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Interview with Sun's GNOME Hackers
Ur@eus writes: "Ever since Sun joined the GNOME Foundation people have been wondering exactly what they have been working on. To solve this we have done an interview with some of the people Sun have working on GNOME. The topics discussed include the background for Sun choosing GNOME, Accessibility, Useability and more. You find the interview at Linuxpower.org."
I looked into the abyss, and the abyss looked into me--and we both winked.
I think ALL of apple's GUI designers are blind! Hahahaha.
thank god *somebody* is working on usability. Linux is great for hackers that know everything about computers, but you've gotta remember that most windows users have a computer IQ of about 12. They want soothing colours, nice pretty fonts, and a generally relaxed feel to the whole thing. This is one area where KDE and GNOME both need some work.
You've got to give it to sun though--they seem pretty keen on GNOME usability.
Its dog slow. Really incredibly slow. Even though I prefer the Gnome environment, on this SunBlade I'm using, its not even remotely usable. I ended up switching to KDE, which is so much faster than Gnome, someone should be embarassed.
I'm hoping Sun will do something about these performance issues sooner than later, but I'm not holding by breath given that the slowest JVM they have is the Sparc/Solaris one too.
Now if only someone would release KDE 2.2 packages for Solaris (I've had zero luck building it from sources!)...
Can be found at ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/2.2/Solaris
have you tried the new 1.4 unsupported version? any previous version was horribly slow but since the upgrade i've been amazed.
it's funny i've been using gnome on my sunblade for months now and sure it doesn't load as fast as CDE, but i find the interface in gnome much more intuitive
Whaddaya mean "Gnome on Solaris"?? I tried running Gnome on my P2-266 Linux box two years ago and it was not even remotely usable. I've been a KDE convert ever since. I work for Sun, and even with the explanations in the article, I'm still mystified as to why the conclusion was that Gnome is better....KDE is going to be much more familiar to the typical Solaris CDE user.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Packages are now available from ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/2.2/Solaris/
I have built KDE 2.2 without any major problems on Solaris 8 (and KDE 2.1.1 on Solaris 7). If you want some help, you can contact me. Or if you want some more expert help, please contact the mailing lists kde-solaris@kde.org and kde-nonlinux@kde.org. You can read them at http://lists.kde.org
Good luck!
Mats
Having a commercial player on your team does not automaticly mean success. Hell, take a look a CDE. That had ALL the commercial Unix players involved, and they threw 10's of millions of dollars at it, though I think a lot of that money got swallowed up in meetings and red tape between the vendors.
A programmer writing something because his heart and soul is in it does a better job than one who's motivation is the next month pay cheque.
Macka
Well, there's one good reason right off the bat, then... most of Sun's users still run OpenWindows because they think CDE sucks.
I'll have to disagree with you. I've don't both a home-rolled Gnome and the pre-1.4 pfg that Sun put out. Mind you, I'm on a Ultra5 and I've not experienced any problems that'd make me want to roll back to fvwm, mwm, or *shudder* cde. But I guess ymmv.
Cheers.
Celebrate the finer things in life
Yhea, CDE is crap, but, honestly, everything that the Open Group put out was crap, or do you like Motif ?
I think that's do because the big players fear suggestion stuff that' sactually good, because then the other partners would also get it. (The mind property crap).
You're right it's not necessarily a good thing, and it doesn't mean success but what it does mean is commercial credibility. Having a large successful company behind suddenly makes the project seem more professional. Very few corporations would use a community driven app simply because there wouldn't be any support for it and they wouldn't know from one day to the next if the app would still be around. With the backing of a large company suddenly there's stability added to the project, along with financial backing, and I'm sure what most companies are worried about is they now have someone to blame/sue if there are any problems ;)
Good things never end "eum" they end in "MANIA" or "teria"
Read the little "slashboxes" for Linux Today, ARS, the Register, etc.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Put it on a quad UltraSparc 2 server w/ 4 GB of RAM, and it works a little bit faster...
Make that a whole bunch faster.
What I meant with "Or if you want some more expert help..." was something like "if you want better help than you can get from me..." :)
What do you mean by this ? many of the KDE hackers are paid by Mandrake, SuSe, TheKompany, Caldera and even RedHat !
The requirement that all Qt-using programs either be GPLed or else developed with a license from Troll Tech, and that all KDE-using programs be GPLed, is still an issue for Sun. Gnome lets proprietary programs be developed, and KDE does not.
(In that regard KDE is closer to RMS's thinking than Gnome, despite past hostility between RMS and the KDE team).
And hiring a group of people to work on it full time with the added perk that they can afford a pint of Guinness at the end of the day isn't a bad thing either.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
This work being done at Sun is one of the reasons why I think GNOME will get a majority of the *NIX desktops, long-term. Another reason is that both Sun and HP have given money for GNOME development.
Basically, any company that wants to sell operating systems (or sell computers and operating systems together) will prefer GNOME. There are never any licensing fees to develop for GNOME; for KDE, sometimes there are.
The sooner GNOME is really good, the sooner Sun and HP stop paying licensing fees for CDE. It is in their best interests to drive GNOME until it is really good. I am confident that GNOME will soon catch up to KDE in polish and usability.
KDE will always have loyal fans; and given the huge amounts of memory computers have these days, there won't be any problems running GNOME stuff under KDE or vice versa... so both platforms have a future. But I do think GNOME is going to become the most popular platform.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
On a similar note, my neighbor just LOVES Mountain Dew (when Sprite is obviously a superior.) I can't quite figure out why he likes it, it's just weird!
Why do I keep typing pythong?
Really? We have a bunch (10) of Sun java terminals (woohoo, the X terminal is back... the id cards and session freezing is really cool tho :) running off a Ultra-60 dual cpu machine, and Ximian Gnome is pretty snappy. Unless you have some serious configuration issues I cant imagine it would be that much slower for a single Blade machine.
It's pretty fast on my own HP B2000 machine too, even running over dual monitors. Well, the using it part is pretty fast. Compiling it all from scratch um... wasnt.
I just installed solaris 8 on a toshiba satellite and both gnome and kde are available from the companion cd. Being the curious type, I included both packages and (so far) can choose either upon login (cde, too and all the regular options). Gnome is a much slicker interface. KDE looks like it was designed by a first grader. Looks aren't everything, of course, and gnome certainly boots slower, but I choose gnome every time. After the boot, they both run about the same speed and for me at least, gnome is much better looking.
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Teach him to eat and he will fish forever.
Two years ago!! Two years ago there wasn't really a comparison between KDE and Gnome. Gnome was still busy building a useable widget set and a fast Corba ORB. They really hadn't even started on actually making a useable desktop.
Gnome has come a long way in two years.
The reason that SUN chose Gnome over KDE should be fairly obvious. First of all, the Gnome libs are released under the LGPL and so you can use them to create commercial software. Several important KDE libs, on the other hand, are released under the GPL (the QT widget set being the most obvious example). This means that it is impossible to create commercial closed source KDE applications without purchasing a special license from TrollTech. That gives Gnome a major advantage over KDE for a company that sells software. The second reason that Sun chose Gnome over KDE was the fact that Gnome is based on Corba. KDE's DCOP might be nice, but it's not a Sun sponsored industry standard like Corba is.
That's not how it started. I'm pretty sure if you checked you'd find that most were KDE developers before they were company employees.
Link is giving me a 500. Mirror?
I'm sorry, that may be common perception, but in reality you are completely wrong. I spent 13 years working for a commercial vendor (9 in their Unix space) and can categoricly state that commercial sponsorship means anything but longevity of a product! A 10 year development roadmap can be swept under the carpet in an instant when the market shifts, or the company get brought out by another with a different focus.
It doesn't even have to be the company that gets sold, it could just be the product itself and its associated development staff! I've seen that happen too
And when a commercial product (usually closed source) gets pulled, the customer base is well and truely shafted, because when the product is gone, it's gone.
With a community product that is open source this can never happen. Lets assume a product goes stale. Even if a customer doesn't have the skills in house to continue working on the source code, he could easily employ a software house to do it if the product is important enough to him!
Commercial involement IMO is mostly good for one thing
Macka
This means that it is impossible to create commercial closed source KDE applications without purchasing a special license from TrollTech. That gives Gnome a major advantage over KDE for a company that sells software.
If you ever coded something with Qt/KDE resp. Gtk/Gnome then you would know that developing with Qt is a lot faster then with Gtk. This little bit extra development speed counts much more than license fees.
I say a typical CDE user will prefer KDE because it has a very similar look & feel, as opposed to GNOME which is a brand new things that doesn't bear much if any resemblance to the environment they're used to.
That doesn't mean that GNOME isn't more configurable, it just means that KDE will be more familiar.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I've typically been pretty unimpressed with the brain-dead rallying around particularly bad choices for creatures that seem to have pervaded this side of the industry .. let's review:
.. wasn't there a gnome that lived in your nose or something?
.." - good thing the linux community didn't rally around a Kevin Costner image from Field of Dreams and run around thinking "If we build it - they will come" (like my old college stadium .. soon became - "if we build it - they will pay")
.. i played D&D when I was a kid - but can't we break this silly stereotype - or do we spend all day polishing textures on something that looks like a squishy dragon toy and trying to figure out how to do +6D damage to companies with a +12D Strength and Toughness?
.. maybe it means 'kick the computer!'"
- The Gnome - where the heck did this come from? All I can think of was those hideous books back in the '70s and all those ugly plastic/wooden statues people would put next to their pink flamingos in their front yard
- The Penguin - Wasn't this from a bad beer commercial with the quip "Beware of the Penguin
- The KDE dragon - what the heck is this? and why does he always seem to be around disconnected gears? - i mean - ok
---
"It's a foot on a computer
Yeah that does happen, however sun didn't buy GNOME (I don't think they could anyway) you're also right about the image, I couldn't say how much sun is actually putting into GNOME, but it would seem that anything they put in is good, it does project the image that GNOME is a capable environment and corporate types won't be so scared of it cause sun is behind it. GNOME still has the advantage of being community driven, they just happen to have corporate support behind them aswell. GNOME is not owned by sun so the worst they could do is back out... and that wouldn't hurt the project much, but would hurt the project's corporate image and appeal. That's really the only thing GNOME is going to get out of this anyway, I really don't think the few people sun puts on the GNOME project is really going to make that big a difference in what is produced, but now maybe GNOME will have a little more corporate respect. KDE has also managed to gain some corporate respect, so it's high time GNOME did aswell.
Good things never end "eum" they end in "MANIA" or "teria"
I agree. Gnome on Solaris is slow. This is a Sunblade as well. Last night I was bored and installed Debian unstable on it though. Interestingly enough, Gnome is quite a bit faster now (and Naultilus doesn't crash nearly as much). So maybe the boys at Sun are doing something wrong..
open-sourcing the X/NeWS code, or
releasing the members of the Grasshopper group from some of their contract terms, so they can in turn open-source either their NeWS code or X/NeWS as of the point Sun pulled it inhouse and dropped Grasshopper's participation in the project.
It may be a little late for display-postscript to reenter the desktop wars. But I'd like to see it take a crack on its merits, rather than being shut out by an artifact of I.P. ancient history.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Off topic, but I couldn't help it...
Since the days of GNOME 0.3, I have been continually told some variant of "that's because you were using a version from last week/month and you should try to latest version instead because it's faster/stabler."
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I like Gnome because Gnom is the best. Gnome is my favorite. I think that everyone should use Gnome.
After you've worked on a large project for a while you realize that the amount of time actually spent in the GUI is tiny. Especially with tools like glade and libglade.
