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Novell, RedHat and Sun Commit to a Linux Desktop
DeckerEgo writes "InfoWorld reports on the Linux desktop and how Novell, Sun and RedHat (wha?) are working on making 2004 the year corporations start adopting open desktops. But which desktop? Most interesting to note is how Novell is planning to beef up the number of Ximian, Gnome, Mozilla and OpenOffice developers after its SuSE aquisition is complete. Does this mean that SuSE will stop being one of the best KDE distros out there and follow the way of the Gnome?"
Don't trust Sun. The high priests of solaris only want to drive a stake between my brethren ...
you have been warned!
- moomin
Some top players committing to bolster the options available to those looking for an alternative to the stuff from Redmond. VERY good news.
Perhaps not, the CEO of SUSE recently said that they are sticking with KDE, but also making Ximian desktop better for SUSE.
RH seemed like they were well on their way in RH 8/9, then suddenly pulled the plug.
SuSE aquisition is complete.
The acquisition is obviously incomplete at this point.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
"Ok you hippies, get cracking on that code so we can quickly package your hard work"
Sure wish someone large company w/ deep coffers would buy Mandrake and support the *best* KDE distro IMHO.
This guy is way out there
Intentional post error by Darl?
I love SuSE, and I love Gnome. I know many people out there may disagree, but having SuSE actually provide better Gnome support is wonderful news to me.
Regardless of that fact, having some big companies work together to create a unified front, a unified showing for Linux on the desktop, whether they use KDE, Gnome, or whatever, is good news as well.
Looks like some fun and interesting things are coming.
Jason Lotito
The 2000.00+ USD cost per developer to write commerical QT apps might be an issue with corp. adoption of KDE.
Everyone that has ever commented on the state of the Linux desktop has begged for consolidation. And now with Novell/SuSE, RedHat, Sun, HP, and IBM all backing Gnome it would appear that said consolidation is finally going to happen.
"I would like to know which of Gnome or KDE is better. Any opinions?"
-- The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor roman, nor an empire. Discuss!
RedHat pretty much have the enterprise linux market at the moment.. why not take the easy way out, and make sure that they are very visable in the desktop market, but never put resources into working on it until the other companies have done all the hard pioneering work for them..??!!
They will put bucketloads of support for the linux desktop enviroments/movements, but wait until the market is plump and tender before that roll in and attempt to dominate the market..
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
The real hippies are using GNU/HURD!
They will no doubt call it "linuxware", and after a few years sell it to a company named SCO, which will then get sold and become another company named SCO that will sue everyone again for some unknown reason...
"Red Hat, for its part, is taking steps toward a widespread desktop offering.
I thought the official line from Red Hat was the Linux Desktop is Dying
More spin here than a Microsoft developers conference. Looks like the Linux 'community' is on the ebb, people are getting sweaty palms. Kerching! Kerching! Kerching!
I suppose this means that one desktop environment (probably Gnome, at this point) will get enough support to bring Linux to the desktop, something that alot of people have been denying Linux is ready for in the past few weeks.
The only thing that really bothers me is that Random Corperate Giant is making the decision, not the users. When it comes down to it KDE and Gnome are both on top because they are both Really Good, and that fuels competition, etc. They've stayed "euqally" as popular because their respective user bases like them so much. So the most well known, in my opinion, Linux, Network OS, and Unix providers get to pick what they like and back it... Frightening.
Does this mean that SuSE will stop being one of the best KDE distros out there and follow the way of the Gnome?"
I hope so. Then maybe Slackware could drop GNOME entirely in favour of KDE, and regain the 90% market share it once had.
I am wondering if they are going to put alot into user interface design like Apple did with OS X, and if they will be selling it preinstalled on computers like Windows does, that should deffinately bring up the market for it, also a unified desktop would be great for it too, people seem to think different on the subject though.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Which will really happen first? In many ways the end result will determine the REST OF HISTORY. Or maybe not. There will have to be a unified vision and presentation before Inux on the desktop makes it to the coperate space or the consumer. And as we all know Longhorn will be ready when flying monkees fly out of my butt. Any one want to place bets? Please, No Macheads, i"m strictly talking x86/ platform.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I suspect we will wind up with the:
Knome Desktop Environment.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
You know Gnome is better than KDE =P
:).
We all know it
wouldn't it be funny if 3drealms didn't finish Duke 4 ever until linux dominated the home desktop market.. then they'd have to re-write their game AGAIN so it would be compatable..
LOL
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
KDE is now part of Debian, so if SuSE drops KDE it is always possible to divert effort into making Debian the best KDE distro (as well as the best GNOME distro).
once a slacker always a slacker. slackware and blackbox for life!
Always great to hear some big names stepping up and increasing their push for a desktop Linux that would be useable for the current Windows user. I think Linux is already ready for the desktop, however the installation process for most programs in Linux is the only thing that really needs to be improved before it would be completely suitable for the average Windows user.
Glad to see all these companies consolodating and backing Gnome. I have been using Gnome for a year or two now and have never had any problems and look forward to every new version of the desktop.
Wha, "wha"?
Szulik said something about the home desktop, not about the desktop in general. Tempest in a tea pot...
MOD PARENT UP +5 Funny.
Smoke this
I came over this distro Ark Linux URL: http://www.arklinux.org , it was very easy to install and support is great. .. but they have done a great effort.
Its a KDE centric distro, the best distro i have used to this date, they are still in Alpha stage
Cheers 33C!
thats offtopic commie fag
It's good that Gnome is becoming the main Linux desktop instead of KDE. Gnome simply looks better - functional, clean, elegant, no pointless shiny eyecandy - and most importantly it's fully free software (unlike KDE).
The reason KDE and GNOME have come so far so quickly (within 5 years) is that they've had each other to feed off of and compete with. If there is any considerable swing in one that the other dies off, it'll mean suckage for the "winning" desktop.
Just look what happened with CDE and OpenLook in the previous UNIX desktop war. After people standardized on CDE, it started stagnating until KDE was founded and eventually GNOME killed it off.
I've been a GNOME user since GNOME 1.0, and I would hate to see Suse switch to GNOME, since they've been a driving force behind KDE, and thus a driving force behind GNOME.
Do you not see the irony of your position? You are equally racist, if not more so. Please don't breed.
Just because Redhat believes that the Linux desktop RIGHT NOW is not as good as Windows for the average home user doesn't mean they think that it will NEVER be as good or better, or that such a time is so far in the future that they should not be trying to bring it about.
The users had their chance.
Plus, with everyone working on ONE desktop - watch it take off...(can I have my cancel button on the RIGHT please?)
once SUSE is acquired by Novell. Personally experiencing two cases of acquisitions of smaller company by the larger one, I know how much those promises worth. Less than 'my 2 cents'.
Dropline Gnome is quite good too...
PC-DOS, then MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows first moved into the corperate environment and from that position into the homes.
Adoption at home came from work to allow the user a chance to do work at home and maybe get an edge on the co-worker who was running a 'home computer' rather than a PC.
