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Seven Years of KDE Celebrated
Ashcrow writes "Almost exactly 7 years ago, Matthias Ettrich announced the start of a new desktop environment, originally called Kool Desktop Environment. Check out LinuxFrench's article (English translation) and the news at Dot KDE. Thanks to the KDE Team for a great 7 years!"
FIRST POSSST TBIITCHSTCH
fp
So I had me some Johnnie Walker Red, then some Black then some J&B Rare and then I found myself in a different place where things just didn't seem to matter. You see, I had crossed the line and now was sipping high. No guilt. No denial. Just a damned good honest legal controlable scotch high.
I have a plasma TV and I sat back in my reclinable surfing channels. Sipping. Sipping. I have a small library I've assembled over the last decade, about 3000 volumes. I picked out three books and sat down sipping (this time Red - dryer, lighter, harsher than the Black - but good) my scotch and water and purusing the books. Phantasties by MacDonald, Don Quijote de la Mancha (en Espanol), KDE Programming Tacticals by M. Witty, and The Intelligent Investor by Graham.
I opened a can of Planters Deluxe mixed nuts. Broke the vacuum seal and heard a whooshing sound. They smell so good when first opened! Took a small handful and ate. A perfect blend of nuts and scotch. Took another sip - boy that was good. Then I got an inspriation! Popped a VHS (a reasson for this) and watched Fantastic Planet, a very special 1970's animated feature. I chose the VHS instead of DVD because the DVD has embedded English subtitles you cannot turn off. The VHS is straight English sound track with no subtitles. Incredible scenery - hallucinagenic. I thought for a moment about an old girlfriend I HAD back in the 70's and felt a little sad we did not keep in touch. What happened to her?
My wife cooked up some really good ribs and burgers on the grill and brought them in with some Budweiser on ice (well, you can see why I chose this one over the previously mentioned girlfriend). After dinner, a little Glenlivet and some meditation on the week's events. I started The Lathe of Heaven DVD and explained to my wife how this movie was only shown once on PBS maybe about twenty years ago and then legal arguments kept it in the can until now. George Orr....... what a trip. A good scotch high. Bring em'
on!
- HK
hackingthemainframe.com always comes first!
Congratulations to the KDE team. Choice is the spice of life, and they've helped provide it!
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
at least it wasn't "kewl d3skt0p env."
though sometimes when seeing the latest junk for karumba I start to wonder..
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
7 Years and hundreds of developers couldn't do what Apple did with OSX in 4 years.
Kongradulations Kto Kthe Kwhole KDE Kteam!
I was always told that the 'K' in KDE didn't mean anything. It was just picked because it came before L in Linux. Meh... anyway congrats to the KDE team for bringing me a good working desktop environment all these years. If it wasn't for KDE, I wouldn't have switch to linux. Cheers!
this is just like celebrating seven years of beating your head into a wall...
And still getting your asses kicked by XP!
...but Gnome is still better, IMHO. Except Nautilus. That sucks.
I recently built a new box and got to the point where I had to go with either KDE or Gnome (not both, time was an issue). I choose KDE because it seemed that the project has more momentum. Am I way off here? I'd love to hear slashdoters sound off on this one.
After what those backstabbing cowardly frogs did to sabotage our efforts to free the Iraqi people and defend Saddam's regime, I am join the fuck-france boycott.
Add this to the disgusting cheeese, wine and crap that I am boycotting.
In 7 years they have created a wonderful desktop. For some years now we have olny used Linux at home and at office, and my wife (designer) and my son (7 years old) use it comfortably thanks to KDE, OpenOffice, Mozilla et al.
Thanks for a wonderful product, and for demonstrating that a holy war (QT license, QT vs GTK, KDE vs Gnome, etc) should not deminish your efforts.
Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
Now, if only they can get rid of (the license of)Qt. I(and a lot of commercial companies) really don't want to release applications for the (KDE) desktop under the GPL OR pay Trolltech.
Come on, trying to bring the world a great desktop, but beeing tied to GPL and/or Trolltech really sucks.
The licensing of QT sucks ass, and when Microsoft buys Troll Tech, KDE will be stolen from...
Sorry, was having flashbacks
KDE is my desktop of choice and part of the reason I decided to give linux a go. Congrats KDE guys!
I've got KDE 3.1 with SuSE 8.2 and I'm seriously impressed with it. It's the best version yet! Cheers people! You've got a great product, keep it going... :)
-- Fuck Beta
Kongradulate KDE on them Konquering Konsistantly well Krafted Kontrol Panels and Kapplets
Alright you buncha trolls. Don't even start any of this Gnome shit. KDE is the best desktop available on Unix, period. Gnome sucks so, STFU.
Happy birthday KDE. We love ya.
So, which is better... K or G? With spellings such as Konqueror, Kdevelop, Koffice, Kmidi...
KDE is more fun than a barrel of monkeys !
But then again, they aren't usually written by self-absorbed yuppie pricks. Fuck your expensive scotch, your wife and I will be laughing about it and your boring video collection this weekend. Then we will drink pure grain alcohol that I strained myself using pieces of burned toast, and fuck behind the 7-11. Enjoy the PBS!
I really had to install Wine sometimes just to play solitair, what an overhead!
So now the real reasoning behind KDE is revealed: To build a non-windows solitaire device.
Kongratulations to the KDE development team. I kan hardly believe that it has been seven years for this krazy and kool environment for linux. There's gno way that Gnome kan katch up with your konstant innovations in application naming! Gnow that I think about it, Gnome's gnot even kapable of kashing in on single-letter usage they way KDE kan! Keep the gnew stuff koming!
Wrong word.
I'd hardly call anything related to KDE worthy of a celebration.
With the exception of its demise, that is.
BTW: Ron Dodd is an asshole.
Why do chinks have that damn fish face? fuckers.
I don't know why everyone this OS X is so great. It's not the impression I got from using it for several hours.
Clicking one of the windows in the background brings only that window to the foreground (makes only that window active) and allows the windows that were open in the original application to overlap the windows that are open in the application that is now the active application. If I have more than one window open at a time it is almost certainly a problem because I need to see them all at once in order to be able to do my work. Making only the window that was clicked active rather than all the windows for the parent application seems almost counter-intuitive and always results in having to either click the application in the "dock" or select the windows from the Window menu. Regardless, it's an extra click or three I never had to do before.
Also, what happened to my Apple menu? It may not have been perfect, but please, it was pretty damn close. I know people who have completely customized their Apple menu and couldn't conceive of working without it. I'd love to see the usability justification for this one.
I am embarrassed to tell you how much I spent on my TiBook last summer because as a web developer, it seemed like a really good choice, and it would be if I wasn't constantly waiting for the spinning beach ball or for windows to resize. Some of the sluggishness may be due to the fact that I have a number of background processes running that most users probably do without (sendmail, mysql, to name a couple).
Now that I think of it, has anyone else noticed that the mouse moves MUCH faster in OS 9 than it possibly can in OS X? I guess we need to slow things down when trying to hit moving targets... another one for which I wonder what the usability justification was. And what about keyboard shortcuts? It used to be you could type your way to the desired file by using the Command+arrow combo to get to the folder in question, and then type the name of the desired file to highlight it and hit Enter (or Return) to open it. That was great. It was fast and worked perfectly. That I know of, none of my applications do this properly or without some bugs (when trying this with Word while writing this, Word crashed).
Well, I guess I've rambled enough here. It just didn't live up to its hype. There are a few other annoyances I've noticed with X, but most of them are probably me just being picky with the new UI. *sigh*
Anyone got any screenshots of the earliest KDE?
Get your own free personal location tracker
I'm just a user and this announcement makes me fell really old.
I had alot of fun compiling KDE 1.0 for the SPARC 5 I had on my desk back then - though it was little slower than CDE at the time.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
... and all I got was this free software!
In this month's edition of Linux Journal, KDE was rated as the favorite desktop environment by the readers. There's a nice birthday present for you KDE!
WURD!!
Around 1999 I had for a few years been experimenting with Linux but hadn't really ever made the switch for more than a week or two, due to lacking real desktop usability. I discovered Slackware and KDE almost in the same heartbeat and converted....and stuck, finally. KDE was the power behind keeping me on Linux and off Windows. Now I have a great desktop that I use every day for hours on end and love every minute of it.
Good job, KDE, and keep going. Gnome? Don't you boys give up, either, because it gives KDE motivation to keep churning out quality. However, you should buy them a beer or two because they've done some fine work for the *nix world, no matter which side of the fence you like to sit on.
Blog,Twitter
France surrenders!
..welcome our new KDE-wielding overlords.
Here's to another seven years of tyranny!
That took seven years? Behold the agility of open source.
Once again, GNOME is behind KDE by a year. No matter how much effort developers put into GNOME, it well never catch KDE in the annivesary department.
Anyone who uses KDE is a big fat smelly vagina.
Reading the original announcement it's nice to see a vision becoming a reality. One can get a bit jealous: in those _old_ :) times it was easy to come up with a good idea, since back then OSS lacked "trivial" applications. Or maybe they weren't trivial at all? Which current underdeveloped application/area will seem trivial looking back from ten years in the future?
KKK?!?!? uggggghh
You'd of thought they would have given up almost immediately.
Thank you KDE, for beautifying my desktop for 5-6 years now.
Matthias Ettrich, you showed it was possible to do something we thought was not possible or did not have the confidence/ability to do. Even Miguel de Icaza was amazed with the potential KDE was showing and we all know that led to GNOME! You started something great, man.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
It's neat to flash back to the early history of KDE.
Back in early 1998, I was setting up a Linux system with a custom program I wrote to help my church manage ticket sales. It ran a KDE 1.0 beta. The hardware? 486/100 with 16MB RAM. For the most part it ran fine!
One has to wonder why it takes longer now to do anything in KDE 3.1 on a 64MB machine than it did under KDE 1.0 on a 16MB 486.
I was going to post a "stupid k-letter jokes under this thread please" comment, but you were too fast for me.
-- Repeat with me: "There is no right to profits".
Yeah, having all these applications held back by the GPL really sucks. Just look at the stifled innovation!
-Malloc___________________ I want to be free()!
K stands for K.. nothing more nothing less..
Damned annoying urban legend..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
..but Gnome is still better, IMHO.
They still can't figure out if 'OK' should be at the left or at the right of 'Cancel'. Although they both improve at open-source-speed (= 1.36 x ludacrous speed*).
But then again, if we both think we're using the best environment, and they are not the same, then that must mean we're just a bit different...
*: see 'spaceballs, the movie'
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
"Almost exactly just doesnt sound right to me... still, big congratulations.
Damn near took her head off too.
$ nslookup kde.org
Server: xxx
Address: yyy
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: kde.org
Address: 80.232.38.131
$ nslookup trolltech.com
Server: xxx
Address: yyy
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: trolltech.com
Address: 80.232.38.135
-----
Other facts:
1) Ralph Yarrow runs Canopy.
2) Canopy owns SCO
3) Canopy and SCO own big chunks of Trolltech
(It looks like Trolltech removed their
information documenting this from their website
I can't find it anymore. )
4) Ralph Yarro is on the board of directors
of Trolltech.
---------
Trolltech, come clean on your relationship with
Canopy/SCO !!!! What agreements do you have
with them??? Do you owe them money ???
Does canopy own warrants on Trolltech ???
I've been so happy with WindowMaker that I forgot about bloatware like KDE and Gnome. To me, comparing which of them is better is like arguing over which of two miniature tricycles is fastest.
All's true that is mistrusted
(sig)
Shouldn't end your sentence in a preposition!
I've been using KDE at home since late 1998 (I think) and at work since mid 2000. Awesome desktop environment!
The heat from below can burn your eyes out
Seven Years of reinventing the wheel what an accomplishment!
["KDE Sucks! GNOME rules!" (reverse, repeat)] (reverse, repeat)
;)
Both of these projects are so good now, it's great while browsing to run into comments occasionally (going back years) asserting that one or the other would cease to be, or that the presence of both in the world of free / Free software was harmful, because it mean duplication of effort, dilution of attention, etc.
Ha!
Hari Seldon *must* have been involved, to see how much these allegedly self-motivated projects catalyze each other.
However much you like either one, note that KDE now has integrated CD (and DVD!) burning software -- IMO on par with anything I've seen on the commerical side (Nero, etc) whereas before I prefered GnomeToaster to anything else, and GNOME now has a good file-chooser (which had been one of my least favorite points about GNOME apps).
Meanwhile, with the right libraries on your system, the Virtucon-backed fluxbox gives you access to the best of both worlds
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Seven years, and it STILL looks like crap. If I HAD to choose a "desktop environment," it's GNOME. That said, if I HAD to use Linux, it's WindowMaker. That said, I have choice in computers, and it's OS X.
Because I need my computers to work for me. I don't need to work on my computers.
It's funny that you should mention miniature tricycles and WindowMaker together. They seem rather similar to me.
Seriously. If you prefer the featureless WindowMaker that's great. But, obviously, most people prefer a more full featured and integrated desktop environment which is why KDE and Gnome are the most popular of all the window managers. Now, WindowMaker aside, when you compare KDE and Gnome KDE is the obvious choice.
The 7-11 fucks behind YOU!!!
There was an interesting interview with Matthias Ettrich, done in 1998, and available here.
:-)
Amazing to see how KDE grew since then, and a good reminder of all these (past) issues with Qt, and the QtMozilla huge hack...
And by the way, is this "KEmacs" thing a reality somewhere?
Everytime KDE is mentioned, gnome advocates try and convince me why is GNOME is better, when it is NOT! Here is a detailed description WHY GNOME SUCKS KDE RULES!
1) The file dialog.
KDE 0.x ALPHAs had a better file dialog than gnome! Today, the KDE one is the best file dialgog in existance, with influence from all desktops.
2) More apps!
KDE comes with over 150 Apps in the full install, with applications for all fields, plus its sleak integration with non kde apps (eg gimp, openoffice) make things more consistant.
3) Configureable as hell.
The KDE control center has loads of knobs/dials/sliders and boxes to fiddle with, yet keeps things elegent. In gnome, half the options don't exisit and you are rudley told "use gconf-editor n00b by gnome zealots" (not joking about this, telling the truth gets you a -1, troll and footnotes).
4) I-kandy!
The Kde eye candy is really powerful, with styles such as dotNEt, mosfet liquid, kermamik, Crystal and more. Looking at art.gnome.org reveals the same old theme in different colours. Since gnome dosen't provide a colour changing dialog for its widgets most "themes" are just colour changes. The Crystal from CVS is an Aqua killer, your eyes will want to love it.
5) Its development framework rocks.
Take a good look at kioslaves, kparts, dcop, arts and qt and see why KDE is a programmer's dream. Modern c++, wonderful IDE, powerful command line scripting. Gnome gives you obsolete c, with a bunch of kludge libraries such as glib, Orbit, bonobo to hack together a application.
6)The defacto choice on Linux. All major Distributions support it by default. This means Mandrake, SuSE, Xandros, ArkLinux, Jamd, Lindows, Slackware, Knoppix, Gentoo and more. How many gnome ones can you mention (Redhat, sure if you like using server distros as your desktop Debian, nope thats the old 1.4 branch Gnoppix, a retarded knoppix rip off.) Most distributions offer gnome as an unsupported alternative.
Also, the only reason why gnome was created in the first place is null and void. Now that Novell has taken over Ximain you can expect VENDOR lock in. Want groupware for linux? Thats $300 a seat.
Get the new Mandrake 9.2 and see the Quality of KDE vs the Sorry state of Gnome 2.4 (and, they STILL haven't fixed that ****ing file dialog), not to mention they REMOVED ALL THE FEATURES. Gnome 2.2 is probably the only gnome version remotley close to kde, that is, KDE 2.0, not the KDE 3.2. I tried the "brokenboring" alpha of it and when it is released this december it will finally put Gnome out of it's misery and kill it off the Linux desktop.
You know, in seven years, Apple went from the original 128 K Mac running System 1.0 to System 7.
Tell me again how non-commercial software is better than commercial software?
They are both almost equally populer. (now polls say that kde is more populer but a few years ago it was gnome, and it will switch back again, but who believes online polls anyhow?)
GNOME puts alot of hard work into having a good UI (good usability, no anooying options, etc...).
Try them both for a week, and see what you like more...
The best part of KDE is the way QT/XFS-XTT makes all of the fonts look nice and antialiased. I used to dread using X11 because of the ugly fonts, but now everything is quite nice.
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
And your 'K' stands for 'Kunt'?
I switched over to KDE from Gnome about 2 months ago after using Gnome since 1.4ish (and I used 2.0, 2.2 and 2.4).
I like KDE better. That's really all I can say. Gnome isn't bad, but I spent too much time wondering if Gnome was ever going to get polished. That and Nautilus just sucks.
When I was using Windows I used Directory Opus as my file manager and when I first started to use Linux full time that was the program I missed the most. Then... then I found Konqueror. Life's been good ever since. From that point it was a slow conversion to KDE as a whole.
I'm very happy with it. Koffice included. I'm very much looking forward to SVG support in the next version as well as a few other little bits I've read up on.
Good job guys!
And just a clarification, I like Gnome. I just like KDE better and you know what's cool? I'm not longer stuck between these two choices:
Windows DE or Windows DE.
The only things I needed to add for her were OpenOffice, Acrobat and XawTV - they all installed without incident.
That means it should have all of my annoyances worked out sometime in 2006!
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
How about, its a big fat smelly vagina with loads of hot semen oozing out of it?
I thought you were trolling but seems to be serious, so will bite. What privilege exactly you want your "commercial comapnies" to have ? to be able to get some one else's code for FREE without a single penny and be able to SELL it and make money out of it ? What sort of an asshole you are to demand that ? You have 2 very good choices . Either be part of a commnity and make GPLed applications which would benefit everyone or pay money to make money. Its as simple as that.Dont expect to take others code for free of cost and make money out of it
Will KDE survive another 7 years with SCO as a majority owner of TrollTech?
It seems like any discussion of the pitfalls of the GPL are beyond the pale on Slashdot.
Even Microsoft doesn't charge for people to use their API.
Some Mono nay-sayers have suggested that Microsoft may indeed start doing exactly that, charging for use of its .NET framework by asserting its patents.
Will I retire or break 10K?
plz post them
X and KDE consume way too much memory.
Why is his statement trolling ?
Isn't trolling looking to create flames and stupid statements? So.....why is his statement a troll Mr. Moderator ?
I have an old computer and KDE slows it to a crawl.
Does anyone remember all the comments on this website about monopoly's win95 being SLOW and Bloated . Well ???? Do you ????
If I find the moderator that called this post a troll he will be META-moderated and hopefully moderation duties taken away.
yes, yes... "to whom would you speak it?"
I have to admit, when I first saw the announcement (I'm Clayton, #5 in the Matthias's original thread), I simply thought, "What a dumbass; he doesn't know anything about X," and moved on. However, the few times that I've been presented with KDE recently, I've been pretty impressed at what a full-featured and easy-to-use desktop it's turned out to be.
Nice work, folks. I hope you keep it up.
Kunt!
So what? I've never used KDE and never will. It's lifeless. Choice the spice of life? Sorry, I thought variety was. But where are, excuse me, the choice and variety in something like KDE? Have any of you ever looked under the bonnet at the code? It's hopelessly entangled C++. You can't build a future on crap like that, and only losers would ever think of starting it that way.
And all KDE tries to do is ape Windows and OS X, and it's a mess of half of one, half of the other, and three extra portions of developer artistic aesthetics thrown in just to make you barf.
KDE is not choice: It's copycat.
The worst about KDE is the Apple web browser Safari. This thing is still so bad, and the reason must be it's based on KDE code and not Mozilla code, which is what they should have done in Cupertino.
1.) I think corporations choose KDE because they've chosen Linux, and they've chosen Linux for its stability.
2.) I think the home users visiting Slash Dot choose KDE because it's dirt cheap, and most of them are determined to not have to pay for anything, no matter how hard someone worked on it and no matter how much they need to put food in mouths and a roof over heads. This arrogant loser group really thinks it has things coming to it. Better to take the platinum spoon out of its collective mouth and give it a good hard shove up its collective backside.
GNUStep is an effort to duplicate the Next environment. WindowMaker uses GNUStep libs so you can say GNUStep is a desktop environment were WindowMaker is it's window manager.
BSD licensed software can't be stolen....
How many times has KDE crashed on me in the past three years you might ask? ZERO
It's funny how people think KDE is easier to use than GNOME is. KDE is great, but it lacks focus. Yes, I've used it for quite sometime now. GNOME's technology is pathetic, but it's useability, simplicity and ease of usage is unrivaled. GNOME is very focused and the standard for entry of GNOME apps are very high. That's why GNOME in my opinion has some of the best apps, evolution and gimp come to mind.
:-D
I agree GNOME is behind KDE. I remember the numerous tools availabe to me in KDE that I now miss using GNOME. And DCOP and Kparts, nothing like them on GNOME. CORBRA is demented. ORBIT is bugy as hell. Metacity isn't as mature as Kwin is. You can't even turn of animations in Metacity. It's the most irritating thing about GNOME.
So why do I use GNOME? Well, as you grow older, you begin to appreciate simplicity and ease of use. Take for example a simple task as changing your backkground or wallpaper. In KDE is would have taken at least 20 steps(hyperbole). In GNOME it takes two. Right click on an image, and select 'use image as background', c'est finis.
GNOME apps are all consistent. What does that mean? It means every GNOME app uses the same shortcut keys, looks, interact and behave in an almost similar manner. Once you've learnt how to use on app, you've learnt how to use the rest. The element of least surprise is upheld to the highest order.
Looks. How many of you have taken a look at GTK2 apps without looking at it again or drooling? Looks. Take a look at epiphany and take a look at Konqueror. Which is visually appealing? Or Xchat and Kvirc. Or Gaim(althought it's not a GNOME app) and Kopete. Although, this understanbly is a matter of aesthetic preference, I have always appreciated the beauty, compactness and KISS style of GNOME and GNOME apps. I even think GNOME looks better than Mac. Yes, I use Macs.
As one matures the benefits of KDE's eye candy, disorderliness, feature centricness and lack of focus begin to weigh in on the user. Don't get me wrong, KDE is rich, but I got burned out. I converted to GNOME about 2 months ago, and I've since then removed any app that begins with K from my system. Oh, that and I had always preferred C to C++.
I for one welcome our new KOverlords.
Yes, KDE's file dialog is superior to GNOME's. This is the one thing that I find annoying.
2) More apps! KDE comes with over 150 Apps in the full install, with applications for all fields, plus its sleak integration with non kde apps (eg gimp, openoffice) make things more consistant.
KDE comes with over 150 apps that are mostly worthless, really. GNOME comes with most of the same functionality, a nice terminal, web browser, pdf viewer, calculator, etc. GNOME also has the best OS spreadsheet in existence.
As for integration, KDE's "make other apps use KDE colors" hack is disgusting. If you want "integration," -- if by integration you mean widgets that look the same -- use Geramik, Bluecurve, or Mandrake's whatever-it's-called.
3) Configureable as hell. The KDE control center has loads of knobs/dials/sliders and boxes to fiddle with, yet keeps things elegent. In gnome, half the options don't exisit and you are rudley told "use gconf-editor n00b by gnome zealots" (not joking about this, telling the truth gets you a -1, troll and footnotes).
Yes, KDE is pretty configurable -- if by configurable you mean you can change colors, fonts, and keybindings. You can do the same with GNOME, without touching GConf. For some more advanced tweakage, you will need to use GConf, which is pretty easy(not near as painful as windows's regedit).
5) Its development framework rocks. Take a good look at kioslaves, kparts, dcop, arts and qt and see why KDE is a programmer's dream. Modern c++, wonderful IDE, powerful command line scripting. Gnome gives you obsolete c, with a bunch of kludge libraries such as glib, Orbit, bonobo to hack together a application.
GNOME has C++ bindings for everything you need.
6)The defacto choice on Linux. All major Distributions support it by default.
Yeah, and Windows is the defacto OS on x86, what's your point? However, several of those distros also support GNOME, and RH is pretty nice on desktops too.
<snipped the rest of your trolling>
Please stop this nonsense, just stop it.
Fucking kids...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
BSD licensed software can't be stolen....
Tell that to SGI and SCO.
media-burning
GNOME 2.x is utterly failing at the moment in the media-burning area. Sure, there is the Nautilus cd-burning plugin, but that is hardly sufficient to meet even modest home-user needs.
On this point, I tip my hat to KDE for the K3b media-burning application. It is truly impressive; it rivals or bests top home-user proprietary burning applications on the Windows platform.
network share browsing
Nautilus performance for SMB and NFS network browsing is abysmal just now, and most of the GNOME 2.4 reviews do well to point it out.
This is a sufficiently significant shortcoming, that it prevents a Nautilus-based GNOME desktop from being viable in many home-office and small-business environments.