:-)
BTW congratulations on KOffice 1.1. Looks really good. Lots of competition for us Abiword hackers.
Keep up the great work on KDE
Martin Sevior
AbiWord - Word Processing for everyone.
oh god no.
There were plenty of reasons why DPS was a bad idea. Lets let it drop.
If you want to go with something resolution independant (a la PDF - smart move Apple), then you have my full support. But DPS - no freakin way.
Reason #1) In DPS you don't really have 'descriptions' of graphics - you have a PROGRAM that gets executed - which just happens to produce the graphic you want. So it is totally possibly for a piece of clipart to BE a virus. A graphic description format should be exactly that. It doesn't (nor shoult it) be a turing complete language with all the havoc it would cause. If you think Outlook macros are nasty, just imagine what would happen if every desktop was running DPS..... And going back to your Church/Turing theory, it's impossible for you to write a program that can tell if any given 'image' is a virus or not.
This is coming from somebody with plenty of NeWS expierience, plus owning two of my own NeXT machines............... DPS is pretty, but lets move on - we've learned our lesson
j
imagine a Beowulf cluster of those.
I used KDE for about two years, switched over to Gnome a few weeks back. The main reason I switched was for Galeon. Best web browser I've seen for Linux IMHO.
Anyway I think you would be shocked to checkout Gnome vs. KDE at present. All my KDE apps work in Gnome and I haven't noticed any change in speed.
oh well i don't have time to bypass with the lameness filter... galeon.sourceforge.net
I do not believe that this would be the case if people like Sun and others hadn't decided to back up these efforts.
Simply because the people you worked for couldn't get it together, that doesn't mean that it can't be done right elsewhere. If these projects were simply left up to individual developers in the traditional style, then Linux would still be was it initially was: a hobby system. There's no reason why Linux should not be both a commercially viable business prospect and a source for democracy, freedom and peace on earth.
The system has failed you, don't fail yourself. --Billy Bragg
The monopolist wanabe who pushed legion after legon of lame client technologies now what me to think they are: 1) going to create somethign comeptitive on the Intel platform and 2) that they and AOL won't have their hand on my wallet.
No thanks. I'll stay with OSX and Linux/KDE.
Considering that GNOME was started despite the existance of KDE largely due to license incompatablity with the GPL, I'm surprised that there isn't more GNOME Foundation members talking about the importance of Free Software.
One of our graduates was hired as part of a team that installed several Sun labs and servers at CSU Chico's computer science department. He has had Gnome running on our Ultra Sparc 5's, 10's and Sunray's for months now. Works great and we now have that as the default desktop in three labs. Of course, he had to hack and compile it himself because the Sun Gnome patches would not work.
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
Call me when I can run Galeon on whatever desktop *I* want to run, and lives up to all the "individual choice" rhetoric of the Linux community at large.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
There is no reason why you couldn't run Galeon under any window manager or desktop that you like, provided you have the required libraries installed on your system. It's not like Galeon is any more proprietary than Konqueror, for crying out loud.
Galeon doesn't depend on any desktop, a toolkit, but unless you want to write everything for each app you create, then your stuck with it.
Konqueror is somewhat dependent on kde, because it is also a file manager, but can be run without it.
Just don't hold out for any documentation...
In many ways this unified all-PostScript approach means the interpreter does not have to be able to do things that are dangerous. For instance an interpreter that could make requests of an X server for window id's, etc, I would suspect could be much more dangerous than one that can only draw on it's own screen.
However NeWS did have the capability to write files, and this certainly should be removed from any modern version.
NeWS is still superior to any windowing system I have seen today, and Sun could go a long way toward redeeming the biggest sin that was every done by a computer company by releasing the source code.
Hello everybody!
As i personally do most if my work on Solaris (well, in my ISP job there's hardly an alternative, at loeast in my company) and I must say, although i personally like GNOME very much, I don't understand the neccessity for Gnome on Solaris. Let's be honest: Most sysadmins don't need GUI's. They are (most times) not stable, they consume disk space and CPU time. I don't know many solaris machines that run a GUI. Solaris is not likely to become a desktop system either, and for people that do desperatly want a grafical interface, CDE is perfect. It is fast, it is stable and it does perfectly fit on top of Solaris.
Don't get me wrong, i don't have anything against Gnome (i also use it on my linux machine at home) but porting it to Solaris makes no sense for me.
bye bye
Johannes
".Sig Stealer" was here
TrollTech now allows redistribution under the GPL, but ISVs still need to pay a steep licensing fee. What possible interest would Sun have to commit their customers to writing to a toolkit that costs them a lot of money and that Sun has no control over? The KDE/Qt licensing is worse than the CDE/Motif licensing from the point of view of ISVs.
You see, in the real world, the license issues involved in Gtk+ vs. Qt aren't about "freedom", they are about economics. Qt just doesn't cut it there--if people had wanted to pay that kind of money for a toolkit, they didn't have to wait for Troll Tech or KDE to come around.
Don't shift blame. This isn't a "failure", the kind of standardization you are talking about was never promised for C++. The KDE project should have known that. In fact, overall, ANSI C++ has probably turned out to be a much better language design than one might have thought a few years ago, but as the basis for a GUI toolkit, it is still a third rate choice.
The KDE project made two seriously bad choices at the start (choosing Qt and C++), and it doesn't matter how nice the KDE desktop becomes (and it is pretty nice) those issues will just not go away.
I, and I'm sure others, would like to know a bit of the history, and why the two groups have not gotten together.
And I worry about the old saw "united we stand, divided we fall".
I've been running Windows XP for the last couple of weeks. It's amazingly fast and stable. The interface is clean and intuitive. The integration between the Office XP applications and the OS is quite simply brilliant. Truly an amazing Desktop OS, maybe the best yet.
They're not Java terminals, they're Sun Rays - completely different.
What's the point of saying "I switched to GNOME so I could run Galeon" if you don't have to switch to GNOME to run Galeon then?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I didn't know I could run Galeon under KDE. However I will not be switching back because I prefer Gnome now that I've seen the new version. Which browser do you use?
It's all about versions. Sun's preview release of GNOME is outdated. Debian's version of GNOME and included software is updated continously. Ximian's version too, but their Solaris version is also outdated, it's the GNU/Linux versions for popular distributions that are updated the most.
In particular Nautilus has had lots of performerance fixes lately. So what the Sun boys are doing "wrong" is not updating their preview to be in par with the latest state of the art.
GNU/Linux. The Freshmaker.
Sorry, I misunderstood your original statement. I was wrong, you were right, and I DON'T NEED TO YELL.
Thanks for a polite response.
Mike
Regardless of development speed, there's no way that Sun could have gone with Qt. There are no licensing fees associated with developing under CDE. For Sun to ask their customers to dish out $2000 per developer to some other company would be suicide. That's doubling the cost of an Ultra 5 development system. Sun customers would simply revolt. Arguing the attractiveness of Qt would do no good. They don't care. Most of them write networking software and the GUI component is not something they invest much time in. Anyone who ever cared about selling desktop oriented software moved over to the Microsoft world.
And it's not just the cost of the license, it's the fact that Sun customers have to deal with a 3rd party when before they just to deal with Sun. There's the extra cost of managing this relationship, calculating the number of licenses to buy, etc.
Sun has the resources to develop a toolkit just as good as Qt from scratch. But the last time they tried that (OpenLook), everyone revolted against them. But they can always improve GNOME. Gtk may have a messy C interface, but you could always use a C++ binding to abstract away the details. Similar things have been done with Motif. C++ is nice and all, but C++ library compatibility is nonexistent right now. Until every vendor can ship with a C++ shared library that gcc and all the commercial compilers can link with, standardizing on C++ will be impossible.