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."
Whats next? Cats sleeping with dogs?
Maybe he browses at +5. :)
I can't wait for KGplayer, twice the features, double the resource usage!
Setec Astronomy
Obviously, this must have been meant for publication on April 1st!
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
Are they planning on unifying emacs and vi?!?
Knome or GDE?
Maybe if KDE gets compromised too it could bring them closer together? *ducks*
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.
Kant happen.
Reminds me of an episod of The Simpsons where Homer puts the Santa's Little Helper (dog) and Snowball II (cat) in to a sack because he wanted to cross breed them out of bordom.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
quote -
"He said he thinks the ability to offer customers a complete, soup-to-nuts solution will be a valuable addition. "We've learned our lesson from Microsoft." "
Does anyone feel a bit uneasy with that expression 'soup-to-nuts'?
Hot soup can burn my lips - I'm not a bout to put that you-know-where!!
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.
Different desktops exist for different people. It's easy to change back and forth to figure out the one you like best. I think that merging the two would stiffle features in the long run. It's best to have 2 competing platforms. Ultimately each group will incorporate the ideas from the other platform, but competition is what drives innovation.
--
Tons of electronics deals updated in real-time. The most powerful listing known to man.
Novell is wasting its time. Integration between KDE and GNOME will never surface. Their programming philosophies, tool kits and target audience are just different.
GNOME's focus is on users, usability and simplicity, to mention a few. KDE's focus is on power, flexibility and reconfigurability, to mention a few. How do you blend those two disparate attitudes towards software development into one unifying pot?
I just don't see how it will work. Good luck to Novell.
What about license nazi's that don't like qt's license?
You mean the GPL?
how will they feel if it's 'unified' with gpl'd gnome?
Umm, since they are the same licence I don't think they'd mind at all. The parts of GNOME that are LGPL won't be an issue either.
Basically, an improved version of KDE.
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
KDE is a bit easier for users who have spent a lot of time on Windows. The first logon to a KDE desktop presents the Desktop wizard where you can choose if you want Windows or MAC style key and mouse shortcuts. This is a big plus for KDE.
BATTLE: DESKTOP
It's one of the lessons they're learning from Microsoft. :p
It's like GPL vs. BSD or other similar arguments. To a "normal" person, they are nearly identical. Or Emacs vs. vi .. to my boss, they are both cryptic editors for geeks to confuse people with.
:-)
The average Joe just wants the computer to work. He thinks in terms of tasks and software to accomplish the tasks, not the underlying nuts and bolts which are just different ways of accomplishing the same boring things.
So the more we (the free software community) can unify these desktop environments and smooth out these incompatibilites, the better. It's not like we don't all run desktop environment A but still use apps from environment B under it.
Personally, I think they both stink. I can't wait to see the unpronouncable app names.
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 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.
How about the second paragraph of the article:
Supporters of the two interfaces have often sparred with each other in flame wars on Slashdot, mailing lists and newsgroups.
Looks like submitters don't read articles either.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
>> 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!
To me the article clearly suggests that Novel will be replacing KDE with Ximian GNOME in future releases:
"we're going to migrate to a single Linux desktop."
Read, we will not support GNOME and KDE.
"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."
Read, we're not even going to try to combine them, but our sales guys will explain how Ximian GNOME has all the same great features as KDE.
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
One of the most interesting coming out of brainshare is Novell's strong commitment to having linux on the server AND desktop. They see the reason as MS having any success on the server side is because companies wanted to use the same thing on server and desktop. Linux is definatly taking over the server side and if companies have a good linux desktop I think the opposite can happen (use linux on desktop because they can integrate it with their servers). It's funny this comes up because I just read an article stating Windows isn't an enterprise OS and the only reason it got on the server is because it had desktop dominence. Which makes sense because when compared with almost any other OS on the planet Win2k3 comes up short in almost every category.
Funny, how the next story down is people (jokingly) saying KDE just hacked Gnome's site. :-)
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
Every Slashdot user should say to himself at least once a day, "I am not a typical computer user."
Why settle for Gnome xor KDE when you can have the best of both worlds ?
Novell just cut through the Gordian Knot that has been annoying me each time I installed Linux :
What desktop should I choose ?
Opening Yast/pieces of Netware and now aiming for the best desktop...It looks like Novell wants the leadership/to set the standards in Linux very badly....
Well, there is a lot of money at stake...in a world opening to open source....
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.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
"We'll merge Vi and Emacs! That way, everyone will be happy!"
