Slashdot Mirror
Bero Quits Red Hat Over Treatment of KDE
Vicegrip writes "In an article on leaked release notes on Redhat 8.0 CNet also revealed that Bernhard Rosenkraenzer, known here on Slashdot as berorh, has quit over objections he has on what Redhat is doing to KDE in the new release. Bero says that the new version of KDE in Redhat 8.0 is going to be crippleware.
I know I always found Bero's comments here on Slashdot helpful and insightful. His worries about what Redhat is doing to KDE for 8.0 have me rather concerned and thinking of switching distributions."
Chat buddy, warn me not!
I pray for first post in the name of the .test community.
w000000000t
Mandrake 9.0 seems to respect KDE & GNOME, and Bero has been part of MandrakeSoft in 1999!
It is sad to see a product / company that has come so far, yet still struggles in such a way.
I'll be switching too...if all goes as planned
I am one of those who say that Red Hat should only support either Gnome *or* KDE, but allow through the libraries to run each other's applications, in a way that it is completely unified (apps to behave and look the same even if they are from different toolkits).
More discussion about this here:
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=1808
Yes, it's a great loss to the Linux community, but would you really want such a man working on crippleware? I see no problem in his leaving and wish him the best of luck. Maybe he will one day make his own linux distro or something of the sort.
from previous stories on this topic, i got the impression that they were 'krippling' KDE's default setttings, but the user could go back and change everything back to the real defaults.
is this not the case?
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
Give it a rest already - if you don't like it then change the KDE they give you. Isn't that the whole point? Free, open source software that you can do what you want with, well, until you do what you want with it then there is a problem. Go buy Microsoft.
I wish I was stupid^H^H^H^H^H^Hwealthy enough that I could quit my job just on principle.
Let me be the first of 100's to point out that when you write free software, people are free to do what they like with it. No one seems to get up in arms when Redhat enhances "ls" to make it more friendly for their users...what's got everybody up in arms is that Redhat is trying to enhance its *brand* by hacking KDE.
Real free software people would be against (or at least oblivious) to the branding in the first place.
Slashdot 's editors are dickheads
Want a distro without the KDE politics? Download the recently (like today) released Mandrake 9.0 and don't forget to use a mirror.
Can someone who's actually USED a beta of RH8 talk about whether the KDE implementation is in fact crippleware? I was under the impression that it was just subjected to some Red Hat skinning and rejiggered so that some of the "scares the newbies" features were off by default. That doesn't sound like crippleware, but someone out there must know more.
Props to the best desktop linux distro!
It's refreshing to see someone standing up for their beliefs. Despite the fact that I actually don't know who this is, the fact that CNet and Slashdot covered it leads me to believe he is someone of worth and recognition in the OS community, and hopefully his leaving will raise more than a few eyebrows.
I fail to see what Redhat is doing that could so offend Bero that he would quit his job with them. Redhat has already acknowledged that they have more Gnome experience on their staff, and Bero quitting will only exacerbate that problem. It seems to me that he is only creating a larger problem for KDE by leaving a position of influence at Redhat over something that appears to be rather benign, and actually insightful on Redhat's part. Looks like big egos will always get in the way of better software.
My sig hates me. That's ok, I never cared for it much anyway.
This story has already been covered once or twice on Slashdot, and a lot of users have said "This is good, it makes GNOME and KDE consistent, and if a user wants real KDE, he/she can always edit the configuration back to use the default KDE applications, etc."
But I've been using Red Hat 8 betas and it's not at all clear just how many things been changed... only that many aspects of the KDE environment in Red Hat are not configured in the same way as the 'real' KDE 3.x environment downloaded from kde.org. Yes, I could try and edit the configuration back to what looks like the real default KDE environment, but it would be a pain (many, many things would have to be changed) and I've no doubt that some things would remain broken or 'disconnected' from the KDE environment and replaced by GNOME applications, etc., in interesting RedHat-ish ways.
I'll be switching to another distribution next upgrade, because I want the KDE environment on my computer, not just kicker and kwm with a lot of GNOME apps and Red Hat apps connected to them.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
> and thinking of switching distributions
Once you go Slack, you'll never go back!
Just go to Slackware, and avoid all the political crap of other distros. Pure Linux, in its sweetest form. No nonsense, no hand-holding, no stupidity, no confusion. Just Linux like it was meant to be!
Easy install, easy maintainance, easy use: Slackware!
to Zero, to reflect his new income level.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
I use gentoo and when i am in the irc channels I always here people asking if they can get the kde theme that Redhat Null (beta) uses. I think it totally intergrates the new look perfectly with every other app. This guy is making a big deal about nothing. Have you seen the default theme of KDE? ITS UGLY! The new look doesnt make kde look like gnome2! It just makes the two desktops look alike so NEW users dont get confused. I remember installing Mandrake 7.1 and they did the same EXACT thing, This is not new. The new user should be able to launch both kde and gnome and they should look Identical. Redhat will make sure EVERY thing works and if it doesnt people will complain and Redhat will make the changes based on user experience. Come on guys, LETs get over this.
And it makes sence because gnome2 is the default DE, why is it bad for qt apps to have unified look?
Gezz!
keanmarine.com
Linux has started to become the platform of choice for extremely complex and involved multimedia production, powering enormous render farms and video storage RAID arrays, yet still, Linux falls on its face for mundane day-to-day productivity work. Linux can render the incredibly lifelike texturing and animation exhibited in "Monsters Inc." and "Titanic", yet it can't even open a simple Word document without formatting errors. While delivering superior performance rendering these intensely detailed and hard-wrought movie scenes, Linux stills falls short of Windows when playing Quake. How did we get into this perplexing state of affairs?
I'll tell you why -- good old fashioned ego. Whereas the low end (kernel developers, compiler writers, etc.) and high end (clustering software, 3D modelling and rendering, etc.) of development is led by strong, well-organised teams of well-trained developers with vision and understanding, the middle ground of the Linux world is polluted with warring egos and silly spats like this. There are myriad competing, mutually incompatible yet separately inadequate office suites (Star Office, KOffice, Applix,...), desktop environments (KDE, Gnome, XFCE, CDE, UDE, ROX,...), and X servers (XFree86, MetroX, XiG). We can't even decide on a printing system! If all the man-hours poured into fighting over KDE and GNOME were combined into a common vision, we would have one perfect end-user desktop, instead of two poor imitations of Windows.
Don't give me the old "competition" argument either. There is only one Linux kernel, which seems to progress just fine without another competing project nipping at its feet and instigating flamewars. The endless KDE vs. GNOME, Applix vs. StarOffice, and other feuds have wasted more productivity than would be gained by and competitive drive.
I, for one, am somewhat miffed that while my operating system powers Hollywood blockbusters and NASA supercomputers, it still can't fully replace Windows on my office desktop. Linux is growing up; its users need to grow up with it, shed their egos and work towards the common goal of creating an excellent working environment.
Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever
I wonder what Red Hat was thinking. If they wanted to alienate KDE users they could have dropped KDE from their distro entirely. Why did they waste money crippling it?
It's clear from the KDE community reaction (well documented in megabytes of flames this last month) that many who love RH and KDE will switch to Mandrake or SuSE over the way RH has treated KDE.
Go with Mandrake. It's not just for newbies anymore. They go to the edge...
Postfix over sendmail
Postgres over MySQL
i586 over i386
I'm sure there is others.
Its not about whether RH or KDE is right.
An employee of RH was being asked to work on something he disagreed with. So he left.
KDE is free to moan, RH is free to mod KDE, and this guy is free to get employment elsewhere.
Personally, it restores some of my confidence in humans. At least we're not all wage slaves who couldn't give a rats ass what they were working for and who they were serving.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I'm sure that, since he is no longer an employee, he'll have even more influence over RedHat's decisions.
I think it would have been better for him to demonstrate a better way -- such as making a set of RPMs for RedHat 8.0 available for how he thinks KDE should be. I remember downloading RPMs from ~bero in the past.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
These wars are pointless. The only casualty is the Linux desktop.
Redhat wants to create a desktop where gnome and kde looks remarkabily similar. I think its a good idea. With the power of linux, if you don't like how Redhat's default interface is, then run KDE's wizards and change it to how you like.
I'm sad to see him go, I hope things work out for him.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
I have a lot of respect for Bero, back when I used redhat I used to use his packages of KDE CVS because I couldn't get it to compile.
However, I can understand why redhat is standardising its interface this and I'm not sure it is a bad thing. The difference between KDE and Gnome _IS_ confusing to new users, and it is somewhat ugly to mix GTK and QT apps on the screen at the same time. I think that KDE and Gnome should compete on the technical merits of their class libraries, not on how pretty their default install is.
Consider Ximian, Lindows, etc. They all modify kde to look like windows. Why is it ok for them to do that, but no ok for RedHat to give all their programs a similar look-and-feel.
Anyway, I hope financial reasons won't mean Bero is no longer able to contribute to the open source community.
I'd really like for him to explain "crippleware". How are they crippling it? While he has seen it and I have to wait for another week, so far everything points to Red Hat simply changing the default themes and icons. I connot see how this is crippling KDE.
Furthermore, it is my understanding that the default KDE themes are in there and simply need to be selected from the configurator. How is this crippling it.
To go one step further, I see a fair bit of ranting, especially on Slashdot(go figure), about how bad this new Red Hat theme is. The thing is, if you don't like it change it. How many people actually continue to use KDEs default themes? Few if any, I'll bet. Pretty much everybody changes the desktop to their own preferrences. So, what's the big deal about selecting your own preferrences over the Red Hat theme versus selecting your own preferrences over the KDE themes?
Much ado about nothing....
Why? Because RedHat continues to release everything they develop under the GPL? Because they're trying to create a credible alternative to MS-Windows on the desktop, so people like me won't have a future of writing .Net crapplications to look forward to?
SuSE is great.. even Linus himself uses it!
But I really don't quite understand the vast resentment about this latest RedHat move: will somebody please enlighten me why it's so out of line?
Besides 'nicety' issues (it would be nice if RH didn't do this) and besides marketing reasons (obviously having a consistent interface is very desirable) can anybody explain any legal reason why RH isn't allowed to do what they are doing?
As far as I remember, when you GPL your software, anybody can do practically whatever they want with it as long as they provide it at cost (duplication costs) and as long as they publish their (modified) sources.
If you don't like the way RH ships their preconfigured Gnome/KDE desktop, well, uninstall the provided packages and install the ones you can download from ftp.kde.org and so on.
The people that would be interested in having a 'pure' KDE and/or a 'pure' Gnome, are technically inclined people which are more than capable of doing what I just outlined: I really doubt that your average non-power-user cares at all about this, as long as they can use mozilla, openoffice etc. I don't think they'd care.
If you have licensed your software under a specific license (GPL, BSD, Artistic...) and a licensee does things to your software that you don't like, well, maybe you didn't think long & hard enough before opting to use the license you've been using. The only solution is to decide on a new license (good luck in getting everybody to agree) and to fork the codebase under that new license, but it's definitely not a painless or sometimes even possible solution (given the 'viral' nature of the GPL).
-- the cake is a lie
I cant say that the changes are that big of a deal. A couple of applications has been exchanged so that the user uses the same ones in Gnome and KDE. Anyone can choose the one they like to try from the menu. The changes are very superficial and to say they cripples KDE in any way is to really overreact. The theme used can be changed easy to the default theme.
I just see this as an honest effort from redhat to make things simpler for the user. They could just as well just plain dropped the KDE desktop and only included the libs.
Why do some of you even complain when you outright screamed when OEM's couldnt remove ie or change icons in windows?
HTTP/1.1 400
Windows is powerful on the desktop, but it falls short in anything more than a four or eight way server.
Solaris is good up to 100+ CPUs but sucks on the desktop.
IRIX is good for scalability and professional level desktop apps, but doesn't have the capabiltiy to be a generic workstation.
AIX, server, not workstation.
HP-UX, Tru64, etc, same
VMS, rocks for transaction based services, bites bag for applications.
Linux is trying to be everything at once. I think with more focus on one end or the other, Linux would go a lot farther. It doesn't have the developer base to do EVERYTHING well, just like the commercial OS vendors.
Out of curiosity, in what way is KDE being crippled by Redhat? I'm aware that they are making some interface tweaks to make Gnome and KDE look more similar (a good idea IMHO). Are they taking steps beyond this that are actually having a negative impact on KDE as a whole? I mean if Redhat is in fact doing something notibly detrimental to KDE, then I'd be more than happy to switch distros (seeing as KDE is what I use). But otherwise this sounds like an overreaction.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I win! I win!
Developers developers developers developers developers!
is give peace a chance.
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Red Hat used to be pushing GNOME, and pretty much ignoring KDE. The KDE guys didn't like this.
Now Red Hat is trying to integrate KDE into their distro seamlessly. The KDE guys don't like this at all.
What should Red Hat do to make these guys happy? I think the only way the KDE guys would be happy is if Red Hat puts in KDE without changing anything. Great, now Red Hat has two different install options that look and work very differently. What a support nightmare. So, Red Hat would have to budget more money for support of KDE, or else just say it isn't supported... in other words, push GNOME and ignore KDE.
So it looks like the only way the KDE guys will be happy is if Red Hat goes out of their way to increase their support costs. Let's face it, if it is going to cost money to keep the KDE guys happy, Red Hat isn't going to do it!
P.S. Calling the Red Hat version of KDE "crippleware" isn't helpful. Red Hat isn't trying to hurt KDE; they are a business, and how does hurting KDE make money for them?
Any bugs Red Hat introduces to KDE will increase their support costs. People who buy Red Hat call Red Hat when they have trouble.
Red Hat is doing this so that a user can run KDE apps or GNOME apps without really caring which is which. Some of the KDE guys are complaining that Red Hat will make KDE look bad. The idea is that no one will even notice whether they are using KDE or not.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
...it's a GNU/Brand
I've yet to see anything tat Red Hat has done to their distribution of KDE that would classify it as "crippleware". Removing the "about KDE" box is rude, and obnoxious, but none of it cripples KDE in the least. Unless someone can show me different, all of the changes can be reversed easily by anyone with a clue. That doesn't cripple a damn thing.
All this kvetching and martyrdom bullshit from the KDE developers is just that. Pissed off that someone is using your code in ways that offend, insult, or annoy you? Fork the codebase and develop under a more restrictive license. These pointless martyrdom gestures and venom-laden rants only make you look dumb and childish.
The desktop sure isn't crippleware, thats for sure, and changing its a violation of the license agreement. Commercial software licenses are the only way to protect developer freedom.
than KDE or GNOME. KDE and Gnome both have pretty faces at first glance, but within minutes of use prove to be slapped together messes. The solution isn't to consolidate the two, rather it's to throw both out and start over from scratch, this time with a game plan going in. Neither will ever pose a real threat to Windows and they are too far gone to turn around.
--- What?
Any thoughts?
Yes, Linux 8 is definitely on the horizon.. of jupiter.
And Linux as a name is about ten times more widespread than redhat. I don't think this will do anyone any harm, except redhat users prefering KDE.
Through all the flames and accusations, the only thing I've definitively concluded Red Hat is doing is changing the default themes & colors & such so that KDE apps and GNOME apps behave as identically as possible, in order to minimize interface confusion for users. Maybe they're doing other stuff, but I haven't got a straight answer.
WHAT IS RED HAT DOING TO KDE? While we're at it, are they doing similar stuff to GNOME?
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
i use RH 7.3 because it included KDE 3. when i tried limbo (RH 8 beta) it was hard to tell what WM i was using. i gave up on it because it didn't even resemble anything i was used to, and it was very slow. if i wanted to learn a new GUI setup i'd go buy a MAC and learn OS X. the thing i have always like most about RH is that it used standard GNU\Linux apps, but made installing and upgrading them a cinch. if i can't install the next version of RH and easily get into KDE or Gnome's default setups i'll just switch to mandrake or debian, both of which are now just as easy to install or upgrade new packages with.
Way to stir up the pot Slashdot. Just what we needed, Thanks!!!
Of course what do the editiors care? They just light the fuse and walk away. It the bystanders who end up getting hurt.
Now this useless blown up story about a developer who disagreed with his employer will spread all around the internet.
I look forward to tomorrow's frontpage of Cnet, NY Times etc where they all say the entire opensource community has turned on Redhat. And also how the split between Gnome and KDE is ripping the community apart, and maybe a little Linux is too fragmented FUD as well.
Did I say thanks already?
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Sounds to me like he was fired. What kind of wierd ethics puts some freeware project ahead of the company you work for? Redhat does pour alot of cash into open source. Shouldn't they be allowed to steer it as they see fit?
Someone you trust is one of us.
His worries about what Redhat is doing to KDE for 8.0 have me rather concerned and thinking of switching distributions.
Jeebus - talk about sheeple. How about thinking about the issue for yourself instead.
RedHat pushes GNOME and GNOME was only created to kill KDE. (Yes, you can mod this down, but it's still the truth and you know it.) RedHat doesn't like KDE and the only reason there were KDE-packages (other than those included in the RedHat releasees) was Bero creating them in his spare time. Yes that's correct, RedHat did not pay their "KDE-maintainer" to create packages for KDE-releases.
If you look at non-technical usegroups, you will see that in areas where KDE-centric distributions dominate (like SuSE does in Europe), about 5 to 15% of users post with Linux, while Linux is pretty much non-existant in American usegroups (although Linux has risen very much in the last months, it's still usually less than 5%).
Coincidence? Maybe. I didn't do statistics on all newsgroups.
(Yes, I do know that usegroup users are not representative for the all computer users, yet is proves that Linux can be used by A LOT of users on the desktop RIGHT NOW and that no magic "formula" is needed. The software is available RIGHT NOW.
Will RedHat's attempts to "nullify" their desktop make it more successful on the desktop? I don't think so (Will GNOME apps use KDE's great printing dialogue that lets you create or even email PDFs? No. Will GNOME PIM apps be aware of the KDE-counterparts? No. Creating a theme does not solve any problem), anyway we will see what happens. They certainly can't do any worse on the desktop than they are currently doing.
As a writer, I'm constantly faced with the same old scenario of "killing my babies" - bits of prose which I love but does nothing to help the overall piece. So I delete those prose bits. Its painful. It sucks. But its has to be done to create a better work
I believe Linux programmers should follow suit if they ever want to see Linux takeover the mainstream desktop.
