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.

Comments

Re:The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

[ThatComputerGuy]

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 :)

Re:I hate KDE

[nitehorse]

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

Re:Not to nitpick.....

[jmorris42]

> And Redhat's Fedora uses GNOME by default!

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 .net rewrite, currently GNOME has a couple of killer advantages over KDE:

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.

Re:kde licensing

[rmm4pi8]

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.

HP + GNOME

[jdub!]

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.

Re:bah red hat!

[Glytch]

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.

Getting back to the point...

[BrokenHalo]

The point in Slackware's case is that there is a very slick, fully-fledged distribution of Gnome being produced by Todd Kulesza of Dropline.net. Despite the fact that it seems that Slashdot referrals appear to have currently wiped out Todd's traffic allowance, it is still available at Sourceforge.

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.

Re:About freakin' time

[frodo from middle ea]

I guess the point of redeundunt mod, was that the parent post was self evident. There really was no need for someone to explain the joke to the rest of us.