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KDE Success in the Enterprise
Arandir writes "Is UNIX ready for the desktop? Display Works Inc. thinks it is! They adopted KDE as their official desktop environment over a year ago, and KDE::Enterprise is running an interview with IT manager Tim Brodie over their experiences. This is a very good interview that covers why KDE was chosen, user migration, and wish lists for KDE. Quote: "I now see KDE taking the lead in polish and professionalism on the desktop"."
An interesting article; not only this, it addresses the issue of inexperienced or job-only computer users using KDE - hitherto not really mentioned in linux-promotion material (apart from obvious examples, eg. lindows). Quite a feather in kde's cap, I'd say.
:)
Or certainly a good sign.
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you
It's a pretty small installation as these things go, but most business uses probably revolve around those sizes of networks.
:)
So good news.
And, if it turns out that it's bullshit, at least it's first-rate bullshit
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
We are operating a LTSP server with (at this date) twelve concurrent users. We also have another four stand-alone workstations used at some of our other sites.
Without wishing to be overly critical 12 users does not constitute Enterprise level. Yes its nice to see a success story but do we really need to get a story on every KDE/GNOME deploment in the universe ? Can we maintain some perspective with the headlines please.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
> intire UNIX platform.
That would be "entire", and I believe *nix is probably more appropriate.
> No small feet, that.
"Feet" are the logo of the Gnome folk. Perhaps you meant "feat?"
> Abandon the closed-source QT license or
> petition to have QT opened?
Neither, actually. The KDE people went to Qt in the first place. It was the Gnome people who had a fit over the license.
> Work on the linux frame buffer potential, or
> expand their prescence over into the *BSD
> projects?
I wasn't aware that the KDE people were working on a framebuffer version. Are you confusing it with the Qt framebuffer?
And it's "presence."
> and using their FSF clout to force Redhat to
> hemogenize the redhat/linux desktop;
"Homogenize?" Redhat was hardly forced by Gnome to do anything. I suspect you are confusing them with Ximian.
> Truly, the GNU worlds' greatest example of
> the american dream -realised!
"American dream?" I was under the impression that KDE was largely a European effort.
> So, I say Huzzah to KDE!
Agreed.
Still, I don't remember the GNOME developers jumping up and down with joy over Bluecurve. Sure, they weren't as vocal as (some of) the KDE developers, but I don't remember a warm endoresement.
But then, I don't remember what I had for breakfast.
Yeah, I think so.
You can go back to sleep now.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Give me a break, I have friends with more computers and servers in their homes than this company. No matter how bad KDE was, that Sysadmin could walk around to each desk and teach everyone in the company how to work with KDE in one day.
KDE is indeed very polished, snappy and comfortable, arguably more so than Gnome (apart from Red Hat's excellent Gnome). However, Gnome & GTK is a more future-proof *platform*, since you can develop a toy application with it, and if it is succesful, you can release it with whatever license you/your employer wants to use. With KDE & QT, your application will only be GPL, unless you cough up the money for QT license *before* you start developing your app.
For example, I develop Python applications in my current job. There are some python libraries that can't be released under GPL, by any means (the will of the company, not mine). In those cases, I just can't import those libraries when I develop a GUI application if I use PyQT. However, with PyGTK, I can release anything I want with any license I want.
So, the main point is that even if your application could be GPL, all the libs that the application would use can't necessarily be so. Of course one can use CORBA etc. the insulate the non-GPL portions, but it's a drag and I'd much rather use GTK. The code that uses GTK can be deployed everywhere without worries, with QT you have to keep vigilant that you don't accidentally GPL'ize anything.
In my view a library is not a "commodity" until its use is absolutely free of strings. That's the reason I avoid proprietary libraries, and GPL libraries. Liberate the infrastructure!
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
[quote]
Truly, the GNU worlds' greatest example of the american dream -realised!
[/quote]
Well like yeehaw and stuff, but KDE is largely a European dream.... which is actually just petty retort on my part in response to your attempt to make "the dream" somehow nationally proprietary.
Keep the jingoism at home, or at least keep the jingoism related to things that actually have something to do with your nationhood.
Aww come on chaps.
As an individual story this is kinda cool. As a slashdoy headline of "KDE success in the enterprise" it's just sad.
And I would imagine all the Apple users raised an eyebrow at "is Unix ready for the desktop".
Like some business somewhere uses KDE on their desktop... so what? You not see how desperate it is to be going nuts over this rather small instance... how many desktops exactly are involved here?
There have to be better examples than this.
His mention of building KDE reminded me of my recent FreeBSD install experience. After getting pissed off at RedHat constantly locking up my USB mouse (I don't know why I keep trying Linux distros. I must be a sucker for punishment or something.) and failing to support my NVidia card (Your kernel is too old, update. Oh wait, now it's too new, downgrade. RPM compile? I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that) I decided to try building a trusty FreeBSD box instead. I figured, "if Linux is here, BSD must already be there too!" Well, I was right and wrong at the same time.
