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."

Comments

Anyone who's used it likes it.

[Nailer]

I'm a KDE user whose been using Null since release:

Red Hat have:

• Unified the default QT, GTK 1, GTK 2, and XMMS look. Someday every Linux distro will do the same.
  
• Red Hat patched KDE to support the freedesktop.org standard taskbar system - yay, panel apps working in both KDE and Gnome. Older KDE taskbar apps still seem to work fine. Again, someday I think KDE will ship with this by default.
  
• Selected what they consider the best applicatioon for each category (web browsing, email, office etc) and used those as default quick launchers on both the Gnome and KDE taskbar. This makes sense: users pick apps based on quality rather than toolkit. Mozilla renders more pages than Konqueror. OpenOffice is more capable than Abiword or KOffice. Evolution matches more of a Windows users understanding of a good PIM than KMail / Konrganizaer / Sylpheed, etc. This isn't a bias towards Gnome - 2 of the three main apps aren't even based on Gnome or GTK, and OpenOffice actually integrates better with KDE than Gnome. They haven't removed Konq, KMail or any other major KDE apps, they've just changed what's in the quicklaunch bar. Konq stil exists, and its still in the menu. So is Kmail. Again, I think someday every Linux distro will do the same. Most desktop users don't know, or care what a toolkit is, and they shouldn't have to.
  
• Removed the About KDE dialog. Not that every copyright, author credit, and license are still there - in About -> App. The About KDE screen is a just an ad for KDE. Its not a big deal, I don't really care either way.
  
• Made KDE use double click for desktop items - this was the only thing I disliked about 8.0 - its a really dumb idea and violates just about everything anybody's written on the subject of usign a mouse. Someone buy Havoc Pennington a Jacob Nielsen book. Then make KDE single click again, fix Gnome 2 to do the same, and thus don't require new users to click desktop items twice in the space of 500ms - and keep desktop icons consistent with web pages, and all their other apps. Ask anyone involved in usability - double click makes no sense.
  

Re:Sooner or later...

[Frater 219]

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.)

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.