Fuck KDE. Fuck Gnome. I don't care. Lets just choose one and go with it. Hell, create a Unity desktop - but one desktop for everyone to focus on. Redhats made the first step with null, the question is - are we ready to follow suit?
Kde is technically better, but out of the box it looks like ass. You can hardly blame Red Had for wanting a consistent and attractive interface.
Oh, and guess what: you don't have to use Red Hat. I don't. Funny how the world works. no?
The middle mind speaks!
send my resume to for the newly open posistion? ;)
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
bero[insert initials of new company here...] berohp beromandrakesoft bero...rh in a couple of months?
My sig hates me. That's ok, I never cared for it much anyway.
This may sound like a stupid question but wouldnt it be better for both of the developers of KDE and GNOME to just work togeather to make one killer WM ?
personally, I find the default KDE look and behavior irritating. if Redhat is going to skin it up and make it purty, then more power to 'em.
... it just has a little better graphics). from what I've seen in the pre-release, RH80 has a much more polished and professional UI than anything else out there.
(for the KDE lovers out there, I find Gnome just about as annoying and "more unintegrated"
How can you compare a specific, detailed task like animation to the diverse needs of common end-users? That's like comparing a single piston to a automobile with options. I'm surprised the parent post was modded up to 5.
Or perhaps those technical people who help a company make decisions will read about this here on Slashdot and be more informed when they are asked if Red Hat 8.0 is appropriate.
Knowing that Red Hat is intentionally hiding some of KDE's features from the users *is* important. I used to consider KDE clunky and unintuitive, and swore by Gnome. Then, I tried KDE 3. It works. While Gnome continues to bloat itself with poorly designed projects (some of which are dead) and dependencies from hell, KDE just gets better.
This doesn't mean that RH 8.0 will suck, but given that Red Hat loves Gnome, it's something to watch out for. And knowing what to watch out for is really important.
Finally, I think it's good that companies have somebody watching what they do, even when those companies are like Red Hat.
--Elentar
The wheel it turns, around and around, with an ancient rumbling sound.
"Looks like big egos will always get in the way of better software."
I must disagree with this. I think strong principles are a great virtue of the open source community. Instead of being less productive at a KDEless Redhat, Bero will be more productive somewhere else. This doesn't say anything bad about Redhat or Bero and only further supports the diversification (and competition) of the community.
I am sure that the majority of MS employees would not walk out if suddenly MS decided to do something as drastic as go Open Source. You may call this corporate strength, but I call it 40,000 "yes" men (and women) who don't give a fsck what their company does, as long as that paycheck comes on Friday.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Red Hat should just drop KDE and put all their resources into GNOME. Every KDE program has a GNOME equivalent. It's not big suprise that they're realling pushing for gtk/gnome, seeing that most of their top hackers are old school gtk/gnome hackers. Let Mandrake and SuSe take over the polishing up KDE for distribution job.
"I keep looking in the want-ads under 'revolutionary' but there don't seem to be any listings.. "
Hello dolly!
... ripping shit down to rebuild, rejecting norms, rejecting opinions and denouncing things we percieve as misguided or wrong is a key part of the process required to arrive at newer and superior solutions.
.. and even quit your job if you like, although the way people go on here, you'd think they were envious or scared of the freedom to do just that.
It's like people have confused 'freedom' with 'freedom do you whatever the hell you want without actually being subjected to what other people _think_ of it'. Which is a shame, because peer discussion and judgement is about the most important check/balance in society. While we try and limit the actions that can result from peer judgement (to avoid mob justice, for instance), we should try and avoid attempting to squash criticism just because its not 'productive'
When people are free to do crap, don't forget others are well within their rights to freedom to voice dissatisfaction
"Old man yells at systemd"
Personally, I think trying to make it so users DON'T KNOW NOR CARE what the underlying libraries are makes sense, the resulting system will become much easier to use. If the KDE apps are crippled, then that's a problem, but I'd expect that to be fixed in future releases. More importantly, it's likely that this process will encourage more reuse between the groups, and that's a good thing.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
RedHat should ignore them. If they wanted control over their product they shouldn't have released it under the GPL.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Here is RedHat's take on this issue, which makes a lot of sense to me. If you're interested in trying an alternative to Gnome or KDE, check out WindowMaker, it's fast, stable, simple and has some nice themes.
--It's Pimptastic!--
Let me summarize what I have read:
From the article:
"Red Hat's new "Bluecurve" desktop interface, a customization of the traditional KDE or Gnome interfaces."
Translates too:
Red Hat decided - instead of using just KDE and Gnome to add Bluecurve which is a modified version of KDE that is "more user friendly"
Former RH employee
"I don't want to work on crippling KDE, and they (Red Hat) don't want an employee who admits (Red Hat) 8.0's KDE is crippleware,"
Translates too:
I think the majority of linux users will not want to use this "user-friendly" crap because linux users are all power users and red hat is dulling themselves down just to try and bring more noobs to linux and make some money and i'm too self-righteous to be involved in that hideous plot.
The words "Cripple KDE and former RH employee" appear on Slashdot and the masses go crazy....
Ave Molech Setting
And when you live in a democracy with free speach, people are free to disagree with Red Hat.
MOD THE CHILD UP!
Would you care to explain exactly which KDE features are hidden? I'm using (null) now, and other than the theming I do not see any differences (I still can access the KDE control center to change my settings for example).
Red Hat have:
Oh dear meohmy poopoopoooooooooo what will become of us ... hehe ... the emotocent webtoe bastard can take a fscking flying leap off redmond towers for all anyone cares. It's a fscking OS_GUI not a chocolate eclair which after all has some intrinsic VALUE. Heh, pad're when ya jump off that tower take a coupla' dweezle pals along fer the glide ...hehe ...
I like all the options. Because of all the options, I get to use really useful, powerful systems, like FVWM2, Galeon, LaTeX, etc, rather than the more "mainstream" KDE/Gnome, Mozilla, OpenOffice, or whatever, all of which are much harder to use (for me) than the ones I do use. Different people feel different things are important, and they grab the bits of various projects that they like and build on them. I can then find the projects that most closely match my own priorities and use those.
I have no idea what this RedHat KDE cafuffle is about, because I chose to use Mandrake. Why couldn't the Mandrake people (or the SUSE people, or whoever) just work for RedHat instead? Because they have different ideas of how to make a distro.
We don't have a common vision, and this is a Good Thing.
-Erf C.
Cthulu always calls collect...
it's about time. I've always found KDE to be ugly and unpleasant since I first encountered it almost three years ago. I'll be glad to see it go.
Hats off to them for having the guts to do whats good for the public in general instead of doing what the *leet* developers of KDE and Gnome think their gui should look like.
:).
Its about choice. If someone doesnt like it then they can leave
... you should think for yourself rather than take one man's word for it - if KDE is crippled, it will show. Install it, try it, love it or leave it. Don't rush to judge. It's RedHat's distro; they can do what they want. A few will disagree whatever they do.
I say more power to them for doing what they think users will like, thus making more sales. You can't always bow down idealists.
If it works, watch others follow with their homogenized versions of their products and maybe the desktops will quit fighting over the crumbs, get on the same page, and go for the big markets. I'm dying to install Linux of some kind on every computer in my family; I'm just waiting for the distro that will keep the distress phone calls from my mom and dad to a minimum. I hope this one is it.
Love to all,
Gabriel
They were saying about existing ISOs for 8.0. Does anybody have them anywhere?
The simplest solution for anything I've ever seen is this:
Try it for god sakes. Before you bitch about it or even see it, just try it. Wait until Redhat 8.0 comes out, get a copy, install it, and check out the GUI.
If it sucks big-time, then flaming is somewhat justified. If it works better than what has gone before, then either use it or go crawling back to your old glitchy GUI versions and feel that hollow satisfaction that your whining was warranted.
Seems to me, the only way anyone wins is if it's an improvement - phorm
...when you're fighting yourself
As an out of work programer, I can tell you first hand that this is not the enviorment to quit in if there is any other choice. Mind you his reasons for leaving are good, but it is aweful hard to get a job today. Maybe he has name recignition to get one, but there are a lot of good programers (and many bad ones too I suppose) who are looking for work.
Good luck is all I can say. If you find a job, please think of the rest of us without work, and see if you can do something for us. (hint, get me a job. :)
Too bad, pad're just one *nix desktop is wanted, if only to bitchslap tarball weenies like you. Droolon. Crawl back in the closet ta grope yer fav electromechanic blo-up dolly. Stay there. Shutup. The rest of us have work to do.
I think it makes a lot of sense for RedHat to cherry-pick the best components from KDE and Gnome and integrate them at the desktop and packaging level. Such integration is long overdue. KDE seems a little better at presenting a Windows-like desktop, but Gnome has some key applications for which KDE does not have a mature equivalent. And third party additions like OpenOffice are yet different and also need to be accomodated
KDE developers can kick and scream all they want, this is good for users, and RedHat is doing the right thing.
is there a slashdot id berounemployed?
>While Gnome continues to bloat itself with poorly
>designed projects (some of which are dead) and
>dependencies from hell, KDE just gets better.
