fancy Celeron machine.

My main workstation is a P200 with 64 Megs of assorted RAM. KDE is fairly responsive on it. In fact Netscape, StarOffice and Gnome are the only things that feel slow on this box.

Yes, I did try Win2K on it ( up to the RCs ) and it was almost as fast as Windows 3.11 on my PS/2 386.

Re:Listen carefully.

[Phil-14]

I'm using gnome and sawmill on a 100 mhz pentium with 80 megs of ram, and it feels fine.

Hmm, all the posters from the third world are complaining about having slow machines that are actually faster than mine. Time to upgrade?

Re:Listen carefully.

[pete-classic]

You might disagree with the philosophy, but it makes perfect sence to develop software that takes lots of CPU cycles and puts them to a useful purpose.

I do not disagree. But the original question was "what is this poor performance buying me?" What is this "useful purpose of which you speak?

-Peter

Re:Listen carefully.

[IntlHarvester]

Presumably a "Network Object Model Environment" buys you something. I know that MS DCOM buys us something at work, and I have freinds that still tell tales of the wonders of 1980's NeXT systems and their network object RPC software.

Maybe in your case it doesn't. Maybe the software hasn't been written yet to take advantage of it. In that case, you're right -- it's just overhead, don't use it.

(Note that the "useful purpose" tag was aimed at Gnome 1.0's buggy nature, and particularly at the pointlessness of Enlightenment for my purposes. RH 6 was a pretty poor introduction of Gnome for most people.)
--

Re:Listen carefully.

[IntlHarvester]

Just for the record, I'm not any sort of Gnome zealot. My Linux box is a server and usually doesn't run X at all, and when it does, it's WindowMaker.
--

Re:Listen carefully.

[Denny]

80Mb is a lot of RAM - which I think makes more difference to most Linux apps (particularly graphical ones) than extra clock-cycles will...

I have a P100 laptop with 16Mb of RAM and it won't run a full GNOME system - all the apps die on startup, giving me loads of really entertaining error dialogues... I might try again with sawmill, as that was GNOME running on E and many people have commented that E is the slowest bit of a GNOME environment... I am now running sawmill at work and it seems okay, but that's on a P3-500 (64Mb RAM) so it's not really a low-end machine...

Oh yes, I had a point when I started all this - I don't think your machine counts as bottom of the barrel when it has that much RAM - most people with P100 - P166 are suffering with 16 or maybe 32 Mb of RAM, which is probably their main problem...

Regards,
Denny

# Using Linux in the UK? Check out Linux UK

Re:You Rock!!!!

[MustardMan]

This hardly induces thoughts of rockage... any script kiddie could write something to do this in a matter of minutes. Maybe when I was 12 I would have thought this was cool. Then again when I was 12 I thought I was a l331 h@x0r d00d. Now I realize I am just a nominal linux user whose only code is pretty much replicating already well documented numerical recipes.


Tell a man that there are 400 Billion stars and he'll believe you

The future of *nix Desktops

[nitehorse]

This is good. TINAFB (this is not a flame but) does it seem like GNOME is playing "catchup" with KDE in more than one way? They've been left behind with the release versions, they've had to come up with their own implementation of a COM-like mechanism, and they don't have an integrated office suite or a web browser. (Clarification: GNOME Office is not *yet* integrated, from what I can tell.) What exactly will they offer that you can't get with the other desktop?

I'm actually curious about this- Gnumeric is awesome, and I could probably never convince anybody who uses windows/excel currently to even *try* linux without it- but what do they offer that you can't get with KDE? What's the added value? How would you sell GNOME to your manager, especially if he's read some article waxing poetic about KDE?

Re:The future of *nix Desktops

[adraken]

GNOME seems like it is playing catchup because the teams did not work in the same track. KDE quickly finished their panel to look like CDE, finished. GNOME refined and tweaked it so (by now) it 1) looks beautiful 2) acts like a next-generation Dock.

With the extra time, KDE developers developed their KOffice suite. GNOME's core developers (actually, mostly Miguel) developed Gnumeric (very Excel-like) as a sample application for others to mimic and integrate other Office apps.

Gnumeric is very Excel-like for a good reason: like-it-or-not, businesses nowadays rely on Excel/Word/Powerpoint. If you provide a good and similar alternative on Linux/*BSD, it is more likely that they will switch.

This sample app -> mimic approach didn't work quite how it was expected. Gnumeric is hailed, but there are no other major apps (word processor, presentation creator, personal information manager) that mimic its level of functionality and integration with GNOME. (AbiWord for GNOME is pretty GNOME-like, but it doesn't integrate like Gnumeric does.) This is why Miguel and Nat created Helix Code. While they will still pretty much control the core libraries and such, they will focus on developing these other applications. They are currently working on Evolution (couldn't find an URL at the moment), an extensive personal information manager which will combine the functions of Balsa, GnomeCard, GnomePilot and others into one Outlook-like functional product. Their main goal is to develop desktop apps for GNOME.

