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No GNOME For Solaris 9
Nailer writes: "Subject says it all really. A (very brief) Linuxgram article claims GNOME 2.0 won't be ready for Solaris 9 and the OS will ship with CDE and Motif as defaults. I'm just waiting for the inevitable announcement the GTK port of OpenOffice has been cancelled."
Why does Sun continue to ignore KDE as a viable alternative to GNOME. KDE is very mature and incredibly stable. I don't see why Sun doesn't just go forward with packaging it with Solaris. Do they stick with GNOME because it's built on a 100% free toolkit? What's the driving force? As far as I can see, KDE is a solution to many of the problems Sun's UI trials of GNOME came up with. It just doesn't make sense... for one thing, if they want easy of use, KDE is much nicer than GNOME, IMHO.
Why bother.
Why? Because KDE now has a larger number infront of it? That really doesn't make it any better or worse. The fact is that the user level differeces between KDE2 and 3 will be much less than GNOME1 to GNOME2 (fixing gtk-flash-bug, aa text, pango, and so on). I can't help but think that if the GNOME project upped the release number everytime I see a new GNOME-related file in sid, everyone would be saying that KDE was dying and GNOME was developing amazingly quickly.
BTW, this should not in anyway be taken as a knock against anyone who use/develop/etc KDE, just those who feel the need to bash the alternative.
Read Linux gram's article. It says in a feature incomplete pre-beta demo of Solaris 9 there is no GNOME 2.0. There is no GNOME 2.0 ( just an alpha version) for shipping versions of redhat, let alone for pre-beta versons of Solaris. This article is just placed here to pull traffic to LinuxGram and doesn't really add anything.
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.
-30-
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++.
- 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.
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
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.
.fvwm2rc file, I'd go for KDE or Gnome myself.
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
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).
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.
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.
1. Bonobo has been out for a while now and used as the core of Evolution, Gide, Dev Help, Nautilus and many others... ever wonder why Open Office is intergrating with Bonobo?
2. nope, no such recomendation at that link. May I remind you that Galeon just won an award for the best linux browser?
3. Absolute unsubstantiated bullshit.
4. I'll just let the pictures speak for themselves:
KDE
GNOME
5. Hurd was started in 1990, before linux, further more, the GNOME people are not employed by Gnu and are associated only substantially by name.
G/K are here to stay, deal with it.
got drum'n'bass?
http://mp3.com/vitriolix
"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.
Sun's official 'unsupported Solaris Gnome 1.4' package is old, unoptimized and is very slow and buggy. It's a hideous example of what Gnome can be.
OTOH, I run Ximian Gnome on my Solaris Ultra 5 (Solaris 8) workstation (slow processor, lots of RAM). Ximian Gnome is great! For most applications, Ximian Gnome is *faster* then CDE, and it's suite of utilities is much more useful then the kruft that comes with the generic Solaris workstation install. I work in a Solaris/Windows office, and often need apps like Gnumeric/Abiword or Star Office.
Gnome on my office-workstation is not as fast as on my cheap home computer (Celeron 366, 128 Mb ram, RH 7.1), but it is perfectly usable.
Most of the slowness seems to stem from the OpenWin server + Video Card itself (slow drawing of boxes, lines, etc). Certain apps like XMMS and Mozilla are slow (but those aren't Gnome apps). Nautilus is crappy slow on Solaris, so i turned it off and use GMC.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Sun would have to get a transferable binary license for Qt on Solaris, but even then, they'd be the only UNIX vendor standardizing on Qt. Or, Sun would have to buy TrollTech outright, likely to be an expensive proposition.
Sticking with Motif makes sense: it's very widely used commercially (far more than Qt), there are lots of widgets and tools for it, it is a de-facto standard, and Sun already has rights to it. There are also several C++-based APIs for Motif. (Technically, I think Qt and Motif is a toss-up, but that's another matter.)
Unfortunately, Sun's OS group seems blissfully disconnected from their Java side; in fact, their OS group seems stuck in the C-mindset of the traditional BSD/UNIX world. And Sun's Java group seems more focussed on Windows than on adding value to Sun's own product line. Sun's lack of coordination and their lack of in-house and open source application development in Java gives people the impression that Java isn't ready. That may have been true two years ago, but today, Java is more than up to the task of building a zippy desktop with a footprint smaller than either Gnome or KDE.
Of course, Sun can't give up completely on C/C++ toolkits, but they have that pretty well covered with Motif and its C++ wrappers, tools that are still much more widely used among Sun's customers than either Gtk+ or Qt.
Sun always seemed like Sun's worst enemy. They need a little of that Gates/Ballmer top-down coherent management and energy. McNealy barks a lot, but he doesn't seem to bite much.
I've never seen such a huge amount of trolls getting modded up with insightful before. Is this just because the average Slashdot-user is a KDE-fan, or do you seriously think these deserve insightful:
1. Gnome 2.0 is not ready for much of anything.(Rant) (Score:4, Insightful): (..)"In my experience Gnome was a dysfuntional, unstable pig of a desktop, full of garbage apps were a pain to use and rarely worked correctly"(..)
Constructive criticism is always good, this is just trashing, which I cannot understand, having tried out CDE.
2. 5 substantial reasons why GNOME is obsolete (Score:3, Insightful) (..)"GNOME is based on the GTK+ library, which was fine for its day, but is now decidedly outdated. (..)It doesn't offer exciting components like KParts, KDE's analog to COM. The closes thing to that will be Bonobo, but its development is far behind even GNOME 2's release schedule and won't make it in until at least 2003."(..)
First. GTK+ still works fine, besides there might be a reason why GNOME 2.0 will be using GTK+ 2.0 instead of GTK+ 1.2. Second. Qt doesn't offer KParts, KDE does. GTK+ does not offer Bonobo, Gnome does. Besides Bonobo is already out in stable versions, and has been used extensively by Nautilus, Evolution and Gnumeric.
3. Sun, why not KDE, for the last time? (Score:4, Insightful): "Why does Sun continue to ignore KDE as a viable alternative to GNOME. KDE is very mature and incredibly stable. I don't see why Sun doesn't just go forward with packaging it with Solaris. Do they stick with GNOME because it's built on a 100% free toolkit? What's the driving force? As far as I can see, KDE is a solution to many of the problems Sun's UI trials of GNOME came up with. It just doesn't make sense... for one thing, if they want easy of use, KDE is much nicer than GNOME, IMHO."
This is not so much of a troll, as uninformed, and I don't object much to the posting, I object to it being modded up to heaven just because the crowd loves KDE.
I realize being objective is hard when you have a situation like this, but please don't just mod up people because you agree. Mod people because they argue well and have thoughtful and well written comments.
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.
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
But here we are talking of _Solaris_, which is not exactly an OS for 'non-technically minded people'.
Rather, the question is: would GNOME or KDE be the best desktop for the kind of people which buy and uses Sun workstations?
My personal answer is: not anymore. The 1.x versions were quite apt (especially kde, IMO, which borrowed several things from CDE). The 2.x versions (present for KDE, near future for Gnome), with their full complement of gadgets, are now much more user-desktop oriented for that (though using selected components only is still an option).
A more effective user interface for scientific and engineering workstation, IMO, could be something like Window Maker + a lightweight file manager (e.g. ROX). Or maybe XFCE, which also offer an easier transition path for CDE users (though I never liked CDE look-and-feel).
Ciao
----
FB
This post freaked me out. Just replace "Sun" with "IBM" and "Java" with "OS/2" and it sounds like something I heard over and over 6 years ago. Damn if it didn't come true.
I love Java, much like I loved OS/2. They are/were great technologies; there just wasn't anything else that kept up. In 1995, Windows 95 was on the horizon... and the end of OS/2 was coming.
So here we are in 2001, talking about how Sun's right hand isn't working with the left hand, much like IBM in 1995... and .NET on the horizon.
Tell me it'll be all right, mommy.
There are lots of points with great merit comparing and contrasting GNOME and KDE, so you really shouldn't have to resort to this sort of misinformation. I think the biggest thing KDE is doing right that GNOME is sucking at is having quick release cycles. We wait too long to get changes out to users, which tends to make user improvements to the core desktop more sluggish than they should be. We're gunning for a really quick turnaround release for GNOME2 - GNOME2.2 with primarily user improvements (using a lot of the new architecture that has been rewritten and/or added). Also, significant usability assesments and rewriting of problem areas is being done, both for GNOME2 and post GNOME2, which should improve the reach of the desktop to a whole range of new non-technical users in the years to come.
-Seth (Nautilus hacker, GNOME2 Release comittee, GNOME UI Lead)
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?
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...
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.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
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.