:-)
My first attempt was to build a Gnome desktop similar to RedHat. FreeBSD 5.0 itself installed cleanly, and with the help of a FAQ I was able to build NVidia drivers for 5.0. (One kernel module! You hear me Linus!!! One module for every friggin' kernel! BTW, for anyone who wants to do this, 5.0 is not officially supported by NVidia. The module will not install by default! You need to modify the header to remove the 5.0 checks and use the new AGP stuff.) So far, so good. I begin the build of Gnome. It built and installed cleanly. Unfortunately, the desktop was a little sparse and didn't look like the RedHat desk at all.
So I began tweaking it. I added Bluecurve to replace the hideous default theme and then tried attacking the problem of installing programs. It soon tells me "Only root can add to the foot menu". Fine. So I log in as root and modify the menus. Come back as the user and none of the new icons show up! Is this a sick joke? Even worse, I cvsuped and upgraded to Nautilus 2.2. Suddenly, I have no way to change the Nautilus theme, it looks like crap, and all my icons are "unknown documents". On the bright side, I can sample the beginning of an MP3 by mousing over. Swell. A search on Google Groups tells me that a *lot* of people are having this problem with Nautilus (both Linux and BSD) and noone has yet found a solution. But don't worry! They'll have an XML config file in the next version that will fix all this. Couldn't they have done this in the first place? This goes on for awhile, with the desktop getting worse the more I tried to tweak it. Oh, and it's impossible to copy desktop settings between users. Apparently, these config files are tailored to individual logins. They look like serialized objects or something. Bonobo perhaps? Finally I give up and install KDE.
Now, I didn't install KDE to begin with, because the 2.x UI was kind of flakey. It wasn't that it didn't work, it just kind of flashes and resizes in a very ugly fashion. None the less, I figured that 3.1 couldn't be any worse than Gnome. So I cvsup and begin a "make install". It begins building. And building. And (this thing is huge!) a day later I have a KDE desktop installed. No install problems to report. I booted up my brand new desktop, and.... WOW, IS IT EVER BEAUTIFUL. Well, save for the fonts. I had to tweak those a bit. 12 pt. Arial looked too thick on the screen. Later I loaded my TTFs from my NTFS partition. Cheating, but hey. Nice fonts are nice fonts.
Anyway, I just started *using* my KDE desktop. There really wasn't all that much I needed to tweak. I got Russian keymappings set up for my wife (a seemingly impossible task under GNO-it doesn't work-ME), installed KDevelop (nice IDE!), Netbeans (I love how unixes don't touch the swap file), and FreeBSD OpenOffice 1.1 (Side note: needs a full install per user. Yuck.). Worked like a charm. Even my wife, who usually hates these experiments, really loved this desktop. She soon was browsing the web, checking email, typing letters, etc. without my help. And she absolutely *loved* the action sounds.
So here I sit. One KDE desktop on the nicest OS known to man (maybe save for OSX) and I am happier than a clam. The really great part about KDE was that everything *just works*. Like with BSD where sendmail works from the point of install, KDE never needed my help to get working. I just had to tell it my preferences, plus enable KDM and I was good to go. No hassle, no idiot scripts to
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Why would that be? As the copyright holder, you can change the license any time you want. You can start it as GPL when it's in-house, and change the license later if you want to sell it outside of your company.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
how do you accidently GPL anything?
You have a proprietary library. You develop an application, that can as well be open source, or proprietary, you don't care. So you use QT, because it appears to do the job well. At some point in time, someone thinks that a feature from the proprietary library might be handy for the app, and you link that library to the app, thinking that it doesn't matter, you just ship a closed source version. The application is shipped to the client, client sees that it should be GPL due to QT being used (note that you can't buy the QT license and make the app closed-source afterwards - QT doesn't allow that). Client requires the sources to the proprietary library and rights to distribute it under GPL.
accidently GPLize?, sounds like a lot of laziness, and a dash of incompetance
These things can happen when people are not watchful (or competent) and time is in short supply. With LGPL & GTK, this is simply not an issue at all.
GPL is greatest thing since sliced bread for layers of infrastructure that you don't have to link against (OS's, apps). Not so good for libraries.
if your employer cant make up its mind of whether to release it as a free or commercial app, BEFORE development commences, your employer has larger issues to worry about
Occasionally people will just play around with something that might become useful in a open source OR closed source app, without knowing in advance. I want to know that if I create something useful, I am free to use it in my day job and hobby alike. With QT I don't have that option.
QT is probably very good for what it is, but for this reason it can never become the de facto standard of Linux GUI development. GTK can, and quite probably will.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
The cost of a QT license amounts to roughly the same money it takes to have a decent developer working for a week or two. And this is ONLY if you're going to sell the end result. This could hardly be a problem for any serious product development company.
May we live long and die out
"You get the entire Microsoft Enterprise developer suite for less money than a Qt developer license."
.NET and its proprietary libraries are leeps and bounds better but I have not tested them out.
