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."

Comments

Does Solaris Need Gnome?

[ll5]

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?

Re:Does Solaris Need Gnome?

[kuhneng]

Solaris isn't just for servers. There's lots of software out there that doesn't exist for Linux / other Unices. The oil industry, for example, is one of the largest users of computing horsepower. For a long time, it used to be the largest, but that may have changed. Lots of geophysical software exists only for Sparc Solaris.

Anyone who's dealt much with Sun's workstation class machines knows they don't make the best servers in the world, but there's still a huge market for their Ultra 5/10 and Blade 100/1000 machines. CDE is a real obstacle to new users on these machines.

If I didn't have several days invested in my .fvwm2rc file, I'd go for KDE or Gnome myself.

BTW- MIT's Athena 9.0 was released recently running Gnome on Solaris Sparc. Sorry, it's MIT specific (lots of site licenses bundled into the release).

Re:Does Solaris Need Gnome?

[Alien Being]

It needs something better than CDE.

Solaris workstations are still used with a lot of bigbuck capital equipment. A modern desktop would help Sun protect their piece of that market.

Another thing to consider is thin client computing. An E10k could serve up lots of GNOME or KDE desktops.

Re:Does Solaris Need Gnome?

[nomadic]

Just because it's a server doesn't mean that a desktop environment like GNOME wouldn't be used. At both my college and my first job most development workstations were loaded up with Exceed and used any one of a number of boxes as X servers.

Re:Does Solaris Need Gnome?

[bockman]

There are compiled ximian-gnome packages for solaris, but (it seems) only for 2.7 and 2.8.
For 2.6 you can try to compile it yourself. It's a day-long operation (especially if you compile it in the wrong order :-( ), but then you can share it with other people :-).

The gcc and gtk+ library (and maybe more) you can get from www.sunfreeware.com, in forrm of pre-compiled solaris packages.

Re:Does Solaris Need Gnome?

[Jay Carlson]

Don't get excited about the Ultra 5/10 and the Blade 100. They have the heart and soul of a PC---IDE disk, ATI video, PC133 memory, (mostly) standard case and chassis. Unfortunately, they don't have the performance of a PC.

I ran around running my Linux cross-compile benchmark on a bunch of Sparcs. The 1G RAM, 440MHz Ultra 10 checked in with performance that was strictly worse than the 320M 450MHz iMac DV+. The 500MHz Blade 100 was around 10% better. Now, these figures are probably a tad low; I realized after the fact I was using an SMP-enabled kernel, and that adds overhead even on a single-processor machine. So credit them with another 10% until I get publish-worthy numbers. The Sparcs are still crushed by the 733MHz P3 el-cheapo Dell Optiplex, and the (badly-configured) Athlon 1200 has nothing to fear.

The Blade 1000 is a different beast. It's a real workstation, with 8M caches---can't get that in the beige box x86 world, and there are a lot of workloads that are just screaming for it. I don't have numbers yet, but I expect they'll be much more competitive. Of course, for $15-20k for a dual processor box, they'd better be.

So why buy a Blade 100?

1. Binary compatibility with bigger machines. If you think your app is going to have to scale up to mainframe size, you won't have to recompile your system to take it there.
2. Commercial software compatibility. No Purify for Linux, for instance. Or maybe you already bought big-ticket software like RealServer, or a GIS.
3. Compatibility with collaborators. In some communities (especially research), Solaris on SPARC is a very common environment.
4. 64 bits. The Blade 100 is the cheapest 64-bit PC in the world. Some people need to develop for a 64-bit world. (It's not the cheapest 64-bit Linux hardware; although current kernels don't support it, the Agenda VR3 hardware is a full 64-bit MIPS implementation.)

By the way, newer kernels improved the Mac performance substantially, and SMP provided around a 60% speedup on the tests on the dual 533MHz PPC. I think I know where to borrow a dual 800MHz PowerMac, which should finally beat the crap out of the Athlon 1200. Of course, now I'm curious about dual Athlon performance, but I dunno if I really need a new machine just to run some benchmarks...

Re:Does Solaris Need Gnome?

[oneiros27]

I have to wonder if any OS that is primarily used as a server needs something like Gnome.

Yes, conventional wisdom would suggest that servers don't need GUIs. Unfortunately, it's getting to where more and more applications (Oracle for one) are nearly impossible to install from the command line. Although some applications (Sun Cluster) have HTTP interfaces for configuration, others (iPlanet Directory) have Java interfaces. Sometimes it's either to go to the individual machine and do the work from there. Other times, you'll want to send the session back to your local machine.

If you're sending it back to your local machine, you'd have to ask what's on your desk. Well, if you're monitoring a whole bunch of Solaris boxes, it makes sense to have at least one Solaris machine on your desk, some sort of a windows machine (as it will run the software that people would be using to connect to the systems), and a few have an extra machine [linux, another solaris, or my mac, as I refuse to live without BBEdit])

Hands down, the Solaris boxes tend to be our primary machines, as you can use them for light development, they handle virtual desktops, etc. Of course, all but one of the nine folks in my office are running CDE. Does that mean that CDE's the best thing to be running? Probably not. I use it because it's here.

Would I switch to Gnome? Probably not with anything but a cold install, as I'm busy enough during the day to take the time to install without messing up my project schedule, and I'm not familiar with Gnome, so I'd have a learning curve.

I see this as being most beneficial to the folks that run linux/freebsd/openbsd at home with gnome, and have ultrasparc machines at work, and would prefer to just deal with one GUI. I don't fit into that category, but I know that I would love to get away from CDE, but I can't afford to expend significant time in switching over.

