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KDE And Gnome Together At Last?
HangingChad writes "eWeek is reporting about Novell's plan to combine elements of both into a unified desktop. Apparently the work has already started. Chris Schlager, vice president of research and development for SUSE, thinks the differences between KDE and Gnome developers have been overstated. Apparently he's not a regular /. reader."
I thought RedHat did a decent job of not mixing them, but making them look the same. Besides, licensing will never let them be mixed code wise. The article states that they arn't being combined anyway. It simply says they are taking the best features from each and making one interface. The slashdot and article titles are misleading.
Who needs to unify them?
;-) )
Emacs can pretend to be vi (M-x viper-mode) and vi can pretend to be emacs (vimacs.)
(And anyway, why would anyone use anything other than emacs - yeah, trying to remember all the keystrokes will drive you insane, but M-x doctor is there to help
>> reporting about Novell's plan to combine elements of both into a unified desktop. Apparently the work has already started
Way ahead of you, SuSE: clicky!
The article said, at least the way I read it, that Novell was going to write yet another desktop combining the 'best' features of both KDE and Gnome. Not combine the two but create a third version. Whether such a third way will take off among anyone other than Novell's corporate customers, will be interesting to watch.
:-)
BIAS: I prefer Gnome to KDE and am using it right now; I hope that Ximian's involvement in all this will steer the new hybrid offspring desktop in a more Gnome-ish direction.
(And here's hoping that the improvements they create will filter back down to us poor Gnome|KDE users).
Or maybe they should just license MacOSX' desktop UI
----- Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM' - Alan Cox.
Novell probably will be a little more successful than Red Hat simply because they now employ both the folks at Ximian and the bulk of the KDE hackers (who used to work for SuSE). Red Hat, on the other hand, employed very few KDE hackers (and the one outspoken KDE hacker they did employ quit :).
My guess is that the folks at Ximian and SuSE are likely to see more eye to eye seeing as how their paycheck will depend on them getting along.
I was in a session at Brainshare on the "Novell Linux Desktop", lead by Nat Friedman. Someone asked him about Gnome vs. KDE and his reply was that the only people who bring up this topic seem to be Slashdot posters.
Seriously, he called attention to the fact that Novell is committed to both KDE and GNOME. According to his slide, Novell is now the #1 contributer to both KDE and GNOME. From what I've seen, though, Novell will certainly leverage its purchase of Ximian in every way it can. All of the desktops and kiosks run SUSE with Ximian. All of the demos and new applications have been written on SUSE and Ximian. Finally, projects like iFolder are being built with Mono. Nat also talked a little about freedesktop.org and the worry that KDE and GNOME will become incompatible, something Novell does not want to see occur.
the IO slaves? I don't know gnome well, so they could have it as well.
BTW, you should know this little trick: you can browse through folders on any computer with a ssh login. Just type fish://your-login@computer-with-ssh-access.domain in konqueror (or in the run dialog), it will show your remote home directory as if it were a local directory. There are lots of other io slaves, too (see all available protocols using K->system->info center->protocols).
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Oh god no!!!!!!!!!!!
I would also like them to settle on one sound architecture. However, it is fortunate that things seem to be heading in the direction of Gstreamer at the moment, because esound has always been buggy and arts is barely maintained and besides, isn't the fastest kid on the block. I mean, come on -- it only runs well if running setuid so it can have higher priority than other processes. Besides security issues, the thing has the potential to bring your whole system down! Magic sysrq keys have saved me a few times when arts has sucked up so much of my system I can't even ssh or telnet in to kill it. More arts? No thanks.
I await the day linux has good userland sound mixing to complement its now-beautiful ALSA sound drivers. For now, I'm stuck with arts because amarok's gstreamer support isn't there yet (and xmms doesn't compare to amarok).
While I understand what you're saying, I have to disagree with you in one respect:
There is a huge movement afoot to create marketshare for Linux, and unification of the two leading desktops would help that movement along immeasurably. Now, don't confuse "marketshare" with "profits." The intent is to gain as much penetration into the OS market as possible for Linux. For every Windows desktop or Solaris server or WinCE handheld that is displaced by a Linux instance, Linux as a whole gets stronger. For every user that says, "Yeah, I use Linux now," Linux gets stronger. And the stronger it gets, the more useful it gets, not only to average end users but to those of us who like it for all the reasons we've adopted it early.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
One of the most impressive IO Slaves is audiocd:/. It displays a CD in your drive as having a bunch of folders: "By Name," "By Track," "MP3," and "OGG" for instance. If you want an MP3 of a track you put in the CD, access it through audiocd:/ in Konqueror, go to the MP3 directory and copy the MP3 "file" to your hard disk. It's an unbelievably intuitive way to search an audio CD.
gnome-vfs is essentially gnome's answer to KDE's IOSlaves, I believe.
And while I don't believe gnome-vfs has quite the breadth of fs modules that KDE has, it does has some of the more "important" ones like smb and ftp that I can think of offhand. It also supports a "sftp://" protocol (which, obviously, lets you access the ftp subsystem of ssh), as well as a "ssh://" protocol of which I'm not sure how it's supposed to work.
Of course, for simple SMB on LAN use I still think smbfs coupled with automount is still the best solution. gnome-vfs seems to create quite a bit of overhead*, not to mention that the smb:// URIs will only work in gnome-vfs powered programs, which makes me wonder if I would even be able to open a document in gedit for example via Nautilus and save it without any weirdness happening since GTK+ doesn't have support for gnome-vfs.
And just to see what happened, I did just that -- the "Save as" dialogue brought me back to my home directory and obviously wouldn't let me CTRL+L to my smb:// mount.
Yes, Gnome has IOSlaves. They're called Gnome VFS modules, and, just like KIOSlaves, they're limited to programs written for their desktop environment with no good reason why this is the case.
LUFS works with any program - KDE, Gnome, the shell, or whatever else, and allows you to mount shares via SSH, HTTP, or whatever else.
If I were a Linux distributor I'd actually cut out the desktop-specific IOSlave / VFS crap and use this instead, thereby providing a consistent experience for my users.
I suspect you haven't used the latest Gnome releases. They have for a while had a bar at the top with separate Applications and Actions menus. The taskbar remains at the bottom. There is work going on to unify MIME types (using a library developed for ROX), though many people will tell you it's a bad idea.
As an end user, Gnome seems gratuitously unconfigurable but nicely simple, whereas KDE seems gratuitously configurable and overly complicated (though I've never played with it long enough to see if that's just a surface impression). As a power end-user, I realise that Gnome actually has some quite advanced configurations possible (e.g. I'm using ROX-Filer and XFwm4 rather than Nautilus and Metacity), without compromising its simplicity.
Personally, I think the underlying technologies should be merged as unlikely as that is, but the end-user interfaces should continue to diverge (as they have been, with KDE staying closer to its roots but Gnome developing a more Macky look and feel).
Look out!
# One of those being a menu of applications located at the far left
# A few shortcuts for commonyl used apps beside that
# Icons on the desktop
Shared menu's, shared icon themes
# A taskbar besides that, including pop up listy boxes for duplicate apps
Shared window manager specs, so any app will be known to a taskbar which supports the spec, and will be controllable by it.
# Some panel apps beside that, for the weather or whatever else
# A clock over on the right
Shared system tray
# A file manager
# A web browser
# An email app
All of these use shared communication protocols (http, imap, pop, smtp) or file formats (bookmarks.html, mbox). The only thing not common (yet) is the ioslave/gnomevfs duality.
Oh, and different keyboard shortcuts, mime types, etc. These don't attract end users, they annoy them.
Shared mime database, shared default key bindings (that last one is in the planning stage)
The difference between gnome and kde is getting to be quite minimal. I fully expect there to come a point where the two desktops will just be two skins on the same backend.