Red Hat is only marginally wrong in saying Linux isn't ready for the home, but the problem really isn't in Linux, it's in the workplace.
Once the workplace reaches critical adoption the migration to home will be a natural move and Linux will be the primary target for Virus writers, not WinBlows.
I firmly believe that the only way Linux will make it's way to the masses that would normally use Windows or Mac is for the desktop to be unified. They need an interface that everyone else will know when they need help, not one that looks different.
The biggest problem I see with Linux on the desktop is there are too many hardcore hackers working with it. I wrote a report on this for my history class, for our section on technology. We learned about this guy, Kevin Mitnick, and he pretty much took over the internet singlehandely. He also bought a Ferrari with some money he stole from AOL users, by "fishing" peoples accounts. If not for the underground lawbreakage that is possible with this Operating System (OS), the Internet (and also the Intranet) would be much safer. There are heaps of people trying to steal our Ebay & Paypal now thanks to Linux. I don't like Microsoft any more tha next dude but is not the answer.
click here to incinerate homeless people
One can only hope!
Sorry kids, but it's not as exciting as it looks, Sun recently put out their Java Desktop, obviously Novell have SuSE and Ximian and RedHat have been doing this for years.
Now wouldn't it be nice if the three partnered up and made a super-Windows Killer?
s.
For that reason, my money is on Novell making it on the desktop because they have a good understanding of deploying desktop/corporate systems. Sun and RH are more server folks. Maybe they can collaborate in some way?
IMHO.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
as the main supported DE, all I haev to say is GOOD.
well, not if you like KDE, but I think that Gnome 2.4 provideds a great Desktop experience and the plans for 2.6 will make it excelent.
KDE has a lot of nice features and such, but the integration is not there as it is in Gnome. KDE does not have the streamlined feel of Gnome.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
> Yeah, you might be upset about it if you use KDE, but look at it this, it is too expensive to be supporting multiple DEs.
Are you sure about that? Novell has seemed to be commiting to two of them.
Also, Qt is GPL on X11, which means it's free to develop with it. Perhaps you were thinking of something else?
Thought they decided to stop at RH9 and go Fedora? Are they refering to fedora being a future desktop solution or are they indeed refering to RH9
They just said they would improve GNOME.
Personally i prefer KDE for business reasons, but hey, if a better GNOME helps the cause.. why not..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I was so happy about the Novell/Suse/Ximian thing because I thought: I'm going to get a great KDE distro, with Evolution and Mozilla properly integrated. I hope Suse does not switch. I'm using RH9 on my desktop now and I miss KDE.
and now for the weekly troll...
let's face it, suse might be by far the best
kde distro, or even the best closed source
distro (as in: yast etc. aren't open)
but that doesn't make it one of the best
distros. in fact it makes it a more or less
successful copy of windows.
thus, if novell planned on taking suse and
transforming it into something really worthwile,
it is very likely that it would be by replacing
kde with the ximian desktop first.
I dunno where this comes from. Last I checked, the default SuSE distro took out things from the KDE control panel like the 'information' tree (devices/dma channels/etc). Why that was completely removed is just a mystery to me. SuSE feels slightly slower than Mandrake does (tested in our labs on identical hardware).
creation science book
I second that. Linus Torvalds quote: "In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people."
Can we get this wrongful ownership thing straight, please?
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Where are all these mythical companies writing commercial Gnome/GTK apps? I don't see them. I see a few KDE (kompany) but no commercial GTK apps. So the license issue doesn't seem to be driving people away from QT/KDE.
creation science book
Okay, positive Linux desktop story...how long until SCO decides they need to remind everybody that they're still around?
My guess is we'll see something Friday.
if you can live without SuSE specific help files remove kdebase-SuSE and KDE will behave more like you would expect, i done it myself and i like KDE better, YaST will still work too
Well, the attitude of most Slashdotters who complain is, "Well, let's see your code then!"
So don't blast them for doing the same thing.
My Network Admin got a LONG call from a Novell rep... We are a K-12 school district, about 13 Novell servers and mostly Win2K on desktops...
:)
The rep called to BS about how Novell wondered if we had thought about Linux on our desktops... (we use 2 as small web servers, mandrake, but nothing that fancy...)
The boss seemed to indicate that they wanted to push linux and open office... Not really a problem for me and the boss, but when I think of the everyday problems my users (Teachers/students) have with the microsoft products, I cringe when I think of turning them loose on Linux and Open Office...
It may be "OK" for me to play with, and for server use, but it doesn't seem to be right for the "average" (read as DUMB) users... And you can make things look SIMILAR to windows, but it's not windows... Our only final argument was that they had to convince Buisnesses to go to Linux and Open Office first... We are an educational environment, so we have to prepare them for what they use when they grow up... The kids that are into the networking and the future admins, find Linux in the networking class... the future secretaries find MSWord & Excell with Win2k...
Sad fact, but true... WE cannot expect to force our users to use something that they MAY not get to see in the real world, regardless of cost or how we may feel about a company.
Now, if you own or have power in a company, then THAT is where you start. Put linux in the front office on the computer of the 55 year old grandma secretary, and make it easy as pie to learn & use. Then you have a chance of changing the OS that is prefered when that same grandma goes home at night and wants get email pics of the grandkids...
Simple enough, right?
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
You people really need to wake the hell up, KDE sucks, it always has, it always will, its the eye candy that made mac appeal to the homo's
KDE also doesn't have the same design braindamage as GNOME. Usable is not the same as functional, and KDE is both.
How about the forthcoming release from Xandros?
i believe there's a version of the vi editor available for the emacs operating system
This is a negative impact on KDE and the tone of the article suggests that Gnome will become the defacto standard for Novell/Suse.. this makes a lot of sense, not only because Novell owns Ximian but because.. as the article states, they want to give a 'single target to ISV's'.
Since RedHat is already Gnome centered..this target is and will be GTK+, which allows for third party linking without them having to pay licensing fees.. this is where the choice of QT finally comes and bites KDE... sad but true, a little ironic though... that KDE loses out because it is not friendly enough to corporate types vis-a-vis QT* while Gnome will win(at least it looks like it will) because it is.
*For those in need of a li'l background QT is licensed under the GPL while GTK+ is dual licensed under the GPL and LGPL. So, QT free(as in speech & beer) for GPL apps but not as in beer for non-GPL apps and while this is fine and dandy for community projects corporations will never pay a 'gatekeeper' if they want to release applications for the 'standard' desktop(even Mickeysoft doesn't charge that.. let's ignore MSDN for now).
