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

About freakin' time

[ArmorFiend]

Its about time one of them, I don't kare which one, got the upper hand and snowballed.

Re:About freakin' time

[kbranch]

Its about time one of them, I don't kare which one, got the upper hand and snowballed.

Apparently you do...

Re:About freakin' time

[Directrix1]

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.

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.

Re:About freakin' time

[james_in_denver]

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......

I like GNOME...

[AvantLegion]

... but I think it's time to start seeing distros NOT contain every software package, desktop environment, etc, under the sun.

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.

Re:I like GNOME...

[BenjyD]

especially as Slack is basically a one-man distro. I'd rather have one good desktop than two buggy ones.

Re:I like GNOME...

[johansalk]

... but I think it's time to start seeing distros NOT contain every software package, desktop environment, etc, under the sun.

Why not? the software is free, bittorrent is fast and unlimited, blank CDs or DVDs cost pennies, and the smallest hard drive on sale these days in an average box will be at least 10 times the size of the largest install possible. I personally have 320gb in this box I built myself and I didn't even splash out on it. I'd much prefer to have a linux distribution contain everything i might need (on a DVD) than to go out on the web searching for each application individually.

Re:I like GNOME...

[supabeast!]

That's exactly why I gave up on Linux. Default installs are crammed so full of cruft that many programs are made dependent on the cruft, meaning that to get a good setup I was compiling everything myself rather than using the Gnome/KDE dependent packages that were put together for everything with a GUI. At that point it made more sense to jump ship to OS X so I can at least have a really, really pretty OS to compile on.

Re:I like GNOME...

[Ralph Yarro]

Try telling that to the KDE zealots who are *still* attacking Bruce Perens for dropping KDE from UserLinux.

Yeah, I'm waiting for them to unleash a similar level of vitriol against Slackware too since I know how shocking they find it for a distro to pick one desktop. Think I may be waiting a while.

Re:I like GNOME...

[Naffer]

Sounds like you need to use Gentoo. As soon as KDE finishes compiling (We're on day three) I'm sure it'll be great!

Re:I like GNOME...

[hsidhu]

I don't know about day three thing. I just compiled kde 3.3.0 well just emerge kde last night and it took about 7 hours on my 1.7Ghz 1gig ram laptop. You just have to plan a little start the emerge at night and by the time you wake up its done.

Re:I like GNOME...

[Solstice]

Yes, but it increases the testing matrix considerably. Keep in mind that the distro creator will need to test all of the included packages. I would much rather have the distro creator spend their time to fix bugs and put together a really solid distro, rather than worring about supporting every possible enviornment.

Besides the QA risk that additional undertested packages pose, there's also a security risk, too. The distro creator will need to watch for security bulletins and other nasties.

I think for Linux to be more successful on the desktop, it will need to focus on a core set of applications and do those really well. The "really well" part includes testing and documentation. One desktop environment is fine for most people, just as one web browser and one office suite are too.

I'm a developer, and yes, I know that it's much more sexy to go off and create your own little fiefdom rather than having to toil on someone else's design (dude, that soooo corporate). But most folks only care about the outcome and not the route.

Re:I like GNOME...

[FuegoFuerte]

More like at least a 3 man distro:

http://www.slackware.com/about/

Yes, that used to be true... but that page is fairly badly outdated. If you follow the link to David Cantrell's site, you will find this: "Please note: I do not work for Slackware anymore (technically BSDi or Walnut Creek CDROM)."

Looking at Chris Lumens' site, he hardly mentions anything about slackware at all, other than to say his server runs slackware -current. So while Slackware used to have a few employees, I believe when it was split off and once again became its own entity it went back to being just Patrick. It still (to the best of my knowledge) remains the only commercial Linux distro which has always been profitable.

Re:I like GNOME...

[Tore S B]

Allright. Well the "know the inner-workings" part some Gentoo elitist troll told you is complete and utter bullshit. It forces you to know it, and if you don't already know the inner workings of Linux, then too bad for you, you'll end up copy-pasting from the install guide, and completely struck when some trivial error arises.

Debian was that bad, but it's getting better (not entirely there yet).
I used RedHat to get comfy, and then switched to Debian, and I haven't strayed. Tried Gentoo for a lark on a 2.8Ghz and I hated it. Even the binary system was crud.

Anyway, good luck ahead. May the Penguin serve you well :)

Might be a good idea

[agent dero]

This is probably a good idea, for every old joe-schmoe who installs linux, there can be more or less, a unified 'look'

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 ;)), then it probably makes life much easier for everybody.

Re:Might be a good idea

[FireBook]

The basic issue with Gnome, as far as packaging it for slackware is concerned, appears to be that it's a REAL bitch to package, with far too many Gotchya hurdles to leap every time theres updated components to incorporate into your package.

Excellent...

[SaDan]

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.

Re:Excellent...

[TyFoN]

And finally you got to disk xap5 and it had bad sectors ;)

ya got it wrong

[Professor Cool Linux]

its not that pat wants one DE its that gnome is taking too much effort for so little when dropline is good enough.

I hate KDE

[wobedraggled]

It feels like Windows, which is what I'm TRYING to avoid.... But whatever get us to the masses quicker I guess... [/annoyed]

Re:I hate KDE

[0racle]

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.

Re:I hate KDE

[knipknap]

KDE can be anything you want it to be.

Nope. GNOME's theming is *way* more flexible in comparism with QT, because it lets you exchange the complete engine. That's the reason why many GNOME themes are superior to the KDE themes, it is also the reason why there is a GTK-QT engine and no QT-KDE engine. (You can use any KDE theme in GNOME, but not v.v.) Hell, there are even SVG-based GNOME themes.

Plus, you could never fix the KDE inconsistency and UI clutter by configuration.

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:I hate KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

It feels like Windows, which is what I'm TRYING to avoid...

I don't understand this. When you first start KDE you are given the option of Windows-like defaults, Mac-like defaults, or UNIX-like defaults. There's also nothing in KDE that makes it "feel like Windows" any more than GNOME or XFCE, they all have the same basic features. And I don't get the "it's similar to another desktop environment therefore I must avoid it" attitude - is it some form of snobbery?

Re:I hate KDE

[Cid Highwind]

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.

Re:I hate KDE

[Quantum Jim]

but unlike Gnome recently, KDE still gives you all of the configuration options you could want to make the system your own

What do you mean "unlike Gnome"? In my experience, GNOME is mostly as customizable as KDE. Things are different and some things are harder to change, but at least they're stable (unlike say the 'remove only' options in Konqueror's toolbar).

IMHO, GNOME and KDE both need to work. But why choose one or the other? Why not use Kwin or Konqueror in GNOME, or how about gnome-panel or Metacity with KDE? Sometimes it feels like everyone associated with KDE or GNOME think their desktops are the greatest things since sliced bread. Little attacks - such as "foo unlike bar" when bar arguably is like foo - seems pretty petty to me.

Re:I hate KDE

[davidsansome]

it is also the reason why there is a GTK-QT engine and no QT-KDE engine.

When writing the GTK-Qt engine, I actually found Qt's theming system far more flexible than that of GTK. Your "reasoning" for why there is not a Qt-GTK engine is rubbish. I have yet to see a GTK theme that can beat a Qt theme in terms of rendering speed or appearance.

Re:I hate KDE

[mabinogi]

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.

Re:I hate KDE

[Antique Geekmeister]

And a pile of sand and metal ore can be turned into any computer you want. There are too many options, and it's dissipating the development effort into a bunch of very silly avenues instead of actually handling features like speed, user configuration of the options that users actually want instead of just what the developer just learned about, etc.

Complex "environment managers" are usually a bad idea: when they break, they break so badly they leave you crippled. For example, what idiot decided to make various Gnome tool installations dependent on installing that CPU pig Nautilus?

Re:I hate KDE

[10Ghz]

a clock applet doesn't need 5 tabs full of options

In 3.3, the clock-applet has two tabs ("appearance" and "timezones"). So what the hell are you talking about?

Not so bad!

[Lispy]

Most Slackware Gnome addicts use Dropline anyway since it's a very lively, well maintained project.
If Todd of Dropline and Patrick work together this could be pretty good for both projects. Of course there is PAM integration in Dropline that Patrick dislikes and therefore he won't include it in the "official" CD set. Slack with Dropline is in fact the best Desktop-Linux Experience I ever had.

Let's hope Todds servers can handle all the load following a slashdotting. ;-)

Gnome is Dying!

[Arghdee]

Look out BSD! Gnome is coming your way! /karma to burn

It's not April Fools Day, is it?

[mkavanagh2]

This makes me want to throw up. I just can't stand KDE's UI, or Qt for that matter. To put it simply: KDE is fugly. GNOME is (in comparison to KDE) slick and poetically designed.

Of course, XFCE kicks the pants off both of them, but that's another argument.

Re:It's not April Fools Day, is it?

[Arker]

RTFA. Not an æsthetic decision. Patrick is sick and tired of struggling with GNOME compilation, which is by all accounts a bear, and Slack users that want GNOME haven't been using his builds for awhile anyway. They use Dropline, so there's not really much point in Patrick spending so much time wrestling with GNOME to get it to compile.

As a long time GNOME user...

[Ianoo]

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.

Re:As a long time GNOME user...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

For a start, Evolution was simply in a different league from apps like Kmail... *if* you want to do anything more than simple POP3/SMTP email. Kmail is badly broken when you try anything ambitious with it, and I was rather shocked to realise how many bugs and crashes I was subconciously working around. Evolution was a, forgive the choice of words, a revelation.

As for the developer GNOME experience... I was up and coding with GTKMM (the c++ wrappers for GNOME and GTK) in no time. In fact, I found them better organised than much of KDE -- even though the underlying Qt is a fine class library and well documented. The KDE code above is... well... less than satisfactory. I've been quite surprised to find how well organised, designed and coded most of GNOME is. I really shouldn't have listened to all the slashdot bullshit over the years.

The desktop itself was also impressively organised and simple. There are a few Nautilus niggles that irritate me... but I was up and running in no time. I even ran a small test with friends of mine, and found that GNOME's organisation and attention to user-experience was vastly superior to KDE (even the later versions).

In summary, I've spent a few years listening to crap about GNOME. I wish I'd tried it earlier. As far as I'm concerned it is now a much better desktop than KDE -- and GNOME apps (with one exception: CD burning, for some reason these apps are a bit naff under GNOME) are considerably more advanced than those I got used to under KDE.

Re:As a long time GNOME user...

[ReinoutS]

I have to admit that C++ as a basis is a much superior choice to C,

If you observe recent discussions on the GNOME mailinglists, you'll see that the GNOME community realises that it should be facilitated to create GNOME apps using higer level languages. Since there's a deadlock in the C#/Java debate, Python stands a good chance.

SuSE is KDE, Mandrake is KDE, Linsipre is KDE (with modifications).

Don't know about SuSE and Linspire, but Mandrakesoft does deliver a first class GNOME desktop with its distro, it's just not picked as the default option.

Re:As a long time GNOME user...

[name773]

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.

Re:As a long time GNOME user...

[Zorilla]

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.

Re:As a long time GNOME user...

[jeif1k]

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.

There won't be any "defacto Linux desktop": people have too many different ideas for where to take the desktop. And that's a good thing. KDE has two additional strikes against it: the license of the underlying toolkit (dual GPL/commercial) and the fact that it's C++ based.

Re:As a long time GNOME user...

[Bob Uhl]

Or how about the "Ok" and "Cancel" button order?

User research has conclusively demonstrated that the OK button--which is most likely to be the one hit, and is thus the default--should be on the right hand side, since the mouse spends most of its time on the right hand side of the screen, adjusting scrollbars and the like. That's why the Mac has always had it on the right.

Windows did it bass-ackwards, unsurprisingly, and this has been blindly copied by those with no idea of what usability means, again unsurprisingly.

Re:As a long time GNOME user...

[Bob Uhl]

Nope--the primary option should be where it is quickest to access (see Fitt's Law), which happens to be on the right. The mouse tends to spend most of its time on the right hand of the screen for most people, and thus the default button should be on the right hand side of the screen.

This has been demonstrated in usability study after usability study. Reading direction hasn't a thing to do with it (or at least, not in the sense you're thinking: I would be unsurprised to find that the most common item should come last because it will be the freshest in one's mind when read, and because it's most likely to mean that one will read the entire list of options).

The Macintosh usability team--until recently, an excellent one--tested this beyond a shadow of a doubt two decades ago.

Re:As a long time GNOME user...

[John_Booty]

Or how about the "Ok" and "Cancel" button order?

Even thought I've always used Windows and barely dabbled in other systems, I've always thought that "OK" belonged on the right like GNOME does it.

To me, clicking "OK" means that I want to move forward in the application. "Cancel" means I want to back up or back out. Since most languages and grapshs go from left to right, it only seems natural that "OK" should be on the right.

Especially since a lot of applications use "Wizard"-style dialog boxes when they present a series of dialog boxes to the user. In those dialog boxes, ">" is on the right. And "Next >>" is basically the same thing as "OK"...

Not to nitpick.....

[nzkoz]

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

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:Not to nitpick.....

[mrchaotica]

An object-oriented program can call procedural functions (i.e. a C++ program can use C functions), but not the other way around. Just from that alone it's obvious that GTK is more flexible than QT, which seems pretty important to me considering that it's a toolkit.

QT might be "better," but IMHO compatibility is more important.

Re:Not to nitpick.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Where did you get that BS from? Ever heard of "extern C"?

Endorsement? Probably not.

[ThatComputerGuy]

"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."

Key word there is "could". After the fiasco with swaret, it's unlikely for many 3rd party packages to get Pat's blessing. And as I noted on the DLG forum (I'm TransAMrit), I didn't see any real endorsement from the emails.

For those of you that don't know about swaret, it was given a trial by being placed in Slackware's extra/ dir a while back. It failed miserably, doing lots of things wrong, breaking systems left and right, so of course, it was taken out of the official tree. But still, lots of people swear by swaret. That is, until they get bit by it. Then the blame is associated not with a half-assed 3rd party utility, but Slackware itself.

I'm not saying anything about the quality of DLG here, but it's easy to see that you don't want the above situation repeated many times.

Unmasked!

[3riol]

"I don't kare"

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.

Re:Unmasked!

[fymidos]

>GNOME is definitely the more professional and
>efficiently designed, from a purely UI perspective,
>of the large Free desktop environments

this is simply not true, Gnome started off later and never managed to keep up with KDE. The final blow was when they killed off gnome 1 and redesingned the whole thing.

