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GNOME 1.2 - What's In It For You?
Ur@eus writes: "We have just posted an article at Linuxpower.org desribing what's new in the GNOME 1.2 release. Since the GNOME press release was kinda thin I think this will be of interest to many people. You'll find the article here. " A nice overview, for non-Gnomers especially. You'll find even more beautiful screenshots, as well as more general information, on the Helixcode site.
KDE: an easy, accessible GUI designed to attract users of some proprietary non-operating systems to the GNU world, while not being exactly GNU itself (Qt, IIRC). Even looks as ugly as those NOSs.
Gnome: a hack in itself, hugely configurable, designed to attract 31337 h4x0r5 from the console. Looks überk3wl. Made of k3wlar.
8-]
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I'll probably get flames for this, but here it goes...
My situation is this:
I'm in the process of switching from Windows to Linux (at least on my home computer). Right now I'm seaching for programs that can replace my existing applications or to say it better, fulfil my needs.
My needs are not very different than what most other users want (and it should be GUI apps):
1. A browser.
2. Something for handling email, contacts, notes and todo's (preferably with support for my Palm).
3. An office suite, especially wordprocessing is critical.
4. All the other stuff (player for various audio/video formats, filemanager, etc.)
#1 Doesn't exist yet, Netscape is ugly and the fonts are to small.
Mozilla is looking good, but it is not stable enough yet.
Konquerer looks pretty cool too, but I haven't tried it yet (but I am going to try the KDE2 betas soon).
#2 Exist, but I haven't researched it much yet. Input is very welcome.
#3 Exist, Staroffice comes to mind, but also the upcomming KOffice sounds cool, and of course there is Abiword, Gnumeric and others.
#4 Does exist, and should cause much troubly generally.
I've just installed Gnome 1.2.0. Here is my take:
The install was absolutely smooth - very cool.
It looks cool and gives you a very clean desktop - much nicer than the latest KDE (version 1.1.2), but KDE2 is, OTOH, on it's way.
It should be easier to install an internet connection.
The start menu has to be "slower" - maybe it is just me, but I easily end up on the desktop, because I didn't guide my mouse properly (it should be easy to fix though).
The control center is pretty cool, but it should only be neccesary to hit "OK" once, even if you make multible changes.
It is a "work in progress", and therefore not stable enough. With stable I mean that *all* the applications should work "out of the box". The "Slashdot applet" and the XMMS' playlist doesn't - before releasing it, they should at least check that all works!
Futhermore various other apps has been crashing on me - it shouldn't when you install a total fresh Desktop Environment.
Overall Gnome 1.2.0 is a major leap forward, but it still needs some maturity, which is why I think most distributions uses KDE. It simply is generally more mature and gives the users a better overall experience.
It all fine that the kernel is rock solid, but if the desktop environment or the apps crashes all the time, then what do Windows users gain?
I want it all rock solid - not just the kernel.
That is what we call unacceptable default behavior, and is not the way you show off how well your Desktop Environment works. It would be like Windows wiping your HD after your CD burner makes a coaster.
Yes, *but*, unlike in C++, the pointer passed to these objects would be a pointer to the base, unless you casted.
I'd have to agree with this comment. I'd say that it was the easiest upgrade for a major component in any OS. Run the command at the helix site, click 3 times and let the installer do the rest. It worked perfectly for me the first time I tried it. It's things like this installer that will make Linux popular in the mainstream.
Just a hint for you. Lots of people use SaMBa on a 6 client workgrope LAN.
There are ways around these performance issues. I admin a huge mixed network sometimes. Like I said the problems are way below the interface.
Tell me about the security issues. I don't see how not telling users what is shared where will save you from anything. If a user is too clueless to use a particular resource properly he should be denied permission. If he is willing and able to abuse the system deliberately then not telling him what is out there will stall him for maybe 5 seconds.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
The one that loses is the one that has the fewest users and a declining userbase. Since both DEs have their own API, a DE can lose the battle if nobody develops for that API. If most people start using KDE, then few people will bother to develop for GTK/GNOME, thus GNOME will have lost the battle.
Correct. However you conveniently ignore the fact that the reverse can also occur. Will it? I don't know. But it's about as likely as your scenario is.
Speed and resource usage. KDE 2.0 is by far faster than any version of GNOME, and takes a significant amount less memory.
Have you by any chance used Gnome 1.2? Didn't think so. Go use it. Then come back and say that again. Or don't, if you suddenly find that statement you made holds no water whatsoever.
This disparity will only widen in the future, since the general GNOME infrastructure will grow quite a bit in 2.0, while KDE's probably won't grow much beyond 2.0 since the basic functionality is in place.
You're some sort of psychic, I take it? It seems to me as though Gnome and KDE are making the exact same types of changes along their paths to 2.0. New file managers, component architectures, themeability on KDE's side, etc. Gnome's added a 1.2 step, but what's the harm in that?
Couple this with the fact that DCOP/KParts is far superior to Bonobo in terms of speed and resource usage (though maybe not as flexible in a distrubuted environment) KDE bowls GNOME over in the speed/resource usage deparment.
And you speak from... how much experience? As I thought, none. Go use it, then come back when you can make arguments and back them up. If you can't back up your arguments, you're just flaming.
KDE still has a much tighter integration between apps than GNOME does. It only takes a cursory look at Corel Linux to show what a little ingenuity and KDE can do to make Linux almost as friendly as Windows for the desktop user.
Ah, and thus we get to the whole crux of your argument, and the real reasn you're posting: "KDE is better because I'm a Corelite." Let's see your examples. I hve no doubt they probably exist, but where are they? You're certainly not too cooperative in pointing them out. Why not?
KDE has far better apps and much more developer support.
According to whom? KDE has StarOffice, but other than that every KDE app I've seen has a Gnome analog. For the most part, the revere is also true.
Sure the KDE libraries can be loaded, but with the increased bloat in both 2.0 level libraries, people will increasingly wish to not have to load the libraries twice.
Again, you conveniently ignore the fact that the people could just as well choose Gnome as KDE.
As such, they will stick to the DE that has the most/best apps.
Which is...? Your answer is conspicuously absent. As if you realized that since you have near-zero experience with Gnome, particularly recent versions, you just might be wrong. Use them, if only for a little while, so you can make a real comparison in that regard.
And please don't forget that even if you are correct, that means little. Remember, people stuck with Windows, which hardly has the "best" apps (the single possible exception being Excel, and both Linux DE's have spreadsheets which are coming along quite nicely in that regard).
KDE is more familer. Diehard Linuxites call it being too Windowy, but it is a big strength for the rest of us who grew up on the start menu and Explorer.
For better or for worse, Gnome is just as Windowsy as KDE. And both are getting even more Windowsy as the versions progress. It's quite sad, really. You'd think the Open-Source community could do better, interface-wise. It's been done. NeXT had a better GUI which was almost completely original. So did MacOS. Win9x and OSX are fusions of these two; Win9x took the worst of both and added some decidedly anticompetitive elements. It'll be interesting to see if OSX has it done right (I admit I don't like some of what I see, but I'll reserve judgement until I've actually used the thing).
These factors, coupled with increasing support for KDE from the business community will allow KDE to become the dominant Linux desktop.
Show me your "growing support from the business community." I don't see it. I saw StarOffice getting KDE integration back when it was still proprietary (versus the pseudo-proprietary Community-Source liense it's under now). Oh, and Corel bundles it with their system. That's all I ever saw. If there's more I'd be glad to hear about it, but I simply don't see it anywhere.
However they seem to think that putting the biggest, most memory hogging features into the DE will automatically make it better.
Give an example of a "big, memory-hogging" feature Gnome has that doesn't make it better.
Software size and quality seems to not be a very top priority, and software speed seems to be an even lower priority.
Depends. Everyone knows that Gnome 1.0 was released too early; I can't dispute that claim. It was underfeatured and unstable. The stability got fixed quite some time ago. 1.2 adds more of the features. Not all of them yet; a few are still in development (Bonobo and Nautilus, most notably).
Speed... well, I'm not so sure. A lot of that seems to have to do with Imlib. Everything that I've seen that replaced it wuth gdk-pixbuf seemed to get a big kick in the pants, speed-wise.
Of course, you can't expect phenomenal speed when you're drawing your entire GUI with pixmaps. That's a large reason of why Gnome feels so slow for a lot of people. Switch out Sawfish for Window Maker and the Pixmap themes for GTKStep and you've suddenly got a much faster desktop. I like Sawfish myself, and used it for several months, but as of this moment it just doesn't seem to be able to touch Window Maker for speed and stability, though Window Maker's icons do get in the way on a Gnome desktop. Things may have changed with the developmental gdk-pixbuf versions of Sawfish; I intend to try it out as soon as I manage to compile the thing.
Either way, this is what's wrong with the state of discussion on Slashdot. People don't debate anymore; they just flame. They'll spout drivel like this post's parent, which say a lot but prove nothing, and thus are no better than "Gnome sucks! No, KDE sux0rz! No way, Gnome 0wnZ KDE! No, KDE is ph4r m0r3 k-r4d @nd l33t! No, you must PH3AR GNOME!" What happened to people not jut making their point, but backing it up? OK, so Gnome sucks NINJA ass; why? OK, so maybe KDE sucks big fat naked petrified donkey dick; why? The point is, unless we get into real discussion, and point out the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two systems, neither one is going to truly improve. They'll just get stuck in an endless feature war, neither one getting the features users really want. They'll just try to one-up the other, and the end result won't be any better than Win2K.
A lot of programs require gnome libs because they provide a lot of functionality which would be a pain in the ass to code yourself. For example, I'm the author of PowerShell, and writing it without Gnome-libs would require me to write the terminal emulation code myself. Why bother, when it's already there? Now, I try to support diversity and try to provide RPMs, DEBs, tarballs, CVS access, etc., so that people can run it on non-RedHat systems. It's also in FreeBSD ports and as soon as I get off my ass I'm going to fix stuff so that it works on Solaris and IRIX as well.
About apps spawning Gnome panels when run, I agree with you that that's just ridiculous (unless, of course, you're running a panel applet.)
--
Hey I luv console, but if you use GUI it doesn't mean you're not a hacker.
:)
Hell, it's hard to be a hacker on the console. Ever try to run a pair of makes, emacs, a web brower to look at online docs, info and man all on the console? Gets pretty crowded, even with virtual terminals.
Really, the only thing I actually need a GUI at all for is Netscape - most everything else is console apps anyway. But I figure if I'm going to use a GUI I should use a really tricked out one...
> Well, excuse me, but if you follow the slashdot announcements of GNOME, there is a question each time about whether this GNOME version is stable. And every time the answer is "Yes, it's been rocksolid".
/. and the GNOME announcements list continuously since before version 0.30. The only versions of GNOME that I recall ever being announced either place are 0.30, 0.9x, 1.0, 1.0.53 (= October GNOME), some kind of 1.2 pre-release, and now 1.2 (originally expected to be called April GNOME). The 0.30, 0.9x, and the pre-1.2 cannot be considered "stable releases" no matter how you want to spin them. 1.0 came with at least an implicit warranty of stability, which it was not. I am not aware of anyone anywhere ever claiming otherwise since the day it was released. Version 1.0.53 is rock solid, at least in my experience on three systems running completely different hardware, different kernels, etc, plus less frequent use on four other systems of varying configuration. I cannot speak for 1.2, since I have not tried it yet, but I have not yet seen anyone saying that it is unstable. (Nor that it is the first "rocksolid" release, since anyone who ever ran 1.0.53 knows otherwise.)
I have been following both
The only GNOME that ever failed to live up to expectations was the original 1.0. That was fixed by 1.0.53.
In short, you continue to misrepresent what the developers and users have been claiming for GNOME, and I am going to continue to point it out as often as I see you post it, so that you will not mislead any lurkers who may not know they shouldn't believe you.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you feel like it, you can port the Qt toolkit to MS-Win32 or to the Mac or to BeOS if you want; there is no license restriction that stops you.
How about this one ??
You may make modifications to the Software and distribute your modifications, in a form that is separate from the Software, such as patches.
So, you can port QT to win32, you simply have to do it in a way that the port is a patch that your END USERS will have to successfully apply to QT for linux and then successfully build. That requires your end user to know patch and have whatever compiler you used.
That makes the chances of any port actually happening pretty close to zero. Technically it can happen, but logistically it is impossible.
The only "rights" that are extended to Qt-applications are that the user of such an application is granted the right to the source code.
Also from the QT free license.
If the items are not available to the general public, and the initial developer if the Software requests a copy of the items, then you must supply one.
This clause for applications that LINK to QT assure Trolltech that no one will ever write an in house program that requires some degree of privacy without buying QT Pro. If you want privacy in your applications that LINK to QT, you must pay the man. If you want to write programs that use QT and are not GPL, you must pay the man.
They're a CORPORATION. They survive by MAKING MONEY. Do you understand that? They are being nice by releasing their software under an OSI-approved Open Source license; nobody REQUIRES that they use such a license. Grow up.
They were ten very good programmers trying to make a buck. I don't fault them for being proprietary, or releasing their product under whatever license they choose. I fault people like you for compromising freedom in software. I fault Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens for not objecting to the license and granting it OSI certification. It fails on the basic, very basic, premise that an open source application should allow derivatives under the same license as the original. Since I could only release QT derivatives as patches on the original, I cannot effectively EVER release a derivative anyone but a hacker would use.
Now don't get me wrong Chris - I think KDE is fantastic. I simply don't like the licensing upon which it is based. And I think calling it open source is a farce. I would rather see software preserve my freedom to modify it and share my modifications with others. Right now, I lack those freedoms with QT.
The biggest issues are with the lack of a real right to distribute modifications. That blocks forking. Now, forking in itself is generally bad, but the threat of forking can inspire real competition. Usually that is plenty. It also blocks me from distributing a new patched QT library to Grandma. Since she doesn't do patch.
The funny thing is, a while back KDE had a whole bunch of new stuff to announce within a fairly short time and Gnome was comparatively quiet, so Slashdot got slammed for doing more KDE than Gnome coverage.
Right now Gnome has more to say than KDE. Then, at some point, KDE 2 will appear and the balance will swing the other way.
So it goes. I've used both desktops and agree that each one has strengths and weaknesses. And the people who develop both desktops are very nice, helpful, and hard-working and both groups deserve plenty of recognition and praise.
- Robin
1. "Network Neighborhood" : It should feel like the MS version too.
3. "Stability, Stability and Stability" : So these people have a reputation to work on.
These are probably incompatible. Network Neighborhood is IMHO one of the top 3 things wrong with Windows.
--
What do the other 10% use?
Bitchslapped? Give Rob a bitchslap from bitchslapped.com.
There are a lot of things that X just does better than the console, though. Netscape, LyX, TiK, licq, xmms, dockapps, and just the general ability to have sooo many things on one screen at once is very useful. And besides, what use is a big monitor without lots of things to put on it? ;P
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END OF LINE
The previous poster had it wrong, but the Debian crew has it right.
KDE 1.x is illegal to distribute in binary form. And this is no fault of QT 1.x, it's just that the KDE developers used a license that was not legal against the QT 1.x license and the GPL. If you want some proof, go start a flamewar on debian-legal.
KDE 2 should be on better grounds. The QT 2 license is far closer to Open Source. And with a little luck, the KDE developers won't release KDE under a license that is incompatible with that license. Of course, it's not out.
Now, Gnome on the other hand.. The libs are LGPL. The apps are GPL. No legal stew here. As for development, I'd say GTK+/Gnome is in a better position now. GTK+ has both C and C++ to play with, libglade, bindings to lots of other languages.. KDE has kdevelop (good) but I really don't understand why TrollTech would design their API in a way that requires extra programs to compile the code..
Considering the Open Source development model has allowed humanity's greatest thinkers to collaborate on GNOME, it seems incredible that the developers are happy to live in the shadow of Microsoft's GUI. And as a wise man once said "He who lives in the shadow is a pale and weak imitation". This is how I feel about GNOME - until the developers decide to show ambition and creatvity, GNOME will always be less than the sum of its parts.
I agree 100% KDE is stable, I've yet to see a stable version of Gnome, and yes I've tried 1.2, it is more stable but GTK will never be as good as QT, end of story, and as for aesthetically more pleasing, please, Gnome never looks finished, and gives me a general feeling of being thrown together. (Different sized icons and such)This is just my opinion of course.
I wish it was hyperbole. I actually sat down and timed it one time because I couldn't believe how slow it was.
I work with 4 desktops, with 8 terminal windows and one Netscape browser open. The system is a Compaq ProLiant 8000 with 512 MB of RAM, 9 GB of disk (including a 512 MB swap partition), and an ATI video adapter with the XMach64 server. The OS is Red Hat 6.1. Yes, I was running Enlightenment; it was the standard installation, uncustomized. At all. Not even a custom theme loaded.
The common thread across these comments is Enlightenment being slow. Okkay, fine, but isn't that the standard window manager for GNOME?
I'm not one of those folks who use GNOME for political reasons - one look at my
--
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Thinking of Evolution, has anyone clicked on the screenshot of "A message with an attachment"? I dunno, something about including the ILOVEYOU virus/trojan/whatever in the screenshot really amused me.
Choice my man :) :)
:)
That's the beauty of Linux (I'll include the *BSDs in this also). If you want to run totally CLI, go for it. If you want to run X with just a lightweight window manager, go for it. If you want to run GNOME and KDE at the same time . . . go for it.
That's the beauty behind the system that we love so much is that everything is replaceable. You can get a different SMTP program and a different mail client if you want. You can install as much or as little as you like. Of course, that goes for your user interface as well.
Some days I run GNOME, some days I turn it off and just run a Window Manager. So, I get to decide how much 'bloat' I wan't to be running at the time. And since I'm always right about what I want for me . . . it's perfect. (Just like you are always right about what you want.)
Man I'm in Love with Linux!
Gorkman
> I tried versions up to 1.0 and still they had panel crashes every hour or so.
Version 1.0 should have been labeled as a pre-release. However, version 1.0.53, the "October GNOME", was quite stable, and has only shown me a couple of bugs even though in continuous use since then (much less trouble than I ever had under Windows 95).
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It's not about zealotry, it's about choice. Obviously when you have two products that offer the same services, one is going to be better at some things than the other is not and vice versa. The beauty with having both KDE and GNOME is you can choose which one better suits you, which from my experience would be KDE if you want stability (if you can call it that) and GNOME if you want a pretty interface. Then there's the countless other options... It's all up to you. So don't complain when a product gets coverage. That's the last thing that we need. More coverage of more products makes us more informed and the products that get covered even better because of feedback. I'd rather be aware of a product that sucks (not saying GNOME or KDE sucks, just a hypothetical) than not know it exists at all.
Ahem, try
Tell your friends about xenu.net
KDE-2.0 in BETA and Gnome 1.2 on it's way out soon. XF86-4.0 is out and the new Kernel has gone into the "Linus vacation stage". We should be seeing serious Linux desktop movements this christmas.
Never mind Wine heading to 1.0 ( eventually ). The big question isn't even "will you be using KDE or Gnome?". Most of us have already made that decision. The mystery is "what will the new users coming to Linux use?" RedHat and Debian don't install KDE as the default. All the other desktop wanabees do. RedHat is very strong with new users. Most people here of them as the #1 Linux.
What this split means is that for the next year or two ( at least ) KDE and Gnome will be pushing the technology and the usability as much as possible. This ongoing conflict continues to attract young developers with nifty apps. It's this competing against each other that let them beet the tar out of CDE ( At least the Sun and SCO implementations I have used ) and draw close to Mac and Win98 in some respects and even pass them in others.
Here is my top 5 list of neto things to add before releasing either of these desktops in the next version.
1. "Network Neighborhood" : It should feel like the MS version too.
2. "Drag to resize" : This on Taskbars.
3. "Stability, Stability and Stability" : So these people have a reputation to work on.
4. "File Format compatibility" : Frankly. I would want Koffice and Goffice apps to use the same file formats. It's bad enough when you need to keep tweaking a semi broken filter for MS bloatware but why shouldn't KO and GO use the exact same blend of XML and compression.
5. "On the fly resolution switching" : Yes this is really something XF86 doesn't do but I still want to gripe about it. ctrl alt - dose part of it. not all.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
it seems to me to be reminiscent of some of the bloat that i switched to linux to get away from.
:) Almost like the joys of *free* beer(tm). :)
;-)
yeah, but at least this is *free* bloat
speaking of free beer bloat after today's Holiday celebrations I have a ton of it
Unfortunatelly, not all of them. Have you tried using GNOME apps without a mouse? Its possible (sometimes only with the help of XFree86 MouseKeys), but inconvenient. Can you place two or more toolbars in the same row (or a toolbar next to the menu) to save some screen real estate? Heck, some of the apps won't even let me switch on small toolbar icons and turn off the text. (Besides, GNOME/KDE copied Windows Explorer, which IMnsHO is a pure piece of unnecessary bloat. MC in an xterm is the way to go! :-)
OK, I'm ranting here. GNOME does look very nice. I only wish it would feel a little bit better. That's why I prefer plain IceWM over a desktop environment. IceWM's focus is on feel, not on the look. I still hope I can say the same thing about GNOME/KDE eventually.
I know what you mean. Helix has always had cool splashes, even if I reveal my shallowness by saying so.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
>>that let them beet the tar out of CDE
>I guess you haven't used CDE much then.
I have. On HP-UX workstations, for about a year and a half at work.
It was much less flexible, more difficult to reconfigure, uglier, and more limited in what functionality it offered the user, compared to current stable versions of either Gnome or KDE. That sounds like a broad, sweeping statement, but it applies to every specific aspect of the system I used often: the window manager, the panel, the configuration system, the help screens, the text editor, and the file manager. Well, to be honest I didn't use the file manager often. You wouldn't either, given either moderate shell proficiency or a choice like gmc or kfm.
It was more stable than KDE Beta 4 or Gnome 1.0, but more recent versions of both have negated that deficiency too, or reversed it if you consider the system as a whole. My officemate last year had more crashes on his $8000 workstation (3, I think) than I did on my $3000 Linux/XFree/Gnome PC; though to be fair it looked like X server or OS crashes, not a CDE problem.
Maybe because of the recent opening of the source on Motif it'll be more likely we'll see these things getting ported over
They have been ported over. Red Hat, for one, sold CDE/Motif for Linux before either Gnome or KDE existed. Didn't catch on, did they?
but so far, the new open-source "modern" desktop environments are only being used as a secondary to CDE on anything but the open-source OSes.
Because CDE is usually preinstalled, because the modern (ooh, look, if you put it in quotes it looks dubious!) desktop environments aren't as simple to install (or even compile, on many, particularly older, systems) as they are on Linux, and because on most networks they can't be installed by the users, only by admins who may be afraid of change or reluctant to put in the work.
I think it'll be a long time before anything "beats the tar out of CDE" as far as sheer number of users.
Actually, it's already happened. It was last year sometime when the rate of new Linux server purchases exceeded that of other Unix servers. And when you consider the relatively greater usage of Linux on cheaper workstations, and the number of non-purchased Linux installs, I think it's a safe bet that there are more Gnome and KDE users total. Whether either desktop individually surpasses CDE yet is questionable, but they both will within the next year, and rightfully so.
I would also love to see this feature added. My (minimal) usage of beos r4.5 really impressed me with their implementation of multiple desktops with varying resolutions.
Those screen shots are, in a word, gorgeous. I'll have to fire up the Cable Modem tonite for sure.
This whole GNOME/KDE thing will be rendered moote if the package actually IS stable and easy to use. The reason? The people we want to run Linux/BSD/TRU64/*nix-flavour-of-the-day mostly use Windows at the moment. A UI this nice, this pleasing to the eye will draw them like bees to honey. Never underestimate the power a pretty picture has over John Q User. If they get work done, so much the better.
Right now I use KDE - but will likely end up using GNOME. Just to show off the pretty screens to the lusers looking over my shoulder.
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Puh-lease yourself.OO generally requires an OO language, anything else is a hack. There *is* a functional difference between the C code and the C++ code --- The C code requires assignment of the function pointer every time the class is created. Also, since the this pointer is passed implicitly in C++, the compiler can optimize it away by storing it in a register or other high-speed storage location, whereas in C, it must be passed the same way all other pointers are.
// Note that in C++ // empty parenthases
// mean (void). Also,
// try doing comments
// like this in C.
// Overrided // Overrided
// Yes, encapsulation is a *good* thing // Yes, *class member*.
Also, how the heck do you plan to handle virtual functions? In your create function, you could create a struct with that struct as its first member, yes, but then what happens when you try to use the pointer passed to it? You must cast it for a derived class. Ugly hack.
Your lack of knowledge is evidenced by your somewhat misleading C++ code.
class widget {
public:
void open();
void close();
};
Try doing *this* in C:
template class AnimationWidget: public Widget, private
DisplayOfAnimation
{
public:
virtual void Tick();
virtual void DrawWidget();
void SetAnimation(AnimationType* t);
AnimationType* GetAnimation();
private:
AnimationType m_Animation;
Timer m_Timer;
};
Templates and operator overloading are fine *when used properly*. If you complain about templates in C++, then one can complain about casting in C. Both have high potential for abuse. C++ doesn't force operator overloading upon you, either.
Encapsulation of class members is also impossible in C without some compiler trickery. Don't complain that encapsulation isn't neccecary --- every time you have used a static global variable or static function, you have used encapsulation.
You make an unfair argument by equating one of the most basic features of C++ with the C version, and then attacking an advanced feature of C++ that C could not possibly implement. I suspect you dislike these things because they cannot be implemented in C (Without something like CFront, anyway.).
Please re-read my post above. a) I can't speak for the other authors, like I said, but I can assure you that any bias you percieve is only on the part of indivual posters, certainly not some sort of policy or directive from Rob. b) why in the world would I want to be anti-KDE? There are licensing issues that are well-known but which frankly I am not swayed by. Since KDE is my primary desktop, perhaps I've simply let me pro-KDE bias distort my morals or something.
But if you're trolling ... well, OK, I'd rather respond than not in this case :) I *like* KDE, am not against it in favor of Gnome. Or vice versa, though. Slashdot has a bunch of authors, each of whom is free to feel, and post, otherwise.
Why spread hostility? Each of the desktops has its own advantages, and we'll continue to post news about them both.
Where is the lie?
Honestly confused, timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
This "you can't do OO in plain C" attitude is silly and immature. Anyone who has done any work on a large (>100,000 line) C project has probably run into OO methodologies employed within the program.
Certainly, OO in C is possible (and done all the time). Of course, the question is more "which is it easier to do OO in?", in which case the answer is obviously C++ (no Java/Python/whatever comments please, I'm talking about C and C++ only here).
Heck, you can do OO in assembly if you have a good design and structure your code properly.
I'm not much of an asm programmer (just inline stuff), but it seems like that would be pretty hard without some decent data structures.
It's not the splash screen that's he's talking about, it's the overall impression that Gnome is inviting. And yes, that is partially the reason for Big Software Companies' successes. Joe Consumer doesn't care how technical something is, as long as it works, and most importantly: works in a way they can understand.
