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KDE & Gnome Usability Engineers Interviewed
Gentu writes "After the recent flamewar between the KDE and Gnome user camps, OSNews brings together the most influencial KDE and Gnome usability engineers to talk about how they will be able to overcome a number of obstacles in order to 'unify' KDE and Gnome in ways that could bring to the Unix desktop an easy to use, integrated and fully interoperated DE to better compete with the commercial alternatives. Waldo from SuSE and Havoc from Red Hat are taking part to the interview, and also Aaron, the head of KDE's usability."
It is ironic because Qt is now GPL which is in accordance with the stated preference of the FSF and the GNU project. GNOME is part of the GNU project.
GNOME was started because Qt was not free. Now, Qt is free, but GNOME developers are concerned for the proprietary developors who might wish to create third party apps.
The irony presented in all it's glory:
"For example, they may appeal to the ego, promising "more users for this library" if we let them use the code in proprietary software products. Popularity is tempting, and it is easy for a library developer to rationalize the idea that boosting the popularity of that one library is what the community needs above all."
(http://www.fsf.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html)
Go back to 1984 and throw a business person whose used to mainframe character based output in front
of a Mac and you'd probably get the same result. Thats no argument for not evolving something.
Perhaps we should still be using DOS boxes and ksh for doing everything?
And the WIMP interface will go precisely nowhere if everyone has the same "well , what else can we do with it" attitude.
I can't believe all the free software geeks on here truly believe that microsoft has got it so
spot on that the best they can do in response is just to copy them. Thats just pathetic.
Hey read the other posts. I've offered to educate you on the difficulties of binding to Qt. It's not really hard. Licensing issues are your own problem. I see no need for KDE to bend over for GNOME on licensing again.
Seriously though, most corporations (greater than a couple hundred people) have many many different computer configurations of hardware with very different ages. Xandros hardware detection is attractive to them, but only represents a small part of the (significant) advantage over Red Hat. I mentioned it as it was more on topic for this thread.
Red Hat Linux is anything but focused on the corporate desktop. If it was they would have made it easy to use and fixed things like the screen resolution controls. We had a Red Hat driven laptop that we had to reinstall Xandros on because we could change the screen setting to drive a overhead projector.
If you want to go off-topic on the thread and talk about Red Hat as a desktop alternative, there are many many more reasons why it fails: lack of compatibility with MS applications (vs Xandros running MS Office, photoshop, etc), lack of compatibility with Windows networks (yes Samba is great for pHd's but the rest of us need Xandros), lack of easy to use control panel features, lack of a good method to update packages (don't even try to argue RPM is a good system vs Xandros apt based technology). All these are nightmares for implementation and daily use and only help to fuel Microsoft's claims that the cost of Linux use are so high.
Furthermore, the Xandros - Red Hat and the gap is widening. Seriously, unless you just want to damage the Linux desktop movement, I stronlgy suggest that you try Xandros. You can get a copy for just $99 (or $49 without CrossOver) It's a great value and you might really like it...
Hunger is the best sauce.