No, no, no

[1010011010]

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.

Re:No, no, no

[GoatPigSheep]

Windows, since version 1.0, is still not ready, yet they ship a new version every couple of years.

Sun, why not KDE, for the last time?

[Lethyos]

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.

Re:Sun, why not KDE, for the last time?

[1010011010]

"QT Developer's License"

Plus, GTK is more motify.

Re:Sun, why not KDE, for the last time?

[Ian Bicking]

I think geography is more important than people give it credit for, even with the Internet. Sun is an American company, Gnome is an American product. KDE is very Europoean.

There are lots of other reasons, of course. It isn't patriotism on Sun's part. But there's not a lot of very influential KDE people on this side of the Atlantic. And the influence goes both ways: Sun wants to have influence on how their chosen desktop is developed, and it'll be a lot easier for them to influence Gnome (through hiring, for instance).

Re:Sun, why not KDE, for the last time?

[luge]

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.]

Re:Sun, why not KDE, for the last time?

[jfunk]

for non corporate use, duh

Uh, no. Corporations can use GPLed code all they want, as long as they do not distribute binaries outside of their organisation without source. If they want to do that, however, they can buy a license to sell closed-source software.

The end result is that Qt encourages *more* open-source code, while GTK does not due to the LGPL.

Two things, though:

- Most software is written for internal use
- If you're going to sell apps, Qt is cheap as dirt as there are no individual licensing fees

It looks like Sun, contrary to the opinion of many Slashdotters, is *encouraging* closed-source by making it easy to do so.

Man, I'm really getting sick of these arguments...

Re:Sun, why not KDE, for the last time?

[ninewands]

Let it be known that Solaris is not designed around ease-of-use; it is still a fairly hardcore UNIX.

Allow me to second that ... 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.

Re:Sun, why not KDE, for the last time?

[Dwonis]

s/corporate/GPL/

Re:Sun, why not KDE, for the last time?

[msaavedra]

Sun is an American company, Gnome is an American product.

Actually, Miguel de Icaza, who is Mexican, is generally credited with starting Gnome. Not that this really matters, though. Both KDE and Gnome have developers from many countries For instance, there are plenty of important Gnome developers from Europe, though a number of them are now living in the US. It's hard to say that either of them is the product of a particular country.

Re:Sun, why not KDE, for the last time?

[Ian Bicking]

I meant "America" in the most generic fashion, though I suppose that wasn't clear.

Re:Sun, why not KDE, for the last time?

[BlowCat]

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.

Re:Sun, why not KDE, for the last time?

[Macka]

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.

Re:Sun, why not KDE, for the last time?

[ksheff]

I also thought that most of Sun's Gnome hackers were based out of their Dublin office. If that's the case, then that pretty much throws out the "it's because Gnome is [North] American product" argument.

Re:Sun, why not KDE, for the last time?

[mj6798]

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.

Re:Sun, why not KDE, for the last time?

[Lussarn]

Of course SUN can pay the licence to Trolltech, but there are other third party developers that possibly can't. The fee is above $1200/developer, which could possibly fall a bit if QT bacame the standard.

Re:Sun, why not KDE, for the last time?

[Flower]

Nope. See, if Gnome goes in a direction Sun doesn't like or if Sun needs to add something to Gnome they can fork Gnome. Being LGPL, we get to keep the source, changes can be brought back into Gnome, and commercial companies can still use the libraries without cost.

Now if I do that with KDE... Well I can either GPL my fork (no proprietary company can use my code now), rewrite the thing from scratch, or.... suck up and take whatever TrollTech gives me because I can't modify their commercially licensed code. Depending upon exactly what I need done I may have to whine a little bit to... well we'll leave that to the imagination or I might get told flat out no and be SOL.

It's not just cost, it's control. GPLing Qt was nice for linux distributors but for a company like Sun I just don't see how KDE would ever fly. No matter how mature it is. I can improve Gnome but the issues around KDE will never change or are out of my hands.

Scott wasn't conned. He just saw an investment that had a better chance of paying off than the alternative.

Re:Sun, why not KDE, for the last time?

[elflord]

or.... suck up and take whatever TrollTech gives me because I can't modify their commercially licensed code.

Do you have a cite to support this claim ? It seems questionable at best.

Re:Sun, why not KDE, for the last time?

[elflord]

It's not that simple. Competitive forces are an obstruction to increasing prices. Low sales volume is an obstruction to reducing prices. It's true that both of these factors interact, but it also appears that a lot of market dominance is necessary to remove pricing obstructions. There are very few software packages that are excessively expensive due to monopoly control.

Re:Sun, why not KDE, for the last time?

[Paul Komarek]

Backing up the comment on the filesystem: don't forget to check all the "etc" directories when looking for binaries like "ping"!

-Paul Komarek

Re:Sun, why not KDE, for the last time?

[dark_panda]

From the QT/X11 Free Edition overview (http://www.trolltech.com/developer/download/qt-x1 1.html):

"The Qt/X11 Free Edition is provided with no support and no warranty.

The Qt Free Edition is provided under both the Q Public License ("QPL") and the GPL. This specifies that you may freely use the Qt Free Edition for:

• Running software developed by others (e.g. KDE)
• Development of open source/non-proprietary software

The Qt Professional / Enterprise Editions are available for development of commercial/proprietary software. If you wish to evaluate Qt/X11 for commercial use, please see the Evaluation information."

You don't need to be much of a lawyer to understand that.

J

Re:Sun, why not KDE, for the last time?

[Paul Komarek]

I must be thinking of SunOS instead of Solaris. Most often, I don't bother differentiating between the two.

-Paul

Re:Sun, why not KDE, for the last time?

[Flower]

Here's my problem with TrollTech. I see page upon page of information about their QPL license but I see squat about their commercial license. So I do have to infer some things.

Like in-house development would require a commercial license of Qt. Look here.

This license allows for use that normally would be considered commercial, such as development of in-house applications and the like, but does not allow for the development of commercial applications or components of commercial applications or products

Or here.

A non-commercial setting means that you must not use the package in the course of your employment or whilst engaged in activities that will be compensated.

And here.

The idea is that if you use Qt, you should pay back either by giving the software you make back to the free software community (the Free Edition), or contribute to the Qt development by purchasing commercial licenses from us (the Professional/Enterprise Editions).

Pouring over these pages just to find out what is and isn't allowed for free/in-house/commercial software makes me want to find a lawyer. The GPL may allow for proprietary in-house software but I don't think TrollTech permits it. In-house definately seem to fall under their criteria for a commercial license.

As for which system promotes OSS better, well that's another post/debate. Personally I think the LGPL is great for getting it in the door and if a company wants to open their codebase they can do it at their discretion. But as to whether you can use the free toolkit for in-house development... I wouldn't give that a resounding yes after everything I've read.

Re:Sun, why not KDE, for the last time?

[jfunk]

After all of your research, did you find anything about TrollTech using a *modified* GPL?

They cannot change the meaning of the GPL without modifying the GPL. GPL is OK for in-house development.

The stuff you found refers to the 'professional' and 'academic' licensing, which defines things differently.

Your last quote is what they think people *should* do, not necessarily what they can.

Re:Sun, why not KDE, for the last time?

[Flower]

I guess my question is which license gets issued when and who gets to choose it. We know the license is issued when development begins. So, if a company is starting an in-house project, which TrollTech obviously considers commercial work, when they get the toolkit it seems logical to me that they have to pay for a license.

Here's the assumptions I'm running on. Somebody corect me if I'm wrong.

1. The copyright owner (CO) gets to determine what licenses the code can fall under.
   
2. The CO determines which license can be applied when the licensed is issued.
   
3. The license follows the product.
   

Under these circumstances I don't think you need to modify the GPL. TT simply never offers you the GPL version if you are producing what they consider commercial code.

Just because Qt can be licensed under the QPL, GPL or Academic, Professional or Enterprise license doesn't mean the customer choses which one to use. TT permits a license based on what you are using their toolkit for.

IANAL, but I think that line of reasoning is sound based upon all the stuff I've read about Copyright.

Re:Sun, why not KDE, for the last time?

[jfunk]

If I download something that's GPLed, then the copyright owner cannot remove that licensing. This is explicitly defined in the GPL. Later versions may be distributed with other licenses, but if you download a tarball which has the COPYING file in it and the appropriate notices, the GPL applies.

The different licenses are packaged separately. If you get Qt/Free Edition distibution (as in tarball), the GPL applies. If you get the Academic Edition distribution (presumably a CD), then a different license applies and it is marked as such.

Also remember that the GPL explicitly disallows selective rejection of use. TrollTech, in using the GPL, cannot restrict usage of Qt to certain groups and not others for any reason, as long as those groups respect the GPL. This includes the internal use group.

Re:Face it, GNOME is dead.

[plastercast]

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.

Does anyone see a troll?

[jmauro]

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.

Re:Does anyone see a troll?

[DNS-and-BIND]

Yah, I noticed that the beta Solaris 9 didn't include GNOME *or* OpenWindows. It's nice that OW is finally deprecated, but I expected to see GNOME alongside faithful CDE.

An aside to you CDE-haters: it's not how pretty the desktop is, it's all about the function. CDE stands for "Common Desktop Interface", and it's true that one can go from a Sun to an HP to an IRIX box, and, using CDE, be productive on each platform. I've been there.

Re:Does anyone see a troll?

[Tet]

one can go from a Sun to an HP to an IRIX box, and, using CDE, be productive on each platform. I've been there

I, too have been there, and found myself equally unproductive on all of them until I got myself a decent fvwm2 setup configured :-) Note that despite the "common" in the name, there's not a great deal in common between the different CDE versions. Each vendor puts everything on different menus, for a start. Sun's menu layout is probably the worst I've come across, with Tru64 being among the better ones. Sure, you have common keyboard accelerators in all versions of KDE, and because they're all running dtwm, the windows look and behave the same. But the end user experience really isn't that consistent. Which kind of defeats the whole point...

Re:Does anyone see a troll?

[Surak]

An aside to you CDE-haters: it's not how pretty the desktop is, it's all about the function. CDE stands for "Common Desktop Interface", and it's true that one can go from a Sun to an HP to an IRIX box, and, using CDE, be productive on each platform. I've been there.

Really? Strange...none of my IRIX boxes shipped with CDE on them at all...hmmm...who should I tell? ;-)

SGI, to my knowledge, doesn't use CDE in IRIX. Sun on Slowlaris, HP on HP-UX, and IBM on AIX...does anyone know any other platforms that ship with CDE by default? I can't think of the other ones right now.. :)

Re:Does anyone see a troll?

[Syberghost]

Each vendor puts everything on different menus, for a start.

Hell, HP puts everything in different places between releases of the OS. Sometimes within patch levels of the same release...

Half our developers run GNOME on their Solaris development servers. The guys in charge of the devel environment (I'm production, thank the maker) had to go ahead and install it because each developer was putting it in his own home directory and using up a crapload of diskspace. They couldn't get anything done with CDE.

I know this is not so...

[sasha328]

But could it be that GNOME is not ready because:
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 .NET?
Just a thought.

Qt+KDE Runs Fine On My Sun Box

[Lethyos]

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.

Re:Disappointed

[IvyMike]

Gnome is easy enough to download and install. You should do it, because CDE does in fact blow.

Re:Disappointed

[buysse]

Please, don't use this version. It can suck a golf ball through a garden hose.

Try the Ximian packaging (www.ximian.com). It's quite a bit better. I still don't like everything about it, but it's a hell of a lot better than Sun's packaging. If you're going to evaluate Gnome, give it a fair shot.

Re:Good.

[1010011010]

What kind of crappy processors do your Suns have, anyway? I don't see anything like the CPU usage you're complaining about.

Porting not an option

[jmorris42]

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.

Re:Porting not an option

[Billly Gates]

Thats funny. I thought I just finished a programming project using java and kde's kjavaapplet class but I guess I was wrong. After all, kde only supports c++. I just wished there was some support for other languages besides java like perl or pythong bindings. If a pything wrapper existed I would probably call it Py-QT. Too bad it doesn't exist. I am sure using bindings for an object oriented language like java or python writtien in a non object oriented language is the way to go. Just make the old c libraries act like c++ by rewriting all the c++ features from c++ and then turn around and bash c. Just re-invent the wheel. right

Thats what I thought.

Proudly written in konqueror on kde 2.2.1.

Re:Good.

[Ian Bicking]

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

Unless Sawfish acts differently on Solaris than x86, any bloat you were seeing was Nautilus. Sawfish probably isn't the slimest window manager -- but it's really easy to use whatever wm you want with. Use Blackbox or something.

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.

Do we Really Need Gnome?

[linuxbert]

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..

Re:Do we Really Need Gnome?

[corky6921]

"do we need all that prettyness and niceness eating cpu cycles on a webserver?"

If Sun ever wants to compete with Microsoft's point-and-click server GUI, the answer is a wholehearted YES. That's the big reason why Sun bought Cobalt... they needed a server with a point-and-click interface. Think about it: as a small business owner with 3 employees, none of whom are very technical, which solution would you buy? A solution that requires you to keep a UNIX sysadmin at least part-time, or a system that allows your secretary to set up distribution lists in her spare time by going to a website? The second group is what Microsoft markets to, and Sun needs an offering that can compete. That's why they are simplifying things with web-based tools and now with GNOME.

Re:Do we Really Need Gnome?

[vrt3]

Think about it: as a small business owner with 3 employees, none of whom are very technical, which solution would you buy? A solution that requires you to keep a UNIX sysadmin at least part-time, or a system that allows your secretary to set up distribution lists in her spare time by going to a website?

You have a very valid point, but at the same time I'm inclined to say that exactly this attitude and this 'ease of administration' was a major cause of the vast proliferation of the recent Nimda, CodeRed et al attacks.
There is no way that this secretary is also going to keep an eye on the security bulletins and to keep the software up to date, whereas the UNIX sysadmin (if it's a good one) knows his stuff, and always keeps an eye out for security.

5 substantial reasons why GNOME is obsolete

[AirLace]

1. Technology: GNOME is based on the GTK+ library, which was fine for its day, but is now decidedly outdated. The basic design, themability and functionality simply haven't changed in years. 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.
   
2. Browsers: The GNOME project depends on Mozilla for its browser component. While Galeon makes the experience quite pleasant, page loads are still slow. In contrast, Konqueror is under heavy development, supporting both Mozilla and KHTML as its viewer component, the latter of which is its greatest strength. The W3C recommends Konqueror for having the most complete CSS2 implementation in the world.
3. Lack of modern features: XFree86 in itself is not that fast in implementing modern OS facilities. But when the XFree86 team did finally implement XRender (some 10 years after amigaOS could do antialiasing), they did it right. Trolltech team, thanks to the component based design of Qt, were able to implement text antialiasing and alpha channels with just a couple of screens of code. The same implmenentation for GTK+/GNOME, in contrast, is only possible as either a hack (render text large and sale it down) or potentially by major redesign, which will be done with GTK+ 2.
   
4. Looks. Although KDE had formerly been the ugly duckling, it really has leapt ahead of GNOME. One need look no further than http://www.kde-look.org/ to see how powerful and customisable KStyle is. As a developer once said, GNOME has themes, but KDE has style! What he meant in fact is that GNOME themes are generally pixmap designs, and when they are done programatically, there is limited scope for customisation.
5. A previous post aptly pointed out that 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.

Re:5 substantial reasons why GNOME is obsolete

[dvdeug]

(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.

Re:5 substantial reasons why GNOME is obsolete

[maggard]

A previous post aptly pointed out that 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.

What a foolish statement. Linux is a lovely fairly traditionial unix kernel, HURD has always had far more radical goals.

Re:5 substantial reasons why GNOME is obsolete

[mj6798]

GNOME is based on the GTK+ library, which was fine for its day, but is now decidedly outdated.

Yes, and you can say roughly the same thing about KDE/Qt. Sun already has better technology than either Gtk+ or Qt. It's called Java. They should use it and deploy it. The reason they don't is the same bogus internal politics that killed Smalltalk, NeWS, and OpenStep on Solaris.

Re:5 substantial reasons why GNOME is obsolete

[fault0]

1). Well, I think that the main thing that's kept GNOME alive is the number of gtk1 apps. This will change with gtk2.

2). I agree, both mozilla and khtml are very standards compliant.

3). antialiasing is not out with Qt 3.0. It was first implemented by Keith Packard (the writer of xrender) as a patch for Qt 2.2.2. It was introduced into base qt in 2.3.0. Since then there has been 2.3.1 and 3.0 now. It was first implemented in Qt over a year ago.

And, GNOME 2.0 and QT 3.0's timetable is NOT the same. GNOME 2.0, according to Sun's website, will comeout MIDDLE of NEXT year. While Qt3 is out NOW and kde3 will be out in a few months (feb 2002).

Re:Have you seen the download page for Sol 9?

[Spackler]

I don't think my work would like me downloading the 700 MB worth of image files.

You aren't kidding! Why can't they learn from those nice svelte linux iso download. What's Mandrake, 30 or 40 meg?

Oh, 1800 for the whole dist? I'll just take the 600 meg install CD, thanks.

Re:Face it, GNOME is dead.

[hexix]

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).

Very Sloppy

[cnladd]

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".

Already been answered...

[corky6921]

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++.

Bonobo is very ready

[luge]

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.]

KDE is an option

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Re:KDE is an option

[AKAImBatman]

I really don't recommend using the binaries from KDE.org on non-linux systems as they are usually nothing more than tarballs. Generally, getting a copy in a proper package format for your system works much better. In this case, grab them from the freeware CD or from Sun Freeware.

As for compile time, I can't say I've ever seen KDE compile all that fast on *any* system. However, if you really want to see a Solaris box put its back into it, renice it and watch it scream. Unfortuantely, until GCC is fully multithreaded, you probably won't see what a SPARC box can really do just by compiling.

Re:Gnome will never die

[Gunfighter]

GNU sought to develop a desktop environment they could release under the GPL. They came up with GNOME. At the time, they had no choice due to the fact that the Qt widget set was not compatible with the GPL. Now that it is, they are happier about companies like RedHat including it in their distributions, but they are still dedicated to seeing their baby (GNOME) succeed. Check out RMS' recent comments on the subject if you can find them.

Gnome 2.0 is not ready for much of anything.(Rant)

[supabeast!]

- 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.

Slashdot Portal

[BrookHarty]

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

CDE

[FireCar]

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.

Check the mailing lists

[Ishikawa Goemon]

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

Re:Check the mailing lists

[dj.dule]

It is not true that Sun should pay TrollTech for Qt. Only if you use it for commercial/closed source development:
You can find QT library under 2 licenses, here is part from theirs FAQ:
What kind of licenses exist for Qt?
The Qt toolkit is available under two different licenses: The Professional and Enterprise Editions for commercial use on all platforms, and the Free Edition for developing free/open source software for the X platform.
KDE is open source project, so noone should pay to TT for usinq QT with KDE.

Re:Check the mailing lists

[Arandir]

And, for a better question, why would Sun want to pay TT for a licence for QT?

Why would anyone want to pay Sun for a license to use Solaris? Tit-for-tat.

Why would any company want to pay for a widget set to develop (closed-source, mind you) for Linux?

Nobody wants to pay for anything. I don't want to pay for lunch. I don't want to pay my rent. I don't want to pay for gas in my car. But I seldom get my wishes fulfilled.

Trolltech requires payment for Qt *only* if you in turn require payment for the software that uses it.

Re:no offense but...

[aussersterne]

Why do you say that GNOME is dying? Is the code somehow becoming less functional? That would be a first!

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.

Re:Gnome 2.0 is not ready for much of anything.(Ra

[dhogaza]

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!

Why I don't like GMC

[Wolfier]

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.

change is good, but keep offering CDE

[green pizza]

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.

Re:Mod this post down, it's informative.

[nathanh]

It's not informative. It's plain wrong on 3 of the points and arguably wrong on the other 2. And it's chockers full of trolls. I don't see how it ever got moderated insightful. Moderators apparently just give points to the posts with the most verbiage.

What kind of crack are you smoking?

[Xiphoid Process]

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.

Re:What kind of crack are you smoking?

[sydb]

GNOME is a GNU project, I don't think 'associated only substantially by name' does that relationship justice.

There's more to HURD than NIH syndrome. It's a microkernel-based system. It's another Free O/S. These are good things. Hurd may currently be less complete than Linux, but development seems to have progressed quite rapidly since Debian got involved; I imagine the looming of a "release" adds impetus to development process.

Windowmaker is not a desktop

[DunbarTheInept]

Windowmaker is not a desktop. It's a window manager, which is merely one component of the desktop. Gnome is NOT a window manager, but can work with other window managers. Originally it worked with Enlightenment, but now it works with Sawfish and Windowmaker as well.

Your post made it sound like choosing windowmaker means NOT choosing Gnome. That isn't so. They are not mutually exclusive options.

You get what you pay for.

[Ars-Fartsica]

But if you don't invoke GNOME, you don't incur the overhead, so webservers are not effected. Without knowing from direct experience I am sure that headless Solaris boxes can be configured to not invoke any X related code at boot time.

Hence there is no particular reason why bundling GNOME or any other environment necessarily hogs resources.

Ximian Gnome on Solaris is good

[stefanlasiewski]

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.

Do we need a Solaris 9 right away?

[green pizza]

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.

