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No GNOME For Solaris 9
Nailer writes: "Subject says it all really. A (very brief) Linuxgram article claims GNOME 2.0 won't be ready for Solaris 9 and the OS will ship with CDE and Motif as defaults. I'm just waiting for the inevitable announcement the GTK port of OpenOffice has been cancelled."
This is really a shame. I use solaris at work, and CDE is really bad. Also, there is a big hole recently discovered in CDE, and Sun has yet to release a patch. Gnome would have been so nice.
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 -- Mathematics is the Language of Nature.
WHy do you say that GNOME is dying? Is the code somehow becoming less functional? That would be a first!
...and just 1 year ago, it seemed the opposite.
The tables have really turned.
I don't use gnome or kde. bash is all I need.
I have to wonder if any OS that is primarily used as a server needs something like Gnome. The experience I have had with Solaris has been fine and I have never found myself looking for more eye candy. Maybe it would be nice for those who are using Solaris as a workstation though. So what do the Solaris users out there think? Is this something that anyone is actually going to miss? Or is this more of a situation where Sun would like to have a slick interface too?
Wanna get high?
They have to ship upgrades to keep the cash coming in. They can't ship Gnome 2.0 because it's not ready.
No story here.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Why does Sun continue to ignore KDE as a viable alternative to GNOME. KDE is very mature and incredibly stable. I don't see why Sun doesn't just go forward with packaging it with Solaris. Do they stick with GNOME because it's built on a 100% free toolkit? What's the driving force? As far as I can see, KDE is a solution to many of the problems Sun's UI trials of GNOME came up with. It just doesn't make sense... for one thing, if they want easy of use, KDE is much nicer than GNOME, IMHO.
Why bother.
GNU always wants to re-invent the wheel. Linux is fine, but they still want to work on HURD, because Linux isn't made by GNU. KDE is fine, but they still want to work on Gnome, because KDE isn't made by GNU.
I for one will be very disappointed if Sun does not ship some version of Gnome with Solaris 9.
:-)
As a big fan of Solaris I've been looking forward to this release, but come on, CDE is a donkey. It's one of the worst interfaces I've ever used.
Sorry, just had to blow off some steam. My hatred for CDE runs deep
And the best part about it has to be Red Carpet. I don't like up2date because it requires registration with Red Hat's site. Does KDE have something similar? Or is there some other tool I can use to keep things patched if I switch away from GNOME? Hell, I've used apt on Debian systems, and something like that would be welcome!
Don't you think dos 3.3 is dead? Has the code become less functional? hmm.. ;)
Why? Because KDE now has a larger number infront of it? That really doesn't make it any better or worse. The fact is that the user level differeces between KDE2 and 3 will be much less than GNOME1 to GNOME2 (fixing gtk-flash-bug, aa text, pango, and so on). I can't help but think that if the GNOME project upped the release number everytime I see a new GNOME-related file in sid, everyone would be saying that KDE was dying and GNOME was developing amazingly quickly.
BTW, this should not in anyway be taken as a knock against anyone who use/develop/etc KDE, just those who feel the need to bash the alternative.
Read Linux gram's article. It says in a feature incomplete pre-beta demo of Solaris 9 there is no GNOME 2.0. There is no GNOME 2.0 ( just an alpha version) for shipping versions of redhat, let alone for pre-beta versons of Solaris. This article is just placed here to pull traffic to LinuxGram and doesn't really add anything.
Obviously not, but this is comparing apples to oranges. DOS is depreciated because new pieces of software do things that it won't. To follow through on your analogy, what does the new KDE do that GNOME won't?
That this news is posted on the same day that this is announced, TrollTech releases QT 3.0 and that KDE 3.0 development is proceeding nicely. Just shows how some projects lose momentum and others do not. Very sad because I actually prefer the look and feel of Gnome to KDE.
--I don't mind the school of hard knocks, it's those darned refresher courses I hate. =)
Why is Gome on it's way out? Why is KDE so much better? It's really hard not to sound trollish when you don't supply any facts.
But could it be that GNOME is not ready because: .NET?
Gnome's leader Miguel de Icaza is currently having a flirtation with Microsoft's C# technologies and is producing a Linux version of the stuff under an open source initiative called the Mono Project. ?
Or could this be a hint from Sun, to ignore MS C# (and MONO)or GNOME will wither an die a slow agonising death? After all, doesn't Sun now offer an alternative to Passport, and so
Just a thought.
Qt compiles without a hitch and so does KDE. And if you want the official word, Trolltech's web site indicates that Qt will compile fine on Solaris, or pretty much any box running some form of X11. The KDE project has also made accomodations to run properly on Sun's OS. Sun doesn't have to do any work other than compilation and making packages. What's so hard about that? At the very least, they could make it an option.
Why bother.
Trying not to be flamebait, but I think now is the time for GNOME hackers to gracefully start porting their programs to the KDE architecture. Is that really such a difficult move to make? Surely the whole Linux community would respect them all the more, because they will have consoldated the Linux desktop. There are GNOME fanatics, and they will try to mod this post down to -1 but perhaps this is not all that crazy a sentiment as it might once have been. Give it some thought, that's all I ask. Image where we could be if we stand united.
Finally, on a grammatical note, please refrain from refering to Gnome as 'they'. Gnome is a desktop environment and should clearly be referred to in a singular sense.
On my personal preference, use the word very rather than really. If you do, then you'll sound twice as intelligent as you currently do.
I'm just trying to improve the quality of Slashdot with this post, so please don't mod me into oblivion.
Keeping
While a grad student, my university standardised on Solaris and RedHat Linux. so some students had CDE while others had the choice of KDE or GNOME. And some of us - me - spent 8+ hours my workstation.
So yes, gnome on solaris would be a good thing. CDE is a peace of crap thankfully Solaris also comes with Motif or OpenStep which s much more functional.
Woe be on to them, all who rise against poor people, shall perish in a the end. Buju Banton
So,it's not their now. But it will be. Come on, how often does a good open source project get started and not get finshed by SOMEBODY.
This is good. I think GNOME would only increase the number of weekly patches needed to keep a solaris system secure for more than 23 seconds.
The List of Grievances with Slashdot.
I don't think my work would like me downloading the 700 MB worth of image files.
"Everything louder than everything else"
Having competition means that one side will always be trying to 1-up the other. That means that each side will have more rapid progress. It also means that end users will have a choice. Creating a monopoly in desktop environments is an antithesis of open source software. You stupid fuck.
What kind of crappy processors do your Suns have, anyway? I don't see anything like the CPU usage you're complaining about.
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 partly agree. The core of GNOME is suffering from a lot of rot, and nobody seems to care about fixing it. Red Hat certainly doesn't. Ximian did care, but were sort of overruled on the push to get GNOME 2.0 out quickly. And now it seems they are mostly giving up on one potentially dead-end project (GNOME) to focus on another certain dead-end project (Mono). Eazel kept people interested in GNOME for a while, but now that they're tits up, Konqueror has been able to catch up with Nautilus in many respects.
That leaves Sun. Having GNOME be the default desktop on Solaris was supposed to be a big thing, but now Sun seems to be walking away from that too. Maybe they finally realized that people buy Solaris for reasons other than a friendly desktop environment. I mean, if they managed to get by for the last five years on a partially broken implementation of the Worst Desktop Ever (TM), not shipping GNOME is probably not going to hurt them. Besides, their primary competitors ship with the same or worse crap, and anybody who cares installs another WM.
So where does that leave GNOME? In the crapper is my guess. I think GTK will live on for a while, but the rest of GNOME is going to die off. If Red Hat and Ximian don't care enough to concentrate their effort on GNOME, who does? At this point, GNOME only has a few advantages left over KDE: prettier icons & themes, better office apps (Abiword, Gnumeric, Evolution, etc.), and a smaller memory footprint. But at the rate KDE is progressing, GNOME is going to be eating dust before long.
KDE is a one trick pony. It is probably the best option for someone who loves C++ and probably grew up on VC++ on 'Doze.
GNOME has bindings for any language somebody liked enough to add support for. Got some C code you want to port to KDE? Delete it and start over, it would probably be faster. And what about the dozen or so 'lesser' languages? Even less likely.
And that is why GNOME will eventually win out. C++ is supported so any KDE app can potentially port but only a small subset of GNOME apps can migrate in the other direction.
Diversity usually beats a monoculture even though the monoculture often excels in a couple of areas.
Democrat delenda est
I know Nailer personally. He has no association with linuxgram.
Having competition means that one side will always be trying to 1-up the other. That means that each side will have more rapid progress. It also means that end users will have a choice. Creating a monopoly in desktop environments is an antithesis of open source software. You stupid fuck.
PS: Qt has a ton of bindings for other languages. Try seaching freshmeat sometime. You stupid fuck.
...the mantra is release early release often but it never truly reaches gold because its never finished.
The List of Grievances with Slashdot.
apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade;
It's really not that hard.
And, yes, Nautilus is bloated. But you don't need Nautilus, as you almost surely know how to use the command line faster anyway. So just don't run Nautilus.