I can see why people are unhappy - Gnome is constantly changing:
They had balsa and gmc, they changed to evolution and nautilus. Abiword was dropped for openoffice.
Even the configuration changes all the time...
This is a pain if you are a distro that tries to actually support it.

that said, i really hope this serves as a "wake up" call to gnome developers. They have to get it together and stop this "let's start over","let's start over again" nonsense, *soon*.

>Nobody serious clamors for less operating
>systems, less trouser styles, or less pencils

there are still many excellent desktops out there, if they get some attention from the developers they could prove more than a match for KDE.

Re:Unmasked!

[kyle_b_gorman]

"...one fed-up maintainer for a redundant Slackware package..."

Um, not exactly. Patrick, who is the guy quoted in TFA, is the ONLY person working on Slackware. The whole thing is his baby (ignoring all the GNU tools of course) and that's one reason I love it.

But back on topic, Slackware is definetly a hobbyist distro. I'd say that it's more likely you'll see a split between the two desktop environments, with RedHat making GNOME/Linux systems and SUSE/HP/etc. making KDE/Linux, than problems for either desktop. Nor is it a Good Thing. If that was the case, I wouldn't have Enlightenment.

Re:Unmasked!

[3riol]

Quite, but the dropped package isn't the only way to have GNOME on Slackware, and he is one person, even though he represents one distro. I don't dispute his right to hate maintaining GNOME (obviously justified) or even to dislike the environment (taste), I'm just thinking that this does not indicate a "shift" towards KDE or even away from GNOME. As for the vendor-split over environments, that seems indeed to be the case already: SuSE have been KDE-centric for years, and RedHat conversely.

Re:Unmasked!

[3riol]

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.

Re:Unmasked!

[MrHanky]

there are still many excellent desktops out there, if they get some attention from the developers they could prove more than a match for KDE.

Just curious. Many? Which ones? I've heard of (and use) XFCE4 and WindowMaker/GNUstep. None of them seem to be real DEs like KDE and Gnome (alright, GNUstep is, but WindowMaker isn't really GNUstep, so it's not really a desktop environment yet).

Re:Unmasked!

[losinggeneration]

There are only two "Desktops" now? I guess Window Managers are being forgotten. Go ahead, keep using your KDE's and Gnome's. I'll stick with Window Maker because it has what KDE and Gnome will never have. Speed. Even KDE with prelinking can't compare to how fast Window Maker starts up and runs. I learned this a long time ago when all I had was a 133mhz and Slackware with Window Maker was fast even on that. Also, you'll be spending a good few hours compiling KDE while I'll take 10-30 minutes compiling Window Maker

Re:Unmasked!

[nyteroot]

To paraphrase liberals everywhere, "Just because it takes courage doesn't mean its right."

When you write code, you find small bugs that you didn't predict, and you write small bugfixes for them. As these small bugfixes pile up, it starts to look like just "messy" code. A year later when you rewrite everything ("I'll do it cleanly this time!"), you've forgotten all those small bugfixes and it takes another 3 or 4 iterations to get them out again, by which time the code is again "messy".

That said, if your entire design is horrendously flawed, starting from scratch is less of a bad idea..

Re:Unmasked!

[BrokenHalo]

Slackware is definetly a hobbyist distro.

I don't know where you managed to pull that one out of, but given that Slackware is now well over 10 years old, and in common use as a server platform, that hardly seems like a statement connected with any reality I have seen.

Re:Unmasked!

[Enahs]

I ran GNOME 2.6 for a month. I switched back to KDE.

I found things that I thought were right in GNOME and wrong in KDE; I switched back to KDE, though, because it's a working project, not a conceptual model like GNOME.

And before you look at that UID and think "WTF does he use KDE? Did he finally just start using Linux or something?" well, cram it. I happen to like having a GUI, and as the most complete Free system for *n?x, KDE it is.

Re:Unmasked!

[caseih]

What are you talking about? Gnome is awful. It's freaky looking, it doesn't follow the conventions just about everyone else is following, its configuration tools are rotten, its maintainers are copying Microsoft's .Net initiative, which is going to be crushed like a bug the instant Bill Gates tires of them and opens up his patent portfolio... I mean, there are so many things wrong with Gnome, where do I start?

Freaky looking, eh? There's a scientific observation for you. As for following conventions no one else uses, well, you are just plain wrong. I love OS X and Gnome. I hate KDE and Windows. So in one sense you are right. KDE follows the same conventions as Windows and drives me crazy. I mean the button order that KDE users love and that MS created is weird. Gnome and OS X both follow a much more rigid set of guidelines that ultimately present a much cleaner and more professional look.

I am exceedingly glad that KDE dumped the Keramik widget set as its default. That was one of the most childish and unprofessional widget sets ever devised. I used to cringe when professional aqauntances would try out linux and load up KDE with that widget set (SuSE).

