Slashdot Mirror
KDE Developer on the GNOME Foundation
The following was written by Slashdot Reader and KDE Core Team Member, Kurt Granroth
One developers Opinion of Sun + GNOMERecently, Sun and HP (but mostly Sun) announced that they will be using Gnome as their default desktop. As a member of the KDE Core Team and as a US press-rep, announcement, I have been asked more then a few times what KDE thinks of this. I have also been asked if KDE user should be worried about the future of KDE now. I've given a rough idea of what "KDE thinks" to those journalists.. but the answer must be pretty generic since KDE is too distributed and diverse to permit me to speak for everybody.
But the wishy-washy answer that I am forced to give doesn't mean that I don't have strong *personal* opinions on the matter -- I do. So I'd like to take this time to offer a few of them for your enjoyment.
I look at the Sun announcement and I try to imagine how it can effect the KDE project. Let's look at the absolute *worst* case situation (from our point of view). Say Sun and HP contribute a significant amount of top-notch programmers towards the Gnome project and as a result, they overtake us. Perhaps for the first time, Gnome is better designed, easier to program for, easier to use, and more stable then KDE. Meanwhile, with the momentum gained by it being the "commercial Unix standard", more and more vendors use Gnome in porting their apps without giving KDE a second thought. Maybe as a result, even "Joe Hacker" in his dorm room might not want to work with KDE.
That's the "worst" case. But say, even if that *did* become true (doubtful, see below), it still wouldn't take away from the fact that KDE is very well designed, incredibly easy to program for, intuitively easy to use and rock solid stable. We have managed to attract hundreds of developers and millions of users to KDE and we will continue to attract the numbers after words. Remember, even if Gnome does become a great desktop, that doesn't mean that KDE will stop being a great desktop. Put another way, KDE will always be around and it will always be a worthwhile desktop to use and platform to develop on.
But let's back-pedal just a bit. I personally find the above scenario *incredibly* unlikely. It has never been shown that throwing more developers on the project will guarantee that the project will succeed, and you can show that it often makes no difference at all. Sun may have a lot of developers, but it remains to be seen if it will matter.
I have reason to be skeptical. Let's not forget just how the backers of the Open Group/Motif and CDE were. That's right -- Sun and HP. Two large companies with all their resources thrown at this that couldn't compete with *either* Gnome or KDE. The Sun website talks glowingly of all the really cool things they will do with Gnome... but those with a memory (and a web browser pointed towards the Open Group's website) will remember that Sun said pretty much the same thing for Motif/CDE.. and look where that went.
No, Sun's developer resources don't worry me in the slightest. We have already shown that we can take them on and win convincingly. I don't see that they will magically change anytime soon.
I do worry a *little* bit more about the PR aspects of this, though. There will be a temptation among the less-dedicated journalists to say that now that Sun and HP and RedHat all favor Gnome, then it must be a standard for Unices. After all, everybody knows that Linux *is* RedHat, right? I am already seeing mentions of this and as people jump on the bandwagon, we'll likely see it even more.
This may have nothing to do with any kind of reality, though. Already, for every new Solaris or HP workstation, there are likely several computers running Linux. Looking at the demographics of all the Linux distributions worldwide, we see that KDE focused distributions are still the norm. All in all, there are likely a LOT more workstations running KDE then there are running something else.
This somehow brings me to the another question that has been frequently asked: Will KDE ever have a corporate-backed "foundation" deciding it's future? While I'm not arrogant enough to think I can guarantee what the future will hold, I am still reasonably secure in saying that pigs will probably fly first. A board like that flies square in the face of everything that the KDE project stands for.
KDE is, has been, and always be governed and managed by those *developers* that actually do the work on it. Working code is what matter, not your market capitalization. Commercial entities may sponsor development on various aspects of KDE, but they will never be allowed to decide what KDE will become. KDE is a desktop "by the people and for the people" and if we were to prostitute ourselves to big-money for the chance of being a media-recognized standard, we would be stomping on all the people that have supported, developed, and used KDE throughout the years. We can honestly say to all developers that if you contribute good code to KDE, we will welcome it and assure you that it will never be subject to the whims and fancies of a company under the gun from shareholders. Your code will be judged purely on it's merits. More to the point, your contribution will make a difference -- it will *matter*.
I do find it ironic, though, that it is *Gnome* taking this step. Could anybody have possibly imagined this when Gnome started? Weren't they the "hacker desktop"? Didn't they have all the "desktop for the people" principles? Hmm... times change, I guess.
But back to KDE and the possibility of a great Gnome. I get the feeling that most of the people that are comparing Gnome and KDE are doing so with current Gnome and KDE 1.1.2 (or less). Even though a version of KDE that *old* still compares favorably, it's a pale shadow to the upcoming KDE 2.0. A comparison between current Gnome and current KDE (in my opinion, of course), shows KDE really shining. I *strongly* urge everybody to check out 2.0 before jumping to any kind of conclusion -- it is a truly kick-ass desktop with by far the best development architecture out there.
So I'll end this longish, partially incoherent ramble with this disclaimer: These are all my personal (largely un-filtered) opinions on these matters. They *may* reflect the views of other KDE developers, but there is no possible way I'm going to be presumptuous enough to claim that they *do*. I may be a little bit pro-KDE in thinking it is superior to Gnome, but I still have the utmost respect for the Gnome developers themselves. I've met a number of hackers -- both "free-agent" ones and HelixCode/Eazel/RedHat paid ones -- and all have demonstrated immense talent and a genuine hacker mentality. Please don't take any of what I said as a attack on *any* person or persons.
The irony is that the framework for a much better system than either of these projects dream of has been around for for years. Why oh why are these two teams full of bright developers wasting their time trying to clone the worlds worst GUI?
Developers that want to work on a better GUI for *nix, instead of cloning doze, GNUStep needs you!
those problems all seem fairly minor.
.000000001 releases was really needed. Even though every time a Gnome developer sneezes, it seems to find it's way on to Slashdot.
Do you think installing Gnome would fix them?
First off, KMail is an application. It has nothing to do with KDE as an environment. You could use mail from Netscape if you wanted.
Secondly, they did not do enough PR to satisfy YOU? I did not realize that flooding Slashdot with
Perhaps you should read a site that is not biased toward Gnome to get information about other Linux options.
When will KDE developers calm down their angry members and get down to implementing Bonobo for KDE, so that they, too, can have a Unix standard desktop and applications?
Cuz that's where it stands as of Monday 8/14/2000.
> He obviously is pissed that Gnome is backed and not KDE
Nope, he isn't -- KDE got an offer from a BIG company one year ago to get 30-40 paid fulltime-developers -- and we didn't accept this offer for the reasons Kurt stated.
Desktop choice is a truly personal thing, but now that more and more non-hackers are running Linux, is the average 'personal choice' based on architecture? I think not. For most newbies--and where else is Linux user base growth going to come from--personal choice is probably based on look (okay, look and feel) and ease of installation. And Gnome has been winning there, albeit I must confess I haven't checked out KDE 2.0 (and I certainly will after reading this).
What will prevent the prettier, easier-to-install desktop win the battle?
I use CDE for the same reason I drive a Jaguar; People know I spent a lot of money for both and that makes me proud of myself and makes my wife hot for me too.
But if you measure your project by the number of users it has, and how much it unifies the desktop, then you're getting into marketing territory, and that's where things like being able to trot out the names of corporate backers like Sun comes into play. That means nothing to most of us here, but to the people who control desktop software in large organizations, it means a LOT. That's what has a lot of the KDE faithful (like me) upset--the fact that GNOME is suddenly playing a different game by different rules. And it sure looks like they threw their principles overboard when they made the change.
There are some Linux distros which are more KDE-centric (RedHat, TurboLinux), and other which are more GNOME-centric (Mandrake, SuSe, Corel), and later have much higher presence on the desktop. This will not change overnight.
In a month or so, you'll see KDE2 announcement, and lot of folks wil shout "end of GNOME".
It would not surprise me to see a KDE-backing group emerging either...
Ah well, it is kind of fun, so let it be. Besides, even if GNOME does become a "winner" one day, so what? I suppose Qt- (i.e KDE-) based progs will start using the GNOME infrastructure where nessesary, and life will go on.
As for the Qt licence, there is nothing dangerous in it anymore, and I have even heard rumors of new licence which is supposed to be GPL-compatible. We'll see..
So, Gnome gets official Sun and HP blessing. Good, but "so what"?
.-)
Both KDE and GNOME are doing quite nicely (with or withouth HP/SUN), and both have their appeal. HP/Sun backing one or the other will not change much, I think. And there is backing for KDE too: SuSe does it, Mandrakesoft does it, and I'm sure other companies do or will do it in the future too. The only thing which COULD kill a KDE at the moment would be some wide-spread mad-programmers desease among KDE developers: rather unlikely in my opinion.
One is sure: Gnome vs. KDE wars are going in the next round. Some people will prefere GNOME, other will stick with KDE, there will be a cute flamewar to talk about during the cofee break...
Is this bad? No. As I said, we have something to talk about, both Gnome and KDE get a lot of free publicity, and all are happy. And, in the meantime we'll get TWO wonderfull desktops, so that is fine with me.
Hmmph. As the saying goes: good programers write good code, great programmers "borrow" good code. -Tupper
(I was being sarcastic in my first response, BTW).
If you really are looking at systems because you like them, fine. But if you go looking for alternates strictly because people say "RedHat is the only rational distribution" then that doesn't make any sense.
--
Ben Kosse
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
That makes a whole lot of sense there. Why are you even using Linux? Shouldn't you be using something not often used like OS/2 or Eros or something?
--
Ben Kosse
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
Last time I looked (yesterday) Gnome taskbar displayed all open apps (given right options), on all virtual desktops. And it has some nice functions, like window operations on taskbar apps, mini-icons, variable or fixed size taskbar, ability to exclude windows from being seen at taskbar... And it is much more visual-appealing than KDEs (I didn't see 2.0, because it's not there yet).
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
>a status indicator for the task bar to show when an application has completed loading
This, however, is nice...
Maybe I miss something, but doesn't the fact you consider this thing useful means you need to upgrade your computer/OS/windowing system/memory/all of the above? On my comp, applications load when I say them to load, and I have to time to stare on the taskbar and see "it isn't loaded yet... almost loaded... loaded but a small part... finally there!". I just press an icon and it's there.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
I just have to say that- ----------
a) I'm not a big fan of gnome. at 1.0, it crashed my linux box. crashed it hard. repeatedly. when I stopped running it, my box stopped crashing.
but b) KDE 2.0 has been "upcoming" for almost a year now. can't you release something in between? all the snapshots and developer packages may or may not work from day to day. fine. I understand the development model of a project like this. but don't talk to me about "comparing current gnome to old kde" when there is no NEW KDE available to compare it to. I'm sorry. this is a rant. but it's frustrating.
-----------------------------------
All that glitters has a high refractive index.
You see, without that little doohicky, the universe stops.
http://propheteer.org
Ah, hell, it's actually not that simple. In some ways, GNOME is actually more *open.* Yeah, QT is more open now, but what's being virtually ignored still in the KDE camp is the ability to code for the KDE desktop in different languages than C++ (last I heard, the "official" stance was, "C++ is the best choice.") This may not seem like much of an issue since C++ is pretty standard in the commercial world, but this ain't exactly the commercial corporate world here. Some folks just wanna code in Python or Lisp. Mo' power to 'em.
:^) The only thing GNOME needs to work on is memory usage. KDE2 has them beat. Oh, and Nautilus. Haven't tried it yet, but hear it's great. :^)
Try out both the KDE2 betas and Helix Gnome; I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by both. There actually is a convergence happening right now, regardless of what the two camps think of each other. And, hey, GNOME may have been a knee-jerk reaction to an offhand comment by Mattias, but it's gotten pretty good and pretty stable (I'm convinced, in case you couldn't tell.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
I wrote my senior project (about half a web browser... it fetched pages and did a passable job at mangling them for display -- BUT it handled broken HTML just fine :-) in Qt when my only other windowing programming experience was Win32.
I also haven't tried GTK, but I have to agree with you -- Qt beats the bloody hell out of Windows programming.
--
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
is anyone else here sick of seeing people closely tied to the kde project taking cheap shots at the gnome people? back when kde 1 was released, it was the other way around. the gnome hackers/supporters were notorious about making derogatory remarks about the kde project, wheras the kde developers had more a reputation as "shut up and code" types. they proved they were better by writing better software.
but now several times within the last few months i have seen key kde people making cheap shots at the gnome project. this guy was constantly calling gnome unstable and hard to use. i use helix gnome, and for me it has been extremely stable and easy to use exactly the way i want to (my one big criticism of the kde group, btw) i can't say anything about ease of development for either environment, not having really done any (although coding for qt sucks ass IMO, or at least did, back in the 1.44 days. coding for gtk+ was way better). all of his shots at the gnome project about being unstable and hard to use are quite unwarranted.
and if this guy has a problem with people comparing te current stable version of gnome with the current stable version of kde, get over it. not everybody is out there downloading beta's or cvs builds so they can see what the next big thing is.
FWIW, i have downloaded and used kde2. first of all, it is not stable enough for regular use, unless you don't mind restarting your X session every now and then. it looks like it will defeinitely be a great product, and i would use it now except for one big beef. it's perfect if you use your environment the wway the kde developers do. i don't. i don't use kwrite, and i can't get it to open stuff in vim by default. (not easily anyway) i don't like the keybindings in their wm, and i can't set my own. i have two mice in my X configuration, but kde decides i only need one (and before you tell me this can't be a kde thing, they both work fine in everything else but kde). and of course none of the cool stuff in kde2 (except konqueror) can be used with any other window manager. i loved kde1 and gnome, because you could use all of the parts that you wanted and none of the parts you didn't. kde2 doesn't let you do that, and until i find a window manager that lets me use all of their cool stuff, or hack theirs to work the way i want it too (not sure which is a lesser task) i won't use it. easy to use doesn't mean squat if i can't use it the way i want to.
(posted from konqueror 1.92)
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
Let the users define the standards.
... like they did with Windows.
--
Yup, and the KDE team, and interested parties define the standard for KDE.
When he says 'define the standard' he means that the 'Users' are supposed to do it by flicking the channel on a metaphorical remote control - 'Users defining the standard' means 'Users picking which standard to follow'.
If you haven't been paying attention, most Users prefer the Microsoft standard.
--
You win.
This line does not exist, and is only here to make me un-lame.
--
I think alluding to market capitalization as being the driving force of gnome is just a wee bit off base. Just because HP and Sun jump on an open source project as their standard doesn't mean the hacker developers behind gnome have somehow become greedy and lost their original focus. I
Brian Seppanen
Minister of Information and Propaganda
Area 54 The Secret Government Disco Labs Provo
Sory. Here is the link http://lwn.net/2000/features/Linux World/KDE.php3
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
It's a little program called grdb. If you're using the latest Helix GNOME, the GNOME Control Center has it under Legacy Applications, otherwise just get it from Freshmeat. It only works well with certain themes (pixmap ones just translate horribly, since other toolkits can't do it).
Windows 2000: Designed for the Internet. The Internet: Designed for UNIX.
Pay attention to the parent comment. KDE has a taskbar applet that displays the loading progress of applications; that's what I was referring to.
Windows 2000: Designed for the Internet. The Internet: Designed for UNIX.
grdb does everything but qt apps (for the reasons I explained above, and KDE themes prior to KDE 2.0 were gratuitous hacks), and "native X apps", because there is no such thing.
Windows 2000: Designed for the Internet. The Internet: Designed for UNIX.
I use Debian and GNOME and am very happy. Actually, I guess when people think of GNOME they are really thinking of 'panel' and probably 'gmc'. I use neither as I prefer to fullscreen all my apps on separate desktops under E and just use root menus for everything. Anyways, I like this environment. Good luck.
-l
Help cure AIDS, cancer, and more. Donate your unused computer time to worldcommunitygrid.org. Join Team Slashdot!
If Linux is going to make it on the desktop, there needs to be a single, unified desktop layer. Fragmentation is bad.
So much for free speech.
KDE2 and Gnome are DnD compatible (more or less).
Both have agreed on the Xdnd protocol. I can for example use xmms and konqueror seamlessly.
If you find a place where it breaks, tell both progam's authors that there is a bug....
BTW, I wish someone would hack xmms to use the kde file dialogs. Make it a compile option. xmms does not use gtk anyways...
That and the gimp (and gtk_gnutella) are the only gtk programs I use.
Moritz
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Have you tried WxWindows??
STFU about slashdot bias.
I, for one, don't use either system. They are both bloated and ugly peices of software. The notion of "icons" and a "desktop" is a poor abstraction of computing carried over by the GNOME and KDE groups in some strange effort to mimmic Windows on top of Linux (a poor fit).
The ideal desktop for me is a minimalist window manager with a built in pager (a small one) with an easy to configure applications bar that pops up when you click the mouse in the root menu.
Now, don't get me wrong, I use and enjoy KDE and GNOME apps because they are useful, it is just the desktop metaphor that I have a serious problem with. Too much clutter, too much wasted window area on useless icons and launch bars and the like.
Currently, my preferred wm is CTWM. Small, fast, useful and fantastic looking. The only thing wrong with it is the need to edit a text file and restart it simply to add a new program to the menus. Maybe one day I'll fix that myself...
STFU about slashdot bias.
Kinda funny. I tried downloading Helix gnome, and couldn' get it to install. It keeps barfing on the last step, telling me I'm outta room on my HD. Next time I reinstall, I'll probably install just KDE.
-----------------------------
1,2,3,4 Moderation has to Go!
I think Sun gains most of all with gnome. they get all the advantages of open source yet unlike linux, they have one standard UI. Developers won't have to develop for gnome, kde or whatever
---
One was clearly better and it still lost. I think that KDE is better integrated and has more components than Gnome. I use Gnome. It accomplishes what I need and gets out of my way. I don't use most of it's components anyway.
This is very personal, so I can advice /. readers to check both the See GNOME in Action KDE2 Screenshots screenshot pages.
Warm GPL fuzzies.
Again very personal and hardly of any concern for _real_ end users. Real end users do not have a strong opinion on the GPL or QPL.
Neato software.
You can run either programs in either environment, and let me assure you that some KDE programs are neater than GNOME's. Try KDE2 and see how well Konqueror is doing. Or try Konsole in fullscreen mode. ;-)
KDE tries too hard to look like Windows.
Yes and no. Face it, the GUI of Microsoft isn't all bad. It's one of the best parts of Windows. Therefore KDE has taken many good aspects from it. And many aspects from CDE, BeOS, MacOS, etc. Check the screenshots again, I can assure you KDE does not have to look like Windows at all.
t-10m I was excited when I downloaded the sources, you can compile the Helix installer myself.
t ... if you already have GNOME installed. *sigh*
The war has begun long ago. GNOME and KDE have already been improving each other. We *are* already winning.
Then use it within KDE or GNOME instead of Englightenment (or the new GNOME wm) or KWin (kwm's successor).
KDE and GNOME are desktop environments with integrated applications and services. You might not need any of those, but they are in a way different league than regular window managers so don't compare them to those.
How about.. if Linux is going to make it on the desktop, you need to stop trolling?
> Did you know that it also runs on Windows?
Well, yes... and this is where things get interesting, because the Windows port of QT is not free. Just like QT is for all non-free software developers on any platform.
Remember, Troll Tech can sell QT to commercial developers with your patches in it.
And remember: you don't have to use pixmapped themes. Really. I know they're tempting and all, but there's nobody with a big stick standing there saying "You must use pixmapped themes".
--
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
huh? the guy is a bit skeptical maybe, but i wouldn't say inflammatory...
Have you seen Ironstayn vs Supergovernment yet?
As soona as a few hundred sun-developers are working on your favourite pet-project[...]
A few hundred developers? You obviously don't have a clue about the size of Sun. They don't have the resources to put "a few hundred" developers on the Gnome project. In total (world wide), they have about 4000 people working with software (SunOS, compilers, cluster software, libraries, CDE, etc, etc.), the rest (and a much bigger part) is working with hardware, sales, etc. So thinking that Sun will put more than 20-30 people (tops) on the Gnome project is probably not very familiar with the industry.
I couldn't help bust out laughing when I read
that phrase in the same context as KDE. What
a crock!
I bought a new 15G hard disk so I started
backing up some files on the new hard disk,
files from a 14G and some from an 8G hard disk.
About 20-30 minutes or so after I started the
drag and drop of directories the system hung.
I could go to different destop with ctrl-F2
and other functions but couldn't login. I tried
to login from my son's computer. Not possible
even though I was able to ping and the rate was
good.
A reset was the only thing that got it out
of the shit. On reboot the expected disk check
was done and tons of files were flushed. A whole
directory of good stuff flushed to hell.
I then used the command line to finish bcaking up
linux stuff.
Too lazy for the winblows stuff I went back to
the KDE GUI to do the drag and drop. I thought
that perhaps it had problem with one particular
hard disk and this one was vfat so I may not have
the same problem. No luck, as it was moving
a fairly large subdirectory it crashed again. This
time I had no different useless desktops. I was
able to ping from my son's computer but no login.
Reset again...
This time I had a surprise, it was impossible to
continue the copying or even delete files on the
directory where KDE fucked up. It was read only.
I looked and the files were w for the user root
which is where I was. I rebooted to winblows where
I deleted the screwed up directory.
My system has 128M or ram and 4 133M swap partitions. I run SuSE 6.4 on an UltraDMA 64
controller from Promise. The processor is
a K6 550Mhz which not overclocked.
You might think the controller is at fault
but how do you explain this other event which
happened before I had the new controller and
was running Mandrake 7.0
I was recording my Dean Martin LPs. I choose
to record a few songs before I would save to
files. I figured it would use swap when I ran out
of ram and was not concerned the least. After 4 or
5 songs there was a deadly crash, very similar
as to what happened.
It seems to me that KDE fucks up big time when
it is required to use a lot of memory. Perhaps
it leaks memory like creasy and breaks the system
in the process. This is pushing emulation of
winblows a bit too far I think.
If anyone has a solution to this severe bug
please let me know at bbcat@netonecom.net
As for being rock solid, anyone who thinks
that KDE is rock solid had one too many drinks
or been sniffing some funny stuff.
I was told some years back from a member of the CDE development team that the collective backers of CDE (IBM, DEC, HP, SUN) spent $30 million to get CDE to V1.0.
The conclusion I draw from that is that big money doesn't always produce brilliant results.
Macka
-- The wonderful thing about standards, is that there's so many to choose from --
While I personally prefer Gnome to KDE, (KDE smacks too much of Windows to me), I have both installed and don't use either on a regular basis. They both try too hard to "protect me against myself" by popping up annoying, modal, "confirmation" windows. If I said to quit, just do it, damn it! I KNOW I haven't saved my changes!
KDE's rather largish ace-in-the-hole, however, is the forthcoming release of Kylix, which IIRC, will be based on QT.
I'll be perfectly content to use WindowMaker as long as the WM guys keep working on it.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
--
Think you know more about how to run your life than Al or George Dubya? Check out Harry!
I understand how the KDE developers and loyal users feel, they feel that instead of the GNOME developers trying to do their best at coding so that people will use GNOME for GNOME's merits, they just threw the towel in and decided to get Sun and HP to back them so people will think that GNOME is the defacto desktop.
:) Oh and as an extra note, I can't wait to have star office components integrated into GNOME, that'll be great. Yet I have a feeling in my gut that it won't go through that well, maybe its still the mozilla aftertaste in my mouth that makes me say that.
However, I don't think that's the case at all. Perhaps I'm missing something but the GNOME developers didn't go out and make a deal with Sun and HP. Sun and HP decided they wanted to back GNOME for their own reasons. That's the thing about GPL code, anyone who wants to work on it can, and if a big company wants to hire people to work on code, thats their business.
Is this person saying that if a large company wanted to hire developers to send in patches to KDE, that KDE shouldn't let them? That it would be selling out? I think we'd be seeing a very different side of this person had Sun chosen KDE.
Of course I might be missing something (seems like all comments end this way
FiGZ.COM - A waste of perfectly good web space
Small, fast, efficient, stable, feature rich...
Ummm, WindowMaker
Um... would that be the Mozilla that was announced as being double-licensed under the NPL and GPL just a few days ago?
Um... well, that was exactly the point I was making... the original poster asked for an example of corporate takeover of an open source project, the reply said "Mozilla", and I corrected that by saying that Mozilla had been released under the GPL.
Try reading the post before replying next time, please...
The Gnome Foundation and buddies actually, as Bob Young said at the end of the press conference, "We haven't signed a single license among any of us....With the GPL, we have eliminated the need for trust."
5 998-3,00.html
See more on the press conference at:
http://www.zdnet.com/sp/stories/news/0,4538,261
Steven
The only silly thing in this article is the whole rant about GNOME being *gasp* commercialized. As long as it stays largely GPLed, I don't care.
On a side note...
I remember casually evaluating GUI libraries several years ago, and thinking to myself 'xforms, this is stupid, positional geometry instead of contraints based is clearly the wrong thing', and 'QT, this looks nice, but I don't like the liscensing, why is anybody basing anything 'Free' off this toolkit?', and 'GTK, hmm, why on earth did they do this in C? And this signal thing seems hokey. The Gimp sure seems nice though.'. This was completely independent of any of the debates on the Net as I wasn't even aware of them.
Just my two cents.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Bonobo is more open because it does not in any way depend on Gnome. Kparts, however, (last time I checked) depends on KDE. Any app can take advantage of Bonobo and not use any other part of the Gnome (besides ORBit of course). That is why it's less proprietary.
This is slightly offtopic, but I would be interested to know how you got your non-GTK programs to use GTK themes.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
In the words of another poster, BZZZT!
That was exactly the reverse. Open Source tool over at corporate project. Originally, Netscape was closed source. Netscape opened it to some extent, with their own licence. Now it looks like it will be genuinely Free. Good try, though, buddy boy.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
CDE sucks. It has no soul, is very generic and offers little in the way of custom features. Gnome for all of its faults is a very mallable piece of code. Seems to me that Sun & HP just want a place to build better looking and more feature rich desktops. They get the added bonus of application level compatibility. At least I hope this is what they are doing. Gnome is also very cheap with no QT dependancy.
The only thing that will make the difference is if the desktop has some effort put into it. Features that are intuitive and flexible are what matter. I have not seen a lot of this out of any of the unix vendors. (except for SGI who has a great desktop!)
If Sun and HP are interested in really making their desktops a nice place to be then it will benefit *nix users as a whole as people will see that UNIX systems can be interesting and visually appealing and all of those other things that don't really matter from a functional point of view, but do matter from a marketing and useability point of view.
CDE does the job, but after using it for a while, I get the feeling that it was an effort to build the most boring GUI imaginable. Lots of simple features are missing. Little things that I guess are not really needed to run a desktop, but neverthless are things that one gets attached to.
Unless the big UNIX vendors change their attitude regarding their desktops, this effort will not mean a whole lot other than things will be easier to port.
People want little things to get attached to on their desktop. All of the people that I know that make the mistake of running Win2000 all talk about how much better the desktop is. Shadow cursor, alpha fades in the menus and such.
None of this really matters though for systems that are designed as enterprise systems, so I can't see any of the big boys (except SGI who goes for that sort of thing) doing anything but taking the default environment, adding a couple of system specific tools, and replacing CDE.
I will wait and see.
(Glad they are using Gnome though. KDE is very functional, but a little too Redmond for me. )
Blogging because I can...
On your system, strain on your system.
Loading multiple widget libraries tends to take up ram
Finkployd
Yeah, but I try not to. It's a pretty big strain when you are using QT, GTK, kdelibs, and gnome-libs all at the same time.
I use both, but I use them on different computers.
Finkployd
I don't suppose you've seen the sgi Change Log?? There are kernel patches (good ones) that Linus has turned down.
Name one incedent where Corporate has taken over an open source project.
Pan
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Thanks for the tip - I will try "Draw widgets as Motif" tonight and see what happens.
Windows style is indeed pretty sucky.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Only if you're in my company's IT department. Don't forget to get something from Microsoft that implements all of the hot new standards, too!
OK, I think I'm done now.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Woops, I forgot one thing:
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Receiving emails from clients with broken dates screw up the sort order?
I used KMail in the office for some time, but it is ultimatly why I stopped using KMail. I wanted to fix it, but couldn't take the time out to do so.
Good for you for fixing it.. I wish I was still a KMail user so I could get your copy of the source.
That makes sense to me. Certainly the QT license is one of the big plusses that I find to Gnome. Ironic, no? At home I run KDE, but when I develop, I want to be able to distribute crossplatform. So far that's lots of trouble, but gtk is getting there. QT never will (what never?, No...) retract and rephrase: The current license that QT has doesn't make developing programs that will need to end up on windows practical for me. NOBODY does a good job of crossplatform. Java is closest (SCCL, but you can draw GUI's and print on most platforms). But when GTK is actually properly developed, then GNome based applications will be crossplatformable. Of course I may still run KDE.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Well, they certainly decide on what they will develop. As does everyone else. And if the coordinators of the project decide to accept the changes (quite likely, I admit), then the features that they add will be added. However, diverse choices are quite possible. Who said there could be only one ... WindowMangage? Word Processor? Theme? I'm not quite clear where you think this limitation will appear. After all, their code will also be GPL'd, so modules from it can be incorporated ad lib into new projects.
Possibly what you mean is that when something is good enough it's not clear what to do to improve it. That's is certainly possible, but so what? We've just agreed that it's already good enough, so the interest will be in another area. What we can hope is that a lot of the effort will go into polishing up the rough edges and documenting things. (OK, so I'm hopelessly optomistic! I said "hope".)
OTOH, I am not now and have no particular interest in doing basic development on the screen interface. I suppose that if I were, then I might consider this more of an intrusion. As it is, I just want to have the services available, the source available as examples, and the stability that I have come to expect. And my real main desire is that GUI builders and report creators for portable applications were around (gtk is helping here, and I can hope that the Gnome consortium will inspire it to help yet more, though I may end up with Kylix [or whatever they end up calling it]).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I know this may sound really strange... but I don't really like either KDE or Gnome. I find that they are both huge, have a lot of bugs, slow down my machine significantly, and pretty much reduce the strengths of linux down to where it looks, feels and acts like M$ Windows. (although I have to admit that KDE seemed a little better to me than Gnome in the areas of functionality, efficiency, stability) I use Afterstep and have abosultely no problems. It's really fast, beautiful, easy to configure, has great features, and is very intuitive (at least to me).
What I am trying to say here, is everyone is talking like there are only two desktop choices for linux, there are a lot more out there in constant development that should not be overlooked and considered when choosing your desktop. I understand that this is a debate between two desktops which very similar goals and objectives, but remember that your goals and objectives may not mirror those of either the gnome or kde teams.
K
"BadTimes will make you fall in love with a penguin" - Laika
"calmed down a lot in the last year as each system became stable and usable" I am not trying to troll here, but I think they were trying to avoid saying "calmed down a lot in the last year as GNOME became stable and usable". I have been following the development of both KDE and GNOME since KDE 0.99beta1 (pre-GNOME AFAIK). I have been using KDE predominantly since then (what is that, two and a half years?). And since the first GNOME releases, I have been wanting to use GNOME, but have always found it lacking. At least once every six months I download the sources to the latest GNOME and try to live with it for as long as I can. GNOME 1.2 is the first version I have tried that had enough stability that I really felt I could use it properly. By contrast, KDE 1.0 was close to rock solid two years ago. Of course the current KDE-2 betas are unstable - they are betas after all, but other than those, KDE hasn't had a release in the last year, so further it cannot have improved in stability. One could argue that certain key apps have seen maintenance work, such as KMail, but the flip side is that the distributions don't seem to update individual apps. I know a number of people in my local LUG who use recent versions of SuSe, Red Hat and Mandrake have found they still contain the 1.1 release version of KMail. GNOME 1.2 is great, but face the truth, a big reason for KDE's historical success was its stability. Now that GNOME has caught up in terms of stability, competition can only get hotter!
I think both GNOME and KDE should be raped and amalgamated (sp?) into one Desktop in order to create a standard desktop to attract point and drool users to the Linux world. Then we can have secrataries using KWord and Gnumeric on their desktops. Of course, I'll still be using Enlightenment when this happens, but hey, what's a guy to do?
:)
:) Have a good day.
GNOME has a lot of neat features: highly configurable, good DnD, nicer icons, better window manager (in either Enlightenments or Sawfish's case) and a heck of a lot more usability. So what if it's not stable, it's really well conceived. But then again...
KDE has a lot of neat features too: tons of apps, it actually has an office suite (although parts of it are kinda iffy sometimes), it has attempted to be a "configure everything here" kinda thing like an operating system we'll not mention, and generally is stable. KDE is also a lot more friendly to those making their way from other pastures. Ya QT is ugly, but what can ya do?
I'm not really a big fan of either GNOME or KDE, but I don't think either of them should be chosen for the desktop standard on Linux. We should take the best part of all words and toss it together. The only request I'd make is to abandon QT and us GTK+, due to my aforementioned opinion. It's Blackbox, WindowMaker or Enlightenment for me. No damn panels I *need* to have to operate well, no huge overhead, and I don't have to RPM (or compile) a ton of crap to have it on my system.
I think I've used up more space than I should have.
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
It should also be noted that Gnome appears to be more of repacement for OpenWindows, that it does for CDE, at least where Sun is concerned. I think the guys at KDE are simpley jealous because they weren't chosen. Also according the FAQ, KDE will be available on one of the bundled CDs, though they it looks like it will simply be a side note.
The all important FAQ is at: http://www.sun.com/software/gnome/faq/
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
It is hard to make a strong footprint argument without real numbers, but I believe I will see a drastic drop in memory use when I upgrade to KDE2. Why? It depends on what you have running. Many of us have a web browser running all the time. On my machine, that means running Netscape -- memory leaks and all -- alongside kfm in KDE 1. That's a lot of memory. If Konqueror is as good as they claim, I should see a leaner KDE 2 desktop with Konqueror than my current KDE 1 desktop or a Gnome desktop with Mozilla.
I wonder if a large part of the Gnome/KDE divide is ethnic or geographical? KDE, after all, is European in origin and it looks like the main movers are still European. The development meetings are in Europe. On the other hand, Gnome has been associated with Red Hat for a long time. It may be significant that all the companies associated with the Gnome Foundation announcement are American. Logistical and comfort issues may contribute to making KDE a less appealing choice for those on the "wrong" side of the Atlantic puddle.
Not bad, except that these do not show shared memory use. You should use "top", which has a "SHARE" column to indicate how much of that footprint is shared libs, otherwise a one-time library size difference gets counted for every app. KDE makes heavy use of shared libs.
Sure, everyone is free to hack away at the code, but no Joe Hacker ever gets the media attention that Sun and HP get when they say they're putting big bucks on Gnome. The media is ruthless and we have to ensure that coding aspects will not pale in comparison to marketing.
Marketing truly can remove freedom from us, you just have to read back a little, seeing how Linux is suddenly RedHat; software vendors and corporations could be making it that way Linux=RedHat...where is our freedom?
Hugonz
Yeah, but he's being sarcastic there I think you'll find.
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
A little planning goes a long way...
score 5, funny?
must be moderator crack smoking day.
-No, Sun's developer resources don't worry me in -the slightest. We have already shown that we can -take them on and win convincingly. I don't see -that they will magically change anytime soon. I have seen SUN programers at work, and it is not a pretty sight. I think this is a desperate attempt by both company to stay afloat in the unix world by trying to look like LINUX.
The fact that an app you wanted to use had a lot of (Gnome) dependancies is GOOD. Get this through your head. It means that the author did not reinvent the wheel, he used existing infrastructure. It means that the app is likely to be much more standards compliant out of the box because it uses common code. It means the app has less code and is more maintainable. I know downloading some megabytes is a pain, but get with the program and just do it.
For me, a proud user, the gnome foundation is meaningles in the short-term. Before any of benefits of the foundation become availiable and stable, I will be using KDE 2.1, or bigger.
People should judge these announcements on a less emotional base, and project conservatively into the future.
Remember when gnome started. Reading posts and news it sounded as if gnome would just delete KDE from the desktop in a few months in terms of features and licencing... I've tried one or two releases of gnome and I am still waiting for the gnome release that will put me off the cleaner integration of KDE.
J
KDE is, has been, and always be governed and managed by those *developers* that actually do the work on it.
:)
THIS is why grandma will never be able to use Linux.
I don't want to inflame the situation even more, but if I was a KDE developer and I was given the spotlight on slashdot, I would have used it to discuss the relative technical merits of KDE and Gnome.
:)
It's fairly obvious, to me at least, that KDE will always have problems stemming from the licensing issues, the only way out of this would be, paradoxically, if a Big Company (tm) decided to buy off Trolltech and re-release Qt as GPL.
It is also obvious that even if at this point KDE is more polished, better etc. Gnome will have more and more exposure because of this announcement and because it's pushed heavily by RedHat which, whether we like it or not, is most of the time thought to be the 'Real' Linux by most of the not-so-informed rest of the world.
This part strikes me as a case of *really* bad sour grapes:
This somehow brings me to the another question that has been frequently asked: Will KDE ever have a corporate-backed "foundation" deciding it's future? While I'm not arrogant enough to think I can guarantee what the future will hold, I am still reasonably secure in saying that pigs will probably fly first. A board like that flies square in the face of everything that the KDE project stands for
basically it reads as if the author wishes that those pigs started to fly, but he knows that due to the licensing issues it won't ever happen.
In fact, if you were Sun, what would you choose ?
- A desktop which, though not as polished or probably a little bit technically inferior, shows promise and is licensed under a very clear license
- A desktop which is very polished, professional and everything but that is licensed under unclear terms and is dependent more or less from the whims of an external company ?
Note that I don't imply that Trolltech is in bad faith, but I do know from experience that the bigger the company, the usually more paranoid it is, and if I was Sun I would take exactly their same decision, and only because of the licensing issues without regards to technical merit.
Note, I just got here to work, and I am still sleepy, if the above doesn't make sense, chalk it up to the lack of sleep
-- the cake is a lie
yeah, and when you read that *IN CONTEXT*, the one thing he doesn't like about these "products" are THE PLATFORM THEY RUN ON... ehhhh windows, if you needed a clue...
This, of course, is a very good thing to do. The ability to build upon other software makes for less work for the developers. With a limited number of developers it is, of course, better if they dont reinvent the wheel more times than necessary.
KDE has done the same in some cases, altho the same old licensing issue will appear every time; they need permission to link to Qt with any GPL code, so they cant do it as easy as Gnome can.
Hmmm, I dunno about that, I believe Solaris CDE got a new icon in the panel just a few releases ago. We held an install party at the office. Or I may be imagining things.
It seems unlikely that any relicensing of KDE will ever happen, as several of the KDE developers have strongly stated that they will do no such thing and they do not agree there is a problem at all.
Further they say they have in certain cases no right to change the license. Which sounds like they havent had complete tracking of the code, and would have serious problems finding out who owns what part and/or have incorporated/borrowed code from other places without asking permission.
The only likely way out is Qt going GPL compatible and that, at least, sounds somewhat likely.
Nothing has changed really; Qt is still controlled by Troll Tech and has commercial licensing strings (for proprietary development). GTK/Gnome are still free and (L)GPL. Corporate backing and funding are not the same as corporate control and steering.
It's too bad that TrollTech has yet to learn from Motif too; the original non-free license and the later free-but-not-gpl-compatible license had a large part of the free software community leery with Motif in mind. And even if they satisfy the free software community by going GPL compatible, that still leaves proprietary software developers with the choice of pay-for Troll Tech controlled Qt/KDE versus free (speech/beer) Gtk/Gnome.
While one can appreciate the argument that people are willing to pay small fees to develop for 'company backed high quality' toolkits as Qt, the argument doesnt hold if one is developing for Linux and/or KDE/Gnome, since you'll already be knee deep in free software, and if you had any objection to such 'freeness' you wouldnt be there. And if you're aiming at 'free (speech/beer)' as the foundations of your free or proprietary application why not go all the way?
Motif pretty much shot itself to irrelevance through licensing and vendor control. And I definitely prefer an entirely free foundation for any apps I write.
True, KDE switching away from Qt is unlikely to even happen. However, with the situation as it is it pretty much guarantees that a large number of companies and programmers will never accept KDE becoming any form of standard. Rock and hard place situation.
