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Slackware Likely To Drop GNOME Support
An anonymous reader writes "After Hewlett Packard, who jumped off of supporting GNOME, Red Hat has followed by splitting their Desktop Linux out to Fedora which is community driven, and now distributions like Slackware have started to drop GNOME entirely in favor of KDE. Read more about their decision here. It looks like companies as well as distributions start focusing towards one solution." Patrick Volderking's quoted message doesn't announce a final decision to drop GNOME from Slackware, however -- and as the followups in that thread note, it could be interpreted as an endorsement of the good job done by Dropline in packaging GNOME for Slack.
Its about time one of them, I don't kare which one, got the upper hand and snowballed.
Choice is good, but if we're going to have a million different distros, then we don't need every single one to have all million software packages too.
This is probably a good idea, for every old joe-schmoe who installs linux, there can be more or less, a unified 'look'
;)), then it probably makes life much easier for everybody.
Being more partial to KDE than GNOME, I don't really see a problem with it, but packaging it is the way to go. If it's a package, that can be 'apt-got' (just for example
Error 407 - No creative sig found
The new fileselector pisses me off bad enough that I'd consider switching for the express purpose of spiting the gnome devs who cooked THAT one up.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Less bloat for the install. Now maybe we can get Slackware back down to one CD for installation!
I've used KDE and Gnome before, even somewhat recently, but just can't stand the overhead. They both look great, but I'm much happier in Fluxbox. All I do is work in xterms all day anyways.
From what I've heard, Dropline Gnome really is an excellent package. Makes sense for Slackware to drop Gnome support, if there's already an excellent source for a Gnome package for Slackware.
Kudos to both Patrick V. and the Dropline Gnome maintainers! This is how open source should work.
its not that pat wants one DE its that gnome is taking too much effort for so little when dropline is good enough.
It feels like Windows, which is what I'm TRYING to avoid.... But whatever get us to the masses quicker I guess... [/annoyed]
Ubuntu- Linux for human beings.
Most Slackware Gnome addicts use Dropline anyway since it's a very lively, well maintained project.
;-)
If Todd of Dropline and Patrick work together this could be pretty good for both projects. Of course there is PAM integration in Dropline that Patrick dislikes and therefore he won't include it in the "official" CD set. Slack with Dropline is in fact the best Desktop-Linux Experience I ever had.
Let's hope Todds servers can handle all the load following a slashdotting.
Look out BSD! Gnome is coming your way! /karma to burn
This makes me want to throw up. I just can't stand KDE's UI, or Qt for that matter. To put it simply: KDE is fugly. GNOME is (in comparison to KDE) slick and poetically designed.
Of course, XFCE kicks the pants off both of them, but that's another argument.
I'm begining to face facts. I still think that GNOME looks better, and is, in many ways, easier to use. But KDE has even made huge progress in these areas in the last year (especially with Konqueror and new skins that finally *don't* look horrible, at least to my eye).
GNOME still has nominally better applications in certain key areas compared to KDE, for example, Ximian Evolution. However, again, KDE has made enourmous progress in this area, all in the last year. It boggles my mind to see how quickly this gap has dissapeared in one area - compare Instant Messaging in KDE and GNOME two years ago (nothing vs Gaim) to now, Kopete has developed so quickly it's just amazing.
One thing I did miss in KDE was Mozilla. But now, we can even use Gecko as a rendering engine in Konqueror, so even, like me, if you considered that KHTML was inferior to Gecko, this "advantage" for GNOME has now dissapeared (also thanks to Apple and Safari).
I still think KDE needs some work, especially in the ease-of-use department (too many settings presented to the user, some intelligent hiding would be appreciated) - but this is improving. And, even as a GNOME user, I have to admit that C++ as a basis is a much superior choice to C, especially considering the kludge that seems to underly GNOME, separate libraries for GTK and GNOME applications with surprisingly few applications taking advantage of the GNOME-only libraries.
If you look at the distributions on the shelves, SuSE is KDE, Mandrake is KDE, Linsipre is KDE (with modifications). You can't buy Fedora at PC World. Any new user getting interested in Linux would probably go here first, and by consequence they're going to get KDE.
So whilst I will keep GNOME around for a while yet, and I think the "race" is far from over (who says there has to be a winner anyway? The whole concept of a "war" is just completely silly), if KDE goes on to become the defacto Linux desktop, then I won't shed that many tears. Of course, GNOME, I'm sure, will be around for a long while yet.
I just installed GNOME at work. Is KDE really that much better? I really HATE QT but I suppose GTK isn't much better. All I know is from like 3 years ago or so, when they both really sucked. I try to stay away from X, but I need it at work for certain things. Is there a good technical reason I should uninstall GNOME and head over to KDE? No zealots, please. You guys are too crazy for me :p
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
Right now, I think ./configure'ed source, GNOME doesn't build into packages easily with DESTDIR).
removing it would be the best thing for Slackware as it's become a maintainance nightmare (unlike nearly every other
now even i thought slackware's packaging system was sufficient (despite what others say), but if you are building and packaging by relying on DESTDIR, you really do need a change in the packaging system.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
HP and Redhats actions are completely different. HP sponsored SCO's roadshow, so we know how relevant their opinion is. And Redhat's Fedora uses GNOME by default!
Sure, slackware is considering dropping gnome support, but this isn't some kind of mass migration away from GNOME, look at what Novell & Sun base their linux desktops on.
Kudos to the submitter for successfully trolling the editors
Cheers Koz
"and as the followups in that thread note, it could be interpreted as an endorsement of the good job done by Dropline in packaging GNOME for Slack."
Key word there is "could". After the fiasco with swaret, it's unlikely for many 3rd party packages to get Pat's blessing. And as I noted on the DLG forum (I'm TransAMrit), I didn't see any real endorsement from the emails.
For those of you that don't know about swaret, it was given a trial by being placed in Slackware's extra/ dir a while back. It failed miserably, doing lots of things wrong, breaking systems left and right, so of course, it was taken out of the official tree. But still, lots of people swear by swaret. That is, until they get bit by it. Then the blame is associated not with a half-assed 3rd party utility, but Slackware itself.
I'm not saying anything about the quality of DLG here, but it's easy to see that you don't want the above situation repeated many times.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
In this case, I think, it's not about focusing to some specific windowing environment / framework. The real reason for (possibly) dropping the GNOME from future releases seems to be much simpler: Pat just feels that building and supporting GNOME is too much trouble and it takes too much time away from the more important stuff.
So, don't take this case as an indication of companies focusing to KDE. If you want to seek some message from Pat's possible actions, then it would be that the building process of the GNOME might be too complicated. Nothing else.
I thought this rejoicing had something suspicious to it...
More seriously, this whole thing sounds sensationalist to me... RedHat adopting a community model with Fedora, and one fed-up maintainer for a redundant Slackware package do not a mass defection maketh. The HP bit might be worrisome, but.
Most of all, I fail to see how one environment 'getting the upper hand' can possibly be construed as a Good Thing. Nobody serious clamors for less operating systems, less trouser styles, or less pencils. And GNOME is definitely the more professional and efficiently designed, from a purely UI perspective, of the large Free desktop environments.
As a perpetual distro switcher, I've tried my hand at both gnome and kde. IMO, the KDE folks, in terms of visual style and interface, seem to be much more of a windows knockoff, and, on the other hand, the GNOME folks seem to actually be interested in usability and human interface guidelines.
I think having multiple GUI environments is an asset to linux, but as for me and my house, I'll take GNOME for it's beauty and interface. K3b is the only KDE app that GNOME seems to lack a real counterpart to.
now back to your regularly scheduled flames and trolling.
I don't see the logic behind dropping support for GNOME when considering the two primary purposes people use it: 1) Uses less resources than KDE 2) Some people prefer the general feel of GNOME to to KDE. The important being the former because alot of people love linux due to it's efficient and low resource usage (on top of it's stability and flexibility ;)), being able to load Linux on their low-end machines to be work horses. Pushing people to KDE may be logical in a "convert windows users" approach but in terms of the majority of the linux community KDE isn't even used.
Then again, alot of people (myself including) don't bother with a GUI and let the pretty colored text on black background get the job done :)
Free iPod www.freeiPods.com
I really do. 2.0 (with the 2.x GTK series) really messed things up, and with more and more crud going in, the good stuff going out...
I switched to KDE. It's much cleaner. So much cleaner. I'm now tempted to build Mozilla with QT.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Until Pat weighs in on this publically I'm not certain about the validity of this claim.
Gnome has long ago lost focus on its goals. It used to be geared towards linux users. It was meant to be a fast and customizable linux DE. Somewhere between 1.4 and 2.0 Gnome development changed. It lost sight of those goals and became geared towards newbies and end-users.
Frankly, it never was as good as KDE at that. Being "user friendly" meant changing the reasons so many of us used and liked Gnome, alienating their base. Gnome became difficult to compile and even more difficult to package. Why can't Gnome install nicely using "make install DESTDIR=~/pkg"?
Pat mentioned in that e-mail that about a third of his time is spent trying to support Gnome, which given the entire size of Slackware is apalling. Spending a third of your time supporting what is around a twelth of the system's size will wear out anyone.
My personal hope is that the Gnome developers will wake up, get their asses in gear, and realize that they're not going to beat KDE on usability for newbies. They need to return to being the fast, custimizable linux DE. I suspect that most of Gnome's old users are now using a plain window manager or Xfce (good stuff).
Slackware, what else when it must be secure, stable, and easy?
All in all, this is not a final decision, it's just a rumor . As long as Patrick Volkerding has not removed Gnome and annouced it either on the Slackware website or in the ChangeLog, I won't believe it...
And this was typed on a Slackware 10 machine running XFCE... Which, IMHO, is so much better than Gnome...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
It's not compulsory.
Deleted
This was Patricks' argument for dropping GNOME. Instead of dropping GNOME support, why not communicate with the GNOME community to resolve the issues? This is really a minor technial issue, and I'm sure things can easily be done to make including GNOME as easy as KDE.
Anyway, I'm sure Slackware will never drop GNOME support. People will stop using the distribution in a second!
This is probably why having a single "dicator" maintaining a distribution is a bad idea: He has very little contact with the community. It's not possible for other's to get involved with the development process either. It would be a trivial task to make someone else maintain the GNOME sources in Slackware.
I like Slackware, running slack 10 now, but this makes me change my mind.
Don't get me wrong, I like KDE a lot, but I started using Linux in the GNOME DE environment and that's really where I want to stay. No, I'm not afraid of change... at all. I just think that we should not totally eliminate all of the desktop environments down to just one for the commercial versions, simply because choice is good. Heh, if we could, I would like to see even more DEs thrown into the game play. GNOME and KDE aren't the only ones around, and even though they may be two of the best, I'd really like to see and hear more about the others.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
These breathless announcements about open source projects as though they were corporations competing and liable to go bankrupt and disappear is they lose the edge are so missing the point. There is no immenent bankruptcy about to send Gnome off the edge of cliff where they sell off all the Aeron chairs and fire all the employees by SMS message becuase X Brand distro has gone with the "competition" and now the Gnome stock has tanked.
That didn't happen.
This whole corporate cut throat mentality is so ingrained in people that they immediately apply it to everything and the fact is, it doesn't really matter in open source.
The only thing that would endanger Gnome would be if computer storage suddenly began to shrink and it was no longer possible to offer several windows managers. That's hardly the case. Hell, LiveCDs that come on old fashioned CD-Rs usually have room for KDE, Gnome, IceWM and a half dozen others. Even these stripped down distros are still unable to take advantage of the now cheap DVD-R because it's just too freakin' much space. It's just not necessary to use all the space that is available.
This isn't a winner-take-all market based development model. There's room for twenty, no make that a thousand, more windows managers.
Then add the stuff you want after.
That's what I do with Debian.
Latin phrase meaning, "It does not follow." The characteristic feature of arguments that fail to provide adequate support for their conclusions, especially those that commit one of the fallacies of relevance.
"After Hewlett Packard, who jumped off of supporting GNOME, Red Hat has followed by splitting their Desktop Linux out to Fedora which is community driven, and now distributions like Slackware have started to drop GNOME entirely in favor of KDE."
What's up with the quality of trolling on Slashdot these days? Even the article summary trolls are poorly written and transparent these days.
Fedora and Redhat Workstation default to using GNOME for the desktop. Novell hasn't cancelled Ximian's GNOME efforts, and is in fact working on improving GNOME in SuSE. Solaris and Sun JDS both use GNOME.
Not that KDE isn't doing very well for itself as well, with SuSE being a very nice KDE oriented distro, not to mention Mandrake, and many others.
Both are doing just fine - the prospect of some distros focussing on one is not surprising, but I'd hardly call it significant. The whole DE flamewar is mostly rather silly. FreeDesktop.org is doing a good job and increasing cooperation and shared functionality between, not just KDE and GNOME, but XFCE, WindowMaker/GNUStep, and even, to some extent whatever new DE Enlightenment eventually turns out. There are different desktop needs, and different DEs pursue very different goals. As long as FreeDesktop.org manages to continue its efforts to define some good shared base standards things will work just fine.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Does any one see the possibilty of KDE and Gnome merging at some point to provide a general WM solution? Compared to the differences between say, FluxBox and KDE, the differences between Gnome and KDE (interface wise) are relativly small and both of them provide a similar UI (main menu, taskbar, desktop w/program icons, pannel applets, etc). Personally I can see a lot of benefit taking the best features out of both KDE and Gnome and making a 'complete' WM. Do you agree?
Mak'tal shree lok'tak mek'ta sa'tak Oz! - Daniel Jackson
I'll let the zealots take over from here... ;~)
"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."
I'd be disappointed, but that's about it. I don't use gnome as a desktop-- I use Fluxbox and occasionally KDE-- but I do run a lot of apps that use Gnome/GTK2 settings. Thus I use the gnome-settings-daemon to give a unified look to Firefox, thunderbird, Gaim and the Gimp, to name a few.
Perhaps because I don't use Gnome as a desktop I've preferred Pat's implementation of it. (Less work and all...) That said, I usually end up having to do some compiling to get the (non-essential) Gnome stuff like gphoto running.
This certainly wouldn't make me quit using Slackware, though if Pat put out a limited Gnome framework I would probably still use that over Dropline-- Just because I could rsync slackware-current and upgradepkg *.tgz.
Acquiescence leads to obliteration
Why do we have to follow the conceptual desktop UI that MS has laid out? Linux should follow the path to what makes using it easier. A single button under which everything is nested seems unnecessary - there have to be better ideas out there.
In the meantime, I've dropped Gnome on my FC2 box in favor of Windowmaker. It's much much faster, eats many fewer resources, and completely avoids the whole "taskbar" concept. And on the plus-side, my roommates are no longer able to use my computer to do anything because they don't know how to work windowmaker. It's just a blank screen with some funky icons and a paperclip!
Fedora, Ubuntu, Suse, RHEL, blah blah etc are all seriously GNOME-oriented.
Get rid of them both. Stick with straight GTK+ apps, and a nice filer like ROX, with your window manager of choice. Both Gnome and KDE have become too messy. Sure wish we had an 'environment' for linux that was more like OS/2's WPS.
Seriously, where is this shelf? Even Fry's doesn't display these distros.
XFCE 4.2 Beta 1 was released a week ago. It still has some quirks, but overall quite nice. A great improvement over 4.0.6 (stable)!
Worth a look if you like GTK, but don't like the bloat of GNOME. Or if you like Fluxbox, but want something with more eyecandy.
"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."
I don't know why I'm having so much trouble with Gnome (the 2.6 release), because previous upgrades were rather straight forward. The biggest problem is that the menus and desktop icons are screwed up. The menus are flooded with duplicate entries and the icons for users other than root are missing. If I add a new user, the desktop for that user is completely hosed and has to be completely reconfigured by hand to get it to look right. I have no idea why this is happening. Completely wiping Gnome (libraries and all) and doing a full fresh rebuild and install didn't help.
I want to go back to Gnome, but it's gotten so complicated to install that it just isn't worth putting up with the problems.
"Last 10 desktop users drop Slackware"
So long, slack. You'll be missed.
0 1 - just my two bits
OK, I confess I have seen some bad submissions, but what does HP dropping gnome (not that I have ever seen anything in news about this), Redhat's decision to spin off Fedora, and Patrick's decision that dropline is good enough for him to stop wasting his time with gnome's odd build procedures have in common? Troll usually appear in the comments, not the articles. Although timothy did make an effort to unspin the Slackware news somewhat, it is still crazy that he would post such flamebait.
Just for the record - in case you aren't up on the latest news - Redhat still ships a desktop linux that uses gnome, and the Fedora project is still one of the strongest linux distributions, along with Debian and Suse (Novell), who both still include gnome and have no intentions of dropping it. Additionally, Sun and IBM are still committed to gnome.
Disclaimer: I don't like KDE. I miss my old mac.
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
Sorry, but what crazy distro wants to drop users? :-)
Because in the end, that's what's going to happen. Guess what? There are other distros which support GNOME *just fine*. I'm very happy with Ubuntu. So far it's the best Linux system in *years* that I have got. I know it's not the ultimate distro for everybody, though. If you dare, take a look at it. It doesn't bite.
Nitpick: Suse is seriously KDE-oriented (and always has been). They just happen to be owned by Novell now, who also own Ximian, who are seriously gnome-oriented.
Perhaps GNOME doesn't fit the Slackware philosophy very well. I means, Slackware is all lean and simple, whereas the same can hardly be said of GNOME.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I don't know if Gnome really is going away. So far this is speculation it seems.
But assuming that is going away, poor Sun. They picked Gnome and hardly even before they get a version out which uses it it is about to die.
But they can't let it die, so now _they_ have to support it with no support from the community.
They could have used a little slack (no pun intended).
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
The only way for KDE to win is if Novell buys and LGPL's QT. Otherwise it is too expensive for small / midsize shops to buy the licenses need to ship their QT projects.
Try getting your manager to approve such a large purchase these days when GTK is free. It is very difficult.
Reading that the major reason for dropping GNOME would be maintenance issues, I have to wonder about Debian.
Debian unstable tends to be close to cutting edge. One of the exceptions is GNOME. There is a Garnome project that helps build GNOME. Could it be that GNOME is too difficult to maintain?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I'm pretty much a gnome fan, but in reading the thread linked to in the story, I have to agree: every gnome since 1.4 has just felt "off" to me.
And having dealt with the hell of compiling gnome on slack, I can't blame Pat a bit.
Funny thing is, although I still use gnome, I've got one box running XFCE and it feels much more like gnome 1.4 did -- I'll probably migrate there as long as I can count on a few GTK+ apps (mostly gnumeric, gvim, and I'll toy with giving up evolution if needed.)
KDE has just never done it for me. I can't put a finger on it, it just doesn't feel right or "open" (yes, I see the irony here.)
The main things that originally attracted me to gnome were a few well-done apps and the clean simplicity of 1.4 -- if only the gnomesters would go back to this root.
Whatever the case, I'd like to echo sentiments here (and on the forum linked to in the article) -- it'd be great if Pat would include a well-integrated Dropline package with slackware, and if Dropline would consider a second 'standard' slackware i486 distro, as this can be counted to run on practically all platforms (the i686 won't.)
So ship a GTK app if you insist on going closed source and non-GPL. It's not like it won't work on systems running KDE.
1 - who says that Novell will use Gnome as the default desktop? IBM is sponsoring KDE, so who knows they will use KDE in the end. SUN's corporate desktop... since when did SUN have a significant share in the desktop market? KDE is what? KDE is the default on mandrake, suse, and others, and the only desktop on most desktop-based distributions like xandros, linspire, lycoris....
2 - on what do you base that Slackware has no user base?
3 - it's not a bashing story, just a report about a mail in the dropline forum.
not Volderking.
If you open your mind too wide, people will throw trash in it.
Red Hat has followed by splitting their Desktop Linux out to Fedora
Complete crap. Red Hat has split it's hobbyist / home user Linux out as Fedora. Red Hat are more than willing to take money off businesses to support Linux on the desktop, just like always. Can we try to keep trolls out of the actual articles?
Why would I automatically be comparing GNOME to KDE if I say something about GNOME?
All I was saying is that GNOME seems not to be in line with Slackware's general philosophy. I didn't say anything about KDE, let alone suggest it would do better.
Insert random abuse beyond this point if that's what you were after.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
As Debian derivatives get better all the time, Slackware is losing its "everything is most likely to just work" end-user/headless distro status; as Gentoo gets more and more sophisticated, Slackware is losing its "best for people who want the system to be honest with them and not hold their hand" high-end status.
