KDE Strikes Back

Nerds writes: "The fourth beta release of KDE has been announced. Also, you might want to check out this editorial at LinuxPlanet. It is a bit biased, but the author makes good points." Its an enjoyable piece that everyone ought to read: it takes some pot shots, and points out some very real truths (and does both with a reasonable sense of humor).

Comments

Desktop Religeon

[Sun_Tzu99]

I think that the debate over the linux desktop is the same as the debate over religeon. Which one is the correct/best one? Protestant, Roman Catholic, Jewish Orthodox, KDE, Gnome, or for that matter, Mac OS, M$ Windows of Linux? It all comes down to a matter of personal preference, and there is no real way for a clear "Best" one to be found, they are all good in different ways.
I personally use KDE, I like it, It works for me, etc... That's not to say that Gnome is bad (M$ Windows is bad) Pick the window manager you like and get over it!

___________________

Re:Desktop Religeon

[jilles]

These religious battles seem to be very american. Americans like two sided conflicts and arguments. You have two presidential candidates (al & george), the other two or three can't be taken very serious. Two desktops, in a war there's the good & the bad (and serious confusion if the two change position during the war). Two browsers (yes I know there are a few others but their marketshares are very small). Open source vs closed source.

And now we are faced with two linux desktops. How boring. On one hand we have Gnome: inconsistent hacked together mess of programs (really, gnome office does not exist yet although gnumeric apparently looks nice). Integration is a dirty word in the dictionary of a Gnome developer. It offers a paper thin cover over the decades old UNIX interface.

KDE on the other hand is very promising, and has been so for years. Always nearly done but not quite so. Promises to reinvent everything including office apps, browser and filemanager.

I don't want either. I want mozilla + framemaker + a desktop that lets me use both comfortably. Gnome is too bloated for that, and KDE tries to replace both excellent tools. Perhaps the replacements are good but I don't care. I want a decent filemanager that lets me rename files for instance (bumped my head trying to do that using the latest gmc on a fat drive, doh!). I want copy paste to work with any application, not just Kedit or Kword.

And guess what, I already know that neither KDE nor Gnome will deliver on any of the above any time soon. Gnome will still be a mess in two years and KDE will still be promising but not yet finished in two years. And I'll still be running windows in two years. Not because it is so great but because it fullfills all my needs. It's bloated, it's ugly, sometimes unstable but the apps I need are available for it and work together nicely in a consistent way. I'd buy a mac if they were priced reasonably. But I wouldn't install linux for desktop usage, even though it's free (as in beer, I don't care about the speech). For me linux is a server OS (and a good one too). Did you notice that the companies backing Gnome are in the server business as well? One of them once tried to deliver a desktop and failed miserably.

end rant.

Re:Desktop Religeon

[jilles]

A window manager is a curiosity that you need to use X. In the case of KDE it is part of the whole environment (though a replaceable part), and in Gnome you can choose from a few (though I haven't found the right one yet, you know the one that just does its thing without fucking up or being annoying).

Other operating systems come with an integrated window manager. That works fine for me. So it's not surprising that few people know the difference between a windowmanager and a desktop environment. It's because they should be integrated.

You might argue that being able to swap windowmanagers adds choice. However, it also makes testing more difficult (which is why it is so hard to get Gnome and windowmanagers to work properly, i.e. not just stable). Now we get to choose between Gnome and KDE, yay. 40% of the apps will run optimally under gnome, 40% will run optimally under KDE and the remaining 20% will run lousy on both. Great choice.

License wars are a waste of energy

[Dan Hayes]

As someone who has worked with Microsoft's products almost exclusively over the last ten years but has recently come to appreciate the benefits of open source the sort of ideological arguments that occur in the open source community truly amaze me. I mean, there seems to be little difference between "free software" and "open source" and yet each concept has rabid followers which decry the opposition at every step.

Thanks to my handy Corel Linux distro I'm well on my way to becoming a Linux "guru". After installing it I tried each desktop and came to the conclusion that KDE is a lot smoother and efficient than Gnome was, and have since been using that. But I constantly hear people bewailing the fact that it's somehow "tainted" by the fact that a couple of words in the license don't match their Beloved Leader's psuedo-communistic writings. And then they go and try and create an entirely new product! So much for the idea of having the source encouraging "code reuse"!

As a consultant I can tell you that these issues seem rediculous and petty to outsiders. And they certainly add nothing to either the image or the quality of Linux, but instead cause resources to be squandered in duplicate efforts. As long as it works, why should the license matter so much? It's only software, it's not a matter of life and death.

To be perfectly honest, some of the rabid fanaticism that I see here just strikes me as childish. There's a real need to grow up in some people and get on with improving the code rather than slating the "opposition".

Re:License wars are a waste of energy

[hey!]

To be perfectly honest, some of the rabid fanaticism that I see here just strikes me as childish. There's a real need to grow up in some people
and get on with improving the code rather than slating the "opposition".

Ah, but hard core hacking is a young man's game. Why deny them the pleasures of the young, including passionately naive (or naively passionate?) political activism? Especially when it's so useful.

Companies play motivational gurus real bucks to light a fire under their employees. The respective Gnome and KDE teams helf self organized into groups whose motivational levels compare favorably to a rutting bull-moose.

Go Gnome! Go KDE!

Hey -- motivation is motivation. You can't fault their productivity levels.

Re:License wars are a waste of energy

[orabidoo]

What people are bitching about is the fact that KDE is not legally redistributable in binary form.

that is irrelevant. the KDE people are putting a GPL on a product that depends on Qt, and that's a perfectly clear indication that they intend to allow you to redistribute it. If they suddenly turned around and tried to sue you for redistributing KDE, no judge would listen to them for half a second.

the REAL licensing problem with KDE, is that you cna't write commercial (non open-source) apps for it, without paying Troll Tech. now, we free software hackers don't care much about this, but companies do. that's why you won't see Sun or IBM telling its ISVs that they should code for KDE, which is probably one of the big reasons why GNOME was picked over KDE for the onslaught of big-corp support. The only way Troll Tech could fix this would be LGPLing (not GPLing) Qt, but that would be quite squarely against their interests, so they won't do it.

other than that, this article didn't seem very convincing. Lots of babbling about politics and personal problems. I say, who cares. If you read the Linux Kernel mailing list, you'll see a lot of politics, conspiracy theories, and bitching and flaming even among the biggest developpers (including Linus himself). And you know what? It doesn't hamper kernel development -- it just moves it along. When there are disagreements, it's better to flame, say what you think, then look for common ground, than to pretend the disagreements aren't there. And no big project can exist without disagreements between people; not KDE, not GNOME, and not the linux kernel.

and then there's the technical arguments of KDE's superiority because of its greater consistency, which can be effectively countered by pointing out GNOME's greater openness (with multiple programming languages, its use of CORBA, and a non-toolkit-specific component model). I won't pass any hard judgements here: both consistency and openness are needed for a project to be good, and obivously KDE needs more of one and GNOME more of the other.

Re:License wars are a waste of energy

[SimonK]

Sigh. Its really not that simple; as the GPL contains a degree of ambiguity the case is arguable both ways. Section 3 of the GPL (covering the distribution of binaries) requires that if the Program is distributed in binary form it must be accompanied either by source, or an offer from some party of distribute source. It is implied that the Program includes all libraries required to run it, but that the components of the operating system are exempt unless they're distributed with the Program.

The ambiguities with KDE/Qt are twofold:

1. Since a GUI system and toolkit are generally considered parts of a modern OS, it is arguable that the OS exemption applies to Qt, and indeed could apply to KDE itself. The term "operating system" itself is ambiguous: the GPL implies a compiler is part of an OS, whereas MS would usually exclude it, but argue that a web browser is. Its doubly ambiguous in the case of Linux, where the bits are available separately, but are distributed in a wide range of combinations (which generally do include Qt and KDE).

2. KDE is licensed under the GPL and LGPL by its authors in full knowledge of the licensing terms for Qt. Thus it is only sensible to assume that in granting this particular license they intended to allow binaries of KDE to be distributed, providing source was available for them, without the source for Qt (since this has never been available under compatible terms). Given this, a judge is going to laught hysterically and award costs to the defendant if they were to try to sue someone for distributing their binaries.

Given point 2, I really have to wonder why people keep bringing up this infernal argument.

IANAL. This is legal advice, but comes entirely without warranty :-)

Simon

GNOME vs KDE Episode 18: Pointlessness

[FascDot Killed My Pr]

I'm getting pretty sick of the GNOME vs KDE flamewars. But before you mod me up as +47 Insightful because I'm spouting the party line of "we should all just get along" read what I have to say: Both GNOME and KDE have got it wrong.

From a economic perspective: You can't win in the marketplace by being "just as good as" the existing Goliath. What features specific to GNOME or KDE are offered that surpass what you can do in Windows?

From a usability perspective: Why is there all this harping about a "consistent UI"? Check my sig for a soundbite on this, but then come back for an explanation. Sure, it makes sense for a word processor and a spreadsheet to have "File" menus with "Save, Save As, New, Close, etc" all in the same place. But does it make sense for all apps? Think about it this way: My car has a certain UI. My telephone also has a UI. They have absolutely nothing in common but I can use them both very effectively. What if LifeKDE sprang into being and created a phone with a steering wheel? Would I be better off?

How does this apply to computers? Because a computer isn't just one tool. It is a generalized tool simulator. Every "application" is a tool. If two applications serve radically different purposes, I would expect them to have radically different UIs. For instance, people often mention that Blender has a difficult to learn UI--irrelevant! The purpose of a UI is not to be easy to learn. The purpose of a UI is to afford access to a tool. (if the UI is difficult to remember that is a different issue--internal consistency is a valid goal) To go back to the Blender example, people often go on to say that once they learned the UI quirks it turned out to be very powerful. Exactly!

What does this have to do with KDE/GNOME? I think each of these projects has a certain amount of validity. For instance a lot of apps need to have file selection dialog boxes. That should probably be a system service. But "standardization" beyond that level is, IMHO, a very big mistake.

So what do I recommend? I recommend two projects:

1) The Common GUI Services Project for things like file selection dialog boxes.

2) The Advanced UI Research Project to do research on what kinds of UI elements work best with what kind of tool and then making that research available to the tool makers.
--

Re:GNOME vs KDE Episode 18: Pointlessness

[Masem]

One reason that GUIs for apps should be consistant (not necessarily similar) is twofold:

Learning the system. Sure, average /. reader knows how to find things, but the average joe *expects* "File/Save", "Edit/Cut", OK and Cancel buttons, etc. By sticking to basic conventions for all apps, it makes GNOME or KDE more user friendly to all computer users and makes Linux look better and better.

Scripting. Sure, most of the time Linux people will be scripting using /bin/bash or other shells, or perl or tk or whatever other language. However, GUI scripting can be quite useful. From my understanding of the gtk and kde basics, the concept of scripting is there, it's more a matter of apps using it. It would be nice if, in the end, we had something similar to AppleScript, where each app has it's own mini-API for script calls, so that if I wanted to save a file during a script operation, I can call the app's 'save' function. However, until that's implemented across GUI apps, one will have to rely on the GUI's underlying toolkit to provide said calls, so that instead, I could call "menu file -> item save". Standardizing on names and orders can help very much here as well.

Of course, it should be possible for advanced users to customize the gtk/kde app, like it was possible for X Toolkit apps to use resources and change every aspect of the design. XML makes for a powerful tool here.

Re:GNOME vs KDE Episode 18: Pointlessness

[Netsnipe]

This article is a troll and a banner count generator - Simple as that. It's easy to see that there are not many factual references. All I see from the editorial is an exaggeration of the "war" between the two camps.

Trolls like this are only going to add fuel to the fears of people outside the open source community that Linux is fragmentating, which is totally untrue, and a myth we don't want to see happening for real or have people believe in.

Sure the competition can be intense, and probably beneficial to both sides, but the way it is being publicised is much more damaging to the community as a whole.

On another point Powell loses all journalistic integrity when writes the following:

"This time it isn't because of anything Miguel has said; he seems to be busy alienating opposing forces within the Gnome community itself through his new company, Helix Code, which plans to make money from Gnome."

The motives of the Gnome community with the formation of Helixcode have been take totally out of proportion in my opinion. Dennis E. Powell might as well attack commercial Linux distributions at the same time if he wishes to take this viewpoint. In his view, commercial Linux-focused corporations would also be hypocritical for "pretending" to support open source for the benefit of society, but at the same time earning a profit from it! This attack is very unjustified.

Any organization or corporation has the right to sell their open-sourced products at any price they choose fit as long as the purchaser has the same right to do so, and Helixcode is no exception. It's a fundamental cornerstone of the GNU Public License that Powell seems to totally ignore in blatantly attacking Gnome while sidestepping the issue of Troll Tech's QT licensing.

Gnome and KDE was originally about bringing about standards to the Linux desktop, but unfortunately it seems destined to become mere cannon fodder for endless flame wars and giving the false impression that Linux will suffer the same failures of fragmentation as Unix did.

MashPotato - Mobile Array of Support Helpers for Potato

FUD, FUD, FUD...

[jmv]

Did I say FUD? He complains about Miguel trying to blast KDE, then he goes on blasting gnome for 5 pages, Nice! I find this whole article so childish! I think he's trying to start wars on just about every subject:
- license wars (QPL/GPL mess)
- language wars (C vs/ C++)
- toolkit wars (QT vs GTK)
- "commercial wars" (which compagny is good (QT), which is not (Helix)

At last, when has anybody (relatively important) working on gnome said "Gnome's goal is to kill KDE". This is the worse piece of FUD I've seen in the OSS community.

(Note: For those who want to know, I use mostly gnome, but use KDE and KDE apps regularly and enjoy them)

a Bit Biased

[vicoder]

Thi article is totally biased. I mean to say Miguel did it all for the money and the whole point of GNOME was to kill KDE. C'mon! Get real. Kill off KDE. It was setup as an alternative and sure any software would like to have a user based particilarly from a competing product but GNOME was made as an alternative to KDE because at the time with the QT licenses. This guy seems to be a KDE enthusist in the way he downplays GNOME. What does he consider a nasty comment from Miguel. That he says GNOME is better than KDE? What is he supposed say "Well GNOME isn't as good as KDE but I would like you to use it". Of course not...I mean if he wants users...KDE is very good product and is getting better but lets not downplay GNOME. A bit of irony of the GNOME ethusiast though. the who Free Unices (BSD, Linux) is supposed to be about choice but *some* GNOME developers/users seem to want it to be the only one. This is where they make GNOME look bad. Gnome 1.2 is a very good product from helix gnome and I use it and have the KDE 1.9.2 Libraries for some of the superior KDE programmed applications. Lets keep the competition friendly between the two desktops.

Anyone paying attention to XFCE Lately

I don't get it...is this a real problem?

[Spoing]

I use a variety of desktops/wms/environments on different operating systems. Most aren't 'compatable' without quite a bit of toil and trouble.

Under X, it's different. KDE and Gnome -- let alone other wms and apps -- are very compatable, and running programs from one on the other is usually a no brainer. Sure, there are incompatable pieces, but none that prevent you from switching between different desktops/wms.

The only thing people are griping about are the last few inches of compatability; libs used, file formats, and the main language used to create the reusable parts (C vs. C++) -- *not* that you can't use any of your favorite tools if you switch between them.

With the exception of licencing, it's a bad idea to even acknowledge this as a any kind of squabble...and I'm not even convinced the licence issues that get dragged up are reasonable after Trol Tech's changes.

I'm sure there will be plenty of people who think I'm just not getting it. That the issues raised are important in a practical, moral, and cosmic sense.

Well, I don't see smoke, I see a description of smoke. There's definately no fire. You can't even warm a marshmellow with this.

Perhaps this is paranoia talking, but...

[PimpBot]

...does it seem to anyone else that Taco is stoking the fires in the KDE/Gnome battle?

I say this because, well, typically KDE beta announcements are posted by HeUnique. They are typically short and sweet: "KDE Beta x is out. Go have fun."

Taco, otoh, seems to be posting material that's pretty inflamatory towards Gnome...trying to make KDE look bad. I know people can say stupid things sometimes, but I don't think its _just_ the KDE camp doing it ;-)

Am I crazy? Ok, well, I know I am, but am I just reading into this too much?
--------------------------

A *bit* biased?

[Tet]

It is a bit biased, but the author makes good points.

It's more than a bit biased. It's utterly, completely and unfairly biased. It has numerous digs at GNOME, all conveniently attributed to anonymous sources. It's low on facts, and its only purpose can be flamebait. And at that, I'm sure it will succeed. I have never before criticised /. for posting a story, but there has to be a first tiem for everything. This story crossed the line. Flame wars don't achieve anything, other than lots of page view. Maybe the conspirancy theorists are right about /. trying to get more ad revenue...

free as in ...

[The Pim]

It amazes me that, for all the emphasis the point receives, a participant in this discussion doesn't understand the difference between free software and free beer. It seems from his diatribe that the latter is all he can comprehend, while it is of secondary importance to the GNU and GNOME projects. It's painful to hear him boast righteously that he won't make much money from his KDE book, while accusing GNU (which has sold software since its inception) of hypocracy for cooperating with corporations on the terms of free software.

Poverty does not a saint make.

What he means...

[jmv]

What he means:

It's been a while since the last gnome/KDE flamewar, so I need to start one. Gnomers are always gratuitously nasty about KDE and that's why Gnome sucks. It's also bad because it's controlled by big nasty companies like Helix and RedHat. Fortunatly TrollTech are nice guys and don't count as a big bad company.

...no need to continue.

FUD!

[RPoet]

Dennis E. Powell has written numerous .comments about Linux desktops, KDE most notably. He's always worth a read, and he makes no effort to hide his bias toward KDE.

You should read with a critical eye though. It's *always* suspicious to base major points you have on a source who just happens to be anonymous and untracable. For all we know, this may be a cheap trick Dennis pulls to hide his incompetance when it comes to technical aspects like APIs.

I also question his saying that Gnome was founded with the one goal of killing off KDE. He uses cheap semantics such as "Gnome is written to the venerable and venerated GTK+, while KDE is written to the technically excellent but politically reviled QT."

He goes on to say "I've tried for years to find out who the king of KDE is, and have concluded that there isn't one." Of course, KDE has a founder and über-developer. Mathias Ettrich is for KDE what Miguel de Icaza is for Gnome, and I've heard him bashing Gnome in interviews lately so I don't see the fairness of that not being mentioned is Denis' article.

I hate to see all this FUD within the Linux camp, when we despise the traditional FUD. I guess with big things like Evolution, Nautilus and the Gnome Foundation going on in the Gnome camp and the long-anticipated release of KDE 2.0 along with KOffice in the KDE camp, this is bound to happen as a result of natural human pride. I hope we can all see through the FUDding and the bashing and just look forward to getting some great software RSN!
--

One good point -- too much C in open software

[GlobalEcho]

Powell has one point that has often bugged me about open source software. Far too much of it is written in portable assembly language (a.k.a. "C"). I appreciate the advantages of this as much as the next guy -- it's good to have a lingua franca, C is widely portable, and a lot of tools for programming it are already there. Nevertheless, C is really primitive, and it's difficult to write reusable bits of code for it. Up until 1997, I had a job where we wrote code in object-oriented languages (C++ and Objective C). Since 1997, I've worked at a place where everything must be ANSI C. That has paid dividends in portability, but we've expended tremendous effort doing things like

* writing array structures, and functions to operate on them (pseudo-objects)
* writing standardized error handling
* synchronizing related structures
* fixing memory bugs
* avoiding that oh-so-tempting copy/paste by generalizing function arguments

all of which would have been alleviated by using some flavor of object-oriented language (or even C++! ;-} ).

If you look at the code for open-source projects, you can see them inventing the wheel, over and over. I suppose you could argue that things are going slowly in the Java direction, which is fine. But that just means that Gnome is in retrograde motion.

- Brian K Boonstra (who can't wait to start using Mac OS X)

Note I sent to LWN

[Havoc Pennington]

Although most responses have been positive, some articles and comments about our recent GNOME Foundation announcement have been disappointingly inaccurate.