As regards your PS's; Trolltech is entirely in the right even (altho wrong about the GPL). It's a good idea. Had they not been supporting the use of Qt as a major component of a potential dominant GUI there would be no problem. As is, anyone remotely paranoid or cynical about corporate behaviour in the computing market will get the idea of perpetual licensing fees for any (including _company internal or private_ (not even the GPL does that)) proprietary development.
As far as judging from their actions... well, the threat to sue any developers of the clean-room free Qt replacement Harmony pretty much settled any doubts about Troll Techs intentions in my opinion.
Nope, he isn't -- KDE got an offer from a BIG company one year ago to get 30-40 paid fulltime-developers -- and we didn't accept this offer for the reasons Kurt stated.
If they wanted something in return then you need to give some idea of what it was if you want your decision to seem sensible.
On the face of it, rejecting contributions to a free software project just because they come from employees of a "BIG company" makes no sense whatsoever. You actually told this copany that you wouldn't incorporate its code into the project no matter how good it was? Why wouldn't you accept their contributions on exactly the same terms as anyone elses, was it purely to spite them?
Gnome 1.2 acts very little like Gnome 1.0? You mean it doesn't core dump everytime you moved the mouse??!!
Boy, gnome sure has gone a long way!
KDE, after all, is European in origin and it looks like the main movers are still European. The development meetings are in Europe. On the other hand, Gnome has been associated with Red Hat for a long time.
First off, wasn't the last large Gnome development conference in France?
Second, one of the driving forces behind Gnome, Miguel, is certainly NOT employed by Redhat.
Third, the one part of Gnome that was indisputedly the pet project of a Redhat employee, Enlightenment, got ditched for another project more suited to Gnome, Sawfish.
Finally, given that most 'conferences' for both projects happen over the internet via email or irc, I don't think geocgraphy has anything to do with it.
Now, if some group in Asia put out a toolkit and users were mostly Asian or if a Russian group put out an environment and the users were mostly Serbian of one sort or the other, or something similiar, then I would take the ethnic/political/geographical differences seriously.
As it is, KDE is just as popular in the states as it is in Europe. Why else do so many stateside distributions (Caldera, Storm, Corel, Mandrake, etc.) ship KDE as the default?
{warning: END-USER opinion follows}
Hi. I'm JUDU (Just Another Desktop User). Pretty much, I could care less whether something is in GNOME or KDE, and most likely don't even comprehend the difference.
Chances are, I need a specific application that does something VERY important to me, and that application will either be written for GNOME or KDE. So, I will use whatever environment supports the application that I must have. For me this app is currently bluefish, BLUEFISH ROCKS THE HOUSE! But, thanks to something about gnome (or gtk, I forgot), bluefish cannot show me line numbers, and that's a MAJOR drawback. On the other hand, kunit (thank you Jan) has managed to keep this american from buying shoes in Europe that would require his toes to be amputated.
My experience is that KDE (in the 1.X series) was quick, solid as a rock, and missing 70% of what I needed. So I got sick of waiting and switched to GNOME.
GNOME was pretty, had 70% of what I wanted, and either repeatedly crashed, refused to inter-operate (address books, for example), or just behaved in a fashion completely counter to what I was expecting. No, wait a minute, that was Enlightenment.(drum crash)
Either way, the Linux desktop just is not there yet. And until it is, multiple efforts can only yield choice; and the developers can (and probably do) borrow any great ideas that the other team might have.
I can't wait to try KDE2, but I REALLY can't wait for that cable modem...
{END-USER DISCLAIMER: before I get modded down by the oh-so-tiring "then write it yourself!" snivelling, remember that I clearly identified myself as an END-USER. I am an END-USER because I am building other stuff, be it databases, websites, or tacos al pastor. User 222722 asked for an opinion, and here it is.}
"The mind is a terrible thing to, um, uh, oh bollocks." -- Me
Now that GNOME and KDE have become solid top notch desktops we should actually be thankful to have both. In the windows world there's really only one choice. At least on UNIX we have a choice of two desktops that are similar enough that people can move between the two (from a user perspective), yet different enough to give developers a real choice in what side they want to work with.
Teletype? Luxury! When I was a child I had to carry a 100-lb box of punch cards 5 miles to the reader and back to the printout. Uphill! Both ways!
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
GNOME has no equivalent to the taskbar.
I disagree. The GNOME panel displays buttons for application selection, though it does limit the available buttons to those on the current virtual desktop. If you want to switch to an app on another virtual desktop, the up arrow next to the pager shows a list of all windows. The functionality is all there, it's just not in yet another bar taking up valuable window real estate.
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
Thank you. I needed that laugh.
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
That bothered me. He's trying to convince us that he is right, using braindead arguments. I quote:
I do worry a *little* bit more about the PR aspects of this, though. There will be a temptation among the less-dedicated journalists to say that now that Sun and HP and RedHat all favor Gnome, then it must be a standard for Unices. After all, everybody knows that Linux *is* RedHat, right? I am already seeing mentions of this and as people jump on the bandwagon, we'll likely see it even more.
Especially the "right?" part. This writing needed the <RANT> tag. He obviously is pissed that Gnome is backed and not KDE, the desktop that is soooo superiour to Gnome. Well, this is your wake-up call, maybe Gnome isn't so bad after all. Maybe the big boys think it has a good feature in front of it. Get over it, get back to coding...
*sigh*
Thimo
--
Avoid the Gates of Hell. Use Linux!
ugh. i went :
motif/cde -> fvwm95 -> afterstep -> 4dwm -> KDE -> gnome -> afterstep
now im sticking to afterstep/4dwm - i dislike bloated pieces of shit like gnome and kde.
hey you gnome/kde developers - heres a heads up for you. not all of us like/use your crappy bloated desktops.
Strain? Your eyes hurt? or maybe your back?
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
(FYI: that was a joke)
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
The GNOME foundation is composed of developers that each have a vote on issues. Sun, HP and the other corporations just have seats on an advisory board (so they dont have any real power). GNOME will always be controlled by its own developers.
-snip-
This comment posted with Konqueror
Damn, that sounds like a lot of extra work.
I would have just chosen one webrowser to do my slashdot posting, but that's just me.
Frogs are primitive animals - so the occasional extra toe is not that unusual. But this is very unusual.
OK, as an end user, I find gtk to be more intuitive, and since gnome is based on gtk, I naturally prefer it. However, I don't use gnome that much, prefering ye ol' rxvt. That's what I get for starting out on unix by dialing into Suns.
-- Superlame http://catpro.dragonfire.net/joshua/
Oh, BTW, for anyone reading old posts of mine and realizing that I do development, I thought I should disclaim that I some times use GTK to wrap an OpenGL context, but more and more I expect to be using SDL for my major apps, and whatever is convienient for minor utils.
In case your wonder why SDL for major apps, I think that what I want to do is move towards having my apps run full screen, ala inferno, softimage, and other great SGI programs. I do plan to update the paradigm a little. At a minimum, I want my programs to be friendly for usage with virtual desktop, and while I will be using pretty much all custom widgets, I want my widgets to operate in a manor obvious to people familiar with the platform (meaning a different version of the widgets for Windows, MacOS, and Linux).
-- Superlame http://catpro.dragonfire.net/joshua/
*yawn* ok let me address this on a political level (because that's where free speech resides). We only gain rights by restriction. I have the right to pursue happiness because others are restricted from infringing on that, and I am restricted upon infringing on others. I have the right to liberty, until I commit a crime at which point I am jailed. More appropriately, I have the right to use, and modify GPLed code, because others are restricted from withholding it from me (and vice versa). So we gain rights by restrictions. What does this mean as far as technical standards? Well when a (good) standard is enforced, it "frees" everybody to do whatever they want *under* that standard. A window manager spec frees implementors to do whatever they *want* as long as they comply. I think the reason that an decent X desktop has been stagnant for so long is that without standards (laws) people were free to step all over each other, duplicate work, waste time, etc. A "single, unified desktop layer" *would* allow people to more freely do what they want without tediously rewriting and duplicating code and writing tons of glue to interface with everybody else's wacky project. Free speech is not equivalent to fragmentation. We can have unity *and* free speech. Mindless fragmentation under the banner of "free speech" is just going to drive this to irrelevancy.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
We? Why are you afraid to identify yourself?
> The ability to run some of GTK's themes
;^)
Yea, this would be hard for them to implement in Gnome.
> automatic modification of the colors for Motif apps
With Motif slowly going away, will anyone care?
>a status indicator for the task bar to show when an application has completed loading
This, however, is nice...
Yes, and you want a single [political] party too.
and you know that I run wmx (just a few more features than wm2)
What about interviewing developers on the fucking troll foundation ?
I've never contributed a line of code to either Gnome or KDE, but I use them daily.
I find the comments of Mr. Granroth to be quite insulting to my intelligence. Does he honestly believe that the end users of Gnome and KDE based their decision to use either on corporate backing?
Is there anything Sun Corporation can say or do that will FORCE me to do anything? Of course not.
I find his comments about Redhat to be quite telling. Is he so shortsighted as to have forgotten that only a few releases ago, Redhat did not even include KDE? It was the end users that kept downloading KDE and installing it on Redhat, until finally they HAD to include it. We (end users) hold the power, not corporate might.
Mr. Granroth, your comments come across like those of a whiny loser, and there is no need for it! Keep releasing a high quality product, and people will keep using it. End of story. Stop embarrasing yourself and the KDE project. This "we are the victims, look at us" attitude has got to go.
One final comment. We do not live in the world of proprietary software any more. We are free (RMS definition) to do what we want. If every company in the world backs Gnome, we can STILL thumb our noses at them, and use KDE. You can take the best technologies from Gnome (remember the GPL!) and place them into KDE. You could develop a KDE version of StarOffice. It is so frustrating to see that one of the head developers of KDE still just doesn't GET THIS.
Sure, of course.
I meant to say: "We no longer [are forced] to live in a world of proprietary software." I should have included the 'are forced'.
It has been so long since I have used proprietary software, it honestly didn't occur to me to add that!
Here's three ( I haven't used KDE2 thoroughly), The ability to run some of GTK's themes, automatic modification of the colors for Motif apps, and a status indicator for the task bar to show when an application has completed loading. These are minor features, but they are handy.
Unlike the guy who started this I am not a developer for KDE. I use Enlightenment, EFM, and mainly GTK apps.
treke
Never said it couldn't be implemented, the poster asked for examples of features that GNOME doesn't have yet. I'd be glad to see more of these since I use way more gnome apps than kde
treke
fvwm is all the desktop environment I need.
Every single desktop Sun have come up with has been a lot of rubbish. People seem to think that Gnome is now the defacto standard, I think they will mess it up like OpenLook, Motif, CDE... The best desktop to compete with Micro$oft is KDE 2. Maybe its time for Trolltech to really sort out that Qt licence, and make KDE the prefered community and user desktop. Come on Trolltech make Qt LGPL this is the time to do it! You can make money with support, manuals, and maybe making the licence require that Trolltech is listed on startup and/or about details as a good form of advertising. It would be really dumb for Trolltech to cling onto QPL and see KDE pushed behind Gnome, until there was less and less profit in it. Join forces with the community and Debian too, and do the right thing!
Well to my untrained eye the Gnome panel looks a hell of a lot like the KDE 1.0 panel ....
Which is a GOOD thing - it shows that people from both groups are stealing good ideas from each other - we're all better off from that sort of cross-fertilization - it's why having 2 GUI platforms is a great thing in an open source world
However as a (smalltime) KDE developer myself I do feel Kurt's annoyance - we're all focused on writing cool code - it's what's we work really hard at - and it's the results of this that we want to be judged by.
The whole licensing thing is a non-issue to most of us that's been beaten to death over and over - if you want to do a line-by-line review of something - look at my CODE, make it better - then I'll respect you.
Remember: "those who code do, the rest become lawyers"
To hell with your fancy-schmancy VT100. Real men use DECWriter line printer consoles.
--
How else can I get a :-)
DEMONKEG on my desktop
"You can catch flies till the cows come home, but wasps are a totally different kettle of fish."
For someone who claims to have no strong feelings he seems to be veiling them poorly. I notice a lot of the language he is using implies a certain amount of anger over the situation. Its hard for me to put my finger on it but something in the back of my head says "Whoah this guy is really angry over this and is trying to hide it"
You don't really see the Gnome camp doing this (or do you?) and they seem to have a good healthy attitude of competition, which is what I expected to read in this article. Yet it seems a lot of bitter resentment (note the bitterness in the "wasn't this the hacker desktop" comment)
Any Sociology or Psyhcology types care to comment?
Yes, I am a Gnome user only because when I started out I thought that it was "shinier" and "cleaner" looking than the stable and application rich KDE. Everything I have ever read intended for Linux starters says to use KDE because its more robust ans stable, I guess I just like the look of some things regardless of how unstable (which explains why Windows is still on my system)
Look at this: there's a Flash animation running inside Konqueror! Man, I might make a visit back to GUI. OTOH, I am very used to CLI for whatever I use Linux for.
Sigged!
Wow, it'll take the combined effort of all of Sun and HP to make Gnome as good as KDE! It must be vaporware now!
I think he meant that he believed it would take a complete redesign of the Gnome/gtk API to make it as easy to program for as KDE, and thus a partial rewrite of all of the current software.
In essence, the easy to use version of Gnome, in his opinion, is vaporware.
I can see how someone who has made KDE their baby would be upset at recent news; There are a lot of big players essentially picking sides, and KDE is the redheaded (but more intelligent, creative, and better behaved) stepchild.
However, this announcement is not a blow to KDE but rather a WIN for Linux! Finally there are companies looking into USABILITY of linux, not just the server end. This is a huge win for Linux, OSS, and the USER in general...
Competition is good. Money pouring FROM big companies INTO a free OS for the people is good.
offtopic (kinda): I looked at Konqueror. Very impressive, and while I am a gnome user, KDE has done some cool stuff. But I just can't help but think that where usability NEEDS to go is not just in making a monolithic container as MS Ineternet explorer and its shells: Linux needs to have an awesome interface for changes configurations. Linuxconf is GETTING to that area, but when yon user needs to jump through hoops and ladders just to install a new piece of hardware, that is bad.
Apt-get/dpkg is already making software asy to upgrdae (alhtough UI improvemnents could me made there, too), but now a user needs to be able to change their screen resolution, hardware, drivers, configure apache, restart services, see what is going toload on boot, etc. etc. etc. from one interface (whether is is a bunch of 'control panels' like MacOS or one interface like in linuxconf makes no difference as long as it is easy).
This is going to give a lot of mindshare to Gnome rather than KDE. It should be clearly obvious *why* this is a huge win for the Gnome camp: I know there will always be a KDE, and a Gnome - whatever the future brings. Likewise there will always be a kppp and a g equivalent.
What there might not be is a k[killer-app], but there'll be a g[killer-app]
If you want to write a big UI driven app, you will be able to target Gnome - with all the bells and whistles - and do linux/sun/hp ports for almost free. If you want a KDE version you'll have to buy or write a portability layer to abstract everything away, and I think we all know how much fun that is.
I *really* dont have a problem with KDE, it looks good to me in my role as joe 'free linux using software only' user - as does Gnome, but if I was writing a UNIX app, I now see a big reason to go with full-on Gnome support rather than KDE.
best wishes,
Mike.
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
/flameon
There has been WAY too much bitching/whining/love/hate/etc. about all this KDE/Gnome/Sun thing. What people really need to do is take a step back and realize a few things.
1 - Not everyone likes everything. That's why Linux, and thus KDE/Gnome exist.
2 - Take a look at number one again. Then think about how if you can't keep everyone happy with everything, why not do both? This is where people need to really direct the attention. To hell with all the petty arguments/opinion pieces/etc., just focus on getting these people to provide more choice. Get Red Hat to offer KDE AND Gnome in a standard install. Get SuSE to do it. Get Sun to do it. Hell, get Microsoft to do it. Instead of this conquer and destroy attitude, how about embracing/cohabitating?
Think about it.
Bowie, do you know that we have 6 Propaganda tiles
:-)
in KDE 2.0 ?
cheers, Lotzi Boloni
Havoc
Don't you think the following scenario likely is 3 months time:
-you can either hack Gnome for nothing, or hack it for money.
-in conclusion, you better go and be employed by one of the companies backing Gnome.
-or if you not, quit hacking Gnome completely.
So the developers are settled at the companies and we are back to a regular desktop consortium kinda stuff, which can be successful, or not. Only that the important and expensive initial ramp-up
was done for free, by enthusiastic hackers, "sponsoring" large companies.
cheers
Lotzi
Well, out of about 20. But seriously: there were discussions about a common "feeling" of the desktop. Now obviously your backgrounds reflect a certain style which is prefered by a large group of people but not by everybody, which is fine.
So it was decided that we will go by default with a mixture of wallpapers such that everybody can choose one fit to his style. Right now the ones in
are:
All-Good-People-1.jpg
Appropriately-Left-Handed-2.jpg
Chicken-Songs-2.jpg
No-Ones-Laughing-3.jpg
Planning-And-Probing-1.jpg
Superfluous-Organ-1.jpg
The-Good-Times-1.jpg
Time-For-Lunch-2.jpg
Totally-New-Product-1.jpg
Maybe I am mistaken about some of them being from Propaganda.
However here comes the challenge - it would be cool having corresponding icon sets to the style of these backgrounds. The current default icon themes ("High color", "Low color") are not really helpful (although in fact they differ more than just the number of colors).
have fun
Lotzi
PS: The challenge is not to Bowie only.
Yes, probably time will tell.
On the other hand there seem to be specific differences between the kernel and the Gnome:
1. Linus
2. The perception difference between the Linux distributors and Sun. (And it is a real difference, too, because RedHat made an unprecedented effort to recompensate volunteers at his IPO)
3. The specific interests of companies and individuals to fix driver XXX, port to architecture YYY.
4. The fact that the leadership still seems to be in the hand of developers (which might boil down to point 1.).
I don't know why I prefer RedHat for Easel. Maybe because they first delivered and did not try to use questionable marketing tactics based on a half-baked product. At least their LinuxWorld presence left a very bad impression.
Best wishes and keep up the good work
Lotzi
I never really chose between them. I was totally stunned and exited by the KDE movement when it started and since then I always stuck to it, from Beta 2 onwards. Already at Beta 3 I installed it on our business' development machines and it kinda stuck there. Partly because it is very easy to migrate to for windows users, partly because -even that early- it was really quite stable, and perfectly useable.
I guess the first attempt to install Gnome (gtk+ more precisely) -long ago- failing miserably, sealed Gnome's fate in my case... Mea culpa I guess, but as time is scarce, I never got around to it anymore, but okay, that's no excuse.
KDE works for me. I disliked the licensing wars, and I *really* dislike the tendency to knock KDE "because it is too windows-ish". As if that could ever be a valid point. Choose on merit, not on resemblance. One does not judge DVD disks by ascertaining that they resemble CDroms, or does one ?
my 0.02 euro
First of all, KDE itself is GPLed/LGPLed. Obviously I'm talking about the license that applies to QT.
"applies to KDE 2"... You mean that it applies to the version of QT that KDE 2 uses?
If so... I'm sorry. I didn't know that Troll Tech changed the license. Their web site doesn't mention anything about any QPL 2. I guess I am that dense. (e.g. not telepathic) =)
>Will KDE ever have a corporate-backed "foundation" deciding it's future?
How would the Gnome Foundation decide Gnome's future? Obviously you don't mean "decide" in the strict sense, because the GPL really prevents that. So, what do you mean exactly?
Where the heck did you get that idea?
From http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/license-list.html:
"The Qt Public License (QPL).
This is a non-copyleft free software license which is incompatible with the GNU GPL. It also causes major practical inconvenience, because modified sources can only be distributed as patches."
Exactly what I did. I used to use KDE 1.1.2 and recently tried KDE 2 (1.92? latest beta anyway)
I now use Gnome with Helix.... 'Nuff said?
Actually, that seems like the traditional big-free-software-project way of doing things - look at (GNU/)Linux itself.
Speaking of the article in general, it seems ironic to fault the Gnome guys for not turning down a corporate foundation's support when KDE itself exists more or less at the whim of Trolltech. But I don't want to write too much since if there were an article moderation system (hint hint) I would have marked this one as flamebait.
I use KDE now, and will move to 2.0 when there are final Mandrake RPM's for me to install on the machines I support. Gnome will be awesome when all this stuff comes to pass stably (Nautilus, Gecko embedding, GnomeStarOffice, etc) but just as with KDE before 2.0 goes final, it doesn't mean a whole lot to the end user. I hope it does happen quickly, because I like the gnome ethos (and look and feel) a lot better than KDE and would prefer to switch once it comes of age.
Meanwhile, if a few of the KDE folks feel threatened by this for some reason, perhaps they should concentrate on making KOffice the real deal since they've already got a jump on the browser, shell and integration side of things. Being able to import/export Word documents would be a good thing to focus on. While they're at it maybe they can put pressure on Troll somehow to fix their license rather than hoping to move the mountain to Moses.
Your freedom to swing your fist ends when it reaches my personal space.
That's too little freedom for you? Too bad. That's the way it is, and it will stay.
It's just the right amount of freedom I say.
You remind me of the folks that claim that they aren't truly free until they can sell themselves into slavery.
The whole philosophy of inalienable rights (why a contract in which you sell yourself into slavery is not binding) is very similar to the FSFs definition of Free Software. The conditions are simply that you can't do anything to make it unfree. You can't sell it into slavery. If you want to claim that prohibition infringes your freedom, fine, but you aren't going to convince me.
Public Domain is "perfectly free" from the point of view that demands the freedom to give up ones freedom. Free Software is "perfectly free" to those of us with enough common sense to note the contradiction in that.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Most users I deal with simply ask this question:
What else is there?
It has less to do with them deciding on a standard, and more to do with a standard being forced upon them through vendor lock-in. Until Linux has everything necessary for them to do their work efficiently (it's getting close, folks) some people have to use it. As much as I hate to admit it, we're not there yet.
Then again, we have only just begun.
GPL: Free as in will
Could everyone just stop this bickering about which is best. Could everyone just get along?
Do not confused the fact that X11 is not programmable via pipes, with the notion that pipes are therefore useless. Rather, this is a case of where X11 is itself broken. See Plan9 for a GUI that needs nothing beyond pipes in order to effectively embed things.
I was not confused. My point was that the meta information of the pipe paradigm, the "nature of pipes", where by we have read and write (since we can safely ignore open and close as they are the "constructor" and "deconstructor" methods), is a significant constraint on moving to a new level of interoperability. A level where as a needer of functionality I can ask an object to "display" me and another object for a dataset that will warn me if a record changes so that I might process my own changes as a result. As I said in my post, pipes are inherently useful as an instance of IPC, but they are very rudimentary.
Indeed whilst plan9 may use pipes as their _implementation_ of IPC, it is an implementation choice not a conceptual one. Plan9 documentation itself talks about how most everything "looks like files", this is the conceptual tie that binds Plan 9. Step outside the "file" motif and perhaps there is another way. I am not convinced that bonobo is the other way, but I am convinved that it is a different way and within the constraints of my limited capacity to investigate, it seems to be an interesting way and a way that HP and Sun might be able to leverage their existing commitment to CORBA.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
If I want to knit things together, I'll use a bloody pipe.
And there's the rub. The pipe has reached the limits of its usefulness, or at least the traditional unix concept thereof. Please don't misunderstand, the pipe is _extremely_ useful and I use it every day, but sometimes I would like to take a file of data and "pipe" it into a spreadsheet that could perform some math on the data the output of which I would then graph. With the ability to change the odd variable in my spreadsheet, the output on the graph would change.
This is where the CORBA (bonobo) model comes in, where pipes know about stdin and stdout, as I understand it, bonobo knows about a conceptual "stdinterface" and the different components can self discover about the functionality they provide to each other, thus my scenario above works with the conceptual simplicity of a pipe.
Remember that the pipe is contingent on the meta information about what is stdio, this meta object completely defines the interaction between functional elements. Well its time for a change, hopefully a change for the better, and I think that bonobo is a contender (KDE 2.0 may have an equivalent with, whats it called? kObjects or something [not a criticism, just my ignorance]) the fact that it is via CORBA (Soap anyone) and that HP and Sun are OMG players is probably what lead to Gnome being the flavour that attracted them.
Anyway, the key point is paradigm shift, pipes are dead long live self discovering interfaces.
$0.02"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
Well, not exactly 'hijacking' per se, but it seems that someone has quickly gone out and registered http://www.gnomefoundation.org and directed it at the KDE website. And I seriously doubt that this would have been done by any of ther KDE developers/associates either.
While using Linux , if I get homesick for Windhoze, I change to the gnome desktop, and after a few minutes it crashes; I feel sated, it's like Win98 all over again except without that grimy feeling....
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
If I was a large corporation and was to select between a platform controlled by a different corporation or a platform I would be able to contribute to - what would I choose?
Qt is not free as in speech. If the Gnome team at Sun or HP or otherwise figure out something needed in GTK, they can code it up themselves and submit the patch. If it doesn't get accepted, they can implement the changes as a separate library within the Gnome project. Sure they could submit changes to Qt, but why give code to a company that might later charge for it?
Moreover, what would stop Troll Tech from charging for Qt in the future? For commercial apps? Not much, fellow slashdotters.
I think KDE is great. However, I wouldn't want to put lots of manhours into a project that isn't 100% free. (Give it a whack, BSDers).
So - they chose Gnome. Totally free. Maybe not quite as good as KDE yet - but still it's what I use for my work. And - it's working nicely for me.
Stop the brainwash
Clipboard support, especially, is something that it would be nice to have standardized. I know its a pain to be working away in one program, then want to paste something to another program, and have to open up yet a third program to actually copy the text. I know that it's impossible to get it to work right with legacy programs, but how hard would it be to have GNOME and KDE programs sharing the same clipboard?
-RickHunter
So theres no real problem... I think microsoft employ's some of the best engineers and scientists in the world, and I still think they produce a lot of dreck (and a lot of good stuff too).
Why would respect for a couple of group members mean you could not critisize the group as a whole and their works?
Despite the hard feelings I can't help but get the feeling that they should try to co-operate a little more. There's no real good reason why KDE and Gnome/GTK can't share things like themes, and general user preferences.. For a short while the teams appeared to co-operate to come up with a unified component system. I firmly believe that there's no valid reason why the UI settings and preferences I configure in either KDE or Gnome can't be shared between both, giving KDE/Qt apps running on a Gnome desktop a similar "feel" to then as the native Gnome/GTK apps, and vice versa.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Maybe this is silly/impossible/ignorant (I've never looked at the APIs of Gnome or KDE), but has anyone considered writing emulation layers that let people run apps designed for one on the other's platform? It's cool that there are competing desktops for Linux. But it's not cool that it divides the application base. We need something to bridge that gap.
Sheeze... AC-hating morons...
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
***********************************************
Help The_Messenger make Slashdot better!
Looking to help clueless newbies.
Current need: keep your sig to four lines or less, asshole. Ever heard of "netiquette?"
I'd ask you to e-mail me, but I get enough spam.
***********************************************
I'm rather tired at the moment, and I won't remember this tomorrow, so feel free to make your first impression again then. :) Welcome to /.
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
Motif and CDE are dead. Film at 11:00.
Actually, they have been dead for awhile - when did anything new and exciting happen with either one? Years ago. So it's not surprising that Sun and the others are shifting to a more up to date desktop environment - otherwise, they would be hurt even more by Linux and Windows2000.
If KDE is badly hurt by the selection of GNOME as the replacement desktop environment, then KDE isn't very good. But since it is good, it will remain significant. And KDE may still end up on top - remember the proverb: "be careful of what you wish for - for you may get it".
But what should I know - I still use fvwm2. I don't need no stinkin' icons. CLI or die!
GNOME 1.2 *is* a great desktop right now. Live with it.
Sun said pretty much the same thing for Motif/CDE.. and look where that went.
CDE is not free software so the same rules don't apply.
Will KDE ever have a corporate-backed "foundation" deciding it's future?
It has had one from the start: Troll Tech pays developers to work on KDE so that it's propietary GUI tool can become a standard.
Commercial entities may sponsor development on various aspects of KDE, but they will never be allowed to decide what KDE will become
Try to ask the KDE project founder to consider changing GUI toolkits to a Free one. since he's a paid Troll Tech employee, I don't expect anything more than a niased excuse to come out of his mouth.
"by the people and for the people"
By this logic, if it can be called that, computers should have only one OS. Guess which one that would be...
This "rights by restrictions" ideology is offensive to me. I don't have rights because criminals are jailed! Criminals are jailed because they violate laws which are genreated in a highly complex process sometimes addressing "rights" and sometimes addressing the wants and needs of influential groups. I support the universal declaration of Human Rights and the Constitution of the United States -- both documents addressing "rights" -- the Constitution says "We hold these truths to be self-evident" not "we hold these circumstances dependant on the threat of deprivation of rights..."
Getting back on topic: If you know anything at all about the development of Linux, then you'll recognize that this idea of enforcement is silly. You're welcome to go ahead and release your own distribution (Totalitarian Linux, perhaps?) that "enforces" whatever you want and the GPL ensures that your users and developers are quite free to ignore your restrictions.
I've used Helix Gnome and KDE 2.0 as an end user. Both have their strong points.
I'm currently using KDE 2.0 and it marginaly has an edge over Gnome for me but from the user perspective it's not "all that and a side of fries"..
I will say the I absolutly loved working with Qt.. I haven't tried GTK though.
From my personal experience KDE is a bloated pig. Now of course there is objection (and rightly so) to this statement but that's not the only reason why I'm not a fan. The other reason is that KDE is trying it's hardest to look/feel/and act like Window$. This is definately not the way to go. Eazel is not exactly helping gnome go in the right direction either.....
I don't really have kick ass hardware just barely enough to do what I need. On my P133 laptop with 32 MBs o'ram. Linux running blackbox & gnome take approximately 30-1min to start up. If I run KDE on this same machine it takes 3-4 minutes and is very sluggish. If KDE went on slim-fast then I would give it another look but until then blackbox & gnome are my way of choice.
"Survival of the fittest Max, and we've got the fucking gun!" - Pi
Come now, we all know the real reason..
People just couldnt be happy without flamewars.
It is the beggining of time Unix was created. Soon Unix guru's became discontent without a flame war going so they decided to create an editor purely in lisp more as a pissing contest than any sane reason we could find, they decided to pave the way for one of the first great holy wars
Ever since Unix gurus have carried this tradition by challenging each other to see who can create the biggest flamewar.
<G>
By installing both GNOME and KDE libraries and running both GNOME and KDE apps.
By installing an X11-based NES emulator and running GNOME vs. KDE: Battle of the Desktops.
That will give you your DEMONKEG (anagram for GNOME KDE).<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Gnome is meant to battle KDE
I know. And if you have an NES emulator, you can join in.
And here's your normal bird:<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
What if there were a video game where you could play for the GNOME team or the KDE team in a competitive virtual sport? Pull out your NES emulators, it's the Battle of the Desktops!
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
If you have an NES emulator (get one at Zophar's Domain), play Battle of the Desktops. A GNOME mascot and a KDE mascot fight it out on the bingo board.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
The 'desktop war' won't be won by the best desktop, it will be won by the one with the best applications. The gnome foundation announcement will be a big help to gnome on this. Gnome is free for commercial developers, Qt isn't. Conversly, if gnome start releasing libraries under the GPL rather than the LGPL they will kill gnome dead. (I'm assuming that all gnome libraries are LGPL.) By far the most important thing Sun can contribute is a good office suite. If Star Office makes the grade Gnome will start to look like a good desktop. But this hyperbole about commercial control on gnome from somebody whose project is based on Qt. Well, it just goes to show that if you don't expect people to be smart and intellectually honest you won't be disappointed.
...by the END USERS. Says it all really.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
Why?
KDE may be, (i do not claim so i say may be)
- more stable,
- more app rich,
- mouch better looking.
BUT, KDE is depended on TrollTech. Can you imagine sun says:"You can buy Solaris for $150 but you have to pay an extra $1000 if you want to make software devoplent".
What we get for extra: a license.
Well, can't KDE get rid of QT stuff? Obviously not now (since they are very busy with 2.0) but even not in the future.
Please KDE folks don't get angry but, as long as KDE is depended on QT, Sun or any other UNIX vendor will not make it standard.
The gnomefoundation will hopefully be do "cool" things for GNOME. But what I don't understand is why this upsets KDE community. It's all a matter of choice, and the foundation will give GNOME what KDE already has (Mozilla for Konqueror and StarOffice for KOffice)
Let's play nice and live in peace forever.
Slackware ... ehm you talk about my distro. Well the Slackware team is not making a new pakage managment system. Maybe we will be able to see more Slackware friendly apps after that. You may want to check http://slaktool.sourceforge.net/.
Let's make it a cheaper version of Solaris or another UNIX variant (wow $300,000 is too much)
When I read the title to the article, I thought that Slashdot was announcing that a KDE developer would have an advisory position in the GNOME Foundation....That's what we need....I'm all for diversity, but it would be nice to have a few more liasons between GNOME and KDE, they both have merits....I use them both...depending on my mood.
-K.
I need a TiVo for my car. Pause live traffic now.
Shouldn't there be one great linux desktop where all the development resources work together against all non-open source alternative?
Why is it that a free society is fighting amongst themselves when they could be collaborating they talent and efforts to create a strong and well-adopted standard desktop for the world?
I know competition leads to innovation... and there is competition - the closed-source software developers.
I wish open-source luck with all these developers being jealous of each other's successes. They should be proud of the recognition the community is getting and always willing to improve the quality of their applications.
This
You missed my point. It wasn't a GNOME-dependency. It was a non-GNOME library that at one point in time was only available with Helix-GNOME. That one piece couldn't be installed alone - it ended up requiring a complete new beta Helix-GNOME install.
I'm complaining about non-orthogonality. I realize things can't be perfectly orthogonal, and have each shared lib stand completely on its own. But this was a ridiculous mass of spaghetti, dependency-wise.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I see parallels in Gnome and KDE. I think KDE is a much better environment, but Gnome has been much better at market positioning. I'm sad to say it, but I think that KDE will play second fiddle to Gnome.
Perhaps I didn't make myself clear enough. You didn't have to take the time to refute all my arguments - I know they're bogus. My point was this: Gnome and KDE are so similar that that was all it took to decide me.
Let's not go there.
--> Yes, but I've noticed that KDE eats less memory
> per app. I *really* looked into this because of
> a memory leak in a beta of 2.0...
I really don't think so. I'm sort of a nevrotic obsessional when it comes to memory footprint, and I lose much of my time measuring everything. I compare with ps, top, or others. Just take the RSS (and make sure that the part of shared memory is of the same order for Gnome and KDE, which is usually the case). I repeat: the resident sizes of KDE apps are usually 30 or 40% bigger than their Gnome counterparts with equivalent functionnalities. And, as mentioned before, the session in itself is outrageously bigger (which I personnally don't care about, since I don't run Gnome or KDE sessions, just apps).
>> KParts seems to work pretty well, yet it's just >> a smart ad hoc and proprietary hack.
>
> Bzzzt. [...] Linux is a "smart ad hoc and
> proprietary hack". So is the GPL, Bonobo [...]
Bonobo is designed to be much less proprietary and more opened than Kparts. The reason why KDE developpers are talking about Bonoboizing their apps instead of the opposite (Kpartizing Gnome apps) are technical, not political.
Good, you're a l33t h4x0r who knows that shared memory matters. Congrats. Now, learn how to read, and you'll be omniscient. 2 posts earlier, in this same thread, I've written this:
"Make sure that the part of shared memory is of the same order for Gnome and KDE, which is usually the case."
I don't know the ps option that displays the amount of shared memory. To have this, I use top, qps, gtop, ktop, kpm, whatever. But ps has the advantage of providing a still output, easier to redirect.
Ok, you're a troll, I should have known from the start. BTW, I did read ps's man page, and the answer is not in it.
> It is hard to make a strong footprint argument
> without real numbers.
I'm waiting for KDE 2 to be stable to make a fair comparison. I've already made one between Gnome 1.2 (Helix) and KDE 1.1.2. It's in French (no time to translate), but numbers don't care. Also, as mentioned before, if you type "free", you'll see that a typical vanilla KDE session takes 9-10 megs more than a Gnome Session. As for the apps:
Editeurs:
[kalifa@wave kalifa]$ ps ux
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
kalifa 15235 0.4 0.6 7264 5112 pts/0 S 11:32 0:00 kedit
kalifa 15236 0.5 0.6 7284 5008 pts/0 S 11:32 0:00 kwrite
kalifa 15238 0.6 0.3 4216 2608 pts/0 S 11:33 0:00 gxedit
kalifa 15239 3.8 0.4 5800 3676 pts/0 S 11:33 0:00 gedit
Gedit et GXedit sont pourtant fonctionnellement plus riches que kedit
et kwrite (surtout kedit, il est monstrueux sachant qu'il ne fait a
peu pres rien).
Visus postscripts :
[kalifa@wave kalifa]$ ps ux
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
kalifa 15273 0.7 0.4 5604 3424 pts/0 S 11:35 0:00 ggv
kalifa 15274 5.2 0.6 7256 5084 pts/0 S 11:35 0:00 kghostview
Visus images :
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
kalifa 15285 2.2 0.4 6272 3760 pts/0 S 11:39 0:00 ee
kalifa 15281 0.5 0.4 6672 3348 pts/0 S 11:38 0:00 eog
kalifa 15282 2.1 0.6 7648 4984 pts/0 S 11:38 0:00 kview
On peut remarquer que les outils bureautiques de Gnome sont de taille assez raisonnables (add-on: current kspread and kword are typically 12-13 megs in RSS just after startup...):
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
kalifa 15328 1.7 0.6 8452 5420 pts/0 S 11:50 0:00 gnumeric
kalifa 15329 0.0 0.1 1676 840 pts/0 S 11:50 0:00 sh abiword
kalifa 15331 2.5 0.6 7444 5260 pts/0 S 11:50 0:00 AbiWord_d
Aide hypertexte :
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
kalifa 15340 0.3 0.7 8804 6068 pts/0 S 11:53 0:00 kdehelp
kalifa 15387 5.5 0.7 8300 5456 pts/0 S 11:55 0:00 gnome-help-browser
Configuration :
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
kalifa 15394 1.1 0.4 6080 3728 pts/0 S 11:56 0:00 gnomecc
kalifa 15397 3.3 0.6 6872 4852 pts/0 S 11:57 0:00 kcontrol
And so on (try with Dia, Gtop/Ktop, etc...)
I wholly agree with his comments on the "benefits" of big corporates, and with his worries on PR distorsions.
However, his statement on KDE superiority is far more questionable, and this also holds for KDE 2.
Two technical and childish "details", yet at the end of the day, this is what really matters:
- Gnome is fundamentally slicker than KDE. When you start an Helix Gnome session, and type "free", you simply have 9 or 10 more free megs than when you start a KDE session (1.1.2 or pre 2.0), for similar functionnalities. Free software was supposed to bring "obsolete machines" back to life, or at least to slower the rythm of obsolescence. So, yes, this matters. The situation is similar when it comes to speed. Besides, most Gnome apps are significantly smaller than their KDE counterparts, whether we're talking about spreadsheets, text editors, bitmap graphics software, vectorial graphics software, ps viewer, image visualizers, word processors, config tools, help tools, etc... In average, a Gnome/Gtk tool is ~30-40% smaller than its KDE/Qt counterpart. Let me remind you that one of the main reasons why KDE dropped Corba was performance issues... talking about this:
- KParts seems to work pretty well, yet it's just a smart ad hoc and proprietary hack. Roughly, it replicates OLE/COM. Bonobo is about to succeed where Opendoc failed, and this time it is really about "components", not just bloatwares with an ability to communicate with other bloatwares. I think most KDE developpers know this, actually.
I won't tak about Gtk+ and Qt, yet there's also a lot to say about this.
See This is the material I want to read, an intelligent and well thought out expression of a persons opinions. I have used both KDE and Gnome and respect both for their own reasons. I use Gnome only because i have gotten used to it, not because it is any better than KDE.
I like the fact that there is and option for me when and if i choose to leave the Gnome-fold.
Variety is the key to survival, if people get bored then they become stagnant. I salute Kurt and hope to see more developers offering up their opinions.
(please ignore the spelling errors as i had very little time to type this up.)
"Never wrestle with a pig, you both get dirty and the pig likes it."
hear hear! .. the common problem with "there's more than one way to do it" tends to be everybody who does it every-which way without simplification or clear hierarchical documentation and/or justification. Tracing program execution is more often like playing the old mousetrap game, with the developer saying "look at what an ingenious mousetrap [and time sink] I've built"!!
too many "genious" chiefs .. not enough lowly indians ..
Please. You can make it look anyway that you want. The amount of themes available are huge, so why not download some of them and carry on. I prefer KDE, but if GNOME overtakes it on features (not meaningless eye-candy) then I'll consider switching.
*Cough*
I quote:
Linux *is* RedHat
Who needs to bother with context? :)
wrighty.
*yawn*
"James, stop that, there's no need to use cattle prods."
Mostly, I don't think this article should have been posted without giving someone influential in the GNOME product time to write a rebuttal.
Or, at least not without solicting a rebuttal and posting it on the site on the same day. This is unconscionable.
Way to kick off more flamewars, /.
Please note that I don't mind seeing this story. In fact, I think we should see this story, because it shows how arrogant at least one KDE developer is. This is not the true spirit of open source software. Yes, I do think competition is good for the world at large in this case, but could we keep it clean?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The QPL is an Open Source licence.
Modifications are explicitly allowed
There is no restriction that those modifications must be for X11. I'm a member of a team porting QT to BeOS right now.
Troll didn't release any version of QT other than the X11 one, but they can't stop you porting QT/X11 to another display mechanism.
I would recommend researching before posting, but if people did that, then this wouldn't be slashdot anymore would it?
--
Read more of this story at Slashdot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"This is very personal..."
Of course the whole thing is very personal, the author even says their irrational. By replying to them I think you're only proving his point that the whole argument is based on personal opinion...
Eric Fikus
GNOME1.2+ is much more stable and versatile than KDE.
Try looking at theGtk themes site if you want a good windows clone.
Of course, enlightenment is going to crush them all when E0.17 hits the world...
Rara Rasputin
Jack of All Trades
It is understandable though how corporate sponsorhip is a huge deal. I say just wait until this whole influx of money and releases goes over and let the public decide. I mean the WMs are to suit everybody, right?
As a side note it would have been better if GNOME had been allowed to speak too. I would have enjoyed to hear both sides of the story as well. It just doesn't seem right to have one programmer speak on the behalf of KDE (or should KDE have a public relations division, with a bit better centralization).
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
get drunk
Philosophically I've always felt more "in tune" with the GNOME project than KDE (I used a Mac for many years) so I kept my eye on GNOME and watched it's progression from afar, still happily using KDE. Many moons later I caught wind of the Nautilus project from Eazel and desperately wanted to use that, so I started to consider a switch over to GNOME. That's when I found out about Helixcode's version and my interest was piqued. I read several reviews of Helix GNOME 1.2 and it sounded nice, but the one that really pushed me to test it out was Joe Barr's review (@ LinuxWorld) where he said he was switching over from KDE after using it. I ordered the CDs from Helixcode and installed them the day they arrived.
I won't go into many details of the installation, but it was the most painless upgrade I've ever done. I knew the moment I logged in that I was going to switch over from KDE--the default desktop appearance was much more asthetically pleasing than KDE, the performance issue was much improved to the point where I really didn't notice any difference between the two environments, and the Helix Update feature was worth the $25 alone.
I haven't tested out KDE 2.0 so I can't say how it compares to Helix GNOME, but I did install Nautilus Preview Release 1 last night and found myself really excited by the way things are working out in the GNOME world. Based on my experiences with the Helixcode and Eazel products, I really think I'm going to stay a GNOME user.
You can tell by the tone of his "personal" feelings... I especially liked the (not so) veiled insults of Gnome.
History is coming back to bite us again...
9 .jpg
I remember a time when there was Athena (Xaw), Motif (Xm) and OpenLook (Xol) and a smattering of other stuff. There was infighting and other nonsense that didn't help produce ANYTHING USEFUL, despite the fact that there were many very smart, and very productive people on all sides.
Now, who came into the ring and creamed everyone? Micro$loth
There are many excellent, creative people here, let's get something done instead of mudslinging.
There are things to like and dislike about both toolkits, but they can be changed...
-Ralph
http://www.mybrain.org/Pics/Fun/.res480/dscn436
Not only is there no standard binary format for C++ object files, there's really not a whole lot of standards compliance among compilers (yet). To write portable code, you have to aim for the lowest common denominator.
Also, as the poster pointed out, some vendors don't even supply a C++ compiler (or sell it only as an add on - e.g. Sun). Yes, g++ is out there and it's pretty good, but no vendor is going to package and support it just to run KDE, particularly since they presumably already have a desktop and they're trying to sell their own compiler. This isn't a problem with C.
I have a theory.
It has to do with Cowpland's recent leave from Corel. In the theory, Cowpland has also seen the media as a bunch of people who will now favor GNOME entirely, and has decided that since Corel Linux uses KDE, the Corel PR will go even worse than it presently is.
Maybe he predicted that the GNOME foundation would cause Corel Linux to bomb.
Just a theory. No flames, just good discussion, please...
Yes. Futhermore Windoze and Linux suck and AMIBios is the best Bios in the world
oops, this happens if you post after hours of studying maths.
Uh, KDE has nothing comparable to gnumeric? How bout kspread? Stop the FUD and check before you post.
Also, you have to also have to pay a license fee to develop a commercial closed source application with Qt (and therefore KDE). That isn't something that Sun and HP require today. You don't have to pay a license fee for developing CDE applications. You might decide to pay for a commercial compiler, but you certainly don't have to. All GNOME libraries are LGPL'd, so they are free for use for open or closed source purposes. And another thing is that Qt is controlled by one company: Trolltech. But GNOME is not owned by any corporation, so the workstation venders would have some influence in its development. I bet these factors were enough to drive the "big boys" away from KDE.
Even before Motif was open sourced, you could pay around $150 or less for a developer edition which would let you develop applications with no licensing fees. If you run Solaris or HP/UX or any other commercial UNIX with built-in CDE, you don't pay anything other than the cost of the OS. Trolltech charges $1550 for a single closed-source developer Qt/UNIX license, with the price dropping to around $1000 per developer en masse. Using GNOME and GTK+ costs nothing.
I won't argue whether Trolltech should charge money or not. They have a right to support themselves. I'm just saying that GNOME is advantageous in this respect. The workstation venders probably feel that the weaknesses of GNOME can be overcome.
You don't have to use Enlightenment, for example. Sawfish is now the new window manager of choice for GNOME. It performs better and has tighter integration.
And perhaps they're paranoid having to defer control of the Qt standard to another corporation. If all UNIX venders standardized on Qt, Trolltech would be a very powerful company indeed. Though the OSF controls Motif and CDE, the OSF itself is made up of the workstation venders.
A well-reasoned and very evidence-supported statement. Thank you :)
where'd my typewriter go?
Personally I've used both Gnome and KDE and I think both have their strenghts. A strong KDE development group is good and the Gnome+Sun announcement is not the end of the world. I like diversity and I see this as Linux vs which ever version of BSD you like type of affair.
"There is magic in the web." - Othello Act 3 Scene 4.
K and G need each other they push each other in the way competition is meant too. As far as resources from Sun and HP only time will tell, though Sun commitment to open source is high on rhetoric and low on follow through. (don't flame me too much) Adh Seidh
I am one of the people who has helped with the creation of the GNOME Foundation and with this week's press announcement. I've also had the opportunity to meet and talk with Kurt and have a lot of respect for him. Hopefully the KDE and GNOME developers will increasingly work together to create bridges between the two environments so that end-users will be able to go back and forth between the two and use the best apps from both. Kurt does misstate the role that corporations will play in the GNOME Foundation. The Foundation will be governed by a board of directors elected by the GNOME hackers. Board members will be hackers elected because of their technical contributions to GNOME. The corporations who are supporting GNOME will be joining an Advisory Board that has NO decision-making authority. It is merely a forum for them to talk among themselves and with the GNOME developers about how they are contributing to GNOME. Bart
Now, I'll be the first to admit that the English language, particularly the American variety, is more of a challenge than it ought to be, but let's try to make the best of it.
"Dance like it hurts. Love like you need money. Work when people are watching." - Dogbert.
I'm a power user, not a developer. I've tried both Gnome and KDE. I far preferred KDE for two simple reasons: (i) it was more stable, and (ii) the KFM file manager was a decent, light-weight web browser that handled 90 percent of my browsing needs.
However, now I'm using neither KDE nor Gnome. Why?
I decided that I didn't want all the extra desktop cruft that came with a "desktop environment". I'm using Enlightenment now, just Enlightenment (and KFM by itself when I want to do that light browsing). However, given that Enlightenment (while reasonably feature rich) is still pretty hefty, I'm thinking very seriously about moving to using Sawfish (just Sawfish) full time.
Why? Because I'm an Emacs power user, and I like lisp.
Frankly, I don't care which desktop "wins" as long as I can still run the apps. There's Gnome apps I use (Gnomba, frex), and KDE apps I use (kfm), and the one primary thing I like about Linux is *I* get to decide which apps I use, what my work environment functions like, and how to get the job done, not some focus group hired by Redmond middle management (thank-you very much).
My 2p.
Viktor Haag
but if KDE is not scared, then why make a big fuss about it?
Has anyone taken a look at KDE.org lately? The last couple of days news appear to be in defense or "we're not worried" quotes.
I'm a GNOME user, and I'm a KDE user.
They're both great desktops, but what I really want is that little damn penguin or an avatar of some type play around on my desktop, fetch my mail and news, compile my programs, and learn from my user preferences and keep things all neat and tidy...
But for heaven's sake, don't make it a paper clip!
"Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."
Are you saying that V2 is GPL compatible?
It's vapor-license for now, so what do we know.
For simple GUI tasks (n+1 xterms & emacs) you can still use any wm. For complicated GUI tasks (components, office apps), you need an environment with lots of work behind it (where would Linux be with Linus hacking with it alone?), and having less (moving) targets, the work is more concentrated. Nobody will force you to use Gnome (or KDE).
Another good thing about standardization: if/when X Window System is put to rest in favour of some other system, porting GTK will be enough to make apps compile for the NEW! IMPROVED! system.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
G P L
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
The underlying greatness of this whole argument rises above just KDE vs Gnome. The greatness is in the fact that we have a CHOICE of what we want to see and how we want to see it. I like KDE and Gnome.... but I also use WindowMaker and AfterStep. It depends on what mood I am in and what I want to see that day. Not to mention some of the other desktop managers out there (IceWm, fvvm, etc...).
The whole beauty of it is that I am NOT locked into seeing the MS Winblows desktop everytime I start my computer. I have a choice. The choice will never be taken away from me. I wish the best of luck to both the KDE Project Team and the Gnome Foundation. I want to see them both succeed. I still want to have my CHOICE.
Of course, this is all IMHO.
I don't drink to because I have to.... I drink to stop the voices in my head!
I don't drink because I have to, I drink to stop the voices in my head!
KDE and Gnome both suck, FVWM is still the best window manager in the world.
That's my exact point. What I'm saying is that the most powerful effective mechanism for humans to tell computers what to do is through language.
By language here, what do you mean? I thought from your previous post you meant exclusively command-line/textual-programming interfaces. I agree that language is the most effective way to communicate, I just think the mode of linguistic communication should be adapted to the problem domain and that for a large number of problem domains, typing text is not the optimal language mode. Personally, I don't even think it's optimal for all forms of programming. I think programming, for me at least, could be a very visual-spatial process, especially functional or object-oriented programming ( I don't like procedural programming anyway. ).
I disagree about the cars/driving computers/programming thing, but I don't think either of us is going to succeed at convincing the other, so I'll leave it at that.
The emphasis on GUIs allows people to stay comfortably in a semi-conscious trance relying on their mechanistic mental facilities to get them through the day - using language effectively requires a capacity for inductive thought which many people prefer to leave dormant.
Strangely, we seem to see the same problems with totally different solutions. I agree that using language effectively requires a capacity for inductive thought, however, I think that textual interfaces are the most effective way to discourage it. What is inductive about CLIs? GUIs, in the non-unix world, at least, are built on the principle that users should be able to apply inductive reasoning to the language of the GUI: "if 'copy' is on the 'edit' menu in App A, and in the 'edit' menu on app B, then it should be there in App C." That's induction. That thought process seems fairly absent from the current crop of command line tools. Where command line tools seem highly effective (I don't hate CLIs. I rely on them. I don't use IDEs to code, just shells, vim, and xemacs (ok, one gui app) is when inductive reasoning is not necessary, because the user can be reasonably expected to learn a large portion of the functionality by rote. I went through VILEARN and memorized a bunch of stuff. There is no inductive way to determine that ZZ saves and exits from knowing that :w saves and :q exits.
I agree that users have brains, and with encouragement, they will use them, but I think that brain time is a limited resource and should be applied as non-reduntantly as possible. Look at programming. Do we expect every programmer to learn systems programming and write their apps on on the metal? No. We could, they would get better performance, more direct control of things, more flexibility, and they'd probably be capable. But we don't do that. It's not an efficient use of brain resources when an interface, in this case, the ones provided by the OS, standard libraries and any toolkits the developer uses, can abstract that functionality and allow the user to focus on new problem domains. I don't think textual interfaces maximize the efficient allocation of brain resources. If you are not talking about CLIs, textual programming languages, etc., when you say "language", then forgive me. It sounded to me like you were.
I think the GUI is weak, though, it could be a lot better. Personally, I think speech recognition is not that exciting of an interface technology. The instructions I give my computer are so different from those I give a human, even when they are dressed up to look the same in a CLI or programmming language. One thing I think that might be interesting for human->computer interaction is something built on gestures like American Sign Language.
ASL is fascinating. It has a very interesting spatial system of grammar. Different positions in space make pronouns, give tense information, etc. Different articulations in gestures perform the functions of adverbs.
I think some combination of ASL, keyboarding(maybe one-handed chording), and typing could make a good interface (maybe a mouse, too). I don't really know, I guess I'd have to play with it.
I think if "words" could be gesturally defined, then structuring commands like "open new email message" could be fairly intuitive to put together and super fast to do for the expert user. It wouldn't be as dumbed-down as a WIMP interface. There would have to be some standard system of text entry, cause that's still the main "content" carried by the computer, but the commands, all the metadata, I think maybe could be gestured in some way. Text entry could even be hybrid and customizable, which would speed things like programming in regular text languages cause you'd be able to push things around and gesture the symbolic markup necessary for programming, like open-curly-brace and stuff, maybe a movement of the hand brings up a list of all class methods to jump to or to insert a call to, depending on the movement.
It's also a powerful paradigm for visual programming languages, but I'll leave that for another post...
jeb.
Sounds like a lot of folks have trouble seeing the forest because those darn trees are getting in the way. All the techno mubo jumbo is entertaining but in truth it can be argued from both sides until the end of time. From a non-technical perspective what matters is who gets a solid desktop to market first with a decent office implementation. Once that is available market momentum will determine the winner. May the best code win... And congratulations to Kurt who for all his work on KDE. At least he is doing something and has the guts to state his opinions.
if Linux is going to make it on the desktop.
And not
if Linux is going to become cool.
The fact is, what makes Linux really cool to us geeks is exactly what is keeping it from entering the desktop realm. Like it or not. It's like what Miguel said: there's nothing in Unix that sets policy. If KDE is out there, and GNOME is out there, there is going to be a KDE set of policies, and a GNOME set of policies, and devolopers are going to have to choose between one or the other, and the end users are going to lose their enthusiasm quicker than you can say "embrace and extend."
HTH.
Axel
Axel
mhm23x3, alt.fan.karl-malden.nose
Who said that you can't have free speech without having fragmentation? Who said that a single, unified interface means there's no free speech? The Linux kernel has a single, unified interface. You are perfectly free to change it - just don't expect the whole world to adopt your changes. You are also perfectly free to use *BSD or Hurd or whatever.
If the Linux application development community decides on one, single unified desktop interface, API, and inter-application communication layer, this will help Linux in the desktop segment. This does not end free speech. You are free to use whatever interface you want. It just won't be the interface that the world uses.
Note, also, that I don't necessarily say that Linux moving into the desktop market is a good thing. I have a very elitist attitude towards my favorite OS, and I don't think it's for the typical PC user. The strengths of Linux are what makes it unfit for the consumer desktop.
HTH.
Axel
Axel
mhm23x3, alt.fan.karl-malden.nose
troll.
Axel
Axel
mhm23x3, alt.fan.karl-malden.nose
If Linux is going to make it on the desktop, there needs to be a single, unified desktop layer. Fragmentation is bad.
Axel
Axel
mhm23x3, alt.fan.karl-malden.nose
Yes. You really can have too much choice.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
I agree with everything else you said, though.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
Yeah, I get a special feeling using code that's 100% pure hacker encoded. It has that pleasant "caffine" smell to it. Using code that came from paid programmers just isn't the same. I guess I'll have to ditch using Gnome now that it has "sold out" to "the man".
Seriously, Gnome is GPL'd! It doesn't matter who codes it. This has been a good month for free software. Even if Sun and HP did nothing but leech the Gnome source without contributing any new features, the publicity alone would be very helpful. I hope this trend continues.
When everyone starts saying things like "you have to have Microsoft..." or "Redhat is the only rational distro to choose" or whatever - That's when I'm looking for something else to use. I prefer KDE. I have no karma!
They both suck. If the developers of both teams stopped slamming each other and focused on not hogging so much RAM, I would consider using one of them. Frankly, as a user, I don't care how well designed either is as long as:
a) it works in a nonflaky manner
b) the interface is intuitive
c) it doesn't waste resources (as I mentioned above).
I guess that's my challenge to the KDE/GNOME folks. Do that and you'll win the hearts of everyone.
We're all a bunch of glorified monkeys.
Fawking Trolls!
Fawking Trolls!
The real Vladinator has a user id.
Lets face it, if this were a regular post that was following up an article it would be modderated as flambait. Yeah, he's venting, and that's okay, but he's basically throwing out a bunch of opinions and not backing them up at all. He implies over and over again that KDE is superior to Gnome with nothing to back it up. Okay, so he's angry, so what.
This rant does nothing for me and it certainly isn't going to make me try KDE 2.0, I'm very happy with the latest HelixCode Gnome right now, thank you very much.
Here's the flambait I am refering to:
Remember, even if Gnome does become a great desktop, that doesn't mean that KDE will stop being a great desktop.
I do find it ironic, though, that it is *Gnome* taking this step. Could anybody have possibly imagined this when Gnome started? Weren't they the "hacker desktop"? Didn't they have all the "desktop for the people" principles? Hmm... times change, I guess.
But back to KDE and the possibility of a great Gnome
Yeah, like I said... I give it a -1 troll or flambait. It's too bad really, I would have enjoyed a nice well thought out response from a KDE developer.
I've been running Mandrake with KDE for over a
year now. I have tried Gnome but there are only
2 things stopping me from using (Helix) Gnome
fulltime:
1. It's a bit slower than KDE
(I have a p2 400, and 128 megs of ram)
2. The 'task bar' in gnome is just an
applet, which crashes from time to
time. (when ever I quit some programs)
The second one is my major Beef.
Sig? What sig?
You're right, I haven't tried KDE2.0 yet.
;P
I will try it at my earliest opportunity!
If I prefer it to Gnome, I'll use it!
---------------------
%46%55%43%4B !
Ummm....moderator....you been on that 3$ crack again. Why is the parent to this Flamebait?
If this is gonna turn into a poll, my vote goes to Gnome.
Reason? Because it looks better to me. It's totally down to personal opinion and you could argue the pros and cons of each until the cows come home.
---------------------
%46%55%43%4B !
Well I prefer GNOME to KDE because of the look too. I also have KDE 1.92 mostly for the programs and KDElibs. I am sorry to say but KDE has some VERY stable applications for its desktop I am not an extremist in this desktop war but I feel all this verbal bashing against both of them is just pointless. And Look has an interesting point to KDE in the way that If the look of KDE is the only thing people can complain or dislike about KDE then KDE must be doing something right in all their other areas. Look is not trivial but I put stability and functionality above cosmetic features but I sure do love the GTK+ themes
:-)
BTW KDE 2.0 (1.92) supports some kick as themes.
-The good humor man can be pushed only so far
why do you GNOME people always act so extreme about GNOME. Damn.. I use GNOME and I think 1.2 is a really good release but c'mon there is not that much wrong with KDE if anything. I just like GNOME more but I love the KDE applications. Please keep your extremist remarks to yourself no one needs to hear them. They are both very good and it is good that there are quality choices and toolkits.
-The good humor man can be pushed only so far
And you haven't tried KDE2, right?
KDE2 looks VERY LITTLE like KDE 1.
The widgets are no longer ugly, and there are some very COOL looking widget themes.
And KDE supports GTK+ pixmap themes.
. . . are bash and emacs. Screw the desktop crap.
Looks matter. Make KDE pretty and slick! Make GNOME the same and then we'll talk. I am tired of everyone showing off their new "skin" Please, you can dress poop any way you like, it's still poop. Toolbars are never alligned, there are weird spaces. Icons (except for a few) look ugly and are only pretty when they are big (don't scale well at all), Mouse pointers switch to ugly X pointers (that point in the wrong direction and were drawn in the 80's probably), what's up with that?
Am I the only one who notices these little things? Wake up, and make this thing decent-looking!!! Then we will see UNIX desktop take off.
Okay, after a few replies, there seems to be a fairly obvious trend - Joe Public doesn't really care who gets involved, so long a *somebody* provides the applications that they want. Most Linux distributions include both KDE and GNOME, and for the most part, it boils down to which window manager you prefer - people will run whichever application does the job best, regardless of whether it uses GNOME or KDE.
I think it's about time both parties grew up and realised that a lot of the point of non-proprietry desktop environments is that you can mix and match you applications - and the majority of users do just that. Personally, I don't use either desktop, but run applications from both; I know a lot of other people do the same.
Perhaps now would be a good time for the GNOME and KDE groups to start concentrating on actually developing what they have instead of this continual one-upmanship, because if that's all it boils down to, neither will get anywhere.
{/RANT}
Is there *anybody* out there who isn't biased either way and has an opinion on this? If it's not a KDE developer, it's a GNOME developer - how about some END-USER responses for a change?
It really sucks to see this kind of thing even taking place. What happened to a *NIX world in which (as long as you didn't care about X/Open :)) you got to choose the desktop/window manager you used? I am not saying that you can't still do that, but it is fairly obvious that this is the direction that WM devel under Linux is going. I assume that is in part due to the media, and part due to the new users that the same media coverage is bringing in, users who have never had that kind of choice, who thought "themes" were kick-ass...
It seems that the idea has infected everyone involved, right down to the developers, that there will only be one desktop for Linux eventually...
***********************************************
Jon Tillman
LINUX USER: #141163
ICQ: 4015362
http://www.eruditum.org
jon@eruditum.org
***********************************************
Help Jon build a network!
Looking for giveaway computers & parts
Current Need: Tape Drive & PI/PII processors
Email me to find out how you can help
***********************************************
I'll be your brown eyed girl.
The point is not that a few companies which have made some kind of statement through the Gnome Foundation to use or promote Gnome will control its direction. Rather, it is that the Gnome developers themselves (some of whom have their own commercial ventures as spinoffs) have never made it clear that they are for choice. Instead, they have made it very clear that they want policy to be imposed, perhaps at the kernel level. Certainly at the level of the X server and Xlib. Gnome is to be "THE" standard desktop and development subsystem, period. I think they would even go so far as to have the filesystem reorganized around CORBO/bonobo objects if allowed to do that.
Naturally companies seeking to profit from Linux want a standard system. They want standards everywhere, so long as these are their standards or at least not some other comapany's standards. Gnome allows them to do this because it is GPL'd and no single commercial entity can control Gnome. This is good, but the trend towards standards also produces homogenization and a kind of blandness that discourages innovation and diversity. We have seen this with Windows and almost every other commercial OS to date.
The balance between standards and vitality that derives from diversity (remember the laws of natural selection that require a diverse gene pool to select well from?) is destroyed when developers who claim to represent the principles of freedom do nothing to dispell suspicions that they don't want choice at all. This merger between the homogenizing influence of commercial culture and individual greed is the danger that Gnome Foundation presents to Linux.
I am not just referring to some statements that Miguel has made recently. Alan Cox has been seen at Linux conventions with plackards reading "Gnome, the free desktop to replace the Kde nonfree desktop" or something similar. It is only human for Alan to side with Gnome as he works for RedHat and his wife is active in Gnome advocacy. However, such partisanship by a person with responsibilities for the wellbeing of the kernel and entire system has caused me to lose a lot of respect for the man. I now question whether or not he would be agreeable to imposing policy requiring the use of Gnome in the kernel itself if so allowed. There are other examples but that should be enough.
It's the responsibiity of all of us to keep this kind of activity in check if we want Linux to remain free from such control by partisan interests. There are ways to allow better interoperability between programs, objects and subsystems without imposing uniformity or policy. Some of this really does belong, perhaps, in the kernel or at least at a deeper level than a gui. But such mechanisms should be as open as possible, and optional. They should never be designed to serve the interests of a particular project such as Gnome. For all its faults, X has done a remarkable job in providing a framework for apps without imposing policy. X can be improved, and so can other "almost essential" components of GNU-Linux.
Weekly World News:"9 out of 10 alien anal probe devices run KDE!"
Ouch! Talk about your embedded system!
For more of a an example: XBRU is a TCK/TK application. It never touches any actual tape hardware. That is all done by (surprise) BRU, which in turn is controlled via (surprise surprise!) PIPES! (A bunch of pipes, actually -- two named pipes, and two anonymous pipes). This is how the Unix component model was supposed to work -- and it does work, quite well, except in the realm of X11 components, where the design of the X11 interface is incapable of properly supporting the Unix component model.
Summary: Don't let the incompetent design of the X11 system interface lead you to excessively complicated communications mechanisms. In most cases, CORBA-style communications mechanisms are needed only because of deficiencies in design, not because of any inherent limitations in the Unix component model.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Whether or not you distribute Qt, it's illegal to distribute KDE binaries because their dependency on Qt makes it a contravention of the GPL. Note that KDE includes some GPL code that was not explicitly contributed to the KDE project, so even if they wanted to add the extra permission needed to distribute KDE binaries they'd have to get the signatures of non-KDE developers to do it. IIRC, at least one developer whose GPL code is used in the project has indicated that he would *not* give such permission: L. Peter Deutsch, author of Ghostscript.
--
Xenu loves you!
Oh, well. You mighe be using my code just now even without knowing it (no, I won't tell you). And I don't understand the purpose of your flamebait. I said that programs should load instantly, not spend so much time that they need loading progress indicator. If they don't, you gotta change these programs or that hardware. If you disagree and ready to accept that you programs load times measure in tens of seconds to minutes - OK, but why GNOME should support this?
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
The issue here has nothing to do with GNUisms, and everything to do with ABI.
Do you run parts of KDE that were compiled using G++, and other parts that were built using Sun's C++ compiler?
I think not; there is no ABI standard, whether "official" or "defacto," and thus you cannot reasonably expect to link code compiled using one compiler to code compiled using another compiler.
The same is not true for C; there is a reasonable expectation that you can link code compiled with GCC to other code compiled using Someone Else's Compiler.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I think you've missed my point slightly.
I agree that GUIs are good for computer->human
interaction. Computers are good at generating images.
> However, language was designed to work with certain hardware limitations: humans can't display imagery as complex as a computer in real time.
That's my exact point. What I'm saying is that the most powerful effective mechanism for humans to tell computers what to do is through language.
"Do I have to draw you a picture"
Saying that in order to use a computer really effectively, you need to be a programmer (to a certain extent) - it's not like saying you should be able to fix a car if you're going to own one - it's more like saying you should learn to drive.
Gui's generally present the user with a small set of choices to make at each point. Your example of choosing a color is a perfect example of what GUIs are good for. The power of language is that the range of choices grows exponentially with the length of the expression.
In the starkest terms: excessive use of GUIs reduce your Turing machine into a finite state machine. The only reason this is considered remotely acceptable is that the bulk of humanity thrives on pointless repetitive ritual. They would rather spend their days repeating almost exactly the same thing than have to stop and think occasionally. The emphasis on GUIs allows people to stay comfortably in a semi-conscious trance relying on their mechanistic mental facilities to get them through the day - using language effectively requires a capacity for inductive thought which many people prefer to leave dormant.
The job of programmers is to bring the power of the computer within reach of the user. Not to tame it by pretending it's a glorified bloody toaster, or to waste their time by demanding they know a bunch of esoteric details (like printcap files) which were introduced for the benefit of the programmer. The best example I know of where an application got it right is autocad. Where I was using autocad the users were all draughtsmen. The best user/programmer there had left school at 15 - he learnt what he needed to know on the fly. You're quite wrong thinking that autocad worked because it's users were engineers. It worked because humans have brains, and with a little encouragement they'll use them.
I agree that GUIs are much more intuitive for some things. I think most computer->human interaction should be GUI based. But I also think the focus on them as the primary mechanism for Human-Computer interaction has held us back tremendously. When we stop pretending computers are something else, things will improve.
This might sound ridiculous now, but it will be blatantly obvious in 20 years. (I'm an arrogant son of a bitch, to be sure).
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
This daft window metaphore crap is largely responsible for reducing the most powerful invention of the previous century to just another time-wasting useless idiot-box where humanity's natural sloth and aversion for thought can reign supreme.
"A picture is worth a thousand words" - it's a myth. Draw me a picture of "love". The trouble with GUI interfaces is that they are predisposed towards the computer transfering information to the human. They are not an efficient mechanism for humans to transfer information to the computer. There is a good mechanism for this - one that has been used for millenia and which are brains have even evolved to use effectively. And that mechanism is language. This is why text based interfaces will always rule over this GUI shit. The "integrated" desktop is doomed to forever strive for the level of power, speed, simplicity and componentisation already provided by the shell tools.
Why use a metaphor for a work-style whose time has past (WIMP - "desktop") when the reality of the computer is orders of magnitude more powerful and more flexible. Even as programmers deny this, and preach the religion of GUIs they implicitly acknowledge that to do anything powerful, you need to use a language - a programming language.
"Oooh, but that's too complicated for my users..."
Am I saying that every computer user should be a programmer ? Yes I am, but only to the extent that it makes sense in the domain. For instance, any real power-user of autocad will write small lISP programs. How could a commerical company make a fully functional, mathematically pure programming language as the basis of an interface for a program intended for draftsmen ? Because they understood that stupidity is like work - it expands to fill the space allocated to it. Expect intelligence and you will receive it. Autocad dominated their market like this. This approach would work in other markets if programmers had the humility to admit that their "users" were as smart as they were, and deserved the same power that programmers reserve for themselves.
If I want to do GUI programming (which *is* good for computer->human interaction), I'll use fltk, a far more powerful and better designed toolkit than either Gnome or KDE. Plus it's cross platform, and LGPL. If I want to knit things together, I'll use a bloody pipe.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
I really like your idea of AST. Your comments seem very accurate and relevent. Could you email so we can continue this offline.
Joss
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Yeah, but despite current GNOME X11 dependencies, GNOME is actually better poised to be moved to a new display technology (if one ever materializes.)
;^)
:^) Up until fairly recently, the KDE team couldn't even *touch* QT code if they wanted to without working for Troll Tech.
Why? Licensing.
You thought that was cleared up. Yeah--for the UNIX/X11 version. (let's just never mind that Linux is not a UNIX.) What if some magnificent bastard comes up with some great kernel design, has POSIX-compliance, and has some great new display technology? Uh, let's talk to the Troll Tech lawyers. Oh boy, time for another round of talks.
GNOME? Well, let's see; we need to port GLIB. And we need to port GDK. Remove those X11 deps...and make sure we're not linked to any non-GPL non-essential libs.
See my point? KDE has been legally dodgy from the beginning, mostly out of necessity. It was the best toolkit at the time. They didn't want to take the time to build up GTK/some other toolkit, and they liked QT, so they used it. The GNOME folks have worked on GTK since then, and it rocks.
Moral of the story? Want to undertake an Open Sourced (no apologies to RMS) project? Make sure your libs are licensed well, and in a way you can deal with--or they will come back to haunt you.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Let's be realistic, here. We've heard some words, but words are just that. Words. Hot air. Now, there's nothing wrong with hot air - without it, hot air baloons would not go very far - but until until it's translated into -some- motion of some kind, it's nothing.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Actually it is integrated into gnome now. Get the newest helix-gnome and look in the control center under "legacy applications".
It is not clear what exactly is the point of this article. We know GNOME will advance. We know KDE will advance. The GNOME foundation won't kill KDE.
Some magazine article predicts that KDE is dead, but the GNOME people never said that. They never say the GNOME Foundation is meant against KDE.
It is not necessary for the KDE people to respond to the GNOME announcement, which is not an attack on KDE.
Free Software: the software by the people, of the people and for the people. Develop! Share! Enhance! Enjoy!
That's precisely why I'm not entirely convinced by the GNOME Foundation. The took HP's (already grim) VUE desktop and threw in a bunch of designed-by-committee stuff to end up with the nightmare that was CDE. I'm just worried GNOME is going to be heading in the same direction. I presonally couldn't care less about KDE. I tried both, and absolutely hated KDE. It's just not for me. I'm not convinced that GNOME is either, but time will tell on that one. I wish both groups luck, but I remain unconvinced that I'll be using either of their products in the future.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
KDE supports a limited subset of GTK themes - the plain engine, and the pixmap engine. That's a HUGE subset, but it's still only a subset. They don't support j. random engine theme. All KDE's themes are engine themes. While there's advantages to this, it makes it really hard for GTK (or anything else) to use KDE themes. grdb sets up theming for Motif applications, among others. All my athena and motif applications, and emacs, use my GTK theme. GNOME has no equivilant to the taskbar. That's not exactly my cup of tea, but I guess other people like it.
Windows 2000: Designed for the Internet. The Internet: Designed for UNIX.
"[...] if we were to prostitute ourselves to big-money for the chance of being a media-recognized standard [...]"
"[...] but I still have the utmost respect for the Gnome developers themselves."
LOL. Cognitive dissonance, anyone?
Just like ghtml is khtml, like a Gnome .desktop file is a .kdelnk.
grdb is nothing than an adapted version of krdb. Look at the copyright. But the latest krdb is alot better and sets the colors and so on for:
* qt apps (not KDE)
* motif
* staroffice5.2
* gtk/gnome apps
* native X apps
* athena apps
the only thing not voered so far is xforms
It is really neat, I can use all the gtk apps and they look almost as good as a native KDE app. They used to be in this ugley light gray or one of these pixmap themes. Really sticking out.
Moritz
They _are_ getting it right. They share the .desktop principle for desktop/menu links, there has been work on more compatible WM hints and both use the same drag-and-drop protocol. KDE2 will also include support for importing/exporting GTK themes.
There is plenty of reason between the two teams and the majority of developers strives to interoperability.
Is that Sun and HP, two of the biggest proponanats for CDE have finally taken the long outdated position of Dropping CDE and moved towards Gnome instead. Is this a slap in the face to either the KDE community or a huge boon for the Gnome community? I seriously doubt it. They got tired of trying to sell CDE when there are better, more aesthetically pleasing alternatives out there, Gnome and KDE are both examples of this. CDE sucked, it was ugly, motif is outdated and there are better libraries out there. So why would Sun and HP not want to drop the dead weight and throw their development weight behind something else? The question is why gnome? Why not something else. Rewriting CDE would be a huge undertaking. So using a codebase that is already established makes a lot of sense. And the potential licensing issues with QT for a commercial entity might very well be more than negligable. Hence Gnome make sense because all of the libraries are open source and therefore free. What does Sun get? A desktop that is fully functional, pleasing to use and look at, and costs them nothing other than a few developers time to make sure the port to Solaris functions. It makes sense from Suns position of trying to increase shareholders value, less expenditure on licensing costs equals a greater dividend at the end of the day. And Solaris users win in the end by getting something better and more functional than CDE. So, what if you want to run KDE on your Ultra 30 instead on Gnome? Port it and install it. Hack the QT-free libraries to run on Sparc, hack the KDE sources to run on Sparc, and install it. Better yet, after you get it working, make a package of it and upload it to Sun Freeware, so that you can share it with the rest of the world! That way everyone has the choice of what Unix Desktop they prefer. This is an issue of choice and as long as there are interested KDE developers and interested Gnome developers, both systems can and will flourish. The community wars between the two are rediculous, get over it...
---------- Hot Rats!
Here's how it's actually going to go down:
1) The System V folks will redo their GUI admin tools (admintool, SAM, SMIT) in GNOME, and continue their development there. So, shops that run the big 3 SysV Unixes will switch.
2) The third-party admin tool folks will switch too, to simplify their work in creating tools for both SysV and Linux. This means Tivoli, CA, Veritas, etc.
3) People wanting to learn their first GUI as a programmer have previously seen it as "I need to learn CDE if I want to get jobs, and GNOME or KDE if I want to write for Linux", so they'd usually choose to learn two interfaces, not all three, because it was the best way. Now, they have to either choose to learn two, or just learn one and be assured of available jobs *AND* good Linux development. A large percentage of them will make the obvious choice, GNOME, and rule that KDE isn't a good choice *EVEN IF IT HAPPENS TO BE BETTER WHEN THEY MAKE THE CHOICE*, because you can learn one interface more thoroughly than you can learn two.
4) The commercial Unix vendors will see that going with GNOME makes them compatible with not just RedHat now, but also System V, and some of the more popular ones will switch.
5) KDE will continue to develop, get better and better, and get less and less relevant. Eventually they'll start hemmoraging non-core developers, as those coders decide they'd like for their work in their off-time to improve their user experience at their jobs, where they're increasingly using GNOME because of #1 above.
6) Long-time KDE projects will begin porting over to GNOME. Die-hard KDE folks will fork them and continue KDE versions, but they'll fall behind.
KDE may never actually die; but it's peak in relevance will be reached very soon, and after that it's all downhill.
--
I never thought that Broook's Law had anything to do with Motif's lack of acceptance or inability to compete with GNOME and KDE. I always thought it had everything to do with the boneheaded licensing requirements attached to it.
Let's see: I'm a small software developer writing X applications for a new PC-based operating system that's available for a pittance. Do I select a windowing environment that's free like GNOME and, to a slightly less free extent, KDE? Or do I choose one that has a licensing requirement that raises the cost of each development system by about US$1000 per seat? Hmm. That's a tough one. Oh, sure! Let's choose the expensive one! If it costs more it must be better, right?
At least that's the choice that I figure the Motif licensors were hoping everyone would make. If only Linux, GNOME, and KDE had been around about the time I was looking for a UNIX to run on a PC back in the very early '90s... one less UNIX Labs royalty would have been paid.
It's too bad that Motif went this route. By tying themselves to the giant, commercial, and ridiculously expensive vendor-specific UNIX versions, they pretty much ensured that they couldn't be part of the PC UNIX game. And I rather liked Motif. If it hadn't become so closely associated with the big computer vendor's UNIX products, it might have evolved into something a little less, shall we say, ``resource intensive''.
But saying that it didn't succeed in spite of the programming resources that Sun and HP threw at it? No way. It was the costs that were passed on to the consumers and the small developers. It certainly can't compete in a open source development environment. A grand is a pretty steep entrance fee into the bazaar.
--
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Are you trying to say "Desktop Integration is Bad", or are you saying that "The Unix architecture is so convoluted that nobody can do Desktop Integration correctly"?
Whatever, but Integrated Desktop users on (say) MacOS or BeOS don't have to trace through 4 layers of script to get it working. The Magic happens to be great in fact for people on those platforms.
What you are saying is that the stack of cards has gotten so high that it falls down randomly. Bad Thing, but you realize what Miguel of Gnome is saying about the suckiness lack of policy in the Unix infrastructure.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I think it always has: in a sense, KDE is "backed by" Troll Tech, and it seems to me that KDE's future has already been influenced strongly through that, starting with the discontinuation of Harmony.
