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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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.