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UserLinux May Go Without KDE
Anonymous BillyGoat writes "For the past few days, there has been considerable debate at the UserLinux mailing list about the (proposed) non-inclusion of KDE in the distro. The KDE developers have written a proposal opposing the decision to go with GNOME as the sole UserLinux GUI, while Bruce Perens has posted a response."
KDE is still one of the most-used desktop environments around. Ignoring KDE in favor of GNOME would be like only including VI and not Emacs (or Emacs and not VI), and forcing all users to use one.
This is a mistake if they don't include both.
Erioll
Isn't KDE a lot smoother and more consistent over all then Gnome? I mean Linus uses it. Especially for business apps, KDE seems like a more natural choice.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The inclusion of two desktop environments, no matter how good they might be, will be confusing to ordinary end users. There might be some argument for including KDE and leaving GNOME out, but I feel that GNOME is less CPU-intensive and the included applications are a little better. The best argument for KDE would be that it would make the transition from Windows easier because it is so similar. That shouldn't be an issue, though. Nobody worries about users switching from Windows to the Mac being confused. It's a good call.
Help me. I've been modbombed by a few people with entirely too much time on their hands.
There is more than one way. Anyone that insists that there is only one way, and that is their way, is probably wrong. KDE has advatages over GNOME, and vice versa. Let the flame wars begin - err continue.
AngryPeopleRule
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Especially for business apps, KDE seems like a more natural choice.
On the contrary, KDE is worse for the business apps. It's all about the license difference b/w GTK+ and QT. Choosing KDE would practically have forced the companies that want to ship closed source software to buy a expen$ive license for Qt (if they want to have the uniform "look", of course).
Personally, I use KDE. That's because I'm not a business, and I use what works (and KDE works better than Gnome ATM). But I wouldn't build my future on it.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Sure, to your average ./ linux geek, not having the _choice_ of desktop environment is sacreligious, but in order to push linux into new markets, a unified, consistent GUI is one of the things needed. Support costs decrease. Documentation (user-level) can be written for a single interface. Users moving from one (UserLinux) system to another receive the same feedback, which reinforces their learning.
What linux _really_ needs (for the purpose of appeasing your everyday, business/home user) is to adopt the approach Apple took with MacOS X. It presents a single unified interface, well-designed apps, etc. but lets you add the rest yourself. It's powerful in the way that OS 9 wasn't. But because it's UNIX underneath, you know you can get in there and change it. You don't need to be an expert to do that - someone else will develop a little GUI wrapper to do it for you. But the fact is it's possible.
We've all known and loved this about Linux for years, but it's mass-market adoption is being stifled by lack of a unified interface. Aesthetics is something Apple learnt a long time ago. It counts.
The point of the various distributions is to target different audiences, to package things in different ways, to pursue different directions. If you don't like one particular distro, choose another. But we really need a distro that is consistent, and doesn't compromise on security (like Lindows). In fact, we need several. Let them fight it out. May the best distro win.
The PERL mantra is CRAP. One of the desktop UI projects needs to concede, and they need to put their efforts together. KDE is good, but lacks some of what GNOME has. GNOME's recent offerings have been pretty screwed up, IMHO.
While competition is good, cannibalism isn't, and that is all the two projects do - cannibalize each other. Put the resources, people, time, brains TOGETHER. It's a hard decision to make, but they really need to do it, if either one wants to get better by the leaps and bounds we need.
The last few times I have dealt with new GNOME updates it gets WORSE AND WORSE. More bloat, more crap, less options, harder to figure out how to change things. There is nothing more frustrating that a feature you used to use all the time being taken away from you
Focus on cleanliness and efficiency. That doesn't mean that all the config options have to disappear (ahem, Metacity can bite my ass). It DOES mean that nautilus can't chew up 16 MB of memory per user just to SIT THERE.
Get it together guys, they're getting ahead of you further than you can catch up at this point.
KDE will always be available in UserLinux, because UserLinux will be a subset of Debian. Want KDE? It'll be just a few clicks (or an "apt-get install kde") away. Want to run just a particular KDE or QT application? No problem; the libraries you need will be installed automatically. This is Debian, folks.
The conflict here is about defaults. UserLinux will include and install Gnome by default, and the developer effort will be geared toward GTK. Why? Because GTK is royalty-free in all situations, unlike QT, and UserLinux is building a royalty-free development environment.
Seriously. So what? If you want to use KDE, use a different distro. This is a non-issue.
-Tom
-Tom
I've used linux for years, from back at redhat 4.2 I believe. I've also used a number of the GUIs and I have some pretty strong feelings about them. In every distribution that I've dealt with, Gnome just works. Sure, it has some bugs, but in general its a smoother user experience. I'm sure you can do everything in KDE, but that's if you want to spend hours configuring it. Gnome just works. I do like the power and options available in KDE, but if I was starting with linux, I wouldn't want that. In fact, when I migrate people to linux, they get Gnome. Once they learn the OS, then I might mention there are other GUIs, but for a migration or business oriented distro, go with the one that just works.
That said, I read the article *gasp* and it was about supporting the environments, not the relative qualities of the GUIs and I have to agree that its easier to standardize on one development environment.This is a good move for a new distro and helps to keep their costs down and quality up. I just hope that the fallout from the geeks doesn't kill them before they get going. I'd love another good Debian based distro
KDE is great, but too much is exposed. I don't need three text editors in a right click menu, I want one that just works, although I generally use vi and they never include that in the click menus:(
First: I am not a developer and I have no stake in -any- OS outside of the business value proposition it offers; yes I am a pointy-haired manager type. OK, except at home where I've got a little of everything (Sun, OS X, Linux, Windows).
Mr. Perens approach is right on the mark. Reducing comlexity in the overall product reduces the cost to support the platform, thus making Userlinux more viable. Even if IT departments were the ones making the choice, in a lot of small & midsize shops you would have a good chance of getting a mixed desktop environment based on the 'technically correct' choice of the moment (i.e. ignoring an overall strategy that factors in business needs and downstream support... which raises costs.)
Choice is good, but an offering where a number of those choices have been made will ultimately present a stronger picture to business. Especially at the desktop level, there is less tolerance for a wide range of choices.
Many managers fear getting into a situation where they are so unique in their implementations that only existing staff can understand them and later choices are limited due to deviation from the norm. Even not controlling versions, of say, Windows/MS Office strategically can complicate the support picture and even reduce the overall efficency of the company. I know from the experience of cleaning it up, and from having made the mistake myself of allowing sys admins having too much choice (letting the purely technical override the strategic).
Clearly making choices at the time of putting a distribution together makes good sense from a Corporate point of view.
Answer me this: why must every Linux distribution be about infinite choice?
I want to see more specialized Linux distributions, and less distribs that try to present all software to everyone. Instead of distribs that have 1/3rd of their GUIs break at various times, a distrib that picks one GUI and makes sure it works is great.
Don't like that GUI? Pick one that uses your GUI. Or pick one of the jack-of-all-trades distribs.
But stop pressuring every Linux distrib to offer every single damn software package under the sun.
Don't forget that he isn't going to do anything that would pull KDE out of Debian. He isn't going to void the UserLinux certification of anyone who supports KDE. He is doing nothing against KDE.
If you want to be a certified UserLinux support guy, you will need to understand GNOME so you can support it. You will not need to understand GNOME to get the certification, but you can understand it if you want to. You can advertise yourself as a certified UserLinux expert who will support KDE, if you want.
So: UserLinux implies GNOME. UserLinux does not imply lack of KDE.
I think Bruce Perens is 100% correct on this issue. There is no reason to demand companies and consultants to grok two complete desktop environments, and there are good reasons why a standard distro like UserLinux should just have one. And if there is going to just be one, the one that is more free is the correct one. No one ever has to pay anyone for the privilege of writing apps for GNOME, even proprietary commercial apps, so it's the correct one.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
This is one danger of commercial entities involving themselves in OSS development. The commercial companies are choosing GNOME not because of technical advantages, but because of monetary advantages (LGPL = no Qt license fees). If GNOME goes from being the second biggest DE (according to most polls), to becoming the standard Linux desktop because of something as stupid as that, that'd royally suck. Especially since, in most areas, GNOME's technology lags behind KDE's.
I just hope this isn't yet another example of great technology dying because the commercial software industry has a tendency to preserve the status quo in lieu of pushing the envelope.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Not a flame, but are you kidding? I've used Gnome 2.4 for quite some time on my home machine, and KDE 3.1.* on my work machine for quite some time now. I have decided to go with KDE at home too. Gnome, to me at least, does *not* seem polished or "finished" whatever that means exactly. (OSS never seems to be finished.)
KDE, for all the claims of bloat, has applications that *work together* in ways that I can not seem to get most Gnome based apps to do. The KDE desktop is more than just the kicker and wm, but a whole suite of OSS software built around that framework that every other DE I have uses lacks. And Konqueror after two years is still my browser of choice -- Mozilla, for all it's geekiness, still seems clunky. (I have no used the *birds yet, as I've had no need.)
That said, there are things about Gnome I do miss. The MacOS-like bar at the top of the screen. I prefer that, and putting the KDE kicker up there is a poor comparison. It does have desktop menus, but then you can't put applets to that, but I hear that is to change in 3.2. I sure hope so.
There are things I like about Nautilus file-manager as well, both in appearance in and how it works, but Konqueror as a file-manager is not bad at all, and it does exactly what I think a fm would do.
In the end, I feel that KDE is the more professional feeling of both popular desktops. It has a unified look-n-feel, simple customization (widgets and window decs) of colors that *I* find pleasing, and the group of apps are just great and always tend to fit whatever need I have at the moment. My only real beef with it is the Trolltech licence. Having gotten into PyQT developing lately, I'm frustrated I can't easily move my apps to Win32 for my friends to use.
Again, not a flame, but I always hear that Gnome always appears more professional, but I gave it a test of damn near a year, and in the end, the DE felt disconnected from all the elements and apps.
As a programmer, C is great because it is quick and low level. Operating systems are written in C. Network stacks are written in C.
.NET is you just extend classes already there. It's an elegant and tidy way to do things.
For a GUI, C is horrific. GUI just lends itself to Object Oriented programming. I know the hard core *NIX geeks will flame me for this, but why on earth would you NOT want to do a GUI in OOP. The beauty of coding for windows using MFC and
Languages like C with functions just turn code into a nightmare. Ever wonder why most game companies program in directX and NOT openGL? OpenGL is C, directX is not.
The commercial issue with QT is really a non-issue. It might even be possible companies and write inhouse software without paying a license fee (since the code is never redistributed.) If companies want to make money writing with QT they will. What do *companies* want, to pay a fee to QT and own their own code, or give it away with the GPL and Gnome?
When someone starts talking about something being "FREER" as in the gpl, I turn on my Stallman filter. These people claim the BSD license isn't free because the code can be 'hijacked' by closed source projects.
If you give something away, you give it away for good. The BSD license gives it away for EVERYONE to use, and doesn't discriminate.
When decisions are NOT based on technical merit, rather on politics, then you are no longer a geek. You are an activist.
Would you use a distro developed with activism placed over technical merit? This is why Linus carries so much weight. He doesn't get into politics.
I could go on to compare QT fans to Windows users... but that would be silly trolling :P
BTW, the #1 reason people prefer Photoshop over The GIMP is most certainly NOT the GIU. That you think that certainly is telling. The reason people prefer Photoshop is a. 99.9% of people don't know WTF The Gimp is, and b. Photoshop has loads of extremely useful features and plugins that The GIMP lacks.
In fact, I would argue that the latest versions of The GIMP have a much saner interface than Photoshop, but that doesn't nearly make up for the features The GIMP lacks.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Do people *really* demand choice? Did everyone DEMAND a big choice of window managers and desktop systems? No.. they really didn't... that's just how things evolved.
I use OSX all the time, and I'm traditionally that guy who uses linux and whatever window manager currently catches my eye.
It's not just about lack of choice.. it's about stability of the target. A developer can know clearly what his target audience has when developing applications for OSX. That's hard, with linux.
Though you may feel the classic MacOS environments were about lack of choice, and confining the user to an unchanging experience, that's not the case anymore.
I don't NEED to mess around with every aspect of my GUI.. I know it can be fun.. but if it was well designed in the first place, we would have a lot less people worrying about skinning it. Go look at a room full of OS X users.. most of the desktops look the same. Any one user could quickly make use of any other user's desktop.. and believe me, it's not because skinning and manipulating the GUI is any harder than it is with X (though I"m sure someone will come up with examples of things)
More important is the fact that the OS X Gui is designed *well*. IT's open; you can write apps for it easily. IT WORKS.. if you have never really sat down to use it, and spent an hour or two getting to know it, you don't know even know what a good GUI *IS*, because you've probably never used one. Windows is pale by comparison, KDE as well (it's on par with windows in my books, in terms of usability). Some GNOME setups I've seen are better... more well thought out, not just copying windows... but still a far cry from what Apple has achieved.
If the desktop is well designed, yet extensible, there is no reason to hvae 20 totally different versions floating around.
Also, it's not because the end user doesn't want choice.. tis' because the developer needs a stable target.
Ask yourself: If you want to write a state of the art gui app for linux, that interoprates with the OS properly, drag and drop, print menus, cut and paste, etc... how will you do it? what toolkits and libraries will you choose? KDE? Gnome? Neither, just use TK? Do it totally self contained, so it looks like a uniqe app, sort of like xmms?
That choice is clear with Apple, and clear with Microsoft.
So let me get this straight. From the very beginning, Qt and KDE has had non-free (beer) commercial licensing requirements; and initially it did was not considered free (libre) by Richard Stallman and GNU, at least until their licenses were modified.
And it was precisely because of this non-free status that Mr. Stallman and other free software advocates heavily encouraged the development and use of GNOME over KDE, despite KDE's initial head start.
And yet now we find that GNOME is the choice for UserLinux because it better supports the development of proprietary software on Linux!
Oh excuse me, GNU/Linux.
I get it!
Actually don't get me wrong, I understand the logic, it's just a funny twist on an old rivalry.
The only argument Perens makes that makes sense to me is that GTK+ can be used in a proprietary product without paying a licensing fee. Again, not trying to flame, but that more or less confirms that Bruce doesn't give a damn about Free Software. If he did, that wouldn't even be a point of contention for him.
Seriously, why do we keep seeing these heavy-handed tactics to kill KDE long after the licensing issues have been resolved? Other than the possibility of holding a grudge (and though I can't find it now, I swear I saw an RMS essay about continuing to treat KDE as a GPL-violator) I can't understand it.
You see, it's very simple. If you release your code under a GPL-compatible license and link against Qt, you're fine, since Qt is available under the GPL. If you want to release proprietary software, all you have to do is pay the licensing fee.
I know; I know. Someone's going to argue "but what about Joe Shmoe who wants to sell a text editor? What if he doesn't have the two grand?" Well, then, he can do what any other startup does: borrow money, and pay back the loan when the money starts coming in.
In no other business that I'm aware of is there the possibility of getting your tools for free, and then use those free tools to turn a profit. LGPL-using developers, you are aware, are you not, that your choice of license means that people are writing derivative works without giving back to you? You might as well be releasing your code under the BSD license (not a bad idea, IMHO, especially if you're not terribly interested in pursuing legal issues, though the BSD license isn't without strings, either.)
Couple the barely-valid cost-of-licensing complaint with the fact that GNOME is currently in a state of flux, the choice of GNOME is iffy at best. Where have all the features gone, and after usability work is done, when will the features come back? Why is the default GNOME 2.4 CD ripper incapable of allowing me to set a default MP3/Ogg Vorbis bitrate? If it's because it's assumed that the average GNOME user would become confused, is it really safe to assume that the average GNOME user is stupider than the average MacOS user? iTunes, at least, allows for some tweaking of settings; they're just not right out in the forefront, and limited to only a couple of important features.
I could go on for days, but to tell you the truth, had someone proposed this in the GNOME 2.0/2.2 days, I'd just have nodded my head; GNOME was a wee bit more bloated and had an ugly API, but if it became something of a standard, so be it. Now? Why are we burdening ourselves with this dumbed-down version of a UNIX desktop?
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Well, it's late in the game, there are a million other comments, and if there were points I was after, this would not be the time or place to write.
However, I feel I have to add my $0.02.
I recently wrote a mid-sized application using PHP-GTK. Reasoning being that it was to be a semi web-based product, it would be best to leverage the PHP code on the client and server sides, and the GTK toolkit can be used to write the UI.
It works well, and is achieving high acclaim in the marketplace in a way that the previous product based on VB simply didn't.
That said, GTK 1.x, which was bound to PHP 4, is a horrible mess.
1) Documentation is very spotty at best. I've at times had to query an object directly with get_class_methods() in order to find out what methods I can call, simply because there was no documentation for it.
2) The widgets are terribly inconsistent. For example, GtkCList (a table of text values) doesn't contain child widgets, even though portions of the widget are selectable! Thus, you cannot use something like tooltips (which creates a popup yellow text widget when you hover over a widget) for anything but the whole table!
3) Things that should be easy, like creating menus, are simply a pain in the rear.
4) The API for GTK is transient - what works in 1.3 largely won't work in 2.0. Thus, when PHP5 is bound to GTK2 (which is the official plan, AFAIK) I know there will be a *huge* porting effort just to get the application to recompile.
5) GTK objects don't have consistent means to access variables. Most of the time you use $object->Set_Data(). But, sometimes you use $object->Set_Row_Data(), or $object->Node_Set_Row_Data(). This is largely because of #2 above....
So, does it work? Yeah. Was it the best available at the time given our resources and needs? Yeah.
But there's a HELL of a lot of room for improvement. (I left a zillion notes in the online gtk.php.net documentation website as my contribution since I am not a c coder)
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
There are Gnome zealots and there are KDE zealots, and then there are the people who say, "They are both OK and neither is clearly better."
At risk of losing all my karma, I have to say that I disagree with all of the above. Both Gnome and KDE suck. In a world which has seen Windows, both UIs seem half-finished. For the developer, KDE's API is unsatisfactory (see Al Stevens' articles in Dr Dobbs in Sept/Oct 2001 - AFAIK they're not on the web, unfortunately) for details. And actually Gnome's is too, because Gnome's base is in C, not C++. Development is bogged down by being based on an obsolete language. True, there is now a C++ API glued on top of Gnome, but it's exactly that, with the inefficiency implied.
So we have two unsatisfactory UIs instead of one satisfactory UI. The quicker we pick one of them and run with it and fix it, the better.
As a desktop environment, I think KDE is better, but for applications, GTK based apps tend to be more mature, it seems. The included KDE apps (Konqueror, Kmail, and so on) seem unfinished and feature-lacking.
I signifigantly prefer the look of GNOME to KDE, though. KDE's window decorations are about twice as tall as they should be, and Keramik is so god-damned ugly that it could blind a person.
What I want to know is why, in KDE, can I not click one button (like in Gnome) to set ALL of the related styles? Unless I am missing something, in KDE you have to set the style and the colourscheme and some other things seperately, it is not grouped together as a 'theme' as in GNOME.
Am I missing something here? Also, where can I find a nice, clean (not ugly) looking theme without over-large decorations for KDE? (I consider Windows 2000/XP to be a relatively decent looking in Windows Classic mode).