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KDE Gets The Hat
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."
..or have editors that can deal with tabs. I mean... it's 2002... you'd *think* that editors could deal with whitespace now...
As it is a beta, they might want to find a
objective way to have beta testers choose
between KDE or GNOME... like the coca cola
vs pepsi test...
However if the final release won't show the
About info, it then *is* a one microsoft way
of approaching their product... they have a rats
ass respect for KDE or Gnome coders.
Robert
Actually, it's X11 that I despise the most. It's great if you're doing Unix sysadmin tasks or a network engineer, but if you're just a normal user looking to use a regular desktop, X11 just plain stinks. KDE and Gnome are both cumbersome, resource-intensive, and huge bandaids covering the shortcomings of the X11 system. The best both of them can do is cover about 50% of the features that other GUI systems such as MS Windows and Mac OS X give you without an add-on.
There's a very real possibility that this is against the LGPL that kdelibs uses due to this clause:
You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Library's complete source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and distribute a copy of this License along with the Library.
Isn't this exactly what Microsoft was talking about, with the GPL being 'viral'?. About the GPL being detrimental to software developers and the industry as a whole?
And everyone shouted them down, calling them capitalist scum etc... MS have a few billion to put into research such as this, they could see these issues a mile off, though were ignored.
I.O.U One Sig.
get some real TTF fonts for chrissakes.
You make some very good points. But I don't think it has to involve removing choice, so much as it should make some of them less obvious. This is kind of how Apple handled it with OSX. Very pretty and functional interface, but if you really want to get your hands dirty, you can easily go for it.
I do not like the new look. I would rather
GNOME-ized KDE than vice versa. But I do not
care as I Ximianize my Red Hat anyway.
Kubus
KDE is a package deal. People work hard on it with that in mind. When someone comes along and picks and chooses pieces from the whole, the original idea is trashed. As all of you know, a big part of the Open Source community is the belief in it. For anyone to do anything for free they must believe what they are doing is worthwhile. I can't help but feel bad for the KDE folks who are watching their baby be split into pieces, and incorporated into someone else's dream. You know, this is Red Hat we're talking about here. This *could* seriously alter the future of KDE. When the very idea behind a project changes, a lot of people become disenchanted. Unfortunately, the thin veneer of idealism is all that holds many projects together.
Then again, a license is a license. Red Hat was totally in the right to do what they did. The question is, how does large-scale project snatching effect the developers? This has happened a million times before in the paying world, and the free one too I'm sure.
Crystal Meth: Would you ingest somthing made from a poisonous gas and an explosive metal? You do it every day -- Salt!
Actually, I feel that way.
My ideal situation would be for all applications to look and behave in the same way. It might be themeable, but there's only one theme - all applications use it.
But Qt-based, gtk-based, and XUL-based applications do not behave in the same way. So I would rather they be visually distinct. The consistency of appearance is a foolish one IMHO because it falsely implies a consistency of behavior.
(Obligatory quote: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds." It's not really appropriate - I respect the RedHat developers even if I disagree with this decision. I just like the quote. ;)
Fortunately, much of it can be turned off fairly easily, at least in the KDE area. I installed (null) tonight and have done this already. What I don't see any way to get rid of is their bad iconset.
Why not? they are free to contribute to KDE (and they do) and they a free to contribute to GNOME (and they do). So why don't they contrubite interoperability to both? I guess they will sooner or later. Hopefully sonner.
KdenLive/PIAVE - non-linear video editing
Actually, I think that the choice between the two desktops is good, and that (healthy) competition between them helps both of them improve.
Red Hat's idea sounds good in practise, but what I would like to see is the following:
a) A set of themes which make KDE and Gnome look and behave similarly (as similarly as possible, anyway);
AND
b) Some sort of unified control panel application which applies settings, themes, etc, to BOTH KDE and Gnome environments.
It should be possible to have a control panel application which detects which environment it's running under and uses the appropriate GUI toolkit - separation of program logic from GUI code and all that - even to detect at run-time whether both KDE and Gnome are installed.
Of course, both environments will not be identical. But the differences between them could be minimised in this way.
>
> You're absolutely high. Not only is that not true, it is the exact oposite of the truth. For example, the basic idea behind the "Cathedral and the Bazaar" was that open source developers do it for recognition.
There is a *big* difference between the amount of recognition that can be gained from a clear credit in the running interface vs. comments in the source code.
Sure, credit must be kept in the source, but how much does that really matter? These are GUI's after all, and ideally they provide means to guide less saavy users to these environments. But those very same users are *never* going to look at any source.
How then is the programmer to get his due?
I also wanted to say that it's not like "Cathedral and the Bazaar" is the Book Of Law, or anything. It's just one guy's opinions. And if there were a Book Of Law, it'd just be another book by some other guys anyway.
-Scott
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda