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UserLinux Continues Debate Over GUI
An anonymous reader writes "Following up the earlier Slashdot item on this, LinuxWorld is carrying both sides of the discussion as to whether UserLinux GUI should be GNOME only, as Bruce Perens last week decided "by fiat," or include KDE."
how bout a slashdot poll? 1. Gnome 2. Kde 3. Command line 4. Wine version of XP 5. Cowboyneil is my interface
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
If you don't like the distribution, don't use it. Simple as that. Keeping the OS simple and maintainable as a laudable goal, and I would find it difficult to argue with them just because my personal choice GUI wasn't included (though neither Gnome or KDE are *my* personal choice :-)).
The beauty of open source is that anyone can do this -- if you really disagree with their choice on which GUI to include, make your own distribution and include just KDE with it.
I sense another Holy War incoming over this. In all honesty, while having a single interface to deal with would be easier, I don't feel the GNOME ca claim to be it. Nor can KDE, but shortening the field by including only one in this project is a bit anti-competitive, and OSS has allways thrived on the competition between similar projects.
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
They're targeting the enterprise market -- defined explicitly by Peren's whitepaper as (paraphrasing) the market that Red Hat gets $$$ in support fees for.
I just don't see companies who want that level of support settling for "here's our linux distro, and if you want support, uh... here's a list of 3rd party providers." Remember LinuxCare? They're still around, but only because they moved away from providing third-party support solutions.
please dont start the KDE vs Gnome war... KDE and Gnome should both do everything they can to get better while sharing between them as much as it's possible without removing their individuality. . I would prefer to have not one but two great desktop environments to choose from.
Try to find a commercial Gtk app. After googling, you'll perhaps find some from Ximian ( which can arguably be ruled out ), and perhaps a few more. Now try to find a commercial Qt app. You'll find hundreds ( including high-profile ones from Adobe and others ).
This means that commercial developers are willing to pay for a quality toolkit, as much so on Linux as on other OSs. Free software folk needn't worry either, as Qt on X is free as in both.
I've said it before. I agree 100% with including only one GUI. The reason for Gnome over KDE is simply a license issue. I personnaly like KDE better and it is what I will continue to use, as I am not the target "user" of userlinux.
Just what is wrong with this approach? KDE decided to write KHTML instead of using Gecko, whilst GNOME is now going to use Gecko as their primary HTML layout engine in the DE. Which is better? I'd say Gecko is much more standards compliant than KHTML, even with the latest patches. The point is that for really huge projects like a HTML layout engine, you need huge resources. A lot of KDE developers work on KHTML when if they'd used Gecko, they could be working on far more interesting things.
Also, surely it's better than free software projects share code. So many people are put off GNU/Linux & BSD by the fact there are 500 different text editors and not one of them works properly (except vi
In conclusion, you're a troll. Have a nice day.
if you really disagree with their choice on which GUI to include, make your own distribution and include just KDE with it.
What's better, you can just apt-get kde on UserLinux.
Gnome will be the default, supported option. It's sensible to pick only one to "officially support", and let the hackers use the other to their heart's content.
Gnome is the better "supported" option because it doesn't require royalties for closed source development. This matters in countries where you can buy 3 developer months for single license of Qt (and for 3 developers, you need 3 licenses).
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
It matters to the KDE folk, because we ( a group of some twenty enthusiast KDE and Debian developers ) were intending to work together with UL on making UserLinux a KDE based enterprise distro that would easily beat other available offers. Bruce's decision stopped this plan, but we are continuing the effort standalone now. Furthermore, the licensing argument is bogus, read why below.
Bruce Perens is making a GNOME-only linux distro. There's no reason for you to try to stop him. It isn't like there aren't 9000 other distros to choose from. Heck, it isn't even like there aren't ten to thirty other linux standardization movements similar to what Perens is doing.
Perens is convinced that in order to do what he wants this distro to do, he needs to choose one desktop environment and focus to it. He's also convinced that GNOME was the right choice for this. You know what? If he's wrong, all that will happen is that his distro will fail. Life will go on, and only Bruce Perens will have lost any time from it. In the meantime, if you like, you can go and make a KDE-only linux distro of your own, and it will succeed or fail or whatever.
I think Perens has an interesting little experiment going on here. If he's wrong, he's wrong, and if he's right, you know what? Once he has something good, you can take what he did, fork it, and add/insert KDE. Huzzah. In the meantime, who cares?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Nuts. Choices like that cost money. If a business lets their employees choose either KDE or Gnome, then that business has to spend money supporting both KDE and Gnome. Why would a sensible business do that?
Business users, regardless of the operating system and regardless of the "desktop environment", typically use a very few applications, day in and day out. The rest of their "desktop" sits there, unused.
A smart business will lock down the desktops of their employees as much as possible, providing access to only the applications emloyees are authorized to use.
All this adolescent whimpering about "choice" is silly and completely beside the point.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
[Reads article.. geez, the things I admit to doing around here...]
Yep, I don't see any holy war material either, even tho I like KDE and detest Gnome. What Bruce says boils down to "All right, I'm tired of arguing about this, it's time to pick ONE (because this here project is partly about a focused direction instead of including everything plus a dozen kitchen sinks), and this here SDK is what I prefer for those there reasons. So we'll go with the desktop that matches this here SDK."
Perfectly reasonable as a project decision, even if I personally disagree with the choice it led to.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The argument is this :
... and ...
SCO's bosses at Canopy controls Trolltech which controls Qt which controls KDE.
(do an nslookup of www.trolltech.com and www.kde.org to verify that last bit of logic)
The second contention that's a touchy subject is "Canopy controls Trolltech". Somebody is going to post a link to the trolltech site that says "only 8% of Trolltech is controlled by SCO/Canopy".
Then what the hell is Ralph Yarro (Darl Macbride's boss) doing on the board directors of Trolltech?
Link here for the skeptical.
The issues is real simple. If Canopy doesn't control Trolltech and Trolltech support Linux, then why haven't they
1) Come clean on exactly what their relationship is with Canopy
2) Voted Ralph Yarro of the board.
Trolltech should come clean. What is their relationship with Canopy? Does canopy have contractual rights to sit on the board? Do they owe debt to Canopy? Does Canopy have warrants on Trolltech? The silence is deafing. Speak Trolltech, tell us the truth.
The sad thing is QT is a good product. They could increase their respect and marketshare by telling the Canopy chumps to take a hike.
Its an interesting point - GNOME was originally started because Qt, which KDE was based on, wasn't "free software". But now it seems KDE is more "free software" than GNOME is.
Remember part of the point of free software is not just that its free to use, but free to modify and use the code for new programs. The only "drawback" being that if you base your software on free software, you are required to make your modification free software too.
Perens says in the article that his decision is not because of one being technically superior, but because you can make proprietary GNOME software for free, but if you make KDE software it has to be either GPL or you pay a lot of money to the makers of Qt.
The reason for this, I assume, and I haven't got the time to check it out, is because GNOME libraries are mostly LGPL, whereas the core Qt library for KDE is GPL only. The "Lesser" LGPL license lets you make proprietary software by screwing over free software developers and using their libraries without giving anything back to the community that provided the entire platform you are developing on. Even GNU says you should not license you're free software libraries LGPL.
The irony is that, as you point out, GNOME was supposed to be a "free" alternative to KDE, with all the GNU zealots following behind it for that reason. But now it seems the GNOME developers are getting fucked by the "open source" crew that were originally blamed for the travesty of KDE using a non-free development kit.
Its just like you can simply download and install mozilla/firebird/opera/etc on any windows machine - internet explorer would only be the default. You dont have to use it.
UserLinux is targeted at the enterprise community. It probably (and hopefuly) be used by non-geeky types who simply use what is installed on their computers. You can see KDE go the same way as netscape if UserLinux ever becomes popular.
I am not sure what the right approach would be though. It makes sense for an OS to have a consistent "face" to a non-techie user. Though choice is great (and it is the reason why I use linux), it can be a hinderance for someone who is not inclined to try out 5 different window managers before she decides which one to use!!
Don't Panic
If UserLinux was an end user-oriented distribution, it surely had to pick KDE instead of Gnome, since KDE is the more integrated and stable GUI and is less messy in the architecture underneath (while Gnome/GTK has the lead in 3rd-party applications and, since recently, UI polish).
But for a "Free Enterprise Linux", there must not be any hidden costs for enterprise software development. This demands that libraries and SDKs should, where possible, be LGPL- or BSD-licensed, and not GPLed with for-pay-exceptions (like in Qt and MySQL).
Of course, the question remains if, due to its proprietary-friendly licensing and relatively conservative (=stable) design process, FreeBSD wouldn't be the better "Enterprise Linux" anyway. After all, the GPLed Linux kernel could be ditched in favor of a BSD kernel with almost the same arguments the UserLinux project now ditched the GPLed KDE libraries in favor of the LPGLed Gnome libraries.
But since Linux is all the hype even where it doesn't make too much sense (like in PDAs, for which Minix would be much better suited), it's good that the "UserLinux" project attempts to prevent that commercial distributors do the same horrible mistakes with Linux and their "enterprise" distributions the proprietary Unix vendors made in the 1990s.
-F
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
According to the article he mentions that UserLinux is intended to be based upon Debian. The reason why is extremely important to understand:
We are looking at what is best described as an evolutionary process of development. This follows a more organic than Project Management path.
In the beginning there was Minix and it was expensive and not free but it worked well enough. Following this was the development of a free replacement called Linux.
Some time after that came Applixware, an Office Products Suite. It was expensive but it worked. Following this was StarOffice and now OpenOffice.
Given these two, we have evolved the software industry to such a point that there is now a very adequate if not excellent free software which can provide us with:
- A base Operating System: Linux
- A very suitable browser: Mozilla
- A very suitable Office environment: OpenOffice
But before each of these could exist, there was a non-free proprietary variant. Not always the case: Xfree, Postgresql, vi, emacs, and so on. But they do exist.The point that is so important here to understand and except is that Open Source, Free, non-Proprietary software is getting really good all the time.
Distributions themselves are following the same path. SuSE and RedHat cost money, but Debian and it's variants are getting better and gaining a larger percentage of users who consider these to be "good enough" to use every day.
In order to effectively provide a "good enough" solution to the Businesses, Open Source communities have to provide all of their free software as easily as possible. But it is extremely important to make it possible for someone to develop a proprietary software solution to fill in the niches that Debian is missing today so that Free Software, as a whole, can move into an ever increasing circle of "good enough" for users.
If there are any barriers of any kind to that entrance it will hurt the overall effectiveness of this process. Any questions or concerns, current or future, about the licensing of software development under Qt, MySQL or anything else, will only make it less attractive to a developer to invest in making a product for UnitedLinux only to have it completely fucked up by a bunch of whining lawyers.
Personally, I'm rather surprised that he didn't select GNUstep as the desktop of choice. Long term, it might be the best of the three options mentioned.
" My understanding is this is to be an enterprise user system, not a home user or personal user. The whole point is enterprise management and distribution management. "
'Zakly.
What is it that GNOME has to offer in this regard?
1.
KDE Kiosk Mode, also known as lock-down mode, makes it possible to restrict the capabilities of the KDE3 environment in powerful and flexible ways including but not limited to the ability to:
1. Restrict desktop, application, and printing actions.
2. Restrict internet access on a URL basis at a desktop-wide level.
3. Restrict desktop resource customizations.
Such functionality is invaluable for unattended operation of UserLinux in a kiosk setting as well as for wide-scale enterprise deployment of a controlled environment.
2.
A new easy-to-use administration tool, yet in the stages of development, will build on top of the KDE Kiosk Mode and expand upon the features in an exciting direction. The tool will enable scalable management of users, their settings and IT privileges. The design goals include:
1. Full scalability from medium to large organisations.
2. Usable by both KDE and non-KDE applications.
3. Seamless integration into existing IT infrastructure.
4. Roaming support.
Please expect more detail and an official announcement in 2004 Q1.
3.
An Integrated Terminal Server and Client employing a new and highly efficient X compression technology thereby enabling seamless desktop integration of applications based on a remote compute server. This feature will be in addition to KDE's existing remote desktop support (VNC and RDP) and is especially exciting in light of the fact that it enables a satisfying desktop experience on a thin client even with a low-bandwidth connection (e.g. dialup) to the application server. The technology will bring us on par with Citrix, Tarantella, SunRay and Windows Terminal Server offerings.
4.
KDE Print: Enterprise-grade technology for intimate management of printers and print jobs, adaptable to innumerable creative tasks.
5.
KDE Core Killer Apps: Whilst too numerous to list here, we expect to leverage core KDE applications where appropriate. In addition to the well-known applications several pertain directly to the enterprise including:
1. The upcoming Kontact, an integrated personal information management suite, which in conjunction with the Kolab Server will provide a powerful standards-based groupware solution.
2. The upcoming KERP, an Enterprise Resource Planner.
3. A set of financial trading tools currently in development.
ISVs in particular will be pleased to note that the KDE/Qt environment sports a rich body of development tools that leverage the elegant and powerful framework provided by KDE/Qt as well as tools enabling development in areas ranging from HTML production to UML modelling, CAD design and document publishing.
6.
KDE brings an impressive body of localization and internationalization effort to the table. With over 80 translation teams and KDE 3.2.x to be available in an estimated 50+ languages, KDE is a compelling choice for an enterprise desktop with an international audience.
Where is GNOME's visionary roadmap for a subsystem as powerful as that?
Thought so.
Companies don't want to support multiple versions of Linux. Thus a single version is going to be what drives Linux in business.
There will be at least RHEL, SUSE, and now UL.
So much for Open Source ideals.
I don't see any conflict with OSS ideals. You are not forced to use UL, it's all Open Source, you can install whatever you want, you can install UL apps on other Linux platforms, etc.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
get working on building the KDE add-on.
I'm pretty much a gnome-only fellow; gnome 2.4 on this gentoo box and dropline gnome on my slackware laptop. That said, I still need qt and the kde-libs. I rarely use them (well, I really only use them for lyx and k3b as there isn't anything like k3b for gtk) but I still need them.
Stop arguing some stupid holy war (I like gnome and I'm not moving and I have friends that swear by KDE and aren't moving). If United isn't going to take KDE, someone needs to build a dropline-ese KDE that will bold right on.
I don't mean to stalk you in this story!
You can see KDE go the same way as netscape if UserLinux ever becomes popular.
KDE made a choice when it based itself on Qt. Times change and KDE's problems have changed - KDE is a good Free Software* desktop environment. But because Qt is GPL'd, it presents a barrier to proprietary development that is against the goals of UserLinux.
If being the default desktop of UserLinux is so important to KDE, why don't they re-implement their desktop ontop of an LGLP'd toolkit?
If it's not so important that they are willing to do that, then people should stop being upset. In the choice of a default there will be a winner and one or more losers. XFCE lost here too, but they're not whining. Only one desktop can be the default!
As for the Netscape comparison, I think there were other factors which led to Netscape's demise, like a bloated product (Communicator). Look how people prefer Firebird over Mozilla. There's still time for IE to be ousted - all the time in the world, from now to the end of time.
* Or is it? Look at what TrollTech say here - TT don't want you using Free Qt on inhouse projects, but the GPL says you can. This makes me distrust TrollTech.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Well then, lets put it on the table. This project is not by or for the community. Yet it depends on the contributions of a huge number of developers.
When, oh when will people realize that the future of Linux and Open Source is dependent on corporate adoption? Bruce says it himself - widespread corporate adoption is necessary to combat the sw patent and other (idiotic) legal threats.
If the corps are not with us, they will be on the other side and we will lose.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
I can understand the business decision to go with one DE over the others... this makes good sense. What I *don't* understand is why Perens refuses to include the KDE libs by default. Including the libs and a few choice applications to fill the gaps where kde apps outperform what gnome offers (k3b and others) would do a lot for improving the total package of UserLinux and keep some of the critics at bay.
If I can put on my tinfoil hat for a second here, the best reason I can think of for not including the KDE libs is to stir up the traditional KDE/GNOME debate and get more coverage on slashdot and other sites. Trolling for media coverage, it's the wave of the future!
501 Not Implemented
Lord, this arcane bickering seems pointless. From my reading Perens' goal is to develop a distro that "just works" for the average corporate user.
I just wrapped up my semi-annual "download a linux distro and see if the damned thing will work" exercise, and once again I'm falling back on Win2K, which does everthing that I need, and does it with a minimum of BS.
Over the last few years I've tried RedHat, Mandrake, and a half dozen other distros, on both bare machines and dual boot systems. In every case I hit the wall when trying to implement some simple or essential feature. Every time I found myself led into that arcane and recursive hell known as man pages and how-tos. (and mailing lists, and discussion groups and...)
I'm good with hardware, and can make Windows do anything I need. I have managed to troubleshoot some exceedingly obscure problems in the past. Still, once again I've abandoned Linux because I can't afford to invest weeks of obscure research just to do day to day work.
I really want to be rid of Microsoft products. I find them more irritating than useful, and surely don't like MS' business practices.
I love OpenOffice and have pretty much abandoned MS Office. I like Mozilla, and use a wide variety of freeware and open source products.
I would in a minute abandon MS Windows if it were practical, but to do that I need a distro that will do what Windows does:
Find and configure all my hardware, set up internet access and networking to allow all of the computers on our system to share files, and easily allow others to use the printers attached to my PC, easily set up my two video cards and monitors, set up to sync my PalmPilot.
And have decent looking fonts.
So far every distro I have tried has blown at least two of these basic goals and has offered no easy way to achieve them.
Again, I cannot afford to spend days or weeks tracking down the obscure solution to make something like HotSync work.
It does not matter to me whether this happens with GNOME or KDE. If I can boot from CD and have all of these things come up working, I'll buy it.
If including only GNOME allows Perens' the time to make a truly reliable installer, then I'm for it.
Three Squirrels
Quite; note that the specific reason Gnome chose LGPL for it's libraries was to encourage popularity!
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
UserLinux doesn't even *exist* yet. That's a far cry from having a monopolist's power to "persuade" 90plus percent of the market to switch over to using Internet Destroyer instead of Netscape more or less overnight (as they upgrade from windose95 to 98 or 2000).
There are no grounds to make an MS - UserLinux comparison. In fact it's ludicrous.
Johnny Quest has two Daddies.
It's funny that one would exclude the top C++ GUI toolkit for commercial development for the purpose of making the distribution friendly for commercial development.
Bruce says he wants to provide as default enterprise class support for one (1) desktop environment.
In his words: Because these service providers are basing their business upon a commodity product, there are already economic limits upon how profitable they can be. The difference between one and two GUIs may spell profitability or bankruptcy for some of our service providers. In a similar vein, internal support and engineering staff at businesses that employ UserLinux would like to have only one GUI SDK to develop for and maintain.
He also says that anyone is free to install Qt/KDE and the vendors are free to sell support for it if they so choose.
Now, I don't see how he can do fairer than this without compromising the stated aims of the project.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.