About the only real advantage Slackware has left is that it's got a large selection of up-to-date software with few conflicts. Except without GNOME, you lose this; you'll have a large selection of up-to-date software with few conflicts, as long as you want to use the software that the distro maintaners handpicked.
Seriously-- once slackware starts mandating one desktop for its users, what use is it anymore? What advantage does it offer at that point over ANY other distro except to people who've just used it for so long they don't want to bother with anything else?
I thought GNOME was on the up! Sun picked it, Debian always had it, RedHat still does desktop, and on there, GNOME is still going to be the default, So what if there is a free comminity product now too in the shape of Fedora, RedHat commercialise it.
As for SUSE, Novell bought them and Ximian, and while they don't seem to have any intention of letting KDE slip, you don't have that many amazing programmers and get Rid of GNOME. Isn't that kindof the 3 biggest Distro's covered as being DE neutral or very GNOME friendly?
I'm sure, but I do believe it would be best to let Dropline produce Slackware's GNOME and quit wasting my own time with it.
It doesn't seem like GNOME will drop off of the face of Slackware as the acticle suggest, but rather, the support for GNOME on Slackware will be off loaded to the Dropline project.
BTW, I'm currently usuing Slackware 10 with GNOME 2.6 for my Linux box. I was looking at the Dropline version of GNOME 2.8 for Slackware. Have any of you tried it?
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
FOr me it goes KDE, Windowmaker. And the only reason it's in that order is bc I can mount shares on my desktop is icons with windowmaker... or at least I do not know how.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
Is there any particular reason people would choose to use the command line only unless they are working on a really low end machine? I don't know about anyone else but I sit at my Linux box for about five hours a day at work and that would give me a serious headache by the end of the day.
I've really heard a LOT of people expressing the sentiment that they liked gnome better than kde at one time, but really feel like the recent GNOME releases are moving in the wrong direction while not making the changes that need to be made.
With this sort of sentiment so incredibly widespread, do you think the time might be right for a fork to take place emphasizing the things that people care about instead of these dumbing-down tendencies and mono?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Maybe I'm stuck in tha past? I've always found KDE to be slow, until I got a dual 2.8GHz Xeon PC at work. Modern versions of GNOME seem to be quite lethargic and large too. I can't afford to keep buying new PCs all the time, and I'm afraid my athlon XP2000+ will have to do me at least another year.
I have an old PC in the house running Slackware 9.1 and GNOME 2.4 which is quite slow. The GNOME terminal runs like treacle on a cold winter's morning. If I fire up a traditional xterm, it's nice and fast.
I really wish I had time to delve through the source to see just where all this bloat and slowness is coming from. It used to be that KDE was the fatty boom boom of desktop environments, but the GNOME people seem to have out-done the C++ folks in plain old C.
What the heck is going on?
Anyway, life's too short to look at boring desktop environment code. Life's also too short to run a bloaty, slow desktop environment.
I'll just stick to a plain window manager and some xterms.
Stick Men
I have to disagree with you. I don't know if you have ever used Debian, but I have and I love it. Here's why (I think the same arguments apply for Gentoo and FreeBSD): package management Just Works.
This is due to two factors. The first is that Debian (Gentoo, etc.) has good packaging tools. They will automatically resolve dependencies, fetching as needed from the 'net, CD-ROM or wherever you tell them from. Upgrades are a simple matter of one command, etc. etc. you can get the full story from any zealot.
The second factor is that pretty much anything is available as a Debian package (Gentoo/BSD port, etc.). This means that you don't have to resort to compiling from source, installing alien packages, etc. You just apt-get install gnome and *poof* it goes and fetches 127 MB of packages and eats nary 426 MB of your disk space.
Now, if distributions were to not package some software, package management would fail on those distros. Package management on Slackware is pretty weak because of this already. When I used Slackware, I compiled from source a lot. I like Debian so much because I don't have to do that.
Of course, packaging takes enormous time and effort. This is why Debian can pull it off and Slackware cannot.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Look at where the Ximian folks landed on the Novell org chart vs the Suse folks and you pretty much know where the Novell desktop distro is heading : GNOME.
What does that have to do with the discussion at all?
1. The discussion is about GNOME being dropped from Slackware. You see KDE or Qt in here?
2. Qt will cost you money if you are doing commercial development. You see that mentioned in the story somewhere?
3. KDE can still win in the current situation. Last I checked, it was doing just fine, besides the problems you signal.
Thank you, you can go now.
this is wrong. you can still install GNOME in Mandrake. do you mean 'default install' or 'not included in the distro'?
I have installed and used GNONE (and KDE) from commercial Mandrake 10 release.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
I know a fair number of people who dislike KDE because it looks and feels like Windows.
The desktop that should be used is the one that lets you work the most effectively whilst also being safe.
I'm sure KDE and GNOME would both pass as 'safe', but only KDE has the kind of consistency throughout that lets a user be confident in what they are doing. They are confident that without looking at the screen the enter key will acknowledge 'OK' the question window that he or she knows will have just opened. They can work speedily in the file open or save as dialogs.
Gnome and GTK has never offered this.
I got over Slackware dropping Enlightenment. Getting over Gnome being dropped from the distro should be easy.
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
I didn't see anyone complaining about the kde dependency on libqt. libqt IS NOT FREE Software. It is released under a dual license QPL. It is GPL'ed in some cases. In the event that you want to release bsd licensed code that uses libqt...you must buy a commercial QT license. On windows linking against qt is even more restrictive! In theory once it is GPL'ed...it is GPL'ed. Legally (IANAL) dual licensing adds restrictions on top of the GPL and would most likely fail in court. However, no one knows for sure on any of this so the best thing to do is steer clear of dual licenses. (Mysql is all dual licensed by the commercial clause is no where near as restrictive.)
:(){
You hate KDE, because it feels like Windows. Well, join the club!
But err, what does it have to do with a discussion about GNOME? GNOME feels like Windows, too, and just because it gets dropped from Slackware doesn't mean you have to use KDE. You can do just fine without either one of them, and you can even get GNOME from outside Slackware if you want to run it.
As far as getting to the masses goes... A wise man once said "Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool would want to use it." Would you rather be using a system that is best for you, or best for the masses?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
A full Slackware install EVEN WITH having to download and Dropline is going to be the fastest (by an order of magnitude) path to a working desktop. Slackware remains the easiest to maintain as well. If nothing else, most of us that use it for servers (and there are a lot of us) will continue to use it for a desktop.
Simplicity has always been Slackware's strong point.
And as for not having Gnome losing software, I don't think Gnome or KDE are the same exactly between any two distros.
Further, isn't Slackware still the only commercial distro that makes a profit? I don't see it going anywhere. Even if Pat said "the hell with it!", I think the user base is strong enough to keep it going-- just like debian and Gentoo...
Acquiescence leads to obliteration
1 - who says that Novell will use Gnome as the default desktop?
Ermmm... Novell. They have made vague statements about continuing to support KDE for consumers, but their business systems are *ALL* GNOME-based.
IBM is sponsoring KDE, so who knows they will use KDE in the end.
No, IBM are trying hard not to alienate anyone, including KDE. I can assure you that their forthcoming desktop will not feature Qt in any central role (althought it will likely be installed)... effectively ruling out KDE.
SUN's corporate desktop... since when did SUN have a significant share in the desktop market?
Sun sold half million GNOME desktops (in the form of JDS) to the Chinese -- with 200 million more lined up. It's also sold half a million to the NHS in Britain... as well as a number of other large contracts. You really should try to keep up with the news, dear boy. Sun has more commercial GNOME deployments than KDE can ever dream of.
2 - on what do you base that Slackware has no user base?
I didn't say it has no user base. I said no-one who matters uses it. Which is true. Slackware is utterly irrelevant in the larger Linux world of 2004.
3 - it's not a bashing story, just a report about a mail in the dropline forum.
No, it's a bashing story. Have you actually *read* it, and noted the wording?
I think this is one example of a broader problem, which is that there is now this huuuuuuge body of interdependent software that starts with the letter G, and the size of that body of software has scaled beyond the ability of its developers to manage it effectively using the casual approach to software development that they've been using. I actually use Fluxbox, and therefore don't care all that much about KDE vs GNOME, but I've still had lots of hassles with the whole software infrastructure that is associated with GNOME.
For instance, the Pango library recently went through a bunch of changes, and now wants all its data files in a different place, and this broke pretty much every piece of application software on my system after I updated the Pango library. When I ran any of the affected apps, the Pango library would print out an error message suggesting how to rebuild the data directories, but the procedure they suggested didn't actually work. After much posting on usenet, the only solution I've found is to wait six months for the smoke to clear before trying to upgrade Pango.
Another interesting example is a music application called GNU Solfege; every time I've tried to install it within the last 2 years or so, it's failed, and it's always failed for a different reason. Basically it depends on so many libraries that your chances of having all of them simultaneously in the right state is zero.
Another scaling-related issue is that GNOME is simply way too slow. I've tried it several times, at intervals of a year or so, and it's always been just ridiculously slow. I keep hearing, "Oh, they've worked on that, it's faster now," but when I try it, it's still too slow. I don't think this kind of performance problem could ever exist for year after year in a small software project. But in a big OSS project like GNOME, nobody really feels individually responsible for bad performance.
The standard Eric Raymond party line seems to be that open source always scales better than closed source (with enough eyeballs, ...), but I think it's more accurate to say that open source works best when there's a small number of developers, and they're determined to avoid bloat.
Find free books.
KDE is a pretty nice desktop. But it doesn't matter how nice it is, no single desktop will take over the Linux desktop. And KDE has two additional strikes against it. First, KDE is based on Qt and Qt's current license is a problem (dual GPL/commercial). Also, a significant number of people don't like the fact that it's C++-based.
On Slack: if you like Slack better than other Linux distros then you haven't spent enough time with FreeBSD.
On Pat: Pat is Linux's Theo de Raadt. Neither deserve the hatred they get but both like to push buttons that a more diplomatic person wouldn't touch.
Who cares what Slackware does? Noone uses Slackware anymore except a few elitist dinosaurs. It is irrelevant as a modern distro.
HP cancelled their GNOME on HP-UX port, which should tell you more about HP-UX than GNOME... ie. that HP-UX is not their leading workstation OS anymore, so it doesn't require active graphical desktop development. HP continue to be involved in the GNOME Foundation, to great effect.
slackware comes with multiuser support and has done so for some time. i have several accounts on my slackware pc.
Issues that caused me to switch to KDE circa Redhat 8...
:-)
:-)
1) Miguel de Icaza.
I will never forgive him for beginning work on Mono, fracturing the limited number of developers for the GNOME Desktop. Setting it back probably years behind KDE. For What? A Microsoft red herring planted there strategically to insure any Linux Desktop application framework built on Mono could be stopped easily using copyright, DMCA and patent law....SHOULD it become too popular.
2) The Lack of decent or equivalent KDE development tools. KDevelop? KDesigner? KCacheGrind? KDevelop Assistant? The list is endless and the above applications will squash anything the GNOME community has like a grape to develop fine bugfree native Linux applications.
If you do not have a coherent development framework how the hell can you develop anything decent? No wonder the Distro/End User GNOME community is fundamentally stressed out. These sorts of complaints do not exist in the KDE community.
There are different ones.
But they do not involve resorting to talk out in the open about dumping a desktop linux initiative such as GNOME. This is VERY serious.
The last gaffe that happened of this sort was xfree86....which is now relegated to the dust bin of history. But, AT LEAST it was reborn better than ever!
Perhaps, what is required....is a FORK of the GNOME Desktop project? A fork of GNOME may breath new life into addressing some of its ill's...one of which is listed below...
3) The Object Oreintation Thingy. I am really sorry if a lot of the GNOME developers think OOD when it comes to the GUI apps is so passe' I think GObject library is a throw back to the stone age, personally. I mean for Christ sake, if your going to reinvent the Object Oreintation of your GUI framework just because you cannot/do not/will not learn C++, you get the build complexity we keep reading about that is killing the GNOME release cycles.
This is a CLUE: Adopt, understand and learn how to build a OOD/OOP conceptual framework for your interfaces and DUMP GObject. Stop reinventing what C++ already gives you. With that RANT I present Exhibit A:
#include
struct GTypeModule;
struct GTypeModuleClass;
gboolean g_type_module_use (GTypeModule *module);
void g_type_module_unuse (GTypeModule *module);
(ad naseum)
I really FEEL for you if you have to deal with the kind of crap above.
4) Finally, though I am not a GNOME fan by any means, I would hate to see the distro's...drop GNOME. It is too early to decide on a Linux Desktop architecture, per se, because there are not enough mature options out there. If you cut too many options out too early you kill a lot of innovation. That is something I feel will happen if distro's start telling people we are not supporting GNOME, if you want it go somewhere else and get the RPM's....and GOOD LUCK! We need options to fight Microsoft when they start excercising their massive patent portfolio. Which IS going to happen by the way when they start running out of money....which won't be too far off into the future. Most American companies in the software biz can't innovate their way out of a paper bag, so expect Microsoft to radically step up the Patent attacks in early 2006.
Don't ask how I know that year either.
I won't tell.
-hackus
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I use packages that require GTK and KDE. My single biggest gripe about KDE and Gnome is that for me to function, I need 400megs of crap if I want to make sure I have a good foundation for me work. This is just retarded. Now is the time for all good distributions to merge for the sake of the open-source community. Both packages are excellent. Time to make the community more mean and lean, I don't care if it is knome or gde, just pick a fricken API.
Seriously, does anyone spell check this stuff before it hits the internet? Patrick Volkerding
While I respect Slackware's deicison, KDE is too busy for me (it has matured over the last couple of years). Gnome is nice and clean, but the dependancy tree for gtk is no better than qt. After using UNIX as my primary desktop for the last 3 years, I've personally settled on fvwm, a simple window manager, for both it's reliability and efficiency .
eldapo
I don't hate it but it really sucks.
OK maybe I do hate it...
KDE is grossly overbloated. It consumes most of the resources available and slows the system down.
It is real noticeable on even a 2GHz Athlon & 1.6Gb RAM.
KDE looks terrible compared to gnome. Seems to be going more for cute than useful.
What's "KDE" mean? "Kawai Desktop Environment"?
How about less kawai and more function?
If Hello Kitty ever goes "open source" it would surely fit perfectly in KDE.
Gnome aint as bad yet. But it's getting there.
I still prefer fvwm to both. I do like useful much more than I like cute.
"I've used Gnome 2.8 and the SB still sucks. I unmerged it and only use KDE now due to the terrible spatial browser in Gnome... Yes, I know you can fiddle about with the GConf editor to make it behave correctly, but if you need to jump through hoops to fix a problem that really shouldn't be there any more, why bother?"
If only Windows users were so easy to persuade.
Gnome has dramatically improved in terms of less bloat, better performance, and stability and is becoming very popular. Fortunately distros like Gentoo, Fedora, or Debian are committed to supporting Gnome.
its not that pat wants one DE its that gnome is taking too much effort for so little when dropline is good enough.
Specifically: KDE just builds, while Gnome takes pat a week of hair-pulling to fix up. Which sounds to me like a wakeup call for the Gnome developers to get their act together with respect to debugging the build before releasing versions.
Assuming it's not already too late and we're beyond the cusp-catastrophy bifurcation point and over the cusp onto the KDE side.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm sure there are other points to consider but from the visual perspective selecting between KDE and Gnome is a no brainer. KDE just looks a hell of a lot better than Gnome.
For your correction to my spelling error.
Does anybody else here refuse to use KDE simply because of its retarded naming scheme?
Did you mean "retarded", like:
* gnibbles
* grip
* gaim
* gnome-about
* gnome-bug
* gnome-calculator
* gcalctool
* gnome-character-map
* gnome-desktop-item-edit
* gnome-dictionary
* gnome-dump-metadata
* gnome-font-install
* gnome-gen-mimedb
* gnome-gtkhtml-editor-1.1
* gnome-keyring-daemon
* gnome-moz-remote
* gnome-name-service
* gnome-open
* gnome-panel
* gnome-panel-preferences
* gnome-panel-screenshot
* gnome-print-manager
* gnome-pty-helper
* gnome-search-tool
* gnome_segv
* gnome-stones
* gnomevfs-cat
* gnomevfs-copy
* gnomevfs-info
* gnomevfs-ls
* gnomevfs-mkdir
* gnomine
* gnotski
* gimp
* gimptool
etc., etc.
I love the smell of flaimbait in the morning...
Let's face it, the time is coming for one desktop to truly assert its dominance. We all knew a great KDE/GNOME fight like this was coming.
If I wanted something that looked like Windows, I'd use Windows. Why use a primative interface when there are other options? Whatever happened to the good old days when I could run Afterstep as the WM with Gnome on top of it? Both sucked so bad before I got out that I was using mainly Enlightenment, but I also used a little bit of everything. Now that I'm an Aqua user, I have my Next/Open/AfterStep-like interface, so everything is good. I hate the Start/Foot/K button! Just give me a dock and a prompt everything is good.
I've been using gnome on all my linux machines. But over time, I like it less and less, as it moves more towards a "newbie" kind of desktop and away from what it used to be.
:-(
Also it seems there's a lot of momentum in the Linux world towards KDE and away from gnome. This kind of makes me a bit sad because KDE to me seems more like a windows knock-off. But otoh, I just don't see a promising future for gnome.
Ah well
Any real shop would find it a bargin comparing the quality of the documentation alone.
It's NOTHING MORE than a god-forsaken GUI API. If I need excessive documentation, IT IS BROKEN and OVERCOMPLICATED. "Quality of documentation" means absolutely Jack Shit. I can get free quality documentation about the Windows API from Microsoft. It's not a reason to switch. Platforms will be chosen based on what most customers are running. Right now that's Windows, and there's no way in hell that anybody will switch to QT simply to provide a Linux version to the minority of their customers.
You might have some other legitimate reason for preferring Gtk, like for example your coders don't know C++, but blaming license cost is a joke.
Are you BRUTALLY RETARDED, or just a Trolltech employee? Once you have the hardware and OS:
Cost of developing on Windows: $0 (the Visual C++ compiler is free).
Cost of developing on Linux: $0.
Cost of developing with GTK: $0.
Cost of developing with QT: $7,480 PER FUCKING SEAT.
Imagine a development shop that has, say, 10 programmers. Are you going to tell me that $74,800 in licence costs is nothing? They could hire at least one more programmer as well as an intern - AND buy top-of-the-line hardware for everybody in the company for that! (FYI, sticking with one platform, Microsoft's compiler and development tools and API documentation are COMPLETELY free).
THE COST OF QT MAY NOT BE A PROBLEM TO YOU. BUT IT IS FOR THE VAST MAJORITY, INCLUDING ME.
If you expect Linux desktop applications to be written, stop trying to let Trolltech ass-rape potential developers with excessive tool costs. The tools should cost NOTHING. Linux development is supposed to be an inexpensive solution.. with QT it is not. Even Microsoft treats their developers with more respect and gives them more freedom to use the API than Trolltech does.
And so, I come to the conclusion that Trolltech Hates Linux. There can be no other reason for them to want to restrict and try to KILL LINUX DEVELOPMENT so much.
(A wxWidgets fan, who codes raw Win32 & MFC user interfaces for a living...)
Fewer operating systems! Fewer trouser styles! And fewer pencils! These are all counting nouns (as opposed to mass nouns like "water", "dirt", or "pudding", in which case "less" is correct). Use "fewer" when talking about using a lesser number of them. Especially when using it in repetition!
Ghome has been dead after they gutted Gnome-1.4 and released the 2.x series. I loved the 1.4 series and all the tweaks a power user could make to their environment. The 2.x series has everyone doing everything the way the developers think is best. This may work for computer novices, but there is no way to create a catch-all environment that will solve all tasks. I have more power with Windows XP than I have with the 2.x series of Gnome. It really saddens me to see this happen. But it does look like KDE is rapidly becoming the most dominant desktop for Linux. Oh well, we still have the GTK tool kit which is pretty cool.
I myself perfer KDE, but I don't care which is picked. I wish the entire community would FOCUS their energy/time on one desktop and go with it. It will help Linux get a broader user base that much faster.
I don't see that as code, but as configuration.
But if you don't like it, simply go with Gnome, or anything else. Or again, you can modify/fork it, as happens with Goneme. Or just be on your own, as there are no further options...
Got Pike?
I've just recently seen the new gnome and it looks and acts (or can be modified to) look like windows. This is a good thing for the "unwashed masses". The geeks can alway hack it up however they like, but if you want a mojority of people to use it, it must be consistent and windows user freindly. /rant
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
Why do we have to follow the conceptual desktop UI that MS has laid out?
Two words: Try Kasbar.
You could also disable desktop icons, and set click on desktop to open KMenu.
Magic! You got a Windowmaker feel in a KDE desktop.
Got Pike?
GNOME to drop Slackware, film at 11.
(Since I noticed that I couldn't view page two because "This Account Has Been Suspended")
./configure'ed source,
I had been wondering when Pat was going to give us Slackers Gnome 2.8. I had heard he didn't much care for Gnome, and I decided to ask him when we might be seeing it in -current. I emailed him.
Quote:
Troy McFerron
to volkerdi
Oct 6 (1 day ago)
I have been using Slackware 10.0 for about a month now and having
switched from Redhat based distros, I am really enjoying it.
My only issue is that Gnome 2.8 has been released for some time now
and there aren't any Slackware packages available to allow me a clean
upgrade path. I could install it from source (with a lot of hair
pulling), but would prefer official packages. 2.8 is a signifigant
release for the GNOME project, and I think a lot of people would be
happy to see it go into -current, so we could upgrade.
I hope this is something that is close to happening and I am bothering
you for no reason, but its something that Ubuntu has by default and
most other distros have easy to install packages for.
Thanks,
Troy McFerron
This was his reply:
Quote:
On Wed, 6 Oct 2004, Troy McFerron wrote:
> I hope this is something that is close to happening and I am bothering
> you for no reason, but its something that Ubuntu has by default and
> most other distros have easy to install packages for.
GNOME 2.8? I'm not aware of too many distributions that contain that.
Anyway, suffice to say the jury is still out. Since GNOME 1.4 I've felt
that GNOME is going in a direction that doesn't fit well with Slackware's
goals, and for at least as long I've considered removing it completely and
taking whatever flames I get for that decision. Right now, I think
removing it would be the best thing for Slackware as it's become a
maintainance nightmare (unlike nearly every other
GNOME doesn't build into packages easily with DESTDIR).
Not what you wanted to hear, I'm sure, but I do believe it would be best
to let Dropline produce Slackware's GNOME and quit wasting my own time
with it. Probably 1/3 of developement time here is used maintaining
GNOME, and *most* of the bug reports I get have something to do with GNOME
(and aren't bugs I caused, or can fix). KDE, on the other hand, tends to
build using the existing build scripts with no changes at all. I can
start the build and come back to finished packages in a few hours. A
GNOME update usually takes at least a week of manual labor, and another
week of cleaning up broken things. It's been a long time (like I said,
around GNOME 1.4), since I've felt the effort was worth the return.
Sincerely,
Pat
Red Hat has followed by splitting their Desktop Linux out to Fedora which is community driven
Er, no. Red Hat has a desktop product which includes both Gnome and KDE. Red Hat likes Gnome, and pays a lot of Gnome developers. IIRC, RHEL 4 will include Gnome 2.8, as will FC3.
Red Hat Desktop: http://www.apac.redhat.com/software/rhel/desktop/
PS - This isn't in reponse to your post - sorry about that. I wanted to get it up top tho, as its a common misconception.
Since the distro is basically a KISS philosophy this is about time. Since the desktops are starting to get functional this kind of thing will happen more, before you needed kde/gnome because neither alone could handle most common tasks.
Slackware was my fave distro pre-gentoo, nice to see it going back to its roots.
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
I really don't think something like this will ever happen.
/me is currently using Dropline Gnome 2.8.0 on all my machines and loving it!
Slackware does and should continue to come with some sort of GNOME installation.
When I first tried Linux I started with Mandrake/KDE. It was pretty good, but eventually I tried to install something that wasn't prepackaged for my distro and soon came to realize what "RPM Hell" was. Soon after a friend introduced Slackware to me. I was immediately impressed by its simplicity and have used it since. Around the same time I tried out GNOME, and was hooked. Over the years I have tried many other distros and new versions of KDE, but Slackware/GNOME is for me. Dropline has only improved on the experience.
What I hope for is that Todd and Patrick will work together to make sure that a version of Dropline GNOME is included. That way Patrick won't have to deal with compiling it himself, and those people without bandwidth won't have to spend a day installing GNOME on their system.
Of course, the best case scenario would be that the GNOME build process gets improved to the point where you will be able to type just a few commands and let it go wild with the entire build process. I hear KDE is much like this and GNOME should be too! Garnome is great and all, but it could probably be handled even better.
If Slackware were to lose GNOME support entirely, I would surely stop using it.
</rant>
It is a waste having two *nix desktops.
There are always companies whining about how they would make more stuff for linux but they are scared away by their being too many libraries, environments etc and not one standard to program to.
There should be one dominant linux desktop project with everyone throwing in their efforts to compete against proprietary desktops instead of competing against each other.
If the industry were "focusing on one solution", they wouldn't be splitting into two camps, supporting either GNOME or KDE. This (possible) move reflects the strength of Novell/Ximian behind GNOME (especially Evolution), with Novell competitors building a strategy to compete, either with or against GNOME. Luckily, the two desktop systems are themselves converging, with a single MIME system, and a single URL delegation system each developing with recent releases. Hopefully the differences, with both systems installed, will eventually become entirely presentation style differences, reflected only in which script a helpdesk operator uses to support all the same features in all the same apps, but perhaps in different GUI paths and widget appearances.
--
make install -not war
The issue here is that getting Gnome built is a headache that Pat finds onerous given that he is known to prefer KDE, and while Todd is happy to distribute Dropline Gnome, Pat might be excused for not wanting to duplicate the effort.
If you are looking for the LATEST edition of Gnome Developer News, you got
1 8-July24.html
http://developer.gnome.org/news/summary/2004_July
Look at the date again. Yep. The JULY issue IS THE LATEST !
Gnome used to be my favorite GUI, unfortunately, it has LOST TOUCH with the userbase, and this time, the DEVELOPER_BASE as well !
NOVELL settled on KDE look here and here.
kompulsory?
telly
LOl like the #1 KDE supporter is slack lol , Slackware cant even support itself ...
Dropline is not that great. I have tried to install it twice on my AMD K6 II 500 megahertz pc and it has totally tanked the OS. It just is good foor older processers. It is a good thing I got Gnome installed before they tried to drop it. Man they will screw you every chance they get.
I used Gnome since around 1.4 and am of the same disposition most people who started using it at that time are. I don't want to rant about how there's no freedom in Gnome anymore etc., that's been done. In fact I don't even have a point, just some thoughts.
I switched to KDE3 after Gnome 2.6 (I was kind of heading for the door at 2.4 but I thought I'd give their new direction a try at least). Initially KDE3 was heaven; everything was configurable. But then it was hell; everything was configurable. I went in search of an old flame, Enlightenment, but that flame had died out, I just hadn't noticed.
Then I discovered XFCE4, just the right balance of configurability and simplicity (for me at least). Now I use 10% Gnome, 60% KDE, and 30% other (rox mostly). I have the best of everything and it all fits together beautifully. XFCE4 is so unopposing that everything can live together in harmony.
Maybe people are right and there should be one common desktop, but for all the people like me out there who like neither Gnome or KDE entirely, I'd like to recommend XFCE4, it's kind of rad.
as it says above...
We, as an open source community need to stop squaballing about the inclusion of GNOME or KDE. Truth is, average computer user doesn't know how to use "make install DESTDIR=~/pkg" they need their hand held. As a open source community we need to make software simpler to ultimately achieve the goal of converting more people to Linux. This must be done without sacrificing usability. This way people of all skillsets from the average Joe to SysAdmins and effectively utilize Linux, something XP hasn't done yet. If we can beat the enemy to this point, then we win a major battle. As for KDE or GNOME, I think both are very good. I'm more partial toward KDE myself (being a big SUSE fan) but I can easily use GNOME myself. Please do note that Pat hasn't made a decision, if he does, please remember that he will be thinking about an open-source commmandment... "OPTIONS ARE ALWAYS GOOD!!!" until then, we'll have to sit back and watch.
On my desktop my coding/gaming computer I only use fluxbox. Its simple takes up very little resources and dosnt bloat my system. I only have the programs I want installed. On my laptop my school/work machine I have KDE installed. This is becasue KDE has alot of tools that are really usefull in school(for chem and trig). I dont like the look and feel of gnome and its lack of features. Anyway this hole thing about KDE/Gnome being more windowize, well they both are use fluxbox.
If the biggest thing you can find to bitch about is whether all the names start with a G(nu) or Gnome vs. K(de), then I'd say both desktops have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
Personally I use both, but I use Gnome for my personal account. GTK is cross platform; so is Qt. My guess is Qt might be better for Windows porting, but as far as Linux itself goes I don't really see much difference. In both cases I just configure until it works the way I want.
Programming is another issue, but I haven't done enough with either to say which is truly "better", and it would just be my personal opinion anyhow. After working with 2-3 other GUI toolkits over the years, I realized they all basically work the same, some just have a cleaner programming interface or more default/standard widgets.
The whining about package dependencies is just that -- whining. Go ahead and try and install something that requires IE components under Windows and see how far you get if you manage to remove IE. The same goes for Gnome's "Bonobo" CORBA support or Qt under KDE. If the package was built with particular software in mind it will need to have it installed.
Or is everyone going to start crying about all the HTML display components that require Mozilla as well? Perhaps you'd like to get rid of glibc because you like another ANSI C library?
Wah.
Wah. Wah. Wah.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Dropline Gnome will still be around though. Dropline Gnome is specifically meant for Slackware and I prefer it over the Slackware default gnome anyways. I guess it is better this way, forcing the user to download dropline gnome rather than allowing them to use a retarded gnome.
The Trolltech license model is confusing and vauge and bothers me to no end.
Actually I'd argue that we do.
It doesn't need to be unified but it does need to be standard, that way we're all on the same page, which cuts a lot of redundancy out of writing consumer level books and tutorials. That will help Linux move into the desktop. When someone says it should look like this it should, rather than the author having to give 10 examples of how it might look and finishing with "Check your documentation" at that point novice users put it down and go buy Windows.
I also think that by having a grossly popular desktop more gifted developers can focus on more than one project, rather than having to worry about being a GTK or QT expert they can just learn whatever everyone is using and there by make software easier, that's the number one reason Windows even took off in the first place. This would mean when someone makes a good calculator we can call it calculator and not gtkalc or Kalculator or something. I'm not saying variety doesn't have it's merit but standardization has huge merits aswell
SING IT BRUTHA!
sigh, I just installed Slackware 10.0 on my room mate's computer and I was going to download dropline gnome (Gnome 2.8) I even had the download page up with link and then Slashdot had to come along and slashdot the webserver:
s ta ller-2.4.9-i686-1dl.tgz. 0.iso.torrent
"This Account Has Been Suspended
Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible."
Doh!
http://www.dropline.net/gnome/files/dropline-in
^^ doesn't work, but the ISO for "The complete Dropline GNOME binary and source distributions can be downloaded via a pair of ISO images for easy burning to CD-ROM. These images are currently only available at the following BitTorrent links:" does work: http://morva.dropline.net/~fflew/torrents/dlg-2.8
"Um.... Are you serious? if they're not appealing to their clients then their clients will move to something that will. Thus, they should wake up or lose a lot of their user base."
Who's "their clients" and why do they all suspiciously look like you?
"Thus, they should wake up or lose a lot of their user base."
No, and unless you haven't been paying attention to all the responses in this story. They very much have a user base that agrees with their decisions.
What you really mean is that "you" will not be using Gnome. A fact that no one will try to take away from you. Just don't pretend that you will excel at predicting Gnome's future, by using your own biases.
Er, you could always borrow/steal some other computers and use distcc. It takes me less than one night to do a full gentoo install, with all my favourite toys. :-)
Problem is when you wanna set em all up at once, it takes just as long as installing them seperately..
I might get mod down for this... but here it goes.
My company recently made the switch to Linux, replacing most of our Windows desktops with Linux (servers are all already *NIX).
I was invovled with the project since the planning stage, and everyone seemed to agree that GNOME was the best choice because at the time (and it might still is), GNOME was the default desktop for most commercial distros. We thought to ourselves: "Oh well, these guys must know something that we don't." Most of us ran KDE, we gave GNOME a small test drive, decided that it looked easy enough and voted for it.
Big mistake.
First of all, GNOME lacked documentation on how to customize it. For gconfd, the GNOME web site only provided 2 links, one of which is dead, and the other was last updated in the year 2000. I asked around on IRC, posted on forums and newsgroups, emailed the GNOME developers, but I did not get any responses. I ended up taking apart all the %gconf.xml files myself, and saving a profile and writing an ugly script to convert it for every user. I am sure there is a better way, but either no one has done it, or nobody cared to share.
What's worse, are the bugs. There are minor bugs that really put a dent on the overall Linux experience, especially for those users that we just switched over. Some of them have already heard about how great Linux is, and how "stable" it is. This only makes them angrier when their Nautilus window craps out and leaves them a core dump (shows up as a little bomb). I looked up some of the bugs, most were already filed, but none fixed. Just a little while ago, there was an email on the nautilus list asking people to help fix bugs, so I think some of the developers agree with me that there are way too many outstanding bugs. When I asked some of the GNOME developers, the response I got then was to "upgrade to 2.6, it is much better than 2.4!". Sounds familiar? Yup, Microsoft told me the same thing.
The similarity doesn't end there. I installed 2.6 and tested it. In my opinion, it was worse. Yes, the spatial view is kind of cool, but you know what it reminded me of? Windows 95. And there is no easy way to turn it off (I would have expected to have it as an option in the drop-down menus). It was not more stable either, but I WAS running an early build of it. I, again, complained to some people about how 2.6 did not quite live up to my expectations, and the answer? "Wait for 2.8, it's GREAT!"
All of this is not helping the Linux desktop movement, especially in my company, where the management was already not really happy about switching over to an "inferior" OS. This just gives them more "evidence" to talk about: "We were right. My WindowsXP box crashed much less often. Linux IS a piece of crap!" But in reality, it was only Nautilus that was crapping out when connecting to a WebDAV mounted drive, not the underlying OS... but they won't understand that, would they?
"Check online polls, KDE always comes out as no 1."
And CowboyNeal comes out on Slashdot polls.
Just why exactly why do you think they post all those warnings directly below the results?
What we need is a grand unified desktop API. One where I can call "createIcon()" or "queryIcon()" or "deleteIcon()", etc., to add, query, delete, or otherwise manipulate the user's desktop(s). Trying to support KDE 2, KDE 3, Gnome, and any other potential desktops is impossible. We have a "create icons" tool for our (commercial) product, and of those who have owned the tool, one was fired, two were laid off, and the latest just quit, all in the span of 2 years. That's actually two independant statements, completely unrelated, but it is an interesting fact to me :-)
In short, a common desktop API would be incredibly useful. From a purely commercial standpoint, it would be just as useful to have only one Linux desktop. Personally, I'd love to see the opensource competition that drives each project to become better, but there does need to be some co-operation, just like OOo and KOffice and others are standardising on common XML document formats, making it easier for not only document interchange, but for others to write to the spec. We need that programmability for the desktops, too.
Fedora is not "community driven". It's basically beta for subsequent versions of the expensive Red Hat Enterprise Linux. RHEL is not just servers, it's also for workstations, and Gnome is the main GUI for the workstations.
Novell has bought both SUSE and Ximian, and they aren't planning to throw that work away.
Slackware is an oddity as a one-man distro; one guy can't support everything in the world, so he might have to drop something, or "outsource" it to the Dropline guys. But before people start tossing out the phrase "distributions like Slackware", they should be able to point to at least one other distro that made the same decision that Slackware did. Hint: there aren't any.
Gnome and KDE are going to co-exist for some time. Get used to it. Gnome apps run under a KDE desktop and vice versa, and the glitches are being worked out so that this integration continues to improve.
Suse 9.1 pro. KDE 3.3 And plenty of disk space.
.02 cents..
When I install, I select ALL packages. ALL of them.
Then I install apt-get and install even more crap.
I do not use Gnome as my GUI but hey, there are a lot of Gnome apps out there and some of them I find handy and can still run them from KDE. I don't care if it's QT or GTK, if it does what I need, I use it. Really. And so what about trolltech license? What are they gonna do, send some ninjas to shoot me with a blow dart gun in the night because I don't like their license?
Whoopy-doo.... It's there, use it if you need it. And a few times, I dicked up KDE so bad that I had to boot into gnome for a little while to repair KDE, rather than wipe the disk and start over. I haven't reformatted, wiped or lost my home directory in two years, despite numerous upgrades, crashes, and constant fiddling. I've had to fall back on Gnome a few times to pull my KDE bacon out of the fire so I say leave it in. What's the problem with the size of hard drives these days and DL DVD's ???
Just my
how about the "g" in "gtk" (the Gimp ToolKit)
It's the Soviet Russia of the mind.
Play Command HQ online
In the open source community this will only make Gnome more popular.
Damn lamers slashdotted my favorite forum....
Silly news site and its associated disease
This is timely. I built a triple-boot PC for my father last year. He recently got DSL, so I needed to update all the network settings. (I did it this morning.)
/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf, and changed them in vi in a terminal (which would not accept BACKSPACE or DEL as valid keys for erasing; I used "dl".) Then I restarted rc.inet1. The IP Address did not change, so I rebooted.
The first issue was that Earthlink provided a DSL modem with only one network jack. He also has a laptop, so he needed another port. $60 got a Linksys WRT54G. He will (probably) buy a wireless PCMCIA network card for the laptop next Spring. I turned off the wireless capablilities, and he has a good router.
Then I changed the network settings for MSWindows98SE on the PC and the laptop. Only 3 reboots each. (It could have been less if I remembered to configure DNS the first time.)
Then I changed RedHat9. There is a GUI for the network settings. Changed the settings. "/etc/init.d/network restart". Perfect. (But why did it tell me to restart the network? It knew it needed to be done. Just do it.)
Then I looked for the network settings in Slackware. I could not find any admin tool to even display the settings. Finally found the
I then tried to figure out how to map the MSWindows share on the laptop for the Linuxes. They refused to see it before I had to head home.
---
The RedHat is probably 9.0. The Slackware is either 9 or 10. The newer Slackware was more difficult to configure than the old RedHat.
[I previously had difficulty because I changed Slackware to boot to the GUI by changing the runlevel. Then I had to copy the startup scripts to the new runlevel. People have already suggested that was the wrong way to do it, although no one has told me how to boot to the GUI without changing the runlevel.]
As far as using them, my father likes KDE slightly better than Gnome, likely because he was trained on MSWindows, and KDE was much closer to MSWindows on the versions he is using. He browses the internet from all 3 OSes (Mozilla on Windows and RedHat, and Konq on Slack), and rips and burns CDs using the Linuxes. He thinks it is fun to experiment with several OSes.
[Off-topic: I also installed Opera on Windows. He tried it once; it opened to Opera's homepage: "There was too much to read", so he gave up and went back to Mozilla.]
He does not have to administer the systems. KDE has been more difficult when it requires intervention.
EXCEPT: KDE detects new monitors much better than RedHat. When I delivered the PC, I had to use Slackware to change RedHat's monitor settings, and I just copied the settings from Slackware. (MSWindows98SE cannot see the Linux partitions.)
---
Yes, I know I am writing about obsolete versions. RedHat is completely obsolete, as Fedora is the current line, and the Slackware install is also over a year old. But most people are using whatever version they had handy. I only download the latest versions when I am installing a new system. Upgrading takes time and causes headaches; why bother?
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
Are they removing GNome completelly? If they are, what about Evolution, Rythmbox, The GIMP and GTK based apps? Doesn't this make these distributions similar to the crippled Windows versions that are sold overseas?
But for about the last 4 months, I've been using Gnome, and I don't even have KDE installed on my main Gentoo box. In fact, I've been writing a new visual theme for gnome over the weekend. I couldn't tell you exactly why I switched, except for a couple of pointers. For one, it seems like new technology is adopted earlier in Gnome. I'm sure some people would point to that and claim problems arise from it, but I haven't encountered anything bad. More than that, though, it's possible to have a level of polish in Gnome that I just can't get out of KDE - and I'm the type of user that designs my own themes (see here).
I don't know why for sure, but as of Gnome 2.6 and 2.8, the project just really seemed to come together. I still consider any gnome pre 2.4 to be pretty much unuseable; I didn't just change my mind. The recent builds convinced me.