It is probably because of the QT license. gtk is free, open etc, while QT is not. I wonder if he realizes that when corporations make decisions these kinds of things come into play. It is not a matter of which one is better or whatever it is what is more economical. GNOME is totally free from the ground up. KDE has license issues and as a corporation they have to be careful about these things. Sure you can download KDE and QT for free, but it is not GPL. Maybe Sun is finally getting the clue about GPL. They are releasing there Star Office under GPL or so they say, maybe they want to use this and GNOME and create a totally free office suite to compete with Windows, and give people No reason whatso ever to use Windows. ;-)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I don't want a lot, I just want it all
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
Please let me know what code you have written, if any, so THAT I WON'T USE IT! The last thing I need is a program that will only run on the developer's computer. Slightly less annoying, but no less onerous are those programs written for 256Meg, 800Mhz and 32bit color. There's too many programs like that now as it is, which is why I like that status indicator.
So your CPU is bigger than mine. BFD. At least I can pee around a pillar and you can't.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
All those who think that these commercial offerings will subvert Gnome into some corporate whipping boy have forgotten the Linux philosphy - choice.
Except that this won't be Linux. It will be Solaris and HPUX and AIX. This isn't some personal computer next to the refrigerator that you can install whatever desktop or wm you like. This will be a corporate desktop and you will have to go crawling on your hands and knees to the IT masters begging for permission to use WindowMaker, FVWM or (gasp) KDE.
When I found a few sufficients megabytes that were not under IT control, I quickly installed WindowMaker so that I didn't have to run the dreaded, ugly and slow CDE at work. Others in my department did the same with IceWM and KDE. It would be especially ironic if we had to continue this sneaking around just for the *freedom* to use something other than GNOME.
"Damn un-american commie pinkoes! Think they're too good for GNOME! We'll show them!"
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Come back after you learn to read.
I bow humbly before your majestic and unassailable arguments. Your logic has dumbfounded me. Let me bask in the glory of your mental acumen. I grovel beneath thee and beg of your mercy not to smite me with your keen wit and insight.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The reason that Sun and GNU can't get their C++ object files compatible is not the fault of C++, but rather the fault of Sun and GNU. It's doubly ironic that even GNU decides to break compatibility between versions.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
When you compile KDE, you also include some code from the Qt header files (macros, types, etc.) so a part of the KDE binaries is derived from Qt. This code is not compatible with the GPL, which implies that you are not allowed to re-distribute it in a GPL'ed package.
The same holds true for any license. Why then are some GPL applications allowed to link to non-GPL libraries but KDE is not? Why can XEmacs link to Motif and no one cares? Why can gcc link with proprietary Solaris libraries and no one cares? Because these libraries came with the OS or compiler or major components of the system. Well guess what? Qt comes with the OS of most Linux and BSD distributions. The exeption clause does not specify that the component must be an OS requirement, or be used by a certain number of packages, or be granted an imprimatur by Debian or the FSF, before it gets the exception. All it says is that stuff that comes with your distribution is excepted. And even if it wasn't, all you would need to do is distribute the source code. And guess what? The Qt source code is distributed.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
They do, it's used extensively in preview releases of Evolution and Nautilus. Bonobo components already exist for software like EOG.
Those seem like a good, well balanced bunch of comments. It sounds as though the Gnome and KDE teams have a good working relationship, where what counts is the software - not some dumbass rivalry between the two teams.
Let's face it, desktop choice is a truly personal thing. Everyone has a polarised view, which means there is more than enough room for both the K's and the G's of this world.
... if only more people realised that to be competitors doesn't mean that one has to do everything within one's power to destroy each other...
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
A little planning goes a long way...
(For the less informed, the subject line evaluates to "Me too!")
I am ashamed that Slashdot printed this article.
No joke. The first thing I thought when I read The Taco's lead-in --
The ongoing debate between KDE and GNOME has calmed down a lot in the last year...
-- was, "Well, this story should fix that problem, then, eh?
Keep in mind, I don't really care what Slashdot's Fearless Leader does with the site -- if it starts to suck too much, there's plenty more Internet out there -- but this cost Malda some karma points in my eyes. What an obvious troll/flamebait story.
Bad Taco! No anime for you tonight!
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
That's just wallpaper and widgets. It has nothing to do with functionality. Sharing eyecandy makes no difference.
KParts and Bonobo need talk to each other. Standardizing on XDND was a good first step, but only the first.
Kind Regards,
Kind Regards,
Bruce
Wow that's cynical, and probably true. I love C++ as a language but the author's (Stroustrup) inability to influence the standardization and upgrading of the language really hurt!
Java has been able to add constantly to itself by being strictly, forcefully, and legally controlled by its authors. Could Servlets, EJBs, and Java 3d have been added as cross-platform open libraries if this wasn't the case? Alas for C++, which was just as good and had the potential to add all these things and be cross-platform. The big unices just didn't care enough about this.
Also, it's a much better theory then that the companies were trying to tap into the "Geek Factor" being higher with Gnome (It has a "gn" in the name!).
-Ben
The bottom line is that no matter how much you may love or hate KDE or Gnome; C or C++; CORBA or KDE's document alternative... you still have to admit that KDE was never even in the running, nor could it be. First, C++ is an unacceptable language for the core of a desktop on a UNIX box. You might love C++, but as KDE shows quite clearly, the diverstity of languages that UNIX supports cannot be matched through a C++ API (or any other language for that matter). Write your API in C and everyone (including the C++ folks) will have a interface, but write it in ANYTHING else, and you're locked to that language. As an example, I love Perl, but if someone suggested writing a major toolkit in Perl, I'd gently suggest that they go get their frontal lobes flossed. You write it in C and then create the Perl interface module using XS.
The real problem, though, is Trolltech. Both Sun and HP were burned by the political problems of OSF (later The Open Group). They really don't want to turn Trolltech (not even a US company, which means less control) into another OSF. It's not that Trolltech is a bad company, it's that Trolltech is a company.
Of course there are other reasons: CORBA is something both companies want to be part of their core offerings; GNOME brings with it a very nice set of C libraries that, if made standard across UNIX systems, would make development of even non-graphical programs much more reasonable (e.g. glib, libgtop, the XML and HTTP libraries, etc); Gimp....
KDE will slowly become another Caldera... the legacy Linux desktop. It's not a comment on the quality of the code or the holy wars that have been fought. It's just the reality of the UNIX and post-UNIX world.
Add to this all of the developers who choose to use alternative languages. C is the lingua franca of the Unix world, and even the most out on the fringe languages provide reasonable facilities to link to C. For a variety of reasons, nothing similar is provided for C++.
I really Like languages such as Haskell, Eiffel, and Ada, and each of these provides bindings for GTK. None provide bindings for QT (at least that I know of).
For that simple reason I prefer Gnome.
KDE is a desktop "by the people and for the people" and if we were to prostitute ourselves to big-money for the chance of being a media-recognized standard, we would be stomping on all the people that have supported, developed, and used KDE throughout the years.
Al Gore said last night:
"A new prescription drug benefit under Medicare for all our seniors, that's a family value. And let me tell you, I'll fight for it and the other side will not. They give in to the big drug companies. Their plan tells seniors to beg the HMOs and insurance companies for prescription drug coverage.
And that's the difference in this election. They're for the powerful. We're for the people."
You've blown your cover! Kurt Granroth is Al Gore!
You're right...
in a way. How many people here actually want desktop integration? I know that i don't. I like having to start programs on the cmd line and not having things happen by default.
Take redhat; I recently installed it on a laptop, and first thing I had to do was to figure out how to disable that crap gnome/enlightenment environment and just get a normal window manager up and running. one without fsking session management. I get really uncomfortable when I have to trace four layers of scripts to figure out why this and that program was started.
Magic is great in fiction, but I hate it on my desktop.
Ok, in retrospect I perhaps shouldn't have chosen the gnome workstation install, but I wanted the libraries installed.
Did you know that Qt has already been ported to the Linux framebuffer console? I was surprised to hear it too. Did you know that it also runs on Windows (much better than the current GTK-Win32 port)? It will get ported to just as many architectures as GTK. That's not a worry. I'm going to be very VERY happy indeed to run a KDE2.x desktop on the Linux framebuffer console.
Besides, there is NOTHING in the QPL that would forbid you from porting Qt on your own to a new kernel. You only need to port Qt, and then any app that is written with Qt (and no X deps) will run fine. The BeUnited project is porting Qt to the BeOS, I believe.
As to your comment about how GTK rocks, I beg to differ. The pixmapped themes are still DOG slow, and they make your desktop suck up at least twice as much RAM as the ugly default. Qt 2.2 BETA is more stable AND is more resource-friendly than GTK+ 1.2.8, which is the version I'm running here.
Nautilus does embed a MP3 player if you view your folder as an mp3 folder (or maybe they call it a "music folder", I forgot). In other words, get your facts straight.
Ok, I went into Nautilus again today and I went into my Music directory. Then I held my mouse over an icon for an mp3 file (Tyler Durden- Welcome to Fight Club.mp3) and lo and behold, it started playing the sound! Without even having said "Play this" or telling it to use a Music view (which also works, but transforms Nautilus into a full-fledged MP3 player), Nautilus was using mpg123 to play my songs.
Have you used it? If you had, you would probably know what I was talking about. If not, then I can understand where your comments come from.
For those interested, Konqueror still holds an edge over Nautilus in some areas... Konqueror automatically detects changes to the files in the current directory, and thus hitting "Reload" to see new files is no longer necessary. Konqueror also uses a much lighter HTML engine than Gecko (which makes Nautilus' memory usage even higher than pure Mozilla alone... and the most RAM-hungry app on my system) and can split any window into several "Frames."
About the RPMS: Helix also provides Solaris support. Yet they haven't rounded out one of the EASIEST and most SIMPLE package systems yet? (TGZ packages.... gotta love them!) Slackware isn't some incredibly old version of Linux that has no recent inclusions. TGZs aren't that difficult to support. Anyway, personal feelings about the GNOME project aside, at least KDE makes it possible and simple to install their latest software on almost any UNIX that I've seen. I've seen KDE2 running on Slackware, redhat, Mandrake, Solaris, and FreeBSD.
KDE consistently puts out clean, well-thought-out code and is making a serious attempt to provide a decent desktop for UNIX workstations. So, for me at least, as long as they keep making it, I'll keep using/bugshooting/abusing it. Everybody gets a choice, and I like it that way.
Evolution : (magellan)
Gnumeric : (kspread)
Nautilus : (konqueror)
We all make mistakes sometimes. oh, and if you wanted to point out the great and innovative Bonobo technology (which KDE "doesn't have!") then take a look.
Not to mention the fact that KDE (once out of beta of course) is faster, more stable, and more colorful. (Always a plus!)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Bullshit, the other comments are dead on. If you want only one desktop use windows.
I want a choice. Hell I want lots of choices.
Just wait, if development of KDE and Gnome continue at the current pace, windows will have to start competing with them.
Oh, and Mac OSX has some cool interface stuff itself.
How are we to know what kind of cool interface things are out there if only one company(group,etc.'s) view is the one put forward. Remember Microsoft doesn't actually "innovate" very much.
If you hijacked a corporation's DNS, you'd probably be prosucuted. Can someone explain what's going on?
The fact of the matter is standards are not automatically bad. Standards are good. If I can sit down at any UNIX machine and have it come up in gnome, that's a big plus for me. I know the environment and feel comfortable in it.
It's closed standards that are bad. Standards such as the ones Microsoft foists on us. Standards like the MS extensions to the PPP protocol, the Word format, Java, etc. Oops. Java's Sun. MS didn't like it very much when the shoe was on the other foot, did they? I think everyone would agree that close standards suck.
While I'm on the topic, if the elite camp has such a gripe about the commercialization of the OS, why are they still using it? There are plenty of open OSes out there which no one is using, so why not use one of them? I'm sure the HURD team or the BSD camp would welcome you... Me, I'm happy that I can get a job working in Linux now. I couldn't have even a year or two ago.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Well, many many hackers are paid to work on the kernel (among other projects I could choose as an example) and the kernel still has lots of volunteers. So I don't think there's any inherent deterrent to volunteer contribution in the fact that some people are paid; after all, even now the majority of contributors to GNOME are not paid. The motivations to contribute won't change; you can still get fame and glory making the desktop the best it can be. And there's even a new motivation, that you have a decent chance of getting a fun job out of it if you turn out to be good at it.
Time will tell, I guess. I'm hoping though that this announcement will make GNOME more exciting to work on, and encourage people to join the project.
Why is it that anyone that disagrees with anything a KDE partisan says is automatically assumed to be a GNOME partisan?
Just for the record, I think they BOTH suck unmentionable animal parts, AND I agree with what the first guy said about this article. It's full of flamebait.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
QT may have scared the biggies away a little bit. The licence has created a saga that I haven't been following much.
But I think that the real reason that SUN went with GNOME is because when they bought StarOffice and gave it away, it wasn't to be nice. SUN's plan is to sell server licences of StarOffice to ISP and companies so that the clients or employees, as is the case, will be able to run them on their desktops from the servers, SUN servers specifically. That's why they are also making the SUN Ray's by the way.
So, a nice free alternative to StarOffice available for free could get in SUN's way eventually. As it turns out, KOffice is pretty good. A bit too good.
GNOME already has good acceptance and provides SUN with some nice headroom and this fall GNOME users are going to love StarOffice.
I wonder what Corel will do now?
Well, competition is good, I guess. But what will be the casualties of these Gang Wars? standards? or will the unix desktop instead flourish in the enriched gene pool?
While I think this article is some pretty serious flamebait, I do have to agree with the guy that KDE is currently a lot more intuitive and stable (and prettier, etc) than Gnome.
You don't say good things about the compitition (When was the last time you heard Linus say Windows was great?).
Here's a link to an interview where Linus says he likes PowerPoint and thinks that VB is a good product. Last I checked they were MSFT products that only run on Windows(TM)
Being in competition does not give you a warrant to badmouth or even dislike your competitors. And even if they do, it does not mean that you should sink to their level.
PS: So what was your point again?
The Queue Principle
compitition makes for better code!
Just look at windows for an idea of what happens when the compitition is not there. Gnome will force kde to be better and
kde will force gnome to be better:}:}
The users win!!!!!!!!
Linux/gnone/kde will force windows to be better
and who wins? The users:}
Pull out your NES emulators and play GNOME vs. KDE: Battle of the Desktops.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Perhaps he's afraid that GNOME developers will start getting more corporate fundy money than KDE will? He keeps talking about "winning" and who's ahead. What does he think he's going to win? Is corporate funding the prize? GNOME was never about winning, it was about making the best truely free desktop possible. Anyone is welcome to help, and this guy thinks it's a bad thing?
Get over it man. GNOME is not fighting with you for the corporate bucks. GNOME was doing fine without their help and will only do better with it.
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
Now repeat afterme: There's no place like Gnome...There's no place like Gnome...There's no place like Gnome.
A sig is a terrible thing to waste
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Sig it.
It is possible to have gnome apps and kde apps installed at the same time.
I think this whole situation will be an excellent comparative case study. We get two projects with, arguably, reasonably similar status. One gets corporate backing, one does not. What effect does the corporate backing have on the project? In a few years we can look back and see.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I think that your analysis of the licensing problems is quite right. The two responses that are usually given are also usually countered with the following arguments:
But there is hope, especially about the second point... As reported on Wednesday, Mozilla is going to be dual licensed. In order to change the license, they will get in touch will all contributors in order to be sure that they agree with the re-licensing. More precisely, as explained in their relicensing FAQ, they will make a reasonable attempt to contact and obtain consent from each of the contributors (it may not be possible to contact all of them, so the law only requires them to be able to prove that they made a reasonable effort).
If the Mozilla team can do it, then the KDE team should not be scared to do it. Maybe there is still hope for KDE2 to be released with the "Qt exception" in all source files. This would put an end to this licensing controversy, and this would benefit KDE (a lot!).
This would probably not end the GNOME vs. KDE flamewars, but at least they would have to consider some more technical arguments instead of flaming KDE for its licensing problems.
-Raphaël
Don't forget which side start the dissing first. If you don't have long term memory, start checking out the old KDE mailing lists to find posts by Miguel. Kurt may be perpetuating an unjustifiable flamefest, but he was hardly the person who started it.
If you spent any time in the OSDN booth at LWCE, you found a lot of Andover employees and volunteers talking about the "death of KDE" with smiles on their faces. This was especially ironic since those folks in the FSF, GNOME and KDE booths seemed to get along quite well.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Okay... that's purely subjective... I actually personally like the look and feel of KDE 2.0 much better than Helix Gnome. I liked the "Feel" of KDE 1.x better than earlier Gnome, and since at the end of the day, I need to get work done, I went with KDE from 1.x.
But it's all subjective here - I don't think anybody wins on superiority,
When you start an Helix Gnome session, and type "free", you simply have 9 or 10 more free megs than when you start a KDE session (1.1.2 or pre 2.0), for similar functionnalities.
Yes, but I've noticed that KDE eats less memory per app. I *really* looked into this because of a memory leak in a beta of 2.0... I played with KDE + only Gnome apps, BlackBox + KDE apps, and some other combos. Lots of experimentation, but no hard numbers - the apps that *you* run may lead to different results. I'd wait until 2.0 is final release anyway... having followed the alphas for some time, they get leaner each release - the developers seem to take a "make it *work* now, and *then* optimize it".
Free software was supposed to bring "obsolete machines" back to life, or at least to slower the rythm of obsolescence. So, yes, this matters. The situation is similar when it comes to speed.
Not to me. I run dual Celeron 350, Pentium II 450, and a dual Pentium 700 as my desktop machines (work, home experiment, home office in order). Every one runs KDE of all flavors with no problem in 64 megs of RAM. (When I got the new dual 700, I had to spread out memory... it was a month before I got some new memory).
In average, a Gnome/Gtk tool is ~30-40% smaller than its KDE/Qt counterpart.
Okay, are you taking memory footprint or size of the file on disk? And *how the hell do you compare*??? Sure, on disk, the kword binary (a nicely featured word processor) is 3428 bytes, and abiword (a nicely featured word processor) is 1053 bytes. Somehow, I don't think that's the end of the story. Even when they're loaded, is it with an empty document? A paragraph? An embedded spreadsheet, several multimegabyte images, and an mpeg?
I've always hated the "show me the numbers" game (because it so often can be balanced either way), so I'm just going to say - all apps run fine on everything I'm going to use 'em on. They all do what I need. I like the potential of KOffice, and I think stability and interoperability is much more of a priority (not *better*, not *worse*, just a higher priority) than many gnome apps.
KParts seems to work pretty well, yet it's just a smart ad hoc and proprietary hack.
*Bzzzt.* Name calling is no way to promote *or* disgrace. Linux is a "smart ad hoc and proprietary hack". So is the GPL, Bonobo and how I set up my pavilion at SCA events. "Hack" is an elegant solution to a problem in *my* dictionary. Everything is propritary to the people who use it.
Roughly, it replicates OLE/COM.
Not a bad thing, if done right... and Konqueror is *damn* fast. As fast as IE on a speedy winbox, and that is fast.
I won't tak about Gtk+ and Qt, yet there's also a lot to say about this.
And it's going to be shortly clear who is hiding spite behind a veneer of religious indignation: http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde&m=9664 2933010813&w=2.
--
Evan "Who uses KDE2 on BlackBox for a lean, powerful desktop" E.
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
This editorial is a different case indeed. I've never heard a developer call corporate backing "prostitution" before. Say what you will, but I think being paid to write free software is a hell of a lot better than being paid to write proprietary software at work, then coming home to write free software. Tell me: which one was selling out again?
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
Nice equation. Unfortuneately, true. GNOME is still chunkier than KDE. The sad part is, the GNOME at 1.2 is chunkier than KDE at 2.x. While GNOME's size will increase quite a bit in 2.0 (like KDE's did from 1.2x ->2.x) KDE's won't increase from 2.x->2.x. Meaning that when GNOME and KDE are on the same level in terms of features, GNOME is be a lot more heafty than KDE. Of course, that brings us to Solaris. Quite a nice OS, and indispensible on those quad-proc SPARC boxes. However, there is a warning to all newbie Solaris users, never run it on a single proc box. Solaris IS quite heftier than Linux. Interestingly, Sun is targetting this combination at DESKTOP users. Will your computer be able to hold up under the burden?
PS> With the coming of GNOME, KDE, and Mozilla, have you noticed how many Linux zealots have removed "bloated" from NT's list of transgressions?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
gnomecc
kcontrol
The only reason kcontrol has anything more is because it includes settings for kwm, whereas gnome relies on a separate WM.
