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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."
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?
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
What he should have said was lgpl'd. Under GTK, developers can write proprietary solaris desktop software without having to pay anything to trolltech. [Disclaimer: I work for ximian, but obviously this post is not written as a Ximian ad, nor does it represent Ximian.]
IAAL,BIANLY
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..
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Let it be known that Solaris is not designed around ease-of-use; it is still a fairly hardcore UNIX.
... Solaris (at it's core) is EXTREMELY hardcore Unix. So much so that it can take a fairly experience admin from another "flavor" about 6 weeks to learn their way around the filesystem. Sun very much believes the old Perl maxim "there's more than one way to do it" and appends "Our way is better." This is a typical old-style Unix thought pattern.
Allow me to second that
utter rubbish
- 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.
(1) When has the basic design of QT changed last? Not recently, and for good reason; no one was to try and code to a rapidly changing library. Both GNOME and KDE run on a system whose basic design was fixed by the early 80's. Does that make Unix bad?
(2) The browser components are largely a wash.
(3) GTK+ 2.0 is going to be out with GNOME 2.0, just like antialiasing is out with QT 3.0, about the same time frame.
(5) RMS doesn't care about HURD. The HURD developers care about the HURD, and that's why the HURD continues to be developed, not for some political point. KDE has reimplemented a ton of stuff, because they liked their way better. That's the choice of a free-software developer.
Because KDE is based on a GPLed Qt, whereas GNOME uses only LGPLed libraries. Many vendors of Solaris software will never open their code for various reasons. Sun doesn't want to see them using a GUI library different from the one that Sun makes standard, neither does Sun want to help Trolltech rip Solaris developers.
That's rubbish. The amount of money the Trolls charge for a commercial QT development license is so insignificant to a company like Sun that it wouldn't even cause the most junior manager to blink.
What it basicly boils down to is one or more decision making people were in the right place at the right time to choose GNOME because they were 'C' heads, not 'C++' heads. i.e. personal (and probably emotional) preference.
If Scott M actually sat down with two desktops side by side and ran them both for a couple of days, he'd realise he's been conned.
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.
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.)
If Sun adopted KDE/Qt, they'd let another company set the cost for any commercial GUI development on Solaris that integrates with the standard desktop. The cost would instantly be much higher than it is now, it would be much higher than competing platforms, and there is no guarantee that it wouldn't go up even further since Sun has no control over TrollTech's pricing or development direction.
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.
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.
Java is more than up to the task of building a zippy desktop with a footprint smaller than either Gnome or KDE.
I remain skeptical, unless Sun leverages gcj or some in-house equivalent to improve performance. OS-visible memory consumption really needs improvement (40MB of RAM for simple tools, such as a volume control, just doesn't cut it).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin