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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.
I'm begining to face facts. I still think that GNOME looks better, and is, in many ways, easier to use. But KDE has even made huge progress in these areas in the last year (especially with Konqueror and new skins that finally *don't* look horrible, at least to my eye).
GNOME still has nominally better applications in certain key areas compared to KDE, for example, Ximian Evolution. However, again, KDE has made enourmous progress in this area, all in the last year. It boggles my mind to see how quickly this gap has dissapeared in one area - compare Instant Messaging in KDE and GNOME two years ago (nothing vs Gaim) to now, Kopete has developed so quickly it's just amazing.
One thing I did miss in KDE was Mozilla. But now, we can even use Gecko as a rendering engine in Konqueror, so even, like me, if you considered that KHTML was inferior to Gecko, this "advantage" for GNOME has now dissapeared (also thanks to Apple and Safari).
I still think KDE needs some work, especially in the ease-of-use department (too many settings presented to the user, some intelligent hiding would be appreciated) - but this is improving. And, even as a GNOME user, I have to admit that C++ as a basis is a much superior choice to C, especially considering the kludge that seems to underly GNOME, separate libraries for GTK and GNOME applications with surprisingly few applications taking advantage of the GNOME-only libraries.
If you look at the distributions on the shelves, SuSE is KDE, Mandrake is KDE, Linsipre is KDE (with modifications). You can't buy Fedora at PC World. Any new user getting interested in Linux would probably go here first, and by consequence they're going to get KDE.
So whilst I will keep GNOME around for a while yet, and I think the "race" is far from over (who says there has to be a winner anyway? The whole concept of a "war" is just completely silly), if KDE goes on to become the defacto Linux desktop, then I won't shed that many tears. Of course, GNOME, I'm sure, will be around for a long while yet.
All in all, this is not a final decision, it's just a rumor . As long as Patrick Volkerding has not removed Gnome and annouced it either on the Slackware website or in the ChangeLog, I won't believe it...
And this was typed on a Slackware 10 machine running XFCE... Which, IMHO, is so much better than Gnome...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
OK, I confess I have seen some bad submissions, but what does HP dropping gnome (not that I have ever seen anything in news about this), Redhat's decision to spin off Fedora, and Patrick's decision that dropline is good enough for him to stop wasting his time with gnome's odd build procedures have in common? Troll usually appear in the comments, not the articles. Although timothy did make an effort to unspin the Slackware news somewhat, it is still crazy that he would post such flamebait.
Just for the record - in case you aren't up on the latest news - Redhat still ships a desktop linux that uses gnome, and the Fedora project is still one of the strongest linux distributions, along with Debian and Suse (Novell), who both still include gnome and have no intentions of dropping it. Additionally, Sun and IBM are still committed to gnome.
Disclaimer: I don't like KDE. I miss my old mac.
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
define "important widgets"
What's important to you might be irrelevant to someone else, and what's useless for you might be used every day by someone else.
Microsoft learnt that the hard way with the idiocy of their hidden menu options in Office 2000.
That doesn't mean that there isn't room to improve things - there definitely is - but just ripping out half the UI doesn't solve anything. One of the main goals behind KDE has always been that there are NO hidden options (as in not exposed somewhere in the GUI). If you ever have to edit a config file - or launch a generic configuration application that is nothing more than a thin wrapper around directly editing a text file, then it's a bug.
Also your comments about konqueror kind of show that you've never really used KDE, or you'll never like it.
You're seeing Konqueror as two different applications crammed into one. But it's not. Tt's a universal browser and viewer via embeddable parts and pluggable protocols - which enables it to handle filesystem browsing and management as well as web browsing as just two of the many things it can do - and all by simply providing a light framework for other parts to do the work.
If you don't agree with that approach, you'll never like KDE because it's fundamental to it.
Advanced users are users too!