Quick quiz, which of the following projects are dead - GConf? Pkg-config? Glib? GDK/GTK? ATK? Fontconfig? Pango? GStreamer? ORBit? Bonobo? libxml? libxslt?
Here's a hint: the answer is none of them.
As for calling these "bloat", "dependency hell", and "poorly designed"... Well, I simply don't agree with you on any count. Gnome 2.0 is a lot leaner on my machine than any of the Gnome 1.x releases, and they're commiting to exactly what comprises the desktop and development platform, so third party applications can know exactly what they can depend on having.
Matt
All those buzz words in a single post really did it for me!
The layperson isn't getting their Linux news from slashdot, so I doubt it matters that much.
I resisted KDE until they allowed me to select focus behavior. I still miss having the desktop be multiple screens wide. I also got frequent corruption of settings files under sawfish, so I switched to KDE but run the Gnome panel with KDE (It works great). I just wish the Kicker had drawers!
Mike
ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/3.0.3/RedHat/7.3/ i386/
[root@hat-trick:~/kde]# rpm -Uhv kdelibs-3.0.3-0.7.i386.rpm kdebase-3.0.3-0.7.i386.rpm
error: failed dependencies:
kdelibs >= 3.0.3-10 is needed by kdebase-3.0.3-0.7
so kdebase is dependent on kdelibs >= 3.0.3-10 and yet they provide you with 3.0.3-0.7. silly
the difference between KDE and GNOME and RedHat's thing, then you are "geek" enough to compile source or install the RPM's that someone will create 24 hours after the RH 8.0 isos hit the mirrors.
I'm not saying that I wouldn't quit if my views diverged greatly from my employer; I'm just saying that it doesn't really matter to most of us.
I won't use this desktop for even a day, but I'll still use redhat for the same reason that I've used redhat for years...It is the best supported distro out there with respect to commercial apps and Free binary packages. Redhat has never been the best desktop OS since GNU/Linux had a modern desktop.
Besides, this is probably a smart move from the corporate desktop point of view.
If the coin was reversed, no doubt you'd be responding to similar bullshite about the Gnome developers. It's bull. The simple truth is that RedHat favour Gnome, they want to go with Gnome but they're afraid to ship without KDE (because KDE is the most widely used) so they're trying to neutralize KDE. It really is that simple.
There is PLENTY of work building free software. I don't see the problem? Did someone say there is a depression in the software industry? They just don't know how to count the REAL new software economy. Now, if only it put food on the table and paid our mortgage.
how does it help a new user if his linux distro has 2 different, but identical looking desktops?
Why not using kde OR genome and modify it to make it more user friendly. This kind of mimicry does only confuse people.
KDE and Gnome are still 2 different things, even if they look identical.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
He's simply viewing the actions of making KDE act the same as Gnome is crippling it's functionality, NOTHING about crippleware!
.
>>
Hi,
Effective immediately, I've left Red Hat (mostly in mutual agreement - I
don't want to work on crippling KDE, and they don't want an employee who
admits RH 8.0's KDE is crippleware).
If anyone needs/wants to contact me, please use the addresses
bero@berolinux.org or bero@kde.org.
For any RH specific KDE issues, please contact Than Ngo
LLaP
bero
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Those dependencies actually fight bloat since GNOME developers dont have to rewrite their own xml/configuration parsers, toolbars, etc etc.
This is just more evidence for the idea that GNU/Linux users don't really want to win the battle... don't want GNU/Linux to become popular... that there is an elitist attitude among many out there (myself included) that relishes the role of the underdog, and wants things to stay with GNU/Linux in that position. So we all need to reconcile these two feelings... ask the question-- do you really want to see GNU/Linux become mainstream? Further, are you willing to see the use of open-source through to its end? So far, in my experience, both of these answers have been "no".
"We must still have chaos within in order to be able to give birth to a dancing star." --Friedrich Nietzsche
Does the KDE team even realize how inane disputes like the one they're in with RedHat end up hurting more than helping? C'mon, guys, if you didn't want this to happen, you shouldn't have used the license you did. Suck up those egos a bit, please.
Endless whining only hurts KDE. Accept reality, and get on with life. If you were really interested in the open source community's interests, you'd quietly accept that sometimes things you don't like happen with free licenses and get on with the coding.
If RedHat did indeed cripple KDE (of which no one has seen real proof of), than RH will suffer a marketshare loss. Happy now? Your holy vengeance will have been wreaked!
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Very true. Red Hat is doing something that consumers have wanted (and Linux tweakers have been doing for some time with themes) -- making their KDE and GNOME apps look similar.
KDE people whining about this are going to be ignored. The GNOME people have accepted the loss of their icons without throwing fits, though it certainly changes RH GNOME's "look and feel". I can't figure out why the KDE people can't do the same for the changes that affected their "look and feel."
May we never see th
I'd tell them to take their desktop and shove it unless they called it GNU/KDE.
To be more specific, his position is that you can't restrict what people do with the software, even if you wanted to. It's more of a legal position than anything else.
I've been looking at projects under an extended GPL called the GGPL, which pulls together GPL, the UN charter on human rights, and a set of sustainable development principles. My first reaction to the language about not using products under this license in war of any kind was similar. Just how would you stop them, legally, or practically.
You probably can't, but that doesn't mean you can't disapprove, and say so. Most of the effect is social anyway, and making a stand can be pretty effective in this domain. Legitimate millitary people would stay away, and the others probably wouldn't know about it anyway, or be bound by it in any case.
So I say, tollerate and disaprove, which is more or less what is happening in this case. It is RedHat's right to do it, and it is his right to disapprove of what they have done. I'm sure he knows he has no legal standing to object.
I'm filling this in so someone sees it and mods this fucking Nazi down.
The fucker.
Its open source, Redhat can do what they want.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Actually, if I remember correctly, Red Hat *does* have KDE as an install option currently (as opposed to GNOME). The KDE guys didn't like it because GNOME was the default checked option in the installer.
May we never see th
The underlying phenomenon here was illuminated many moons ago by ESR in his 'noosphere' essay, and is broadly obvious to anyone with a background in marketing.
Windows has a distinctive look-and-feel. The macintosh has a distinctive l&f. Why? Branding, branding branding! The same organisation that is responsible for the overall package -- the OS in Microsoft's case; computer in Apple's --- is responsible for the interface. The visual differences between KDE and Gnome exist for similar reasons. By replacing their respective brand-imagery with its own, RedHat now gets to gobble up the mindshare of both teams -- the only form of 'payment' that these projects really ask for --- without any sort of renumeration. Need I remind the reader how important mindshare is to the financing and ultimate success of any open source project? Would KDE have received funding from the German government if it had just been some grey nnonymous widget-maker for a couple of American software firms?
Sure, you could characterise this as a case of warring egos; but egos are essential to survival: The perfectly altruisitic quickly become fodder for the pragmatically selfish. KDE and Gnome are well within their rights to protest; their identities are their equity. That's how this market works --- regardless of the apparent legality or probity of such maneuvers under license.
- undoware.ca
Sayfoos, United Linux and Mandrake run pure, unadulterated vegan-macrobiotic KDE. Go there. Me? I don't care. I use Blackbox. It's bad enough I have to load QT, KDElibs, KDEbase, etc., to get the few KDE-based programs I compile (kfontinst, kastrolog) and the analogous Gnome parts for the even fewer gnome programs that don't run like molasses or crash all the time. Is there any complete distro out there without EITHER?
I know: debian, slackware and vector...
I noticed that "ls" messes around with alphabetical order in the latest Red Hat distributions, like ignoring caps and ignoring punctuation. The files "data_*" are mixed with "Data_xyz" and "data-xyz". I thought about piping the result of "ls" into "sort" but "sort" seems to be crippled as well. How do I get "ls" and "sort" to sort using plain old "strcmp" as the ordering test?
he was a useless hack anyway. he won't keep making redhat look like crap this way.
...and many here do, is that this is ENGINEERING A PRODUCT, and that this is NOT ART!
Developers need to get their ego OUT of the development process and decisions. We are building a product that is useful to others, and it is the OTHERS who decide whether it is useful.
Know your audience, listen to them closely, and build what THEY WANT.
Our job is to make the most reliable, efficient and robust implementation of what they want, not to tell them what they want.
In fact, there are very few situations in which developers have a real chance of actually knowing what the users want, generally limited to building developer tools, and situations where the developer is also a domain expert in the project area.
This kind of "I'm writing it and I know best about everything" nonsense is the main thing holding back Linux and the open source movement.
In contrast, the main thing moving Linux forward is serious projects focused building to customer-centric (vs egocentric) specs.
[flame off]
I should probably have included it in my submission to Slashdot. My humble apologies to the maintainers of that website for any inconvenience caused by the traffic. I just linked to the site the way CNet did :-(
.
List: kde-devel
Subject: New address
From: Bernhard Rosenkraenzer
Date: 2002-09-25 7:36:31
[Download message RAW]
Hi,
Effective immediately, I've left Red Hat (mostly in mutual agreement - I
don't want to work on crippling KDE, and they don't want an employee who
admits RH 8.0's KDE is crippleware).
If anyone needs/wants to contact me, please use the addresses
bero@berolinux.org or bero@kde.org.