--
I have been trying to figure out why Gnome is so popluar. Don't get me wrong I don't think its a bad gui but when givien the choice of Gnome or KDE, I prefer KDE. I just think the asthetics of KDE seem better and how the include utilites that interact with Linux for system Config. I mean we was a community want choice and by all these companies pushing Gnome....would things become more like MS as technology progresses and Gnome becomes more of a INTERGRATED part of the system? and would this push KDE into the trenches and be hard to install/configure. Once again Im not trying to troll but this polls to other GUI's like Fluxbox, Blackbox and Windowmaker
..is that somebody wisened up and realized that the opportunity that GTK represents is the possibility of deploying applications across Win32 and Linux. abiword and gimp are both great examples of this. So there's finally a cross-platform toolkit that can have some heavy cross-platform momentum behind it. MacOSX users even get in on the action with XDarwin.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Did anyone else think that by supporting GNOME, these companies just try to delay the success of the LINUX DESKTOP ? KDE was always the more polished kind of the two, it is more usable, it is more controlled, it is relying on more defined standards....etc. GNOME on the other hand resembles more of an M$ type of spagetthi bowl, trying to make things work together. I'm all for choice, but in all honesty; should not these corporations support something that has more chance to achieve the goal in the shortest time..??? Just my $5.00
hmmm
its odd though, cause I though Redhat was going to abandon desktop linux...
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Try doing some research before posting, you cunt.
I recently installed SuSE 9 on my laptop and had no trouble choosing Gnome as the default desktop. I can't speak for previous versions of SuSE, but both KDE and Gnome are quite prominent in the current install options.
For those who've posted that RH has dropped desktop support, I have to wonder at your ability to read or use a search engine.
RedHat has set their desktop free with Fedora, and now developers are maintaining their own projects, rather than stupidly making RH employess keep track of 100's of dependencies.
As a result, development is skyrocketing, and package management, installation and upgrade is taking quantum leaps foreward with yum & apt, and up2date can utilize the same repositories.
Addtionally, far from abandoning the desktop, RH has given substantial support to it via package repositories, bandwidth, and maintaining a multitude of mailing lists as well as hosting search interfaces for them.
The 2.6.10-test linux kernel is available in rpm format for any who want to try it, and I'd expect the Fedora Core 2 to be released once the stable kernel is released by LT.
From my perspective, I'm gonna trust a Linux desktop with RedHat backing eons before I'm going to trust anything SUN puts together as a desktop release. (I've now installed 2 dozen servers and 18 desktops with Fedora on Dell and Compaq with no problems.) Novell/Suse is an interesting idea, but I've just tried the latest Suse distro, and package repositories are far too slow ( 50 kb/sec? ick) for me to consider them a serious contender yet.
They'll concentrate any efforts towards the corporate enviroment. Which means other things past spreadsheets and email will probably be neglected. They refuse to realise that targeting all aspects of PC usage is necessary to unseat the giant in Redmond.
Parents will not use Linux if the latest and greatest game cant run on it. Never mind the Xbox becuase console systems have proven they're not good enough yet to unseat the PC as the best gameing system for your money.
This is all based on what I hear, as in any case actions speak louder than words so I await to hear what really happens later down the road.
Here's to UserLinux!
A wise man once said. Say hi to the new boss. Same as the old boss.
Why is that "informative"? What exactly did the inform us of? Mandrake is the "best" KDE distro? Mandrake needs funding?
ok if thats your game I can play it
In my opinion, Linux should be used. It is good. Linux is different than windows. I wish everyone would use it.
But I'm going to keep scratching my head until I find a site dedicated to Linux improvements (from our, the users, standpoint). If you've ever been to kde-look.org you should have a pretty good idea about what I'm talking about. Slashdot is a great forum for commenting on exactly what it is you believe 'Linux' needs (or why it sucks), but that isn't its purpose and it doesn't collect or organize this information so Red Hat execs can skim through and see just what the uncleaned masses are griping about now..
Quack, quack.
Can any of you USians tell me why you don't use the word "spat" ?
(And while you're at it, could you tell me why you say "petting the cat" instead of "patting the cat".)
I'm a died-in-the-wool Windows sysadmin (7+ years), just new to Linux (Libranet 2.8.1, Debian + extras) and in the middle of the learning curve (so take my comments for what they are worth -- probably not much), but already I think the great virtue of Linux/desktop is the organic, user-driven nature of development. It's not corporate-driven (that is, tied to quarterly project planned) milestones, but rather user-determined utility. This requires TIME. Linux is on a different schedule and that's fine. It will win the race against Redmond in the long run. The current drive toward the desktop stinks of corporate expediency. I can't fully articulate my concerns, but it's something like "wolf in sheep's clothing"...
When Novell makes their presentation on Linux at my work in two weeks, one question I will ask is whether they will offer a 'Live CD' for their corporate users to take home and boot into Linux on their home PC's, thereby allowing workers to connect to the company network with a STANDARD CORPORATE DESKTOP from their home PC. Not only will this be convenient for workers and more secure for corporations, but it will also put Linux on home PC's faster than any other initiative. What do you think?
Every one saw it here first! I coined LID! Patent Pending, Patent Pending, Patent Pending! Hands off. Just kidding, but that would be a cool name for it. BTW I know Microsoft says 2006, but come on, thats at least 2 years from now. As Xtreme programming says "Any time estimate greater than 2 weeks is made up". They won't have it ready until 2008 at the earliest. Giving me enough time to excriment monkees. You know, on second thought that sound painful. Scratch that.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
l'countrare mo' capintun
chardenae
french horn
Sun just scored a 1M+ desktop agreement with China, which wants Gnome/Linux, not Windows or Solaris/CDE. Novell's got Ximian's Evolution, which offers a low retraining barrier-to-exit for Windows/Outlook users. Gnome's got the initiative right now. It's in RedHat's interest to make the Gnome/KDE interoperation barriers disappear, bringing together a unified desktop strategy for the growing Linux platform. Therefore, it's in Sun's interest to work on that convergence; likewise Novell. In fact, everybody is best served by converging to one basic desktop, perhaps with addon features specific to KDE, Gnome or others. Sun would be the last holdout, but that China contract might have finally convinced them that people prefer Linux on their desktop to Solaris, at least for now. By going along, Sun gets to sell them on Solaris for the server, which much better supports enterprises, especially distributed ones.
--
make install -not war
Certainly the competition between the two has created some "drive" in the projects but even if one of them were to recede there are still at least two other significant desktops with which to compete, Windows and OS X.
The fight for the open desktop is a tiny battle compared to the fight for all desktops. Perhaps KDE and GNOME have reached a maturity where greater focus on the large battle might be beneficial.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
The pick between gnome and kde reappt does not matter. Gnome supports kde programs and kde does gnome. The programs will work the same. Really this 'corporate' standardization is about the libraries to be used. Anyone with his head in the linux pool knows about the Troll-Tech/Open-Source question and its accompaning arguements. The fact is that corporations are going to drive linux down the road to full desktop acceptance. At this point the linux desktop acceptance is needed to accelerate their growth or for example, Sun needs it just to start becoming profitable again. These corporations feel uncomfortable developing an open source platform that from stupid CEO perspective is questionably under control of Troll-Tech. For a stupid CEO (there are a lot out there) there is some uncertainty surrounding the KDE stuff. Companies are going to feel a lot better knowing that the code they are running was open source from the beginning and that there are minimal liscensing questions. Everyone knows that the GTK+ libs are a bear. I really doubt that Redhat, Sun, Suse, ... don't know that. But these corporations may feel programming the GTK+ may become easier or would be more conducive for their business for the future.
Novell has specifically said that they will offer both KDE and Gnome. They do not want to get into a religious debate.
Out of all distros, only Ximian seems to have the goal of integrating major apps, which include:
- galeon
- open office
- evolution
Sure, the other distro-makers are making Gnome/KDE easy to use with centralized GUI configuration tools, but the real work is ensuring you can take a picture in Gimp and pasting it into Open Office. For example, redhat's latest effort is making the desktops look the same under their Bluecurve theme.
The integration of major apps is not perfect yet, but I believe it is in the right direction(and the latest bounty by Gnome confirms this).
Kashif
My take as a sysadmin/user.
;-)
I think the KDE desktop is more easily configurable, but Gnome (GTK-2) apps are nicer.
Certain KDE components-- like Kate, Konqueror (as file manager and browser), Kasbar and Konsole are more elegant and utilitarian than their Gnome counterparts. That said, many utilities written for Gnome, but not necessarily part of Gnome are nicer than the Equivalent KDE third party apps--by this I mean Things like Gaim, Pan, and (this is a stretch) GTKed Firebird. Gimp's superiority goes without saying.
I was a long time KDE user but the need for speed and elegance caught me. Now I use Fluxbox because all is available from the right mouse button, and any app can be "tabbed" with any other. I find myself using the aforementioned Gnome/GTK2 apps, konqueror and quick show for occasional file browsing/image viewing, and aterm.
I just wish some how Exposity would work with Flux...
Acquiescence leads to obliteration
Thing is, if Gnome really becomes "the real thing" in the business arena, all the cool people will just stop using it, because it will then be like Windows -- so passe! KDE has survived so far without corporate help, and may do even better if Gnome gets hijacked.
Anyways, the big problem with KDE/Linux isn't KDE, it's Linux! If the Desktop Overlords help out with hardware drivers, software installation, and library API/ABI stability, then I will end up doing quite nicely out of all this ta' very much.
-- Demonic
Wow, those are two companies to take seriously, huh? And Redhat seems to be heading in their direction.
All in all, no one in Redmond is going to lose any sleep over this.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
The title is accurate - Red Hat, Novell/SuSE, and Sun would love to have every desktop run GNU/Linux. (Actually, Sun would rather have Solaris on every box, but that's never going to happen - Solaris has nothing GNU/Linux doesn't have, and lacks the most important feature of all: Freedom.) However, the idea that they are promoting an "open desktop" is incorrect. While any GNU/Linux desktop is "more open" than a Windows or Mac desktop, Red Hat, Novell/SuSE, and Sun think every desktop should have Java, Flash, Acrobat, and tons of other proprietary junk that they claim is "essential" to a desktop. The only essential is Freedom - with it, we can create anything else we need.
Some people here need to read the KDE Licensing Policy at: http://developer.kde.org/policies/licensepolicy.ht ml.
;-)
It states that source files which are included in the kdelibs module must use either the LGPL, BSD, or X11 license.
So, KDE can be used to develop commercial apps as long as the developer has a valid QT license.
It is amazing what five minutes of research on the Net will get you.
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck.
"... Every last one of those businesses has something to gain by having the Windows hegeonomy fall. ..."
:O)
:O)
I don't know what "hegeonomy" means, but it's a cool word.
-nomy = system of laws governing or sum of knowledge about
hege- = referring to Hegel?
Hegelian discourse is based on single-winner argument, so I suppose this could mean the study of Microsoft's monopolistic theories of software.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
you talk to much
I saw a study about a year ago showing (IIRC) that untrained students and teachers were able to get up to speed on K12Linux in about a week, as opposed to about three weeks using Windows.
There's also links to related projects there, including
disclaimer: I know almost nothing about any of these. I never got through to K12os.org when I tried just now.
gratuitous plug: I went to Riverdale Grade School a looong time ago, the district where this stuff originated.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Someone earlier said, ... "make the Gnome/KDE interoperation barriers disappear" ...
This is very, very true. In my case, I am presently using both Gnome and KDE apps - and the XFCE WM. If Gnome & KDE would stabilize on a common underlying data model (be it XML or whatever), then I could keep the same address book in both. I could use whichever calendar I wanted at the moment. And, because these two dominate the Linux desktop now, sooner or later all the other WM and desktop environments would probably migrate there too.
Perhaps these desktop groups could actually meet online or in San Diego, or wherever, and decide to agree on data formats and communications / object protocols!!
Even groups who went their own way could develop a mapping from their way to the common lingua franca.
One of the big advantages of open source software is that proprietary considerations take a back door to improving the breed. And all it takes is agreement at the bottom level.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
this guy is not a troll. trolltech are a bunch of dumbfucks.
They could easily be the next Borland, yet they refuse to budge from their no-lgpl, high cost model.
Borland made it big by charging $99 in a market that was charging thousands...and they had a better product. Qt and Kdevelop is not the greatest, but it's okay...the debugging is really weak (no object inspector/structure browser).
why they don't get off their high horse and just sell a annual license for $149 (say) that inlcludes one development license (platform of your choice) and unlimited runtime for all platforms?
Why not? because they couldn't handle the demand! It would be phenomenal! I'd buy a cdrom tomorrow, and every year i can think of, and ten more for the other developers in-house.
But no, $2000+ for one license, one year, one developer, one platform. Asinine! MS Visual Studio Pro and Win2K Pro are far less ($999 and $200) and I get unlimted runtime forever...and in a lot of ways it's a smoother product.
So this dude is not a troll, trolltech and Qt are doing a great thing but their business model SUCKS RED BABOON ASS!
When I showed a demo at work of what Qt could do, everyone loved it...very impressed. The debugging environment, as I said, is weak though. Then I had to say "but..." and tell the licensing saga...I was almost laughed out of the room...$2000 per developer, per year, per platform...for a widget tookit! HAHAHAHA! They're on crack!
The only thing that really bothers me is that Random Corperate [sic] Giant is making the decision, not the users.
But in the end, the commercial company has to convince end users to buy its product. They're going to do that by selecting the desktop that they believe the users will like best. So, in the end, the users are the ones making the decision.
Since the QT issue might be a factor in standardization attempts, I'm curious as to what kind or gross revenue TT realizes from licensing sales?
I've never actually come across a QT/W32 app. Wondering if anyone else has.
Not on our install here, which was a stock install. Also, after the *longest* linux install in the past 12 months, we still didn't get something as basic as 'locate'. Hrm...
creation science book
Suse got bought. They will do what Novell wants. In any case his statement was a polite way of saying KDE is over.
I have just begun experimenting with Linux (redhat 9). Gnome was a brutal assault on my senses. I might as well have decided to experiment with flint hand axes. KDE, I found vastly better, with Konqueror even offering some advantages over windows Explorer, Nautalis on the other hand, well...the same cannot be seriously said.
Novell is well aware that the driving force behind linux on the desktop will be availability of vertical applications with a standard set of essential business applications. Of course Novell is going to add development effort to the Mozilla/OpenOffice/Evolution combo. That combo is widely recognized as the Linux business application package. Novell will follow the momentum those names already have, to be sure.