Re:Do we need a Solaris 9 right away?

[sql*kitten]

SunOS 5.8 (Solaris 8) brought us... nothing too special

Not too sure about that. Solaris 8 new features are here.

Re:Do we need a Solaris 9 right away?

[Doctor_D]

Well to answer your subject, my answer would be "it depends..." What are you running today that you may need the new features of Solaris 9? If you're getting a Sun Fire 15k (Starcat), then running Solaris 9 would be in your interest. Solaris 9 has better support for the 15k, and other features:
(taken from http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/programs/solar is9ea/)

Solaris 9 Early Access features of great interest to our developers:
* Multiple Page Size Support in the kernel for better memory management
* Improved threading library for better scaling and performance
* Linux APIs, commands, and utilties enabling most Linux applications to easily be recompiled and run Solaris 9 Operating Environment
* Linux compatibility mode which allows Linux Intel applications to run unchanged (no recompilation) on Solaris 9, Intel Platform Edition
* New Reconfiguration Coordination Manager API allows applications to react to Dynamic Reconfiguration events

Of course that's not an exhaustive list of what's new in Solaris 9, but it's still in beta, and unlike Microsoft, Sun tends not to preannounce features of their Operating Systems. Also Sun has set a roadmap of future releases of Solaris. Sun doesn't force you to upgrade the version of the OS. I know quite a few who are running 2.6 and some who are still running 2.5.1. Of course quite a few are updating to Solaris 8. Most of the reason people upgrade their OS version is to use new hardware or new app versions that are only supported on a newer release of Solaris.

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.

Well the main reason Sun chose to drop the 2.x in naming of Solaris was for the PHB's benefit. They look at HP/UX that's at 11i now, and Solaris 2.8 doesn't sound as mature to a PHB. Hence Sun just dropped the preceeding 2. Hence Solaris 8, which still equals SunOS 5.8. There is a good discussion of this in the Solaris Internals Book, chapter 1, I believe. Also there are sub-releases under each main version. ie Solaris 8 10/00, Solaris 8 01/01, Solaris 8 04/01, Solaris 8 07/01. Each of these are still Solaris 8...the differences is the updates of the supporting software or new features, or new hardware support.

Re:Disappointed

[DNS-and-BIND]

Does this ximian version include both SPARC and i386pc pre-packaged binaries, in pkgadd format, with dependencies properly laid out?

And the golf ball thing...only use that expression in a positive sense. As in, "sure, that girl I went home with last night was a bit chubby, but boy could she suck a golf ball through a garden hose".

Re:Have you seen the download page for Sol 9?

[DNS-and-BIND]

That's one of the things I like about Solaris 9 beta...you can't just "burn ISO and install". You have to have an install server set up, which few linux dweebs have. You also must download almost two gigs of data for the install images. It does wonders for keeping the stupid questions about the x86 version of Solaris 9 to a blessed minimum.

Re:Good.

[Tuzanor]

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.

That would make no commercial sense for Sun.

[mj6798]

If Sun shipped KDE, they'd be shipping a desktop based on a toolkit that another company has complete commercial control over. Anybody who wants to write commercial software for Sun and fit in with the "standard" desktop would have to pay thousands of dollars to Troll Tech. And if TrollTech wanted to, they could jack up their commercial license fees for Solaris to whatever limit the market will bear. It just doesn't make sense for Sun to place the keys and toll-gate for commercial desktop application development on their platform in the hands of some company they have no control over.

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.)

Re:That would make no commercial sense for Sun.

[Dr. Evil]

• 
  

  Third party: "Hello, Sun? We like your operating system and would like to modify our application to fully intigrate with it."
  
  

  Sun: "It is GPL."
  
  

  Third Party: "But our application is commercial. Can't we link to the underlying libraries without being affected by the GPL."
  
  

  Sun: "No, you can't do that, that would require the LGPL, like what Gtk has."
  
  

  Third Party: "Why isn't Qt LGPL?"
  
  

  Sun: "Because it is owned by Troll Tech. They charge flat fees for commerical development. You will have to contact them to find out the costs for developing commercial apps which take advantage of our GUI."
  
  

  Third party: "What's to stop them from charging royalties in the future?"
  
  

  Sun: "Nothing."
  
  

  Third party: "uhhh... Thanks, bye."
  
  

This IMHO, is why Gnome has all the commercial support, and no matter how technically superior KDE is, as long as Troll Tech controls commercial development for the GUI, KDE will always be a fringe desktop environment.... even if that means that Linux never makes it to the desktop.

Just like Sun decided, the only option was their old GUI was CDE or Gnome.

Re:That would make no commercial sense for Sun.

[FattMattP]

If Sun shipped KDE, they'd be shipping a desktop based on a toolkit that another company has complete commercial control over.

Hmm. Kind of like shipping CDE which depends on a toolkit (Motif) that another company has complete commercial control over.

Re:That would make no commercial sense for Sun.

[Isldeur]

"Third Party": Hello Sun? We'd like your operating system and would like to modify our applications to fully integrate with it."

"Sun": Good!

"Third Party": What are the chances that your current environment CDE/Motif, though a standard doesn't suck?"

"Sun": Well, ma'am, it does suck. I'm sorry.

"Third Party": Oh. Well about this new environment for Solaris you've been touting: what are the chances that, after paying top dollar for your computers and proprietary architecture and closed-source operating system, as well as three-times as much more for your support contracts (because I simply want to get the job done with the best possible tools available) I give a fart about some also-not-fully-free windowing toolkit?"

