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?"

Comments

good news

[symbolic]

Some top players committing to bolster the options available to those looking for an alternative to the stuff from Redmond. VERY good news.

Re:good news

[Soko]

I'd be inclined to agree with you, however look at the names up there. Every last one of those businesses has something to gain by having the Windows hegeonomy fall. As well, they actually have the weaponry needed to put up a pretty good battle this time.

I'm not sure about 2004 being the "Year of the Linux Desktop", but the battle for the desktop is definately on again. With a vengance.

Me, I'm smiling. This is almost certainly going to be fun to watch. For the first time in quite a while, I'm really interested in desktop technology again.

Soko

Re:good news

[shanebush]

This is indeed good news.

However, in my opinion, if these coporporations want to really start working on making 2004 the year corporations start adopting open desktops, they need to consider heavily sponsoring and help develop the freedesktop.org projects.

After all, KDE and Gnome need a base. That base is an X server. Improvements have to be made there as well.

Again, this is only my opinion :-)

Novell, Red Hat and Sun to Open Source Community

[Anonymous Coward]

"Ok you hippies, get cracking on that code so we can quickly package your hard work"

Mandrake

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

Sure wish someone large company w/ deep coffers would buy Mandrake and support the *best* KDE distro IMHO.

Why the will pick Gnome.

[DAldredge]

The 2000.00+ USD cost per developer to write commerical QT apps might be an issue with corp. adoption of KDE.

Re:Why the will pick Gnome.

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you kidding? $2000 is nothing when you include costs of running a commercial outfit. Furthermore, Qt is such an easy-to-use, high quality toolkit compared with anything GNOME has to offer that you are bound to be ahead on the development costs in time savings alone. Qt also works on the Mac and Windows - GNOME toolkits don't - this is very important for most commercial developers.

Re:Why the will pick Gnome.

[k98sven]

The 2000.00+ USD cost per developer to write commerical QT apps might be an issue with corp. adoption of KDE.

1. Most users, by the very definition of the term, do not develop software.

2. $2000 USD is practically nothing in terms of software development costs.

Re:Why the will pick Gnome.

[opkool]

Mmmm

The price of a similar set up (OS + Development Studio + ToolKit + Database Server + groupware APIs + web server + ...) for the "other" OS (yes, the one from Redmond, WA) is, at least 5-fold.

And, if you decide to use QT to develop GPL software, your cost goes down to zero. On the other platorm, the cost remains the same... and probably you cannot GPL the whole code.

Of course, you can opt to build GTK-based applications.

So, in short:

- it is cheaper
- you have choice of toolkits
- you have choice of license for your code

I say developing for Linux is better.

Peace

Re:Why the will pick Gnome.

[0x0d0a]

Yes, God forbid that a company that produces classy software like Qt should ever make any money whatsoever from it.

I don't think anyone said that nobody should be able to make money from classy software. Red Hat makes money and yet you can download ISOs, so there's something going on there.

Frankly, I think TrollTech should have (back in the day) made Qt, handed it out under the LGPL, and then sold a good set of Qt development tools, and tried to get adoped by folks porting commercial software to Linux. There would never have *been* a GNOME, since the license wouldn't have been an issue. It'd be a little harder to make money, yes, though I think they could have made it. They wanted to go for a bigger gamle, though -- commercial control of a major Linux library. There is *tremendous* resistance in the Linux developer community to becoming beholden to any one company. They really didn't want Qt to become another Motif. You don't want the OS that you work on, that is built almost entirely of volunteer-built software, to have as a fundamental component, a non-free set of libraries that all "standard" GUI apps use. And so, I think that the GNOME movement was reasonable, well-founded, and justified. They were not stopping folks from using Qt -- people just said that they wanted to donate time and effort to providing an alternative.

TrollTech held out for a long time -- perhaps long enough to kill their opportunity. Their licensing system is *still* not as free as GTK's, and I think that they will have a tough battle if they attempt to regain their position -- there is currently a significantly larger developer mass behind GNOME, even aside from Linux distributors tending towards GNOME. The only major advantage that they had was early maturity and stability -- and GTK can pretty much go toe to toe with KDE these days.