For any RH specific KDE issues, please contact Than Ngo
LLaP
bero
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
KDE in Redhat 8.0 is going to be crippleware.
I think this is great! Finally, an IT firm is considering the "differently-abled" when it comes to software UI! Although I do take some offense at the use of cripple...
Wait. We're talking about the same thing right?
What is music when you despise all sound?
All this nonsense about Redhat trying to cripple KDE is ridiculous.
Most of my users use Gnome (they work for the DoD, and I'm contracted to support them), but with this next release of Redhat, i'm wondering why I don't switch them over to KDE.
First of all, I can't use the cluttered menus as an excuse not to use it anymore, because Redhat his fixed that.
Second, Konqueror is a much better file manager ATM than Nautilus.
So contrary to what people may think, this move could actually bring more people to KDE.
Think about it. Why choose Gnome over KDE when KDE has a superior file manager, but everything else is closely the same?
There is an old saying... "Vote with your feet."
I don't run either GNOME nor KDE. I run XFce. That is the wonderful thing about Software Libre. Choices are a Good Thing<tm>.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
However, if you look at it from the KDE developers' point of view, it is different. Imagine that you are a konquerer developer. Until now, you know that if someone tries out KDE, they will try out konquerer and that makes you happy. They may not stick with it, but that is ok. However, with the new redhat, even if a user chooses KDE, they may never see konquerer! Now you begin to wonder what are you writing all this open source code for if no one will see it. I think that is why the KDE developers are so upset.
No, probably because they are slowly becoming the Microsoft of the Linux world.
As Balmer even says, free software is about the community. RedHat does not respect the community.
redhat has made the same changes to *both* gnome and kde to make them both meet at a middle ground. these kde trolls are whiners and pussies and need to die.
> GNOME was created by the GNU folks as an
.net craze after Ximian's "distribution" did not convince anyone to give him money for it.
> alternative to KDE at a time when KDE was
> dependent on a piece of non-free software,
> specifically the Qt libraries.
So instead of replacing the qt library by free software (harmony project) and uniting all forces behind KDE (and harmony) some big ego jerks started spreading lies about KDE and Trolltech and started gnome, which still lags behind KDE by month even though it got a lot more money.
In fact Miguel de ICaza was disappointed that his ideas did not impress anyone at KDE, so he left and started GNome, which he left to get some scraps of the
Richard Stallman discovered that he had not realized the need for a free unified desktop. He felt insulted that someone else (Matthias Ettrich) had that idea and did not call it GNU XYZ something. In fact they did not even ask him for permission. Disrespectful like that Finnish guy... So he supported GNOME for political and personal reasons.
Trolltech got so annoyed that they made a big gift to the world by donating qt to free software. After that nothing would stop KDE.
But no, some people still think GNOME is more politically correct and should therefore be used.
Moritz
redhat is allowed (i know, its shocking) to *not* include redundant applications in its distribution if it wants too. face it, mozilla and evolution are best of breed, konq + kmail pale in comparision. be thankful that RH are including the KDE stuff at all if (for some insane reason) someone actually felt some urgre to use it. you don't like it? dont use it, redhat wont care, becasue you arn't paying their bills anyhow.
If you tell me how to change the following aspects of KDE behavior to the way I have them right now in GNOME, I'll switch to KDE right away:
- The GNOME pager that I use right now renders a miniature version of each virtual desktop that I have, with miniature windows, in color. I have never been able to get KDE to do the same thing.
- In GNOME, panel buttons extend all the way to the edge of the screen. That means, specifically, if my mouse pointer is positioned on the edgemost possible pixel of the panel, I can still click the mouse and execute the panel button. I would like KDE to duplicate this behavior, because edge pixels are very valuable by virtue of being easy to hit.
Please do not tell me to rtfm. I have been told to rtfm about a dozen times and invariably when I press the matter the other person admits that they don't know either. I do not think it is even possible to get KDE to do what I describe. If I am wrong, I would really appreciate being told how.For my usage habits, these two differences alone make GNOME vastly more usable than KDE and I could not even consider KDE for daily work unless KDE were to address or surpass GNOME on these points.
Perhaps Slashdot should be keeping quiet about this, rather than broadcasting it.
;)], but its easy to maintain despite transitioning between the different admins that we have coming and going. and i still keep a copy of it installed on my laptop. again because its easy to use, and it gets the job done.
It's a little scary hearing someone saying this, and specially so nonchanlantly (no offense to poster specifically, intentions seem good).
But this comment is basically suggesting the censorship of information. isnt that what open source software and freedom of speech are so against?
simply because this news may perhaps not be great for m$-alternative software [we dont even know what kind of impact this release will have], doesnt mean it should be held from the masses [and slashdot readers arent exactly the masses anyway].
personally, i started out with more user friendly distros such as mandrake and red hat. we use red hat at work because it offers the strengths of gnu/linux [dont wanna piss anyone off
i'm interested to see what all this talk of convergence actually amounts to. anything that offers an alternative to m$ is at least worth checking out, in my book.
Damn. Bero's linux-easy.com is gone. This is where he kept KDE builds for Red Hat users. It's now a...umm...I have no idea what this site is supposed to be. This is a bad thing for sure.
e =UTF-8&oe =UTF-8&q=cache%3Awww.linux-easy.com%2Fdaily%2F
All that's left is this cached page from Google.
http://216.239.51.100/search?hl=en&lr=&i
what a choice!!!
That said, I don't think I can continue using RHL as my desktop distro. I like the KDE interface. I don't want to use a kinda-sorta merging of 2 different graphical environments. Besides voting with my dollars, I want to let Red Hat know the reason I won't be coughing up the bucks for RHL v8.0+. Who do I contact to let them know that this customer thinks they're making a big mistake?
Sadly, I think more and more people are becoming polarized in their software views where things must be "their way" or "no way".
Never overestimate the end user. -jeramy b. smith
It would be foolhardy for Red Hat to try to compete for all Microsoft users today, Troan said. "This isn't for the secretary," he said, only for people doing basic tasks such as entering data in a Web site.
No shortage of arrogance here...
Single click open is not a good idea because it removes or makes much harder the ability to SELECT the item WITHOUT launching it. Something possibly done much more often than launching.
One click -> Select
Double-click -> Select and Launch
It's a good system. Single-click launch systems are more dangerous and more error prone. You should only Launch when your REALLY mean it. There's nothing worse than launching a hundred kwords. Or even one when all you REALLY wanted was to select a file for a cut and paste operation.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
I don't use KDE or Gnome. I think a serial console is pretty nifty. And these glass TTY's sure are a lot faster than a Model 33ASR, but sometimes I miss the paper punch.
Don't you think it helps to have one desktop look that people can associate with? The mindless computer using drones of society need something without choices, so long as it's not chosen by microsoft or other closed source thugs. So isn't Red Hat doing the right thing?
shh... dont act pro-gnome 'round here, you'll get modded down
intereting point about a open source "mp3" like file. These do exist somewhat such as an .shn format. http://www.furthurnet.com (windows and mac)--legal live music traded
It's sad to see the open source community bickering like this about two good applications that could be even better. (Sigh...) so much energy wasted that could be spent coding...
Bill G doesn't need to beat Linux; we're doing it ourselves.
Look at my karma - I'm bad, just like Michael Jackson!
So will Red Hat still be a viable platform for those people who want to learn to develop using KDE tools/libraries ? This might be a dumb question I`m new to Linux.
freedom of software, and letting people change things to suit their needs. If the KDE and Gnome folks are upset about Red Hat's mods, they should change their license so Red Hat can't make any changes. And while I'm ranting, if the FSF want's people to call all their derived works "GNU/whatever" they should change their licenses to require it. Seems to me, all the folks who claim to champion "free" software sure want to attach a lot of strings to those freedoms.
The only way a lot of the KDE guys would be happy is if RH excised GNOME, ditched every gtk+ app, fired everyone who worked on GNOME, and ran a Stalinesque show trial where everyone publicly humiliated themselves for having ever dared to do anything other than pour money into KDE.
that I agree with you 100%.
RedHat is not a showcase of desktops, it has to .rpm from www.kde.org
provide simple and common look desktop for
corporate users.
If Bero quits for this, then I think he make a bad
decision. Come on, quiting at RedHat only for this?
Working for RedHat is a dream job!
If you want a fullblown KDE desktop, just download
the damn
If you want Linux to be in the Corporate world,
install RedHat 8.0
I'm with RedHat this time, because it is working
on standards, and standards *are* good!
Get my e-mail after a captcha test in: http://tinymailt
I'm intensely curious what all this Bluecurve noise means for the next Ximian release. I love my Ximian desktop, and I've never done a Red Hat upgrade until Ximian's ready for it. I'm certainly willing to give Bluecurve a try, but I suspect I'll end up right back with my current Ximian settings.
Did they even try to get these changes accepted upstream before implementing them on their own? I doubt it, but would love to hear otherwise.
and they don't want an employee who
admits RH 8.0's KDE is crippleware
Uhhhh...that is something about crippleware. Still immature on his part I think,
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Not extremely important, but I believe his name on Slashdot is bero.
RH has also:
- Broke plugin handling
The gruesome details are all in bugzilla.