To finally answer your question, I'm not even sure that GNOME is ready for the business environment yet, but don't dismiss it as a "wannabe" or "johnny-come-lately". GNOME's core architecture seems to have many advantages over KDE, so we'll see what comes down the pipe.

Re:The future of *nix Desktops

[ahde]

Show him the gnome panel.

He probably doesn't care how everything is an applet, but all the neat things you can run on the panel are what made me switch from KDE. I think KDE is supposed take this approach in 2.0.

The panel is themable and the ease with which you can put launchers on the pager is cool--just let me put them in the order I want. The cli macro launcher (whatever it's called) is my favorite--once I can alt-tab to it, it's "goodbye, mouse!"

Despite what people think, managers like toys. The day I get my go-fish program to dock on the gnome panel -- okay, the day after, when someone adds solitaire, is the day we have the killer app that will bring the world into submission.

Lets just hope MacOS X doesn't get there first.

Re:The future of *nix Desktops

[Kyobu]

You can put them in the order you want, Either middle-drag them, or right-click and pick "Move applet."

Re:The future of *nix Desktops

[nitehorse]

I've used the GNOME panel - I like it, but in my experience (from versions .66 to 1.0.53) it's never been quite stable and it hasn't always reacted as expected- if I start Sawmill and then the panel, half of the time GNOME-pager complains that I'm not running a GNOME-compliant window manager. I like the panel's functionality- when I use GNOME, I have a vertical bar in the upper right, a horizontal bar in the lower right, and a single button Menu launcher (with the foot icon) in the lower left corner. It's great- but I run KDE2 almost all of the time now, because it offers (to me) everything that I need from a desktop.

That doesn't mean it's perfect, but it works well enough. The pixmap themes are more stable (and leak one hell of a lot less memory) than the GTK+ equivalents, and it's relatively straightforward to convert a GTK theme to a KDE2 one. I've done so at my web page and you can see that although it's not *quite* the same, it works and it looks a lot better than the default settings.

Anyway, back to your post. Everything in Kicker, the new KDE panel for KDE2, is also an applet- and there's a nice structure and backbone provided for building your own custom applets with it. However, I like it relatively simple, so I leave well enough alone. However, I am most impressed by Konqueror, the new KDE file manager/everything browser. Somebody pointed out that you can coax Explorer into doing some of the things Konqi does (automatic embedding of document views, like a Word doc or a KWord doc [in konq's case]) but you can't do the frames! Once you actually see the frame action working, you'll switch back.... ; )

Or not. But that's why choice is good, no? : )

Re:The future of *nix Desktops

[nitehorse]

My point was exactly that- technically, what are the advantages of using GNOME over using KDE, especially from a programming perspective? I don't know how many other /.'ers use the pre-alpha version of KDE2, but I'm one of the lucky few- and I can tell you, it's impressing the hell out of me.

To start with, there is the whole idea of KParts and the embedding of parts within eachother. From what I can tell, Bonobo does equal KParts in basic functionality; but IMHO the KParts mechanism is/would be more attractive to prospective developers since it is already working/in use by two MAJOR (albeit pre-alpha) projects: Konqueror and the KOffice suite. The beauty of the KParts mechanism comes into play when you realize that you have the ability to embed a web page into a KWord document which could be embedded into a Kpresenter presentation... which could on the next slide have a Kspreadsheet with an embedded Kchart. It's true desktop office functionality- with source, and for free.

Also, maybe not as impressive as KParts (or maybe more, depending on how you look at it) is the new KIO library. KIO is what provides the getting/putting of files for applications within KDE- and it's new implementation is over 5 times faster than it used to be. It blazes (by my calculations, Konqueror with KIO is about two or three times faster than Mozilla currently) and it's totally internet transparent. So by including a couple of headers and writing a few small lines of code, one could theoretically have a very nice application which integrated with the entire KOffice suite while also being lightning-quick and providing a nice viewing component for the Konqueror.

What I'd like to know is- what are the structural advantages of GNOME over KDE's? Especially since GNOME-2.0 has a lot more time left to take (KDE2 is supposed to be released this spring); what will they be offering to developers to convince them that GNOME is where to be?

Re:The future of *nix Desktops

[RickHunter]

To me, GNOME has a lot over KDE. The versions of KDE I used always felt like someone had taken Win98 and tried to translate the interface to Linux. I can't stand the Win98 interface (especially the single-click icons and the browser integration!), so I switched to GNOME. I liked the panels, the applets, the interface... practically everything but Enlightenment.

-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.

Performance of GNOME

[Oestergaard]

I felt that KDE was too ``german'' in it's looks and feels (no offence meant to germans, but I'm sure some of you know what I mean). So I preferred GNOME over KDE. However, GNOME was slow. Especially when switching desktops, I would have to wait for -too long- to get a netscape away and six terminals where I wanted them.

So I decided to just skip the desktop race, and go with enlightenment, straight, mean and lean. Much to my surprise, this didn't change the situation... After a little wondering, I started out on a new track.

Now, with GNOME and icewm as my window-manager, I have a lean and fairly mean desktop system going, and it's *MUCH* faster at desktop switching than enlightenment ever was.