The default desktop is inconsequential as long as both frameworks are supported. It would be prudent for Novell to keep the options open for developers to decide on which framework to use, as far as desktop linux is concerned. That's why I doubt any desktop environment would be dropped.
I love it when all the GNOME fanboys come out.
They always raise the GTK red hering too.
GTK is not a problem. The BSD ans LGPL are not a problem.
Those arguments have been over for some time.
Get a grip on it man.
When GNOME can allow you set any application up to run on the workspace with simple right clicks and menu selections for the entire process let me know.
Until then it's no competetion for KDE.
Evolution is ugly even thought it's very good and easy to configure so Ximmian is a joke too.
Face it KDE is the window manager most people use and it will be forever.
GNOME apps are good and I use a pile of them, on my KDE Window Manager.
The GNOME window manager sucks.
That is all.
As you can see I don't care about my karma.
I think getting a standard desktop is a good thing. Not only will it bring more development to the standard platform (ability to write more code, revise it, analyze it for security issues, etc..) but perhaps a lot of duplication effort will be reduced and those developers can focus on innovative features, new areas of development, etc.
As a KDE user, I am slightly sad to see these corporations favor Gnome, but I would have to imagine that the features that I really like in KDE would find their way into the standard Gnome desktop (if that ends up being what happens) becuase lets face it -- the FOSS that is developed generally mimics the users of that particular FOSS.
It will be very interesting to see what type of inroads will be made in 2004.
Personally, I prefer gnumeric and abiword, and I've never really gotten over the early kde's horrid icons. Perhaps that's because I'm a Mac refugee (that's not going back, by the way.)
These days I've come to ignore the D.E. wars. All I ever seem to use anymore is gnucash, lyx and vi.
With fvwm2, no less.
Ask google for define:hegemony
The Enemy will never let the penguin come to the thorwn of the desktop.
The war is set, the pieces are moving. We come to it at last.
"I see it in you eye's, the fear of spending too much on software. A day may come when our servers may fail, y. When we forsake our code and break the GPL, but it is not this day. This day we fight!.
[echoing voice]All you have to decide is what to do with the hardware that is given to you[/echoing voice]
"We shall see the commandline again"
You gave away your root password, I can no longer protect you anymore.
"We cannot win this by source code alone."
Not for ourselves, but we can give GNU a chance...
*Followed by several quickly flashing scense of battle slowing as the string section in the back ground retards*
"NOOOOO!!!!!"
*black with titles: Lord of the Desktop: return of the command line.
Oh, wait, I thought this was the review of RotK...my bad...
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I'm a devoted KDE user but sadly, it looks like KDE is going to lose momentum to GNOME. - Let's look at the areas they're devoting more resources to:
Gnome: NOT KDE
Mozilla: NOT Konqueror
OpenOffice: NOT KOffice
My favorite part of KDE: Kio slaves. I find being able to tranparently edit/save files across sftp to be invaluable. (Of course I/O slaves do much more, such as allowing transparent access to a digital camera, a tar archive, smb shares, etc.)
If you've never used KDE, picture being able to attach a file to an email from a remote machine without ever downloading it or mounting a share. I attach files stored on my remote webserver via sftp to emails with Kmail all the time and would sorely miss this ability if over time KDE lost ground to GNOME and I felt compeled to switch.
Does GNOME offer a similiar feature?
--Aaron Greenberg
Was going to implement RH9 to showcase Linux in our data center(Oracle on one and Network monitoring on another). Well EOL on RH9 was announced and my boss asks "what the hell am I doing showcasing on an OS at EOL?". After a few months of back pedaling I finally get the green light on Linux again. Do you think it will be Redhat? Hell no. You only have to burn me once. Matthew Szulik does the double speak almost as well as Darl Mcbribe. The guy has come off sleazy in his defense of the asinine decision to stop workstation support. ass talking like a jackass
The greatest advantage about Windows/Solaris server is that admins can run the same environment on their desktop. The same process of installing apps on the server is mostly the same for the workstation. RH had this advantage before but sadly not for a very long time. The EOL on RH9 was just a post mortem. When RH separated the workstation and server lines I was so pissed I started working with SUSE and Mandrake but unfortunately my hardware was not as compatible with them as RH out of the box and it was just too time consuming to track down all drivers and dependencies so back to Redhat I crawled like the unwashed admin I was. Now though both SUSE and Mandrake are on par with Redhat's server product and workstation. So I am moving on. No Redhat on my workstations no Redhat on my servers and I feel fine. How are you feeling Matthew? Nervous I bet.
The truth suffers more from convictions than from lies.
Sarcasm aside, I feel this country stands for freedom (including freedom to be narrow minded) and thus it is likely you I have vastly different ideas about what constitutes "the enemy". I hope we can come to a place where we can incorporate a variety of other mindsets into our moral dialogue (note this is coming from someone who got check-minus in "plays well with others)
ACMD eht detaloiv evah uoy
I've only run into Qt lightly, and while I've worked on a number of GTK apps and used glade, have never done more than tiny apps purely from scratch. However, here's an attempt at some comparisons:
* Qt has good C++ bindings. Better than GTK, though GTK does have gtkmm.
* I'm not sure whether it's possible to do Qt in C. If so, it would be quite ugly. If you are otherwise entirely neutral as to choice of toolkit and desktop, C fans (traditional UNIX folk) are probably going to prefer GTK, and C++ fans (generally Windows folk) are going to prefer Qt.
* GTK is more widely used and supports more languages outside of C and C++. There are no Qt ocaml bindings, for instance.
* GTK uses less memory and is faster.
* Currently (and according to Qt/KDE developers, due to linker deficiencies), Qt apps launch more slowly than do GTK apps (both toolkits do too damn much init-time processing IMHO).
* There are tearable panes in either KDE or Qt...not sure which. This is a very nice feature that GTK does not do.
* GTK allows (though with GTK 2, a config file option must be enabled) the user to easily rebind key combinations associated with a menu choice. Qt does not do this.
* Qt currently has good support for small framebuffer-based devices. I do not believe that there is as much work on GTK for this (though GTK can go through the framebuffer instead of X).
* Qt is "commercially supported", FWIW.
* GTK is currently more widely used.
* Qt provides more *things* than GTK does (Note: this is based on my experiences, which are biased towards GTK 1 instead of 2). I suspect that you could write an app entirely within Qt -- GTK is designed to supplement the existing UNIX APIs.
* If you're into the ideology, the FSF/GNU people have tended towards supporting GNOME rather than KDE.
* Qt has been around for longer than GTK has.
* Qt widget engines support fading menus. I do not believe that this is currently the case for GTK.
* You may prefer using various apps associated with either GTK or Qt. Features aside, I find that Konqueror feels more like a "native" app to its widget set than does Galeon, but on the other hand, GTK has GIMP and a number of other programs that I use.
* No matter which you use, either API is modern, and light years ahead of Win32 or the Macintosh Toolbox. Programmers who have worked with these in the past are in for a big, big treat. It's *much* easier and faster to write code for common cases, and a lot of neat debugging code is present.