If I'm uninformed, then you sir, are a liar. Read the actual bug report sometime. Red Hat have done nothign of the sort - they've just compiled KDE with the current GCC - Macromedia has yet to release a GCC 3 based Flash (tho it would seem Flash 6 corrects the problem). You're trying to make out that Red Hat have deliberately sabotages KDE plugins. When Suse, Mandrake, and every other distro also compile KDE with GCC3, will you accuse them of the same?
nuff said.
hi, i definatley came in a bit late but isn't it time for a new GNU/GPL 3 ? e.g. containing lines about protecting developers for their work.
the gnu gpl stuff always had some sidepoints e.g. protecting people. today we see the negative sideeffects from companies ripping off other people's work. i am not against opensource but i am for protecting peoples work. and gnu gpl is definately not protecting it.
He quit his job over the treatment of KDE software? My brother has been out of work since April, as a matter of fact quite a few people are out of work right now. We are currently not hiring, I know of nobody hiring.
We need a new topic for careless and stupid advocacy.
Get a free ipod.
Waldo explains it here:
- 09 -24-008-26-OP-DT-RH-0061
http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2002
To quote someone else.
Redhat may be right. Don't know, haven't used their stuff. But mark my words. When a marketroid starts telling kde or gnome or kernel or whatever developers what to do and what not to do, a number of them will quit. The reason they are doing what they are doing is to get away from the marketroids.
Redhat has the capability to put together an excellent distro with relatively few people because of the contributions of others. Yes it's free, yes they 'legally' do whatever they want. But they of all people depend on the developers. It's up to them to fix this.
A question. Similarly, the kernels that redhat and others use are patched, different than the kernel.org kernel. Some things like file systems or others don't really matter. But what about the bug fixes that get into these and not the main kernel? Has not the mild forking that has occurred hurt the community?
Derek
This is plagiarism, and in academia it is taboo for a reason. Did you see how the kde logo got replaced with a red hat? Did you see how they got rid of all of those program names that had k's in them?
That is how marketers work, they maximize their brandname's recognition, and minimize that of their competitors. Marketers have never cared much for such academic concepts as fair attribution.
If you don't want to pay us developers money, fine, Einstein wasn't made wealthy either, but we don't go calling it Addison-Wesley's theory of relativity just cause they print it for us, do we? Well, the trend is that with RedHat we will never know what person other than RedHat wrote the code. It will be just like Microsoft stealing other people's ideas and never crediting them, except now it is code not ideas.
Stallman needs to get off his behind, and issue the new GPL with provisions requiring proper crediting, and restricting the removal of trademarks and logos, and if he doesn't do it (he has been thinking about it for how many years now?), then someone else needs to.
Kudos to Bero, a man of principle.
The thing you're forgetting is that this is NOT aimed at you.
You CAN edit it back. But you won't. Because it's "too hard". And you're "sure" that some stuff would remain broken.
In other words, we have smoke being blown from a nether oriface.
This isn't about Gnome or KDE. This is about providing a unified end-user experience to those who are using the OS for the first time.
Experienced users are still more than free to hack it to whatever they wish.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The funny thing is that xft is in QT 3.1. Wonder if they're going to yell at TT?
A ct ion=Show&AID=107
n =2002-09 -24-008-26-OP-DT-RH-0039
http://www.trolltech.com/company/announce.html?
As far as the font thing.
http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?lts
It's actually the right thing to do. Someone later down does point out how that may break a proprietary plugin (shockwave). IMHO one more reason to avoid closed-source.
If you don't like it, vote with your feet. But Redhat are making things better, not worse.
Command attempted to use minibuffer while in minibuffer
To be fair, I really should be using the newest version of KDE. I just started with 3.0.0 because that's what came with my distro (redhat 7.3, speaking of which).
Red Hat isn't crippling KDE, they are wrapping it in their own interface to be consistent with Gnome. All the KDE functionality will still be there, just wrapped up in the Kwrap desktop that Red Hat installs.
You'll still be able to use all your favorite programs, there will just be a new, Kwrappy look to them. Every Qt program on your hard drive will have this new look, so that your computer screenshots will all look like Kwrap.
I can understand why Bero might have wanted this to be a more limited change, but what would the point have been? If only some of the KDE programs were given a new look, would people say that Red Hat's desktop was only a piece of Kwrap? No, Red Hat chose to make sure their new distribution was full of Kwrap.
Apologies to the late Satire Wire
Can someone please tell me just exactly what part of the GPL Redhat is violating here? The license that KDE is released under gives anyone, including Redhat, the right to modify it. Redhat is releasing all of the source code. If your feelings are hurt just use another distribution and quit belly-aching! Redhat is doing absolutely nothing wrong here, either legally or morally. There are more important battles to fight. Let it go, for Christ's sake!
This still doesn't answer the question. Saying Crippleware implies a lack of functionality, none of your points demonstrate that. Now, I'm not saying that Bero is blowing this all out of proportion, I'd just like to know specifically what his reasoning for using that phrase was.
Wu-Tang Name: Half-Cut Skeleton Get your own Wu-Na
http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/source/1.0.1/in dex.html
Scroll down the page if you want the Windows download.
In my experience, Bero was extreemly bad in managing KDE for RH. Just one example. Get kdemultimedia-2.2.2-1.src.rpm. The kdemultimedia.spec list --enable-final as non-working. This was true at the time of 2.2.0. He just never followed fixes. He never ever pulled them from CVS. I did it all myself and now have extreemly stable KDE.
People, bero sold www.linux-easy.com. I'm sure that will cover his unemployment leave for now.
I don't think he did a good job for RH. Let's face it. KDE was crippled in RH while he was there last two years. It was his job to maintain KDE. He had been failing for last two years. Now he says it's RH fault. Why didn't he care before?
People have to understand that if they release something as open source that someone else may use it. They may even modify it. They just might even make a profit off of it. Did not anyone from KDE really believe this. All you're doing is making pedagogues like Stallman look like they were right when they said you didn't get it.
"This tight integration is one of KDE's great strengths; without it, KDE is, well, crippled."
'This tight integration of IE is one of windows great strengths; without it, windows is, well crippled.'
Hey! If it works for MS.
"Plus, since these apps depend on libraries that are not preloaded when KDE starts up, they will appear to be sluggish to the user, who might incorrectly conclude that KDE is slow and clunky."
I've noticed on my GNOME account, on my Mandrake box that KDE apps load slower and sometimes have stability issues, because some KDE services aren't initially running. So I've incorrectly concluded that KDE is slow and clunky.
I still say the KDE guys are trying to make a mountain out of a molehill.
Hey maybe Bero can team up with the other ex-Redhat primadonna (Rasterman) and develop their own distribution. Oh no, that won't work because linux on the desktop is dead
I use KDE with Moz and OO -- believing each to be the best-of-breed. I don't find the lack of integration too problematical. But it would be great if RedHat spends some resources on improving the integration between these three -- perhaps that will be a beneficial outcome.
Waah! RedHat has a clue and realizes that no one save idiots care about the pathetic little 'war' between KDE and Gnome!
You know, I've had my problems with RedHat before. But I think I'm going to stick with them. Considering the sheer amount of cash flow they throw back to Linux.. And now, considering that they have the balls to stand up and do the logical thing in regards to desktop environments..
Bernhard quits a job developing free software (in a recession, mind you) over a disagreement with the product manager and you're glad that he's not a wage slave? Trust fund baby is more like it. Maybe he thinks he can write his own ticket, but most of us are just putting gas in the president's Porsche.
I use windowmaker..
Actually it's worst for the poster you're replying to. The whole TT QT issue started with Debian, not Red Hat, or Gnome. many have forgotten that (wonder why), and it's been a downward slide from there.
Also if memory serves me correctly, the Harmony project was killed by the actions of TrollTech. Now who wants to jump on that train?
Plain and simple, everyone made the decision they made, and a few don't want to live with the resulting consequences. As the saying goes shit rolls downhill, and no one wants to be the guy at the bottom.
Linux will never work on the desktop no matter what Red Hat or anyone does. If you have a desktop, you need Windows. That's the bottom line.
Let me please point out:
RedHat has done basically nothing for KDE in the past couple of years, other than try to make us be more compatible with GNOME. SuSE, Mandrake, Connectiva, Caldera, et al, have all been great KDE supporters.
So:
1) Now RedHat wants to make it impossible to tell KDE from GNOME, most likely to phase out KDE altogether. If the user can't tell the difference between KDE and GNOME, why not dump KDE altogether in a future release?
2) KDE gets the bug reports for KDE. Is RedHat now going to take all the bug reports and fix the bugs, contributing back the KDE source? I didn't see very much happening in the past. I don't see more happening in the future. So now KDE gets bug reports for broken KDE patches written at RedHat by GNOME programmers. If I see those reports, they will be closed immediately with a message: "Try another distro." Perhaps a nastygram to RedHat would be appropriate in each case too.
3) The educated user is a member of the top few percent. He knows to use KDE and can install it from source or self-built RPM. The uneducated user (> 80% most likely), will either not be exposed to the concept of KDE at all, and thus will believe RedHat is to credit for the code (since the about info is even removed, apparently), or perhaps will believe that the bugs introduced by RedHat are KDE developers' fault (if they know the difference).
This is not about themes or icons. All distros change those things. This is about core code and behaviour changes. I would be more comfortable if RedHat renamed their KDE packages and splashes to RedHat-Modified-KDE or something similar. Hmm perhaps RedHat/KDE.
RedHat: Choose a desktop and ship that one - only! Provide separate packages for the other. Don't ship KDE if you don't like it. Oh wait, over 50% of Linux desktops run KDE according to most online polls. Hmm that wouldn't be good for RedHat sales.
At least if RedHat makes KDE suck, they can start to bring down that 50% number and justify only shipping GNOME in the future, to make their employees happy.
Okay I know this has been said before and will be said again, but people its Open Source Software, the source is out there for anyone to use and modify how they wish. If you don't want others playing with your code go closed source other wise shut the hell up.
The only thing KDE has any right to complain about is the removal of the about KDE fields, and even that can be worked out without the major bitching thats been going on lately.
RedHat is the Microsoft of Linux community they don't care about the software, they care about the profits.
Debian with WindowMaker rocks your lame ass. Does any self-respecting Linux user really still use RedHat. It's fine for the novice, but sooner or later you need to move on to a real distro.
Debian GNU/Linux
>And Linux as a name is about ten times more widespread than redhat. I
>don't think this will do anyone any harm, except redhat users
>prefering KDE.
>
>
And given the fact that the vast majority of RedHat users don't like or use KDE to begin with I don't see how Bero leaving affects RedHat or people like me who don't install KDE to begin with one way or the other. It's a non-issue.
How "boohoo" and unprofessional that post was? Not flaming, but I can think of a million other ways to get your points across other than "boohoo they're ruining my project".. sheeez. Come work for Real World companies, where Pointy Hair's and "Team Leads" cripple code for a living.
No one seems to get up in arms when Redhat enhances "ls" to make it more friendly for their users...
Actually I was pretty ticked when I installed whatever version of RedHat they changed that in (7.2?) and 'ls -a' didn't sort by ASCII value.
I don't want my files to be in alphabetical-only order. I want dotfiles first, then UPPERCASE, then lowercase. At the time I poked around in the docs for quite some time and finally figured out some switch that seemed to make it work "properly", but when I upgraded to 7.3 it broke again and I haven't been up to hunting again.
Though to be fair, I do like the color-coded directory contents, so if that was RedHat's idea way back, then I guess we're even.
Graham "Teach" Mitchell, computer science teacher, Leander HS
Is tinkering like this not the only reason while it is understandable that so many distros exist -- and why open source kicks ass over closed source? I mean -- what you do to seperate yourself from the next guy is a noble move in such a crowded arena.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
www.gentoo.org and Gentoo Linux
So Red Hat is "Free Software", but do they care about the spirit of the whole thing? Or do they even care about the customers?
They will make sure that as many Linux users as possible has to use Red Hat. Examples of this is servers from big vendors with special hardware that is only supported if you run Red Hat (even if you can hack it into another distro that means you can kiss help from that vendor good bye, and that won't go over well with the management, for good reasons) and how Red Hat wants control over various key parts of the OS.
They have a huge investment in gnome, and not just pride. If gnome would fail on account of KDE this would mean that they have not only thrown a huge sum of money in a black hole, they also will look weak for potential buyers (and the corporate servers is what can make real money after all). If you fail big time on something as big as gnome, well, you can figure it out yourself.
So Red Hat is willing to do what they can to make sure that as many, if not all, users of Red Hat runs the software they endorse. Some of the software they don't care about and will just throw in with minor effort, so those will remain choices (vi/emacs for example).
I wish RedHat cared more of the people who don't have the memory or don't want to have both Qt and Gtk+ (and their various wrappers) loaded at the same time. Neither of them is particularly small; it is quite apparent to me that having both at the same time is simply not worth it.
They took away the free sodas, espresso machines, and the foosball table.
:P
Come on, that's one of the few reasons people leave places anymore, isn't it?
It amazes me how much people seem know about the reasons he has chosen to quit his job at Redhat. The post on the mailinglist gives a little hint for *part* of the reason, but I don't believe that is the whole reason. Furthermore, he didn't explain what he meant with "crippleware" and we certainly don't know the internal discussions at Redhat.
When Microsoft prevents somebody from loading another browser icon onto the desktop it is shady business and a matter for the court system.
If somebody from KDE project wants to prevent Redhat for loading other icons on to the desktop it is high moral standards.
If this isn't double standards I don't know what is!
Max M - IT's Mad Science
GTK did not even exist when KDE started. GNOME's design goals were just to be different from KDE. So they implemented object oriented programming in C. Also they took the motif replacement gtk from gimp and tried to work with it.
A better way would have been to put resources into harmony and create C bindings for thos unwilling to learn OOP in C++.
Until today nobody serious thinks gtk is better than qt.
Moritz
or use komba. Any decent distribution will preconfigure them. I am not talking about Redhat.
Moritz
"Diversity is a strength of Free Software: This is why MandrakeSoft not only provides the two leading graphical environments KDE and GNOME, but also WindowMaker 0.8, IceWM 1.2, Enlightenment 0.16.5, BlackBox 0.62 and others as an option. All Mandrake users will be pleased to discover that application menus are consistent across all the various graphical desktop environments. "
Mandrake has been already doing this for a long time. You guys are all stupid clueless and useless trolls. That just run around and attack things without any facts.
http://pst.mandrakesoft.com/index.php#3
Theres something worse with RedHat, the lack of easy upgrade. Yes RPMs can be upgraded. But it has do be done with "hand-power". And it cant be done easy over version bounderies. I cant say I can upgrade my RedHat7.0 to RedHat7.2 without actualy putting in the CD and run an upgrade. This is what made me look at debian and here "apt-get upgrade" that upgrades every package on the system to the newest.
"Diversity is a strength of Free Software: This is why MandrakeSoft not only provides the two leading graphical environments KDE and GNOME, but also WindowMaker 0.8, IceWM 1.2, Enlightenment 0.16.5, BlackBox 0.62 and others as an option. All Mandrake users will be pleased to discover that application menus are consistent across all the various graphical desktop environments. "
http://pst.mandrakesoft.com/index.php#3
Mandrake has been already doing this for a long time. You guys are all stupid clueless and useless trolls. That just run around and attack things without any facts.
noshellswill,
Hurry up son the short bus is here!
You're talking about bugs. That's the whole point of releasing beta versions - to find and correct bugs.
It's unfair to criticize a beta release for having bugs. Do you really believe that releasing buggy code is a goal for RH in the same way that those other useability changes are?
Now, even in the most advanced IT positions, your boss has a drawer full of resumes of people just as smart as you think you are. Pretty scary, actually.
Actually, the boss in question probably has a drawer full of ASP/VB/Delphi programmers' resumes. Perhaps 1 in 100 of the resumes would actually be worth looking at. It might be harder than you think to find good programmers/techies (and believe me, a degree doesn't make a good programmer. Experience, and lots of experience, makes a good programmer).
Sue Blake, FreeBSD developer and advocate
What Red Hat is doing is a great example of open source in action. Rather than release yet another Linux distribution that screws users by trying to make KDE and Gnome both work as intended by the two UI teams, Red Hat has taken what they fell is the best of both worlds and made it into something user-friendly. Hopefully Red Hat will also have the sense to strip apps of silly, nondescriptive names as well, and we can have a major desktop Linux distro that grandma can use.
For the people who think Red Hat is crippling KDE, or Gnome, or whatever, deal with it the simple way- just download the official releases yourself.
that the usefulness of a Linux distro is beginning to hinge upon what the GUI will or will not do/look like. It's not like Redhat is doing away with the CLI.
I'm not saying it's not true, but I generally like to hear more than one side of things before I jump to conclusions.
This looks more like one of those things which will not be done right in the x.0 version, of which there is a long history with Red Hat. I have usually bought the latest and greatest RH distro (literally all since 4.2), and haven't always been entirely pleased with the decision in one regard or another-but it has always worked, albeit sometimes I had to tweak an ap or two (read: waste time to get working again). I used AfterStep (talk about elegant gui's!) for a long time, then to WindowMaker, then Gnome, and finally went to KDE from Gnome when the aa fonts came out, and I have never looked back.
I have checked back with Gnome from time to time, and in fact played with the latest Gnome just last week, but switched back because I liked the KDE look and feel better-I used to have one gui as root and another as user (strong color differences too, etc.), to keep down the risks of leaving things naked when I have a lot of work to do as root, but now both are KDE. It is easy on the eyes (aa fonts), easy to get to pleasing colors, the taskbar is easier to configure, and just altogether an easier gui to adapt to. There are also a lot of features that are no brainer easy to use with KDE-the tea timer is great!!! Also, I'm a college instructor, and I need my KOrganizer with its alarm 20 min before class, and a lot of other KDE apps (like Konq) are really nice to have handy, even if not used very often. Ditto, a lot of Gnome apps (gnumeric) are nice to have handy on occasion.
If they are playing around in ways that *may* make it difficult for me to use KDE, I simply will not buy their 8.0 product, and, if it isn't fixed by 8.1, I will go to another vendor. I am going to continue to use KDE and I am not going to spend two days trying to restore my panel-in fact,I am not going to even risk having to spend two days restoring my panel, getting apps to work, etc. 7.3 forever? I hope not.
If KDE team doesn't like the gpl why don't they just create their own opensource license and get it OSI approved?
:pbpbpbp~
Favourite quote from kde team: "they're destroying our beloved kde!" -- LOL
Yes, let's see how long they last/how popular they become with an apple-like license (must submit all changes to source code, cannot distribute to public without permission).
You don't here an outcry from gnome when companys like SuSE distribute half-arsed copies of gnome do you? Talk about a bunch of cry-babies, silly kde.
chrisd: "....seriously considering changing distrobutions..." --LOL
What you don't think anybody is going to make 'untampered' kde packages FOR you? You don't think that when kde 3.1 comes out kde or some thirdy party will make rpm's FOR you?!? (or do it yourself ninny)
I've been using kde since 1.x, and this is making me change... change to gnome. The whole bit is pathetic, and truth told kde doesn't need red hat to 'destroy' them. Kde can do that to themselves. Does noone else remember the VAST number of great programs available for kde 1.x, only to see them NEVER get ported to kde 2.x? The number from 2.x to 3.x diminishes even further. Lack of a stable abi/api/#insert_term_here PROHIBITS further 'independent' development, and that is something the Gnome team realizes and has worked on for gnome 2.x.
So come on everybody port your prog's to gnome 2.x
Anti-choice? That's absurd! I hated school uniforms, and I hate only having limited choices on my PC.
All I'm saying is that KDE and Gnome both try to serve the same demographic. They're attempts to bring a Windows-style GUI to the X environment, while still keeping unique touches that they perceive makes them "better" than the Windows GUI.
There will *always* be plenty of other choices for X, that serve different purposes. For example, people using the LTSP project and serving X remotely to "thin client" PCs are not generally fond of KDE or Gnome because they're way too graphics-intensive and difficult to "lock down" so users can't muck up the environment.
That's why these people will still use FVWM or TWM or "BlackBox" or "ICEWm" or who knows what else. It's not like consolidating KDE and Gnome will bring about the "end of choice" for Linux and X!
From the beginning, people accused KDE and Gnome authors of bickering with each other needlessly, just due to "ego". Both people wanted to "come out on top" as the superior interface designer. The users (who are, after all, the ones that ultimately matter) just wanted something that worked well. I don't see why some people find it so "awful" of a concept, to take the best features of both and roll them together into one?
I'd certainly prefer that to taking up disk space keeping both installed, so I can go back and forth between them. I'd prefer that to the half-assed looking applicatioon menus, with sub-folders saying "KDE Applications" in Gnome, and "Gnome/GTK Apps" in KDE.
From the gimp source code (libgimpbase.h) we have:
So you are wrong. But that's not all. The date which KDE was started is immaterial. The date that GNOME was started is the only date relevent to the discussion since that was the point at which the decision not to use Harmony was made. Your speculation on the GNOME programmers unwillingness to learn OOP is unfounded. GTK is based on OOP design principles. It's merely implemented in C per the previously stated design criteria.
Thanks for playing.
-Hope
well, I have no choice but to switch, RH 7.3's KDE was too broken to use, even tho I have it on 20 or so systems at the office, the last RH KDE desktop to work half-way decently was 7.2, everyone at the office complains about the 7.3 systems and there's no complaints about the 7.2's, I can't go back to RH 7.2 since I need some of the KDE 3.0 features for various reasons, I've been using Debian on a few systems and have had no trouble with the desktop and it's even quite a bit faster than RH! the faulty 7.3 systems at the office are hurting my push with linux on the desktops and there's a growing dissent toward RH, I'm not waiting for 8.0 to see what's broken or incompatible, my donations are going to Debian from now on (also management isn't too happy with the price RH wants per server and required support for clustering our couple hundred servers, which we badly need to deploy)
So really, how meaningful is trademark protection of the sort Mr. Troan seemed to intend? Granted, I can't go off and come up with a totally unrelated desktop and call it "Bluecurve." That would infringe on Redhat's "Bluecurve" trademark. But I can modify it (even beyond all recognition) and still offer it as a derived work called "QuantumWeasel Bluecurve," a la "Redhat Linux," Mandrake GNU/Linux," Turbo Linux," et cetera.
So my heretofore implied points is explicitly this: Who are Redhat to think they can protect the look/feel of Bluecurve without also respecting the KDE and Gnome looks/feels on the same footing? KDE(TM) and Gnome(TM) are claimed as trademarks by their respective foundations.
If I've missed something, I'd appreciate someone pointing it out.
thank god..he was really annoying with the "we cannot do this" and "we cannot do that" speeches every time a redhat release came out
A newbie using Pee Cee doesn't even know, and most certainly doesn't want to know that there is something called Linux, under the hood and same goes for Windows. That's the whole point of this modification, and it can't be that hard to understand. Why don't you people use your brains, if you have 'em?
Newbies are using Pee Cee, with no idea about different operating systems and if they see something is broken, they think PC is broken. NOT Linux and NOT Windows, they can't think anything about those if they don't even know they exist.
--Must repeat that last line to make the point--
they can't think anything about those if they don't even know they exist.
they can't think anything about those if they don't even know they exist.
they can't think anything about those if they don't even know they exist.
It isn't even crippled. Nobody can seriously think that changing a damn kernel in SYSTEM is crippling something. Linux is still there, not that anyone would want to use it, it's just not in your default INSTALL.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
FVWM, TWM, Blackbox, ICEWm etc. are on a different playing field than KDE and Gnome. In KDE and Gnome's playing fiel they are all that's there. Consolidate (sp?) them into one and suddenly there's no options for what they do.
/etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, a mysql or postgresql database? I can do any of those.. I don't like sysvinit... I think I'll use another .. hell lets redo the boot scripts too and create a whole new boot system.. choice choice choice... and off in the background, like I said, all I can hear from people like you is "conform... conform... conform.." It's like a big ass thorn in my side.
I want to use a desktop environment, not a window manager. Gnome and KDE approach things from different angles as well. Trying to mix them together would be a disaster. KDE prefers a more traditional modular "bunch of small tools that can be put together in any number of ways" approach and gnome seems to prefer an unorganized mix of a bunch of large all-encompasing applications with more of an emphasis on pretty gfx than on good code. Personally I don't want Gnome's development style mixed in with KDE at all.
Why don't every single X window manager take all their best features and create the ultimate X window manager? I just don't get it.. I mean I use linux 'cause I like the crapload of choice.. I got my choice of what.. 3 or 4 X servers, at least 3 compilers, at least 3 desktop environments, an ungodly amount of window managers, a gazillion different tools for the command line... I can just keep going and going. Do I want to store my user info in
Also I'm not sure how the developers for KDE or Gnome feel but if it was my project the users can bitch and complain about my ego until they turn blue in the face.. it's my project that I'd most likely be making for my enjoyment. If they wanna use it that's fine but I won't be taking orders. It's probably not like that tho... somnehow these authors of large non-profit free time consuming projects somehow get the mindset that they must please the cheap users who feel they should get everything and give nothing.
Single click to select, double click to execute is REALLY USEFUL. I don't care what people in usability tell you. KDE single click shits me to tears. Their drag boxes for selection are a pain in the arse. Things are always launching themselves in KDE.
Having to press the control key before doing the vast majority of operations available on a GROUP of files is really anoying.
Just to balance my bagging, when will gnome allow me to mod the permissions on a group of files from a contextual menu without whipping out the xterm? This is off topic but this shits me too.
Gimp may be older than KDE, but the gimp toolkit is younger. The first versions of gimp were motif based. GTK is a motif replacement library.
The first stable relase was in 1998, two years after KDE was founded.
From the Changelog of gtk-1.00:
Mon Apr 13 19:16:22 PDT 1998 Shawn T. Amundson
* Released GTK+ 1.0.0
See here http://www.gimp.org/~sjburges/gimp-history.html
"The GIMP had a lot of neat stuff attached to its first public release, version 0.54, (January 1996). It had a plug-in system, so developers could make separate programs to add to GIMP without breaking anything in the main distribution. It had some basic tools to do drawing, and channel operations. It had an undo feature the likes of which was not found in any known image manipulation program. It had loyal users swearing by it. It was protected by the GPL. And it had a cool name.
But all was not well with the GIMP. It had rather frequent crashes, that could be caused by plug-ins or problems in the main code. It had a dependency on Motif for its GUI toolkit, which made efficient distribution to a lot of users impossible."
Moritz
Real software engineers don't debug programs, they verify correctness.
This process doesn't necessarily involve execution of anything on a
computer, except perhaps a Correctness Verification Aid package.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The release date of GTK 1.0 is immaterial. The author suggests that the design and framework for GTK was initiated from scratch as a response to KDE. This is simply incorrect. The people tasked with developing GNOME looked for a basis to begin their work. As the core design of the GIMP graphic library met their needs, they used it.
To suggest that GTK was a ground-up rewrite discounts all the original work done in the Gimp library. Even glib, the foundation for GTK shows a copyright of 1995-1997. Certaintly, they don't contend that glib was written in response to KDE as well.
Lastly, GTK is not a motif replacement library. Less-tif is a motif replacement library. GTK is an event-based object model that evolved out of the GIMP GUI library. And it is this object model that became the basis of Gnome; hence, the discussion.
-Hope