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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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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?
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.
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
It's better to have the world think you're a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
Slackware's package manager doesn't give a damn about DESTDIR. Let me repeat that. pkgtool et al don't give a damn about DESTDIR. DESTDIR is just a nice way of placing all files compiled to be put into /usr into another directory that can then be packaged up. This is immaterial to the package manager, no matter what damn package manager it is.
Really, what's happened to the linux community? The trolls used to have some idea of what they were talking about.
Slackware, what else when it must be secure, stable, and easy?
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.
Well, the fileselector is much better than the old gnome-file-selector.
Now with gnome 2.8 and udev+dbus+hal the new fileselector rocks! Navigation is much quicker (due to the "directory buttons"). Try it a while, you will love it if you just forget the Microsoft/KDE training you had.
Move Sig. For great justice.
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.
the large array of choices is one of the things i like about kde, and linux in general. don't hide it or take it away.
As a long time KDE user, I've recently realised the opposite. I tried out GNOME and found all the crap I'd read about it was totally untrue.
But is it still true that there's about ten different configuration tools for the desktop, some of which do the same thing as the other? In addition to that, there's a preferences editor which suspiciously looks and feels like regedit. Or how about the "Ok" and "Cancel" button order?
Oh well, at least anything is better than KDE's menu system. I think I've found at least five different locations it references, and the shorcuts and directories aren't in the same place. And then you have some crap in XML in a third location, etc.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
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.
Does anybody else here refuse to use KDE simply because of its retarded naming scheme? But seriously though, I have KDE and Gnome installed. I occasionally switch over to my KDE session after reading about all these great new features. I usually end up using these features about once every other month, and then I end up switching back to Gnome. Gnome is simple, it doesn't bombard you with a million stupid menus with stupid program names, gtk is far less gross windowsie, and Gnome is just more intuitive. I'm not saying KDE doesn't have its merits, but I think Gnome in all its simplicity has many more.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
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...
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.
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
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?
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.
Why?.... There are more similarities than differences between the two. I get pretty windows that I can drag around, resize and even minimize and maximize!!! I really don't notice much of a difference switching back and forth. I do feel for the single maintainer of Gnome though, that's gotta be a LOT of work. Maybe if they tore it down again and started over?.... It worked last time! The only thing I might be concerned about a single solution would be if the licensing model changed (can you say XFree86???). And from what i saw a while back, Trolltech still owned Qt.????? Besides, 5yy5ddjjjjjjjp:wq still works in vi on both of them......
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
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"