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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.
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.
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
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?
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.
KDE can be anything you want it to be. You might have to work at it, but unlike Gnome recently, KDE still gives you all of the configuration options you could want to make the system your own. Chances are that the default is 'Windows like' because since almost everyone has used that, its a good starting point and middle ground.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
No, but I have to learn what a million different things ARE just to pick what I want.
KDE can be anything you want it to be.
No it can't. I want KDE to be simple a simple UI that has all the options I use and nothing more. Unfortunately there's still no options for "only show me the important widgets" or "death to sidebars" or "simplify these menus" or "Just make stuff work, and get out of my way dammit!".
When the KDE developers realize that 80% of the widgets on their screens are utterly worthless, a clock applet doesn't need 5 tabs full of options and a file manager is not the same thing as a web browser, I'll go back. Until then, Gnome does almost all of what I want, with less frustration and fewer wasted pixels.
0 1 - just my two bits
I don't know. I personally think it takes courage to clean off a dead base, and start anew, just as it took to change Nautilus to spatial navigation.
That aside, Evolution and OpenOffice are not even part of GNOME (at least by 2.6), nor was abiword. Concerning OpenOffice at the least, mentioning it in this context is absurd.
I'll take an environment with clear human interface guidelines, an elegant line, and a determination to do things in what they consider to be the Right Way over one with flashy buttons, millions of features and a commercial-consistent evolution any day.
For GNOME's thought-out interface design and commitment, I'm ready to overlook occasional upgrade pains (and I've had them), some changes I dislike (eg the new file selector, superior in many ways and inferior in some), and an outdated language (yes, I know QT is C++). I don't ask anyone else to do so, and I don't see why I myself should not.
We don't need a grand unified desktop.
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...
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.