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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."
You have to admit both have strong qualities that the other does not. For instance, the Gnome stuff has a tendency to run a little better for me while the KDE stuff looks a bit cleaner. Aesthetics, yes, but it sells it to me. Maybe they just want to offer that whole 'choice' thing Open Source keeps talking about.
If they don't like GPL they don't use Linux :-P
Just because something is available in a dual license form it doesn't turn it in non-GPL... That being said, I don't think it will last, but I sure hope I'm wrong as what linux really need it's a unified window manager.
Windows had a huge head-start. KDE and Gnome are now as stable and have more features, so I bet Micosoft will be taking cues from these desktops soon. Not to mention that a new windows desktop comes out ever few years at best. KDE and Gnome add features regularly.
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Mad crazy deals. You ain't see nothing yet!
This really looks to me like tilting at windmills. Red Hat Tried this with their eminently forgettable "Blue Curve" standard look and feel, and the result pleased no one that I have asked. It is possible to skin them to look alike, of course, but below decks there is little enough similarity to make them mix as well as oil and water.
The real question is "Why Bother?" If both libraries are present, apps from both work well enough together to make the whole question moot. This is a marketing driven decision, with no real respect to the technical merits of the question.
Soli Deo Gloria
Well if it is going to be that easy, I say do it. If I can do the things in Gnome that I prefer to do from KDE, or vice versa, I like it.
Now don't ask me to give a technical answer for why, I for some reason prefer Gnome for admin stuff but like KDE for playing. Both desktops are an acheivement, they can only get better, and what a way to get better.
In Soviet Russia, Nigel makes plans for you!
How is this different from Red Hat's Bluecurve? And will there be a big outcry as there was when Red Hat combined looks and features?
I think the changes will be bigger than just blue curve cause Novell now has the pull to make changes to both. They are the only ones who pay many developers in both desktops and zealots will give them the benifit of the doubt. Not to mention they're not #1 so we are not as fast to cry treason.
Though I don't peticularly like the way Novell is now trying to give off the smell they're the only ones doing anything. We have had freedesktop, gnome/kde guys working on this for quite some time and now they step in and make it sound like they're initiating this working together. Thier PR guys are in full force IMO and the press releases are starting to get annoying. "we have the first 2.6 kernel" wow gee thanks novell! That works fine for your business partners but many of us have apt-get'd or emerged 2.6 kernels our venders supplied for months now.
Actually, KDE is a lot easier for users who have never enjoyed using a Mac, but that's not the same thing as users who have only used Windows, although there is certainly a lot of overlap.
People who have never enjoyed using a Mac fall into two categories: Those who have used one and didn't enjoy it, and those who haven't used one at all.
There's very little to "intuitive interfaces" except that they need to be internally consistent, and they need to make it hard to accidentally do the wrong thing. The two Windows 95 blunders that exemplify this are having the main system menu spring up from the bottom of the screen while having the application menus come down from the top (inconsistent) and putting the window close button in the upper right corner (easy to do the wrong thing).
Macs also have UI bugs. The shared menu bar that changes depending on which application has the focus is very inconsistent, and the button order on applications is reversed from natural language order (i.e. "No or Yes" instead of "Yes or No"), making it easy for people to click the wrong thing.
Both KDE and Gnome can emulate or avoid most of these bugs via their configuration options. However, you cannot switch around Gnome's button order--so it will continue to be the more difficult of the two interfaces, except for people who had already grown accustomed to the non-intuitive button order on Macs.
There are some things that need unification, KDE and Gnome as projects are not among those. What really needs to be done is to establish some common traits to make the whole platform stronger (now you expect me to use the words "paradigm" and "shift" next to each other, right?).
Let me clarify. During the last weeks, I have been on the look for a stable (not Sylpheed), graphical (not Mutt or Pine) mail client that supports proper GPG/PGP encryption and signing out of the box/package (farewell, KMail) and can handle a 30,000+ message mailbox (so much for Thunderbird) that didn't require the installation of 75% percent of Gnome (so much for Evolution). Turns out there doesn't seem to be one, but that's not the point here.
The point is that it is impossible to use the same addressbook from at least two of those programs! Of course, you can do some fancy import/export stuff, but that's time-consuming and error-prone. Evolution tried to import an LDIF file created by KAddressbook, segfaulted and couldn't be started again without purging the configuration; Firebird created one empty entry for every entry in that file, then mangled the entries and built some complete rubbish from them; Sylpheed that becomes really weird after connecting to an LDAP server (which is what I'm getting to next) imported it flawlessly. And even if the import would be working, it'd have been one hell of a time to keep up sync between my non-KMail MUA and KOrganizer which I use and (to some extent) like. Next I tried setting up an LDAP server for that task which promptly broke an bugzilla installation that wanted to have its user DB in LDAP all of a sudden after the libraries had been installed.
Do I need to mention that I was almost crying at that point? It's just an addressbook for crying out loud. If the developers want to be farkwits, that's up to them. But I suppose they're all intelligent people that should have that spark of common sense that their babbling about "having the choice" is pretty much worthless if The Choice better be final or you're in for a world of pain when reconsidering.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
I think this is in fact the most likely interpretation.
I do too. I've been both a SuSE Linux and NetWare user for years and had a long chat with my Novell rep. about this just after the buyout was announced. This is exactly what he told me _wouldn't_ be happening after I expressed concerns to him about it.
I like KDE and want to stay with it so it sounds like it's time to hunt out a new Linux distro. (And before anyone chimes in, no, Mandrake is not an option.)
Combining the two into a single desktop is the wrong approach. Their internals are just too different. For instance, how do you use combine KWin with Metacity when their written in different languages and paradigms. Or do you hack KWin to use Metacity themes, or vice versa? Ditto for Kicker verus Panel.
A much better approach is to help in the interoperability effort. Make the two desktops work better together. Create some unified themes. Work on QtGTK+ or GTKQt. Then pick ONE desktop to be the default, while still providing the other as an alternative.
Unfortunately, I see this as an uninformed pronouncement by Novell management. Consider the two following incompatible quotes from the article:
"Technically, you can't combine them, but we are working toward having the best features of both in a single interface. We'll implement all the best features in one technology."
and
"...you'll see the first major results of this effort in the next versions of SUSE Linux, which will be released toward the end of the year."
I wonder what this major result is going to be? KPanel? Metaciwin? Konqilus?
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
What about Knuth?
:-)
I think we'd do a just homage to a guy who contributed a lot to graphics presentation, not to mention other little things...
That's a little isolationist. Obviously it takes a community to write something like a great desktop and it's somewhat irresponsible as a community which is providing software for a larger community not to think about the impact of their work. As much as Linux started as the hobbyist's OS, it's very quickly reaching the momentum where not only will individuals not be able to affect the whole character of the OS, it will be required that many people work together to move the OS in a planned direction. I think it's obvious that the closest goal of Linux is to be an alternative for the masses. From there, who knows...
Who you gonna call?
Gnomebusters!
Actually, I prefer Gnome myself, KDE is too MS Windows-like. But combining KDE and Gnome, isn't what RedHat's Bluecurve is all about?
note: IDRTFA
Here we go again!
KDE recently released some code that allows you to use the IOSlaves from any application. You can use the IOSlaves to mount to the file system, similar to how LUFS can use gnome-vfs to do the same (although they also have their own non-gnome-vfs implementations as well).
>>There is a huge movement afoot to create marketshare for Linux
A conscience movement to increase marketshare? Perhaps in the minds of executives at Redhat, Novell and other commercial entities.
Ok, sure, all of us geeks would like to see linux more widely used. (well some of us anyway, I keep forgetting that slashdot has a lot of windows users, who may or may not care less)
But I don't think that market share as a goal, is a "movement" like you describe.
The marketshare is a side effect of passion. Passion is what countless thousands of developers, sysadmins and techies have for linux and opensource.
Microsoft on the other hand, had a single goal: to capture marketshare. If anyone's had a "movement to capture marketshare" it was definitely Microsoft. It worked quite well in hindsight.
No. I'd have to disagree with you and say that "marketshare" is not the movement. The movement is "doing it better", which if results in more marketshare...fantastic.
j
I agree completely. Well, the one thing I disagree on is the UI, frankly I find GNUSteps preferable to Aqua (and I'm writing this on a Mac.) I've never understood why folks wasted all that time reinventing everything for GNOME and KDE when they could have done everything they wanted, easier, with GNUStep.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
> Problem is, we want non-hackers (which is most
> computer users, believe it or not) to use Linux
> too
Do we? Serious question: why do we want this? I've always wondered. I use the OS I like (Solaris) and I don't care *at all* what anyone else uses. I just don't get this advocacy thing.
Despite the flag waving and fanaticism I think most people round here would probably hate it if Linux went mainstream, because they'd lose their superior, leeter-than-thou bragging rights. I imagine they'd all move to AtheOS or Plan9 or somesuch, then scoff at l4me linux lusers.
This is a KDE/GNOME thread: the "friendly" faces of Unix. That means dozens of "your all ghey I use blackbox/FVWM/fluxbox/E/screen/ratpoison" posts from weenies trying to impress the stupid trend-following GNOME/KDE herd.
Sorry. I'm sure I had a point to make when I started writing this...