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GNOME 2 to Replace CDE As Solaris Default DE
Gentu writes "OSNews had a quick chat with John Fowler, Sun Software's CTO about Solaris 10, Java, the web services competition and more. In the interview, Fowler reveals the timing in which Gnome2 will become the default desktop environment: Solaris 10, which is expected to have its first beta later in 2003. This is a huge step for Gnome2 in the UNIX world, as it will be replacing CDE for good as the default desktop environment (betas of Gnome 2 for Solaris 8/9 already exist) and becoming a standard part of the large operating environment with millions of installations worldwide. Additionally, Sun is now pushing developers on coding on either GTK+ 2.x or Java (they have in fact revealed plans on creating GTK+ bindings for Java which will make all future Solaris apps look like alike)."
by the way, Mozilla 1.2.1 is out now, as of about ten minutes ago.
Sun has been babbling about the switch to Gnome from CDE for almost two years now. I use both KDE and Gnome, and both are far more a "desktop" than CDE ever was.
It also confirms my decision to use GTK for GUI development under Linux (I love QT's APIs and structure under KDE, but GTK lets me port to Win32 clients without cost.)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
with CDE theme? :)
*duck*
Granted, this was the first time I read osnews, but didn't the article seem weird to anyone? They hinted at an interview, but instead of quoting the person, they paraphrased the whole interview... Who knows what the Sun guy actually said, and what got interpreted by the interviewer/writer?
Je ne parle pas francais.
You can get Mozilla 1.2.2 alpha... I uploaded it to http://www.mr-moo.com
Hint Hint... :)
Given how expensive Sun hardware is, I'm not sure how much of a dent this is going to make for most people. Many schools have deals with Sun, as do many corporations...but I don't know of any individuals that use a Sun box themselves.
It would be more interesting to see a major commerical player, such as HP, begin to ship Linux systems with Gnome as the default. Gnome already has a strong geek following...what it needs now is mainstream use, which Sun is not.
I've been using the Gnome2 ( pre-release beta 3, IIRC ) Sun beta on an Ultra 1 in my office for quite some time, and even though the ancient graphics card only supports 8-bit graphics and 1280X1024 resolution, it rocks. hard. you can't deny the power of Motif, but as far as a solid desktop goes, GNOME has it. KDE is excellent as well, but I personally prefer GNOME.
I just hope Red Hat and Sun don't gut each other fighting over the corporate workstation market. I am perfectly content using both platforms, both at home and at work, and would like to see both prosper. Ximian is excellent as well ( actually I'm writing this from a RedHat 7.3 boxen w/ Ximian GNOME ).
I'm drooling at the thought of Solaris 10 right now...
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
Since Netscape 7 is on also Solaris, my guess is an equivalent of Mozilla 1.2.1 (Netscapeized) will come along officially from Sun also.
I speak for myself only.
Not a troll, but does anyone else feel that strategically, TrollTech should have made QT LGPL?
KDE is much more tightly done than GNOME and the overall effect is defnly smoother, kinda like Windows done right!
But if Companies prefer GNOME, then in the long run TrollTech will see reduced demand for its product... or am i wrong?
Of course, there is the counterargument that LGPL would ensure that TrollTech would never get any money out of QT, but i suspect that it would have fetchdd more in the long run, like it is doing for Ximian.... consulting you know!
A crank is a little thing that makes revolutions
The initial write up seemed to suggest that this will be a first for interfacing Java and the GNOME-related libs. This is not so. (In fact, with gcj you're able to write native-binary GNOME apps using Java and the above projects... Admittedly, you're giving up portability but Java is nice, or at least interesting, for many other reasons.) There may be other similar projects out there, that's just what I turned up with a few minutes' search on freshmeat and sourceforge.
Bravo to Sun, though, for making the decision to commit to GNOME. CDE is an ugly pain in the ass, IMHO. Even OpenWindows had some degree of retro charm about it, CDE just looked like what happens if you let Soviet housing block architects design a GUI. Feh!
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Through the use of remote X clients, windows from other copmuters can be displayed on Solaris X. I have been known to kill the dtwm process (ugly motiff window manager), replace it with sawfish (running remotely off an intel machine), and even run gnome-panel. The result is a desktop on CDE that effectivly is gnome. Programs launched from the gnome menu work fine. You must make shell scripts with timmers (sleep) to invoke the commands because on our machines, the keyboard doesn't work when dtwm is killed. Obviously the server running linux is on the same local network as the Sun boxes because otherwise it might be a little slow.
MAKE YOUR TIME
Hey guys, you finally did it! I was a KDE user myself since the alpha stage of KDE 1.0. I tried GNOME a few times, but it always seemed more tempermental and less responsive than KDE. However, when I upgraded to KDE 2.0 and it took forever to start a desktop session and KDE apps were taking longer to launch than before, so I gave GNOME a try again. I was impressed but it still seemed to lack KDE's stability and consistency. I upgraded over the last year to KDE 3, which was a disappointment. The performance/responsiveness has worsened and the stability has taken a turn for the worse. For the first time I find myself preferring GNOME for the same reasons I chose KDE before: performance, stability, and consistency. The stability of the MetalCity WindowManager seems to have made an impressive difference and the applets, panel, etc are much improved. The GNOME developers also took to heart some feedback when Sun sponsored the GNOME Usability Study a while back.
Now am I knocking KDE? Not by any means- as a C++ programmer I prefer programming for KDE. But when you're at the top there's no where to go but down, and that applied well to the KDE project. Besides, I think it's great to see a strong GNOME and KDE... because in the Free Software Movement we prefer competition which inspires innovation. If KDE wasn't so awesome from 1999-2001 then the GNOME project wouldn't have been quite as motivated and I expect GNOME 2's success will spur more inspiration on the part of the KDE project. I look forward to comparing GNOME 3 and KDE 4 in the future!
"As flies to the wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for sport." - William Shakespeare, King Lear
I think Sun is promoting Java to push Gnome to avoid Mono.... think about it.... if they push C#, it undermines Java... why not port everything to some sort of Java binary?
This space for rent.
Why not KDE? Speed? Stability? API? Any ideas?
All I can say is FINALLY... I have lots of ignorant friends who do computer science at university and because our dumb terminals use CDE as its Window Manager..... They immediately get turned off from any *NIX Platform... saying its ugly and gay!!!
CDE is probably one of the most ugliest DE I have ever seen.... Sorry for the negative comments but I really hate CDE!
Hrrrrmmm. This means that the split is deep as a rift.
KDE vs Gnome, that is. Hrrrmmmm.
It's only taken five years for me to fluke a legitimate "first post". *g*
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I use KDE. It still has some issues, but they have made lots of improvements since the 1.18 days. KOffice can be the best thing for them if they use it to their advantage. I want a usable computer right after I get done installing, so by making all of the apps work right together it makes my life better.
the FOO BAR reign!
dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,
first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.
on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.
many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.
unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.
having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat , ximian and sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.
some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf , an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.
you may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more , more and more emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.
but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.
if you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. the core development team actually don't care for the complaining home user. it's more important for them to reach the customers with the cash. it seems that this has been told to them by the company leaders. everything about gnome has been decided already, a way back or direct communication isn't possible. don't get trapped by sentences like 'we listen to our users'. they listen to you - yes, to make funny silly jokes about you afterwards.
i thought that everything was build up on friendship, build on programming for fun, build on understanding each other. but the reality looks like it's all for the big money. the cash is what matters everything else is a lie and a dream. time for people to wake up.
not long ago they threw one of the most important long year core developer martin baulig out of team. a guy who worked really hard on getting gnome into the right direction. a nice friendly person who put all his time into gnome. but narrow minded gnome elites such as havoc pennington were responsible that he left the gnome project. the trouble and the pressure that was put on him was to much.
with the new gnome desktop a lot of user interface changes happened such as button reordering . needless to say that this confuse people who are used to the 'right' button ordering for ages. even our fellow linux guru alan cox wasn't thrilled about this idea. but the gnome elites such as havoc pennington, seth nickell, calum benson and dave bordoley knew it better. why following the road of any other desktop that exists ? why not doing something that don't confuse their users and still stay usable ? well it seems to be too easy. gnome needs to be different than anything else so they changed the button order which was one of the reasons that users became unhappy. they said that there was a hard fight about this and the decision was made to change the buttons. but i belive they simply copied the behaviour of macos because most of the gnome developers use a macintosh as either laptop or desktop. sad that they forgot to keep in mind that users tend to mix applications and that this will lead into weird button searching and clicking.
but as if this wasn't enough the same people decided that the new gnome human interface guides were the ultima non plus ultra in human interface guides. the announcement contained informations that the kde usability people got initiated into it. unfortunately the kde people heard about it the first time when seth nickell went to the kde mailinglist which happened after the announcement. you can imagine that they got highly pissed off about this attitude. you can read more on this link . to summarize it, the kde people clarified that gnome should care for their own business.
the problem that came with the new interface guides was, that every little gnome hacker started to become an user interface expert over night. a lot of gnome programs that we like to use matured into a disaster over night. hackers that never programmed correctly for their life started to blindly follow the hype of simplification. for an example look what happened to galeon's interface (pay attention for the last paragraph). even philip langdale a long year galeon hacker got highly indignant by the target that gnome leads and wrote this email to the galeon mailinglist.
here another reason why users became angry. the elite assumes, that the user knows nothing about their system. you find a couple of heavily insulting mails on their mailing lists containing sentences like the quoted ones.
"the user don't know what a window manager is",
"the user don't know what themes are",
"the user don't know what a homedir is",
"the user can't compile a kernel",
"the user don't want to customize their desktop",
"the user shouldn't see preferences which purpose they don't know"
you may imagine that a lot of people are being offended by such lines because it's exactly these gnome users who are meant by these phrases. to read more such lines on the gnome mailinglists, simply click on this link and grep in their archives. be said that most of these sentences are coming from havoc pennington.
such evil practices shouldn't be tolerated by the users and need to be fighted. u*nix users aren't stupid people. who actually gave havoc pennington the rights to decide what the user wants and what not ? various users told him that people who use a u*nix like system are well aware of their capabilities dealing with such a complex system. there's a reason why people are switching from alternative operating systems. they want to learn, they want to use the full power of the system, they want to change everything they like.
to top all this, look at the future plans of nautilus . the current maintainers got the idea of changing the whole nautilus concepts into an object oriented user interface design. you may be highly interested in reading the exact words of alex larsson's vision for nautilus' future direction by clicking on this link .
to summarize it, it's assumed that the user don't need to deal with his homedir or his whole filesystem because it may confuse him or because he don't understand it. the new concepts of nautilus should be that the user deal with symbols in the nautilus view. e.g. you get a cdrom symbol and by clicking on it you see the directory of your cdrom, you get a photo symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your pr0n pictures, you get a music symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your mp3's. you don't know where all these files are located because you don't deal with the bottom layer of your homedir or filesystem anymore as mentioned earlier.
the question is why are people that know nothing about their users, that know nothing about correct user interface design destroying gnome ? the users don't deserve all this specially those that backed gnome for all the years. even sun threw a bunch of so called user interface experts together and have them work on gnome. don't forget that sun are the creators of the common desktop environment . we don't need another cde clone named gnome. even havoc pennington author of the good user interfaces text isn't able to get his own written software following his rules.
not long ago there was an report about the 'two captains of nautilus' where the reporter (uraeus a gnome contributor himself) reported alexander larsson and david camp. you may imagine that such a report can't be taken serious because it's done by their own people. we here have a saying that sounds like this 'one crow doesn't hack the eye of another crow out'. now you can click on this link and read more. it may be interesting to read the replies from various users all over the globe of what they think about gnome and nautilus in general (please pay attention to the listed ip's there). another nice and informative reading can be found by clicking on this link .
the fileselector problem was a long discussed issue in the gnome community. finally they came to an solution for this and have decided to go for this ugly fileselector instead going for this one which was developed by a free volunteer for a long time and in general looks and behaves better.
most users have no problems with the idea of keeping things simple and clean. removing some not needed preferences was indeed a good idea but it doesn't stop. people started to remove everything from their apps. you're forced to use dubious programs like gconf-editor which basically works like the windows registry editor, to tweak uncommented preferences. i don't think that this is an advantage. even the possibility to tweak preferences with an editor was taken away with that ugly implementation of gconf. all your preferences are stored in a directory tree with an unknown amount of *.xml files. even if you delete programs their keys are still remaining orphaned in these trees and finding them is like playing trivia. at the end it's worth a discussion if a system driven by a single home user needs such a registry like system. we didn't need such a system for over 30 years but the gnome development team got the idea copying one of the most retarded systems from windows to u*nix. not to mention that the copy is more retarded than the original.
it's a shame to see how such a nice desktop got thrown into the trash by such people. but there is a lot more behind the scenes that i don't know about. everything around gnome is a big marketing strategy. poor people are working the hell out of gnome for nothing and companies such as those mentioned above are getting the big cash. for sure you could say - go and fork gnome - but seriously how can you go and fork gnome ? such a big project which needs a bunch of people to keep the code alive and compatible. well you know it's all about open source the code is signed under the gnu/gpl or gnu/lgpl, you can't own it. even the companies are aware of this. but if you can't own the code - go and hire their developers. you can direct them like puppets in any direction that you - as company - like. exactly this is happening with gnome.
well you could easily come up and tell me to simply not use gnome and let them do whatever they like. well, you are right with that but things are more complicated nowadays. gnome is influencing a lot of third party projects such as xfree86 which recently added a lot of gnome components into their cvs repository. please know that with the next coming xfree86 version you get a lot of gnome components without even knowing it. code like, gnome-xml , pkgconfig , fontconfig , xcursor and xft2 were mainly written by people who're heavily involved into gnome development. also the gimp is maturing more and more into getting the look and feel of a native gnome application. the cvs version of the gimp has a lot of gnome pixmaps inside and they are heavily working on integrate the gimp into gnome. if not today but the direction is sure and i fear the day this gonna happen.
it's ok that these things exist and it's ok to see xfree86 and the gimp are beeing hacked on. but please think about the people that don't like or use gnome. what about them ? why force them to have gnome components installed on their systems ? why can't gnome go the same way that kde went e.g. doing their own stuff without infecting other projects like aids. seeing more and more libraries and applications that were in no way related to gnome jumping on the pkgconfig boat which's really not needed. look what will happen to solaris, the world famous operating system on u*nix used by big companies and long years experts. they really plan to replace cde with gnome. i know that cde wasn't the best invention of desktops but it rarely crashed and it fits far better into the philosophy of xfree86 with their configuration system than gnome. you know the good old way having your settings defined with .xdefaults and all nice
default configurations are going into /etc/x11/app-defaults/ and so on.
understandable that the good old way may be blocking the future of applications
for multiusersystems - but why must it have to be a windows registry like
system that replaces future configuration ?
well to come to an end i personally don't like many of this stuff. i can't stand the button reordering, i don't like the gconf system and even more i don't like the commercial outsourcing of gnome and the bad influence that gnome has on other applications. the bad attitude of some gnome developers is another story since we are all different reacting humans. luckily there are people sharing some of my thoughts otherwise i wouldn't be able to proof my text with so many links. even amongst the gnome developers there are silent voices of people that hate many of these decisions and silently use something else. right now if you checkout the gnome cvs repository every day you find out that the whole gnome development seemed to came to an halt. the contributions to their cvs are poor. while projects such as kde are reaching easily 10-20k commits per month - gnome is getting around 1-2k per month on it's best times. it really looks like the situation of gnome is unclear so it would be better to have it not influence so much other programs or at the end we deal with an disaster.
now i hope this text was informative for you. i hope that you start to think about the situation and the global direction. the situation of gnome is unclear, their target is groggy too since i can't belive that the users that they are targeting ever heard of u*nix or linux. they plan to get out of the 0.05% desktop niche but this will for sure not happen if they continue their current direction and their bad ugly attitude.
The rumors that tons of freeware software and even Gnome might be integrated into Solaris started floating around even before Solaris 8 release. After Solaris 8 release, Sun has made several official statements promissing to include the Gnome desktop in Solaris 9. Solaris 9 has been released in May and it still does not include the Gnome desktop. The last rumor I have heard, was that Solaris 9 12/02 (which was supposed to be released this month) will include it. However, I haven't heard a confmation of that rumor in a long time and now this. They're asking us to wait until Solaris 10 release, damn you Sun.
And no, an unsupported add-on beta package is not good enough. I want it to be integrated with Solaris and supported by Sun, just like any other Solaris package (this includes fixing bugs and providing patches as part of Solaris patch clusters).
I think a brand spanking new SunBlade can be had for like 999 dollars. I mean, not Walmart-Lindows-cheap, but I wouldn't call that expensive.
Especially considering that I think you can attach a "PC on a PCI card" and run a full blown x86 OS side-by-side (for what I don't know, maybe apps dev?).
on the other hand, I don't know what to make of this constant change of GUIs. many people loathed it when Sun went with CDE from OpenWin, so they had to support both, and now switching to GNOME when finally CDE is getting reasonabbly stable and whatever (and I am actually pretty sure there are a handful of CDE zealots out there that's very vocal) so they will probabbly need to support all three from now on.
I mean... while good news and all, just another facet of the sun indecision "Sol9 for x86, not for x86, cost $$, maybe not, go with one GUI, but wait lets change it over later." AFAIK Java has not suffered too much amid these indecisions and the specs havn't swayed that much (somebody correct me if I am bs-ing), which is thankful for.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/features/mcnealy _keynote.html
Scott McNealy's Comdex speech was more informative.
Gnome's mentioned down near the bottom.
So, are you saying that trolltech would have a lot more customers if they didn't charge any money?
Fascinating...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I hope they join up with the Gtk# team if they want to create Java Gtk+ bindings. Gtk# has a very complete platform for parsing Gtk+'s GLib structure to generate OO bindings which could be easily modified to output Java code.
But then again, Sun probably don't want to acknowledge the existence of C#. It'd be sad if politics got in the way and caused a duplication of effort -- there really isn't any reason why Sun should have to start the project from scratch, it's a very large undertaking.
You can write commercial gnome/gtk applications without paying a penny to anyone. QT license does not allow that (although, it _is_ an open source license)
jeez doesn't John Fowler have a freaky hair part?! Someone should teach that dude to not part his hair so far down the side, or is that just how the wig comes?!
From the Trolltech FAQ:
For those thinking to develop with the free edition, then just buy a license when they're ready to deploy:
The minimal price for a single platform commercial license is $1240USD. See Trolltech - Pricing Desktop.
The price is very reasonable for the functionality, but I only have so much money to spend on tools, and I'm not willing to plunk down the coin now just in case I need to be able to use my code commercially (i.e. to support a client site.)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
GTK has been ported to windows, and of course native Java compilers exist on windows (perhaps even gcj, don't know). The Java-GTK bindings haven't yet been ported to win32, but that's the only piece that would have to be done in order to write cross-platform native Java/GTK apps. Mac OS/X probably wouldn't be too hard to add either.
I currently use Swing for GUI Java apps because it's cross platform with minimal headaches, but Swing is a slow pig on anything less than a 1GHz machine. Unfortunately I don't think there is anyone working on it right now, but It'd be great to dump Swing for GTK once these bindings get ported.
Will they finally flesh out the woefully inadequate GTK+ documentation?
One of the biggest problems I've found when developin free software is I'll think "Ooo... this toolkit/framework has the features I need" (happened with GTK+ about a year ago) and then it'll take a month to find documentation or guides about it or figure it out from scratch myself.
It's been said heaps before, but developer documentation for Windows stuff comes by the bucketload and there's less different things to document. Of course, the ever-changing nature of free software APIs may have something to do with it...
This is a big boost for Gnome...and it's been needing the boost since KDE is coming on so strong. Unless of course, Sun screws things up...which is entirely possible. My big concern with the dueling desktops is that for uniformity's sake there really should be only one standard desktop.
"3. Sun only supports open standards it can control, like GNOME. Yeah. It's our total control over the GNOME community that has enabled us to get GNOME 2.0 out on Solaris so early (currently scheduled for mid-next year). Yep, obviously and undeniably true, you have caught us again. ;-)"
read full statement here.
Not that I'm an entirly large fan of GNOME (I use Enlightenment myself), but, this has probably sold me enough on picking up Solaris 10 (and I might as well go all out geek and pick up some sexy peice of SPARC hardware to go with it :D). So sign me up in a year or what not.
Sure the CDE has its problems, but it was relativly compact, almost impossible to break, and actually worked.
gnome (1 and 2) on the other hand is bloated almost as badly as windoze, buggy, horribly slow, and IMHO butt ugly.
KDE is just as bad, but more responsive and less butt ugly.
I use windowmaker for everything, its small, fast, unbreakable, and very simple to use.
With this move Sun is trying to turn Solaris into Linux, in the same way that RH/MDK etc are trying to turn Linux into windoze.
Someone at Sun is smoking something really illegal to come up with this
Actually Swing is quite adequate for desktop applications, and some very complex desktop applications have been written using Swing (such as Netbeans). The main problem with Swing is that if anything, it's *too* complex and tends to run visibly slow on anything less than a 1GHz machine.
I think Swing's sluggishness has been a detriment to Java. Recent model JVM's with JIT compilation are quite fast at executing Java code, but people who use a Swing app on a slow machine will say Java is slow when what they really mean is Swing is slow.
CDE sucks, it is good that a better WM is making it to Solaris, finally. Even though I use KDE, Gnome will be a welcome change for everyone, I think.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
enough with the acronyms already
OpenWin was intended to run with DisplayPostscript, and did so very nicely. When the Unix standards wars and POSIX were ongoing, CDE was selected as the standard from various vendors contributions (components of HP's ToolTalk, Motif, etc.)
I've never run into anyone who thought CDE was better than OpenWin, but that's what was selected as the standard, and that's what Sun provided. If they hadn't, they would have been locked out of a lot of important markets.
It's not like there is a "constant change of GUIs" as you indicate. OpenWin was the Sun standard from about 1987 (not sure) until around 1990-1995, when CDE was spec'd. Now they're shifting to Gnome.
Note that all the way through, applications continued to run with the different desktop managers. Or were you under the impression that different versions of apps were running for different desktop managers?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Where's the ******* source!!
The pre-built binaries suck big time
Does this mean all apps are going to get that ugly created with java look or that java apps are finally going to look decent?
If Mono, Gtk#, and Gnome2 keep going the way they are going, Sun may be shipping a .NET-based desktop before Microsoft is :-)
Not to start a flame war here, the fact that I personally prefer Gnome to KDE does not mean that the latter sucks (it doesn't) but the Gnome interface is very clean, smooth and consistent.
Oh, I guess his mommy took the computer away for a few months.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Gnome isn't a WM, it's a desktop manager: The current WMs are usually either the feature-rich Sawfish or minimalist Metacity. Don't know if anybody's still using Enlightenment as a WM, it's a bit overkill for that...
Might I recommend a fabulous book on the topic of,. . .er. . .,voiding your bowels:
Everybody Poops
by Taro Gomi
Stimulating read.
Not really in a hurry, but am currently hitting CVS
The cost of QT is per developer, so in order to have their customer's application developers use QT, they'd have to include a QT license with the distribution of Solaris development tools. Not cheap. Not cheap at all.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Musk didn't found paypal, his failure x.com (banking services, etc) absorbed it in 2000. It was the only saving grace for a company that plowed through millions of dollar of venture capital with little to show. Zip2 had quite a bit to do with his wealth, though. My friend went over to Musk's house to sit in his $1,000,000 Mclaren F1. Now that's a waste of $!
Until this year, the science department of this university (University of Copenhagen (Denmark)) from where I am posting used SuSE Linux 7.3 exclusively with FVWM2 as the default Window Manager. Now, you take a guess to how many people were turned off from using Linux because of that? Sure it is rock solid and is easy as hell to support, but it is also a major turn-off for most people. Fortunately, they also have KDE2 installed, but there is just no way to use it except editing ~/.xsession manually - fat chance that the normal users would ever figure that out. My disappointment in the admin was enormous when I came back from summer break to find that they had installed Windows 2000 on the machines. Why switch from something that just works and does so every single time to something that... well... doesn't? Needless to say, I quite often see strange things happening under Windows. My reaction: hard reboot the machine next to it and get on with some serious work (or reading /. ^_^). And you wouldn't believe how many lusers type their stuff in Word now instead of using LaTeX-mode in (X)Emacs... They haven't even bothered to install OOo.
Disappointed in them I am!
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
The free version of QT for Win32 is outdated.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Linux won't be able to ship with Java/Gtk by default until Sun open source the jdk.
.NET environment (from mono), but not a Java environment.
If they don't do anything you will have the weird situation of Red Hat 9.x shipping with a
I know about gcj etc, but to be able to run Apache Tomcat you really need a Sun derived JDK.
-- Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.
QT costs money for other platforms. GTK is free everywhere.
Qt works properly on other platforms. GTK+ is broken everywhere except X11 (doesn't work, or is very buggy, doesn't look like a native app).
If you are going to recommend an alternative to Qt for cross-platform GUI development, you do yourself a great disservice by suggesting GTK+. Try wxWindows instead - a much better alternative than GTK+, although it does still have issues.
I actually like the CDE, and have never seen it break, even with me using it (sparc solaris 7/8) for some horrible dev work.
Compared to gnome its tiny, which yes I know is not hard.
I agree that the CDE needs to be replaced with something better, but gnome is a huge step backwards, even the KDE would be better.
The only hope is if they give options in addition to gnome under solaris 10
If its mandatory Gnome, thats the end of me dealing with solaris, I will move 100% to Linux
It would be so much better if there was only one desktop software. But instead we got gnome and kde. Its caused many problems and many deaths. Can't we all just get along?
Whenever SUN and GNOME is brought up, there are always someone suggesting they should have used KDE instead. I'm a GNOME-user and I do not want to get into a discussion about quality here, so lets assumed that the (biased) assumption that KDE is better than GNOME is correct.*
The main issue is control. GTK+ and most GNOME-libraries are based on a LGPL-license, while Qt is based on GPL. This is all fine and dandy for free software, and this is certainly not a question of morality. Qt is free software.
For closed source development however things look different. For GTK+/GNOME you can develop closed apps without problems, with Qt/KDE you have to obtain a license from Trolltech. This could be fine for SUN themselves, but:
SUN would not like to be held totally at ransom by Trolltech for all third-party developers. If Trolltech wanted to, they could cease giving out commercial licenses for the SUN Solaris platform at ANY TIME. Do you think any OS-developer would be boneheaded enough to let someone else control the platform? Do you think Microsoft would form the next Windows using Qt?`
The question for SUN is:
"Do we use a platform that is in direct control by another company for third-party development, or do we use a platform that is not?"
This is an easy question to answer wether or not you like KDE or GNOME better.
(*) It might be. I like GNOME better, but this might be my biased opinion. I just wanted to state that this was irrelevant.
please excuse me but my first post is today! and i cannot help but notice that poop is gooey too. haha just joking, of course ;) but seriously.. it IS kinda gooey, yeah? of course it is, or at the very least one might suppose that it certainly CAN be born with that quality provided the constituents of said feces are properly prepared.
I think that the GUI has run its inevitable course and now Linux is moving away from the desktop metaphor into the command line. after all, that's where its strength lies - not in shoddy crap like GNOME and KDE. It's time for a breakthrough and GNOME 2 is _not_ it. Sorry to say so.
It's hard to put any kind of faith into someone who won't even post their name or drop a fake email address alongside their scathing, ill-informed piece of slander that they are spreading around like a virus. My theory is that it's some kid who was attempting to write code for gnome and was asked to leave because the quality of the code was around the same quality as the grammar and punctuation in this post. Don't buy this crap.
"We must still have chaos within in order to be able to give birth to a dancing star." --Friedrich Nietzsche
I did look at Gnome 2 when it first shipped, but it drove me nuts very fast, it was far too slow, buggy, windoze like, buggy etc. And that was on a high end SMP Xeon Box, with 2GB of RAM and SCSI RAID array.
I did have a go at getting Gnome to run at a speed that made it usable, but even after disabling as much eye candy as possible, source building optimized binaries libs, and disabling as much junk as possible, it was not even close to WindowMaker, or even KDE.
To me CDE is more dated than butt ugly, but I agree that its not for everyone, and for the newbee out there, terrifying, complex to do anything with etc.
If sun does the sensible thing and includes an alternative to gnome, I will still use it, I care not if its CDE, OpenWindows (still in use by several of my clients), or even WindowMaker (my choice).
There is no way that I would use gnome (or KDE), and even created a mini-gnome library install to let me run the apps without installing full gnome.
I do not use, support, or recommend Gnome or KDE to my Linux clients, which would be the same approach that I will take with Solaris 10.
BTW. My original post was not a Troll, just my take on Gome being bad for Solaris. I just forgot to log in to post it.
It would be the fifth - Sunview, NeWS, Openwin, CDE, Gnome.
... brilliant innovative technology but Sun kept it proprietary while X was BSD licensed.
People tend to forget Sunview because it wasn't X based. Hell, it was kernel based, but it ran reasonably quickly on a 68020 with 4MB of memory across 10Mb ethernet. Sun took their GUI out of the kernel and into user space a few years before Microsoft took their GUI the other way. Go figure.
The arguments about NeWS have been well rehearsed
Then there was the Openlook vs Motif holy war, during which Scott McNeally was quoted saying Sun would adopt Motif "over my dead body".
As for Gnome, Sun have been putting development effort into Gnome for a couple of years now, working on some of the boring bits. They wouldn't have done this if they didn't intend to use it.
Dunstan
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
The next major release of HP-UX will also sport a GNOME desktop. Posting AC for obvious reasons!
bigot
Linux workstations are replacing Sun workstations hand over fist in nearly every market where Sun still has their foot in the door (Animation, EDA, Financial, Oil&Gas, Medical).
I believe this news is largely irrelevant. By the time Sun ships Gnome2 as their default desktop for Sun workstations, their market share vs. Linux workstations from Dell/Compaq/IBM (which will also be shipping Gnome2) will be close enough to 0 not to matter.
http://www.stuckless.com/~colins
How's the performance? Have you tried Sun's packaged GNOME 1.4 on the same box? Why do I ask?... because I tried GNOME 1.4 on an Ultra 1 as well, and it was miserably slow. I really can't imagine that 2.0 would be that much faster, maybe even a tad bit slower.
For the record, I was using an Ultra 1/200E, 512 MB RAM, Creator3D gfx, Solaris 8 7/01 with latest patchset.
CDE/dtwm on the same box was about as zippy as it could possibly be. Vanilla plain, but fast.
This message might not get any replies, being down at the bottom of the stack, but it's worth a shot...
:)
What has CDE been like over the past year? I keep hearing folks talk about how mature/stable/etc it has become. I first used CDE under Solaris 2.6, and later on Solaris 7 and Solaris 8 (revision 07/01). I never had much of a problem with it... it did the job and had a clean look to it. BUT...
...my big beef with it was the blasted memory leaks. All three versions I tried would gobble up insane amounts of ram over about a month's time. Logging out at night solved the problem, but was a bit of a pain on non-networked, always-logged-in boxes. I was used to Openwin as well as SGI's "IndigoMagic" desktop, both of which could run logged-in for months without sucking up more than an extra mb or so of ram. I guess maybe CDE's developers felt the average user would logout after a day or two... or reboot every day like the Wintel PC crowd. I dunno. *shrug*
My long term solution was to ditch CDE on my own box and just use mwm as my wm and have a nicely configured "right-click" root menu. xterm and xwsh are my program launchers, damnit!
don't know about gnome 1.4, but i've used gnome 1.2 i believe on an ultra-5 w/ 128MB Ram, and a shitty graphics card (don't recall the name), performance was ok with that and kde 2.2. though when i had to start a weblogic server, things would get a little flakey if i left the gui running much.
HP handed Sun their head on a platter last quarter.
Granted, HP did this by selling PA-RISC and Alpha. These are two dead architectures, with zero native binary compatibility with Itanium.
HP must be pretty happy that there is a sucker born every minute.
They have the best supply of handcuffs!
gcj implements most of the Java programming language, but it only has a tiny fraction of the Java libraries.
There is currently only one Java platform implementation, and it is proprietary and comes from Sun; several other companies have licensed it and are shipping modified versions.
CDE is an ugly pain in the ass, IMHO.
CDE is basically what was considered fashionable around the time of Windows 3.1 and OS/2. Also, while the bindings may seem strange to people who have grown up on Windows or WindowMaker or whatever, CDE is actually pretty consistent.
I'm kind of conflicted about CDE/Motif. The actual implementation of Motif sucks badly and is quite buggy. But Motif takes much better advantage of X11 than Gtk+, and technically, CDE does quite a number of things a lot better than Gnome.
my my, how do you get a +4 for a comment about GTK being broken everywhere cept with X and you have ZERO DETAILS to back that statement up
GTK+ 2.0 works for me on Windows XP.
Ever heard of GTK#?
http://gtksharp.sf.net/
Actually, GTK# is misnamed. It should be gtkDotNet or something.
It has C# bindings to GTK+ 2.0, GNOME 2.0, GConf, Glade, Gnome-DB, GDA, etc...
The C# bindings to gtk+ 2.0 (and dependencies, such as glib 2.0, pango, atk, gdk) in GTK# works on Windows and Linux.
The C# bindings to GNOME 2.0, GConf, Glade, Gnome-DB, and GDA only work on Linux due to the native libraries for these things have not been ported to Windows.
Nice troll!
T-ranger writes:
QT costs money for other platforms. GTK is free everywhere.
marm writes:
Qt works properly on other platforms. GTK+ is broken everywhere except X11 (doesn't work, or is very buggy, doesn't look like a native app).
Methinks you misunderstand. For Sun to use QT/KDE in Solaris, they'd have to pay trolltech $BIG$MONEY$. GTK/gnome2 is free software. They could use it for free. And they are. And they're contributing a lot back to the project.
Assuming your statement about 'other platforms' is correct, it doesn't matter. Why? Because Solaris GTK/Gnome2 is going to be on top of X11 anyway.
I'm running the solaris8 gnome beta (gnome1.4) and it works really well. When I have some freetime at work, I'll install the gnome2 beta for solaris on top of it, and see how it does.
Zapman
GNOME 2 beta 3 is much faster on my Ultra 1 (167 Mhz, 256M RAM, Creator 3D, Solaris 9) than GNOME 1.4. Nautilus rocks. :)
Beta 3 supports the SUNWmlib media lib library with gdk, which utilizes the VIS instruction set.
Very cool. I'm not a big GNOME fan, but if Sun's release version will run nicely on an Ultra 1, then I'll be way more likely to give it a shot. Might even be kinda zippy (heh) on the Ultra 30 (300 MHz) I may soon be getting.
BTW, how's Solaris 9 working out for you on that box? I'm still using 8, which feels a tad slower than 7, but it may just be a placebo effect.
I wish that there was some way to get Sun and all the other CDE using companies to look at XFce. It's capable of looking and feeling like CDE. However it's got more functionality and more cababilities than GNOME or KDE. It's also as fast (if not faster) than IceWM and other light WM's. The iceing on the cake is that, from within XFce, you can run all the GNOME and KDE apps with absolutely no compatability problems at all.
Now, I am not saying that GNOME (or even KDE) are not outstanding products. They are two great projects doing fantastic work. It's just that if you were going to move from CDE wouldn't it be better to go to something that would be easy for people to use as a steping stone to GNOME? It's only common sense.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
Hahahahah! Oh yeah, I can see it now. GNOME 2, which totally and utterly refuses to work if your $HOME is NFS-mounted, will become the default for Solaris, from Sun, the people who invented NFS.
This should be amazingly funny to watch. I'll have to stock up on popcorn.
08:58 greycat> ~laugh at gnome 208:58 @apt> HAHAHA! AH-HAHA! gnome 2 just cracks me up!
No, Sun wouldn't have to pay TrollTech a cent.
Sun would have to pay Trolltech to use QT for anything with has a license which isn't GPL compatible (read: most of what they'd be using a new toolkit for).
One of Sun's biggest concerns (or any OS vendor for that matter) in shipping shared system libraries is that the API/ABI remain backwards compatible. Just as all applications depend on libc remaining backwards compatible, I imagine many future Solaris applications will depend on GNOME/Gtk. Does GNOME 2/Gtk+ 2.x offer this ABI guarantee?
Yes, you could ship many versions of shared libraries each tailored to a specific Gtk version, but you lose the advantage of older applications automatically gaining new features.
the overall effect is...kinda like Windows done right
:-)
Except many people don't like Windows, and dislike KDE for the copy-Windows approach. It's a matter of flavor -- GNOME diverges more radically from Windows.
I do have to say that this is something like the ultimate slap in the face for the KDE project -- built to replace CDE, its ultimate goal was to do exactly what GNOME is now doing.
Of course, lots of Qt promotion running around...might as well add my own gtk promotion.
GNOME is much more acceptable to adopt as a major standard partly because of the far, far broader application support. The gtk application base has got to be at least five times the Qt application base. There's only a single "killer app" on Linux that's written in Qt -- licq, the best-of-breed Linux ICQ client (which *still* has issues with Windows clients and also has a gtk interface). If you use Linux, you *will* be using gtk at some point -- gimp, xmms, gtk-gnutella, dctc/dc_gui, gkrellm, sodipodi...and if you want a consistent desktop, a gtk-based environment is really the only way to go, since you're going to have to use gtk anyway.
Sun chose long ago, and has been putting plenty of effort into GNOME for a while ago. People acting shocked that they didn't fall behind KDE shouldn't be surprised -- the choice was made a long time ago -- Sun's usability work, donation of code...
Other major points -- the development model is much more appealing to Sun. GNOME has a very open architecture. It's much easier to get something accepted into GNOME than KDE, and GNOME is much less tightly controlled by the GNOME people than KDE is by the KDE people. It's a more open development process. Sun probably decided that it couldn't control the KDE people, so the GNOME approach gave it more freedom to do things the way it wants to.
Next, cross platform support -- as has been mentioned in other posts, in the Solaris world, there are more closed-source app developers who don't want to screw around with GPLing cross platform stuff. The license is much more of an issue on Solaris than it is on Linux.
May we never see th
my my, how do you get a +4 for a comment about GTK being broken everywhere cept with X and you have ZERO DETAILS to back that statement up
Because it's the truth. GTK+ 1.4 and 2.0 both work on Win32, but they are both exceptionally buggy - have you tried using the GIMP Windows port? It's not a good experience, and that's not just because the GIMP has a terrible interface anyway. GTK+ apps running on Windows don't look or behave like Windows apps either, they behave like... GTK+ apps. Sticks out like a sore thumb. Second, GTK+ doesn't run on MacOS X at all, not natively, anyway. The X11 version works if you have an X server installed on the Mac, but that just means you're running the X11 version, so my original statement still holds true.
I'm not saying GTK+ is crap, it's just not designed to be cross-platform (assuming you count X11 as a single platform, and I do) and it shows. I was taking issue with the idea that GTK+ is a sensible toolkit to choose if you want cross-platform apps, which the original post in this thread suggested. If you want cross-platform GUI apps, choose Qt or wxWindows - or heck, Java/Swing if you're a masochist, but don't choose GTK+, it would be a dumb choice.
The poor economy forces everyone to think about the performance of applications on 4 year old hardware.
Companies are not replacing computers every two years as they once did.
Also, XML can be parsed quite decently on older hardware so I don't see what your point is in relation to Swing's slowness on new hardware. This is solely a Swing problem. Swing is a very poorly designed Java graphics toolkit that creates 10 times more temporary objects than it should. Sun would be well advised to abandon Swing altogether in favour of a Gtk wrapper.
I'm mainly a KDE user, and first experienced GNOME 2 beta on Solaris.
a nd lots of other minor and annoying things
I don't know what's SUN's fault & what's GNOME behavior. (I've never tested GNOME 2 on Linux)
- Lot's of GNOME-apps doesn't work (either don't start or crash very often)
- removable disks cannot managed (no Icon or something to access them - need to use old CDE programs)
- Localisation mostly undone (Even in a beta version Localisation should be mainly done)
- limited ways to configure window behavior (I really miss my stay-where-they-are-even-if-I-click-in-windows)
With that experience I would say GNOME on Solaris is still in alpha state.
--
Stefan
DevCounter ( http://devcounter.berlios.de/ )
An open, free & independent developer pool.
It's funny.
I'm running KDE on Linux on dual 2.2GHz Pentium 4s with an nVidia card. It's great.
But I've used Sun workstations from (Sun 3/160) 1985-2001 (Ultra2).
When OpenWindows started to ship with XView and then with CDE, I moved over to use plain old twm, then ctwm and finally fvwm. Avoided CDE all these years. It's only now under Linux that I've conceded to using one of these full-featured desktops because it doesn't feel heavy.
Desktop UNIX is going free and Sun will be wise to change to the times.
Sun still rules in the big server arena, but it could leverage that in making a name for itself in the newly emerging low cost UNIX desktop area, as long as it doesn't get caught up misty-eyed pining for the times when people were willing to shell out $20K for a workstation. Enterprise level integration and management of UNIX LANs running StarOffice, Mozilla and Evolution is a potentially huge market playing to Sun's traditional strengths. (NFS, NIS, etc.)
If Sun doesn't, then we'll have to look to other players that may not be quite as well positioned from some perspectives: HP, IBM, Red Hat, Dell...
"Provided by the management for your protection."
It's boxes, not boxen, you idiot. Did you get it? Good!
You can write commercial Qt/X11 applications as long as they're GPLed.
Don't mix up commercial and closed source.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
> Besides, KDE is also driven by commercial companies like SuSE, Mandrake, Trolltech etc. ...who also employ all the key KDE developers.
Developers have to eat too. I so no problem with the GNOME or KDE commercial developer situation.
Sorry late reply, had to sleep...GNOME2 on it feels like it's a tad bit slower than CDE, but not much. As far as Solaris 9, it's fine by me. I've run 6,7,8, and 9 all on the same class ( Ultra 1 ) of machine, roughly same processor speeds and RAM ( 512 MB ), and not noticed a difference speedwise. But I very rarely compile anything on it, as I don't do much work/development on Solaris, just Linux, so for me the important things on Solaris 9 are vi, shell utilities ( bash, sed, awk, etc. ), perl, and ssh.
Give it a shot...or try running Linux on it ( I remember the Redhat 6,2 distro ran nicely on an Ultra 1 a few years ago, haven't tried it since ).
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
I wonder if this will extend to the next version of Trusted Solaris. It would be very nice to get rid of CDE there, too.
I despise CDE. Not for its obtuse configuration scheme, but rather for the fact that it has so many security holes. ToolTalk especially is the bane of my existence. Take a look at what CERT has to say about CDE. Whoever coded CDE should be fired.
There's only a single "killer app" on Linux that's written in Qt -- licq, the best-of-breed Linux ICQ client
Discounting of course the whole of KOffice, the only Linux office suite that's nice to use. Or Konqueror, the web browser, file manager and universal viewer that's actually good to use and does what it says on the tin. Or KPPP, the only friendly GUI way of getting online if you're on dialup. Or Quanta, the nicest HTML editor. Or Kate, the all-round best GUI text editor. Or KDevelop, the best IDE by miles. Or Scribus, the only DTP program on Linux worth a damn. Or Rosegarden-4 or MusE, the only halfway-usable music sequencers on Linux. Or Karbon14, now part of KOffice, not quite there yet but a vector drawing program like Sodipodi that, unlike Sodipodi, doesn't drive you barking mad.
GTK+ has more applications in number, I agree, although not anything like the 5:1 ratio you think, and few of them are large and complex. Only two of the apps you gave as examples, the GIMP and Sodipodi, could really be described as large and complex, and both of them have a reputation for having a terrible user interface. The rest of the apps you gave are all fairly small and limited in scope - a music player, a couple of p2p apps, a system monitor. Personally I think that says a lot about GTK+'s suitability for writing large applications.
Compare that with Qt, which has Scribus, Rosegarden-4, MusE, KDevelop and Karbon14 as large and complex killer apps, all of which have quite decent user interfaces, and all of which have smaller development teams than the GIMP or Sodipodi. Heck, Scribus was written almost entirely by one person! You'll note also that there aren't too many specialist commercial applications being written in GTK+ - where are the medical imaging apps or the geological survey apps, to pick two that TrollTech shows off as success stories? Or of course there's Opera, or the HancomOffice stuff. Or all the PDA stuff for the Zaurus. If the commercial licensing was really a problem for Qt, don't you think these would have been written in GTK+ or wxWindows instead?
There's this persistent myth put about by some people that no-one is writing apps with Qt, and it simply isn't true. You're just choosing not to look at them.
If you use Linux, you *will* be using gtk at some point
Not really. The only GTK+ apps I keep around these days are the GIMP and Sodipodi and they are such pigs to use I often find myself booting a VMware Win2k session to use Photoshop and Illustrator instead, even for quite small tasks. The only non-Qt app I find I use regularly is OpenOffice.org, and that's only because it's the only thing that will reliably open MS Office files - if I'm starting a new document I prefer KWord or KSpread, they play nicely with the rest of my desktop, are lighter on my system, and are easier to use.
Sun probably decided that it couldn't control the KDE people, so the GNOME approach gave it more freedom to do things the way it wants to.
You're almost certainly right on this point. ;)
Of course, freedom for Sun isn't necessarily a good thing for the end user - or the volunteer developer. Witness all the moaning about the direction GNOME 2.x is headed from... end users and volunteer developers.
I see no read more on the article. I go to the comments section and hit read more, and see the same article.
I agree with the original poster, what type of "interview" is this?
- sigs are for wimps.
Why can't GNOME get rid of their stupid, ugly icon? If they're going to be an "enterprise" desktop they should start looking like one in all areas.
Swing is not a window manager which is the first thing they need.
Plus they said in the article to write your apps in Java (they'll provided the look & feel) or GNOME, so I don't think it's a statement on Sun admitting anything on Swing.
Why waste money with yet another desktop environment when there's a free one? That's the thinking that probably went into this.
- sigs are for wimps.
they have in fact revealed plans on creating GTK+ bindings for Java which will make all future Solaris apps look like alike
All future apps? Gentu has been smoking crack!
Unless there's a gun pointed to the head of Solaris developers, there's nothing stopping them from using Motif or vanilla X11. Most commercial UNIX developers have never used GNOME. Sun cannot seriously think that people will jump on the GNOME bandwagon just because they change a desktop. Is Adobe going to release Gramemaker and Rational to release Gleargase just because Sun thinks it's a cool idea? Hah!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I know this isn't the point that the submitter chose to focus on, but I have to point out the anti-IBM spin that the OSNews author let through or inserted:
The omission of AIX on POWER4 is completely bogus. IBM is Sun's only real competition right now, and Big Blue's offerings outperform Solaris on Sparc at a fraction of the cost.
I'm sorry, but who really thinks that it's a bad thing that IBM is paying a large number of developers to contribute GPL'ed code to the Linux kernel? IBM's work has had a lot to do with the high-end progress that we've seen in 2.4 and will see in 2.6. They're not steering the kernel and they're not subverting the process, they're just submitting their patches like anyone else could. They're adding their efforts to the efforts of others in the community, and everyone is benefiting from the results.
Sun, on the other hand, is willing to make the massive contribution of writing some drivers, if no one else will do it form them. Otherwise, they're satisfied to offer Linux, only as a low-end player, and do their darndest to make sure it stays that way.
It's false that IBM is "not evolving AIX" anymore -- their last release was less than 2 months ago. But their actions clearly show that they want to help Linux grow into the role that AIX currently fills (to be clear, that would be running on pSeries machines to outperform Solaris on Sparc). Obviously, Sun has a problem with that, but why should anybody else?
Yes. Read Advanced XFwm configuration.
FreeSpeech.org
Aye, the antisemitic KDE troll is one. Go through his brief posting history to see him screaming about Israeli propaganada because someone dared suggest that suicide bombings were not a good thing.
As Martins resolved spat with the rest of the Gnome team keeps getting quoted, without the subsequent reconciliation, lets put it straight.
Martin is still involved in gnome, and is a member of the gnome foundation (and stood for the board)
You'll notice that when you start KDE apps under Gnome, various KDE daemons are started if they aren't running. If you run Gnome apps from KDE, various Gnome daemons get started. I expect tooltalkd or some such will be started to deal with the CDE applications in the same way.
Did anyone ever actually use tooltalk with CDE? I never saw anything except recompiled Motif applications...
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
RedTux absolutely bullshit. Go and inform first before replying here. For someone that uses Gnome for around 3-4 months now you are trying to act like an expert here.
I thought NeWS was the DisplayPostscript equivalent to an X-11 server. *shrug* Maybe my memory is fuzzy...
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
- The Qt toolkit is available under two different licenses: The Professional and Enterprise Editions for commercial use on all platforms, and the Free Edition for developing free/open source software for the X11 platform.
In other words, with Qt you can have free OR cross-platform, but not both. If you want free AND cross-platform, you have options like wxWindows, Perl/Tk, and Java.Find free books.
GNOME 2 [...] utterly refuses to work if your $HOME is NFS-mounted
No, it refuses to work if your $HOME doesn't support locking (i.e. you use a really old, broken version of NFS). Believe you me, Sun, who invented NFS, has an implementation of NFS that supports locking just fine. They won't have a problem.
Of course, I know from experience that NFS has problems with lots of locks held simultaneously, which may be an issue unless these locks are only held briefly. But surely Sun (who invented NFS) is aware of that, and has looked at the issue. They're not usually that stupid.
"Opera is unusable on Linux (where one has virtual desktops), thanks to the MDI interface. I won't count that an indispensible app in the least, especially since it's little faster than Mozilla."
.. and that's the funny part. they expect Windows refugees to relearn any number of things but Opera's interface was too tuff.
If you actually tried it lately, you would know
that you can choose mdi or sdi.
Besides sdi is not better it's just what you are used to.
Once they try it, many prefer mdi. There is nothing about virtual desktops that precludes
mdi or vice versa.
If you want to talk about non-free, or ad supported fine, but the mdi objection was always and still is a laughable prejudice.
I always got a huge kick out of all the Linux
bigots who whined that Opera's interface is too
hard and poorly designed.
All they were saying is they were unfamiliar with it and didn't want to bother learning it.
feet of clay, we all have...
I have a SunBlade 100 right in front of me ... and I love it. It's quiet and as fast (if not faster) than I need. Admittedly we upped the RAM to 512 straight up.
load average: 0.21, 0.13, 0.09
It only gets higher than about 0.4 when I'm doing a major compile or patching (or running xlock, damn that must be bloated). I'm happily running mozilla, and it crashes less often than my last Linux box. Which is to say not in my memory. I've had X crash on me once or twice when I was still running Solaris 8, but that was usually because I did something stupid. (I'm a FreeBSD convert now, but Solaris 9 is what we're running at work).
I have a PC card inside (which is unfortunately rather noisy. Damn PCs) with an external monitor. I run VNC software so I can use Windows XP and Solaris 9 almost as if it's one dual-headed machine. Roll the mouse to the right I'm in Windows, roll it to the left I'm in Solaris. I find it a very productive setup for the work I do, which is sysadmin with some Java & Python development thrown in, and some need for MS-specific applications (not just Office, though that is certainly one - several? - of them).
I haven't used an Ultra-2, so I don't have a comparison, but it's a major improvement on my old Ultra-5.
CDE is the most butt ugly GUI I've ever seen. It wasn't exactly useful either. But then again, it's hard to learn a GUI when you have to look away from the screen every 10 to 15 seconds due to disgust.
The only spare SUN box I have is a anchient SS10, which is not really upto anything with a GUI.
:-)
If time allows I may have a play on my Ultra60 which should be much better.
confrontational me, never
I allways speak my mind, and have a long standing bitch with Gnome, and to a lesser extent KDE.
ok, well first off there never was a gtk 1.4. Second, gtk 1.x had some issues with Windows, and wasnt recommended for production use on windows. GTK 2.0 is fully ported to Windows and the GTK people support it. As far as a GTK program sticking out, GTK can be themes and I have LOTS of Windows programs with a 1000 different widgets, some written in Borland, some in MFC, some in tcl/tk even. also, GDK does the actual drawing, and all it takes is for one person to write a Mac OS X backend for GDK, then GTK can be ported easily to Mac OS X
I know they don't *say* that it is unix, but in the same way as your S.O. never dumps you, they just return your things and smash up your car :-)
Once you start with what is UNIX and what is not UNIX, well where do you end (i.e. The pope and the kkk are both christians)
CDE was such a steaming turd of a desktop that many Solaris shops never migrated to it. We're still running OpenWin as the default desktop at my workplace. I'm glad to see Sun has finally come to their senses and is going to provide a quality desktop environment for their customers.
Hmmm... You say that the elections for the GNOME board have been dominated by Sun, Ximian and RedHat. This is correct to some extent, although this should not be surprising if you take into account how much these companies have contributed to GNOME. But then you say that the "community of free volunteers has been basically sqashed" and the board is "controlled by major corporations." Did you forget that Ximian is a small company (not a major corporation) that was founded by several of the volunteers who started the GNOME project? They have decided to create a company because they have chosen this way of making a living. But they started as free volunteers like you and me (although I do not know who you are, but I hope that you are an active contributor and not just someone who complains about something without having participated to it).
You could object that some of these companies are trying to promote their own interests in the GNOME board and are going against the community of volunteers. As far as I know, this is definitely not the case. I am generally happy with the decisions taken by the GNOME board and I am not associated with any of these companies. Also, I would like to mention that there is no "community of free volunteers" going against the corporate developers. There is only a community of GNOME developers (or several communities, if you take into account the applications such as the GIMP, Sodipodi and so on) and this community includes some people who are paid for working on these programs as well as many volunteers. And in almost every case, everybody is happy with that.
-Raphaël
Do we have to see George Clooney's bottom 9 TIMES OVER?! They should have made Linux the movie!
1. It is a myth that Java is a cross platform technology. It works mostly on win32, with serious bugs on macos9, with some bugs on macosx, stable only on a server side on most of Unix and Linux/x86 platforms. It doesn't work well on Linux/non-x86 platforms or doesn't work at all. 2. Java will never be fast. CPU becomes faster and instead of AWK we have SWING, later we'll have SOAP based UI, later SOAP over EJB (or EJB over SOAP?). Besides, Java is an interpreter - it's never been design to be fast. 3. Java is not RAD. You have to compile your code => your development process is slow. 4. Java will never become a desktop environment. Remember Netscape? They have tried to rewrite it on java. What's happened? The project is failed. And even ownership of Sun, Java inventr, did not help. Desktop is much more complicated then just a web browser. 5. Java is an interpreter of compiled code - that the most insane invention I've ever met
Less is more !