Gnome On Dell's Business PCs

jedipapi writes: "Dell will unveil on Monday that they'll have Gnome preloaded on selected business PCs along with a partnership with Eazel among others. ZDNet has the full story."

Comments

What's the big deal on this?

[jcoleman]

I bought a Dell *HOME* computer in April and it came loaded with *gasp* RedHat 6.0, Enlightenment, Windowmaker, Gnome, and KDE. Sounds like a non-story to me.

losing browser war

[KevinMS]

I'm starting to realize that linux is in real danger in the desktop arena before its even a real contender. What concerns me is web browsers. Netscape looks like it will not keep pace with IE and I'm sure MS realizes this. Mozilla looks like its going to remain a "hobby" for a while now, and konqueror is wasting its time with desktop integration eventhough desktop integration was just a way for MS to try to avoid anti-trust arguments. Maybe opera will help, but could they be moving any slower? MS knows that linux is screwed because of browser-envy, that is probably the main reason why they stopped their porting of IE at solaris and OSX. The linux office apps will be good enough very soon, people will realize they dont need talking paperclips, but when they cant see the webpages or the plugin media they want to they arent going to be happy

Bigotry obviously runs high!

[Christopher B. Brown]

From my certainly-biased perspective, it's nowhere near as evident where manifest superiority lies:

• Is Debian superior, because it doesn't suffer from the RHAT thing of releasing weird customized versions of kernels and compilers, or is it inferior because it took longer to get The XFree86 4.0.1 release out?
• I no longer use RHAT these days, using Debian instead; the long times between Debian "stable" releases is legitimately a pain against which the questionable robustness of RHAT "dot 0" releases must be balanced.
• On Debian, I've had a whopping lot more success running GNOME applications than I have had with KDE applications; your "clearly superior" code has tended to suffer badly from segmentation faults. I've never gotten any of the prepackaged KOffice stuff running.
• I tend to prefer the architecture of GNOME to that of KDE, particularly because information about it is actually published and available.

  Most of the documentation about KDE development seems to focus on the "soft" matter of "What are the UI guidelines?", with a distinct dearth of technical architectural material.

• I could argue that KDE, by largely forcing developers to program in C++, this represents its own "denial of passion for excellence."

  After all:

  "C++ is more of a rube-goldberg type thing full of high-voltages, large chain-driven gears, sharp edges, exploding widgets, and spots to get your fingers crushed. And because of it's complexity many (if not most) of it's users don't know how it works, and can't tell ahead of time what's going to cause them to lose an arm." -- Grant Edwards

  :-)

  GNOME, by being agnostic about what language you are expected to use, does not force you into

  "Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS." -- Alan Kay

The notion that GNOME is necessarily terribly awful and that to use it means denying any notion of "passion for excellence" seems to me to be a ludicrously unfair way of characterizing it.

At one time, GNOME wasn't much more than a counterreaction to KDE's adoption of the then-rather-more-proprietary Qt toolkit; that is certainly no longer true.