In particular, two mistakes are common. The first is referring to the Foundation as "consortium"; the Foundation is not a consortium, but an organization of individual contributors to the GNOME Project. The companies joining the Foundation join an advisory board which has no decision-making function; decisions are made by a board of GNOME contributors elected by the membership. At this time, around two-thirds of the members of the Foundation are independent volunteers not employed by one of the advisory board companies. The Foundation is simply a legal entity that can act on behalf of the preexisting GNOME Project. The GNOME Foundation is comparable to the SPI/Debian and the Apache Software Foundation. For more details, see the press release: http://www.gnome.org/pr-foundation.html

The second mistake is that this represents some kind of flareup or resurgence of a "war" with KDE. At our press conference, we took pains to discourage this interpretation of the announcement when members of the press asked about it. We are interested in healthy and friendly cooperation with the KDE project and other free software projects. Interoperability efforts such as http://www.freedesktop.org continue and will not be affected by the GNOME Foundation.

Both GNOME and KDE have valuable contributions to make. We're creating a foundation to help us run GNOME well, and we're excited about the recent commercial acceptance of GNOME, but these things are advances for GNOME, not attacks on anyone else. Our primary focus is to expand the userbase of free software; competing with other free software is not the point.

Re:Helix wants to own Gnome

[Havoc Pennington]

Also, the reason was not to fork proprietary versions, that would probably be forbidden by the assignment papers just as it is for the FSF assignment papers. It was just to change license between LGPL/GPL/etc. and be able to defend copyrights in court.

use is not proof of necessity

[TheDullBlade]

That important code is available under the GPL is not proof that it would not be available without the GPL.

How many programmers who would have written public domain code decided to use the GPL just because "that's what all free software is written in"? RMS didn't invent free software, he distorted the name Free Software for his own purposes ("it's not really free unless you place restrictions on how you can use it" - good logic, Mr. Stallman).

---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.

A three way battle?

[molog]

From the article linked above: "Miguel and the Helixes" are in a running battle with Red Hat and Eazel...

Maybe I have it all wrong. When Helix really started coming around I remember reading on Redhat Labs that with Helix working on GNOME usability and how it looked they were going to focus their energy on improving the base toolkits like the GTK. Eazel is making the filemanager thingy(for lack of a better word) to add to the GNOME desktop. This doesn't sound like a battle to me. It sounds like each is working on their own part. Well I don't have anything to add other than that.
Molog

So Linus, what are we doing tonight?

This is a highly biased article.

[Performer Guy]

It's surprising the way he sweeps the whole license issue under the carpet. Can even the free non-profit license be withdrawn like he says?
This is way worse than I had realized.

The other amazing thing is in the same breath he notes that the KDE GUI is free for NON profit uses then says these commercial companies backed the wrong horse. Why the heck should any commercial entity back a proprietary standard as the desktop for Linux? Does he really expect they are lining up to pay royalties, or to force their customers to pay royalties? They can do that now with Motif et.al. You can get the whole of Windows for less than just the library license fees for the darned Motif GUI on a Unix workstation, in the mean time unix custs are asking why their workstations cost more than wintel systems. The consortium wants to change this and get a standard adopted, not recreate this attrocious situation.

When are these KDE folks going to get it? The license is CRITICAL. It's THE major obstacle for KDE, it's not enough to dismiss these concerns or say "trust us". KDE-Qt is doomed to be marginalized in the long term unless it ditches the QPL.

His bias blinds him but he does make some points

[Greyfox]

Gnome is currently the snowball that starts the avalanche. With bonobo in place and people writing reusable components left and right, gnome code will start improving by leaps and bounds. Predicting that corporate involvement will not significantly advance gnome is foolish.

The whole language issue is similarly silly. You can pretty much program in what you like, which is how Linux has worked all along. And ORBit bindings are either already in place or being worked on for all the big languages (including C++.)

He does have a very good point about documentation though. Thus far I'm not aware of any resource that will tell you everything you need to know about Bonobo programming, for instance. Gtk/Gdk have reasonable resources available, but gtk-- is barely documented. Hanging out on the developer's list will provide insights into various things, but not everyone can afford the time to read the developer's lists every day.