While there's no doubt usability problems with Gnome, if you use it some you'll get along just fine. IMO, there's not much reason to be running either on a server.
Gnome is pretty and nice. i use it, i like it. i also have a sun box and run cde. Solaris runs servers. do we need all that prettyness and niceness eating cpu cycles on a webserver?
call me a troll, but isint this one of the bigest complaints about win2k, it has a bloated gui that eats resources better left for runing services on a server.
cde isnt pretty, but it does the job, and doesnt eat alot of resourses.
yes i know sun is offering a choice of desktops, but gnomes lack of inclusion really doesnt seem like a big loss to me..
I was really sorry to read this. Sun is a major force in terms of bringing unix to the masses, and I had looked forward to them using a UI that was something pleasurable instead of horrifying. It's a huge deal for all of us IMHO.
Slashdot 's editors are dickheads
I tried running GNOME 1.4 on a couple of new machines we were integrating into the network, and it was unbearably sludgy. The combination of Nautilus and the bloated Sawfish window manager ate over 50% of the valuable CPU time, time that could be far better spent handling database queries and web requests.
Why are you running X-Windows, period, on your database and web server(s)? Division of labor, man. Save the UI (and its inherent overhead) for the end-user workstations. And yes, if the machine is truly an end-user workstation, you're allowed to spend a hideous amount of CPU + memory on the UI. Older versions of the MacOS spent 100% of the CPU on rendering the menu anytime you clicked on the menu bar. Nobody, except for the people that were trying to run background tasks (very few and far between in the Mac world), seemed to mind.
I suppose there's an alternative to my question-- why are you running core services on end-user workstations? That's asking for trouble in my book. Workstations are subject to the whims of users; servers should not be.
As for GNOME not shipping with Solaris 9-- I find that somewhat disappointing. Most of my Linux users (on their workstations) seem to prefer GNOME to KDE. It'd be nice to have the choice.
lethyos is a karma whore...a skanky, dirt, greasy karma whore
All sun processors are crap. The USIII is barely able to pace a Pentium 4, and in most cases the P4 will smoke it. You thought the P4 was expensive - look up sun's per cpu cost.
If your anus is exposed to anthrax, you will get an anal infection. This will also prevent cmdrtaco penetration.
You're right in saying GNOME is not dead. The development is very heavy in GNOME 2.0
However, every time you see a gnome component getting updated in sid isn't because there is something changed/new, it's just the debian developers fixing something with the package. Thats why the version will be 1.4.1-x
x being the package revision number.
All the GNOME developers seem to be busy developing for 2.0 and so they aren't working on 1.4 as much, if at all. Which is fine by me as long as I get to use 2.0 some time. Although, I wish a new version of Nautilus would come out as there is a lot of little quirks in it's behavior (especially placement of icons on the desktop).
FiGZ.COM - A waste of perfectly good web space
When are we going to see the arrival of the Penis Birds on this forum? See, you're right... this "story" is PURE trolling on the part of Linuxgram. Therefore, it should attract all of slashdot's best and most prestigious trolls who will post ASCII art of the Penis Bird and the Goatse.cx ass with "Taco" in the rectum.
I'm also wondering what sparc system this fellow is using to report such high CPU usage. Current specs from dual-pIII 800's. /proc/meminfo
/proc/loadavg
<BR>
<BR>1% CPU on one processor
<BR>4% on the other
<BR>
<BR>I have VMWare running Win2k Advanced Server in my other window with 512 megs RAM total in the box and Evolution Beta 0.16.99 and Galeon to type in slashdot. Gnome 1.4 w/Sawfish & Nautilus drawing the background (I like Verdana for my desktop fonts); lotsa applets in the panels & gkrellm.
<BR>
<BR>cat
<BR>
total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
<BR>Mem: 526299136 521420800 4878336 0 4407296 255361024
<BR>Swap: 526409728 3760128 522649600
<BR>MemTotal: 513964 kB
<BR>MemFree: 4764 kB
<BR>MemShared: kB
<BR>Buffers: 4304 kB
<BR>Cached: 248456 kB
<BR>SwapCached: 920 kB
<BR>Active: 84472 kB
<BR>Inactive: 169208 kB
<BR>HighTotal: kB
<BR>HighFree: 0 kB
<BR>LowTotal: 513964 kB
<BR>LowFree: 4764 kB
<BR>SwapTotal: 514072 kB
<BR>
<BR>Looks okay so far. Let's check load average...
<BR>cat
<BR>0.08 0.05 0.01 1/83 5268
<BR>
<BR>Wow, looks good!
<BR>
<BR>Looks to me like the troll should go back under the bridge...
<BR>
<BR>
If you think that sawfish is bloated, your just plain stupid. Sawfish is relatively minimalistic, and can be made to be extremely minimalistic if you're so inclined.
/. does give about a 60/40 chance that any given post is a troll), try doing a little exploration and thinking. And remember that if a tool requires you to learn a little bit about it in order to use it effectively, it isn't the end of the world.
As for gnome 1.4, maybe something is horribly wrong on whatever compiler was used for your package, but I run it daily and I don't have constant CPU usuage. I've never seen anyone who did have constant CPU usuage from it. Well, ther eis the fact that you're running nautilus, but it begs the question: why? I don't think that anyone has represented nautilus as being close to ready for real use. And what were you using it for? there are plenty of graphical file managers, including gmc - the gnome standard one.
And if you find the gnome interface difficult to navigate, then either you're completely braindead or are just so used to some particular interface that you think that anything that isn't that interface is hard.
I'm sorry that I'm in a bad mood and as a result my comments are sounding harsher than I mean them to, but basically your post is either a fairly well devised troll or a bunch of stupid drivel. In the off chance that it's the later (this being
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
Um, what? RH? Not shipping with GNOME? What crack are you on? Every review of 7.2 I've read so far mentions how nice and polished their GNOME interface is. If someone could mod this troll into oblivion before he spreads more FUD it would be appreciated.
IAAL,BIANLY
Very sloppy, Slashdot. You should know better. There's a reason why I don't go to a Linux news site for news on Solaris. The claim that Gnome 2.0 doesn't appear in the Solaris 9 downloadable beta, and then extending that claim to encompass the final version of Solaris 9 is completely ridiculous. Of course, they temper that claim with by saying that Sun labels the beta as "feature complete", which is true. However, I think I'd be hard-pressed to find a final copy of Gnome. The last I saw was a news snippet on Gnome.org, dated October 11, claiming that Gnome 2.0 was "coming up fast".
Finally, for those of you who have closely followed Sun's plans for Gnome, Sun has never once claimed that Gnome 2.0 would be a part of Solaris 9. Sun's Gnome site provides Gnome 1.4 as a "reference implementation", and says that Gnome will be the foundation of its future desktop. According to the site, "The next major release, GNOME 2.x, is expected in mid-2002".
--
Welcome to the land of the easily amused...
Gnome, like most Linux software is a bloated piece of spaghetti coded crap. It's good to hear that Gnome isn't going to contaminant Solaris. If no one believes me, try any version Gnome, and then try fvwm 1.24r. Oh god. Doesn't it feel soooo good?
The real problem with Solaris 9 is not that it
doesn't have the crappy GNOME but that it won't
have OpenWin, which many of us Sun lovers use
everyday. It used to be the only X server that
was halfway decent and not a bunch of crappy bloat
ware like CDE.
Slashdot did a story on this a while back. Click here to see what the Sun GNOME group had to say about KDE vs. Gnome. Essentially, as a highly-moderated post put it, it came down to the fact that GNOME was C-based, and the Sun GNOME team was more familiar with C than with C++.
FWIW, I have no idea where your information on Bonobo is from, but Evolution and a number of other current GNOME projects use Bonobo extensively. If Bonobo was as unready as you claimed Evo wouldn't run at all :) [Disclaimer: Ximian employee, not the views of my employer, yada, yada.]
IAAL,BIANLY
Well, what you say is partically true, but the new gnome componets are very often updated, not just repackaged. For instace, many different versions of bonobo have come out during GNOME1.4. Same for GCONF, Nautilus, and many/most of the GNOME files.
Wish we could see more proplerly reasoned posts like this. Informative, and a pleasure to read.
I tried to use gnome 1.4 .... what a memory hog and kinda sucky anyway. CDE was much more functional and stable.
Moderators must take action to ensure that nobody sees the valuable, substantiated, and useful information presented in this post. This story has been declared a pure trolling forum and intelligent posts like this will not be tolerated. Slashdot, as a whole, is a community of trolls, not intellects. Being a greed driven, censorship laden fiasco of foolishness, we can't have intelligent conversation taking place. Those who try to turn it otherwise must be punished by the subtraction of karma points. Remember moderators, you are solders in the Slashdot army to squash intelligent and alternative viewpoints! Do your duty! Mod AirLace down!
If you check the Sun Freeware disk that comes with your Solaris 8 media kit, you'll find an option to install KDE. I haven't done it myself, but I hear it works pretty well. And if you don't have a media kit, go grab a copy at Sun Freeware, a Sun sanctioned site.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Argh. I can't believe I'm wasting my life responding to this troll. Link to the exploit details? huh? Thought so. Go away.
IAAL,BIANLY
Yes. Sadly, I must agree. Gnome is losing blood right and left; red writing flows like a river of hands. You don't have to be a Kreskin to see the walls... ;-)
This is fine trolling guys. Keep it up. Let's see how big we can make this thread.
"Older versions of the MacOS spent 100% of the CPU on rendering the menu anytime you clicked on the menu bar. Nobody, except for the people that were trying to run background tasks (very few and far between in the Mac world), seemed to mind."
------
That was one of the coolest things about the old MacOS -- if you wanted to suspend processing for some reason (usually reading something before it went away for some reason), you could open a menu and keep reading. When you were done, let go. The system would proceed. =)
I still instinctively do it in OS X, and am slightly frustrated when the system keeps working.
Does anyone else find the lameness filter annoying? I just copied and pasted the previous comment, and it flunked the filter until I cleaned up slashdot's html.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
i want some fucking penis birds damnit
I thought linux was immune to security issues -- only M$ has problems with security patches...
I'm afraid it's true. RedHat 7.2 is shipping with KDE2.2.1 as not only the default, but the only desktop environment. The details of the remote exploits are at http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/4352. This doesn't really represent a problem for die-hard GNOME fans as Ximian will continue to provide their Red-Carpet service to RedHat users.
I have always prefered Gnome to KDE from a lookability/usability standpoint....But alas -- it is hard for me to say this, but the develpment AND stabilization of KDE is the clear leader nowadays...Between KDE 2.X and Konq....I can't deny it any longer.....I remember back in "the day" when KDE was slow, bloated and browserless...And Gnome 1.0 was a shoo in with the mighty Netscape doing a Gtk+ version of their next browser -- to be known as Mozilla...But somewhere on the way to the fair.....And those damn KDE developers came on like a Kenyon in a long distance race -- making the world class competition look like chumps on a Krispy Kreme run....
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
You remind me of a great comment by Mark Twain. Paraphrasing: "Every time you're tempted to use the word 'very,' change it to 'damned.' Your editor will delete it, and your writing will be as it should." (Paraphrased.)
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
- Disclaimer - This is a pissy rant by someone who at this point has a very hard time using the words "KDE" and "Gnome" without variants of "fuck" involved.
Gnome is not ready to go into Solaris. Or Red Hat. Or SuSE. In my experience Gnome was a dysfuntional, unstable pig of a desktop, full of garbage apps were a pain to use and rarely worked correctly. I eventually gave up and switched to KDE, which seems to have only two real advantages over Gnome, Konquerer, and a cute error window to let me know about all of the segmentation faults that the newest so called "stable" release of KDE seems to bring up repeatedly when I try to use Konquerer.
Crap like that might cut it in the world of free software geeks, but it has no place in the world of serious UNIX servers. Sun manages to sell their slow, overpriced hardware because people want stability - not flashy desktops that come with more half finished applications than any Windows install.
And yet the Open-Source world continues to rally around Gnome and KDE, proclaiming them to be saviors of the Linux desktop, when in truth those same programs are likely to help keep Linux off the desktop of people who want a computer that works - and not just a klude of annoying junk smushed together into a monstrosity that makes me realize why Apple's simple OS X/Aqua desktop has captured my computing soul in a way that nothing has since my father would lug his computer home from work and let me play Pac-Man on it.
Gnome and KDE, whatever. Just give me a stable enlightenment with a few nice themes, StarOffice 5.2 (Like a rock, baby!), and keep the silly mess that is Gnome/KDE in the gutter with the rest of the trash.
If you want a fast manager run twm.
In private, a Sun rep (won't disclose his name but he is close with the VP of Development) told me about a month ago the problems with UI stability and the more "archaic" look and feel has caused them to reverse direction. I figured if I was able to get this info, Slashdot would have before me so I never mentioned it.
Yes, give it a good long rim job. That guys really needs it.
You have potential sir, for your troll is quite elegant. I hope to see more trolling from you in the future to help keep Slashdot intellect-free.
My top slashbox is Solaris Central. On Friday Solaris Central linked "No Gnome for Solaris 9" also. Under that is freshmeat and funnies. Alot of stuff has been making it was from the slashboxes to the Main slashdot page.
BTW, skip gnome/kde use icewm
A man walks into a doctor's office with a bird on his penis. Doctor says "what's wrong?" Bird says "my feet are stuck to this guy's cock!"
/|
(o>
| )
8==x==D
Here at university we have 2 labs of Sun machines. One lab is used for by the Engineers for design and the other is used by the systems programming class. I had never used CDE before I walked into the CS lab. CDE does not have all the glitz that KDE or Gnome have but I find it to be pretty sharp. I wanted to download a copy of it for my Linux boxen to test it out on non-Sun hardware but it costs $50 to buy it. Oh, well KDE is good enough for me.
First of all, Sun CPUs are far from outstanding. Until the UltraSPARC III came out (which many people do not have yet), they were much slower than most of their workstation/server competitors. (I am assuming you are talking about workstations here because no one should be stupid enough to have a desktop environment running on a server.)
Second of all, remember that if your system is doing nothing, it is very generous to processes that would otherwise do nothing. From what you say, it sounds like some kind of network access or other runaway process is taking up your CPU time. Check your mpstat, your netstat -i, etc. to look at your bottlenecks. You could have some combination problem going on that causes a performance problem when two things are running at the same time.
As for comparison of HP's VUE (excuse me, CDE,) to GNOME, a lot of that is personal preference and habit. I used HP VUE prior to CDE coming out, and then switched to CDE and found the differences relatively minimal, even in the config files. I use GNOME at home, my wife uses KDE. My major complaint about GNOME is that I prefer the old xterm to ANY of the newer terminals I've used. (Get rid of those stupid menus, and give me back the xterm scroll bar, complete with the "strange" mouse control.) CDE's pager is mildly annoying to me, but that's because the first pager I used was similar in style to the one in FVWM and GNOME rather than CDE.
CDE is dead because of a squabble between the major CDE "partners". Ever try to get HP's CDE and Sun's version to cooperate? It's effectively impossible. The two sides are squabbling so much that CDE has not fundamentally changed since 1996 so far as I can see. It is clear that something needs to be offered soon to desktop users soon with proper commercial support. Maybe GNOME isn't the right answer yet with nautilus. (I prefer gmc myself for what little I use a file manager for.) But something does need to be done.
"I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend unto the death your right to say it." -- Voltaire
As I've read some of the mailing lists every day for the past few weeks, there seems to be MAJOR activity by SUN on GNOME. Sander, Billh, Calum, and Stephen (sorry if I missed people!) are very active on the mailing lists. The Accessability Toolkit has been part of their work, but also in drafting some rather encouraging style guides and documentation, along with general hacking on various libraries and applications (including Nautilus, which was pronounced dead after Eazel went boom...). I seriously doubt they plan to drop GNOME, as I seriously doubt Solaris 9 will ship without it, considering the work they are putting into it. The DEVELOPMENT platform should be out by Christmas, with other applications ported soon afterwards.
And, for a better question, why would Sun want to pay TT for a licence for QT? Redhat? Why would any company want to pay for a widget set to develop (closed-source, mind you) for Linux? If a Symantec, IBM, Intuit, or, GASP, even M$ wanted to write Linux software, my guess is they would use an LGPL library (Gnome) over paying for QT licences. (I could be wrong, as I don't pay much attention to KDE, but their FAQ seem to say I'm not...)
Which brings me to the main point I'd like to make, IT'S BEEN ALL ABOUT THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR THE PAST YEAR!!! It takes a lot of behind the scenes work for a program such as Evolution to work, so that's what the Gnomers have been hacking on. The problem is, YOU (the user) won't see it right away!
The technologies these guys have been busting their arses on will make the applications (like Evolution already proves) kick butt.
GConf - Consolidated configuration system with multiple backends. XML or BerkleyDB for user now, hopefully ACAP or LDAP for network users soon. Who know's what's next!
ATK - Accessability Toolkit for screenreaders and such, built-in to the platform. This is important for corporate use with the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) in US, and I'm sure others outside the US.
Bonobo - Corba based REAL components, not just OLE. Look at the power in Evolution. (I'm a big fan, as if you couldn't tell, but not just for myself, but for my wife and grandmother as well. I don't think mutt would cut it for them... :>)
Pango - i18n and l10n, Right-to-Left, and such... Don't know much about this being an en-us, but I'm sure it's important!
Glib/Gtk+ - Very nice improvements, Anti-Aliased text, and so forth.
Nautilus - Darin and others have been optimizing and working out the bugs in this for a while. It has it's problems on the bleeding edge, but it's comming along! I'm not sure about the extent of his involvment, but tigert has been showing up on the list. If he is working on it, we can expect quite a bit in the way of jaw-dropping eye-candy...