I see KDE as a very cool tool. It's customizability is second to none. That's what the gentoo users want (although all gentoo users I know use fluxbox -- maybe that's why they think their distro is so blazingly fast).

In short, there is no evidence that Gnome sucks more or less than KDE sucks. The old patent argument is tiring. I mean Gnome is not about .NET (that's a separate initiative). If MS really tries to start utilizing patents, don't think for a minute that KDE is somehow safe because they don't integrate with Mono. KDE could also be crushed just as easily by your arguments. Personally I don't see things so bleakly. Gnome is evolving nicely. So is KDE. As long as they can work together, then I'll be happy.

Re:Unmasked!

[10Ghz]

And GNOME is definitely the more professional and efficiently designed

What makes GNOME "more professional and efficient"? Seriously?

Comparing how "professional" they are.... For example, KDE-folks were aware that people disliked the default style (Keramik). But they were unwilling to change it in a minor release, since change like that would significantly affect the look 'n feel of the UI. They are changing it in 3.4 though, but only after alot of forethought.

GNOME, on the other hand, had not problems changing their entire filemanagement-style in a minor release. They went from browsing to spatial filemanagement. And that is a huge change! They also changed their fileselector and god knows what other things!

KDE tends to be more conservative with disruptive changes like that. And to me, that feels like they are concerned about their enterprise-users who don't want disruptive changed in a minor release. Disruptive changes are for major releases.

As to "efficiency"... KDE seems to be way ahead of GNOME. Everything in KDE is a Kpart that can be embedded in to other apps. Take a look at Kontact. All those apps (Kmail, Korganizer etc.) are standalone apps that can be ran separately or as part of larger whole (Kontact). Stuff like that simply doesn't happen in GNOME. Evolution and Kontact are more or less comparable. But Evolution is one lumbering mass of an app, whereas Kontact is simply a framework os using separate apps stogether (in true UNIX-style).

What KDE needs is more sensible defaults and refined UI. But those are relatively minor superficial things when compared to the more fundamental changes that wait GNOME.

Re:Unmasked!

[nofx_3]

I feel this way too. Not only that but it seems like the HIG has changed quite a few times, talk about confusing the user. Every couple version I try gnome out, everytime its quite good but doesn't pull me away from KDE on fast systems and XFCE on slower systems. Also each time I try it seems like a completely new system. KDE has been consistently improving yet staying similar throughout its 3.x series, and 4 is looking to have some serious enterprise and underlying system updates. The only think I truly hate about KDE is arts, which is a horrible piece of crap.

-kaplanfx

Re:Unmasked!

[geordie_loz]

I can understand peoples Gconf is a lot like windows registry so it's bad...but as far as I can tell it differs in some pretty major ways, and really is a sensible way of doing things.

• Window's Reg uses one file, gconf uses loads of files, essentially it manages the old style .rc files for you (although they're xml and stored in one place and cached, so you can't edit by hand which is a pain in the ass, but rare).
• Because gconf is a central server based system, a change to it from one app can be reflected in other applications immediately, i.e. change proxy settings, they change everywhere then. (This obviously requires the app to play nice with this).
• GConf allows top-level locking of certain settings.. This may not be that useful to you or I, but for corporate desktops being able to make alterations and lock them for your users (i.e lock their proxy, keep remote desktop open/closed) very helpful in a IT infrastructure.

I'm sure there are many other reasons for it, it's maturing nicely. Gnome did get stripped pretty big, and put a lot of noses out of joint, but it really has been a good move.. It reminds me a little of Mozilla, loads of issues with that bloated app, but the work is paying off with Firefox etc.. now wooping IE's ass..

Admittedly gnome has had some pretty large changes for it's revisions, but they are becoming smaller and smaller over time.

Re:Unmasked!

[sploxx]

ACK.

And the gnome devs. managed to scare users away because their UI decisions got rather arrogant.
They removed the "Undo" button (amongst others) because (not the original wording, but surely close enough) "it is easy enough to undo simple changes by hand". Removing features after a release should be done carefully and may (IMHO) only be done if

a) the feature is available as a separate package then
or b) other parts of the application include the feature

Mod me flamebait for it, I was a gnome user but I'm now (since 3-4 months) using KDE. And everything works!

I still like writing GTKMM code more than writing QT GUI code(*). Hopefully, GTK doesn't disappear together with GNOME just because it is the underlying toolkit.

(*) - not that I like writing GUI code at all :)

HIG

[LazyPhoenix]

As a perpetual distro switcher, I've tried my hand at both gnome and kde. IMO, the KDE folks, in terms of visual style and interface, seem to be much more of a windows knockoff, and, on the other hand, the GNOME folks seem to actually be interested in usability and human interface guidelines.

