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KDE Gets The Hat

Posted by michael on from the kat-in-the-hat dept.

minkwe writes "Tension is currently rising between the KDE and GNOME followers, following the release of the new beta to Red Hat's upcoming distribution. Neither group appears to be satisfied with the fact that Red Hat has null-ified the difference between the two desktop environments."

20 of 540 comments (clear)

  1. Re:grrr... by Anonymous+Butthead · · Score: 2, Informative

    Check out the google mirror... basically it states that redhat deved up similar themes for both sides... making both look the same. This release is also called "null"

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  2. screenshots by laserjet · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here'w a bunch of screenshots from the article to show what they are talking about:


    Screenshots:
    #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 #9 #10 #11 #12 #13 #14 #15 #16 #17 #18 #19 #20

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    Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
    1. Re:screenshots by Nailer · · Score: 4, Informative

      They don't even have the same window decorations!

      Actually, by default, they do. The person that created this screenshots changed the KDE theme from BlueCurve to Keramik.

      BlueCurve is a theme for KDE window decoartions, KDE styles, a GTK1 theme, a GTK2 theme, a Metacity theme, and an XMMS theme.

      Yay consistency. Better yet, yay Gnome without endless unreadable dark grey/brown icons.

  3. Google Cache by BoxJockey · · Score: 5, Informative

    You can find Google's cache of the article HERE.

    --
    "UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things."
  4. Re:This is the way it should be... by laserjet · · Score: 2, Informative

    Not sure why I got modded up, I was just joking. But, hey, I'll take the karma.

    --
    Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
  5. Re:grrr... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    From the google cache:

    Texstar of pclinuxonline, recently posted a bunch of screenshots from Redhat's 3rd beta release known as null. Redhat has made a huge effort via the use of similar icons and themes to make their packaging of GNOME and KDE resemble each other more closely . What do you think?



    Screenshots:
    #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 #9 #10 #11 #12 #13 #14 #15 #16 #17 #18 #19 #20
  6. Re:So what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Well, the sequence of events goes roughly like this:

    • Article about redhat beta 8.0 appears on pclinuxonline, including screenshots
    • Articles pointing to pclinuxonline then appear on both gnomedesktop.org and dot.kde.org.
    • The gnomedesktop.org article gets a few people discussing how nice/horrible the new redhat desktop looks and a few mentions of how this will threaten Ximian. dot.kde.org, on the other hand, goes completely ballistic. One KDE developer (Roberto Alsina) posts a message accusing RedHat of being like Stalin because they have changed the icons and moved the "About KDE" boxes. the webmaster of dot.kde.org accuses RedHat of trying to "actively destroy KDE", and on and on and on. Scary stuff from a bunch of loonies.
    • gnomedesktop.org story: someone posts a link to the dot.kde.org story, and says that this is why he dislikes KDE... they are bunch of clueless flamers - even the developers. Roberto Alsino upsticks and moves to gnomedesktop.org and proceeds to make a fool of himself by claiming that they are violating the GPL (he hasn't read it, the clueless shit-for-brains, details in the gnomedesktop story) - while being unable to post each message only once. Things rattle on for hundreds of messages with Roberto never gaining anything remotely resembling a clue, and still thinking RedHat is a secret organisation dedicated to the eradication of KDE.
    • Slashdot posts link to gnomedesktop.org and blatts it out of existence. You can, however (for the moment), still read the insane ramblings at dot.kde.org. Hold your nose though... there is a strong stench of lunacy about the place.
  7. Re:So what? by TimToady · · Score: 2, Informative
    Maybe if Larry Wall keeps writing about it, it'll spontaneously code itself.

    Oddly enough, that's precisely what's happening. It's amazing how spontaneous programmers can be.

  8. Re:OK.... focusing on just the themes by sprzepiora · · Score: 5, Informative

    As it stated in the foot notes comments, you can change BACK to the default settings with GConf. End of discussion. What they did is do away with the appearance of fragmentation between UI's while leaving the power to switch if you like/know about it, a smart move IMHO.

    --
    Stupid things kids do.
  9. Re:New meaning to "Red" in Red Hat by FredGray · · Score: 3, Informative
    I think I may try Sarge soon.

    Be careful: rumor has it that Debian will start migrating to gcc 3.2 soon, so we're probably about to enter one of those periods where "unstable" really means it...

  10. Mosfet.org updated about why this is bad by mosfet++ · · Score: 1, Informative

    I've updated my web site with my opinion on this. Basically they made KDE a shell for Gnome apps so when you select the "KDE" desktop you don't get the KDE web browser, email client, etc... You get all Gnome apps. This is in addition to removing "KDE" from the KDE "About" boxes. They negated the differences between the desktops by removing much of KDE.

  11. Re:Slashdotted, but GNOME2 *is* leagues better by fatboy · · Score: 2, Informative

    I know plenty of developers who use GTK 1.x out of licensing issues, when they openly admire Qt but can't touch it.