I can't figure out what you dislike about GTK, frankly. You may prefer C++ to C. That's particularly legitimate if you're an experienced Windows high-level programmer, where C++ and MFC has long been standard. However, GTK is a *very nicely* (IMHO, of course) built example of how to do OOP well in C. It is faster and more modular than Qt, and provides a number of significant features (such as built-in runtime user-level key rebinding) that Qt has not kept pace with.

A number of Qt design decisions were quite reasonable at the time of its production, but are now rather unfortunate in the presence of more solid C++ compilers. Qt contains its own string class, and reimplementation of a good deal of STL functionality. If Qt were being built today, it's doubtable whether these decisions would go the same way.

That being said, choice is nice, and in the end, it's probably a good thing to have two desktops -- if the maintainers of one project don't like your idea, get it tried out on the other desktop. If it works well, the other folks should accept it, and everyone wins.

Everyone Wanted Consolidation

[Jason Earl]

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.

Re:Everyone Wanted Consolidation

[Zork the Almighty]

I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it. Novell/Redhat/Sun would have to succeed beyond everyones' wildest expectations to make it happen. I think we'll have KDE vs. Gnome for years to come, and we'll have situation where gradually, over time, the interoperabilities will be ironed out or smoothed over. Hopefully, KDE vs. Gnome will become a question of how you want your desktop to operate, without all the technical issues of whether or not programs work and whether they "look right".

Re:Everyone Wanted Consolidation

[Jason Earl]

The question becomes a little murkier when you realize that a sizable percentage of the KDE hackers will soon work for Novell, and that Nat Friedman is heading up Novell's desktop Linux division.

Don't get me wrong, I don't expect KDE to disappear overnight, but the Gnome crowd now has the majority of the professional KDE hackers by their paycheck. At the very least you can expect their to be a lot more talk in the KDE world about "integration" (and it will be the Gnome crowd calling the shots).

Re:Everyone Wanted Consolidation

[Makarakalax]

Actually I think the vocal minority wanted "consolidation".

The rest of us wanted healthy competition. I'd hate for corporate America to standardise Linux distributions like Microsoft have standardised the intel personal computer.

Maybe I'm just nervous because I hack on KDE.

Re:Everyone Wanted Consolidation

[dmaxwell]

Actually I think the vocal minority wanted "consolidation".

The rest of us wanted healthy competition. I'd hate for corporate America to standardise Linux distributions like Microsoft have standardised the intel personal computer.

Regardless, everyone wants or should want interoperability. That means the object models must have a way to pass data and pointers back and forth. It means lots of fit and polish thing like the applications not looking or acting jarringly different from one another. When all is said and done, applications are king. Neither of the desktops possesses all of the best apps. Most of us run a mixture and we want them to work together.

It fine if you don't want consolidation but things like unified theme sets and standardized ways to cut and paste more than just text are not evil.

To what effect?

[somethinghollow]

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.

Bad for both KDE and GNOME

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Gnome-KDE thread here!

[Kethinov]

Gnome-KDE thread here! (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 25, @07:48PM (#7564231)
OK:

"I would like to know which of Gnome or KDE is better. Any opinions?"

*bites troll*
KDE's better. Hell, even Linus uses it. But just because KDE's better doesn't mean Gnome sucks. Gnome's faster, GTK is better than QT and GTK apps look better in Gnome, and Gnome is overall less bloated. But KDE is far more configurable, so I like it better.

-1, trollbiter

this promise may mean very little

[porky_pig_jr]

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'.

Noone said 'drop KDE'

[nurb432]

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..

Not to rant..

[msimm]

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..

Not... just... yet.

[Pluh]

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"...

Some bad, some good

[Chuck Chunder]

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.

Congratulations- I think you'll never go back

[JimmytheGeek]

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!