Watching its procedure using tcpdump, it boggles the mind how ineffecient the libs used by Nautilus are here.
Konqueror has Nautilus beat hands-down here.
However, GNOME will improve. With its unmatched HIG, its insistence on including only apps of the highest quality and even removing from future releases those that fail to persist in excellence, its insistence upon support for assistive technologies, and its overall usability, I still believe that GNOME will become the dominant *nix desktop environment.
The moderator that me offtopic is an idiot and another example of happy censory moderators that may have a bias towards KDE.
You know, GNOME wouldn't be where it now is if people stopped trying to convince themselves that it's as good as KDE, and just freaking *made it happen*, instead.
And this comes from a former GNOME guy. I'm not gonna rant or correct some faulty assumptions in your post, it's just not worth sinking to that level (however, I'll try to point out some of your good points further down, for the sake of fairness). Besides, there are much cleverer people than I with in depth knowledge of both environments that make a much better job of summing up the issues at hand than I could. Interestingly, this guy too used to think that GNOME would become the #1 desktop environment. That was a few years ago.
This being said, you're right about a few things. There's much more to desktop integration than widget appearance. And GConf is indeed not as bad as the Windows registry, mostly thanks to the absence of CLSID and related codes!
As for the rest, this is Slashdot, so I won't bother. Those who care, already know, and those who don't care or don't want to know, won't stop not caring or not wanting to know just because little guy Balinares is busily opening his mouth.
Additionally, your post misses entirely the number one reason why you should be using GNOME:
Because you -like- it.
That's the most valid reason on Earth to be using anything. So please drop the would-be technical comparisons that GNOME can't and won't win because it's just fucking not designed to, dammit. Go back to writing the freaking best code you can, and let people enjoy GNOME if GNOME is what they enjoy. Blind zealotry turns people -away-, you know?
I just wish the GNOME guys would stop phagocyting third-party apps just for the somewhat awkward "this is now a GNOME app so GNOME rules!" bragging rights... People who like to choose based on technical merits have a right not to have GNOME forced into their apps if they don't want GNOME, dammit. We can bitch all we want about the KDE guys, but when they need an app, they code it, they don't go encyst themselves into neutral apps...
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
For full comic effect your reply should read: "you shouldn't use a preposition to end a sentence with".
Well, I just installed Linux earlier today, and now I'm looking at this page from KDE.
what sig?
You mean minority owner?
Looksie at Canopy and SCO at the bottom of the list. Majority owner is... the EMPLOYEES.. with 65% of the holdings.
You're wrong. Go read 100 pages on the difference between Latin and English on Google.
There are reasons why democracy does not work nearly as well as capitalism.
-- David D. Friedman
Install both, use the panel you like, the apps you like and the window manager you like. I'm happily using applications from both with fluxbox, enlightenment, metacity and even twm - or remotely with CDE, pc-xware or cygwin. One user has the KOffice apps running all the time from the gnome panel, and the bluecurve desktop (and fluxbox on the 8 bit display).
Wahhhh.
Fucking Crybaby.
At least windows moves the help button 2 clicks away instead of putting it on the launcher giving a false sense of hope ... er, help ... no hope.
I hope you guys aren't being serious. In case you are, I was *joking*. Don't be so pathetic.
Disclaimer: I don't care about purity of licenses. I don't care about C vs C++. I don't care about RMS.
KDE is just the most remarkable piece of free software I've ever seen. It's so big, so slick and advances at such an incredible pace. It works perfectly, and just the same on Linux, Solaris and BSD (though I haven't used and BSDs in a while). It's wonderful.
I used to love GNOME, but now, with the best will in the world. I can't take it seriously as a rival to KDE.
Yes and no. I think you mean "WindowMaker is just a window manager because it doesn't set a comprehensive desktop appearance policy". In that sense, yes, *for the most part* all WindowMaker does is manage windows, but that's not *entirely* all it does.
In fact, you can run Window Maker without using its included window manager; in the default right-click menu you have the option of restarting with IceWM or with BlackBox. Window Maker is a desktop, in that it is a layer of abstraction above a window manager.
All's true that is mistrusted
I have been loving the KDE since I got Mandrake 6-something after running Red Hat 4-something. I knew the folks at Uni Tubingen were totally cool! I've used gnome a bit, but KDE still rules AFAIC.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy