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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."
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!!
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.
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 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?
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*!
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.
Every Slashdot user should say to himself at least once a day, "I am not a typical computer user."
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
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...
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.
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 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.
Except that very few programs use GNOME-VFS. The same thing for Bonobo controls. GNOME has them, but the implementations aren't very good, and very few apps use them. Hell, the file selector doesn't even use them!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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).