"Sun": Probably little, sir.

Re:That would make no commercial sense for Sun.

[Dr. Evil]

There is little to prevent Troll Tech from changing their licensing model from per-developer to per-unit sold.

Nobody would have to upgrade to their new toolkit, but don't think that would be considered having control over one's own commercial products.

It is clear that the Free version of QT is there only for the purpose of promoting QT. When QT is adopted, there will be lock-in to a commercial toolkit. TT can change the license on future revisions of QT to anything they want.

That is not hysteria or conspiracy theory, it is a fact. Yes, you're locked into Solaris too, but not only is it Sun's goal to sell Solaris to CUSTOMERS, but it is relatively easy to port from Solaris to another UNIX.

QT is sold to companies doing commerial development. There is a huge difference between for example, developing an app in Visual Basic, and including VBA in your application. One is a flat fee tool, the second is a per-unit-sold fee.

Gtk is not bound by such a potential restriction, period.

Why on earth would a commerical corporation give another company such complete control over their product?

Sun should use Java

[mj6798]

Sun already has a mature, powerful toolkit and component architecture in Java. Sun should put their money where their mouth is and sponsor the open source development of a desktop environment based on Java.

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.

Re:Sun should use Java

[bockman]

To make a Java desktop, Sun should first develop a real compiler for Java, which generates nice old executables and dll (I _do_ hope GCC 3.x improves enough on this to become a standard ).

I can't see the ten processes or so which composes a desktop each running its own JVM ANd make them threads is not a solution, IMO). When I run more than 2 or three java apps , my Sun WS starts trashing for lack of memory.

Re:Sun should use Java

[RNG]

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.

That may be factually true, but have you seen how butt-ugly Motif & CDE are?? They really show their age by now. After seeing a Sun workstation running their (preinstalled) CDE environment, I am surprised Sun that manages to sell more than 2 workstations/year. The hardware is not bad (but nothing really special either) but horribly overpriced and the desktop looks like crap. It may be a standard but it looks slightly neolithic and is IMHO even more unusable than the worst of Gnome and/or KDE (combined).I found myself cursing at that environment all day. For the record, I curse ever once in a while when working on Win2K and almost never curse behind my Linux box (which is currently running KDE).

Of course, the one the server side (which is Sun's bread and butter) this doesn't count since you don't need a GUI ...

Re:Sun should use Java

[_|()|\|]

Java is more than up to the task of building a zippy desktop with a footprint smaller than either Gnome or KDE.

I'll believe it when I see it. JBuilder, with it's partially Swing-based UI, forced a computer upgrade at work. The Java-based Oracle installer needs 256 - 512 MB.

Java has potential, but the resource requirements are still prohibitive. Besides, I think Sun is quite content with Java's acceptance at the enterprise level by Oracle, Bea, et al. It's not just for applets, anymore.

Re:Sun should use Java

[Junta]

It is suprising that Sun hasn't done more with Java lately. For a while they have been rewriting and adding a lot of things based on Java (their system installer, media player..) A desktop environment would be a great demonstration of the power of Java, but it is easier to just move Gnome forward than start from scratch. Besides, while Java is a great language (particularly Swing), it still seems to me rougher around the edges than C/C++ as far as interaction with the system it runs on. It's possible, certianly, but not nearly as easy to do as C/C++..

Re:Sun should use Java

[pmz]

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).

Re:Sun should use Java

[mj6798]

The volume control wouldn't be 40MB, it would be a few kbytes running inside the same process as most of the other desktop threads. To enable this kind of sharing is why the Java runtime is as big as it is in the first place, and you only see benefits from it if you take advantage of it.

If you go with gcj and separate processes, you lose most of the advantages of Java over C++ (although you still get something that's easier to learn and a bit more robust).

Re:Sun should use Java

[mj6798]

I think Java-based desktop should only use a single VM process to do everything that Gnome (minus major applications) does out of the box. The one-process-per-function approach is a holdover from C/C++ days, where you need separate processes to keep components from crashing each other and to make sure memory gets cleaned up. The single VM approach also makes it much, much easier to communicate among different components.

I do agree, however, that a sharable VM and sharable JIT results would be good. Using Java for a Sun-sponsored desktop project would also help improve Swing and any remaining performance bottlenecks.

I think something like gcj is a crutch. It would let you write C/C++-style applications in Java, maybe even using Gtk+. That's better than nothing, and would allow for a smooth transition from something like Gnome to Java, but I think it also means giving up on some of the major advantages of Java.

Re:Sun should use Java

[mj6798]

I'm not sure why you think gcj (now just the Java mdoe of gcc 3.x) is a "crutch".

What I mean is that gcj and other ahead-of-time compilers allow people to continue writing Java code as if they were writing C/C++ code: small, standalone, native-code applications that are composed of a mostly static codebase. In order to achieve that, they sacrifice many of the properties that make Java interesting in the first place.

If you take a single-process, dynamic-compilation approach, Java really shines: you can combine lots of software components at runtime, and the dynamic compiler will optimize and inline everything at runtime. That's not theoretical, it really works. If you keep a single Java process running (rather than starting things up again and again), javac, jedit, and other substantial Java programs are lightning fast.

I agree that gcj is very worthwhile, and I hope its development will continue. Many people (myself included) still want to write small, stand-alone applications some of the time, and being able to use Java is nice for that. Gcj's easy connection with C++ also is a great link to existing codebases.

Nevertheless, for developing a modern desktop, I think the dynamic compilation approach is a much better way to go than ahead-of-time compilation.

Re:Solaris 9!!!!

[green pizza]

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.

Re:Gnome 2.0 is not ready for much of anything.(Ra

[BlowCat]

Please don't compare GNOME 2.0 (unstable developers only prerelease) with StarOffice 5.2 (official closed-source release).

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.

We are very happy to hear this

[WillAffleck]

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!

Re:Sun was optimistic. So were we(the OSS supporte

[PigleT]

"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.

I seriously don't believe it

[GauteL]

Watch me get modded down to hell for this.

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.

• SUN has already invested lots of money and effort into GNOME
• SUN employees are much more comfortable with C than C++
• SUN happen to like Gnome (WHAT???)
• Gnome is also very stable and quite mature. KDE is not better at all areas

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.

Re:Good.

[bockman]

And what were you using it for? there are plenty of graphical file managers, including gmc - the gnome standard one.

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).

Who are LinuxGram?

[Per Abrahamsen]

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.

Re:Sun was optimistic. So were we(the OSS supporte

[bockman]

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 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).

Deja vu

[garver]

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.

Pretty much blatant misinformation

[nullity]

Marking "-1": blatant misinformation

1. Bonobo has been distributed with GNOME since GNOME 1.4. It is a more flexible comprehensive architecture than KParts, and implements a lot more features you'd find in something like COM than KParts. The tradeoff is complexity...Bonobo is based on CORBA which has bright points, but also can make things more difficult for the programmer at times. Bonobo has undergone a lot of revisions for GNOME2 and promises to be even better than before. KParts is not an analogue to COM, it is basically an embedded rendering system with added smarts (which is very useful, but not really like COM). WRT to GTK....this is why we are about to release GTK2, which is a major rewrite. Bot the technical aspects, and user aspects, of the widget system have been redone and improved. Incredible font and internationalization support for "unusual" languages have been added through Pango, and a great accessibility framework have been included, making *nix environments accessible to still more users.
   
2. GtkHTML2 should be a major option for the GNOME2 desktop. GtkHTML1 already exists for light rendering. The Mozilla component is still the most comphrensive solution for browsing the web, but KHTML is putting on the heat. Good stuff, glad to see some competition in this arena.
   
3. KDEs ability to use XRender had little to nothing to do with "components". It had to do with KDE applications already making use of a font wrapper in QT rather than directly manipulating X fonts (probably a result of TrollTech having markets outside of X and hence needing this sort of system detail wrapped). GNOME anti-aliasing fixes have been very slow in the coming, but they're running just fine on the machine I'm typing on, and will be a part of the default environment in GNOME 2. "rendering large text and scaling it down" is sometimes called ANTI-ALIASING . Anti-aliasing is any sort of filter function that removes or alleviates artifacts caused by by aliasing, including scaling down. Nautilus uses freetype to do its anti-aliasing and it works just fine.
   
4. I really think this point is debatable either way. *shrug* I think GNOME is much prettier, but I understand why some people disagree. I suppose it all depends on your taste.
   
5. Yeah, that's whats going on. I work on GNOME because I'm trying to further the evil plans of GNU. Most of us have little or no affiliation with the free software foundation or the GNU system other than using the GPL license.
   

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)

its just a matter of time....

[nullity]

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

Re:Good.

[Derek Pomery]

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.

Re:Sun should stick with CDE...

[Junta]

As to the graphics issues, you are likely running Ultra 5s/10s with the builtin-video only. These are pretty old Mach64s if I remember correctly. Designed not for high-end graphics stuff. If you want good graphics hardware in a Sun, you have to go with at least a Creator3D, Elite3Ds are, of course preferable. But, as is the case with most Sun equipment, they are overpriced and still underperforming, but much better than the builtin. Though I admire Sun hardware as being rock-solid, they are way too expensive and too under-performing per-unit. For workstation and small server (i.e. anything below about 4-procs) I see no reason to go Sun anymore...

Re:Good.

[ajs]

bloated Sawfish window manager

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.

X can be shut down!

[NevDull]

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.

Re:Good.

[be-fan]

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.

You do get something for your money

[Ars-Fartsica]

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.

A Terrible Idea

[Ars-Fartsica]

How would Sun communicate to its customers why its new desktop was 50% slower than anything released by themsevles and competing vendors in the last five years????

They would be practically handing the workstation market to IBM.

There is a place for Java, and this isn't it.

Re:A Terrible Idea

[Reality Master 101]

50% slower? Java is at least 80-90% slower (5-10x) that equivalent C code, according to my various tests (particularly XML parsing), and that's using Sun's latest compiler and environment. I like Java-the-language in a lot of ways, but the JVM is a millstone that will never be overcome.

And no CDE for this Solaris user

[4of12]

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.

Bravo on covert karma whoring

[Ars-Fartsica]

Why is it that whenever someone emplys the cheap reverse-psychology of "I know I'm going to get modded down for this"...it always works????

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!

Re:Bravo on covert karma whoring

[kindbud]

How do I tell what my kharma score is in the first place?

Re:Gnome 2.0 is not ready for much of anything.(Ra

[supabeast!]

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.

Re:What ?

[acoopersmith]

No you won't. The beauty of X is that the X server works with any window manager you throw at it - you don't need to recompile the server just to run another window manager.

Re:Good.

[ajs]

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.

Re:Good.

[be-fan]

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?

Re:Good.

[ajs]

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.

Re:Good.

[be-fan]

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.

Re:Good.

[ajs]

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.

Re:Good.

[be-fan]

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?