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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."
Want a distro without the KDE politics? Download the recently (like today) released Mandrake 9.0 and don't forget to use a mirror.
Red Hat have:
what's got everybody up in arms is that Redhat is trying to enhance its *brand* by hacking KDE.
Anyone who's used the 8.0 beta can tell you they're enhancing their usability, nmot their brand with their changes. The grab bag of different applications, inconsistent themes, and desktop specific panel apps are there if you want them. But Red Hat have made themes and panel apps consistent by default and put what they consider the best apps forward by outting them on the quick launch area of the taskbar. Its no big deal, and Red Hat 8.0s KDE runs every KDE app I've built and packaged for it.
Actually, it's false, and I suspect you might not know it. GNOME was created by the GNU folks as an alternative to KDE at a time when KDE was dependent on a piece of non-free software, specifically the Qt libraries. Though it's now Free, Qt was at the time "shared source," more or less. Once Qt became Free, people kept developing and using GNOME because they were used to it and had come to prefer it.
They did it for the same reason RMS started GNU in the first place: to give people who insist on Free Software a good system to use. RMS didn't start GNU to "kill" SunOS or HP/UX or BSD, but to have the kind of system that his ethics and aesthetics preferred. Yes, BSD was non-free when GNU was started: BSD depended on AT&T proprietary Unix code. That quit being the case in 1994 or so -- but you wouldn't expect all the GNU and Linux developers to suddenly jump ship for BSD, would you? Of course not; as with GNOME and KDE, they had come to prefer their own system and kept developing it because they wished to.
That's called freedom. Not "killing" -- freedom. Learn to recognize it.
>Go with Mandrake. It's not just for newbies
>anymore. They go to the edge...
>
>Postfix over sendmail
Postfix was added to Red Hat in 7.3.
>Postgres over MySQL
Postgres has been in since 5.0, about five years ago. (On a side note, MySQL didn't make it in until 7.0).
>i586 over i386
Red Hat compiles -mcpu=i586 -march=i386, which means optimization for i586, but without using instructions that are incompatible with i386. The performance increase for doing -march=i586 is negligable except in a few corner cases.
However, the kernel and glibc are shipped with optimizations for multiple architectures, so as to provide most of the benefits without locking out non-pentium architectures.
Matt
If you know the truth of proposition P (viz., that the purpose of the creation of GNOME was other than to "kill" KDE) but you assert in debate proposition not-P (that the purpose of creating GNOME was to "kill" KDE) then you engage in a wrongful act of lying. There is no place in intelligent debate for lying. The only purpose lying can serve in discussion is to attempt to lead another astray -- to cause another to think or act on the basis of information you know is wrong. Though lying may serve some useful purposes in certain social occasions (contra Kant) it has no justification in debate and is wholly immoral.
Now, back on topic -- license problems may not be a "real life" issue to you if you are neither a Free Software developer or distributor, nor of the opinion that secret-source, thought-monopoly software is harmful. However, not all the world is in the same boat you are. To a substantial number of people -- among them the GNU and GNOME core developers, self-evidently -- these are issues most assuredly real. They would be remiss in their ethical duties to set aside their own principles simply because a fool might someday mock them as impractical.
I don't think anyone would have complained if RedHat had just changed the default look. Other distros have been doing this forever. The fact that they introduced bugs, broke some third-party app compatability, and made KDE slower as a whole (replacing konq with Moz, etc.)
RedHat should have given the user a choice at least. If the user installed KDE (not default), then by gosh, they probably wanted to run KDE.
But then they would have had to test two totally different KDEs and support them. That's non-trivial, and even more confusing to users trying to figure out what's being installed. You'd have KDE+GNOME style KDE, *and* vanilla KDE (which would have to be packaged separately and eat more space, as well, and would have to be marked as incompatible with KDE+GNOME style KDE).
If someone really wants KDE, they can get it straight from kde.org -- I get a fair amount of software from the original source. The KDE project can distribute their blessed distribution however they want to do so. If you *really* want vanilla KDE with no GNOME integration done at all, then there are distros like Mandrake that *have* taken this approach...but I like seeing the diversity among distros that characterizes Linux. If someone wants to make a distro that has a totally terminal-based UI through an X server and AAlib and runs Enlightenment...well, they can do so. The users will end up voting by using whichever they prefer -- it could be that Red Hat is doing the wrong thing or the right thing. People will try both, and comment on them. RH will probably polish things up in 8.1, and if people still don't like the approach...well, Mandrake will get them.
May we never see th
QT had more than license issues. One of the GNOME design goals was an all C implementation. KDE did not meet that criteria and therefore a new implementation was started. It was not however started from scratch. GNOME is built on GTK which is built on GLib. Whether this was a wise decision or not only time will tell. I personally use C for libraries and C++ for applications. It gives me more leverage later on if I want to incorporate that functionality into PHP, Perl, Python, Java, or whatever.
-Hope
>Things like using xft2 early without testing,
It might be considered premature, but its the direction things are moving in both the GNOME and KDE world. One thing that is rarely pointed out by the khicken littles is that this code hasn't been declared stable for GNOME either.
>changing KDE service types (thus, breaking third
>party kde apps that use kparts/ktrader.)
They only changes the binary names. The whole point of ktrader is that you don't *need* to hard code names or paths.
Matt
Maybe because there are third-party apps that use KDE libraries, just like there are third-party apps that use GNOME libraries. I just wish more people would realize that wanting to have GNOME and/or KDE installed is not always necessarily the same as wanting to have the look-and-feel of GNOME/KDE.
GNU/Linux. The Freshmaker.