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."
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:(
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.
Slashdot Mirror
> 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 :(
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