So I ask you again, who gives flying f* what "desktop environment" you are using? They do NOTHING. It is the programs that do everything. I run KDE, but I program in GTK only. Incompatible programs are a pain in the ass (although I hardly experience any problems currently). Imagine trying to tell a Linux newbie that he can't copy and paste between two different applications because of what they were programmed in.
To conclude this rant, let me say this:
I should be able to use any program made for GNOME or KDE, almost to its full potential, with a program made for the other "desktop environment". In TWM. Period.
This is why I am still a little pissed that they didn't link to the interview I submitted in which Kurt dealt with the whole "Corba Issue". Here is the full quote. This is more valuable than his whole rant above.
Kurt: Yes, we did. The initial development on the KDE 2.0 branch was all done with Corba, using the Mico ORBb.
Liz: What changed that?
Kurt: There were several reasons. We worked on the KDE 2.0 development starting when we were still stabilizing KDE 1.0. We spent months on it but were unhappy with the results. The performance was very bad. That, we knew, was potentially fixable through the use of a different ORB, possible Orbit. In addition, though, the complexity of the code, the complexity of the Corba standard, was such that the code became more and more difficult to work with. Eventually, we only had a small group of seven or eight developers who really understood it and could work with it. That was a huge bottleneck for development. Then one of our developers sat down and developed KParts, an alternative to CORBA, within only a short amount of time. He showed it to us. Not only was it blindingly fast, but the code itself resembled the code we'd already written for KDE 1.0. That made it possible for all of our developers to work with it immediately.
Then we had our KDE developer meeting in Europe. We sat down and looked at the potential cost of dumping CORBA. We would be losing the ability to use remote components, but we didn't know anyone currently using that ability and felt it could be added later if people really wanted it. Interoperability with other CORBA implementations wasn't a major impact; everyone builds their own layer on top of CORBA (like Bonobo) and you really have to be compatible with that, not just CORBA, in order to interoperate. So all we really felt we lost was the buzzword. That isn't important to us as developers, so we moved to KParts.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
in the case of KDE, you just can't build a commercial, non-free KDE application without paying Troll Tech. And *that* is what is makes KDE unacceptable as the ultimate free desktop for Linux and Unix. *Especially* for companies like Sun, who want to be able to make apps for whatever desktop they adopt, and these apps are not necessarily going to be all free. And they want to be able to tell ISVs that they should be coding for GNOME rather than Motif/CDE now, without having to tell them "code for KDE, and pay the Trolls everytime".
In the end, my opinion is that it's KDE's obstination to stick to Qt (and develop closely with it) that has ultimately doomed KDE as the mainstream Linux/Unix desktop. At the time KDE started, using Qt was the only expedient way to build a desktop, relatively quickly. But they chose to follow the Qt APIs very closely, without building layers of abstraction between the toolkit and their apps, and this has continued up to now, when KParts is intimately tied to Qt. Contrast this with GNOME, whose component model (Bonobo) is toolkit independent, and then the components that use it happen to also use GTK calls. Considering Troll Tech's decision (very justifiable for them as a business -- i'm not trying to criticize them) not to make Qt freely available for non-free development, the KDE team should have taken a step back after the 1.0 release, and either work on the failed Harmony project to re-create a LGPL Qt replacement, or switched their efforts to GTK, helped the C++ bindings mature, and ported their stuff on it. If they'd done that, we'd probably only have one desktop environment now, and Miguel de Icaza might well be a KDE hacker. But that didn't happen, and GNOME is now reaping the benefits of its more far-reaching vision, in the form of significant commercial support.
I say, good luck to both teams :)
Somewhat to my surprise, I found a lot of non-linux people quite concerned about this.
I use GNOME at home, and I program at work in Borland Delphi. Borland is porting Delphi to Linux (Kylix), and it is to use the Qt toolkit, and have some degree of (optional) KDE intergration.
This was all fine until the GNOME-Foundation announcement came up, and then a thread began in borland.delphi.non-technical (I think) about how Borland might be going the wrong way with Kylix. A lot of windows Delphi programmers who were/are planning to port to Linux were very concerned that their apps would (a)"be left behind" or (b)not run at all
It took a lot of explaining to make them understand how you can use KDE apps in GNOME and vice versa.
I thank you for expressing your views on the matter, and it pleases me that the KDE team are not daunted by publicity and commercial backing of Gnome, indeed - I would be somewhat dissappointed if they were. I think that a major push for Gnome will have the effect of 'raising all ships' for *nix's so KDE could well see a nice boost in developers and users as well.
I am rather dissappointed in your numerous backhanded slaps that you have made at Gnome - it is true that the 'old tech' that is KDE 1.2 compares quite favorably with Gnome 1.2, and that KDE 2.0 looks like it has a lot of great stuff going for it. However Gnome has some great stuff going for it to - have a look at Evolution, Gnumeric, or Nautilus - these are wonderful tools that KDE has nothing that really compares. And these are all in the early stages, I fully expect them to blow away ANY commercial offerings not long after 1.0.
So again, both teams have a lot going for them and both have different strengths and weaknesses.
It should not be an either/or choice - because neither are a complete solution.
Tom M.
TomM@pentstar.com
It's hard to see how you can have the "utmost respect" for a hacker and yet say his products are, well, second rate, not to mention to come within spitting distance of calling him a sellout and corporate drone.
I have both KDE and Gnome on my computer and regularly switch between them. Although most of the time I work in plain ole IceWM, KDE has regularly remained my favorite desktop. The continual torrent of great new features and improvements each team has made over the last year simply amazes me. My hat is off to them -- as hackers they're in a league way beyond me, and coming from a arrogant old sinner like me that's something of an admission. The fact that both teams are so productive means there's no reason to resent resources the other one scores -- its hard to make really big improvements when you're already doing a great job.
The idea that the Gnome foundation somehow hurts KDE is rubbish. I know Kurt says he believes this too, but I wonder if he may not entirely believe it; at the very least he sounds like he has a little case of sour grapes. No matter. When KDE2 comes out, the KDE team will have all the vindication they need.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I don't think that Sun is worried at all. For all of Linux's positives, it doesn't even begin to compete with Solaris on the type of big boxen that Sun likes to sell. Sure, Sun still sells workstations, but its been quite a while since the public has thought of Sun as a work station company. Sun's core business is big honking servers. When Linux begins to deal well with 64 CPU servers with Gigs and Gigs of ram, then Sun misght start to get worried (and Beowulf class clusters only count for a very limited domain of problems).
And even then, when Linux becomes the equal or superior to Solaris in every aspect, Sun will still not have anything to worry about because Linux will run on Sun's hardware, from whence the bulk of Sun's income comes from.
What Sun and HP are likely after is someone to do free work for them. Right now, its likely that both Sun and HP are spending a good deal on supporting and maintianing CDE. Moving to Gnome frees up a lot of resources people wise, time wise and money wise.
Further, if they sanction and support Gnome on their proprietary Unixes, all of a sudden it becomes much easier to run thousands of (currently) Linux only apps on HP/UX or Solaris. This is a wise move that could conceivably increase marketshare for workstations which are profitable for Sun, even if no longer their core business.
Just my two cents.... Eat them for what their worth.
Yes, perhaps just a link to the article would have sufficed...instead of embedding it in Slashdot giving the feel that it may be Slashdot sponsored. I would expect that we have a feature on the opinion of *GNOME* on this issue coming up soon?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I am ashamed that Slashdot printed this article.
This developer not only dissed the quality of Gnome but also their principles. Then believes that a quick backpedal at the end "I think some of them are cool hackers" will make up for this. This is unconscionable, CmdrTaco, I know flamewars drive page views but causing enmity between KDE and Gnome by printing this obviously flamebait article will only hurt Open Source.
This is truly sad.
The Queue Principle
Funny, when I first started looking at them, I thought KDE looked like a Win-Wannabee, and GNOME was trying to be the OO UI that OS/2 had. Over time and some GNOME usage, I've become disillusioned with it, too. This is especially as one reads more and more if Icaza "wanting to do Windows, only the right way".
Well, I believe a share of Windows problems are architectural, not a matter of implementation. You simply can't come up with a clean implementation of a broken architecture.
The last straw finally came in the past few weeks, in two parts. First, I've been looking to get my wife off of AOL, and went searching for IMAP cllients for her to select from. One of them required a non-GNOME library, but I could only find a GNOME update of it in RPM form. That required a few more GNOME updates, and so on. Eventually I would have had to download an update tens of megabytes of stuff just to test a stupid GUI MUA. I gave up. Later I found a "non-GNOME encumbered" version of the library, and discovered I didn't like the MUA, anyway. At about that time, Icaza comes out with his "make Unix suck less" rant. IMHO it looks like a wishlist to come up with a middleware layer on Unix roughly akin to Win32. In other words, he wants to take the problems I just had, institutionalize them, and make them even worse.
I agree that shared code has been a bit of a problem in Unix. But IMHO, the lib*.so.* system works, we just need to use it better. I don't want to see the API turn into a monolithic mess, especially one that has to be installed in the form of two dozen inseparable components, and that's just for the run time.
I will probably continue to have GNOME and KDE libs on my system, just for access to their applications. But at present, I run neither desktop. They're both too win-like and too bloated for my taste. I just wish I had the WPS for Linux. Well, at least DFM is alive, again.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
What I see here is that this kind of debate is generating some stupid competition in which you have the technologicaly-happy (KDE) and the ethically-happy (Gnome).
IMHO, KDE is smoother and more complete than Gnome. Like it or not.
But now, if we just let people choose ONE solution instead of us then we might encounter a problem similar than the Windows one we just start to solve by bringing variety to the desktop market.
So ? What is the best UI ?
This is the one you'll take time to choose, not the one (whether goods or bad) that somebody will have decided that YOU will install on your Personal Computer.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Where is the press release from Kde about being voted "best desktop" or whatever at this week's Linux World Expo? It's true. Kde is the most popular desktop among Linux professionals - the people who attended the show. These are not newbies needing a smooth transition from Windows by any means. Of course among the newbies Kde is at least as popular.
The only substantative thing in Kurt's piece I would disagree with is making a hasty comparison between the current Kde 2 betas and the current Gnome, which is 1.21 + updates. Kde 2 is very near completion. They could probably take a snapshot of the current work, check for showstoppers, and put a 2.0 label on it right now. However, Kde 2 is very, very ambitious. Kde really is using a component model for *everything* now, not just talking about doing so. Some modules which aren't ready have been tentatively moved out of the base packages to get the release out, and Kde 2 probably won't be as stable as the current Kde 1.12 until verions 2.1 or beyond. The changes are extensive to *everything*. It's a complete rewrite, and some Kde 1.x users will not like some of the changes at first but I feel that most of these are improvement which will grow on them. Also, there will not be as many Kde 2 applications written by third party developers like myself at first. We are waiting on a stable release of the base packages for that. Even though the core team has tried to avoid source incopatible changes through the beta period, doing so may be considered unrealistic for such an ambitious project. I look forward to the stable release mostly so I can jump in and start coding appications using the new framework and the new Kdeveloper IDE, which is very, very nice.
I have always been drawn to Kde because it is the original effort to modernize the unix desktop, and what has followed in more of a pale imitation. I feel that even non-technical users can sense this also. After getting somewhat involved in the development process myself through submitting bug reports and monitoring the lists, as well as working on some Kde code, my intuition about Kde has been amply confirmed. The project truly is a labor of love regardless of some commercial backing (mostly to pay the salaries of full-time developers). There is no slick PR machine and even the concept of that is foreign to how those involved in the development of Kde think. What better proof than the above - an attempt at PR by someone who is not very practiced at it, or maybe not even capable of such a mentality.
The best kind of PR Kde can engage in is simply to publish the facts about numerous awards for best this and best that, and the real figures on usage. These figures may be much higher than most of you who read Slashdot may think. I'm sure that they will remain just as high or even reach higher percentages regardless of efforts by a commercial consortium to define what the "standard" desktop for unix might be. Let the users define the standards.
The problem is simply this: there is no standard binary formats for C++ object files, even on the same platform. So, code compiled in g++ will not link with code compiled in Sun C++ will not link with... While there is a draft standard for object format, no one is following it yet, and probably everyone won't for years.
This makes KDE unacceptable to a UNIX vendor, because half of their customers buy C++ (at great expense) and the other half use g++. Which half will the support? GNOME, based in C, doesn't have this problem. So it gets tapped even though (IMNSHO) KDE is the better desktop.
--
-- Slashdot sucks.
Based on my personal (and possibly naive) readings of the GPL and QPL,
-
I can distribute Qt source code, without problems.
-
I can distribute KDE source code, without problems.
-
I can distribute Qt binaries, if I provide source as well.
-
I can distribute KDE binaries, if I provide source as well.
-
I can not distribute KDE binaries along with Qt binaries, if the one links to the other, unless I provide both under the terms of the GPL (which is plainly impossible, as I do not have rights to license Qt under the GPL).
(The above analysis may make it seem as if I have something against KDE. I assure you that any such impression is purely a product of the reader's imagination. I think KDE is excellent software and that it is useful regardless of binary licensing issues, since the source code is a valuable asset and may unquestionably be compiled, copied and modified under the terms of the GPL. Also, the authors of KDE are free to release KDE binaries along with Qt since the GPL license terms do not apply to them.)Common responses which I have gotten back from the KDE people include:
-
Qt is not a part of KDE, so when giving KDE to other people you don't have to provide Qt under the GPL terms that would be required if they were one work.
-
The fact that KDE was so obviously designed to work with Qt confers to the general public an implied license to ignore the GPL source-providing requirement of KDE with regard to Qt.
Let's not discuss the merit of these points (since that would lead to a licensing flamewar). These responses certainly represent a valid point of view. But are big companies going to buy it? Lawyers at big companies are very careful and don't want to get caught doing anything illegal. I simply cannot see companies such as Sun, IBM, and HP embracing KDE on a large scale as long as the legality of distributing KDE with Qt is unclear.For now, commercial support of KDE really does seem to be limited to newer companies such as Red Hat, Caldera, MandrakeSoft, etc. who maybe aren't as worried about the licensing issue. Not that this is a bad thing--as Granroth says, large corporate backing certainly didn't help CDE/Motif get anywhere.
Corporate Backing does not insure a great program. Or success of a program. OS/2 was great, but unsupported. Sun/HP have gone this route before, why did they suddenly choose Gnome? Cheap?
-----------------------------
1,2,3,4 Moderation has to Go!
Please, please keep this in mind when replying.
You can disagree with Kurt's views, but don't take it out on KDE as a whole. As active member on the kde and kde-devel mailinglist I can tell you that this is not at all the general thought, there are plenty of developers who rather look at their own efforts than paying a lot of attention to GNOME, especially with the nearby release of KDE 2.0 and a heavy debugging rage among the developers.
Let's keep this discussion informative, insightful and interesting. There are obviously hard feelings between the KDE and GNOME teams but let's not degrade ourselves to such nonsense.
While he has some good points, it seems he is struggling to keep his rage in check while writing this :)
:)
Personally, I like both and use GNOME at work, and KDE at home. I would have liked to have seen a little more positive supporting of KDE and showing off of KDE's strengths as evidence that they aren't worried instead of backhanded accusations of GNOME whoring itself out to the highest bidder. I kind of reminds me of whenever a punk band gets signed to a record lable, all the other punk bands jump over themselves attempting to cast them as "sellouts"
The thing to remeber is that this is open source. SUN and HP do NOT control GNOME, the devlopers do, and if for some reason the devlopers give in to all that money and become corporate puppets and screw up GNOME, it simply forks and continues like nothing happend. We've seen this before people.
However, the point that throwing money and devlopers at a project does not mean it will suddenly improve is well taken, and nobody should assume the GNOME foundation will succede simply based of this this reasoning.
Finkployd
Konqueror still boasts several features which I don't see in Nautilus, and likewise vice versa. But I don't need a filemanager that plays my MP3s when I hover over them- I'd rather have one that embeds an MP3 player when I click on them instead. KDE2 is making some great strides forward for UNIX desktops in general, not just Linux. Besides, Helix in particular seems to be pretty unfriendly to even some versions of Linux. How do they expect to take over the UNIX desktop market if they don't even have a working Slackware installer? Things like this boggle the mind...
Why aren't both Gnome and KDE getting interoperability right so that Gnome vs KDE stops being a monolithic decision and becomes a matter of personal choice?
I want to drag a block of text from kword into an openoffice spreadsheet, and embed that openoffice spreadsheet in the afforementioned kword document while running either desktop (Maybe I feel gnomic one day and troll-techy the next), and have the system stay stable.
Actually I don't, because I'd have to be even more insane than I am to want to do that, but I want to be able to, dammit!
Gav
"There's no such thing as data that can't be manipulated"
This article seems to imply that Sun, HP, etc. will be controlling the foundation; however, the only decision-making body in the foundation is a board of 9-15 contributors elected by the membership. As of now, over 2/3 of the members are not employed by a "GNOME company." Also, no company is allowed to have a majority on the board. Since 2/3 of the membership consists of volunteers, there's little danger of corporate control.
(Of course, the board won't be telling people what to hack on anyway, since that wouldn't be very productive, as anyone who's in a free software project knows. It's just a way to organize our efforts and enhance communication within the project and with outsiders such as companies.)
Companies that join the foundation join an "advisory board" with no decision-making powers. The advisory board also has nonprofit members such as the FSF.
I think it was also misleading to mention only Red Hat among the Linux distributions; at least TurboLinux and Debian are also shipping GNOME as the default (or only in Debian's case) desktop.
In any case, there's no cause for FUD; it's exciting to see large formerly-all-proprietary companies contributing to free software alongside traditional open source supporters. That's the way I look at it anyway. All the code is GPL, it's not like we can lose anything; they can't steal our code.
That seemed like a pretty reasonable exchange, nothing too harsh, and everyone acted like adults.
People, that's just not going to work at all.
I mean, civilized debate is nice these days, but it's just not going to pull in the pageviews and generate the advertising money. What we need is something more like:
National Enquirer: "David Talbot, the 'D' in KDE, to join new GNDOME initiative!"
Weekly World News:"9 out of 10 alien anal probe devices run KDE!"
Jerry Springer:"My wife is cheating on me with a GNOME developer"
Then, and only then, will Slashdot get the attention and pageviews it deserves!
-Denor
I just prefer VT100 :)
The spectre of the failed CDE desktop has been bounced around a lot in the wake of the Gnome foundation announcement. The reasons for its appearance are obvious - commercial Unices have dipped their hands into the waters of a standard desktop before and then messed around with the concept without really going anywhere with it. I have access to CDE on the AIX systems I work with, and while it has some plus points, I opted to use FVWM instead as being a more customizable interface.
But why should we be tarring Gnome with the same brush as CDE? The motivations are different - Gnome has arrived as an already competent desktop object model. It is not perfect, not is it complete, but it covers enough now that it is fully capable of most tasks. It has been written by people who wanted a GPL'd desktop model and decided that the licensing issues with Qt were sufficient motivation to not develop KDE instead. And why do these commercial Unix vendors suddenly care about Gnome? Because it is eclipsing their own offerings in available scope and applications written for it. It makes perfect sense from their perspective that they should go with the flow and convert, support and maintain a widely used desktop system. I don't suddenly see this 'Big Brother Unix' appearing on the shoulder of Gnome and controlling its destiny. Rather I suspect that we will see bug fixes initially as these vendors get their paws on Gnome, followed by patches and new bonobo objects, new applications under the GPL or otherwise, and greater integration of Gnome into their own offerings.
All those who think that these commercial offerings will subvert Gnome into some corporate whipping boy have forgotten the Linux philosphy - choice. If we don't like it, we don't have to take it or use it. And that applies to piecemeal offerings and patches equally as to whole applications.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Those who don't understand the Free Software ideal (as very distinct from Open Source) are doomed to say really stupid things about it. It seems really obvious to me that a person who would make the quote above doesn't understand the principles that he's complaining about. Complaints about QT were not about corporate involvement (as the above quote seems to suggest is the big sin among the FSF crowd) but about lack of programming freedom.
Part of the FSF ethic is that anyone is free to hack on the programs, and that "everyone" includes big corporations. To tell Sun and HP that they mayn't become involved is actually more contrary to the spirit of the GPL than accepting big corporate money. The problems come when people try to place restraints on the code. Given that everything is going to be kept open by the GPL, I don't see this as being a big problem.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.