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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"."
Let's face it, for well over five years the KDE team has slaved away forging a complete and total desktop solution for not just linux, but the intire UNIX platform. No small feet, that. Along the way, they've had to make some hard choices. Abandon the closed-source QT license or petition to have QT opened? Work on the linux frame buffer potential, or expand their prescence over into the *BSD projects? 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; KDE kept their focus almost to the point of obsession. Quality, and Nothing but. So, I say Huzzah to KDE! Truly, the GNU worlds' greatest example of the american dream -realised!
I now see KDE taking the lead in polish and professionalism on the desktop
:)
I bet those Polish people are happy...
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
that when he wants to develop an in-house program that isn't going to be distributed anywhere else, the GPL doesn't require him to release his sources to the public, so he didn't need to be really concerned about the licensing issue.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
Yeah, I think so.
You can go back to sleep now.
-- thinkyhead software and media
I personally find KDE to be better than Explorer for me. Of course windows on a whole is still far more user friendly when one considers program instillation, learning curve, and generally things working. However if one were to consider the desktop environment of windows compared to KDE I do find KDE to be superior.
Configurability: KDE hands down, the Control Center simply allows so much to be configured, my system is currently set up to respond precisely how I want it. Windows respond to mouse overs after the time I specified, right number of desktops with the correct visibility of other apps, themability also a big plus. Don't know if XP has themability or to what degree but I don't consider it a major function.
Look & Feel: Used to give it to Windows but now I think I like KDE better. Basically a function of familiarity of the system combined with actual looks, themability helps KDE here.
Usability: Both have a fairly comprehensive start menu. I'll discount the points I could give KDE for a greater amount of software initially since this isn't necessarily a long term effect as you'll fill both with software you need eventually. However I do prefer the KMenus method for listing large numbers of programs as a heirarchy, when Windows tries to list 3 full columns at once it's much too slow especially since you probably already know the location of the item you're looking for. Also KDE gets points for multiple desktops, yes I know that you can get programs for Windows to mimic that but it doesn't work as well, most notably it simply hide apps so that cycling through apps in one desktop gives you apps for all desktops. The file manager for windows is generally nicer but the combination of file manager and CLI built in for KDE should give it the advantage there but I'll call it a tie.
Either way overall I prefer KDE but after a certain level it comes down to familiarity. I used to use Windows alot and prefered that but recently I've almost entirely switched over to Linux, just found that the things I did alot were just as good and easy in Linux. Actually it's mostly multiple desktops that gets me. Frankly Gaim still isn't up to par with Trillian and Evolution isn't as nice as Eudora but the entire environment is nicer to work in. But either way that isn't directly pretaining to the Window Manager.
I stole this Sig
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
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.
After reading comments that there should be more examples, and a larger amount of clients would add credibility, I would say there is:
m ai n/0,14179,2860180-1,00.html
. sh tml?tid=19
How about 450 thin clients running KDE with 800 users? All running from one Linux server box. Now that sounds good!
Articles:
http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/
and the follow up:
http://newsforge.com/newsforge/02/12/04/2346215
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
Did Picard endorse this?
Yep. The new apps "KPolarityReverse and KSensorArrayMod" are awesome.
Oh, crap. I gotta go. I have a runaway "KNanite" process.
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
1. KDE 2. BSD 3. OS X ...oh wait. That's only two.
Yeah, those apps are nice. However, my KEjectWarpCore always seems to crash when I need it most (although it appears to be running fine when not being used). Has anyone else experienced this problem in their enterprise?
Yeah. Upgrade to KPlotDevice 2.2a and you'll be fine.