* Qt is better documented. The core GTK functionality is well documented, but some more esoteric GTK or GNOME related libraries have very little documentation.
* GTK's license is LGPL -- frankly, this license is much more generous and gives a good deal mroe freedom than Qt's license, which is GPL at best and commercial (and costs $$$) at worst. Since the core widget set for a platform is a pretty crucial element from a licensing perspective, it's awfully rough to try to force every GUI developer to use a particular license or pay a license fee.
* Both have RAD GUI design tools. I'm unfamiliar with Qt's. GTK's is called glade -- it has a rather awkward interface, but works reasonably well, and has plugins to export to a number of the GTK-supported languages.
* (A bit of a digression) GTK uses glib. Glib is really, really, really cool. Any C programmer out there will *drool* at the idea of having glib's functionality available to their programmers, even if they like Qt (as a matter of fact, KDE now uses glib, IIRC). Not a huge deal for C++, but glib provides some functionality that C could really use, when aimed at application development.
I'm going to digress a bit from Qt/GTK to KDE/GNOME, since your choice of widget set also affects your desktop environment.
In general, from a user perspective, I've found that GTK/GNOME apps tend to be a bit more oriented towards the hacker, and Qt/KDE apps tow
May we never see th
I would personally love 2004 to be the year of the open source desktop, but I fear the CIO et al management of many large companies is totally closed minded on the subject.
I work for a Fortune 10 company and let me tell you how depressing it is... Their approved standards list has nothing but Microsoft products wherever possible. It would be not be an exageration to say the criteria for building this list was "Does Microsoft have a key product in this area? If so, that's our standard. Otherwise, we'll just choose whatever is most popular."
In many cases the products these IT desicion makers are choosing are unproven and unpopular even, but hey they're from Microsoft so they'll win eventually anyway. This includes...
- Microsoft Sharepoint (instead of industry leading Documentum)
- Microsoft Passport for authentication
- IIS (They catagorize Apache as "contain", meaning no new deployements should be done)
When asked about all this during a meeting at a local site, one of the IT corporate leaders said...
"Anyone here ever deal with Microsoft on corporate licensing"
[Silence]
"Well, let me tell you those guys play hardball. Unless you can convince them your heart and soul is behind them and their vision, they won't give you a good deal on the licenses you need like Windows and Office."
He then went on to describe how Microsoft was unhappy that our company was using certain competing products such as Lotus Notes. And that they told us they wanted us to get rid of those products as switch to Sharepoint etc or they would screw us on the Windows/Office licensing.
So I can't see us switching to Linux/open source desktops anytime soon, regardless of their quality or other compatibility issues.
The only good news is that Microsoft's actions in strong arming some of these big companies is likely polarizing: Either the company will embrace Microsoft or reject them. Let's hope they manage to piss enough big companies off with their actions.
that is the view held by those IN the US.
Many of those in central/south america object ot the use of "American" to mean those from the US... as do us Canadians, often.. though we are too laid back to care.
You can call yourself American if you want..
The rest of us, who are not from the US of A, and feel "American" is not specific enough, often refer to Americans online as "USians"... it's not at all meant in any derogatory way. If you can't handle it.. tough.
At some point you have to know so much about communication that there isn't enough room left over for knowing how to do anything.
Call it Balkenization, or Babel-ification. It's part of why Windows is a great marketplace despite all of its percieved difficencies as an OS, and Linux is not.
The 'Linux Pimps' might do well to appreciate the virtues of simplicity as they seek to cry it's sins.
I think it'S the best itegration of KDE.
I like it. I've seen Gnome, and I wouldn't be happy with it.
I don't understand why they should change?
It feels like the kde development is a bit more steady and a bit faster than gnome.
Every week, Slashdot has a compulsory article about companies who are going to push Linux on the desktop... great... but, once again, the whole IDEA of Linux on the desktop is malformed. Why? Simple! Repeat after me as many times as it takes to understand the concept... IT'S NOT THE DESKTOP THAT MAKES A DIFFERENCE, IT'S THE SOFTWARE. KDE, GNome, or even XFCE are great, user-friendly, nice-looking, eye-candy-stuffed environments. Breautiful. Now what? At the end of the day, people want to work. It's not the OS, it's what you do with it. What makes Windows so popular... it's not the OS itself, it's the tons of professional programs that run on it. Unless companies like Adobe, Macromedia etc start porting their apps under Linux, there won't be any wide adoption. Databases, 3d design, word processors (StarOffice IS the most significant thing that happened to Linux in the last 2 years), financial soft, etc - those are the only things that will make Linux a success Just my 2C
http://www.automatiq.se
I can't believe this! Ximian attempt to write enterprise-level software, and maintain it, using C.
Have any of you people actually looked at some of the evolution code? It's a *mess*
Mate...
I really and truly hope that these companies have pulled the coding standards of their programmers up a number of notches for these projects -- there's no place for shit coders. Unfortunately, it's more-than-likely that the number of ex-VB drones will just swell.
If life sucks, start a software company. Hurt other people.
I have moments of intense frustration, but I'm learning. And the things that are cool in Free OS's outweigh the things that suck (dependency hell). There just aren't any things that strike me as cool in the Windows world.
I don't want a teletubby desktop. I don't want arbitrary restrictions driving my costs. I don't want to keep track of licenses. The SPA tried to extort some money from us and the ensuing audit took many, many hours that could have been spent doing cool shit with our network. Figure that in the TCO. Figure end of life forcing an otherwise unecessary upgrade. RH pulling support for 9.0 is a bit of a problem, but I have learned to compile from source! I can even build an rpm. So I don't need Redhat to support my now-legacy servers. I can nurse them along until the pain of that outweighs the pain of switching. My call. Staying on NT 4.0? Not if you connect it to anything. Uh uhhh. Not your call.
It is cool to use stuff made as a labor of love, an act of generosity, or simple itch-scratching. We can go so much farther with the source!
Not to start a war here, but I am tired of having Gnome being pushed for reasons of company politics. Gnome may be right for some people, but it just doesn't do it for me.
If this keeps up, they will get me to install Gentoo yet...
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
and the users will flock over. :)
Why did Win 3.11 fail to replace DOS? No good games...
OS/2? Did they even have games?
BeOS? Damn, this could have been a good gaming platform.
Win98 had Games, tnx to DirectX which finally was a reason to stop writing DOS-Games
Big coperations never seem to think of this. Users need games, games, games! They prefer using the same Desktop at Home like in the Company but they won't ever switch to a system which does not have theire favourite games (except a few workaholics).
voila: http://ranger.befunk.com/blog/archives/000072.html
Worth a look, James Turner and Mark R Hinkle debate either side of the issue.
Mozilla: NOT Gnome
OpenOffice: NOT Gnome Office
Nice sig. It reminds me of something funny that happened when I was at The Univeristy of Chicago (before I dropped out...). A friend was on the football team. He told me about how once during practice the QB threw the ball to him quite hard. My friend fumbled the catch. The coach yelled at him, so my friend responded, "Come on, he threw it so fast it turned blue!" The best part is that the other players laughed. Not surprising that they didn't have a very impressive record on the field....