Clue: If GNOME is too slow for you, try replacing the default window manager. Try icewm (has an *ugly* default theme, but has others which are nice and readily available from T.O.). Or try sawmill (haven't done that myself - yet).

For historical reasons, enlightenment is the default window manger in the GNOME releases done by redhat and others. This is changing. Enlightenment is - hands down - the most artistical window manager I've ever seen and used. But there's just (IMO) too much of artistical sophistication instead of lean code in that one, to perform well on ``old'' systems (my dual PPro with a Matrox I for example).

GNOME with icewm rocks. It seems faster on FreeBSD 3.4 than on Linux 2.2 though, but on the other hand, Linux wins when it gets to disk I/O etc. on the day-to-day workloads. GNOME is not slow in a sane configuration, it's just slow in it's default configuration.

Re:Performance of GNOME

[harmonica]

I felt that KDE was too ``german'' in it's looks and feels (no offence meant to germans, but I'm sure some of you know what I mean).

Um, care to explain it to the rest of us?!

Re:Performance of GNOME

[RickHunter]

I can't stand KDE (the interface feels too windows-ish for me, and I hate the one-click and browser integration stuff!), but I've liked the versions of GNOME I've tried. The thing I haven't liked about GNOME is Enlightenment. It seems big and unwieldy, and a lot of what it does seems to be duplicated by GNOME. So a lighter-weight manager like IceWM seems the perfect solution.

-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.

Re:Performance of GNOME

[angelo]

I think he means the widget set looks a bit too rough and technical. Try driving a German vehicle sometime. all kinds of odd buttons, and lotsa squareness in those things. Like mercedes has all kinds of giant rocker switches on the dashboard, and the radio is very wide. It's just a different aesthetic, and something I'd expect from a French or Italian car as well. Different countries, different engineers.

Re:Performance of GNOME

[harmonica]

Hmm... While I see that there are some prominent German KDE developers, I seriously doubt that it has a 'German' look. Too many other people involved there... And I really think many things simply look a lot like the Windows GUI (which is basically a good thing IMHO). But that's very subjective. Could it be that KDE resembles whatever QT has to offer?!

Re:Let's have the KDE v. Gnome debate one more tim

[Fyndo]

gmc IIRC is going to be re-written from scratch (or a written from scratch file manager substituted for it)

Re:Let's have the KDE v. Gnome debate one more tim

[adraken]

these GTK+ Pixmap theme / flickering / sluggishness issues are likely to be fixed with gdk-pixbuf and gtk 1.3 (which is only in CVS at the moment).

These are not GNOME issues per se, but because of what it relies on.

About gmc, I think most everyone agrees with you, Nautilus is GNOME's messiah.

Re:Let's have the KDE v. Gnome debate one more tim

[adraken]

> gmc IIRC is going to be re-written from scratch (or a written from scratch file manager substituted for it)

This is Nautilus -- the eazel-written GNOME 2.0 Filemanager/Desktop.

Re:Let's have the KDE v. Gnome debate one more tim

[Ozwald]

Just as a side note: KDE and Gnome are slower than MICROS~1 Windows on the same computer, but that is not necessarily the fault of either of these two libraries. The XWindows protocol is incredibly powerful but has a huge amount of overhead.

When the next version of XFree86 comes out later the year, I believe the performance difference will be night and day. Much of the XWindows overhead is supposed to vanish for localhost displays.

But if I am wrong, I have found that some of the crazy Gnome skins did trash my system resources beyond usability. But that is avoidable.

Ozwald

Re:Let's have the KDE v. Gnome debate one more tim

[adraken]

I completely agree, the desktop issue isn't an either-or dillema. GNOME and KDE (especially with a window manager that supports both -> Enlightenment) work well together. GNOME has a much nicer panel (and applets) than KDE, but KDE has more well-developed applications. So, use both. It can be a very simple, very inclusive desktop.

Re:Let's have the KDE v. Gnome debate one more tim

[weisserw]

Try sawmill

-W.W.

Enlightenment -> Sawmill

[CMonk]

Gnome isn't the slow one, E is. E just tries to do stuff that it doesn't need to do. It's a filemanager for god's sake, why does it need a file manager? Anyway, sawmill is lean without sacrificing extensibility.

Re:Let's have the KDE v. Gnome debate one more tim

[adraken]

You may run WindowMaker with GNOME, it works almost perfectly, except WindowMaker doesn't have session management (or at least doesn't work with GNOME'S), therefore it gets screwy. If you plan to try GNOME again, try sawmill with it.

Re:Let's have the KDE v. Gnome debate one more tim

[adraken]

*insert Daniel's comments here as to why GNOME seems slow* In addition to this is the fact that Enlightenment is currently the default Window Manager for GNOME. This will change to sawmill soon because it is so fast and it integrates so well with GNOME (it stays out of the way when it should). (Sawmill author is even going to GUADEC -- GNOME Conference in Paris)

Re:Let's have the KDE v. Gnome debate one more tim

[Daniel]

Any idea when 1.4 (stable version, 1.3 is unstable) will be out? I tried the CVS code recently and it seemed a long way from releasable -- unstable, test program segfaulting like mad, etc..

Daniel

flaming overestimated

[mattdm]

There was a post like this last time this discussion came up, and I noticed the same thing: lots of comments on "oh no, look at the flamewar that always explodes when this comes up", and very few actual flames. (And, thanks to the moderation system, any that do happen are relegated to the bottom of the heap.)

So, I'd like to propose that next time there's a Gnome or KDE article, people just skip commenting on the theoretical but largely imaginary flamewar.

--

Re:flaming overestimated

[pb]

Good call. There used to be big flamewars back when people knew or cared about the licensing. (but now that issues is even stranger, but people are satisfied regardless...)

I'll be very interested to see what the next releases of GNOME and KDE look like, they both sound very cool.

But I probably won't use them, because I still don't know why a "Desktop Environment / Application Suite / Thingy" could possibly be better than an xterm, or why I'd want a window manager other than my particularly boring fvwm2 configuration. :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Re:Let's have the KDE v. Gnome debate one more tim

[pete-classic]

Wow, I can't believe the activity on this thread!

Lots of interesting info. I have run E without Gnome, and I must admit it is quite pretty, but it is not shy about consuming resources.

I would also like to mention that there was a lot of "you should do this or that." I have used several window managers, and I am not a sycophant who can't remember life before "desktops" (i.e. KDE and Gnome, as differentiated from WMs like AfterStep or Xfce (I kind of dig Xfce, even though I am not a big fan of Slowlaris, but I digress.)) My intent was to start a bit of a dialogue, and get a clearer idea of what other people think of these two projects.

-Peter

Re:Let's have the KDE v. Gnome debate one more tim

[whoop]

Oh yeah, there isn't enough closed applications out there already. We need more, lots more. I think you've changed me. Anything that promotes this damned "Free Software" idea is bunk! We need the freedom to not share with the community, to build upon all these years of source code without giving a damned thing back! This is the only true way now. Damn the QPL! Damn the GPL! Long live the new General Private License, "You have no right to do anything with this software. Do not touch it. Do not do nothing to it. If you are found to violate any terms of this license, you will be required to not release any source code. Good day, sir."

It's over mate, the empire is gone....

[gruntvald]

Why make Americans speak your dialect, just 'cos you can't deal with people in the world talking *differently*...... ? Maybe US coders understand fall, and that's why the schedule is described that way.

Wierd humor

[BoLean]

Eazel is a new GUI thats supposed to be easier for people to use. I guess you could call it the "Human Gnome Project"

And whats with calling these hacker attacks "DDoS attacks". Next time somthing like this happens give it a better name like "Overloaded Gates Attack" or "MSOverKill" or "Winstorm plague" or "Win2KOut". I mean really, if yer gonna use the bad press really use it.

Re:screw Gnome! Hail KDE!

[treke]

My understanding of the issue is that the QPL( the license troll is using) allows use of QT for Open Source projects. I'm gonna look at it a little more closely. Only thing i'm not sure about is kdesuport, since it looks like it was just the distribution of other libraries.
treke

Re:VA Linux Distribution

[Jebediah21]

I can totally see a VA distro happening. It would likely be flashier kinda like Caldera. It would be interesting to see, but I am not going to ditch RedHat for it unless it is really good. I got plenty of other distros to try yet including Corel, and Debian.

If only this were flamebait

[rambone]

Linux interfaces so far have yet to demonstrate much in the way of innovation.

The developers of Eazel claim their product will be "revolutionary". Currently it looks like Midnight Commander++ - certainly nothing to get worked up over.

Expect to see Aqua ripoffs on linux by 2003.

Speeding up GNOME: Tips

[ajs]

GNOME has several pieces, and each can be approached seperately. First, the window manager. GNOME is window manager independant, so if you don't have a kick-ass system with at least 128 MB of RAM, I suggest ditching enlightenment. Go with sawmill or icewm or one of the other WMs.

Next comes widget themes for Gtk+. Keep in mind that themes that have pixmaps for every widget take up a LOT of memory. The flat-colored themes are the least expensive, but least visually apealing. Try looking at the various theme entries on themes.org and note the sizes. Pick a list of your favorite themes and use the one with the smallest size (the size of the theme is not a perfect guage, but it's a good start).

If GNOME still seems slow try these tips:

• Don't use transparent windows, and if you must, don't use shaded transparency
  
• Exit netscape if you're not using it. It's a pig.
  
• Don't run GNOME and KDE apps at the same time. They both have huge libraries.
  
• Grab the source for glib, gtk+ and gnome-libs and re-compile with "-O2 -finline-functions -mxyz" where xyz is your platform (e.g. "pentiumpro"). The GNOME coding standards require lots of little functions, so the "-finline-functions" parameter will really help.
  

Hope this helps!

