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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).
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.
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Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
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)
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
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...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
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.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
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!
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"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
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)
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.