I think having multiple GUI environments is an asset to linux, but as for me and my house, I'll take GNOME for it's beauty and interface. K3b is the only KDE app that GNOME seems to lack a real counterpart to.

now back to your regularly scheduled flames and trolling.

bah red hat!

[tetsugin]

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 :)

Re:bah red hat!

[Anonymous Coward]

>but in terms of the majority of the linux community KDE isn't even used.

Check online polls, KDE always comes out as no 1.
Look at awards, KDE usually wins the award for being the best available desktop environment

So in terms of the majority of the Linux community, KDE is de leader :)

Heck, even Linus likes KDE over gnome :)

Re:bah red hat!

[Homology]

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

If you are low on resources, neither KDE or Gnome is an option if you care about speed. I use KDE on my desktop, but for my elderly PII laptop, I use XFCE that is much less resource hungry.

Re:bah red hat!

[volkerdi]

1) Uses less resources than KDE

It seems to be using a lot more resources here.

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.

An Opinion on GNOME

[Alan Hicks]

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).

Re:An Opinion on GNOME

[fossa]

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.

No. I believe its goal is usability. There is a big difference from "newbie friendly" and "usability". Ideally, a computer interface is usable for everyone, from newbies to experts. This is a challenging but not impossible (I hope) goal.

Now, whether or not GNOME can or will achieve this is a different question entirely. But I know they are not trying to cripple so called power-users.

The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

[Noryungi]

Please note three things real quick before screaming:

1. Patrick Volkerding has been wondering about Gnome since version 1.4 ... So far, he hasn't taken a decision yet...
2. The same empty rumors have been circulating about KDE... KDE is still in Slackware...
3. This rumor comes from Dropline Gnome (a site that provides the latest version of Gnome for Slackware), and is attributed to someone who is totally unkown on their site/forum.

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... ;-)

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 :)

You know you don't have to install *EVERYTHING*

[Colin Smith]

It's not compulsory.

Re:You know you don't have to install *EVERYTHING*

[AvantLegion]

>> It's not compulsory.

No, but I have to learn what a million different things ARE just to pick what I want.

Re:You know you don't have to install *EVERYTHING*

[blowdart]

No, it's marketing. It doesn't seem enough to simply release/sell a *nix OS any more. Package up 4 CDs worth of ISO images with 17 different text editors and hey, you can say you get all this software which you have to pay extra for on Windows.

Of course add to this an install that doesn't explain what the differences are, dependencies that fill your hard drive, stuff that fights with each other when you just tell it to install everything because you don't know what else to do and frankly it rapidly becomes a useless marketing exercise.

Re:You know you don't have to install *EVERYTHING*

[Incoming9000]

And since when learning is a bad thing? If we don't learn, how do we know what is good or bad, right or wrong?

Pat's arguments

[Andreas(R)]

I think removing it would be the best thing for Slackware as it's become a maintainance nightmare (unlike nearly every other ./configure'ed source, GNOME doesn't build into packages easily with DESTDIR).

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.

Re:Pat's arguments

[M1FCJ]

Anyway, I'm sure Slackware will never drop GNOME support. People will stop using the distribution in a second!

mmmmm... Why should we?

When I use Slackware, I use it because it is tight, small and fast. I use it because I like compiling my own stuff when necessary. Why should I stop using it because they no longer have something no longer revelant? If I'm using Slackware, I'm already using Windowmaker et al., not Gnome.

IMHO, I don't want sixteen different editors and 10 different GUIs. One good one is enough (fvwm95?), if I need something else, I can go and get it from someone who supports it with binaries or compile my own.

Slackware is not a starter distro, although I did start with it with its very early versions (when you still had to download them on floppies), I wouldn't give it to someone to learn Linux nor I would install it on someone's machine if they intend to use Gnome. Mandrake/Suse/FC is what's that for.

Re:Pat's arguments

[Jameth]

"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."

Oh, yes. Of course having a dictator is bad, which is clearly evidenced by the fact that basically the only distro run by a central dictator is also the longest running distro, one of the most popular distros, and one of the most stable distros, as well as one which tends to stay fairly well on the cutting edge.

I'm sure people will disagree with a lot of that, but that's from my experience. Three times I've had friends try setting up Linux. They all tried Mandrake first, then either SuSE, RedHat, Debian, or Gentoo. Usually Slackware was a later attempt because they wanted something easier. Then, it was the damnedest thing: Slackware worked out-of-the-box, and they got through the installer without handholding.

Slackware works damn reliably for me, and I have no serious complaints. Which is rare, because I can barely stand the bugginess of the other distos I have tried (or the bugginess of almost anything, for that matter).

Re:Pat's arguments

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

[...]Instead of dropping GNOME support, why not communicate with the GNOME community to resolve the issues? This is really a minor technial issue[...]

Problem is, Gnome has been a pain to build from source for as long as I can remember (back in the early 1.x days). It's a tangled mass of difficult-to-resolve interdependencies among separately-distributed libraries.