Re:Speeding up GNOME: Tips

[Hawke]

From "Speeding up GNOME: Tips"

• Grab the source for glib, gtk+ and gnome-libs and re-compile with "-O2 -finline-functions -mxyz"

I don't know how well Gnome responds to this, but KDE sometimes gets good results from being compiled with "-Os".
"-Os" tells the compilier to compile for small size. This may cause the code to run slower, or if you are memory limited the much smaller footprint may actually cause it to run faster.

GNOME is not a windowmanager

[fluch]

My guess is that KDE and GNOME both aspire to be more than just window managers. Gnome is not a windowmanager, and AFAIK KDE isn't either (never the less, KDE comes with a windowmanager kwm).

Re:GNOME is not a windowmanager

[ralphclark]

Duh, that's what he just said more or less.

KDE is a whole desktop environment INCLUDING a window manager. Thus, it's more than just a Window manager.

GNOME is also a desktop environment and currently lacks a window manager (people generally use Enlightment or Window Maker I think) but it will soon have one of it's own. Either way, you can say it's more than just a window manager.

Anyway, the issue as to which platform is best is completely moot - both environments are only as cool as the applications written for them. I don't have much experience with GNOME apps, but I feel justified in saying that many of the applications written for KDE are total crap and seem to have been written by kids without any sense of the importance of finishing anything. The offending apps are mainly GUI with fairly little functionality behind them, and come with poor or no documentation at all.

Maybe QT makes things too easy. Judging by the above characteristics, we seem to be looking at the OSS equivalent of a generation of self-taught VB programmers here (shudder).

Don't try to use KDE in a business environment or you'll probably get burned. I cite as particular hazards: Netscape's extra propensity to crash under KDE, Kmail's lack of IMAP support and KOrganizer's general bugginess and half-hearted implementation of a "to-do" list.


Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction

Re:GNOME is not a windowmanager

[Kyobu]

Yes, that's true, but you can also use Enlightenment with KDE (as well as with Gnome, or by itself). If you object to having to download and install kwm, I'm sure there's a way to just get the individual packages/tarballs.

Re:GNOME is not a windowmanager

[ralphclark]

I'm not a troll, and I've already proved it. Now *you* try to prove it's not. Twit.

Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction

Re:Let's have the KDE v. Gnome debate one more tim

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes - there are some problems with Gtk+. The problem is not that its "slow" - its just that it 'flickers' - There is a 'no_flicker" branch for Gtk+ in CVS which should make things appear to be much smoother and faster

Damned flamer

[bartok]

Listen, what liscence a person chooses to use is part of a person's freedom. The freedom of the GPL and LGPL is about "free speech and not free beer".

Therefore, if someone wants to make a closed source project with a LGPL'ed toolkit, they are free(freedom = = no constraints) to do it but not with Qt ($$$ = = constraints).

Re:Damned flamer

[AArthur]

Actually the LGPL has several constraints, for one if a person wants to you a piece of LGPL'd software in their binary-only product, it's illegal, as is statically linking a LGPL'd piece of software, in a binary only release.

Re:Let's have the KDE v. Gnome debate one more tim

[bero-rh]

Both have their good sides.
IMO it isn't important which you run - there's no
problem with running GNOME applications inside KDE
and vice versa, so you can just pick the best of
both worlds.
With Qt 2.*, the licensing is no longer much of an
issue (and even with Qt 1, you could have a look at its source, just not re-use it or add your own
modifications).
My personal preference is KDE simply because GTK's API is (IMO) painful for programmers (I'm sure many of the GNOME developers will disagree with me here though) because of its attempt to simulate an
OO-style API in a language that simply wasn't
designed for this sort of stuff - causing, among other things, oddities like stupid bugs (such as an attempt to add a listbox item to a pushbutton) to compile without problems.

To those who bitch about Rasterman's "messy" code-

[Taco Cowboy]

So many people are bitching about the quality of Rasterman's code it isn't funny anymore.

In fact, many of those who are bitching never contribute even a single line of source code for the betterment of the open-source communities, and yet they bitch away.

The thing that they have chosen not to say is no matter how bad Rasterman's code are, at least Rasterman has done more than them - that Rasterman, through his no-so-quality-coded-Enlightenment, has demonstrated many NEW WAYS to do things !

And we must NOT forget the very one unique thing about open-source - that the source code is available, and if you feel that the source code needs updating, tidying, or "quality control", you can do just that.

I sincerely hope that those who are bitching about the "quality" of Rasterman's code will stop bitching and instead contributing their effort to "clean up" whatever "mess" they think.

That is all I want to say right now.

"Office Suits" for Linux

[Taco Cowboy]

Since many of you are talking about the "Office Suits" that run in Linux, I wonder why so few of you are mentioning the Siag Office http://siag.nu/ that just has its version 3.20 came out a few days ago?

Yes, it is not as powerful as M$ Office, and yes, it is not "G-integrated", but that doesn't mean it can NOT be integrated into Gnome.

Somebody just has to roll up their sleave and do the integration, but so far, none is doing that.

Why are there so many people who complain about the non-availability of this and that, and none wants to do something about that?