Glade/libglade/bonoboui(?) - XML UI descriptions at runtime. RAD UI development at it's best... This is very important.
GStreamer - While not Gnome platform, per se, it has ALOT of infrastructure in place in the A/V dept, and once ported to 2.0, will make for a nice multimedia API/Application Toolkit. (If memory serves correctly, it's been a while since I checked up on this one...)
And a plethora of other platform tidbits. Sure, YOU (user) won't see any radical differences between 1.4 and 2.0, other than AA text and such, but just wait until 2.0.1, 2.2, or 3.0, and so on. It took YEARS for the infrastrucure of Linux to become what it is. Now, it is proven solid. The infrastructure of Gnome is REALLY fleshing out. And need I remind you of the 1.0 - 1.2 hurdle... I imagine 2.0 will come out with eveyone trashing it, much like 1.0, then 2.2 come along with much the same reception 1.2 had... Sure, not good for PR, but... :>
NOT that this takes anything away from KDE. Infact, it's what I recommend to my non-developer friends. To my developer and/or sysadmin friends, I show the horsepower under Gnome's hood. So far I've had nothing but ooos and ahhhs from both camps. Later, I'm sure I'll be showing Gnome all-around.
And finally, CUT THAT "GNOME'S DYING" CRAP OUT! Not only does two projects not hurt, it HELPS! We need all the competition we can get, because that's what causes innovation! We've all seen M$ resting on their laurels, because they've had no competition! WE DON'T WANT THAT! And aside from some notable exceptions, the DEVELOPERS OF BOTH PROJECTS SEEM TO UNDERSTAND THIS!!! Take a look at this happy bday congratz to KDE on Gnome News and PLEASE, BE THANKFUL TO EVERYONE.
For my part, thanks Havoc, Owen, Michael, Seth, Darin, Sather, Ian, Jacob, Alex, Maciej, Calum, Bill, George, Chema, and all I've left out for your hard work. Don't let the ignorance of a few make you at all hesitant in your work. It is greatly appreciated!
Chris
YES, the GNOME code is becoming less functional. I wasn't the biggest fan of GNOME 1.0, but it worked better for me than any subsequent release or patchwork CVS grab of GNOME. On my machines at least, every time I play with GNOME it seems *less* stable and *more* resource hungry. GNOME is definitely going in directions that I had hoped it wouldn't go in. I'm not speaking as a developer, I haven't done any GNOME development at all. I'm speaking as a prospective user who remembers when Gtk applications seemed like the *more* stable of the bunch.
A few years ago, it was a toss-up between what seemed like a resource-hungry KDE 1.x and an unstable GNOME 1.x and everyone was wondering who would end up the de-facto standard. Today, for better or for worse, there is only one free Unix desktop de-facto and that is KDE, for obvious reasons -- people are having less and less success using GNOME as a desktop in real-world environments, while KDE continues to become more and more usable by the day and memory, hard drive space and CPU power on commodity machines are cheaper than ever.
Probably I will be moderated to "-10 Anti-GNU Asshole" for saying that, but it has to be said again and again until I can accept it, and others may as well do the same. I can't give you any specific reasons why I and others sense that GNOME seems to have been its own worst enemy, but one definitely gets that feeling more and more with each checkout.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Wha? I've had Nautilus 1.0.4 forever (well more like 5 months, but that is eternity for an open source project that really needs a new release).
If there is a new version of nautilus out I'd love to know, but I don't see one.
FiGZ.COM - A waste of perfectly good web space
Weird, I run KDE 2.2.x on my laptop and desktop and have never seen such problems. If you're not a troll, how about posting some specific steps I can take that will lead to my KDE 2.2.x install showing that cute error window you tout? I've never seen it. I'd love to see it. Help me out by telling me how to pop it up eight times a day, baby!
If it does not restrict how small I can resize the window, I'll be using it a lot more than I do now. I hate when my window must be as least at big as the lined-up buttons.
Programmers, remember: restricting your users is always a bad idea.
I'm hard to please, I have major issues with every desktop environment I've used. I don't love CDE, but it's fine with me. I certainly prefer it over the latest GNOME builds from Ximian and Sun.
I support change, so please bring on GNOME and/or KDE and attempt to make them better. But please keep CDE and Motif for those of us that don't want the 'latest and greatest'. Patch a few of CDE's major memory leaks and I'll be a happy, content user.
1. Bonobo has been out for a while now and used as the core of Evolution, Gide, Dev Help, Nautilus and many others... ever wonder why Open Office is intergrating with Bonobo?
2. nope, no such recomendation at that link. May I remind you that Galeon just won an award for the best linux browser?
3. Absolute unsubstantiated bullshit.
4. I'll just let the pictures speak for themselves:
KDE
GNOME
5. Hurd was started in 1990, before linux, further more, the GNOME people are not employed by Gnu and are associated only substantially by name.
G/K are here to stay, deal with it.
got drum'n'bass?
http://mp3.com/vitriolix
Your post made it sound like choosing windowmaker means NOT choosing Gnome. That isn't so. They are not mutually exclusive options.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
So much bullshit and at the end it turns out we have a Mac fanatic here ...
Who gives a fuck what Apple groupies think.
This
Hence there is no particular reason why bundling GNOME or any other environment necessarily hogs resources.
KDE would be nicer, but Sun bulks at the QT Developer's License. Solaris focus changed from a workstation to a server OS a few version back since that is what most people use it for, so need for a GUI is minimal. I wish they would ship WindowMaker instead. It runs fine on Solaris and is lightweight enough for a server.
As it stands, when you tell me to wait for GNOME 3.0, by that time KDE will be at 4.x or even 5.0 the rate they are both going, and will certainly have much more going for it then GNOMe will - KDE's rate of improvement is simply more accelerated than GNOME's. Added to which, the GNOME desktop will continue to have a fractured integration for some time to come - Nautilus and Evolution are going to be buggy for a very long time, Mozilla will continue to stand mostly on its own, and StarOffice will continue to also be an island unto itself.
It makes me sad that slashdotters are so quick (and eager!) to jump on GNOME. There is *a lot* going on in the GNOME world that is exciting. The above post mentions many of them. GNOME's infrastructure has been undergoing a major overhaul and that takes time. Remember how long it took for KDE to rewrite itself for 2.0? A long time. More people should be like the above poster and encourage other free software developers, not gather like buzzards around (what they hope is) a dying project.
~~~~~~~~~
dissertus scribendo latine videri volo.
So GNOME doesn't work for you, and KDE falls over all the time too. Interesting that, especially as the majority of people don't seem to have your problems.
Perhaps your problems are machine specific
Sun has got a feature-incomplete beta of Solaris 9 available for download through the company's early access program, but it seems the promised open-source Gnome 2.0 won't be the thing's default because, as we've pointed out before, the Gnome widgetry won't be ready when Solaris 9 ships for real in the first half of next year. Sun will cleave to its traditional Solaris Common Desktop Environment for the time being.
Gnome's leader Miguel de Icaza is currently having a flirtation with Microsoft's C# technologies and is producing a Linux version of the stuff under an open source initiative called the Mono Project.
Solaris 9, at least in its Intel incarnation, is supposed to be able to run Linux apps. Sun has been putting Linux APIs in the OS so Linux apps can be ported to Sparc.
How does a browser fit in on this?
Shall we scrap ever OS since MOST developers angle towards windows user running IE? should we also scrap the w3c since the only group that matters is IE team at MS? Not on your life... your just introducing your bias in browser for picking a windowing tool.
Hey lets face it Corn Flakes are dead frosted flakes have have a nice tasting frost.
Sun's official 'unsupported Solaris Gnome 1.4' package is old, unoptimized and is very slow and buggy. It's a hideous example of what Gnome can be.
OTOH, I run Ximian Gnome on my Solaris Ultra 5 (Solaris 8) workstation (slow processor, lots of RAM). Ximian Gnome is great! For most applications, Ximian Gnome is *faster* then CDE, and it's suite of utilities is much more useful then the kruft that comes with the generic Solaris workstation install. I work in a Solaris/Windows office, and often need apps like Gnumeric/Abiword or Star Office.
Gnome on my office-workstation is not as fast as on my cheap home computer (Celeron 366, 128 Mb ram, RH 7.1), but it is perfectly usable.
Most of the slowness seems to stem from the OpenWin server + Video Card itself (slow drawing of boxes, lines, etc). Certain apps like XMMS and Mozilla are slow (but those aren't Gnome apps). Nautilus is crappy slow on Solaris, so i turned it off and use GMC.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
SunOS 5.5, 5.6, and 5.7 (Solaris 2.5, 2.6 and 7) were Sun's transition to a 64-bit OS. 5.5 added support for the UltraSPARC processor, 5.5.1 added 64-bit register support, 5.6 64-bit files and filesystems, and 5.7 an optimized 64-bit kernel. (Of course, SGI IRIX users will gloat about SGI having done this years earlier with IRIX 6.0, but the point is moot).
SunOS 5.8 (Solaris 8) brought us... nothing too special. And 5.9 (Solaris 9)? Even less.
I don't really understand why Sun didn't just make a "Solaris 7.1, Solaris 7.5, and Solaris 7.6" before going to 8. Maybe it's because I've never been much of a numbers game fan.
If there's a sliver lining in all this, perhaps it's that SunOS 5.8 was the last to support the Sun4m architecture (SPARCstation 10 and SPARCstation 20), no more upgrading for those old machines of mine. Not that I would need to anyway, they're happily running 5.7.
I run an old Ximian gnome (1.2) on a redhat 6.2 box. It has never crashed. ever. And this is with 6 desktops, many, many xterms, XMMS with visualization, Netscape and Opera. I even occasionaly play heroes 3 or task to a vitual console and bring up a second X.
Gnome with redhat 7.1 on my laptop, has also never crashed. (The video driver has, but this is not Gnome's fault, but rather the X4 S3 driver.)
They misunderestimated me. -- George W. Bush
Sun wants to differentiate Solaris from Linux. Using KDE or GNOME would be an admission that Solaris is just another UNIX variant. That would be bad for Sun hardware sales. CDE may be crap, but at least it's different than Linux and FreeBSD desktops.
I was going to mod this down when I read the bashing. Then, I was going to mod it up when you said the magic word, "simple". Then I decided to just reply. There's more going on here than GNOME and KDE. Check out GNUstep.
check out the konq-bugs archive. you'll find lots of sites that cause konq to segfault. which sucks, of course, but konq is still more useful than either netscape or mozilla (i won't even mention that mdi atrocity)
Yeah, right. That's because of CDE stability and maturity we have to wipe out $HOME/.dt once a month and try to get something from a backup.
CDE is slow, illogical, unconfigurable and generally insane piece of software. I felt ashamed each time I had to explain a user how to perform another task in CDE that was supposed to be simple.
I have a Sun Ultra 5 in my cubicle. Since I got a Linux box with GNOME year ago I totally abandoned the Sun.
I have been doing UNIX system administration for living since 94 and I can tell -- GNOME is wastly superior to CDE. The quicker Sun moves to GNOME the better.
You're the dumbest Apple groupie I've ever seen.
Just what the hell are you doing running a Desktop manager, hell even X, on a server...especially a database(performance) or webserver(security). Those kind of servers should only be console. Do what i do. Just use a laptop and connect with PuTTy through Windows 2000 Pro/XP (or SSH through linux/freeBSD if you really prefer). The average PuTTy sessions I have are insane. I usually have like 14 sessions going :-)
Plus you have a more consistant Desktop to work with. Just 1 on the laptop. So you can have your mp3s, background of the playmate of the month, ICQ/yahoo messenger, etc all without worrying what other people are doing to the servers with your stuff on it.
I hate almost every UNIX desktop i've ever come across. They always look neat in screenshots, but when i start using them I get so fustrated. Don't get me wrong, UNIX is my favorite OS, but I still feel it belongs on the server.
The only possible success story with a UNIX Desktop that i can see is OS X, but i don't really have the right to comment on it yet as the only exposure I have to it is 5 minutes on a Powerbook Titanium in a store.
and it is super cool.
http://paul.makeout.org/cgi-bin/pboard.cgi
Actually, fvwm was designed to be faster and take less resources than twm. That seems to have changed with version 2 (although it's still real freakin' fast) but if you want faster than twm try fvwm1.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
Sun would have to get a transferable binary license for Qt on Solaris, but even then, they'd be the only UNIX vendor standardizing on Qt. Or, Sun would have to buy TrollTech outright, likely to be an expensive proposition.
Sticking with Motif makes sense: it's very widely used commercially (far more than Qt), there are lots of widgets and tools for it, it is a de-facto standard, and Sun already has rights to it. There are also several C++-based APIs for Motif. (Technically, I think Qt and Motif is a toss-up, but that's another matter.)
Unfortunately, Sun's OS group seems blissfully disconnected from their Java side; in fact, their OS group seems stuck in the C-mindset of the traditional BSD/UNIX world. And Sun's Java group seems more focussed on Windows than on adding value to Sun's own product line. Sun's lack of coordination and their lack of in-house and open source application development in Java gives people the impression that Java isn't ready. That may have been true two years ago, but today, Java is more than up to the task of building a zippy desktop with a footprint smaller than either Gnome or KDE.
Of course, Sun can't give up completely on C/C++ toolkits, but they have that pretty well covered with Motif and its C++ wrappers, tools that are still much more widely used among Sun's customers than either Gtk+ or Qt.
Sun always seemed like Sun's worst enemy. They need a little of that Gates/Ballmer top-down coherent management and energy. McNealy barks a lot, but he doesn't seem to bite much.
Sun made the decision to use Gnome during the happy times of "dot com". Those exuberant days are over. I find it rather amusing the the classic wars are so easily restarted. Neither Gnome *NOR* KDE, IMHO, are ready for Solaris and other environments. KDE and Gnome both feel too disjointed to really make the Unix desktop feel like a computer that non-technically minded people would use.
;-), but I feel that there are design decisions that make the environment difficult to use - enough that I was screaming for my Gnome desktop back.
I happen to use Gnome, and have grown quite accustomed to it, but I still keep many terminals around to get things done. When I used CDE on Solaris in the past, I did the same thing, probably to a greater degree.
I tried to use KDE 2.2.x this past week, and I couldn't get accustomed to it. Perhaps I'm not European enough
Either way, though, the Unix desktop doesn't have a prayer. Sun was just commerical support that could substantiated Gnome as a major desktop force.
Ultimately, the Unix desktop feels too disjoint - which doesn't matter to people like me to want to poke around with the system, but matters to anyone new to Unix. The one advantage the Windows desktop has is how tightly integrated the GUI feels to the OS itself. You need to at least create that illusion in the Unix world - and so far it still seems like something that we aren't even close to acheiving.
On a final note, a consistent widget set across applications gives users a much more cohesive-feeling experience. It may seem silly to a lot of us, but the fact that Windows/Mac apps all "look the same" makes things feel "normal" for a lot of users.
Hi,
:)
hands off sawfish!
It is not bloated at all (if you use it stand alone as I do)
Bye.
Tell me about it. We have one department that is almost complete with their Solaris 2.5.1 -> 2.7 (Solaris 7) upgrade evaluation. I have 8 on my personal workstation (an old Ultra 30) but 7 on pretty much everything else.
Kinda reminds me of Waterloo's Maple. For years, simple revisions to Maple V were the current version. Then came Maple 6. Maple 7 followed less than a year later.
If you want stability, use stable releases. If you want cutting edge features, fix things that don't work for you and contribute fixes back to the developers instead of bashing the project on SlashDot.
and I tried GNOME 1.4 when it came out, and blam. Nautilus crashes. So I switched back to KDE, which is *much* more stable (and less bloated).
actually, there are plenty of american developers of KDE now. people like kurt g, charles s, niel s.. unlike GNOME, power is not split into company camps (rh, ximian, sun), and is very decentralized :-)
and all of sun's gnome hackers are from europe (ireland)
uh, didn't you goto slashdot anon. coward training? all slashdot trolls have to be pro-kde now, as commanded by our lead troll JonKatz.
From what I've seen the machines are just too slow to run anything heavier than CDE. We have Ultra 5/10s here with decent amounts of RAM and even CDE seems slow to me compared with Windows/Linux machines (try turning on the "display window contents while dragging" option and watch them repaint the screen in real time!).
:-)
The 400mhz processors in the Ultra10s are no racehorses by any stretch of the imagination - I ran benchmarks with them (using the distributed.net client) and they turn in scores less than 1/5 of my Athlon 1.4. Coupled with this, the video is abysmal (do they have ANY graphics acceleration?) but then "vi" doesn't need that much CPU power
Much as I like using Ximian/Gnome (without Nautilus) on my x86 linux boxen, I think it'd run like a dog on a typical Sun workstation...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
When we here at the Front de Liberation des Naifs de Jardin heard that GNOME was no longer included in Sun machines, it really made our day.
We have long espoused freedom for gnomes, especially those which live in gardens, and feel that any act of liberation for them is a good thing.
While we are aware that GNOME is quite different, and not a GUI in the same way that a Gnome is not a Dwarf, the happy news that someone supports liberation for GNOME is quite marvelous.
Vive les nains de jardin libre! Et les genies des ordinateurs aussi!
Will in Seattle
Went to the Crownjuwels conference last week in Amsterdam, and a Sun representative told us the same thing. Because 2.0 isn't going to be ready in time for testing and such it won't be in the first release of Solaris 9. But I won't be surprised if they did included 1.4 as an extra, with CDE still default and when 2.0 is stable they will release that in te later releases of Solaris 9.....
"Sun made the decision to use Gnome during the happy times of "dot com". Those exuberant days are over."
Actually, no, life in the ".com" world does go on for some, it's just that the hype has disappeared, and we know that there's nothing special in a mere version mismatch like this "news" story.