---
Book(n): Utensil used to pass time while waiting for the TV repairman
Having redundant libraries is kind of a sad fact of life. No currently popular OS has been able to avoid it. At any given time, the average Windows machine is running several different toolkits (.NET, XP common controls, MS Office toolkit, etc). There is even redundency between Carbon and Cocoa in OS X.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
As long as I never have to hear the names of 2 desktop environments when talking about Linux, I'm happy. Choice is great but having two pretty good environments instead of one great environment is not going to win any market share. Only in open source could the two top competitors work together. For this we should be thankful. I don't think there's much to stop Linux from taking down Windows if this is even remotely successful.
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.
I imagine this isn't about so much look and feel but more about desktop integration. Imagine using Evolution to open an attachment using the default app settings confiured in KControl. Or saving the image you just edited in the GIMP directly to a remote server using the FTP KIO slave in the KDE file dialog. Or scripting office procedures using the desktop agnostic D-BUS (KDE's admitted DCOP successor).
There's so much more that just theming. Look at freedesktop.org to get a feel of the potential.
Let me repeat myself...
If there was any sanity in the open source desktop developer community, we'd see more effort going into GNUstep.
Works with everything we have today? Check, there's compatibility with KDE and GNOME applications as well as Motif, with window style hints too.
High level language support? Check, Objective-C provides Smalltalk-like object orientation, and automatic memory management is available. There are also bindings to Ruby and Java. You can even build Java applications with native quality look and feel.
Compatible with what programmers know today? Yup, Objective-C is a slight superset of C, so almost any programmer can get to grips with it in a weekend. (Speaking as someone who did.)
Good class libraries? Yes, modeled on NeXT's excellent work, the same foundation used to build OS X. I've written Cocoa code, it's the most painless class library I've encountered. (Yes, I write Java too and have written C++.)
Cross platform? Yes again, programs are portable between GNUstep and Cocoa without too much work--see GNUmail for an example. Non-GUI programs even port to Windows without major effort, allegedly.
Good developer tools? Again, yes. Excellent developer tools on OS X. Doubtless the free tools on Linux could use some work, but that shouldn't be too hard. We can even build them using the OS X tools if necessary.
Pretty UI? Well, I think it looks OK. Not as nice as Aqua, but it's functional.
Mature? Well, the Objective-C compiler is GCC, Apple use it for their developer tools and push back improvements, the class library design has been refined over the course of 10+ years.
Think about it, people. We could unify the Linux and Apple developer communities. All work towards one common goal. Get 10%+ desktop market share for OpenStep/OS X/GNUstep in no time.
Hell, get GNUstep up to scratch and you'd probably see developers porting their commercial applications from OS X to Linux. Wouldn't you like to see products from Adobe, Macromedia, maybe even Apple available to run on your Linux desktop?
Think about all the problems that have been solved by NeXT and Apple. Application packaging, for example? Solved, applications are bundles of files that you can just drag-drop wherever you want to keep them, and they work.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
GnuDE ?
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
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.)
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.
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!
I can't explain why except that the feel of each is right for those purposes, to me.
If I may expand on this without offending people...
KDE has done a better job than Gnome of integrating its applications into the desktop, while Gnome has done a better job of creating a minimal out-of-your-way interface. Thus KDE is better suitable to a user's desktop when multiple applications are interacting with each other, and Gnome is better for root's desktop which typically does just one thing at a time sequentially and can't be bothered with distractions.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Even the schools around here at adapting Linux...
:-)
I'm taking a university extension course in Linux device drivers. I brought my laptop and was running KDE. The guy behind me kept looking over, and finally asked, "it isn't Windows, what is it?" This was in a *Linux* class. I didn't have the heart to tell him it was FreeBSD
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Look at SUSE 9.1 Personal, it *only* includes KDE as a desktop. It does have GTK apps such as the GIMP and non-KDE apps OOo integrated into KDE.
I think this is what they mean. They will integrate GTK into KDE.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
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 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.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Novell:
The Open Source world consists of a massive herd of cats. They live by themselves, they do their own bizarre cat things, and they're awfully independent. They're talented but touchy. Some of them are awfully stubborn. Sometimes, one will get interested in something or gets an idea into its cat-brain, and start heading the direction of whatever's interested it. Sometimes other cats come along, and you get a whole pack swarming along. Occasionally a lot of cats get really interested in something (like a kernel), and then the sight is truly magestic, with a herd of cats pouring over everything that obstructs them from their goal. They're really quite unstoppable then.
The problem, Novell, is that right now a good-sized pack of cats have it firmly in their heads that they definitely and without question want to go *west*. There is another good-sized pack of cats that are absolutely certain that they want to go *east*. The combination has produced cats going in opposite directions colliding with each other and hissing and scratching at each other.
However, Novell, before you step smack dab into the middle of this writhing, temperamental herd and try to direct them to go *north*, I suggest that you keep in mind -- you are herding cats.
May we never see th