If all of us keep on doing the complaining part, and none do the coding, how do we expect the open-source movement to be continued?

Re:AbiWord Crashes constantly. Unstable mess

[Romen]

I probably shouldn't reply to this, but I can't resist.

1 - Precisely which "hype" would you be reffering to? I have yet to see that much hype about AbiWord. For example, mentions of it on Slashdot are very rare, unlike many items that don't even exist yet.

2 - I have to say that when Star Office is 1 free, 2 10 MB in size, 3 under development for only about 2 years, 4 has only about five people employed to develop it then I will consider your criticism more reasonable. I consider AbiWord a better word processore, that uses less resources and has been developed with less work than SO.

3 - What problems precisely are you refering to? I am willing to take any problems posted here and bring them back to the developers.

4 - Someone must like us. We have won Show Favorite at LinuxWorld twice in a row.

Sam TH
AbiWord Developer


Sam TH

Re:Let's have the KDE v. Gnome debate one more tim

[CloudWarrior]

"(1) has become moot with the free license now, but many people haven't gotten the message and will just hate Qt/Troll Tech forever."

Lets say you wanted to do a Qt version of Mozilla. Then the MPL tells you that you have to allow Netscape to take any code that you write, and not to let anybody else do so. The QPL tells you that you cannot let Netscape take the code. So combining two 'free' software projects is a failure.

That is the problem with these leaching licences. It creates little islands of software, which, although you can make them bigger, you cannot join together. Thus you end up reimplementing everything.

Unfortunately all the people who admire Mozilla, Qt, et al so want their project to be 'right', that they sweep this inconvinient fact under the carpet.

CloudWarrior . "I may be in the gutter but I'm looking to the stars"

Re:Let's have the KDE v. Gnome debate one more tim

[casp_]

Ok,
I'm using Gnome from the beginning ( cvs version 0.99.x ),
it is true, that when 1.0.0 was launched, there was stability issue... however, today Gnome is fast and stable...

If you don't believe it, just try the unstable gnome version ( which are extremly stable )...

What i think is KDE look like windows,
also, and it is probably related to QT :
it is extremly slow, and it look really ugly.

And gnome use a newer architecture which made it
far more evolutive than KDE.

Now just a hint,
i've noticed that when gnome is used with
enlightenment as a window manager, the memory
that the X server use keep growing ( i've reached
60% on a machine with 128 Mb of ram )...

It doesn't occur with wm like sawmill,
so if you want to experience a *fast* & light gnome, just have a try to the latest gnome tarball, with an other wm that enlightenment :)

Re:Let's have the KDE v. Gnome debate one more tim

[friend]

Maybe I fundamentally misunderstand the situation, but couldn't the effort that created Gnome have created a GPL work-alike to QT?

The Gnome-team offered to do just this, but the KDE team refused to give any guarantees that they would use the new gpl Qt-workalike product. Therefore, the Gnome-project was started.

Re:Let's have the KDE v. Gnome debate one more tim

[Daniel]

Yes, I might. Let me look at it again. They say Gnome 2.0 will be based on GTK+ 1.4. Fine. They also say Gnome 2.0 will release 'around fall 2000'. Ok. So you *could* infer that GTK+ 1.4 will be released around fall 2000

However, the Gnome folks don't speak for the GTK+ folks, and the GTK+ 1.4 release could be scheduled for any time prior to or after the Gnome 2.0 release, which is already pointed at a rather vague target. I'd like to hear from someone who knows something about GTK+ developement when I can start using the new version :)

Daniel

Sawmill configured slow- but it is not

[duder]

The last time I used Sawmill's default configuration, it sucked. With such a configuration, it seems slows and clunky. You speed problem mostly like is because Sawmill delays the raising of a focused window for a little bit, which gives the appearance of being slow. Anyone using Sawmill without configuring it will most likely see it as slow. Just spend five minutes configuring the thing and see what you think then.

Memory leaks

[Daniel]

Actually, there was a thread on debian-devel the other day that indicated that the memory (actually, X pixmap) leaking may not, in fact, be fixed. People were reporting that their X server was using over a hundred megabytes of memory if left running overnight; the only commonality was that they were running Gnome and using various imlib-based things (pixmap themes, transparent Eterms, etc)

This is actually worse than your average memory leak, as the only way to recover the memory is to restart X.

Daniel

Finite time

[Daniel]

If I could I'd clean up every piece of messy code I could get my hands on. Heck, I'd rewrite the entire system from scratch.

The fact is, though, that I do not have an infinite amount of time in which to work, and that therefore, I rely on other people to fix things I don't have time to get to. Does this make sense? I'm not sure it makes sense to me :)

In any event, E is way too broken on a fundamental level to be fixed. I switched to Sawmill and never looked back; I predict that E will either eventually become an entire operating system (possibly even incorporating a kernel :) ) -- the logical extension of its current development path -- or collapse under its own weight. Or possibly both.