Thats no way to treat desktop support people. Troubleshooting a machine will be an exercise in futility, because you will need to figure out how to use the damn machine (due to all the user's customizations), figure out any potential software conflicts (insane, because you need a 'standard' to work from), and finally figure out exactly what is going wrong. THEN how to fix it.
Every network I have any influence over starts locking down things and removing the 'soft and fuzzies', like weird screen-savers, various browsers, alternate office programs, etc. They are there to work, not to form an emotional bond with their computer.
Things get even harder with Network apps, since you need to isolate whether its on the server, its a hardware issue (bad NIC, cable, jack, etc), an application issue, or an OS issue. The more variables you throw into the equation, the longer and more difficult it is to finally isolate the cause.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
I've been thinking a lot about widespread Linux desktop installations lately. I almost posted an Ask Slashdot about it yesterday.
You want to see widespread Linux desktop installation? "Which desktop" is precisely the wrong kind of question to be asking. That information is superfluous to both the IT droids who'll have to support it, and the cubical dwellers who'll have to live with it.
To get ANY Linux out there in significant numbers, you need to best Microsoft. The system would need to restrict itself to asking and giving what Microsoft does now. All the distros I've tried give way too much choice. Choice is great from hackers. It's pure terror in the form of tough questions for the MSmasses.
Install easy, with a minimum of user input. Give what Windows does: desktop, "office" suite, email, web, and hidden below the surface unless needed, the ability to run server or client based specialty software in a window that looks and acts like all the others.
It'd need to automagically recognize any networking being offered it and configure itself to that. When it did ask questions, they should be "What is your internet address going to be? (This is a collection of up to 12 numbers with periods between them; if you don't know, ask your system operator)", NOT "Input your IP dotted quad".
Users don't WANT to know how cool it is, much less which of the possible configurations is cooler. They want transparent instant operability. They couldn't care less if their desktop were the black, lavender and orange Star Trek LCARS screen, as long as they can do their job and not have to readjust to a new configuration of they switch seats or machines.
Give them that, for less than MS, say $100 per machine INCLUDING phone tech support (something like Sun is planning with its Java Desktop plus presumably Suse), and it'll look as inviting as MS.
Make it more stable, and easier to recover from crashes (no more "Well, we'll just have to reinstall the operating system") and it'll be more inviting than MS.
Send out 10,000 of them free to the top companies' IT people, invite them to install it and try it out on some unclued cubical dwellers machines, and wait for the results. After enough time has passed, contact those companies CIO and ask how well it worked, and if they'd like to buy. They'll ask the IT people, and your answer will be assured if the distro was done right.
Oh yeah, and make it be not bloatware, and use that as a selling point. For an example, see muLinux, the distro that fits (and RUNS) on 5 floppies. A complete install, including all docs and archives of the install files, took 30 MB on my machine. Oh yeah, it had a GUI. I don't recall which. I didn't care then, and I don't now, because all I cared about was whether it worked or not. It did.
MS software is obviously not better than Linux. Something else about MS must be. Find it, and best them. Even if that means turning your favorite distro into Linux for Dummies, because it's dummies who sit behind most of the machines out there.
And if it's still a concern that a given distro/desktop would still require more maintanence, because the dummy in front of it can't do squat, then your distro/desktop is not ready for Cubical Heaven/Hell Prime Time. The successful (as in widely deployed) Linux desktop user system will be the one that decides "OK, that's enough hacking. It's time to go to work."
"True artists ship." -- Steve Jobs to the original Mac design team.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
What about the whole thing of Dell supporting LInux on the desktop? Does this mean that, in a few months, they might offer machines with Linux pre-installed? If so, and wouldn't that be great, would they offer these only at the enterprise level or would small businesses (or even, gasp, home users) be able to buy a new Dell system with Linux preinstalled and no Windows tax?
And can I fit any more questions into one post?
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
Unless of course the President is a fool.
For years now I've bought Suse, not just to get one of the best distros out there, but also to support KDE. If the SUSE Desktop gets now hijacked by GNOME then SuSE 9.0 will definitely be the last SuSE version that I've bought and I guess many of my friends and colleges will do the same. There is no chance that I will ever switch to GNOME since the GNOME project has done so many horrible mistakes in the past.
- Why the hell did they start the Gnome Project in the first place? Sure QT was commercial back than but a free rewrite of QT would have been the perfect solution for that problem. I guess that without this mistake the Linux desktop would by now be already better than Microsofts Desktop.
- Why have they chosen C instead of C++? C might be easier to learn for a beginner, but for a project as large as a hole desktop environment you need a decent way to organize certain things in your project. I have done one of my first projects with GTK and after that experience I switched to QT because it was such a mess to work with GTK. GTK is programmed in a semi object oriented way but why then didn't they chose a clean object oriented language in the first place.
- Why do they use Corba? To me Corba is like a poisend lure. It looks delicious from the outside, but once you have swallowed it, you'll notice that you've made a big mistake. It looks like it can solve all your IPC problems but once you start doing real work with it you will notice how complex, bloated and slow it is. Most of your time will vanish by just working out issues with corba and not with your actual project. There is always a clean and easier way than using corba. The KDE project noticed that early enough to spit Corba out again.
- Gnome's file selection dialog is a crime!
I'm using just one single Gnome application namely XMMS and yet the GTK fileselection dialog is the most annoying issue on my hole desktop.
Perhaps they could call it the Common Desktop Environment or something. Sounds like a great idea.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
If you look around at all the pro-linux desktop sites out there you will usually find the KDE desktop running mostly GTK/GNOME applications.
For example, these apps are what I consider to be the best in their class:
Web Browser: Firebird/Mozilla
Mail: Evolution
Graphics: Gimp
Aim: Gaim
Music: XMMS
The problem is the GNOME desktop has very little functionality compared to KDE and ever since the release of KDE 3.0, the GNOME desktop feels somewhat 80's. I use KDE for work only, and I work a lot. These are some of the things that I feel help my productivity that I don't think GNOME has.
1. more COMPLETE apps. Apps that when you run them work as advertised. I think GNOME has some of the more polished apps but KDE definately has a larger selection of complete applications and many polished apps itself, like KDevelop for example or K3B.
2. A file dialog that is very customizable. This is important to me. As a developer I have lots of stuff and lots of directories. Being able to customize the side bar on the file dialog to pop into my most used directories with 1 click is great. I am a Linux user after all, I can handle an advanced file dialog.
3. A 'file explorer' that is far better in my opinion feature wise to Nautilus. It might not be as fast but I think the 3200+ ca handle it. Although I use the console a lot, its nice to have the Konqueror when needed.
4. Maybe GNOME has this, I've never been able to find it. A decent graphical menu editor for the 'start menu'. I like to get hide all the stuff I don't need and reorganize it a little. With the menu editor, this takes like 3 min tops when I first install.
5. Unified system configuration panel. Sometimes I feel that since GNOME can run on any window manager there is a seperation that makes having a unified configuration manager (like KDE Control Center) impossible. In KDE, to do anything, you can look in 1 place and find it which is good because there is a lot you can do.
6. The right click dialog in the Konqueror. I can do things like automatically create and add a file to a tarball with 1 click, right click on a file or dir and have it create a new K3B project with that file ready to be burned,the 'Move To' and 'Copy To' dialogs are nice too. Also, the customizable navigation panel. This can be invaluable at times.
7. The panel applets are actually useful and are of better quality. Granted, the good old Xeyes is still there, that and 15 pieces seem to be the only non-useful panel apps. I remember GNOME having a ton of crap. Maybe that has changed. The color picker has actually turned out to be really useful for me.
8. This never worked for me in GNOME and was actually the reason I switched. I have many commerical apps that are neither KDE/GNOME. They are usually like Motif looking or some other toolkit. In GNOME they cover up toolbars and cover up 'always on top' windows. One of my apps called C-Forge also tended to constantly crash the taskbar under GNOME. In KDE, they all work perfectly and follow all the rules.
9. The taskbar. I like to only show the tasks on the current desktop and save room by grouping similar tasks when the bar is near full. I run a lot of apps and I use the taskbar so being able to customize what a right, middle, and left click on the taskbar does was cool. It seems there is just more room saving features than GNOME has.
This doesn't have to do with productivity but its an annoyance.
All the different versions of libraries I need to run GNOME stuff. When you install KDE 3.0 to 3.1, every app it comes with has been updated and has a standard set of features that all work the same with each app. With GNOME stuff there is a major difference in quality between applications and some of them need older versions of this or that to actually compile or run.
So, my complaint really is that the GNOME desktop itself is not providing enough of the base libraries. The GUI toolkit is just not enough to create
he is the gay, then hy can not be "the motherfucker" - he can be only "a fatherfucker" :o)
This year's pronouncement may not turn out to be the one, maybe not next year. But it's only a matter of time before the castle falls. The problem with being on the top of the hill is you only have one direction to go.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Comment removed based on user account deletion
it is
>> But the nagging lack of applications for desktop Linux,
>> notably Microsoft Office, still hangs in the air.
Huh? Is it "Office" or "applications compatible with the inscrutable, obese, proprietary POWERPOINT and WORD formats"?
Why don't companies just stipulate "junk the proprietary formats"?
In my opinion, from there onwards, moving to alternatives to MS is a downhill race.
* Desktop behaviour is relatively easy to tune up.
* Dumping Outlook for Evolution by migrating the whole message and contact base AUTOMATICALLY is just a few scripts away.
* Office productivity functionality is basically there, 'cept a large number of baroque MSFT flourishings few will miss
- and BY THE WAY... I see it's only fitting that corporations and governments are beginning to bite: they may WANT a well targeted, limited-scope desktop for their worker bees to replace the MSFT bottomless gusher of uncontrollable, undocumented, unrequested, useless funkshownality.
Damn, that was funny.
dinner: it's what's for beer
In a productive desktop environment, an interoperable clipboard implementation is required - the clipboard is the basic productivity tool for office users.
At least 2 things are needed:
Currently in most X window applications, it works OK only for text data and nothing more! Almost all Gnome and KDE applications are flawed with respect to that...
BTW, please, don't answer that I can sit down and code this myself. This is more a matter of education of developers and influence in the community. Even if I had the time and expertise to make Mozilla correctly exchange web pages data with Kwrite, OpenOffice with Konqeror; Gimp graphic data with OpenOffice; Ardour sound clip data with Audacity etc...
Even then, my patches would be probably refused by maintainers or misunderstood and broken in future releases.
That's because majority of developers in OpenSource community don'have the knowledge about X clipboard and various component object models used in variuos envoronments (KDE, Gnome).
This is not a job of single coder, but organizations such as Freedesktop.org, RedHat, Sun Microsystems, Novell etc.
Your 2C has been devalued!
See my journal, I write things there
Holy crap, did all the South Americans die of ebola, so their lands had to be bulldozed into the sea?
Did we finally kick the other North Americans asses and forcibly integrate them into the US? Those damn canucks and beaners deserved it, I guess, but why wasn't I informed?
Oh, and I suppose the non-american state of Hawaii has been jettisoned as non-essential to the mainland's economy. What with the Bush economic miracle destroying the tourist trade I can understand that...
I agree that this is good news - though I also agree with the person who said "we've heard this before..." But these are very big names, and they all have a huge incentive to make it happen.
If even a few major coporations adopt Linux on some or all desktops, that's the thin edge of the wedge. Right now, software developers can afford to ignore the small businesses that adopt Linux desktops, but they won't be able to ignore major corporations. Nor will the suppliers of those corporations. It's certainly not an outrageous scenario to consider the possibility that the following things might happen:
1) A few major corporations start installing large numbers of Linux desktops;
2) Those corporations experience difficulties integrating with Windows users (file format problems, mostly);
3) They demand that their suppliers conform to document formats and standards that are easily compatible with Linux;
4) The suppliers, not wanting to lose business, either start using some Linux desktops themselves or else demand better format interoperability from their software vendors.
And so Linux interoperability continues to be an even faster-growing, larger issue than it is now, and the leverage of those big corporations gradually ripples outward into the IT world in general.
And, of course, the better Desktop Linux gets for businesses, and the more interoperable it is with Windows, the more attractive it will grow to home users who either use it at work or are looking for less-expensive PCs.
The last two aren't surprising. How can I use Konq or KOffice on Windows? Both Mozilla and OO.o have windows ports (which I use).
-no broken link
ssshhhh.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Perhaps hegemony is what you're looking for?
Perhaps hegemony is what you're looking for?
LOL.
At first, I thought you were criticizing me for giving the definition of hegemony when "hegeonomy" is the word being discussed (I didn't even notice the difference when I originally posted)...
Then I looked up hegeonomy on dictionary.com and it told me that the word didn't exist, and that I was probably looking for Hegemony.
Well, speaking as an ignorant American (or USian or jackass or whatever you want to call me...I've got better things to worry about)....
:)
Come to think of it, I really don't remember ever hearing an American use the word "spat". I would definitely say "spit", because "spit" is both a noun and a verb and "spat" isn't a word! Ok, yes, I'm sure it is, but it just sounds wrong to my ears.
I think we Americans just don't like the 'a' sound there. Same reason we'd say "the bear shit in the woods" instead of "the bear shat in the woods". It just sounds silly
Linux won't be ready for the masses on the desktop until Jane and John Doe can buy a off the shelf multimedia PC and install without ever see the word "dependency". When a non-geek computer user tries to install software and have to deal with dependencies or worse have to recompile anything you are making the price of Windows look small to them.
Even Linux on servers I've seen the typical Windows SA work on a Linux box and give up because of all the dependency issues. Sure you are probably calling these people names, but they are the people you need to get marketshare. Windows got where they are because any idiot can set it up and reboot when they have trouble. Brainless ease of use is why these people are willing to pay for Windows.