Win32api, MFC, com/dcom is a nightmarish piece of crap. May god help you if you have to develop software with it.
Swing is good for general programming or jsp's but your apps are limited to java.
Carbon/coca is ok but its limited to the mac platform. WxWindows/GTK is a great cross platform gui toolkit but its limited to mainly gui development.
QT is the best api out there for gui development. But its not its main strength.
QT has classes for gui's, database access, 3d graphics with opengl integration, 2d graphics for video and 2d graphics development, networking, xml, and it even has pda portability! Its a suite of api's and it provides a great value.
Its worth every penny if you are a professional developer or a corporation who develops software. If you think its expensive have you ever scanned the price of third party api's? Rogue wave is expesnive and many companies charge $1,000 per user for just a networking specific or pda specific set of api's! QT offers not a specific set but a whole suite. The gui example shows how much time can be saved with QT also. This is important because programmers are expensive not to mention bugtracking eats into deadlines.
QT not only serves a market for cross platform development, but it also saves money for alot of companies and professional software contracters. I heard stories of WIndows only developers using QT becase MFC and the win32api sucked so bad and just took to much time to get anything done. The few grand spent paid itself back.
There are alot of free api's to use of course and part of QT is free for non professional development. However QT is really not that expensive compared to the competion and quite good. You really get a good value. Not to mention companies like SCO (vomit) charge over $1,000 for their own 1980's ms C compiler and gnu tools.
http://saveie6.com/
Microsoft Visual C++ .NET Standard 2003 - $109. (About $95 if you shop around.)
Trolltech's QT library for one platform - $480.
Win32 is not that terrible, especially compared to X. Yes, it's not quite click-and-play, but with a little experience Win32 is easy to find your way around. The documentation and examples are second-to-none.
For Christ's sake - if the API isn't free nobody will write anything commercial for it. It's that fucking simple. Forcing someone into a choice of licence for their end-product because of a choice of GUI API is retardedly counterproductive.
How much of a fuss would people be making if Microsoft Visual C's EULA dictates how you use, licence and distribute programs generated by the compiler? The sooner someone re-writes KDE to not use QT the better.
PS: Check out The Fox Toolkit if you haven't seen it. Cross-platform and quite unencumbered.
"> how do you accidently GPL anything?
You have a proprietary library. You develop an application, that can as well be open source, or proprietary, you don't care. So you use QT, because it appears to do the job well. At some point in time, someone thinks that a feature from the proprietary library might be handy for the app, and you link that library to the app, thinking that it doesn't matter, you just ship a closed source version. The application is shipped to the client, client sees that it should be GPL due to QT being used (note that you can't buy the QT license and make the app closed-source afterwards - QT doesn't allow that). Client requires the sources to the proprietary library and rights to distribute it under GPL."
You haven't "accidentally GPL'ed your software". You've only violated the license.
Stop this "GPL is viral"-myth. Your software does not automatically become GPL'ed if you distribute or link to GPL'ed software! You'll be violating the license, yes. But your software won't be automatically GPL'ed!
You can download the old icons if you like from kde.org. FreeBSD has the Kde icons themes in the ports. Go look at themes.org or kde.org to download the themes pack. Its kind of hard to fine on the web. I do wish the KDE team would at least put some of the other icons in the theme folder.
I also find that kde 3.1 is getting a little cluttered and its not as clean as the 2.x series or gnome. It use to be the other way around in the past. Kde was always had a simpler interfact then gnome. However Sun has invested alot of R&D into UI development for Gnome and it has paid off. Maybe version 4 of kde will fix this.
PS trash Suse or any other
http://saveie6.com/
I have recently realized that People dont care about Real Multitasking, Threading, a easy to use shell. What people dont want is "Questions" to a normal user, a "question" is a mind bogggleing thing, even if its just to turn off a startup hint, they will dread reading it and ask "whats this mean" to the nearest IT person.
What windows does is it ignore's us geeks who like to decide what we want top do and just does it without asking. So really, you just need to remove "Questions" and you will have a suitable desktop/home system.
This is also why I feel that a lot of people dont like the debian installer (even geeks).
The word 'enterprise' doesn't really mean anything, it is just a magic word uttered by marketers because it has a positive effect on other marketers, PHBs and general timewasters. Whatever meaning it once did have has been squeezed out. In general, any product with 'enterprise' in the title is to be avoided (just like any Microsoft feature called 'smart').
So no point arguing about what exactly 'enterprise' means. Let those who want to use it use it, and the rest of us can continue speaking English as before.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
"While GNOME was making critical mis-steps such as following in the footsteps of Microsoft, and using their FSF clout to force Redhat to hemogenize the redhat/linux desktop;"
You only say that because you're a geek and therebefore not GNOME's target group.
Like it or not, GNOME has moved on to the "keep it simple and stupid"-philosophy. People like you are not their target anymore. They're targeting average users, who demand a simple, easy-to-use desktop that don't overload them with options. People like your grandmother, who don't care about lots of config options or other geeky features like you do.