Daniel

Do not mix GNOME/GTK apps and KDE/QT apps

[duder]

1. Well, being honest, I have never written anything in in qt or gtk but I have read threads about the issue and understand your point. Your complaint is that people that program with gtk usually use C, which is not object-oriented. QT is written C++ and therefore a lot of programmers that use QT use C++.

   
   

   However, just because a tool-kit is written in one language does not mean it can be used in others. Both QT and GTK have language bindings that allow for other languages to be used. I you wanted to, you could write a program that makes use of QT completely in plain old C.

   
   

   Your complaint about the tool-kits are really a C vs C++ issue.

2. As for your suggestion that people can pick the best applications of both desktop environments and use them in one meshed environment is not really that wise to suggest. First of all, both GTK and QT are large libraries and using both would be redundant. Being redundant almost aways results in more resources being used than neccessary. Second of all, GNOME and KDE try only to use one tool-kit because they are aiming for a default look and feel which would be completely hosed if you mixed gtk and qt apps.

   
   

   As GNOME and KDE evolve, it will become more evident that mixing KDE and GNOME apps are a bad idea. GNOME is headed towards a environment where the apps are all tightly intergrated together through GNOME using CORBA. An example would be that GNOME mail client will not store addresses but rely on the GNOME address book client. I do not know as much about KDE, but I know that they have scrapped their CORBA design. KDE and GNOME are just not mature enough for people to realize that the mixing of the apps are very bad.

Re:Do not mix GNOME/GTK apps and KDE/QT apps

[bero-rh]

I tend to disagree on both points.
1. is related to a C vs C++ issue, yes. One of the main problems I have with gtk (and I've programmed in both) is that it pretty much tries to do C++ stuff in C, and has to use some relatively ugly kludges to get it done.
Yes, I know gtk-- exists, and I have tried it, and it gets nowhere near Qt/kdelibs as far as usability for the programmer is concerned (at least IMO), partially because it has to use what gtk does.

As for 2., I know there's some redundancy and you don't get the same look and feel unless you configure it twice, but unless you're on a really slow machine, it's not that big an issue.
Interoperability between KDE and GNOME is going to improve, not to get worse (with KDE 2.0, you can use drag and drop from a KDE application to a GNOME application and vice versa).
KDE will use DCOP for a number of things GNOME will do with CORBA - given enough time, the other problem you mention will be solved with a DCOPCORBA bridge.

Re:Do not mix GNOME/GTK apps and KDE/QT apps

[duder]

I really disagree with you on that DCOP-CORBA bridge thing. It might be useful for some trival things but with a really environment intergrated app it would be useless. I wish I knew more about what I was talking about but I know that GNOME is evolving in a environment where one app is dependant on another specific app(s). Someone using KDE used a GNOME app that used a lot of other surronding GNOME apps, they would need those other GNOME apps. It just seems far too redundant to have a bunch of apps that you might not use just so that one can be used.

I guess, this redundancy/dependance could be fixed/worked-around with some creative programming but I would rather see a port of the app to the other environment. A port really just seems cleaner.

Re:Do not mix GNOME/GTK apps and KDE/QT apps

[Kenelson]

Do you care to elaberate on what you find so missing from gtk--? What version did you try?

I can name a lot of traits where I think Gtk-- has done better that Qt. (I don't try to compare it to all of KDE, because that is comparing the work of 3 guys going bindings to a magnitude more.) The use of templates to form signal/slot mechanism and the embracing of STL style within the code are most often mentioned by our users. We also strive for GUI independence be not forcing out types onto the users at all if we can help it. Thus you won't find Gtk::String creaping into your non-GUI code.

If you what improvements you need to supply feedback.

--Karl Nelson, Lead Gtk-- Developer

Re:screw Gnome! Hail KDE!

[Cid Highwind]

And when Debian defines their spec for licenses requiring that it be free for both personal and commercial use.. that sorta screws KDE over (provisions in the QPL

Why is requiring a commercial QT license worse than the provisions in the GPL which make it illegal to use GPL software in commercial products under ANY circumstance? You would be having a fit if somebody was putting GNOME code into a commecial product. QT realizes that despite the zealots, commercial software isn't going to go away any time soon, so they might as well make money from businesses using their code.

You have to expect a little zealotry from Debian, the call it "GNU/Linux", which seems like needless RMS ass-kissing to the non-zealot linux user community. (GNU/Debian GNU/Linux 8.2 GNU/CD 4, the entire GNU/source-tree of GNU/Emacs)

Seriously, the fact that KDE is less buggy, compiles on the first try every time, and adheres to most of the existing X standards that GTK ignores more than makes up for the crufty QT license. Speaking of which, I have read the QPL, and it seems fine to me. The continued availability of QT is assured, despite the FUD thrown out by the GNOME crowd. If TrollTech folds or is bought out, QT reverts to the BSD license.

Re:Let's have the KDE v. Gnome debate one more tim

[scrytch]

> My personal preference is KDE simply because GTK's API is (IMO) painful for programmers

Try Gtk--, the C++ binding to gtk+. Looks very Qt-ish, except it uses template functions for signal/slot connections instead of a gross macro hack to the language.

I use plain ol twm myself, there's something zen about having a completely blank desktop when you're not using anything.

Gnome Road Map

[Linux Lovah]

Who cares about what they are doing? I use Gnome now and I love it but KDE will win. With KOffice, Konqueror, KDevelope, and QT being about 10x easier to program than GTK I'm sorry to say but Gnome will lose this one, but yet again, who am I to say anything.

GNOME does seem to be slower than KDE

[TedC]

I used KDE as my main desktop for about 15 months before switching to GNOME last week. My initial impression is that GNOME is indead slower than KDE on similar hardware, but it still runs ok on what I've got (P2-300, 128 MB RAM, RIVA TNT). Its also not as far along as KDE as far as features go, but the "October" release seems to be much more stable than the version that shipped with RH 6.1 (1.0.39, I think).

So far I have to say that I like GNOME better than KDE, despite some of its shortcomings. The default E theme that RH uses is very clean, and I like the look of the GTK+ widgets. I'm not sure that there will be a clear winner here; both KDE and GNOME are miles ahead of the Windows UI. I'm looking forward to GNOME 1.2 and the stuff eazel is working on, but KDE 2.0 looks like its going to be great too.

BTW, this is the first time I've been out here in about six months, and I was dismayed to discover what a cesspool /. has become. :-(

Re:screw Gnome! Hail KDE!

[Cid Highwind]

Point 1: sorry, I thought it was off

Point 2: Yes, it does. You can't take GPL source and put it into a commercial binary. See the John Camack vs QuakeLives article from yesterday. You can put QT into a comercial app, close the source, and charge money for it, provided you pay TrollTech for the license.

Point 3: Yes, he is. I just think that insisting that GNU projects be called GNU/whatever is a little ridiculous.

I call FUD when I see it, and insinuating that TrollTech, or Debian, or RMS can yank the GPL rug out from under KDE is creating fear, uncertainty and doubt about the future availability of KDE. Karma whoring and zealotry aside, if the FUD shoe fits, wear it.

Re:Let's have the KDE v. Gnome debate one more tim

[AArthur]

AFAIK, that's not quite right. I am not a lawyer, but here is my impression on how the QPL works.

"Lets say you wanted to do a Qt version of Mozilla. Then the MPL tells you that you have to allow Netscape to take any code that you write,
and not to let anybody else do so."

No that's not correct at all. The MPL says you must give Netscape any code (for any use, properity or not) that you have created based on MPL source.

"The QPL tells you that you cannot let Netscape take the code."

Basically the QPL just says you must provide your code to anyone for free, if you want to use the qt free license. If Netscape decided to put your product to a non-free use (ie. not provide the source on demand), it must first purchase a license from Troll.

"So combining two 'free' software projects is a failure."

I wouldn't say so. Maybe I am just plain wrong, but a quick glance at both licenses, shows that some of those conflicts you refer to don't really exist.

Re:DOH hit wrong button

[Alex Belits]

Yeah there was a lot of very scary stuff going on and the "Commies" were behind most of it. Vietnam was "clearly" part of that trajectory. Even allowing the possibility that the whole Indo-china problem was not a plot hatched in Moscow, (I know it wasn't) they could hardly be complacent about it. It sure looked like a Commie plot, and certainly if you were an American policy planner, could you possibly doubt that the opposition in Moscow and Peking would make the most out of any opportunity arising from new satellite states in S.E. Asia?

The problem is, it was not a decision of one politician or group of politicians at that time. "Blame Commies for everything" at that time was "the" direction of american international politics, and at that time it was as "natural" for american politician to think in this direction, as thinking that planets make circles and epicycles around the Earth was "natural" for medieval astronomer despite better explanations being easy to come up with.

The Leninist strain of Marxism was something that simply had to be fought off actively. It was contagious, as it offered really bad people a way to get everything they always wanted --with the cooperation of people of good will. I cannot say that the necessity of resisting Leninism justified all means used...

That was Stalinism, not Leninism (and certainly had nothing to do with Marx) -- and it is well known that Communists themselves managed to turn domestic policy away from it as much as the dominant political force was able to soon after Stalin's death, so this was not tied anywhere to their main doctrine. Ideology/philosophy/religion often have very little to do with dictatorship and oppression -- by now ideas of "capitalism" and every major religion (with Islam being most prominent lately) were quite successfully used for the same goals, yet US didn't try to fight all of them at the scale anywhere comparable with communist ideology. It's also very likely that many of those countries would end up more tolerable (similar to USSR in 50's-80's) if US and other western countries didn't demonstrate so much hostility toward them just for the sake of anti-communism.

Be grateful for Non US coders

[hoss10]

Linus, Alan Cox, that bloke who invented the WWW. etc. There are many more I can't be bothered typing in.
A VERY large proportion of the code on your Linux CD came from various Europeans, Australians etc.
If it weren't for us you can wipe a few years of the development. Imagine trying to fight Win2K with what we had in the early 90's. We didn't even have a free kernel then! AFAIR

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"If I can shoot rabbits then I can shoot fascists" -