Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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
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.
# 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.