Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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
Cheers.
Celebrate the finer things in life
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
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 see. You're that one person for which Microsoft created Bob! I knew you existed somewhere.
With Bob, the computer has one button. But don't touch it--you might break it! (sorry...paraphrasing a Dilbert cartoon).
--Be human.
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.
Do you understand how slashdot works?
It's a p-o-r-t-a-l, which means it disseminates information gathered from other sites (Ok, Katz is an anomoly.. in more ways than one)...
sheesh.
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
people have to switch to root to do a bunch of stuff - and who wants that on a home computer? I suggest (and I'm not kidding now) an "Insecure Linux" flavour, where there is only the root user.
Sounds good on first blush, but the problem is that the root concept is used for two different things. It not only guards "privileged" operations like certain software installs, but also guards dangerous operations by requiring root login for actions that might damage the system. Everyone would like to be able to install software on a personal system without su'ing to root, but if the average user could also destroy their system at any time, that would be a decrease in usability.
It's another example of how basic assumptions made in UNIX are in conflict with user friendliness principles, and how there's no quick fix for pervasively unfriendly assumptions.
Tim
The easy way to fix this is to do what Red Carpet and the Ximian Setup Tools do. Just ask for the root password before opening up a program that allows the user to install software or change various settings. The user just has to be told that the root password lets programs that change important system settings that you would not want just anyone changing. No security is sacrificed and the user can learn about the shell and su later.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
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
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
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
There's a "The Register" slashbox?
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.
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".
There once was. There's still an RDF feed that they set up for Slashdot:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/tonys/slashdot.rdf
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
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?
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