arb writes "The Age has an interview with Shawn Gordon, president of theKompany.com where he discusses such issues as RedHat's focus on Gnome and the relegation of KDE 'to second best', other Gnome vs KDE issues, distributions including proprietary bits and so on."
Not a /. interview
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Um, you did read the fact that this is an already published interview, and not an upcoming/. interview, right?
Re:"Race KDE cannot win"
by
nick255
·
· Score: 4, Informative
> Surely a conservative decisionmaker will choose > a desktop-agnostic Mozilla or OpenOffice over > the KDE-specific versions.
You mean like those people at Apple who chose KHTML for Safari?
Re:Second best?
by
IamTheRealMike
·
· Score: 4, Informative
So, my question is, why is KDE considered second best? Are there technical reasons, or political, or what?
[sigh] It's not. Look, I'll try and tell it like it is, but nobody is entirely neutral in this debate OK?
Basically, with Mandrake looking like it's going down the tubes, there are 2 major commercial Linux desktop distros left, Redhat and SuSE. There are others like Xandros of course, but they are more focussed on providing an "appliance" style OS, rather than staying level with the current cutting edge in Linux development.
RedHat are popular in the states, and are "biased" towards Gnome, that is they have more Gnome hackers with experience than KDE hackers. As such, their distro focusses on Gnome more than KDE. SuSE is similar but opposite, they focus more on KDE than Gnome and afaik don't have any Gnome hackers on the team.
When Redhat 8 came out, as I'm sure you noticed, they attempted to equalize the desktops somewhat. BlueCurve was an attempt to give Redhat a distinctive brand on the desktop and it worked tremendously well. Nonetheless, some people involved with KDE got a bit upset, because KDE has its own brand (as does gnome) and Bluecurve changed that.
Today the desktops are basically equal, although they are stronger in different areas. So, GNOME has better usability IMHO, but KDE has more features. I should think theKompany likes KDE/Qt as a developer platform more because Qt is commercially supported, has professional docs and is more cross platform, so (if they pay) they can sell their apps on Windows and MacOS as well. Of course he has hackers with KDE/Qt experience which also tips him. On the other hand, GTK is more Linux specific, but has some cooler features. Some people will tell you that GTK is harder to program for, but in reality that's not the case, if C++ is your thing then both Qt and GTKmm are excellent.
I think you're exaggurating when you say KDE is slower and uglier on redhat. I think the BlueCurve artwork is great, but you can always retheme it easily, and it should be no slower.
Re:"Race KDE cannot win"
by
IamTheRealMike
·
· Score: 4, Informative
KDE people also have the weird habit of producing their own versions of various pieces of software.
I agree with the basic thrust of the post, but in fairness this occurs with Gnome as well. Gnome seems less centralised to me, for instance they don't produce their own media player as such but RhythmBox is a Gnome app, they don't produce their own email app but there is Balsa and Evolution, etc.
There is way too much duplication, I agree. The projects are starting to work together a lot more now though, largely thanks to the work at freedesktop.org. Not just there though, for instance KDE was considering using GStreamer for its multimedia architecture at one point (I think they decided to wait for it to mature, which is fair enough).
Some KDE projects seem rather dead though, I think the more decentralised approach gnome takes (or rather, doesn't take) is a bit better. AbiWord isn't a Gnome app but you'd never know, it integrates nicely etc and is a good deal more active than KWord seems to be. Ditto for Gnumeric and KSpread. Noatun is just a joke, really, but it's kind of the "official" KDE media player.
Note that I have been KDE user in the past (alternating with less popular lightweight wm's), but Gnome seems to finally have gotten their stuff together with gnome2.
Agreed, at least in terms of desktop experience. It's not all there yet, but it shows great potential. KDE still leads in terms of developer platform though imho, their documentation is much better (though to be fair to gnome, they don't have a company like trolltech maintaining it for them). Also some Gnome technologies like Bonobo tend to be a bit confusing, especially in the more advanced usage. On the other hand, the KDE usability effort seems to be going nowhere quickly:(
Re:Second best?
by
sydneyfong
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Political. KDE relies on a library, QT, that is GPL'ed, which means that all KDE applications must be GPL'd, and by default, is hard to sell directly for cash.
There IS an option not to GPL the application, but that requires paying licence fees to Trolltech, the company that made QT.
Commericial companies get wary of these issues, since they would always like to preserve the option of selling the software, or at least reserving their rights from their code.
Sun, from their evaluation report, seemed to have chosen GNOME as their future desktop mainly because of the licensing issues, but not of technical merits
-- Don't quote me on this.
Re:"Race KDE cannot win"
by
IGnatius+T+Foobar
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I think there might be a grain of truth in the fact that KDE has very hard time winning the desktop. Gnome has the huge advantage of licensing (LGPL vs. GPL). It doesn't matter how much smoother or better the technology underlying KDE or KDE applications is.
This cannot be understated. I've been a KDE fan for many years, but I've noticed that most ISV's choose GTK for their applications. To wit: Codeweavers (the config screens for Crossover), VMware, Netscape (the Unix version of Mozilla uses GTK), etc. TheKompany is the exception to the rule. And even then, TheKompany doesn't use KDE anymore, they just use Qt so that their apps can run on all three of the major platforms.
Combine this with the fact that as of late, both GNOME and KDE are very intuitive and usable... Shawn may be right. When Red Hat 8 came out I tried the BlueCurve desktop and I really liked it. I started in KDE mode, but over the last couple of weeks I've been running it in GNOME mode and I really didn't notice a difference. That says something important.
-- Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Re:"Race KDE cannot win"
by
printman
·
· Score: 2, Informative
FWIW, FLTK provides the same advantages as Qt but is provided under the LGPL and is a lot smaller and faster.
The 2.0 release (currently in development) will take us beyond what most of the current toolkits can do, and is the basis of the Equinox Desktop Environment. At the same time, 2.0 retains the same goal of small size, high speed, and portability/cross-platform programming.
-- I print, therefore I am.
Re:Where have you been for the last two years?
by
arkanes
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Look at wxWindows for a LGPL, cross platform (GTK, X11, Windows, Motif, some others) toolkit. It's sort of a cross between Qt and the MFC (no preprocessor, so no signals/slots, uses MFC style event tables), but it's (much) cleaner than MFC. It's not as polished as Qt, but it's open source on all platforms without spending lots of money (You have to pay for a commercial Qt license if you want to work on windows, or use the sadly outmoded NC version), and help is very forthcoming on the wx-users mailing list.
Re:Where have you been for the last two years?
by
IamTheRealMike
·
· Score: 3, Informative
What's wrong with KDE's (and QT's) GPL license?
Two major problems:
1) It means you can only write GPLd software with it. Apple were pretty keen not to let Safari be open sourced, though god knows why, it's hardly a cutting edge browser so they actually had to produce Qt wrappers and de-Qt parts to prevent it becoming GPL software.
2) It's only free software when using X11. That means KDE software can't be ported to Windows or MacOS and use the native graphics layer on each, they have to use an X server. Also, if one day (unlikely but possible) we all decide to move away from X, unless Trolltech update the license KDE is kind of shafted. Obviously that's the least likely of all scenarios, and anyway I expect Trolltech would just update the license, but you get the idea.
Of course you can write commercial or portable software with Qt, but have you seen the prices? It's $1500 per developer for the professional edition, meaning unless you are a rich company you have to make your software GPLd and X specific (which is what they intended, but hey).
In contrast, GTK can be used for commercial and portable apps, and really it's quite a good toolkit these days. Hence the flamewars.
Outdated opinion (was: Re:"Race KDE cannot win")
by
Reinout
·
· Score: 4, Informative
... there'd be no lisensing issues. KDE was foolish for choosing a toolkit with such a license
BRING BACK HARMONY. (....) Harmony is a GPL replacement toolkit....
I'm getting the feeling that the poster doesn't know that QT now comes under the GPL license (instead of their original non-GPL one). The poster loves KDE, but loaths it's licence. The license is GPL! Nothing wrong with that (as the poster likes linux).
Funny (or not) thing is that RMS is basically backing gnome (LGPL) while at the same time advising everyone to stay clear of the LGPL because it is an inferior language. GPL is preferred. KDE&QT is GPL, so it would be better to put the FSF's weight more (and more openly) behind KDE. By "better" I mean from a purely FSF-political standpoint.
Re:"Race KDE cannot win"
by
marm
·
· Score: 3, Informative
AbiWord isn't a Gnome app but you'd never know, it integrates nicely etc and is a good deal more active than KWord seems to be. Ditto for Gnumeric and KSpread. Noatun is just a joke, really, but it's kind of the "official" KDE media player.
You read in the article about there being something of a cultural difference between the two camps: USA vs. Europe, noisy vs. getting on with it. Well, this is the perfect example. You think AbiWord is far more active than KWord. It has more developers, more mailing list messages, more CVS commits, more releases. But look at the current in-development versions of both of them, and compare them with what they were like a year ago. I think you'll find the comparison doesn't come out in AbiWord's favour. Partly this is architectural - there's FAR more code sharing and reuse in KOffice/KDE/Qt than in AbiWord/GTK, partly because the balance of talking about it/doing it is further towards the doing it end with KWord than with AbiWord. I guess this also explains why Slashdot appears to have a tendency towards GNOME whilst the Linux community as a whole seems to prefer KDE.
And don't diss Noatun: you might not like it but from my point of view it's far nicer than anything else available. It plays all my music, has a good equalizer, does effects, the interface looks and works like everything else on my desktop (although it doesn't have to), and most important of all, happily hides itself down in the system tray when I want it out of the way and stays there. The KDE 3.1 version embeds Xine to play video: now it's the only media player I use. I love it.
On the other hand, the KDE usability effort seems to be going nowhere quickly
I take it you've not used KDE 3.1 yet then? There's some good improvements in there.
And let's face it, GNOME usability still has a long long way to go *cough*GTK+ file dialog*cough*
Re:Can't we all just get along
by
jacoplane
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Not extremely exciting, but the guy who left red hat to fork a kde-based distribution can be found here: ark linux
Re:Second best?
by
StarTux
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"RedHat are popular in the states, and are "biased" towards Gnome, that is they have more Gnome hackers with experience than KDE hackers. As such, their distro focusses on Gnome more than KDE. SuSE is similar but opposite, they focus more on KDE than Gnome and afaik don't have any Gnome hackers on the team."
SuSE have at least one Gnome hacker on the team, but they have certainly been more focused on KDE. For instance Waldo Bastion who I think still leads KDE development is a SuSE employee.
"Today the desktops are basically equal, although they are stronger in different areas. So, GNOME has better usability IMHO, but KDE has more features. I should think theKompany likes KDE/Qt as a developer platform more because Qt is commercially supported, has professional docs and is more cross platform, so (if they pay) they can sell their apps on Windows and MacOS as well. Of course he has hackers with KDE/Qt experience which also tips him. On the other hand, GTK is more Linux specific, but has some cooler features. Some people will tell you that GTK is harder to program for, but in reality that's not the case, if C++ is your thing then both Qt and GTKmm are excellent"
I liked to use both desktops:). You can ony theme so much, even though Linux desktops are probably the most themeable. Although right now I have settled on KDE as I prefer using the Ximian desktop (whats taking them so long?). From what Shawn has mentioned on the kapital mailing list he seems to really like QT, not just for support but because of its environment.
it IS unfinished. SuSE has not put much refinement into the GNOME2 packages, they more or less take the release of GNOME2 as it is released. So please complain to the GNOMEs, not to SuSE. It is not a distributors job to finish and fix a desktop environment. SuSE has not broken these packages with their changes, they were crap to begin with. Redhat broke KDE with their changes.
I know that OTOH KDE releases feel finished, because I compile them myself and there is nothing broken or unpolished in them. KDE-3.1 will be better than ever!
Slashdot Mirror
Um, you did read the fact that this is an already published interview, and not an upcoming /. interview, right?
> Surely a conservative decisionmaker will choose
> a desktop-agnostic Mozilla or OpenOffice over
> the KDE-specific versions.
You mean like those people at Apple who chose KHTML for Safari?
[sigh] It's not. Look, I'll try and tell it like it is, but nobody is entirely neutral in this debate OK?
Basically, with Mandrake looking like it's going down the tubes, there are 2 major commercial Linux desktop distros left, Redhat and SuSE. There are others like Xandros of course, but they are more focussed on providing an "appliance" style OS, rather than staying level with the current cutting edge in Linux development.
RedHat are popular in the states, and are "biased" towards Gnome, that is they have more Gnome hackers with experience than KDE hackers. As such, their distro focusses on Gnome more than KDE. SuSE is similar but opposite, they focus more on KDE than Gnome and afaik don't have any Gnome hackers on the team.
When Redhat 8 came out, as I'm sure you noticed, they attempted to equalize the desktops somewhat. BlueCurve was an attempt to give Redhat a distinctive brand on the desktop and it worked tremendously well. Nonetheless, some people involved with KDE got a bit upset, because KDE has its own brand (as does gnome) and Bluecurve changed that.
Today the desktops are basically equal, although they are stronger in different areas. So, GNOME has better usability IMHO, but KDE has more features. I should think theKompany likes KDE/Qt as a developer platform more because Qt is commercially supported, has professional docs and is more cross platform, so (if they pay) they can sell their apps on Windows and MacOS as well. Of course he has hackers with KDE/Qt experience which also tips him. On the other hand, GTK is more Linux specific, but has some cooler features. Some people will tell you that GTK is harder to program for, but in reality that's not the case, if C++ is your thing then both Qt and GTKmm are excellent.
I think you're exaggurating when you say KDE is slower and uglier on redhat. I think the BlueCurve artwork is great, but you can always retheme it easily, and it should be no slower.
I agree with the basic thrust of the post, but in fairness this occurs with Gnome as well. Gnome seems less centralised to me, for instance they don't produce their own media player as such but RhythmBox is a Gnome app, they don't produce their own email app but there is Balsa and Evolution, etc.
There is way too much duplication, I agree. The projects are starting to work together a lot more now though, largely thanks to the work at freedesktop.org. Not just there though, for instance KDE was considering using GStreamer for its multimedia architecture at one point (I think they decided to wait for it to mature, which is fair enough).
Some KDE projects seem rather dead though, I think the more decentralised approach gnome takes (or rather, doesn't take) is a bit better. AbiWord isn't a Gnome app but you'd never know, it integrates nicely etc and is a good deal more active than KWord seems to be. Ditto for Gnumeric and KSpread. Noatun is just a joke, really, but it's kind of the "official" KDE media player.
Note that I have been KDE user in the past (alternating with less popular lightweight wm's), but Gnome seems to finally have gotten their stuff together with gnome2.
Agreed, at least in terms of desktop experience. It's not all there yet, but it shows great potential. KDE still leads in terms of developer platform though imho, their documentation is much better (though to be fair to gnome, they don't have a company like trolltech maintaining it for them). Also some Gnome technologies like Bonobo tend to be a bit confusing, especially in the more advanced usage. On the other hand, the KDE usability effort seems to be going nowhere quickly :(
Political. KDE relies on a library, QT, that is GPL'ed, which means that all KDE applications must be GPL'd, and by default, is hard to sell directly for cash.
There IS an option not to GPL the application, but that requires paying licence fees to Trolltech, the company that made QT.
Commericial companies get wary of these issues, since they would always like to preserve the option of selling the software, or at least reserving their rights from their code.
Sun, from their evaluation report, seemed to have chosen GNOME as their future desktop mainly because of the licensing issues, but not of technical merits
Don't quote me on this.
Combine this with the fact that as of late, both GNOME and KDE are very intuitive and usable... Shawn may be right. When Red Hat 8 came out I tried the BlueCurve desktop and I really liked it. I started in KDE mode, but over the last couple of weeks I've been running it in GNOME mode and I really didn't notice a difference. That says something important.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
FWIW, FLTK provides the same advantages as Qt but is provided under the LGPL and is a lot smaller and faster.
The 2.0 release (currently in development) will take us beyond what most of the current toolkits can do, and is the basis of the Equinox Desktop Environment. At the same time, 2.0 retains the same goal of small size, high speed, and portability/cross-platform programming.
I print, therefore I am.
Look at wxWindows for a LGPL, cross platform (GTK, X11, Windows, Motif, some others) toolkit. It's sort of a cross between Qt and the MFC (no preprocessor, so no signals/slots, uses MFC style event tables), but it's (much) cleaner than MFC. It's not as polished as Qt, but it's open source on all platforms without spending lots of money (You have to pay for a commercial Qt license if you want to work on windows, or use the sadly outmoded NC version), and help is very forthcoming on the wx-users mailing list.
Two major problems:
1) It means you can only write GPLd software with it. Apple were pretty keen not to let Safari be open sourced, though god knows why, it's hardly a cutting edge browser so they actually had to produce Qt wrappers and de-Qt parts to prevent it becoming GPL software.
2) It's only free software when using X11. That means KDE software can't be ported to Windows or MacOS and use the native graphics layer on each, they have to use an X server. Also, if one day (unlikely but possible) we all decide to move away from X, unless Trolltech update the license KDE is kind of shafted. Obviously that's the least likely of all scenarios, and anyway I expect Trolltech would just update the license, but you get the idea.
Of course you can write commercial or portable software with Qt, but have you seen the prices? It's $1500 per developer for the professional edition, meaning unless you are a rich company you have to make your software GPLd and X specific (which is what they intended, but hey).
In contrast, GTK can be used for commercial and portable apps, and really it's quite a good toolkit these days. Hence the flamewars.
BRING BACK HARMONY. (....) Harmony is a GPL replacement toolkit ....
I'm getting the feeling that the poster doesn't know that QT now comes under the GPL license (instead of their original non-GPL one). The poster loves KDE, but loaths it's licence. The license is GPL! Nothing wrong with that (as the poster likes linux).
Funny (or not) thing is that RMS is basically backing gnome (LGPL) while at the same time advising everyone to stay clear of the LGPL because it is an inferior language. GPL is preferred. KDE&QT is GPL, so it would be better to put the FSF's weight more (and more openly) behind KDE. By "better" I mean from a purely FSF-political standpoint.
Reinout
Reinout van Rees
AbiWord isn't a Gnome app but you'd never know, it integrates nicely etc and is a good deal more active than KWord seems to be. Ditto for Gnumeric and KSpread. Noatun is just a joke, really, but it's kind of the "official" KDE media player.
You read in the article about there being something of a cultural difference between the two camps: USA vs. Europe, noisy vs. getting on with it. Well, this is the perfect example. You think AbiWord is far more active than KWord. It has more developers, more mailing list messages, more CVS commits, more releases. But look at the current in-development versions of both of them, and compare them with what they were like a year ago. I think you'll find the comparison doesn't come out in AbiWord's favour. Partly this is architectural - there's FAR more code sharing and reuse in KOffice/KDE/Qt than in AbiWord/GTK, partly because the balance of talking about it/doing it is further towards the doing it end with KWord than with AbiWord. I guess this also explains why Slashdot appears to have a tendency towards GNOME whilst the Linux community as a whole seems to prefer KDE.
And don't diss Noatun: you might not like it but from my point of view it's far nicer than anything else available. It plays all my music, has a good equalizer, does effects, the interface looks and works like everything else on my desktop (although it doesn't have to), and most important of all, happily hides itself down in the system tray when I want it out of the way and stays there. The KDE 3.1 version embeds Xine to play video: now it's the only media player I use. I love it.
On the other hand, the KDE usability effort seems to be going nowhere quickly
I take it you've not used KDE 3.1 yet then? There's some good improvements in there. And let's face it, GNOME usability still has a long long way to go *cough*GTK+ file dialog*cough*
Not extremely exciting, but the guy who left red hat to fork a kde-based distribution can be found here: ark linux
"RedHat are popular in the states, and are "biased" towards Gnome, that is they have more Gnome hackers with experience than KDE hackers. As such, their distro focusses on Gnome more than KDE. SuSE is similar but opposite, they focus more on KDE than Gnome and afaik don't have any Gnome hackers on the team."
:). You can ony theme so much, even though Linux desktops are probably the most themeable. Although right now I have settled on KDE as I prefer using the Ximian desktop (whats taking them so long?). From what Shawn has mentioned on the kapital mailing list he seems to really like QT, not just for support but because of its environment.
SuSE have at least one Gnome hacker on the team, but they have certainly been more focused on KDE. For instance Waldo Bastion who I think still leads KDE development is a SuSE employee.
"Today the desktops are basically equal, although they are stronger in different areas. So, GNOME has better usability IMHO, but KDE has more features. I should think theKompany likes KDE/Qt as a developer platform more because Qt is commercially supported, has professional docs and is more cross platform, so (if they pay) they can sell their apps on Windows and MacOS as well. Of course he has hackers with KDE/Qt experience which also tips him. On the other hand, GTK is more Linux specific, but has some cooler features. Some people will tell you that GTK is harder to program for, but in reality that's not the case, if C++ is your thing then both Qt and GTKmm are excellent"
I liked to use both desktops
it IS unfinished. SuSE has not put much refinement into the GNOME2 packages, they more or less take the release of GNOME2 as it is released. So please complain to the GNOMEs, not to SuSE. It is not a distributors job to finish and fix a desktop environment.
SuSE has not broken these packages with their changes, they were crap to begin with. Redhat broke KDE with their changes.
I know that OTOH KDE releases feel finished, because I compile them myself and there is nothing broken or unpolished in them. KDE-3.1 will be better than ever!
Moritz