My grandmother doesn't want to edit configuration files in order to get X to work, she wants to buy a computer and have it work without trouble on her part. Gnome's splash screen gives that impression.
-----
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Please don't suggest f*cked hardware, thats what Windows NT users say every day when thier beloved OS BSOD's on them.
Sometimes they're right. It's easy enough to check; simply swap out the hardware. I've had a SCSI card and ethernet card physically fail in the last two years, and I've seen two DIMMs, a video card, and a hard drive fail among my friends. It happens. RAM failures are the worst, as it's basically impossible to distinguish between unstable software and stable software running on unstable RAM. Swapping out the RAM to test or heavily loading it with known stable software (a large compile in Linux, for example) is still possible.
Also, most Linux users are more hardware savvy than the Windows crowd.
That means they know how to avoid low-quality hardware, not how to telepathically detect when their quality hardware goes bad. These things all have their MTBF, you know.
"It must be the hardware." is a last resort Windiot explanation.
True, but that doesn't mean it isn't sometimes a correct one.
Even when it's not the hardware, it can be the drivers. Adaptec drivers in Linux are pretty shaky when the hardware returns unexpected (but correctable) errors, for instance, and I've seen Windows systems go from daily crashes to stability with updated video drivers.
First off...
I haven't seen a single Gnome app spawn a panel without an option. Sure, gnomeicu *BY DEFAULT* wants to make a little docking icon thing for the panel, but it is configurable in the options as well as at the command line "gnomeicu -a". Other programs are similar as well.
Second point:
Helix has made debs for a long while now, and they have been available for the general public to apt-get for around a week or so. Many Helix people are Debian users, by the way.
Well I run KDE on my desktop - but that doesn't
:^)
stop me to run Gnome applications.
For example Gaim is a great program, so I use
that.
I'd be interested to see a comparison between
KDE/Gnome apps - which has the better application
for which task?
Then I want to pick and choose.
it's a lot easier to miss by one on a menu than to click 15 pixels too far to the right in an apps' title bar.
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Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
You don't have to distribute it as patches; you can distribute a version under a different name, like KDE did for a while during QT 2.1's development. READ THE LICENSE
They either use debian or Suse. I don't think there are anymore, but I could be wrong.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
From the article:"The kind people at Helix Code had set up a system to supply everyone with prebuilt binaries for the release, but due to their master server being hit by the Slashdot effect minutes after the files were posted, most mirrors failed to get the packages and were close to useless."
___
Tautology: needless repetition of the same sense in different words; redundancy Regarding this: . Since the GNOME press release was kinda thin I think this will be of interest to many people. You'll find the article here. " A nice overview, for non-Gnomers especially. You'll find even more beautiful screenshots, as well as more general information, on the Helixcode site. GNOME is all kinda thin, not just press releases. GNOME is just beautiful screenshots Helixcode Gang need more real world contact and more commitment to promises instead of new "fancy" but buggy versions
Offtopic, I don't care, I have to agree. I literally laughed my ass off and called my brother (who actually got the ILOVEYOU virus, but on his webmail account, plus, he uses netscape so he's less endangered) to check it out - even he got the irony.
Every time I see another release of GNOME, I shudder to think of what could have been. At this point, it is obvious to me that GNOME will lose the war with KDE in the desktop environment department. Now don't start on me about how free software cannot lose a war, or about how the two are not competing. The one that loses is the one that has the fewest users and a declining userbase. Since both DEs have their own API, a DE can lose the battle if nobody develops for that API. If most people start using KDE, then few people will bother to develop for GTK/GNOME, thus GNOME will have lost the battle. You can say that GNOME is a project and will continue wether or not it has support, and you'd be right. A project can still be alive and still have some users and still have lost. At some point, it just become irrelevant. Take a look at OpenStep. Sure it may oneday rise up and grap the hearts and minds of Linux users, but it is more likely that it will continue to putter along, maybe contributing some valuable technology to one of the dominant DEs in the proccess. Even if the developers do not want it to be that way, GNOME and KDE are at war. They are at war for the deskspace of the user and the coding time of the developer. Up until recently, the only reason I got anywhere near GNOME is because it had the nicest user environment available in Linux. It was asthetically pleasing, and generally nicer to work with than KDE. Of course, in KDE 2.0, KDE took GNOME's asthetics and usability and made it its own. Now that both are on the same level, interface-wise, KDEs strenghts can come out and allow it to pull ahead of GNOME. In a succinct list, these strenghts are,
1) Speed and resource usage. KDE 2.0 is by far faster than any version of GNOME, and takes a significant amount less memory. This disparity will only widen in the future, since the general GNOME infrastructure will grow quite a bit in 2.0, while KDE's probably won't grow much beyond 2.0 since the basic functionality is in place. Couple this with the fact that DCOP/KParts is far superior to Bonobo in terms of speed and resource usage (though maybe not as flexible in a distrubuted environment) KDE bowls GNOME over in the speed/resource usage deparment. This is significant becuase people don't leave Windows to arrive at another bloated OS.
2) KDE still has a much tighter integration between apps than GNOME does. It only takes a cursory look at Corel Linux to show what a little ingenuity and KDE can do to make Linux almost as friendly as Windows for the desktop user.
3) KDE has far better apps and much more developer support. Sure the KDE libraries can be loaded, but with the increased bloat in both 2.0 level libraries, people will increasingly wish to not have to load the libraries twice. As such, they will stick to the DE that has the most/best apps.
4) KDE is more familer. Diehard Linuxites call it being too Windowy, but it is a big strength for the rest of us who grew up on the start menu and Explorer. It is a moot point which one is theoretically easier/more intuitive. If that mattered, NeXT would still be around (or AfterStep would be dominating in the DE department.) Whatever is easier is whatever people are used to. MS might have the clout to force a new style of desktop on people (a la Windows 95) but Linux does not.
These factors, coupled with increasing support for KDE from the business community will allow KDE to become the dominant Linux desktop.
Back to my thoughts about GNOME, it saddens me to think of what GNOME could have been. It has a great set of people working on it, and the developers have a great asthetic sense. However they seem to think that putting the biggest, most memory hogging features into the DE will automatically make it better. Software size and quality seems to not be a very top priority, and software speed seems to be an even lower priority. Features seems to head the list, and everyone knows what that mentality gets you... it gets you Windows 2000.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I switched from GNOME to KDE because, on a quad Pentium II Xeon 450, I got tired of asking to switch windows with the mouse, waiting ten seconds, and still typing at the wrong window...has that gotten any better?
--
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
The general tone of the comments here makes me want to weep - I can not believe the amount of bitching.
/. moderators would know not to moderate that kind of post up.
There are a few points of FUD always bandied about in these discussions.
1) GNOME is unstable.
This is wrong, plain and simple. 1.0 was released too early, and gave people a bad impression. Does the fact that GNOME was unstable make it unstable now? No!
2) GNOME is a hack.
People generally say this because they can not understand OO in C. If you like C++, fine, use it.
Use one of the GTK C++ bindings, eg gtk--.
The GTK+ object system is more flexible due to its dynamic nature, and it is (in my experience) easier to know what is going on - no pointer assignments doing copies remotely over CORBA, due to the fun of operator overloading.
3) Its all an RMS conspiracy against KDE.
This is the "Debian hates KDE!" type stuff.
The fact is that it is a breach of the licence to distribute KDE in binary form right now, as they still don't seem to have made up their minds on what to do (Artistic Licence, GPL exception).
This will be fixed I'm sure.
There are a lot of other stupid things people say,
but by now I would hope
you're forgetting one thing. much like microsoft installs it's own proprietary shit and basically forces it down people's throats, we're coming to this in the linux world now too. "You need the GNOME libs for this program" or that program, or whatever. Choice is rapidly becoming necessity :(
More and more programs are going to rely on GNOME to supply something and that's where it gets hairy. It comes down to either use GNOME because it's got a lot of shit writen for it, or use the CLI or blackbox or E and suffer the consequences for not using the window manager that everyone else is using, and more importantly, coding for.
Oh well, c'est la vie. I still have my guitar.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Just because a group of people think that the project "isn't as cool" or "isn't as good" as another project doesn't mean they need to stop give up and throw in the towel.
GNOME != KDE just as KDE != GNOME. There are things that are great about both yet you'd be nuts to say to the other "you guys need to shut down because you don't do what the other does." The GNOME Crew thinks they are doing great and can keep going. Why should they stop now just because you think KDE rules?
300th comment
(-1, Humor Deficient.)
You really don't think this guy was serious, do you?
Weapons of Mass Analysis
It Works. No Problems :-).
I've just started to look at GTK--. It looks like a better way to use GTK in a C++ program but was not available in a stable form till now. Abiword very sensibally used the working base of plain GTK we probabally won't switch. The GUI front front end is rather minor part of a program as complex as a full featured Word Processor.
As for the flame against GNOME, it is clearly incorrect by number of users using and number of developers developing for GNOME. No argument needed. The facts speak for themselves. That is not to say that KDE is not a great piece of software :-)
Martin Sevior
Abiword Developer
tbat was my point, flamer
--
+&x
I'm not a major fan of ESR, but I did read The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and one of its foremost elements was the principle, "Release Early, Release Often." The gist of this concept is that it is desirable to have frequent unstable releases and periodic stable releases, clearly differentiated from each other. That way, users desiring stability can use the stable releases, and developers, debuggers and users desiring more features can use the unstable releases. A case in point is the Gimp. 1.0.4 is very stable, but is missing a whole raft of features. Various minor releases in the 1.1 line have been unstable to varying degrees, but have contained more features. Some of them have been rock-solid, and some have been... well, not so solid. But the point is to release often, and marke stable releases as such. I don't think anyone thinks that October Gnome (1.0.53) was unstable. I've been using 1.2 since it came out, too, and no part of it has crashed yet, even panel applets. For that matter, I used the explicitly-marked unstable 1.2 prereleases, and they were mostly stable, too, except for a few panel applets.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
GNOME, for me, is the only way to go. I adore it. People in this forum have noted the similarities between it and the Windows environment, but there's a depth in GNOME that's not present in the MS desktops.
:)
Yes, 'out of the box' it has a 'start' button, a taskbar, and even a little clock in the same place. But if you take a little time to experiment, you may notice that any part of it can be turned off. Other bits can be turned on. You actually have complete control (a startling revelation for some people).
What the GNOME people seem to have done is take all the popular ELEMENTS from the most popular GUIs and built them all as components that can be added in. You like a Mac interface better? Well all the pieces are there. Rearrange a few things, turn things on and off, and you've got one.
Think for a minute - GNOME seems to be all about accessability, so is it a surprise it defaults to looking a bit like a Win95 interface? Of course not. Show me a person who has a computer and doesn't have a clue how to drive Win95 these days. It's an ACCESSABLE interface, and quite good for a novice user to get the confidence to keep exploring and changing things.
What GNOME is growing into is a wonderful system where the elements that make any GUI great are all there, but it's up to the user to decide which bits are of value to them. If you like taskbars, have a taskbar. Virtual desktops, take them or leave them. Start menu, optional extra.
For me, this is the major strength with GNOME. It doesn't judge other systems. It embraces and extends.
Wasting your time since 1997.
>Am I alone in wondering whether GNOME is truly
>worthy of so much recent coverage on Slashdot?
>Is GNOME really the final word in GUI usability?
>GNOME still feels to be very much emulating the
>look and feel of Windows 95, and GNOME even
>seems to emulate much of Windows' bloat and
>instability.
Although I do not think Gnome has had the "greatest thinkers" collaborating on it (don't take it the wrong way, but there is a big difference between smart people and "humanity's greatest thinkers"), I have to agree: I find it dissapointing.
Stability issues aside, GNOME's UI seems to me an imitation of Win/Mac/predecessors, which is not entirely bad, except that KDE does a better job at imitating them.
Maybe it provides greater control over the aesthetic components as someone wrote, but what are the choices? Mac-like? Amiga-like? Isn't that a problem with Linux GUIs? ("We not only imitate Win95, we also imitate any other OS's idea of a GUI!)
I love the idea of changing GUIs to whatever I feel like, it's one of the reasons I use Linux, but the GUIs are far from the pinnacle of intuition and natural-feel.
Maybe I'm not looking where I should, but there seems to be little experimentation in new UIs precisely in a community with the greater potential: propietary OSes has more to lose (changing their popular GUIs is risky and expensive, although some are wise to take risks) and perhaps more limited influx of ideas (marketing research does not a good design create, it can only show how bad an existing one is).
Currently I use Enlightenment all by itself (not as an addendum), and I like it (a lot, in spite of the hiccups) over my "stable" KDE desktop.
A non-technical person said of Enlightenment "It looks like game." as if it were bad, because he felt disoriented outside the Win-paradigm, so I can see why there is a need to duplicate it.
Still, that statement protests exactly what I find promising: games are about the only sector in the consumer software that seems willing to reinvent GUIs and come up with good ones, or the game just doesn't sell. So I guess Enlightenment is doing something right, and it's not just me.
But is it the only not-an-homage GUI project for Linux/*NIX? (and treated as add-on usually, to boot)
Why the main support seems to be for imitative projects? And why the main opposition to the Win-GUI is based on "learn the others, it's not that hard!"?
If Linux is to take over the consumer/business markets, it shouldn't expect users to educate themselves in computers anymore than courts expect citizens to understand legalese. It shouldn't even expect users to learn as much as for Windows (or even Mac)... it should be much easier than that.
The irony is that while Linux has the most to gain, the least to lose, and the best chances to have a lot of designers try different and wacky ideas of a natural GUI, all the effort seems focused on replicating the first, quirky attempts at an intuitive GUI.
Bodrius
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
That requires your end user to know patch and have whatever compiler you used.
... I cannot effectively EVER release a derivative anyone but a hacker would use.
Perhaps, but if they're on a Linux system anyway, it's your duty as any kind of developer to make your instructions lucid and clear enough for anyone to be able to patch your version of Qt into the main one. Standard tools such as diff and patch are available with *every* Linux distro that I know of, as well as *BSD and most of the UNIX variants in existence. If your grandma can't follow simple directions such as "Download it to this directory and run these commands" then maybe your grandma doesn't speak english?
Your argument has some holes in it...
If you want to write programs that use QT and are not GPL, you must pay the man.
Not quite- your app doesn't have to be GPL, it can be GPL or QPL or a couple of the other OSI approved licenses. However, your source must be available or else yes, you do have to pay the man. What's wrong with that?
It fails on the basic, very basic, premise that an open source application should allow derivatives under the same license as the original.
All future versions and/or derivatives are going to be released under the QPL. That argument is just false.
Taking your grandma analogy farther, would you really want her to be downloading/installing unchecked versions of libraries? If she has any common sense, she should only be using the Troll Tech version of Qt- you never know what other people might try to put into the library. If you have a truly useful patch, you can submit it to Trolltech and they'll incorporate it into their main branch. If you have a cute little patch which makes all QObjects place your name in text in the lower right corner, that should not be releasable as the official Qt library and I wouldn't want you to name it that and put it on your web site.
Basically, all that I can say is that Qt provides two distinct ways to write software for people who want to use the toolkit. If you want to make money off of it, you have to pay them first. If you're going to make your product free and reusable, then you don't owe them anything. What's the matter with that?
>>> try running PROGRAM --help to see if you can turn off the panel stuff (like gnomeicu, irssi with xchat its an option in the prefs.)
I thought GNOME was supposed to be about "choice"? Then why are so many developers hell bent on making sure I don't have a choice if I want to use their application?
>>>maybe they dont want to reinvent the wheel with ANOTHER LIB to link to.
On a related note, I have been told by friends on the gnome mailing lists that Helix isn't going to make Debian packages because they feel it is "too hard". What the hell kind of logic is this? As if it is any harder to make a .deb than it is to make a .rpm?
>>> why not READ the helixcode.com webpage, theres .debs available. i know cause i apt-get'ed them yesterday.
i thought I had no sig?
Actually Enlightenment is not the Gnome Project's Window Manager. Up until recently, Gnome hasn't had a default window manager. Enlightenment offered the best Gnome support at the time, and was highly customizable, so RedHat, and others shipped with E as the default Gnome wm. Recently Sawfish (formerly Sawmill) has become the default Window Manager for the Gnome Project. There will be tighter integration with the Window Manager and Gnome, although you can still use Window Maker, Enlightenment, or some other wm.
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Celebrate the finer things in life
"What exactly are KDE and Gnome? Are they a combination of the GUI toolkit and a collection of programs like the toolbar and Gnumeric and such?"
:) window manager of GNOME.
.kdelnk file for the mimetype, go to the .kdelnk files for the apps and associate the mimetype with the app for each .kdelnk, and then go back to the mimetype .kdelnk file to choose the default app to go with the mimetype.
Pretty close. KDE and GNOME are desktop environments, which basically are a toolbar + a file manager + session management + some utilities. They also come with frameworks for writing applications, which is a GUI toolkit plus other provisions like component models and such. I would classify Gnumeric as an app written with the GNOME application framework rather than as a part of the desktop environment proper. One does not need to be running the desktop environment to use an app written for either the GNOME or KDE application framework. It is sufficient to just have the application framework installed, which for GNOME is gnome-libs, and for KDE is kdelibs and kdesupport.
"Where do they stand in relation to X itself and a window manager?"
Window managers provide the functionality needed to move, resize, close, iconify etc. windows, and they typically do this by decorating windows with titlebars. Window managers and desktop environments run on top of X. KDE includes its own official window manager. GNOME is intended to be runnable with any window manager, although a window manager that is GNOME-compliant is necessary to use features like the GNOME pager or tasklist. GNOME 1.2 comes bundled with the window manager Sawfish, which is the "unofficially official"
KDE is far more of a package deal than GNOME. The different pieces of the KDE desktop are far more interdependent than the pieces of the GNOME desktop. For example, I can run the GNOME panel without gmc, the GNOME file manager, but I can't run kpanel without kfm, the KDE file manager. I can't really run kwm, the KDE window manager, by itself either. I need kpanel to 1) provide a dialog for changing the number of virtual desktops and 2) to provide a taskbar or a window list, so that iconified apps can be deiconified. However, I can definitely run a GNOME-compliant window manager all by itself, even Sawfish. This difference between KDE and GNOME is not particularly positive or negative if one is using all the parts of the desktop; it's just a difference.
GNOME is more malleable than KDE in terms of look and feel. I can have a GNOME panel that acts sort of like a Window Maker dock. I can have more than one panel. I can configure what parts of the right-click panel menus are submenus or main menus or are absent at all. GNOME is sort of window manager independent as well, although Sawfish realistically speaking is the unofficial window manager of GNOME. KDE isn't quite as flexible. I can only have one kpanel, and kpanel is always stretched out along an edge of the screen; I can't make it like a Window Maker-style dock. kpanel in KDE 1.x always has the K-menu, CDE-style pager, screen-lock and logout button; they cannot be removed. The KDE 2 panel, called kicker, is a bit more malleable. The tasklist and pager are applets as they are for GNOME, although as with kpanel, kicker is always stretched out along an edge of the screen, and I can't make it like a Window Maker-style dock. For most practical purposes, KDE is not window manager independent. KDE can be used with window managers other than kwm, but the results are kind of funky. The window manager and kpanel may not agree on how many virtual desktops there are, and maximized windows may maximize as if kpanel weren't there. The window manager independance is mostly a nonissue, since one can easily use the window manager bundled with the desktop, whether it's Sawfish for GNOME or KDE's kwm. Malleability of the desktop is more a bonus than a necessity. KDE with the default setup just plain isn't that difficult to work with.
I would say kfm is slightly easier to use than gmc. If I drag an icon in kfm, when I drop it, I *always* get the "Copy, Move, or Link" popup menu. This means that to do most file shuffling in kfm, I only have to remember one thing--dragging and dropping, and the popup menu does the rest. In gmc, to get the "Copy, Move, Link" menu, I have to hold down the middle-mouse button while dragging. Dragging and dropping with the left-mouse button always moves files and icons. This is a bit more complicated. I can associate an arbitrary number of apps with a single mimetype (file type) in kfm, default app for the mimetype that gets launched when I click on the icon, as well as apps that appear in a right-click popup menu. In gmc, I can only associate a max of three apps to a mimetype. Adding a new mimetype and associating apps with it is easier in gmc than in kfm, though. In gmc, there is a nice, neat dialog for handling such things, while in kfm, I have to create a
Keybindings are easy to configure in KDE, while the ease with which keybindings for GNOME can be made depends on the GUI config tool for the window manager used with GNOME.
Stability used to be a major problem for GNOME, but from October GNOME onward, it's been pretty reliable.
Which one is better? If customizability is really important to you, then GNOME is definitely the better choice overall. If you just want a workhorse that is simple to configure and by and large is trouble-free, KDE is the better choice, IMHO.
Pretty much. They consist of a set of libraries, including a widget library, inter-application communication, and other useful utilities like printing, a set of utilities like file managers, and applications which make use of their facilities.
Where do they stand in relation to X itself and a window manager?They stand above the X protocol, and therefore machines using either have all the nice networking abilities of X. All existing X applications run fine under either system.
Any window manager will work with either KDE or GNOME, but there are some window managers which have extra capabilities which make them work better with the systems. KDE ships with its own window manager, kwm, and GNOME ships with Sawfish, but GNOME has shipped with Enlightenment in the past.
Is there any real difference between KDE and Gnome, or are they just two different products filling the same niche (like IE vs. Netscape)?From a user's perspective, there's not a great deal. Frankly, until the office suites get closer to release, the decision isn't all that important.
From an ideological perspective, Qt (the base toolkit on which KDE is derived) is under a licence which is free enough to be regarded as open-source and RMS-free, but is a real pain as it is viewed by many (including the Debian project) as being GPL-incompatible. Therefore, in the view of Debian, KDE violates its own licence! The KDE people, however, disagree.
From a programmer's perspective, the toolkits are different - Qt/KDE is based around C++, and Gtk+/GNOME are based around C. Up until recently, the C++ support for GNOME has been regarded as pretty bad, and the C support from KDE equally so. They have made some other differing architectural decisions - GNOME is using CORBA to support object embedding, where KDE is using their own protocol.
Finally, I'd just like to point out that GNOME apps run fine on a KDE desktop and vice versa. So, provided you have enough memory to keep both widget sets at once without thrashing, choosing one doesn't mean you've lost the other.
Disclaimer: I use and develop with GNOME, but have no experience with programming KDE apps.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I spent over 7 hours downloading the update over a 56K modem, only to have the installer tell me I didn't have enough room to install it all.
No problem, I thought.
Trashed some game demos and came back to install it again. Too bad it decided that I never would have enough disk space and deleted every file I downloaded.
Now I am sticking with KDE for good.
First off, there is no war. There is no conflict. Hell, there isn't even competition for mindshare, since all of the great KDE apps get GNOMEified in short order and the great GNOME apps get QTified in short order. It's possible that in the future this will cease to be the case as GNOME and KDE focus on not-entirely-compatible technologies (GNOME uses CORBA, while KDE is moving to a more lightweight toolkit), but for right now it's the case.
:) Find me a benchmark which says KDE is slow and I'll find you one that says GNOME is slow.
1. SPEED AND RESOURCE USAGE.
Benchmarks are lovely things; there are so many results you can choose to get.
2. INTEGRATION BETWEEN APPS.
Oh, yes, we've seen in Windows 98 how integration between apps is always to the benefit of the end-user. (Note to KDE fans: I'm not comparing KDE's level of uniformity to Windows' sickening degree of the same. I'm just pointing out uniformity and integration are not the be-all of environments.)
There's a wise proverb about "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds", or something to that effect. Consistency is good up until it becomes a foolish consistency, at which point it becomes horrible ("WTF does Microsoft mean, it's `intuitive' to view my hard drive as a freakin' webpage?!"). Does KDE have a more consistent look and feel? Yes, I'd agree that it does. Is this a selling point? Personal preference. To me, it's a nonissue.
3. APPLICATIONS AND DEVELOPER SUPPORT.
Both environments are breaking out all over with new applications and new developers. Last year I had to special-order Dallheimer's Using QT and Harlow's Developing Linux Applications with GTK+. This year there are far more books on the shelves relating to both environments. They're not on the bookshelves for their own sake--they're on the bookshelves because people have been asking for them, and because people are buying them. That shows more than anything else that both are alive and quite well.
4. KDE IS MORE FAMILIAR.
Only if you've got a lot of experience using KDE or Windows. Remember: a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin... If GNOME thinks they have a better GUI, then they should put that forward. If the GNUStep people think the OpenStep interface is the be-all end-all of GUIs, they should put that forward.
Horse-and-buggy transportation was much more familiar to people at the turn of the century. Should I take it they were all fools to abandon the system they knew to experiment with the newfangled, crochety, prone-to-breakdown Model T?
5. HONORABLE MENTION IN THE FUD CATEGORY
"[The GNOME developers] seem to think that putting the biggest, most memory hogging features into the DE will automatically make it better..."
If you didn't bother to read the press release, GNOME 1.2 takes up fewer system resources.
"Software size and quality seems to not be a very top priority, and software speed seems to be an even lower priority..."
Strange. Most of the GNOME apps I've seen are pretty modest in their memory footprint. Insofar as quality goes, I've never had any complaint.
"Features seems to head the list, and everyone knows what that mentality gets you... it gets you Windows 2000."
GNOME is not about features. Making that assertion shows that you really don't grok the free software movement at all.
GNOME is about choice. Don't want to use Gnome Terminal? Great, use Powershell. Don't want to use Powershell? Fine, use an xterm.
I agree.. things work smoothly now.. I added the single line to my sources.list, and did a apt-get update, apt-get install task... on the thing.. and it installed perfectly, upgrading my old gnome install. no broken packages at all.
/usr/bin/tcsh, and now it won't get past the inital login.. I even created a whole new blank account to test this.. to make sure it wasn't something else in my config.. nope.. it just won't do it.. I change my shell to bash.. and it works perfectly.. :(
the only complaint I have so far is that tcsh stoped working.. my shell is normaly
The only thing I have problems with is Netscape.
:o)
Oh, you've got that problem also? Actually, if netscape could just handle java better than my world would get a lot closer to being perfect.
"I mean, All you can definately say about a fellow who thinks he's a poached egg, is; He's in the minority." James Burke
I mean dont get me wrong I like gnome alot but KDE has alot more going for it in terms of applications and install base so what gives? I mean I know the whole QPL shit was a problem for most of the Zealots but gnome is still really damn buggy and a fresking resource Hog, Hell compare to kde 1.9 I just dont see why slash has the bias it has.
KDE is based on a proprietary library. A library that cannot be ported or forked except by its authors. A library that reserves some rights to everything that even links to it. A library that demands a copy of everything that links to it, even if it is private. A library that reserves the right to take your patches and roll them into its proprietary product, all the while NEVER allowing you to distribute anything except its product with your patch separate. You have to distinguish your code from their by separately distributing it - they do not have to distringuish your contributions to their code at all.