    I thought those issues were fixed about 2 years ago. Heck, even RMS is cool with the QPL, last I checked.

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    --fatboy
  12. Re:ridiculous by Genyin · · Score: 4, Informative

    Neither of these companies violated the GPL in any way
    umm... neonapster DID violate the GPL. They provided source, but did not mention anything about GPL in the binaries, at first at least. (in fact, the license for the binaries flagrantly violated GPL, restricting redistribution. etc)

  13. It's important to note the distinction between by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Sarge and Sid. Is is "unstable" and will always be. Sarge is currently "testing" and will one day be "stable".

  14. Woops by Critical_ · · Score: 2, Informative

    That's what i get for not previewing the subject. I have ran Limbo but now I am running NULL.

  15. Re:Now they know . . . by Nailer · · Score: 3, Informative

    Which Linux kernel developers? When was the lat time they did `this'? How is providing a consistent desktop theme bad? What did Red Hat so with their packacged kernels that was bad?

    I can't believe this load of unsupported tripe gets moderated up. If the author had anythign to say I'm sure he'd have provided some supporting arguments, but he's trolling instead.

  16. Re:So what? by 0x0d0a · · Score: 3, Informative

    You use tabs for *compression*?

    If you have a *single* mp3 on your hard drive, you're probably looking at a good 5 million characters blown right there. Text files are not the primary drain on resources any more.

    Besides, if you compress your text files, gzipped or whatever, you save more than just using tabs instead of spaces.

    Unless I'm missing sarcasm here...

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    May we never see th
  17. Re:Slashdotted, but GNOME2 *is* leagues better by jmv · · Score: 3, Informative

    I know plenty of developers who use GTK 1.x out of licensing issues, when they openly admire Qt but can't touch it.

    I thought those issues were fixed about 2 years ago. Heck, even RMS is cool with the QPL, last I checked.

    Well it depends what you're talking about. For an open-source developer, there's no problem with Qt. For someone who wants to write a closed-source application, Qt costs a lot of money. Then again, it's fair since Troll Tech has to make money somehow and making Qt GPL was already very nice of them...

    --
    Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
  18. Re:Want Linux to be successful -- this is good by nagora · · Score: 5, Informative
    All I want is a desktop that does its job -- who cares what it is? A user in an office should never have to care. They should simply be able to use it.

    This is what I do:

    1. Install WindowMaker
    2. Copy over my standard WM setup and icons from one of the other office machines
    3. Copy over .xmodmap to change CapsLock to Control and the funny menu key to CapsLock
    4. Show desktop to new employee and say "The function keys take you from screen 1 to screen 10, the number's in the top left. Screen 2 has Opera, Netscape and Mozilla [points to icons] so you can use whichever you like. This icon is Pan which lets you read newsgroups. Screen 3 is for graphics: that's Sketch, the Gimp and GQView. Screen 4 has Open Office and Acrobat Reader and screen 5 is music players; that's a cd player and that's an Ogg/mp3 player. The email program is on the right under the calculator. Any questions?"

    Generally speaking that's all anyone needs to be told about the desktop.

    TWW

    --
    "Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
  19. Re:New meaning to "Red" in Red Hat by rweir · · Score: 2, Informative

    +3 Informative? More like -1, Talking Out My Arse.

    A rather important Boolean expression:
    Sarge == Testing != Unstable.

    Firstly, for people who aren't up with the whole gcc 3.2 thing:
    The newest GCC release, 3.2, changes the C++ ABI. The ABI is basically the set of rules for how binary programs call functions in libraries, and how those functions are named in the libraries. Because C++ supports things like polymorphism and overloading, you have to 'mangle' the function names so that int blah(int k) gets a different name, in the library, to int blah(string k). The rules for how to mangle functions names has changed from release-to-release, but GCC 3.2 is (supposed) to be the last change for a long time.

    The problem is that all current C++ libraries and programs (in Debian at least) are compiled with GCC 2.95 and they can't (easily) interoperate with things compiled with GCC 3.2. So, to switch to GCC 3.2, you pretty much have to recompile everything with GCC 3.2, which is a bitch.
    I say 'pretty much' because there are a few ways to hack around the problem, but none of them are very neat. This is an especially big problem for Debian because it allows upgrades from release to release; I can stick in some install disks from Debian 1.0 and (if my hardware is still supported;) install Debian, configure it and upgrade to the current unstable with out a reboot. Thus, there needs to be some way to move from GCC 2.95 C++ programs and libraries to the GCC 3.2-compiled versions of same with breaking things in the process.

    Why Sarge won't break anyway:
    Packages only hit testing after surviving in unstable for at least two weeks without a Release Critical bug report. Thus, the gcc 3.2 transition will happen in unstable, and pretty much everything (C++ stuff anyhow) will be re-compiled with gcc 3.2. When everything is pretty much working, it will trickle down into Sarge (testing), no breakage required.