Yeah, like "hooqqa" is a really cool fucking name...fuck off, you stupid cunt.
Great to see this! .... :-) ... :-)
Sheesh - has anyone else had a look at the number of dependencies that Gnome packages (**especially** Gnumeric) have ? Arrrrgh
I mean, gee - it's all very well grabbing that (and so testing apt for the good apt-devs), but it really is beyond a joke
Just look at the nonsense with Nautilus' so-called "spatial-browsing". A great example of a solution looking for a problem. Far too much of what the devs want, instead of what the USER wants. Viva KDE and fluxbox
1) Qt is GPL or QPL. You cannot create proprietary programs without paying trolltech. Standards should be free for whatever purpose, and that includes desktop api's.
2) Crazy amounts of buttons and options. Hello! It's even worse than windows in this regard. GNOME tends to copy Mac more, and most people agree that the Mac interface *is* easier to use than the Windows interface (ignoring the old menus on windows versus the one menu difference).
3) Otherwise KDE is very nice. But 1 and 2 kill it. Number 2 can be fixed, but it is highly unlikely that this will happen. I can never see 1 being fixed.
And for me, that settles it. Argue all you want about how you think everything should be GPL or how you think commercial users *should* pay to use the platform. I don't care. That is not my philosophy.
Volkerding, for crying out loud!
All this shows is a realization that HP-UX and Tru64 is becoming irrelevant on the desktop, so there is no point spending time and money updating to a new desktop.
How many people do you know buying new HP-UX desktops? How many of those people actually use it as their "productivity" desktop, rather than having a Windows (or maybe Linux) machine on the side? People who would buy them have existing applications that run well under CDE, and their life would not be improved by switching to GNOME; they'd probably rather not switch. The remaining future for all the proprietary Unixes is in the machine room, not on the desktop.
GNOME on Linux desktops makes far more sense, and HP is doing at least some work there; for example in supporting the Debian/GNOME-based Ubuntu distribution and in the hp441 multi-user desktop. (Don't know if that runs GNOME or not.)
I really wish everyone would. I cannot understand the approval here for restricting focus to one desktop implementation...are monopolies only negative when they're Microsoft imposed?
Similarly, the efforts of groups like freedesktop.org should encourage the development of new UI metaphors.
Funny coincidence today. In a hurry to get stuff done, I managed to take out some system libraries and then proceeded to reboot. Early morning, no caffeine, stuff happens.
Anyways, not wanting to have to deal with the Fedora core installs again, I popped open the Slackware 10.0 cds I got from a magazine.
God I miss slackware's interface. So much nicer and straightforward!
Want to know what else I miss? The speed. I'm running a 1Ghz athlon and with Fedora, the system was managing to get by with ALOT of disk swapping. I had Gnome running on the system and it is a bear. For that matter, so was KDE. The problem is that the GUI/WM has become laden with crap that really should be small efficient applications and not massive monstrosities causing my system to choke each time I want to start open office or surf the web. That's insane.
I fired up Slackware 10.0. Installed fvwm2 with some nice themes and noticed a few things:
Seriously, I'm glad my machine took a hit since I've been wondering what's been wrong with my machine. It wasn't my machine, but the way that KDE and GNOME are designed. Both are serious resource hogs. I'll run the occasional KDE app or Gnome app as needs arise, but unless it's pressing, I'll steer clear until they can figure out a way to play nice with the system and each other.
In response to the poster who mentioned that it takes a certain kind of courage to start from scratch, I agree... the first time around. The first time around, you realised you made a mistake and are starting over. That's fine. When you start from scratch over and over again, then there is something else wrong and you have to look at the process being applied to the project/problem/etc.
I too started with Slackware and am glad to be back on it. I'm thankful that someone(literally) kept working on it and kept it alive. The text install is sweet compared to the garish graphical ones.
I used to stand by Gnome and the fact that they were more true to the OS path. But that was due to the QT/Trolltech licensing issue, which has been resolved. Since then, KDE has consistently provided a more responsive environment while Gnome has continued to provide a more unified environment. But neither one is really all that great. You've only exchanged a maze of pop-up menus or pull-downs for the configuration text file. Neither one is really all that easy with the exception that once you've learned the text file method of configuring, you can do alot more than the menu method.
Both KDE and Gnome can learn something from projects like the Firefox project or the fvwm2 project: KISS.
If they can't slim down their overweight projects, then they basically begin the slide towards the MS end result: bloated software that runs slow even on fast hardware.
If I want a pretty interface that ran slow, I would run Mac OSX via PearPC.
I really wish both KDE and GNOME would stop trying to include every make and model of kitchen sink into their software and focus on the essentials: cross-compatibility, reliability, speed, small footprint, and usability.
Winged Power Photography
None of the hardware in my PC is supported in Windows 2000. I haven't tried XP, but I can't see how it would be any better. On the other hand, everything was instantly detected and used by Linux (Slackware in this case).
As an avid Slacker i've done my fair share of packaging. I've made well over 500 custom packages since 9.0 alone. When I installed dropline, I nearly shat my pants.
Dropline overwrites a crapload of system packages with versions built with new libraries which quickly lead to that dreaded "dependency hell" people in RPM distros talk about. Think about if you installed a bunch of Mandrake RPMs in Red Hat or SuSE. Even though dropline was designed for slackware, it changes way more things than it should just to provide a GNOME Desktop. I had to replace countless packages and eventually uninstall dropline in order to get my applications running again, and I had to rebuild a bunch of packages because I later found out they had been built with libraries only existing in dropline and not in standard slackware.
I am not alone in this though. Go into any common Slackware forum or irc channel and ask for horror stories about Dropline use. Many people have reported it doing crazy shit to their systems and never wanting to touch it again. It is NOT what I would want as the "official" GNOME Desktop for slack.
On a personal note, even though I prefer GNOME to KDE, I wouldn't mind getting rid of it in order to regain space on the install CD(s). Also keep in mind Slackware comes with a handful of different window manager alternatives including XFCE.
KDE gets a greater number of people using it as its got a nice centralised system to manage most components. That is the one aspect that makes me use KDE over Gnome even though I would love to use the exchange connectors and so on.
I used gnome first off.. didnt like it as there was no easy to use and configure place for the componets. Ive since started using kde as my default and I never have any problems...
Though it is a shame that there are more corporate packages availible for gnome (ximian etc etc etc). If only KDE had proper exchange/callendar support.
/.'ed
Here Linux branch.
Flavour OS/X-alike:
- gnome (base)
- mono (scripting desktop, RAD, etc..)
- XUL apps
Flavour OLD*-alike:
- KDE (optional)
- C based librarys
- C based apps.
- Python based apps
*temporal name.
Both will use the same kernel for a while.
-Woof woof woof!
Or if you wish to be cross-platform.
Closed source apps is not the only thing that requires a commercial QT license, non-Linux platforms (at least Windows) also requires a commercial QT license.
i have never liked the way kde looked or felt. it had a kind of cheesy, garish look about it, kind of like a third-rate pachinko machine. kartoony, i guess. i know it can be themed, of course, but there's something about it - almost intangible - that transcends the themes.
gnome looks/feels solid, neutral, reserved... it just has more class, IMHO.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Hi,
but what about accessibility. Last time i talked to a blind buddy on #irc he mentioned QT's major suckage in the accessibility sector (making KDE unusable for him). Has that changed? Am i misinformed? What about Gnome otoh? Using gtk2.x gives it at least all of gtk2's accessibility features.
KDE is written for the kind of people who liked OS/2's Workplace Shell -- a complete disaster of a user interface, designed by geeks, for geeks. I've been trying to get my wife and kids on Linux. KDE is horrible for new uers. Gnome, even with its numerous (in my opinion minor) shortcomings, is much better interface for someone who couldn't give a shit about computers -- they just want to send e-mail, type a school report, read web pages, maybe change the desktop theme or wallpaper. I tried to interest them at first with a Knoppix CD and the interface was *way* too busy. At the moment, we're using Gnome 2.8 on Fedora Core 3 Test 2. Even my 8-year-old has had few problems understanding and using it, while my two hackers -- a boy, 13, and a girl, 15 -- had the interface customized in about an hour of first logging on. That's the right balance. I sure hope we don't lose Gnome.
However, less techie people with PCs have become used to the Microsoft way of doing things and expect to see application menus jammed-packed with shortcut icons to "free" utilities and applications - unfortunate, but it's just the way of the world.
If Linux is to penetrate the desktop market, then it needs to present a single "unified" look to draw people away from Windows and the distro makers are bound to want to capitalise on that as much as possible, in order to make their products viable to users and businesses thinking of making the Windows to Linux desktop change. KDE is therefore the natural choice for that.
Personally, I don't care about Linux desktop penetration unless it means a lot more applications and games are released to run natively on Linux as a result.
However, I do hope that Gnome development will continue because it is still the desktop of choice for more experienced Linux users who want a compromise between lack of bloat and quick installation.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
You make a good point, but unfortunately, there are also points to the contrary. In order to understand why we have two libraries we have to see why KDE was developed in the first place (it was developed after Gnome). Why not just extend Gtk or Gnome?
I sympathize with this issue. My specific problem is that the KDE library and components is so damn huge - much larger than Gnome's... or for that matter, Gtk (you really don't need gnome).
www.dropline.net/gnome is the answer boy :))
Saxa
Saxa
Clearly, Gnome has exceeded its usefulness and will now walk the short road to oblivion following in the footsteps of BSD and Gentoo. I for one salute the courage of the few developers and far fewer users of Gnome who stuck with the project despite the fact that we all knew it would never amount to anything. It takes a lot of guts to throw mediocore code after bad.
Well,
KDE is based on C++ and not C while GNOME is based on C and not C#. Shows how little you know, realy.
And of corse - since it is KDE which uses the new technologies while GNOME is based on old technologies "Flavour OLD*-alike" is of wrong as well. Should be "Flavour NEW-alike" realy.
Maybe that KDE is older the GNOME - but GNOME was a huge step backwards and still is.
With Regards
Martin
One benefit from Slackware is it's less bloated compared to other Distribution. I use neither Gnome or KDE but if i need to made a decision I would prefer KDE! Gnome is more Evil with every new Release (I have used Gnome 1.x nearly 2 years). I think the Gnome HIG people smoke Crack, just look on the ugly Gtk File Dialog! Usability isn't improved, the opposite happens with Gnome. I really hope Gnome will be removed.
If KDE is so bleepin' configurable, how do I replace the default icons with something I like without trolling all over the net looking for new icons?
I suspect a great deal of Gnome's appeal is simply aesthetic -- people like the way it looks out of the box. And, they don't like the way KDE looks. To my eye, KDE's default appearance reminds me of a Denny's restaurant. (For non-Yanks, Denny's is a restaurant chain given to garish color schemes.)
Configuration options are nice, but only if you have a reason to use them. If, like most people, your interaction with the desktop is confined to clicking on icons to launch programs, you'll never touch those options.
I think the default KDE icons are ugly, and nonoe of the icon sets available after an install are much better. Ditto the rest of the window controls, color schemes, etc.
I've been to the usual KDE "art" sites, but haven't found anything that's better.
I'm not trolling, really. Is there a site that helps you tone down KDE? I've seen some nice screenshots, so it must be possible.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
all i had to do was emerge gnome-light
This "story" highlights the failure of so-called journalism taking place on sites like Slashdot.
There's been no verification that the remarks attributed to Slackware's Pat. V. are true. We simply have a single pseudonymous post to one online forum.
Where's the attempt to check with Pat V. to see if he actually made those remarks? Nowhere that I can see.
Slashdot, among others, lathered itself in sanctimonious glee when CBS was duped by a bogus memo. How is this any different?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I recently updated my main machine at home from RedHat 7.3 to Mandrake 10.0. Something I found very useful in KDE 3.2 was tabbed terminal windows. I am still getting used to it, but it is nice to have several terminal windows in one.
On the packaging note, I have found that Mandrake's packaging tool is pretty slick about telling you what dependencies there are when installing something, and you can automatically choose to install those as well.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Journalism? On Slashdot? The editors seem barely able to string coherent sentences together, let alone check facts.
Kiosk.
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.
You mean there are people out there who run X with slackware?
/okay maybe not so funny
I won't get into your beef with Gnome, KDE and their alleged overweight. I do, however, find it very unlikely that a 1GZ Athlon would have a constant load of 1.0+, running only KDE/Gnome and a few apps. You mention that you switched distros at the same time; might it not be so that Fedora ran a lot of daemons and stuff that Slack does not (by default)?
I mean, constant 1.0+ load and constant swapping on a 1GZ machine, that's not the Gnome I know at least.
:wq!
be defensive, just because you have a low UID. Some of use are non-numerist, you know. :)
a language being pure OO must mean it's better/faster to develop with than anything else!</sarcasm>. Why does every Ruby fanboy feel the urge to spout such crap? Get real and more people might listen.
unless you've added your own crappy object layer on top of C like... GObject and it's ilk. It makes wrapper-writing a complete mess when you not only have to worry about the semantic difference between the wrapper language and the wrapped language, but have worry about the stupidity that is GObject on top of that. Not that I'm a huge fan of C++ or anything. In fact, I think it is a vile abomination of a language -- although templates can be incredibly powerful as demonstrated by Boost (and Boost::Python in particular) -- and should be replaced with something cleaner (syntactically and semantically).
> we have to see why KDE was developed in the first
> place (it was developed after Gnome).
That is not true. GNOME came one year after KDE. Miguel de Icaza was first big contributor and follower of KDE when it started but due to huge disagreement between his opinion and the opinion of 30 other KDE developers he left and started GNOME. Please get your facts straight before posting nonsense.
Your point is a valid one and was brought up years ago when the Gnome project began (as a result of license issues in KDE/QT that have long since been resolved). The usual counterarguments were made: "Memories are getting bigger so bloat doesn't matter", and , invariably, "Choice is good." Well, computer memories are bigger -- but so are the GUI packages, so bloat remains a problem. And choice is not good. I want basic things like file choosers, help systems, and cut and paste conventions to be *exactly the same* on all my apps. The main reason the Mac is so user friendly is that developers were given relatively few choices about how their programs were to interact with the user. I'm glad drivers don't get to choose which side of the street to drive on.
dropline site is down.g nome/
but you can download it from sf.net
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dropline-
On my laptop, KDE looks like heck and I can't get
its text anti-aliasing working well. Switched to Gnome and no problems. Sure hope KDE is going to compile with the right options or whatever is needed to fix that. I used KDE for years before this but just couldn't deal with it on the LCD screen!
Out of curiousity, does anyone actually have a problem with GTK apps in KDE? I prefer the feel and plethora of configuration options of KDE but I use a lot of GTK software. Mmmmm, Gimp... Gaim... And at times I even like Nautilus, all under KDE.
So if KDE will run both major toolkits, (as will gnome, I believe) than it should only be a question of overall look, feel and configurability.
The only thing about KDE that makes us mad, my precious, is that the taskbar places apps top to bottom then left to right, when I'd rather it place them left to right THEN start a new row. If this is changeable without knowing how to reprogram it, let me know, eh?
"Some people bitch about apathy, but I don't really care."
- Sin Elemental
Freedesktop.org has pushed things in that direction with some success.
I've made the opposite observation. I find that in the move from GNOME 1.x to 2.x that it has actually become MORE focused on specific goals and has a definite "philosophy" behind it. GNOME developers spend a great deal of time on usability--conformance to a unified HIG for a seamless operating experience seems to get noticably more attention on GNOME/GTK apps than on KDE/Qt apps. And in terms of speed and resource usage, I think both KDE and GNOME have abandoned that goal to a large degree. Almost all players have--don't expect Longhorn to be snappy on your existing PC for example.
Those who knock spatial operation as a throwback to Windows 95 do not know fully what a spatial UI is, and don't know how to best use a spatial interface because they have never used one before (ie. they aren't long time Mac users--Windows 95 does NOT provide a spatial interface at all--it merely provides an "open folder in new window" option). If GNOME's detractors were to get past that and other changes to things they were used to they'd see that GNOME is the project that truly strives to be naturally usable. It took GNOME a long time to get there but KDE is still somewhat preoccupied with what computer people like (programming libraries, configurability, etc) and not what everyday users worry about (making files easy to find, menu selections and structures that make sense, consistency amongst application UIs...).
I do not have a study of thousands of users to compare, but in my limited experience beginners who have little to no experience with computers find a typical GNOME setup (2.4+ in particualr) to be more elegant than that of a typical KDE setup. It just feels like more thought has been put into the interface--a lot like how a mac works--all the designers of all the apps appear to have actually talked to one another. Apps like Konqueror, KOffice, Kopete, etc I feel are behind in capabilities and polish in comparison to GNOME counterparts (there is nothing like Evolution geared towards KDE--nothing nearly as advanced anyways, for example).
Unfortunately such a "forward thinking", ideological approach by GNOME means they dump familiar ways of doing things if they don't fit with the philosophy--even if things worked "good enough" or are done that way in Windows. The result is something foreign--even to old GNOME users at times. Thus, GNOME is more of a challenge to implement as a Microsoft migration project. Much of this has to do with the more rapid pace of change, but I expect things to settle down a bit eventually.
By contrast, KDE has no specific underlying goals in terms of the user interface, and its philospohy seems to consist of "make it like MS Windows" and "make it tweakable". KDE is NOT a dektop for Newbies--it is a desktop for those with EXPERIENCE IN MS WINDOWS. I find if you introduce Linux to a Windows "power user" then they are most impressed by KDE because it fits like an old glove (at least more so than GNOME). Implemented in the right way, KDE can be made frighteningly similar to Windows, and KDE has been consistent and "mature" for awhile, making it great for migration to Linux.
In the end it's a matter of personal preference and needs. Should KDE and GNOME compete until one is defeated would be just as tragic as if Apple stopped making Macs. Both projects should focus on simply making their products better than their last versions--they should not strive to kill each other. The argument that having these choices is not the best use of resources, but that argument is made on the flawed assumtion that there is one right way to solve every problem.
I certianly agree that it would be a much better idea to provide some sort of standard API that could be implement in a compatability library that would allow an application standard interfaces to Gnome, KDE, etc, for things like registering icons and putting itself on the menus so developers dont have to write special code for each environment. I dont however think that a single piece of software, window manager, or environment should be forced on everyone. Furthermore, if you run KDE that doesnt mean you cant run Gnome apps, you can! It is frustrating to hear people say things like, "I run KDE but I miss Mozilla" , or "I run Gnome but I miss Konqueror". I've run Konqueror under Gnome just fine, and Mozilla under KDE fine.
Furthermore, although Linux claims to be all about "freedom" and "choice", it seems most window managers and desktop environment seem intent on forcing their idea of what is right and useful on you and forcing you to do things a certian way. We fail to realise that different people have particular and unique tastes and a look and feel that seems perfect to one might seem unuseable to another person. It is disturbing to see how many people seem to believe that any feature that they see as "unnecessary" should be thrown away and no one should be allowed to use them becuase it doesnt fit their idea of what is the right way. They forget that a feature that is useless to one person is essential to another. Instead of throwing away features and creating stripped down "fischer price" GUIs, the key is making it configurable, so the user can configure it however they want and decide for themselves what features to include. Desktops can come with a default configuration but it should be completely customisable by the user. Every WM I have tried forces a very rigid set of limitations on me and gives me little choice on making the desktop my own. On KDE, I wanted to float the panel, so i could move it around the screen and so it wouldnt stick to the side of the screen, I wanted to be able to configure Konqueror to require a double click on an icon, yet none of these things could be done. Rigid and inflexible. I think if we want to make Linux GUIs more user friendly we need to make everrything configurable via a GUI interface, the less used options can be put in "experts options" tabs so they dont necessarily have to bewilder the main options screens. Many people dont have enough time to learn another document language just to
require double clicks on icons.
while I use/support Linux wholeheartedly I find this whole gnome/kde redhat/slackware/debian/etc/etc thing very disturbing when it comes to actually porting our app to Linux. We use Qt so for Win32 we have one target (this means 90% of our market), for MacOSX its one target (for 10% of our market), but for Linux we have to have many targets/dependencies (for what, 1 % of our market? try to explain that to your CEO) because of the myriad of configurations we have to support: kde/gnome/glibc/etc.. are just too many variables.. and a serious problem when it comes to porting your app to linux. hopefully the linux standard base will handle things like that, will it?
from our point of view the sooner one of the window managers takes over the better, thats at least one dimension of the multi-dimensional configuration space gone.