Gnome is an open-source project, it is not a product that must be released on a schedule to fit in with Sun's arbitrary release dates. The real world's version numbers just go up and up and up, there's nothing special about them.
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
I've never seen such a huge amount of trolls getting modded up with insightful before. Is this just because the average Slashdot-user is a KDE-fan, or do you seriously think these deserve insightful:
1. Gnome 2.0 is not ready for much of anything.(Rant) (Score:4, Insightful): (..)"In my experience Gnome was a dysfuntional, unstable pig of a desktop, full of garbage apps were a pain to use and rarely worked correctly"(..)
Constructive criticism is always good, this is just trashing, which I cannot understand, having tried out CDE.
2. 5 substantial reasons why GNOME is obsolete (Score:3, Insightful) (..)"GNOME is based on the GTK+ library, which was fine for its day, but is now decidedly outdated. (..)It doesn't offer exciting components like KParts, KDE's analog to COM. The closes thing to that will be Bonobo, but its development is far behind even GNOME 2's release schedule and won't make it in until at least 2003."(..)
First. GTK+ still works fine, besides there might be a reason why GNOME 2.0 will be using GTK+ 2.0 instead of GTK+ 1.2. Second. Qt doesn't offer KParts, KDE does. GTK+ does not offer Bonobo, Gnome does. Besides Bonobo is already out in stable versions, and has been used extensively by Nautilus, Evolution and Gnumeric.
3. Sun, why not KDE, for the last time? (Score:4, Insightful): "Why does Sun continue to ignore KDE as a viable alternative to GNOME. KDE is very mature and incredibly stable. I don't see why Sun doesn't just go forward with packaging it with Solaris. Do they stick with GNOME because it's built on a 100% free toolkit? What's the driving force? As far as I can see, KDE is a solution to many of the problems Sun's UI trials of GNOME came up with. It just doesn't make sense... for one thing, if they want easy of use, KDE is much nicer than GNOME, IMHO."
This is not so much of a troll, as uninformed, and I don't object much to the posting, I object to it being modded up to heaven just because the crowd loves KDE.
I realize being objective is hard when you have a situation like this, but please don't just mod up people because you agree. Mod people because they argue well and have thoughtful and well written comments.
Let's say! Again one of KDE fans. Just tell me how Gnome is losing blood. I personaly avoid using KDE since KDE is slow and too Windows like. GNOME also makes me posible of configuring things runing on my desktop. Not being forced to use which Window manager makes me realy happy. I could say KDE is dead. It's so fuckin' slow. Ok, but enough don't You think You all are being stupid arguing KDE is better GNOME is better. THEME SONG IS THAT GNOME 2.0 HASN'T BEEN USED ON SOLARIS. THIS WAS NOT TO BE EXPECTED. IF YOU'D READ SUN'S ARTICLES YOU'D SEE THAT SUN'S ENGINEER'S ARE BEGINING THE REAL PORT ABOUT TWO OR THREE MONTHS. THE ARTICLE ABOUT STAROFFICE NOT BEEING GNOME-LIKE. However all of You! "kde is better, gnome is better" GO PLAY ON THE PLAYGROUD. Both projects are good. I as a *NIX person could hardly imagine my self using Windowsh KDE. But I also respect people using KDE. THERE'S ONE MORE QUESTION: "HAS ANYONE OF YOU "my is better" CONTRIBUTED ANYTHING. Hail to the Open source
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
Actually, GMC was the standard file manager up to 1.2. In 1.4, is one of the packages of the so-called 'fifth-toe', i.e. add-ons (and reading mc-devel list, it looks like they are soon going to drop the graphical version of mc).
The standard file manager for GNOME is Nautilus, now, which may be a good choice for middle-to-high-end home desktop, but not for most of the uses for which SUN workstations are purchased ( like scientific workstation in engineering facilities and control centres).
Ciao
----
FB
So now we are forced to use ugly, bloated CDE, unless ugly, bloated Gnome get ready in time?
Well, there is always my Debian box with olwm.
I'm just waiting for the inevitable announcement the GTK port of OpenOffice has been cancelled.
What GTK+ port?  IIRC, they are going to make OpenOffice into a Bonobo component so that it can be embeded in a Bonobo container.  That componentization does not mean a GTK+ widget interface for OO...
Nice troll...
There "about" field just tell how professional and fact-oriented they are, but their articles look somewhere between MS FUD and /. trolls.
From the front page:
- IBM hasn't made any major open source announcements for several months.
- The Free Lunch crowd is against reasonable and nondiscriminatory licenses.
- Sun drops Gnome from Solaris 9.
I'd put a lot more trust in the last rumor, if it wasn't posted together with the first two exacmples of LinuxGram profesionally reported hard facts.
I think you need to take some more of the pills the kind doctor gave you.
I know you're not really interested, but to answer some points you raise:
1) KDE compiles and works on Solaris fine (I've done it myself)
2) KDE isn't Windows like... it's more like OS/2 with bits of Windows, Mac and RISC/OS
To agree with you:
1) Starting KDE applications is too slow. This isn't KDE's fault, it's C++ & the library system -- people are looking into object prelinking to improve the startup times dramatically.
2) Both KDE and Gnome are great projects. I'm looking forward to Gnome 2 eagerly (I'm also looking forward to Enlightenment 17... if it ever gets released).
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
I hate to be the one to point out the obvious, but Gnome 1.4 is already available for Solaris 7/8. So you don't *have* to wait for it to be included with solaris by default to use it.
http://www.sun.com/gnome
www.bleepyou.com
I have tried to install both in Solaris 2.6 (is what we have).Pain,pain, pain.
And that is only the installation.
CDE runs for months before Netscape manges to kill it once in a blue moon.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
All the oil industry is shaken by your comments.
There Solaris is the main desktop in use.
Any other examples would be welcomed.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
But the dependenices, order, library versioning is horribly complicated. I calculate I would need 3 or 4 full days to make a compile succesful... if at all ...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Miguel is famous for starting something and not sticking it through to the end. He's started and inspired a menagerie of different projects...from GNOME to evolution, to bonobo to....etc. Has he stayed around to finish any of them? NO. He jumps from project to project like an ADD monkey, leaving everything half-done.
Is it any surprise GNOME is percieved as having lost focus?
I wonder how much that Register article about GNOME 2.0 stung. The sad thing is, all rhetoric aside, the Reg had some good points.
You make this out to be such a big deal and it's not. Sun will ship Gnome in Solaris 9, just not in the initial release. Each Solaris release has updates and Sun will put Gnome in one of those. So it will make 9, just not the initial release of 9.
DOS can do anything Windows can. It's easier to develop consistant GUI applications for windows, so your question should be: What does KDE make easier to do than GNOME does? The answer: Damn near everything.
But here we are talking of _Solaris_, which is not exactly an OS for 'non-technically minded people'.
Rather, the question is: would GNOME or KDE be the best desktop for the kind of people which buy and uses Sun workstations?
My personal answer is: not anymore. The 1.x versions were quite apt (especially kde, IMO, which borrowed several things from CDE). The 2.x versions (present for KDE, near future for Gnome), with their full complement of gadgets, are now much more user-desktop oriented for that (though using selected components only is still an option).
A more effective user interface for scientific and engineering workstation, IMO, could be something like Window Maker + a lightweight file manager (e.g. ROX). Or maybe XFCE, which also offer an easier transition path for CDE users (though I never liked CDE look-and-feel).
Ciao
----
FB
It's blatant bullshit.
KDE has bindings for other languages...take kjava or the Python bindings, for example.
Ah, but actually getting the FACTS before you spout off (and get modded "insiteful" by stupid slashdot moderators) is too much effort, I guess.
This post freaked me out. Just replace "Sun" with "IBM" and "Java" with "OS/2" and it sounds like something I heard over and over 6 years ago. Damn if it didn't come true.
I love Java, much like I loved OS/2. They are/were great technologies; there just wasn't anything else that kept up. In 1995, Windows 95 was on the horizon... and the end of OS/2 was coming.
So here we are in 2001, talking about how Sun's right hand isn't working with the left hand, much like IBM in 1995... and .NET on the horizon.
Tell me it'll be all right, mommy.
There are lots of points with great merit comparing and contrasting GNOME and KDE, so you really shouldn't have to resort to this sort of misinformation. I think the biggest thing KDE is doing right that GNOME is sucking at is having quick release cycles. We wait too long to get changes out to users, which tends to make user improvements to the core desktop more sluggish than they should be. We're gunning for a really quick turnaround release for GNOME2 - GNOME2.2 with primarily user improvements (using a lot of the new architecture that has been rewritten and/or added). Also, significant usability assesments and rewriting of problem areas is being done, both for GNOME2 and post GNOME2, which should improve the reach of the desktop to a whole range of new non-technical users in the years to come.
-Seth (Nautilus hacker, GNOME2 Release comittee, GNOME UI Lead)
Okay, I'm running the July release of Solaris 8 on an anchient Ultra Enterprise 1 with Gnome. And mind you, that's not the Creator, but the non-64-bit capable, 167 MHz really old UltraSparc. And you know what? It's pretty fast running a few terminals, opera, and some ldap browsers. Throw in a few rarely used servers including Novell's eDirectory and stuff still doesn't slow down. Changing panes takes a second to a second and a half unless one of my daemons is pegging the CPU, but pretty much everything else is fine. Granted, I'm not running Nautilus, but why would I want to run such a bloated piece of crap when I have "ls", "locate", "cp", "rm", "mv" and "df"?
And I agree with the poster who was wondering what the @(&* you were thinking running any kind of GUI on a workhorse server? Repeat after me, "GUI's do NOT belong on servers"!
I like lots of people. That doesn't mean I go carting them around the galaxy with me. --Dr. Who
GNOME will come to Solaris, its just a matter of Solaris 9 being deployed before GNOME 2 is finished. Sun really wants GNOME 2 to be the first "officially supported" release of GNOME they ship (they have already done an unsupported technology preview CD). Lots of Sun developers are working on GNOME, and they're still pushing to get GNOME in Solaris as quick as possible (probably in an update to 9).
cheers,
-Seth
But Linux sucks less than any of the alternatives, all the while it costs less. And while Linux borrows liberally from its predecessor, just about every major feature in Windows or MacOS has been taken from other people's systems as well.
Why on earth are you comparing efficiency under the old familiar (for Linux, GTK, Gnome) x86 architecture against SPARC?
I've also experienced massive CPU consumption on a SPARC Ultra 80
Yes, disabling Nautilus helped. As did turning on wireframe window movement, minimization. But it was still slow.
Gnome has nowhere near the same overhead on the x86 Solaris. I am not certain why, but I suspect perhaps the graphics libraries not taking full advantage of the processor.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
If they want performance and efficiancy they should include flwm. It's small simple and fast to use, and it takes about 10K of memory. Can you say that about Gnome or KDE?
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
**Neither Gnome *NOR* KDE, IMHO, are ready for Solaris and other environments. KDE and Gnome both feel too disjointed to really make the Unix desktop feel like a computer that non-technically minded people would use.**
non-technically minded people have no business running anything with regards to unix except an idiot-proof kiosk. i'm tired of trying to help idiots run linux/bsd just because its "neat" and "different". we are talking about servers and gui's have no business in an enterprise level enviroment. please leave the resources for my checkpoint firewall and oracle databases you devilish ram gusslers.
I can not believe that the parent post got the moderation (Score 5: Insightful).
I am sure that he has had some problems with Nautilus bloat (which is a commen problem), but Sawfish bloat is really a stupid comment.
I am also sure that he has grown up on CDE, but to claim that the Gnome interface is clumsy and difficult relative to CDE or Windows for a new user, is just rubbish. Also, one should give Sun credit for working hard on making the Gnome interface more user friendly, something all GUI should have even mind all the time.
But the real troll comment is "GNOME is at least five years away from any sort of maturity". Since we just have celebrated KDE's 5 years birthday, that is one of the least : Insightful comments I have seen in this whole slashdot posting. Talk about not paying attention for the last 10 years.
Moderators, wake up!
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
Jesus Christ.. how the FUCK did you get moderated to +5 ? I havent had a segfault with GNOME or KDE in months (running the latest versions) Maybe you used RedHat 6.0 which came with GNOME 1.0 or something and based your rant on that.
Yes Aqua is nice, but KDE or GNOME arent slowing down, and will soon catch up.
"I keep looking in the want-ads under 'revolutionary' but there don't seem to be any listings.. "
What?! On my Linux box, sawfish runs at just a hair over the memory usage of xscreensaver and three times that of ntpd! I think this is more than fair for something that's displaying so many widgets. Are you trying to tell me that CDE's WM is smaller than Sawfish (not counting shared libs, of course). Sawfish was specifically created in response to the ultra-slick, but massively bloated Enlightenment window manager, which Gnome used for some time.
Here are things to do to improve your Gnome performance on any platform:
- Choose a theme for Sawfish and Gtk+ that's light on pixmaps. The "modern" theme for Mozilla is also quite expensive.
- Run in 16-bit display mode, not 24 or 32.
- Don't use a background image. Instead use a gradient (1-pixel-wide tiled pixmap) or a flat color.
- Don't run the gnome-terminal with transparency turned on or with a background pixmap
- Reduce the number of virtual desktops
- Never leave multiple large apps (e.g. abiword, gnumeric, mozilla, etc) running unless you need to. These are all beastly programs that, while they do a lot of useful things, will kill your performance once several are running at once.
Most of this is just the routine memory-conservation that any desktop can benefit from. Gnome gives you a WHOLE LOT of rope, because some users WANT to take advantage of 512MB of RAM to load background pixmaps, pixmap-heavy themes and 6 huge apps!It may also be that the Solaris X server is less efficient about loading pixmaps and such into the card. I know PC display technology can often speed up the user experience quite a bit.
SPARCstations are TurboSPARCs. Sun's first line after they moved from Motorola chips. Popular around the same time as 386's and 486's. Running Gnome on one is probably good if you're CPU is into S & M.
Ummmm, just a thought...MacOS X could to have informed your thinking on this one.
Dude, FUCK! That story makes me feel all insecure.
Hi! How are you?
I send you this file in order to have your advice
Thanks. See you later
You don't have to be running X all the time!
You don't have to be running an X server on the server -- you can manage through a remote X session if you have X-based apps!
X is so much more flexible than the Windows gui in that regard, I don't see room for adequate comparison.
Don't waste your mod points on negative moderation unless someone really deserves it. Do not use moderation to advance your point of view. This is not merely a troll, it is a viewpoint! And one that a vast number of people agree with. I wouldn't waste a point modding it up as funny either, mind you.
Most of this is just the routine memory-conservation that any desktop can benefit from. Gnome gives you a WHOLE LOT of rope, because some users WANT to take advantage of 512MB of RAM to load background pixmaps, pixmap-heavy themes and 6 huge apps!
>>>>>>
The funny thing is, I can do all this stuff in Windows *without* killing performanc. Even on my relatively old computer. GNOME is nice (and so is KDE) but performance isn't a strong suit.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
My "normal bird" gives some advice:
O> -- If you want GNOME for Solaris,
/ ) go to Ximian's web site.
X
Will I retire or break 10K?
...time for the inevitable "KDE is going gangbusters, GNOME is going to hell in a handbasket" post.
I'm seriously thinking about switching to twm after a friend showed me how it doesn't take any shit from the apps.
The GNOME Desktop is developed using the GTK toolkit which uses the LGPL License.
The KDE Desktop is developed using Qt toolkit. The Qt toolkit is licensed under GPL (free edition).
The Free Software Fundation recommends using GPL instead LGPL for software. The reason is that GPL encourage free software projects but LGPL can be used in any project (remember that FSF promotes FreeSoftware).
So ? What toolkit whould FSF promote ? Qt or GTK ?
What Dekstop should FSF support ? KDE or GNOME ?
You may say that Qt is not pure GPL because it is dual licensed. But that make no sense. If Qt is distributed under a non-free (free as in beer) license, this is an extra motivation for developers to use the GPL edition.
I think FSF should evaluate which is the best way to achieve its objetives.
MOD THE CHILD UP!
You get a toolkit that makes sense, is well designed, and well supported. With GNOME you get "major rewrites". GNOME developers are beholden only to themselves, while Troll is going to treat developers as customers.
...then they can start a KDE channel using Red Carpet.
They would be practically handing the workstation market to IBM.
There is a place for Java, and this isn't it.
It never actually made it past the Openstep for Solaris 1.1 Beta.
It was nice-ish. As a long time die-hard NEXTSTEP user and administrator, I found it a nice hybrid. I supported it in production development on sun4m for a very large financial company that was a heave NEXTSTEP/OpenStep base.
OpenStep looks like hell in dithered 8-bit from TGX and GX graphics on Sun. I think if you really want to run openStep on Sun, run OpenStep (mach) 4.2 for SPARC. Still looks like hell in 8-bit, but 256 grayscale is sweet actually.
I have a Sparc20 712 (dual 75MHz SuperSparc), 256/18GB, and it is running Solaris 8 with GNOME underneath, but CDE as the WM. Less colormap flashing and color cube mooching by the WM. Yet I still have gkrellm and GNOME Terminal, etc.
Running on an 8-bit video system, you get a great appreciation for 16 and 32-bit mainstream video options these days. GNOME and OpenStep, though nice framwork platforms for PC, are ill suited for SPARC, IMHO.
My 1989 NeXT Cube is still running, is my mail, NFS, and printing solution, and is cool as hell, however.
I've run Sun desktops for years.
And I'm still using fvwm2 because I don't like the bloat of CDE. It was especially bad in the early years when it first came out and the hardware SPARCStation 2's and 10's was not as fast as it is now.
Now, with the hardware capabable, I'm hoping to use either Gnome or KDE, just because it seems like more development is occurring for those environments than for CDE.
