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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.
Hi. I'm the guy that runs the BitTorrent tracker that's been used for the past few Slackware releases ( http://transamrit.net:8082/ ). So, I suppose this should give me a teensy bit of credibility.
:)
:)
Having said that:
1. Pat's said that he wasn't eager about adding GNOME in the beginning. He's still regretting it.
2. Rumors about KDE? Well, they're just rumors. These aren't rumors about KDE, they're straight from The Man himself. Both of those emails mentioned in the DLG thread linked above are real. I've even clarified what I could in my post (as TransAMrit).
3. Yes, the person that posted the first email appears to be unknown to the forum, as am I. So, you can say that I may be bullshitting as well, but... well, you've gotta believe someone, don't you?
And you're right, this is not a final decision. However, it is NOT a rumor. It is a decision that Pat has said he needs to make.
He just hasn't made it yet
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
it should be explained here that the paperclip is not clippy. the paperclip is the standard icon on the clip, which can hold icons and applets
I'm afraid you have no idea what you're talking about.
KDE and Qt also fully support switching out the widget rendering engine - I should know, as I've been writing style plugins that do this for *years* now.
And this isn't a recent feature - this has been available since KDE 2.0.
-clee
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.
> And Redhat's Fedora uses GNOME by default!
.net rewrite, currently GNOME has a couple of killer advantages over KDE:
As does Red Hat Entrprise Linux, which just released a beta of version 4 in four flavors:
Enterprise Server
Advanced Server
Workstation
Desktop
So whoever submitted this article is either an ignorant slut or more likely a RedHat hating KDE zealot looking to spread a bit of FUD.
> look at what Novell & Sun base their linux
Exactly. RedHat has far too much invested in GNOME to give it up and Novel liked Ximian so much they bought em. So all you Suse fans better get ready to love GNOME as the default/only desktop.
> Kudos to the submitter for successfully trolling the editors
Not all that hard, especially on an otherwise dull weekend, guess they figured there isn't anything quite like a good old-fashioned GNOME/KDE flamefest to make the ad server go "cha-ching!".
So in the spirit of fanning the flames......
I'll state again that while I dislike several GNOME misfeatures and greatly dread Miguel's obsession for all things Microsoft, possibly leading to a nightmare scenario of a total
1. Language independence. Being written in C has lead to GTK being easilly wrapped in a metric buttload of languages. KDE, being based on Qt is pretty much limited to C++ and closely related OO crap.
2. Platform independence. You can port Gtk/GNOME apps to Windows without worrying about license issues. Not so for KDE/Qt. You can port FROM Windows to the Free world but never the other way. Windows ports of the major GNOME/Gtk apps means a large userbase to tap and when they convert to Linux/GNU/X they will have never seen a KDE app but will already be up to speed on Gimp, Gaim, OpenOffice and such.
Democrat delenda est
this is silly. all of the qt-linux code is GPLd. thus, you may always use it for anything sans fee, and no of course you can't release it under a bsd license any more than you could do the same with the linux kernel.
all dual-licensing means is that you can do things that you wouldnt be able to do under the GPL (bsd, proprietary software) by paying a fee to the owners of the copyright.
the windows licensing is a separate issue. rather than being dual-licensed, this separate codebase is not released under the gpl. the kde-windows people are working on porting the gpl'd qt-nix framework to windows, if Trolltech were enforcing restrictions beyond the gpl they would not be able to do this.
U.S. War Crimes blog. Email for free Mandriva support.
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.
it is also the reason why there is a GTK-QT engine and no QT-KDE engine.
When writing the GTK-Qt engine, I actually found Qt's theming system far more flexible than that of GTK. Your "reasoning" for why there is not a Qt-GTK engine is rubbish. I have yet to see a GTK theme that can beat a Qt theme in terms of rendering speed or appearance.
-- Wibble
The logic, if you had read the article, is that Gnome is a nightmare to package, especially if you happen to be the sole maintainer of an entire distribution.
Have you ever personally built Gnome 2.x from source tarballs without problems? Have you ever successfully changed the target install directory, so that making a package (tarball, rpm, whatever) is easy? And that's not even counting the new libraries popping up all the time, often with undocumented dependencies. And then there's miserable pages like this, which have the basic list of dependencies, but only provide links for 3 of them.
By comparison, KDE is simple to build. It's just a dozen or so source tarballs, all of which do the "./configure ; make ; make prefix=/temp/package_to_be_tarballed install" thing quite easily, without major dependency issues. X.org or XFree86, QT, and a recent XML2 library are all that's needed, last I checked.
Slackware dropping Gnome has very little to do with how the two desktops compare when being used, and everything to do with how they compare when building from source. If this alleged email from Patrick is true, then it just means that he's sick and tired of Gnome's chaotic, maintenance-intensive mess of libraries. I don't blame the guy.
I was actually willing to mod you down, but as I didn't feel ignorance as a fair reason (and neither in the modding list)...
BenjyD refers Slack as a one-man distro just because Pat created it and is mostly its only maintainer and official packager. When Slackware was supported by a CD distributor (it was Walnut Creek?) he had a few lieutenants, but I guess he currently does the job alone.
On the other hand, I guess Slackware ALWAYS has multiuser, as Linux by design always was, and only in the very early days the Linux init sequence was just to start bash (and that doesn't means that multiuser capability wasn't quite there).
I didn't see that, but I'm booting Slack since 1995 and I never heard anything such a non-multiuser Linux distro, besides those end-user oriented new distros as Lindows.
Got Pike?
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.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
This has been demonstrated in usability study after usability study. Reading direction hasn't a thing to do with it (or at least, not in the sense you're thinking: I would be unsurprised to find that the most common item should come last because it will be the freshest in one's mind when read, and because it's most likely to mean that one will read the entire list of options).
The Macintosh usability team--until recently, an excellent one--tested this beyond a shadow of a doubt two decades ago.