The QPL is about assuring a lifetime of riches for the authors of QT at the expense of the freedoms of its users. GNOME was started specifically to provide freedom to its users.
All that aside, there are two and only two key factors in the popularity of the desktops GNOME and KDE. Factor one is the preload factor. The more computers come with a desktop loaded, the more it will be used. Helixcode is a HUGE step in getting GNOME onto people's desktops more easily. Other factors are primarily OEM loads (Compaq, Dell, VA Linux...) Most US computers will come with GNOME, most in Europe with KDE.
Factor two is how easy it is for a non-hack. A successful desktop will make Grandma happy, and Grandma is not a hacker. Grandma wants to download digital photos, print them, send email, shop online... EASILY.
All this fussing over ORBs and libraries and bloat is worthless. It just doesn't matter in the long run, except for the pride of the programmers. Make it easy, and market it well by getting it preloaded everywhere - or at least making it dern easy to upgrade (witness Helixcode).
"It seems to me that GNOME is just another step in the total GUIness of linux. Sure it's nice, it can do alot of stuff for you, but it's a huge resource hog, and all in all, it seems to me to be reminiscent of some of the bloat that i switched to linux to get away from."
Okay. I have to ask if A: you read the article; or B: have tried the new release of GNOME? If you haven't then I would suggest you look before you rant.
According to the article, the resources required by GNOME have gone *down*.
But if your rant was about GUIs in general then, yeah that's your opinion. Quite frankly, the GUI is the modern interface and is more sophisticated than the command-line.
And how is this about Microsoft? It has *nothing* to do with Microsoft!! Look, you are using GNU/Linux, browsing the web with Netscape or Lynx, typing your documents with Emacs or Vi, and TeX, and doing mail with Mutt or Netscape Mail. Microsoft doesn't affect you anymore! They are our past. They are gone! Why must you dwell!
(Okay, I'll calm down now.)
A lot people put a lot of work into them.
Leave it at that.
I didn't use the preview button, so get over it!!!!
Mike
--
Slashdot better start posting more news that I want to see.
Go get your free Palm V (25 referrals needed only!)
I don't think anyone is against guiness (especially if they still have their prompt), they are against the poor programming, and monopolistic nature of Microsoft.
- learn mathematics - shoot dope -
Object *yadda = new Object();
vs:
Object *yadda = gtk_object_new();
C doesn't know you're trying to do OO, so it doesn't tell you when you forget. C++ will only let you instantiate a class according to the rules of its constructors. And then superconstructors and super destructors (which you remembered to declare virtual) are automatically invoked by C++, even for multiple inheritance and in the correct order. This you may easily have forgotten in implementing your constructors and destructors in C, bus error...
But then, with more manual control, you can define your own object paradigm. Go for metaclasses! fix the downcasting problem! RTTI with low overhead! reflection! introspection!
Those are kind of significant differences.
This is absolutely true, and much more deeply so than the zealots might think. I personally enjoy hacking together a myriad of programs to do XYZ on the console, building from sources, and whatnot- but I tried using helix-gnome, and must say that their setup is wonderful. No hassle trying to disentangle RPM dependancies, no config files, no nothing. Just install, and in no time you have a working system. And a good-looking one at that! Many people are not interested in learning bash, vi, emacs, what-have-you; if I plopped my little brother down in front of this he'd love it because of the pretty colors and the overall feeling of wholeness and attractiveness. This idea of 'good looking' is sorely missing in a lot of OSS stuff. I personally don't *need* it, but that doesn't mean I don't *like* it. I switched back to GNOME while upgrading KDE a while ago... and what the hell, I just can't go back to KDE's spartan feel. Just my two bytes.
stop calling people names and go program yourself a sense of humor, open-source zealot.
Go get your free Palm V (25 referrals needed only!)
I don't think that apps are quite as important as they might first appear. GTK/Gnome apps seem to have no problem running under KDE and visa versa. People can choose whatever desktop they like and still run whatever apps they like. Isn't that the kind of freedom and choice that Linux/Free software/Open Source is about?
Also from what I can tell, the KDE and Gnome developers both recognise the importance of interoperability between KDE and Gnome stuff and are working towards this goal. Not too mention the fact that (for the most part) KDE and Gnome are both under GPL so people can freely port apps back and forth between the two.
There is no reason for everyone to converge on only one desktop. Both can live happily.
--
Simon
I think he makes this assumption because
of the vendors that sell in europe compared to the U.S.
Unless I am mistaken, RH is the #1 distro in the U.S., right, and S.u.S.E. (did i do the capitalization right ?:)) is the number one in Europe. RH uses Gnome by default, while S.u.S.E uses, again by default, KDE (unless things have changed).
Also, Mandrake, which becuase of it's great language support, I assume is popular in Europe, uses, by default, KDE as well.
------- Oh damn.... the Sigfile escaped... -Great OM
Your sig is great. Especially as I recently posted the quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo." in the X-box story. :)
After KDE release their own GIMP, xmms, GNOME update and make prettier icons I may give them a try. But I prefer my desktop "pure", all GTK+, just the best software.
-- "Usefulness arises from what is not there" - Daoism saying
some people on slashdot are more stupid than I thought they would be.
Go send Bill more money, he needs to hire more lawyers...and programmers.
--
+&x
I agree KDE is extremely stable. But Gnome isnt that buggy either. I have had absolutely no issues running either of the Window Environments. If you want something tried and true, then get fvwm or windowmaker or something. :)
KDevelop alone is worth the price of admission (which of course is $0.)
I tried it last winter, and found it utterly useless for creating anything but KDE apps. I'm trying to write ISO C++ libraries, and Kdevelop (at the time, at least) didn't even have a library project template! Maybe I'll try it again sometime, but I was seriously disapointed with what I saw.
This is not meant as a slam towards the Kdevelop people, for creating a KDE app it would be great. It just didn't do what I needed it to do.
BTW, why did you mention Kdevelop, when you claim you are talking about the general desktop market, or as you put elsewhere: "Linux grass-roots zealots weren't invited. I was talking about KDE and GNOME in terms of a viable desktop environment, not something that fuels some nerd's desire to be 'leet just because his apps don't match."
And it's spelled 31337. Get it right.
While I'm not quite sure about why /. is so Gnome enthused, I can at least offer personal experience. Running both straight out of the box, I found KDE to be more aesthetically pleasing, and Gnome to be more stable (at least until I recompiled KDE). Now I usually run whichever one I please, which is usually KDE (the fact that Gnome doesn't automatically focus on a new window is a slight annoyance. I have seen screenshots of both KDE 2.0 and Gnome 1.2, and so far, I am leaning towards Gnome. once the /. effect wears off, I'm going to download it and give it a try..
Think --> Think Different --> Think OSS
No I am not joking, I do sincerely believe /. to be heavily biased against KDE.
/. readers are so dim witted as to not know what the score is.
I believe you must be at least a reasonably intelligent person and that you must read this site regularly and that you do take an active interest in desktop environments. Since I believe all these things to be true I cannot believe that you are not aware of the strong anti-KDE bias of this site.
I believe you are saying something untrue knowing that it is untrue, that is a lie. Normally I wouldn't care but your opinion on this matter is as close to an official statement on this matter as I'm going to get.
I'm not saying there is any conspiracy going on. Rob is ardent supporter of the FSF, has close relations with Gnome developers, and started a lot of arguments by posting KDE stories so it's no wonder that he doesn't post many of them anymore. (And he has pretty much set the tone that other authors follow, the only author who bucks the trend is HeUnique)
Also while a lot of KDE development is done in the US a lot more is done outside the US and hence KDE stories are less regionally relevant than stories about new US companies being set up to develop destop environment related software. (Slashdot is a US centric -perhaps even myopic- site if you hadn't noticed)
Generally Slashdot covers Gnome stories in preference to KDE stories, that's ok you don't have to give it fair coverage. However please don't lie about the fact, I find it offensive that you would think
I am becoming increasingly disconcerted with the amount of applications that are REQUIRING gnome libs to run.
.deb than it is to make a .rpm?
.deb is any harder; you could do it yourself if it's that important. Otherwise, I wouldn't expect it to take too long for a third party to take care of it.
Why? I have apps that require imlib, GL, gtk, ncurses, or many other libraries to run. Those libraries make it possible for the app authors to get more functionality out of less new code by accessing the work of others, and they reduce the amount of RAM in use on my system by allowing the same code pages to be loaded once and used by many different processes. Gnome libraries aren't any different; they have extra widgets, XML support, printing support, and other things that every app writer shouldn't have to reinvent.
And how is this any better than somebody writing an application for Windows only?
Because Windows isn't freely downloadable, won't work alongside my other Linux apps, doesn't use portable APIs, and takes a hundred times the space of the gnome libraries.
On a related note, I have been told by friends on the gnome mailing lists that Helix isn't going to make Debian packages because they feel it is "too hard". What the hell kind of logic is this? As if it is any harder to make a
I wouldn't know... but I've made well-written tarballs into RPMs in fifteen minutes, so I doubt making a
I've even had apps spawn a GNOME Panel when I run them.
Not apps, but applets. I agree, it'd be nice if they'd run in their own Xwindow. I suppose that will be done eventually, but the regular Gnome developers have enough on their todo lists now, and I don't see anyone else interested in doing the work.
If you look really close, you'll notice that the foot is really a G with toes.
That is correct. GNOME is still not ready for the general public for consumption. Not just yet. But we do acknowledge this problem, and we are working towards addressing those issues: redoing the user interface elements that are not trivial to understand, using better wording, giving a better visual layout, redoing things so that they are conceptually cleaner, and easier to understand. But our work does not stop there. We are doing new applications, adding new features to the system (user-level for instance, historic configuration) that will provide the GNOME user with a better user experience. As any other technology, we are still on the early days of GNOME, and people using GNOME are still early-adopters of this technology: the GNOME team is working very hard to make GNOME ready for everyone, and bringing free software to everyone. With your help (providing good bug reports if you are not a programmer, documentation improvements, constructive comments, code, patches, contributions, enthusiasm) we will be able to achieve this goal sooner than later. Miguel.
Well here I am running Debian/PPC. I guess you could say the Debian/PPC users are a minority (especially if they use KDE like me).
.debs from the Helix Code LinuxPPC 2000/YDL 1.2 .ppc.rpm packages. They pretty much worked, with the exception of a few files being out of place (namely the gdm ones).
I used alien to create GNOME 1.2
Also, don't forget there are some other PowerPC users that run SuSE, TurboLinux/PPC, RockLinux or MkLinux (okay, technically thats not a reguluar Linux distro).
"Why is /. so Gnome enthused?"
Why are you asking us?
"I mean dont get me wrong I like gnome alot but KDE has alot more going for it in terms of applications and install base so what gives?"
I would say they are about equal. But I would wait for *real* statistics before I come to any conclusions so what gives?
"I mean I know the whole QPL shit was a problem for most of the Zealots but gnome is still really damn buggy and a fresking resource Hog, Hell compare to kde 1.9 I just dont see why slash has the bias it has"
That was a run on sentence. The QPL *was* a problem, not anymore. Gnome *was* buggy, not anymore. Why do you have such a bias?
And the people at slashdot, Rob, Hemos, etc. can you please add an entry to the FAQ of something like "Why does slashdot like GNOME better, whaa whaa?" so that the KDE advocates will stop reminding us about this problem? Pleaaaase?
<li>If, in a GNOME article, someone mentions KDE, mark it off-topic. The same goes if the reverse happens.</li>
<li>If, in a GNOME article, someone mentions Microsoft, mark it troll. The same goes for KDE articles.</li>
<li>If, in any article, someone mentions that the Slashdot have a bias towards GNOME, then mark it off-topic. These messages should go to the Slashdot team and not to public in general.</li>
</ol>
Just trying to disern the signal from the noise.
The problem is, every version of GNOME was supposed to be the stable one. GNOME was released early, oh well, it's a 1.0 release, what do you expect. 1.01 is stable. Oops, it's not, oh well, 1.02 is stable, oops it's not...
Hmmm... maybe using dates instead of versioning would make it seem more stable. Ooops, October release is still not that stable (crashes on my system). And then we had the next release (whatever they called it, February?), and that was supposed to be the stable one.
Now, if M$ had done the same (and they are), nobody would believe them, but if GNOME does it, then it is all OK?
Je ne parle pas francais.
What color is the Sun in your world?
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
[OS] is the most preferred OS among cats and dogs
[Software company] stocks splits 2000 to 1 - and you get 50000 shares!
You are absolutely (if (male) "handsome"; else "beautiful")
[your favority celebrity] in the next prequel of Star Wars
Malda loves you
Cool people that are just like you throw rocks at the main building of [company you hate]
CowboyNeal loves you too.
Go get your free Palm V (25 referrals needed only!)
One of my points was that it was all about the apps, and KDE has the good ones. Though the Gimp is probably irreplacable, KDE has the majority of the good apps. KDevelop alone is worth the price of admission (which of course is $0.) In addition KOffice is shaping up startingly quickly, and though the spreadsheet may never be as good as gnumeric (doubtfull, as the KDE guys seem to know their apps pretty well) the rest of KOffice will be a major factor. Also, KDE has a lot more developer support than GNOME does at the moment, and in general the KDE apps are far more mature than their GNOME counterparts. (Aside from a few exeptions like Gimp and Gnumeric.)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Yes! IceWM, which is a GNOME complient windowmanager, Has mini-icon support. Unfortunately there is no way currently to get it to use all of the GNOME icons by default... I am going to have to gripe at Marko about that. There should be at least a patch or something that does that. However, given the praise IceWM gets as being GNOME freindly, it should be enabled by default.
The point of linux isn't necesarly to get away from GUIness Microsoft. The point is to really away from that unstable, expensive, Microsoft Bull shit. Hey I luv console, but if you use GUI it doesn't mean you're not a hacker. I personally think a hacker would rather use the best tool avaliable avaliable for the job instead of using the harder tool for the job just to say "my penis are bigger then your penis."
The whole point of linux is for you have the freedom to choose. Unlike Window if you want all console you are free to do so, but if you want to use a GUI you can go right ahead.
The onlything GNOME means for linux is another (in my opinion) powerful tool at your despence.
WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. The Party - 1984
Linux is not even using it? I'm fucking booting off it. You can read on how to set it up since the Linux IDE guy hasn't merged his patches into the main 2.2 tree yet here: http://www.linuxnewbie.or g/nhf/intel/hardware/udma66.html
Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 6.30
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
PDC20262: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 30
PDC20262: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
PDC20262: (U)DMA Burst Bit ENABLED Primary PCI Mode Secondary PCI Mode.
ide2: BM-DMA at 0xd400-0xd407, BIOS settings: hde:pio, hdf:pio
ide3: BM-DMA at 0xd408-0xd40f, BIOS settings: hdg:DMA, hdh:pio
ide2 at 0xe800-0xe807,0xe402 on irq 15
ide3 at 0xe000-0xe007,0xd802 on irq 15
That would be the promise ultra66 controller, sharing an irq for both ide channels.
Lars -
Just finished using the installer, no problems at all. And sawfish is nice.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Sorry, I'm running XFree86 4.0 here and it still doesn't let you change the size of the desktop :(
while (1) malloc (1);
I am a longtime user of Micros~1 products who also has a GNU-Linux box that utilizes Gnome 1.0 as a windows manager. I am fully behind the open-source philosophy, but I have a question. Why is the the Gnome/KDE/whatever interface even now still a pure bastardization of the MSWindows and Macintosh interfaces? There are brilliant people inovating in every area of design; why has nobody bothered to figure out a better interface? When we're talking Operating Systems; Yeah! It works better! But on the face of things it still looks like we're a bunch of hotheads reverse engineering the work of the highly-paid graphics people Microsoft was employing in 1995 (not to mention the highly-paid graphics people Apple was paying in 1984).
My $.02; moderate this down if I don't know what I'm talking about.
These comments and opinions are mine and mine alone, although they shouldn't be.
yes they did. That is what made gnome, rpm, and a lot of other good technologies possible.
To clarify #5. I was talking about changing desktop size and not just display size. ctrl alt - is only usefully when I go to a site which forces a very small font size ( I run 1024X768 on a 15" monitor ). What happens when I want to use a 640X480 or 800X600 app via VNC? ( Some useful apps have a hard coded window size that's relay convenient if it fills the desktop ) I then have to be careful just to keep the cursor within the window.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Part of the services that Helix provide for the packages we ship is
the updating service: this is a service that lets people deploy
fixes, improvements, and new GNOME packages in their system with a
simple to use user interface.
Currently our updating service works with RPM and Debian packages
(In Debian we just use the great apt infrastructure to achieve
this), but other platforms do not have very sophisticated packaging
systems that support upgrading and that support vendor tagging.
Building software with RPM is very good, as we can keep the
original source packages plus all the patches required as well as
the detailed instruction list of how the package was build in a
single location (the Source RPM).
This is what we used to do the Solaris port of Helix GNOME. And
naturally, RPM produced RPM packages, which we could easily
integrate into our updating service.
Using Solaris packages would be an option, but by the time we were
done with the packages, it was too late on the release cycle to add
support for Solaris packages (not to mention that Solaris packages
are not as powerful as RPM packages).
Hence, we decided that it was in the best interest of end users to
use and distribute RPM packages for this release in Solaris. This
might change in the future though.
If you feel you're being "lied to" after reading my posts above, and / or doing a search for "KDE" on slashdot, then I don't know what else to say.
/. authors have the same prerogative. I'm not anti-either, I'm pro-both.
Like 'em both, use 'em both, wish both projects great success, will continue to post on either as I see fit and all the other
If you find the balance of posting here to indicate an "anti-KDE" bias, then submit some exciting stories to do with KDE to the submissions bin. I'd be happy to post them.
I exit this conversation at this point --
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Enlightenment, especially older verions have terrible focus behavior and defaults. I would recommend getting a new version of enlightenment and looking through focus settings. The sawfish window manager works better with gnome, though you will have to fix the focus settings also(very easy). I would recommend using helix gnome, it works very well and is far better out of the box than any other distribution. I think it can be used with any 6.x version of redhat, and apperently the rpm version is very easy to install.
OK I have a lot of random thoughts to put out here. This is really late into this story's run, so I'm sure this will wallow forever at the bottom of the page at default score :)
.deb than it is to make a .rpm?
Anyways:
First up, I don't really care for GNOME or KDE. I find them to both be clunky copies of Win9x , and although they can be customized beyond this, they don't offer anything I want in a UI. But to each his own, and I'm glad that GNOME is moving along nicely.
HOWEVER:
I am becoming increasingly disconcerted with the amount of applications that are REQUIRING gnome libs to run. I've even had apps spawn a GNOME Panel when I run them. This is just ridiculous. I do NOT use GNOME. I do not WANT to use GNOME. I just want to run an application.
I thought GNOME was supposed to be about "choice"? Then why are so many developers hell bent on making sure I don't have a choice if I want to use their application? And how is this any better than somebody writing an application for Windows only? Isn't this the same type of exclusion that the OSS community has always been against?
Sure, I have the source. And of course I could modify it to suit my needs. But it seems a bit unreasonable to have to modify every single program I run across just to run it without using GNOME.
On a related note, I have been told by friends on the gnome mailing lists that Helix isn't going to make Debian packages because they feel it is "too hard". What the hell kind of logic is this? As if it is any harder to make a
Anyways, my thoughts, albeit rambling ones.
-[Blaine]- "'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic."
95% of the people who use KDE are end users and are not affected by the license. I bet most of you here are the same way. Unless you are a KDE developer why should you care? I certainly don't, just being the end user. I prefer KDE because of its looks and behavior. The developers license shouldn't be what you base your opinions of a program on. I don't care if KDE had the hitler/stalhin general license, I would still use it.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Excuse me? "Informative"? This is the exact reason that Microsoft, and in general companies with well funded advertising and PR campaigns are more popular than they deserve to be. A nice look will colour people's opinions to the point of them forgiving technical gaffes.
I have no grudge with Gnome - I run some Gnome apps (but not Gnome in it's entirety - i.e. panel, et. al. - i run vanilla fvwm2), and I prefer them to KDE/Qt apps. But to say that the coolest thing about Gnome is it's splash screen....
It looks like Corel has implemented it somehow in Corel Linux. I don't know if standard KDE has this, or it's a Corel add-on that will find its way to other distros as time goes by.
(Note, I haven't played with this myself, but I saw a demo of Corel Linux a few weeks ago - Pretty impressive if you don't mind KDE's ugliness. - No, I'm not going to hide the fact that I find KDE aesthetically plain to the point of being seriously displeasing.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I think both GNOME and KDE have taken the beneficial parts of Microsoft's GUI and left out the parts that are either extraneous or just plain bloated. I can see why Slashdot has a bias towards GNOME as the screenshots released are pretty slick looking, although I will note that the last time a KDE article was posted, everyone bitched about how Slashdot had a KDE bias.
See how silly moderator rules are? I just mentioned all of the items you spoke about in a very respectful way that actually may have added a little to the discussion.
And frankly, I'd like to see more mention about KDE when talking about GNOME, not less. The fact that these two are out there and somewhat competing against each other gives us a) choice and b) better features as they continually learn from each other and play off each other. The progress in both GNOME and KDE this year has been amazing and it's probably a direct result of each group's desire to make a better interface than their counterparts.
isolation wrote: "Why is /. so Gnome enthused? I mean dont get me wrong I like gnome alot but KDE has alot more going for it in terms of applications and install base so what gives? I mean I know the whole QPL shit was a problem for most of the Zealots but gnome is still really damn buggy and a fresking resource Hog, Hell compare to kde 1.9 I just dont see why slash has the bias it has."
:)
Since I posted this story, I guess I can offer at least a small bit of explanation, but can't speak for the other slashdot authors.
I use KDE most of the time, on a AMD K6 233 running Mandrake, and I recently installed RedHat 6.2 on a pentium 90 machine as well, with its default Gnome desktop.
I like KDE a lot -- Koffice is exciting to me (hey, I have a boring life), the KDE work is well integrated and thought out. Since I've never been all that much of a Windows users, I'm fairly neutral about / unmoved by KDE's similarity to the Win95/98 interface, though I've seen a lot of friends impressed by it.
Gnome 1.2, though, I admit I am excited by, just like I'm excited by Eazel. No accounting for taste, of course, but I think the aesthetics of Gnome outpace the Windows desktop by a good stretch, and the internationalization / userfriendliness that's gone into it is incredible. When I see what the installation shots look like, I know it is something that even computerphobic pals of mine would be happier with than Windows' install screen, sort of like Linux Mandrake's install is nicer than putting on Windows (in my experience).
And as leaders of both projects have been saying, while you may only be *running* one of these environments at a time, applications written for both can be used, so long as you have all the right libraries in place. (Please correct me if that is in error.)
My bias is toward improved interfaces, whatever they're called. A search for KDE on slashdot does pull up quite a few things -- "KDE 2.0" got 4 relevant stories on that as well, including the release of 1.90 -- and the sponsorship of new developers for KWord was mentioned in the recent Slashback. We're ("I'm" =)) definitely not trying to give KDE short shrift -- that would definitely not be in my interest, since I use it daily! It's just that Gnome has had a flurry of neat developments lately, and the release of 1.2 is probably the biggest one since October gnome, as far as releases go.
Sorry to rant so long. But really -- I use both, I'm happy to see both KDE and Gnome making giant strides, and glad that helixcode seems like a good focal point for those who complain that the various desktops available are too difuse in management / release info (a common complaint for people to whom freshmeat is still what the butcher hands over the counter).
That's all
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
How the hell do you know Grandma's not a hacker? This is stereotyping all Grandmothers out there. As i type this there is probably hundreds of Grandma hackers out there coding C and hacking perl. Do you think you're better than they are? You think all Grandma does is neat sweaters? How would you like it when you're 85 and your grandson is out there claiming Grandpa's useless?
Unfortunately, I've had similar problems, although with other bugs in the installer:
Remote install - Downloaded the RPMS, then said, "RPM is for wrong architecture" - The installer subsequently deleted all the RPMs and quit without installing the RPMs or giving any notice of a problem. (The errors were in the console - not everyone looks there!)
Local install - Installer segfaulted.
I downloaded the RPMs and installed manually. Once the installer is fixed, Gnome 1.2 is quite good.
BTW, on the stability/bloat issue everyone harps on - I've never had stability issues with the versions of GNOME that RedHat packages with their distros, esp. not 6.2
Bloat - This is enlightenment's fault, not GNOME. GNOME ditched E for this reason among others. Sawmill (sawfish now due to trademark issues) is just as pretty, and is MUCH faster. And of course, those that read the article will see that gdk-pixbuf's aim is for a major speed increase.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
KDE is based on a proprietary library.
Hope this clears something up for you:
If by "proprietary library" you mean Qt1.x, then you are incorrect; KDE is no longer based on Qt1.x. KDE is now based on Qt2.1; just as much as I'm sure you hate people spreading lies about GNOME, I can't stand to see it happen to KDE.
Your statement should read: KDE *WAS* based on a proprietary library.
A library that cannot be ported or forked except by its authors.
If you feel like it, you can port the Qt toolkit to MS-Win32 or to the Mac or to BeOS if you want; there is no license restriction that stops you. The only restrictions on it are that you can't close the source to your ported version, and you have to make notice that your version is not the official version. That's reasonable, is it not?
A library that reserves some rights to everything that even links to it.
The only "rights" that are extended to Qt-applications are that the user of such an application is granted the right to the source code. There is no right that is reserved for the library. Please, read the QPL thoroughly.
A library that reserves the right to take your patches and roll them into its proprietary product, all the while NEVER allowing you to distribute anything except its product with your patch separate. You have to distinguish your code from their by separately distributing it - they do not have to distringuish your contributions to their code at all.
They're a CORPORATION. They survive by MAKING MONEY. Do you understand that? They are being nice by releasing their software under an OSI-approved Open Source license; nobody REQUIRES that they use such a license. Grow up.
The QPL is about assuring a lifetime of riches for the authors of QT at the expense of the freedoms of its users.
Where did you glean this information from? I can find no evidence to support it. The QPL provides a means to preserve Free Software as Free Software. It also provides a means to make money when others don't want to be as nice as you and release their source code as well. Where does the QPL limit the freedom of the user?
How much hacking on an OS project have YOU done today?
But anyway, the point is, "Running GNOME" can be whatever you define it as... I personally define "Running GNOME" right now as running gnome-session with Window Maker as the window manager (Alt- for virtual desktop switching, my own comfortable keybindings for various WM operations, and per-WM_NAME/CLASS configuration has me chained and bound to Window Maker like no other)
the real at&t mix
the yellowdog packages are essentially the same as the linuxppc ones. 90% of the people running linux on a mac use linuxppc or yellowdog. So the linuxppc support is not unwaranted.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
anyways - it shows you a bit more than the other screenshots.
--
Er, could it possibly be a Gnome's footprint? :)
I don't personally think either one is right, but I do think that KDE is further along. I think GNOME had the right idea behind them when they got started, but the fact is that I still can't find a GNOME version that runs worth a crap on any of my machines. I've been told what an idiot I am for this before, but I can run any other desktop I want without having to wait for 45 seconds just to see the desktop (and most all of them I compile from source, including GNOME). I've used XFCE, KDE, FVWM(and FVWM2), AfterStep, Windowmaker....
I know this is going to get me bitchslapped, but I don't really care. If GNOME is so much better, and they are the ones that are right, then prove it with a usuable desktop, not just a bunch of bitchin'. GNOME should exist, but GNOME doesn't need to be shoved down everyone's gullet. Linux is about freedom and choice. My choice is KDE at the moment. Whether you like it or not, it's within my rights to use it. So, who the hell cares who's "right" in your view? You do, and others need to be able to come up with thier own view of what's right, not just be told what's right.
Bite my yammer.
Thanks guys : ) I personally like that splash a lot too.
ultra 66 support in linux is laughable at best. Linux is not even using it, thats why it doesn't lock up. You just diagnosed the flaky hardware and blame windows for being unstable? I run a dual celeron with a BP6 mobo, and NT has *never* once blue screened. Its locked up when I was overclocking to hell, but no crashes. Sure netscape seg faults almost daily, but IE never has.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Gnome is not a windowmanager. Enlightenment is the GNOME project wm. so that's the default wm in RH installations. If you're looking for a good wm, try WindowMaker, it'll make your life easy. it's simple, fully configurable, menu-driven, small and stable.
ound the message used repetitively over and over still nothing grows silen
KDevelop alone is worth the price of admission (which of course is $0.)
:)
I tried it last winter, and found it utterly useless for creating anything but KDE apps. I'm
trying to write ISO C++ libraries, and Kdevelop (at the time, at least) didn't even have
a library project template! Maybe I'll try it again sometime, but I was seriously
disapointed with what I saw.
>>>>>>
Huh. If I'd tried GNOME at that version level, I'd have run away screaming. Try anything 1.1 and above. It is rock solid, and now (in 1.2) has integration with GNOME development files. It is a serious competitor to VisualC++ if they can only get rid of that annoying "I" beam, and get IntelliSense type stuff in there. I develop entirely with classes and it is a bitch remembering function headers.
This is not meant as a slam towards the Kdevelop people, for creating a KDE app it
would be great. It just didn't do what I needed it to do.
>>>>
Try using an app when it is release-quality. I don't judge Linux on my impressions of Slackware 3.5, and you shouldn't either.
BTW, why did you mention Kdevelop, when you claim you are talking about the general
desktop market, or as you put elsewhere: "Linux grass-roots zealots weren't invited.
>>>
I was talking about the general desktop market. Many programmers are part of this too. Real grass-roots zealots use VIM
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
w00! that was a good one! I bet you're one of those idiots that use M$ and microsux to call Microsoft right? And windozzze!
y0 b0y, I want to join your l33t m$-bashing fan club! No, I'm not talking about some of the more level-headed open source advocates, but I'm talking about cool m$-hating-joke-churning machines just like j00!
When I'm using linux, I blush when I think of the fact that morons like you are using it too.
Go get your free Palm V (25 referrals needed only!)
ok, so whats the difference in having to remember to do:
Object *yadda = new Object();
vs:
Object *yadda = gtk_object_new();
oh, it must be the destructors then, because clearly:
delete yadda;
is must clearer and simpler than
gtk_object_delete(yadda);
Hell, I use C++ too. check out the latest GTK--s. Not quite as slick as QT in places, but the event system is signifigantly better than the "moc" hack.
You didn't take a look, did you?
wow, you certainly seem sure of yourself for someone who is so wrong, and obviously has never used GTK. People might take you more seriously if you actually tried things before you attacked them for non-existant flaws (don't get me wrong, there are plenty of flaws in GTK's object system, you just don't seem to know about any of them).
re: virtual functions. C has these things called function pointers. object constructors (those gtk_xxx_new() calls) set them.
Windows maximize correctly.
:-)
Maximize one window, open another, boom! Maximized.
Maximized windows don't move.
Terminals always seem to pop up in the right place.
Things Just Work Right. By Default.
I had the exact same problem.
;-(
"you have insufficient disk space".. Whatever.
It was a really nice idea though. I wish I knew at least what order the rpm's needed to be updated so I could do it easlily by hand, now that I've got all the rpm's downloaded.
bleh
When I first started using Linux desktops, I found GNOME to be terribly unstable. I tried versions up to 1.0 and still they had panel crashes every hour or so. I also tried KDE, but it was not astheticly appealing to me. I finally decided on Enlightenment without any other panel/filemanager. For me, the CLI is good enough to manage my files, and Enlightenment's root menu starts my apps just fine without crashing. It looks good too (see my screenshot on my website). However, I feel that GNOME provides a useful application set for Linux newbies, and for that I will applaud them, maybe I'll even give 1.2 a whirl on my other box. Keep up the good work.
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
I wish it would have been a little more verbose..
And why exactly can't it see that there is enought disk space available.
Is there any fix for this available?
I applaud the great work of GNOME (and feck it KDE as well I suppose, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day). Ok we've got ourselves an interface that works, its just bugfixing from now on :-). Functioning spreadsheet and word processor base, nifty graphic package. I would like to see some sound apps myself, video editing software and 3d apps (blender I suppose though)
One telling thing about free software is not how great it is in itself, but how it blatently reveals the sheer incompetence and glacial slowness to deliver of most established software corporations.
C.
I sometimes write stuff
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
Troll go home.
--
+&x
They already have this. Go set your preferences. If it doesn't do what you like, go download it from slashcode.com and make it. If you don't like the way /. is run, tell them or go to one of the subthreads to talk about.
And if you think Microsoft software is a good value, I've got a bunch to sell that they won't let sell on ebay, so send me an email.
--
+&x
Even if Gould, Watson, Crick and Hofstadter haven't actually collaborated on GNOME, the Open Source development model has *allowed* them to.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
I realize the GNOME vs. KDE debate is practically a religious one, but speaking as someone who has tried both, I do know that the decision as to which is best is a difficult one.
However, if you haven't downloaded the entire HelixCode distribution of GNOME and given it a try, I can recommend without hesitation that you should do so. GNOME development seems to be progressing *fast* and there is lots to love about GNOME 1.2.
(By the way, when KDE 2.0 final comes out, I'll be trying that out too.)
Switch Gnome with KDE and this is almost exactly the same as comments posted to the last story on KDE. Why does every story have to have a comment that "This story shows Slashdot's bias towards XXX"?
If you don't want to hear about Gnome, you can just turn off all stories about it.
I was impressed with Helix's work.
Riding off of a stock RH6.1, it installed like a dream. I chose [INSTALL ALL PACKAGES]. Installation was maybe 30 minutes off of a T1, bombed out once... I restarted the script, it picked up what was already downloaded, and continued without a hitch.
The UI polish is exceptional. The new Sawfish windowmanager default is a godsend from the clunky old Enlightement. The MacOS-style menu up top is actually usful. The width and breadth of applications it comes bunded with is incredible.
I got:
Development Tools
15-odd games
A word processor
An extremely competent spreadsheet
A flowcharter
Themes for everything
Multimedia applications (xmms et al)
A dozen and five text editors, and mini-word-processors
Hex editors, calculators, basic address books, index tools, palmpilot tools, calendars...
The panel/applet system which is extremely pleasurable to use coming off of Win9x
A goddamn online dictionary reference
A much improved control panel
Endless tools and monitors and just tons of other things...
Cost:
Economic price of $0.00
Time price of 30 minutes
Effort price of Zero
This is a significantly better value proposition for me than paying 100 dollars or more for a near-useless-by-default Windows 9x, several hundred dollars for a flakey and inflexible WinNT, lots for a MacOS-capable hardware setup, or anything else...
Helix gives gnome polish, like Corel and SUSE did for KDE... It's nice.
DontBlow.com is an absolute good.
Okay, I've been using Helix's tweaked GNOME 1.2 for a while now. The (non-mandatory) graphical installer was extremely impressive.
.deb installation or the powerful UI nightmare of GnoRPM or whatever your distro or OS makes you use. Boo, hiss.
As for GNOME itself, Helix and their friends at Eazel and elsewhere have done a lot to make dialog boxes and menus consistent and rational, less of a homage to Emacs. Most apps still lack consistent keyboard accelerators across the UI, but they're getting there.
The control center, written largely by the RHAD folks, has also got a better, friendlier layout.. but its fundamental UI design borrowed from Linuxconf, of "swallowed" dialog boxes that you have to OK/Cancel out of before being allowed to switch cleanly to another panel, is still idiotic and has no precedent anyhere in the past 20 years of WIMP GUI design. Fix it. Now. Quite a few of the individual control center dialogs still can't hold a candle to MacOS, WIn98/Win2K or KDE in terms of clarity and ease of use.
The taskbar/panel is still fugly and still handles mouse events in nested menus in an uncivilized, amateurish manner. You need some subtle delays and stickiness, folks. By default.
Thank goodness for Sawmill/Sawfish. The window manager configuration is now swallowable by (and largely incorporated into) "GNOME" configuration. For non-geeks this is a Good Thing.
The Helix GNOME Updater is also slick and nice, very clear and friendly. But its UI is different from the Helix GNOME installer. As it should be. Except that Helix leaves you with no easy, friendly, non-geek way to install GNOME modules you passed on during the original install. For that, it's back to manual RPM or
Without Helix's enhancements and interface tweaks, GNOME 1.2 is a more stable, less bloated version of the same poorly-designed desktop environment we've had for a couple of years now. With Helix's tweaks, Miguel and crew have shown they understand that a well-thought-out GUI is something desirable. But there's still a lot of work left before GNOME will be fit for everyday use by non-techies. With 1.2, I can run GNOME now without too many problems, but I wouldn't wish it on friends or family. KDE, whatever else you might want to say about it, still has GNOME beat on usability hands-down.
KDE's always felt more sluggish to me. Of course, I stopped using Gnome for a while waaaaaay back when because it taxed my system too much. That seemed to go away in the 1.0 days. Using gnome with a lighter weight window manager than E also helps (Although E's also improved a lot recently.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
There has been talk of getting the helix guys to take over Debian's gnome stuff. We always seem to be behind and things never work quite right. It would be great for the users and us maintainers if helix could take all gnome packages for us.
Please describe what is functionally different between:
struct widget_s {
void(*open)(struct widget_s*);
void(*close)(struct widget_s*);
};
and:
class widget {
void open(void);
void close(void);
};
This "you can't do OO in plain C" attitude is silly and immature. Anyone who has done any work on a large (>100,000 line) C project has probably run into OO methodologies employed within the program. Heck, you can do OO in assembly if you have a good design and structure your code properly.
On the other hand, I've seen plenty of C++ code that was far from object-oriented--inelegant, over-classed, and buggy C++ code. No matter what language you use, you can program it wisely or poorly, elegantly or hacked together.
The installer is just BEAUTIFUL. Also, installing is rediculously simple. All you do is type:
h p3">This Link</a>.
lynx -source http://spidermonkey.helixcode.com/go-gnome-sh
as root and BOOM. A nice purdy installer pops up and does the intall for you. Very nice work gnome people. From the people I have spoken too, installing and settuing up is by far the hardest part, and this is <B>SIMPLE</B>. I think we should say thank you to the gnome team for this. And hey, they even included a linuxPPC binary. BTW, for people that don't have a RedHat 6.x system, you guys should use <a href="http://www.helixcode.com/desktop/download.p
Once again, Three Cheers for the gnome people,
Hip Hip Hooray
--Alex
Oh well, i wasn't aware of this (although i thought so) but thanks for correction.
ound the message used repetitively over and over still nothing grows silen
Possibly for the same reason you claim GNOME is still buggy as hell, and KDE isn't... Zealotism. Same reason I am replying to your post with this, since I particularly love GNOME.
the real at&t mix
Am I the only one to have tried building the Helix RedHat packages from the SRPMS ? The reason I did it is that the prebuilt packages are all compiled with "-g", which results in a massive waste of disk space (not far from ~100 MB). With 1.1.90, I managed to built almost of them (once I had figured in which order to build them, gdk-pixbuf must come first), except a few which didn't compile (most notably gnome-libs dying with a compilation error on a RH6.2 box with gnome 1.0.53). I wanted to do the same with gnome 1.2, but unfortunately, the updated SRPMS are not yet available (only the 1.1.90 can be found). :-)
I don't understand this. They build the packages from SRPMS, right ? If HelixCode really wants to become a prominent Open Source company, they better fix this.
Except for this, Gnome has made a lot of progress, and the infrastructure for programmers is simply wonderful. However, it is highly time to improve the UI design and to invent new ways to interact with the desktop, even though the current stuff is very usable. Gnome programmers have done so much neat stuff that expectations are high
I use Gnome and KDE because I have two computers, and I really find Gnome to be much more aesthetically pleasing. Maybe KDE2 will look a lot nicer, but right now Gnome 1.2 is very much more to my liking. KDE doesn't really have anything going for it in terms of apps. All apps are compatible across both desktops so long as the libs are installed. I think that the Gnome-Panel is really a fine piece of work, and the new control panel is very nice looking as well. Gnome is not at all buggy, I have nearly no problems with it. The only thing I have problems with is Netscape.
Nascantur in Admiratione. (Let them be born in Wonder)
I've personally never seen the panel crash. I'm using the latest version of the 1.0 libs/core, and I've left my computer running in use and idle for hours at a time without exiting X. Although I must admit, I never run applets within my panel.
the real at&t mix
Can't help with the overall looks, but adding the following to the .Xdefaults file which is probably in your home directory would probably help. I did this a couple of days ago and it has made all the difference:
I pretty much use KMail for all my email reading under X. Kmail comes with KDE, but I use it everywhere. The only annoying thing is that it launches KFM whenever you click a URL. I wish I could make it lauch other programs, but I don't often click links from email, so it isn't a huge issue with me. XFMail is pretty cool, too. I hope you meant "shouldn't cause much trouble" in point number 4, because I haven't had any difficulty with multimedia stuff once I got the sound card recognized, which Mandrake did perfectly right off the bat. Oh, and you can try different font sizes instead of that 100. It might help.
Logic ... merely enables one to be wrong with authority. -- Doctor Who
It's beautiful... *sob*
I love you man...
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I see in the screenshots specifically in this one that there is a feature that i have long awaited in gnome or at least long awaited to see (for all i know it was in there since the .1 days) The ability to show the icons of the app in the 'taskbar'
Call it what you like, but i find this feature useful in that when you have 20 windows open on 4 desktops an icon is much easier to locate than the three letters left in the button.
Is this feature easy to turn on by default? or is there tons of config file hacking to enable it. I would do this, but i am a full time programmer and i have no time to play with configuration details, i just need to get my work done.
Another question is there any other wm other than kwm that supports the upper left corner app icon (like win9x).
I do like using kde, but i wanted to try something different, but i did not want to waste my time dling and playing w/ libraries etc to find out the things i want/need arent there.
cristiana
i just think it's ironic how alot of people talk about the inevetable death of microsoft, etc. etc.
:)
It seems to me that GNOME is just another step in the total GUIness of linux. Sure it's nice, it can do alot of stuff for you, but it's a huge resource hog, and all in all, it seems to me to be reminiscent of some of the bloat that i switched to linux to get away from.
that being said. it does look pretty fucking cool
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Excuse me, but you have never actually looked into Sun's PKG packaging system.
.pkg files are provided....
.pkg's.
.tar if you cant.
Describing PKG as not a very sophisticated packaging systems that support upgrading and that support vendor tagging and Solaris packages are not as powerful as RPM packages demonstrates just that you have not informed yourself before making such bold and false statements.
The Sun PKG packaging system supports everything that the RPM system does, and it is installed on every Solaris system on this planet (in contrast to RPM). And for updates and patches you could eigther use pkg itself to update (PKG supports version numbers) or the sun patch system.
However, i do agree that the documentation for PKG is very thin. I had to dig quite deeply to find some useable howto's and docs. (http://docs.sun.com/ is a good starting point)
I am not going to use RPM on my solaris machines, so i guess i have to wait until
well - if i have a few spare moments, i will build it myself and make my own
It is never a good idea to use an alien file format for binary distribution - use the means that are provided with the target OS, or stick to
Jor
Has anyone had any success getting SlashApp to run? It always gives me a "Cannot parse XML, net connection down?" error...
sig this
On eBay the ratings of the msoft account would be equivalent to moderating on /.. Thus the eBay staff changing the user moderation would be like Taco bitchslapping someone who moderated Signal11 down. Anyone can still be stopped by Microsoft, it's just that now they can claim the illusion of a neutral rating when they are decidedly more evil than that.
Slashdot - contra bonos mores
One thing the LinuxPower article talks about is enhanced language support, including Japanese.
:-D~~~) before worrying too much about getting Japanese working. For now, I have my kterm, my yudit, and at least Nutscrape can view the pages right.
I'm currently running Red Hat 6.2/J, which has an integrated Japanese environment and the included GNOME works well. However, my Japanese support was practically destroyed when I downloaded a previous version of HelixCode GNOME. I did submit a bug report at that time.
I've been running this new 1.2 version for a couple of days now, and I've tried to set my language environment back to Japanese (also tried Japanese.euc), but the menus only appear as gibberish instead of in Kanji.
Therefore I'll probably wait until Red Hat 7.0/J is released (with XFree 4.0, GNOME 1.2, Linux 2.4.0, Wine 1.0, etc.
If anyone has any insight as to how to enable this language support, I'd be grateful.
> GTK+ has both C and C++ to play with, libglade, bindings to lots of other languages.
This actually matters in some circles. I have seen an ad for a commercial product built using the Ada bindings for GTK+. The product sells for $4995US/pop. (No, I didn't leave out a decimal point.) Someone is taking GTK very seriously.
I know there aren't likely very many Ada fans here, but the GtkAda crew deserves kudos on general principle. In addition to "just" providing the bindings, they have produced PostScript documentation for GtkAda to the tune of 328 pages, and have extended their bindings beyond "pure" GTK+ to include the excellent GtkExtra widgets for plotting, spreadsheet-style cells, and dumping plots and text generated by your programs to PostScript files. All under the GPL, with an LGPL-like exclusion for link-only usage.
I know of at least 3 more non-trivial projects underway using GtkAda, though I might reasonably be accused of pushing vaporware if I said much more about them at this time.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Alright, forgive me for feeding the trolls, but here we go. I'll paraphrase Louis Black (an amusing comedian): [Screws up face, shakes head violently] IDIOT! I'm sorry. I know name calling doesn't help a lot and only serves to piss people off, but it makes me feel better too. You, and every other anonymous pansy who insists on posting absolutely STUPID drivel like this without backing it up with even a single piece of real information, make me absolutely sick. I have one question: Has Slashdot ever actually deleted even one fucking post?!?!?! Have they? You stupid monkey, if something gets moderated down, for whatever reason (biased or not), you can still fucking read it if you're *that* desperate to read it, by lowering your damned threshold. Can you even begin to comprehend how the moderation system actually works?!?! If you don't want to trust the moderators' opinion, set your threshold to zero and shut up ! Have your precious trolls, flamebaits, and hotgrits posts. Or you could come out from behind your shelter of anonymity, register to get a real account, then *moderate* something of your own! *EVERY* Slashdot user here who's not too cowardly to use even a fake monicker is given the opportunity to moderate here. You seem to think it's only a small group of people. Perhaps it is -- perhaps it's the small group of people who are absolutely fucking sick of AC's such as yourself trolling for your own pathetic entertainment. Assface.
Read my stuff.
(sorry to step offtopic) Just an FYI to fix your focus problem. You change the focus behavior in the window manager either through editing the script or through the configuration program (Enlightenment configuration, Wmaker.conf, etc. or in the case of Sawmill/Sawfish[gnome 2.0 default I think] it is in the GNOME control panel) Hope that helps improve things for you. I don't believe either KDE or GNOME directly change the focus behavior it is just that most people probably use KWM as the KDE window manager.
Insert pithy comment here.
I just converted to Linux for good (I'd used it in the past, but only recently become usable for me as my only system). I'm using Gnome because:
1. I don't really know either Gnome or KDE
2. RedHat installs Gnome by default
My questions are:
Are there any comparisons of the two out there that aren't written by fanatics? Like magazine comparisons, or something like that?
Is there any real difference between KDE and Gnome, or are they just two different products filling the same niche (like IE vs. Netscape)?
What exactly are KDE and Gnome? Are they a combination of the GUI toolkit and a collection of programs like the toolbar and Gnumeric and such? Where do they stand in relation to X itself and a window manager?
What would be the relevant criteria for deciding between the two? Is one better suited for certain uses and the other for other uses?
--Kevin
The problem is, every version of GNOME was supposed to be the stable one.
Well, all software is supposed to be stable. Whether it turns out that way or not is another story.
GNOME was released early, oh well, it's a 1.0 release, what do you expect.
I expected a stable release, and was sadly disappointed. Releasing too early was a huge PR mistake; as your post points out, people become jaded and treat even good subsequent releases unfairly.
1.01 is stable. Oops, it's not, oh well, 1.02 is stable, oops it's not...
No, but each was more stable than the last. After about 1.07, IIRC, I never had a desktop crash on my system. With October Gnome, I never saw a crash on any of my friends' systems either.
Ooops, October release is still not that stable (crashes on my system).
How often? How does it crash? Have you considered checking your RAM? I'm not saying it's impossible; I've seen one panel crash and I think one GMC crash with October Gnome. But I've been running October Gnome nearly 24/7, with weeks between login and logout, ever since it's release (updating with subsequent releases). If you're seeing a crash every week there may be something else wrong with your system.
Now, if M$ had done the same (and they are), nobody would believe them
And nobody does.. but I'm starting to. A friend of mine, after seeing Windows 2000 crashes daily, managed to find the right combination of drivers to leave it rock solid. It's a rock solid lightly loaded desktop, but compared to every other OS I've seen from Microsoft that's still impressive.
but if GNOME does it, then it is all OK?
That if statement is false; but that's okay, the premise is false too. Gnome isn't perfect, and stuff like abiword, dia, and gnumeric (the pre-1.0 apps) are probably still unstable, but the core apps seem solid now.
Object Oriented programing in C is not a "hack" as you put it. From a technical standpoint, that is. Prefer C++ if you like, but don't presume to the level of arrogance where you claim to know more than thousands of C hackers who have been doing professional OO programming for years.
Gnome IS unstable. It is about as usable as some MS hype. The only difference is that this unusable piece of software comes from the supposedly "better" free software community. Gnome is an embarassment. Gnome IS the MS of open source. All talk, lots of bugs and hype, and trashing of an obviously superior product (KDE).
Perhaps you haven't used Gnome lately. It is rock solid, and is arguably better technically than KDE.
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
First, I am not attempting to come down on either side in the "you can't do OO in C" war. Fact is I think you can, but for a lot of reasons I prefer C++ for OO.
:)
Functionally, OO in C requires you to construct each object manually. This, by itself, is a major pain in the hind end. You wind up having to write code to initialize each new object (big deal--you have to write it in C++, too), and you have to remember to call each initializer.
Destruction is identical but in reverse. Unless your object is pretty trivial, you've got to remember to free those valuable system resources.
It's also difficult to do data hiding in C. In C++, you can declare things to be safely inside the black box, away from the grungy hands of the hackers who don't understand your code and whom you don't want futzing around with your code (and sometimes that grungy hacker is you, six months later, doing something hare-brained and stupid because you've forgotten some small detail). In C++, we've got lovely words like "private" and "protected" to help keep us from shooting ourselves in the foot.
There's foo, bar, baz and quux as well as construction, destruction and data hiding. The fact of the matter is that OO in C is definitely possible, and does not need to be an ugly hatchet job. You can have beautiful, elegant OO code in C.
Remember that the first C++ "compilers" were really preprocessors (anyone remembet AT&T's cfront ?), which took a C++ source file and mangled it down into OO C.
OO in C is gruelingly difficult; I always forget to explicitly call my destructor functions, for instance. C++ has better support in the language for OO code, which is why I'm a C++ hacker more than I am a C hacker nowadays.
E rox my sox!
Seriously, with Gnome 1.2, I'm probably going to transition to using gnome again. I'll still use E as a window manager. I simply can't live without epplets.
Bitchslapped? Give Rob a bitchslap from bitchslapped.com.
Thanks? Did you design that, or just happy that they used gimp to design it? :)
Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) -GAIM: MicroBerto
Berto
Compiling from src on a Sparc Sun Solaris 2.6 box.. that's what .. freg. But what a feeling when it works with icewm (I hope) .. Finally to do away with CDE .. muhahah!
.. .
I'm super excited about Evolution cause honestly. I'm getting sick of netscape/mutt/pine etc.
> gnome is still really damn buggy
For those who haven't been paying attention, GNOME hasn't been "really damn buggy" since October, when 1.0.53 came out.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
There's been lots of talk how the internet will be the driving force for the obsolescence of geographical boundaries and a new kind of "network topology" would take its place.
Doesn't seem to be the case, does it?
Distributions: Most Americans seem to be running Red Hat or some derivate. Red Hat has a marginal market share in Europe, they don't even seem to sell it in my local computer stores.
Desktop Environments: I have seen uncountable installations of various window managers (mostly KDE) in Europe but I haven't ever seen a Gnome desktop. If it wasn't for screenshots, I wouldn't even know what it looks like. A great number of Americans seem to be using Gnome though.
What could be the reason for this geographical inequilibrium?
Thanks for the Netscape hint - I'll try that.
XFMail sounds cool, but it pretty ugly imho. Maybe I'll just use Netscape's email app. It supports Palm too, I think...
And yes, #4 was supposed to say "shouldn't cause...".
Mandrake is cool - I'm running Mandrake 7.1beta with ReiserFS. The only problem I had with it was XFree 4.0 - it crashed the install (but hey - it is a beta...).
They have updated the installer, so the small issues there were with the installer in Mandrake 7.0, is gone.
Although this sounds stupid, you must admit that the purple flower that is shown when GNOME loads is the coolest looking thing ever! The shades of purple on it are very deep and satisfying, and it is like the doorway to a very pleasant looking system.
Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) -GAIM: MicroBerto
Berto
You might try the 4.06 XFree86 server. I got it at rpmfind.net/linux/MandrakeCooker/contrib/Mandrake/ RPMS (that's the FTP site). It worked when the one that came with 7.1 crashed on me as well. I have an NVIDIA card, and it works pretty well.
Logic ... merely enables one to be wrong with authority. -- Doctor Who
You don't need to know which order to install the rpm's. Go to the dir you dl'd the files into and type "rpm -Uhv *". Rpm is smart and will look at each package, then complain if any dependancies are left unresolved, otherwise, it will commence installing for you.
BTW, the "U" is for upgrading any previously gnome rpms, "h" to show the nice progress bar and "v" for verbose messages.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
see subject :-)
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.