It's too bad Gnome won't be coming with Solaris 9.
Over the next month I'll bring up an Athlon system as soon as I can buy SuSE 7.3. I suspect that for desktop applications it will suit me better. Then, if I really need a Solaris app, I'll run it over X from the server.
Except for the OpenGL based stuff...hmmm.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I've tried all the major versions of KDE. Sure is nice...my grandma could probably use it. Too cluttered and slow for me. I've also tried all the major versions of Gnome. Seems a little zippier than KDE, and my mom could probably use it. Too much clutter for me.
I keep going back to Blackbox everytime I try a new "Desktop Environment".
Want karma? Just disavow it in the first ten lines of your post!
P.S., I know I'm going to lose karma for this!
Why does everyone think that all things Java MUST be interpreted? A suite of Java desktop apps could be natively compiled using something like TowerJ or GCJ along with the JRE installed as the static library. The speed and memory use would be very similar to C/C++ native apps.
(Yea, I realize interpreted code can be JIT compiled for speed, but the start-up time is annoying)
I don't know, I just didn't feel like putting any thought into a flame.
By calling that guy a Karma Whore you are just building yourself to get modded up, you Meta-Karma Whore!
got drum'n'bass?
http://mp3.com/vitriolix
That is exactly my point. I want stability, not unstable development stuff on Solaris. Keep the wacky code in Linux distros where it belongs.
Actually, I currently run Mandrake 8.0 and SuSE 7.2. As I stated, I have not touched Gnome in a while (Nor do I desire to.) and have been playing with KDE for the last year or so, on numerous laptops and desktops, and have seen segfaults in Konquerer, some of the games, the PDF viewer (Which seems best at bringing up blank pages anyway.), ksirc, kmail, different aspects of the KDE configuration tools.
As for KDE and Gnome catching up, they will never catch up to anything, because playing catch up is all they seem to do. KDE and Gnome are constantly trying to be Mac OS, Windows, each other, and whatever else people want to emulate. Lack of any real identity is the largest flaw in both suites, leading to a strange kludge of design ideas that makes the Windows XP GUI look compact. This is why I like Apple's Aqua, rather than try to push the old Mac ideas much farther, most of it was dumped for something new. The result is a bit odd and lacking at times, but at least they know what they want and where they want to go.
Nautilus 1.0.5 has been out for months. Check it out.
My feeling is that Maurene O'Gara is sometimes deliberately dishonest.
The funny thing is, I can do all this stuff in Windows *without* killing performance
Nope. Can't do pixmap themes (that is, themes where all of the widgets, title-bars, etc have pixmaps, not just flat colors or gradients). Can't do windows with transparent backgrounds. Can't do much of the customization that you can do with Gnome. Sorry, but that's an apples-to-oranges comparison. MS has just failed to put in the features that I'm suggesting low-end users turn off.
Windows does better in terms of MS-only apps will tend to share a lot of code through DLLs. However, as soon as you load an Adobe program or someone else's browser or any other large third-party app, it starts tanking.
There is a lesson here: UNIX apps need to be better integrated. Even among the GNOME apps or KDE apps, much code is duplicated, so you are always in the situation that, under windows, you get into when you start running non-MS apps.
This could be improved, and should be, but you also cannot pretend that MS' desktop is 100% useful without 3rd party apps.
IceWM's a decent window manager, but BlackBox (with the vital component bbkeys) trounces any other wm. It's only a few KB, fast, fast, fast, functional, uncluttered, and pretty good looking (compared to IceWM, especially).
well, GNOME isnt really big on innovation on the interface part, more on the backend that nobody really sees. It pretty much steals the best ideas from every good operating system's interface and melds it together.
"I keep looking in the want-ads under 'revolutionary' but there don't seem to be any listings.. "
Nope. Can't do pixmap themes (that is, themes where all of the widgets, title-bars, etc have pixmaps, not just flat colors or gradients).
>>>>>
Nope, sorry. Try Window Blinds
Can't do windows with transparent backgrounds.
>>>>>
Wrong again. transparency too. Plus, this is even better than GNOME's transparency. Performance is great. Moving is instananeous, and resizing is only a little worse than KDE-2's without transparency. Plus, you can make any window transparent, play a video, and then put the transparent window over it. The video will by alpha-blended with the window in real time, without ANY flickering or jerking. I tried it with the opacity program web page, and the logo overlaid perfectly over a CNN newfeed. Last I heard, X won't allow *real* transparent windows, where the window underneath can update and the updates will show through. Oh, and all this is on a lowly PII-300 with 256MB of RAM.
Can't do much of the customization that you can do with Gnome.
>>>>>>
Like?
MS has just failed to put in the features that I'm suggesting low-end users turn off.
>>>>>
So, these features are just in my mind? I'm imagining real transparency because its so late at night?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Actually, windows can do everything I said it could not, just by installing VMWare and then running Linux inside of it!
No, Windows cannot to pixmap themes and transparency. Sure, there are third-party apps for that, but that's not the point.
No, Windows cannot to pixmap themes and transparency. Sure, there are third-party apps for that, but that's not the point.
>>>>>>>>
But it can! Are you telling me that those programs don't really exist? What's this third party bullshit? Like GNOME or KDE aren't third party programs on top of X? Plus, if you'd bothered to read the opacity website, the API for transparency is built into Windows 2000. Its just that its a totally useless feature that doesn't warrent a utility coming with the OS. As for pixmap themes, some level of theming support has to be built into the widget API, or else Window Blinds wouldn't be able to override the default look. For a while, Win95 had the feature to be able to look like Win 3.x, so the look isn't as hard-coded as you'd like to believe. Besides, that's a moot point anyway. XP officially has theming support and a visual styles API.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Look back at the discussion,and stop debating tangents.
...
The question posed to me was relating to Windows' efficiency. Someone was saying that Windows doesn't have the performance problems of Gnome.
Well, I agree. *Windows* does not. When I run Windows + Adobe Photoshop + Mozilla + WinAmp +
THEN I get some serious performance problems. I was attempting to compare apples and apples.
So, let's talk about your third-party apps. You say that the API for transparency is in W2K. Do you seriously think that that degrades the performance of W2K? No, of course not! USING it does. Linux desktops, on the other hand, ship with applications that use that feature, so many people will see a performance hit because they use it.
Does this make Linux desktops (using eterm or gnome-terminal) more "bloated" or "slower" than Windows? No, it's just that the feature set is different by default. That's been my point all along.
Actually, I'd love to see benchmarks on three hardware platforms, a bottom-end system (min requirements for Windows, since that's so much more than min requirements for Linux), a mid-range system (something like a 300MHz single-processor box with 32MB of RAM) and a high-end system (dual 1.xGHz with whatever max ram is for the system).
The main thing I'd like to know is, with the same screen resolution, the same functional application mix, same features in use (e.g. no pixmap themes, no transparency, no Ximian-style second panel, no multiple desktops).
Problem is, I don't know how to structure such a benchmark. Using specific applications to test is not workable. I guess you could compare Gnumeric to Excel, and so on, but that's just going to show the efficiency of THAT app, not the OS.
So, let's talk about your third-party apps. You say that the API for transparency is in W2K. Do you seriously think that that degrades the performance of W2K? No, of course not! USING it does.
>>>>
Except that it doesn't. Transparency in Windows is a hell of a lot smoother than transparency in GNOME, and GNOME transparency isn't even REAL transparency.
Does this make Linux desktops (using eterm or gnome-terminal) more "bloated" or "slower" than Windows? No, it's just that the feature set is different by default. That's been my point all along.
>>>>>>>
Yes. GNOME is slower than Windows both with the cool features on and the cool features off. Except for resizing (which transparency kills of course) Windows WITH the features is faster than GNOME WITHOUT the features.
Actually, the best benchmark is real usage. Try just opening up a bunch of desktop apps and manipulating them. Cell highlighting in KSpread, for example, is jerky while it is butter-smooth in excel. I have yet to see a X widget set that draws as fast as the Windows default one. Windows apps (especially on XP) start faster than comparable KDE or GNOME apps. In Windows, my mouse never hiccups, while it does so regularly in Linux. This usage tests are quite apples to apples. I'm trying to do the same types of things with similar apps. Both systems are tweeked because I use them on a regular basis.
There is no doubt that Linux is faster, more stable, and more memory efficient that Windows. But if the software base built on it (including GNOME and KDE) suck in terms of performance, can anyone say that Linux the platform is faster than Windows the platform?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Is the CDE enterprise quality? It fucking craps out on me at work on Tru64's and sun boxes far more than gnome on linux at home ever has.
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
All that graphical shit runs on your local web-browser not on the server. Perl or whatever generates a webpage page/form, but its a local window manager and browser sucking up the resources of your crummy local PC, not the fucking server! In any case, I'll take vi'ing a conf file over a 9+meg binary secret registry any fucking day of the week.
It is stupid to conflate graphics point and clicking with the garbage produced by microsoft. Yeah microsoft points and clicks, then crashes.
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!