KDE doesn't seem to have any fewer libraries, but they appear to be developed and packaged in more coordinated groups (e.g. the "kdelibs" project) and is, by comparison, a breeze to figure out how to build and install (and/or package).

I can't imagine that, having been a problem this long, that this is "a minor technical issue", nor that the Gnome folks haven't heard of this issue before, so I don't think Patrick or anyone else is going to be able to induce a major, fundamental shift in the development methodology used for Gnome, which is really what it would take to "resolve the issue". I could MAYBE see getting the glib and gtk+ (and gdkpixbuf?) folks to coordinate their releases into a single package (which would be roughly equivalent to QT), but somehow if it hasn't been done already, I don't imagine the orbit, libgnome, libgnomeui, libgnomecanvas, and whatever other individual projects there are would feel comfortable trying to integrate their projects into a more tightly integrated single project (analogous to "kdelibs"). Given that the more freewheeling, independent development style is one of the things, I think, that makes Gnome what it is (the good as well as the bad), I don't know that this issue could be "resolved" without the result slowly ceasing to be Gnome any more...

Usually when the subject of the hassles involved in compiling Gnome come up, someone will say "but the distributions pre-compile it for you, so why does it matter?". I guess it's finally getting to the point where less heavily staffed distributions might be getting tired of spending the time dealing with it. I can certainly understand Patrick's desire to "outsource" maintenance of Gnome packages for Slackware to an outside project, under these circumstances.

Note that I doubt we're talking about a complete "wiping" of Gnome-related libraries entirely from Slackware, either. I imagine glib and gtk+ would remain, for example, since those two libraries are used in many places independent of Gnome. Presumably atk, pango, and a few others would similarly be preserved for the same reason.

Re:Pat's arguments

[Burnon]

Unfortunately, the list of dependencies isn't really broken out like that. Individual build scripts (like jhbuild, for instance) have that information included, at least for the gnome dependencies. If you're looking to build releases, garnome might be worth looking at as well.

Do a minimal install.

[khasim]

Then add the stuff you want after.

That's what I do with Debian.

non sequitur

[__aanonl8035]

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."

Obviously GNOME sucks...

[Coryoth]

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.

Re:packagin

[Alan Hicks]

Right now, I think removing it would be the best thing for Slackware as it's become a maintainance nightmare (unlike nearly every other ./configure'ed source, GNOME doesn't build into packages easily with DESTDIR). now even i thought slackware's packaging system was sufficient (despite what others say), but if you are building and packaging by relying on DESTDIR, you really do need a change in the packaging system.

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.

Gentoo!

[maskedbishounen]

I'll let the zealots take over from here... ;~)

Re:Gentoo!

[Anonymous Coward]

We're too busy compiling

Re:Gentoo!

[BottleCup]

With gentoo, your system no longer runs slow because it is unoptimized. It now runs slow because you're always busy compiling something to make it more optimized.

Exactly!

[casuist99]

Why do we have to follow the conceptual desktop UI that MS has laid out? Linux should follow the path to what makes using it easier. A single button under which everything is nested seems unnecessary - there have to be better ideas out there.

In the meantime, I've dropped Gnome on my FC2 box in favor of Windowmaker. It's much much faster, eats many fewer resources, and completely avoids the whole "taskbar" concept. And on the plus-side, my roommates are no longer able to use my computer to do anything because they don't know how to work windowmaker. It's just a blank screen with some funky icons and a paperclip!

Re:Exactly!

[name773]

it should be explained here that the paperclip is not clippy. the paperclip is the standard icon on the clip, which can hold icons and applets

Re:Exactly!

[kirun]

Why do we have to follow the conceptual desktop UI that MS has laid out?

We don't. However, if we want to help people make the switch from Windows to Linux, then making the basics familiar is a good idea. That is clearly irrelavant to you, so you picked a different DE. Hurray for choice, no need to complain about the options that were wrong for you.

A single button under which everything is nested seems unnecessary - there have to be better ideas out there.

Windowmaker moves this from the bottom-left of the screen to the right mouse button. It's really not that different. At least Linux desktops put games under "Games", not like on Windows where we have Half-Life next to Print Artist because Sierra wants us to know they published them both.

Anonymous editorialization

[DrWhizBang]

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.

QT costs too much.

[DAldredge]

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.

Re:QT costs too much.

[Anonymous Coward]

Try getting your manager to approve such a large purchase these days when GTK is free.

I did, and it was not difficult at all. The amount of development and more importantly code maintenance time saved by using Qt over competing solutions (wxWidgets and especially GTK+) is largely worth the license cost.

You may find it interesting to know that a number of companies actually request that Trolltech does not publish the fact they're using Qt, because they see Qt as an essential competitive advantage they don't want the competition to be made aware of.

All I want now is a Qt equivalent of GtkAdjustments, please. Adjustments are cool.

Re:QT costs too much.

[nonmaskable]

Only a "pretend" commercial shop would find the Qt cost too high. Any real shop would find it a bargin comparing the quality of the documentation alone.

Sure, if your idea of a product is 100 copies at $10, it's a lot of money but that's a hobby and not a business.

You might have some other legitimate reason for preferring Gtk, like for example your coders don't know C++, but blaming license cost is a joke.

Re:QT costs too much.

[platipusrc]

"the QT license has left me to develop commercial applications using GTK, simply because the GPL does not impose any financial overhead. "

That's not right. The GPL does impose overhead. If you use libraries that are GPL, then your code must be GPL, too. And that is what the parent of your post was talking about. QT is GPL. GTK is LGPL, which allows some usage of it in non-Free applications. The thing with QT is that if you want to develop closed source applications, you have to purchase a license (it's dual-licensed).

Re:I'd consider switching

[B2382F29]

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.

Still miss Gnome 1.4

[mercuryresearch]

I'm pretty much a gnome fan, but in reading the thread linked to in the story, I have to agree: every gnome since 1.4 has just felt "off" to me.

And having dealt with the hell of compiling gnome on slack, I can't blame Pat a bit.

Funny thing is, although I still use gnome, I've got one box running XFCE and it feels much more like gnome 1.4 did -- I'll probably migrate there as long as I can count on a few GTK+ apps (mostly gnumeric, gvim, and I'll toy with giving up evolution if needed.)

KDE has just never done it for me. I can't put a finger on it, it just doesn't feel right or "open" (yes, I see the irony here.)

The main things that originally attracted me to gnome were a few well-done apps and the clean simplicity of 1.4 -- if only the gnomesters would go back to this root.

Whatever the case, I'd like to echo sentiments here (and on the forum linked to in the article) -- it'd be great if Pat would include a well-integrated Dropline package with slackware, and if Dropline would consider a second 'standard' slackware i486 distro, as this can be counted to run on practically all platforms (the i686 won't.)

Re:QT costs too much (bullshit).

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Patrick's name is Volkerding

[Grayswan]

not Volderking.

I see it differently

[Bull999999]

I'm sure, but I do believe it would be best to let Dropline produce Slackware's GNOME and quit wasting my own time with it.

It doesn't seem like GNOME will drop off of the face of Slackware as the acticle suggest, but rather, the support for GNOME on Slackware will be off loaded to the Dropline project.

BTW, I'm currently usuing Slackware 10 with GNOME 2.6 for my Linux box. I was looking at the Dropline version of GNOME 2.8 for Slackware. Have any of you tried it?

Stuck in the past?

[turgid]

I just upgraded from Slackware 9.1 to 10.0 today. I don't use a "desktop environment" for the simple reason that I like a nice lightweight window manager, WindowMaker, and xterm.

Maybe I'm stuck in tha past? I've always found KDE to be slow, until I got a dual 2.8GHz Xeon PC at work. Modern versions of GNOME seem to be quite lethargic and large too. I can't afford to keep buying new PCs all the time, and I'm afraid my athlon XP2000+ will have to do me at least another year.

I have an old PC in the house running Slackware 9.1 and GNOME 2.4 which is quite slow. The GNOME terminal runs like treacle on a cold winter's morning. If I fire up a traditional xterm, it's nice and fast.

I really wish I had time to delve through the source to see just where all this bloat and slowness is coming from. It used to be that KDE was the fatty boom boom of desktop environments, but the GNOME people seem to have out-done the C++ folks in plain old C.

What the heck is going on?

Anyway, life's too short to look at boring desktop environment code. Life's also too short to run a bloaty, slow desktop environment.

I'll just stick to a plain window manager and some xterms.

Re:On the shelves?

[bcrowell]

Even Fry's doesn't display these distros.
I guess your Fry's doesn't, but my Fry's had both SuSE and Linspire (or Lindows) last time I was there. I was actually surprised they didn't have Mandrake. IIRC, they also had Red Hat, Slackware, and one of the smaller BSDs, but not FreeBSD, for some reason.

Your Point?

[RAMMS EIN]

You hate KDE, because it feels like Windows. Well, join the club!

But err, what does it have to do with a discussion about GNOME? GNOME feels like Windows, too, and just because it gets dropped from Slackware doesn't mean you have to use KDE. You can do just fine without either one of them, and you can even get GNOME from outside Slackware if you want to run it.

As far as getting to the masses goes... A wise man once said "Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool would want to use it." Would you rather be using a system that is best for you, or best for the masses?

Re:Slackware is kind of becoming irrelEvant.

[Rooktoven]

A full Slackware install EVEN WITH having to download and Dropline is going to be the fastest (by an order of magnitude) path to a working desktop. Slackware remains the easiest to maintain as well. If nothing else, most of us that use it for servers (and there are a lot of us) will continue to use it for a desktop.

Simplicity has always been Slackware's strong point.

And as for not having Gnome losing software, I don't think Gnome or KDE are the same exactly between any two distros.

Further, isn't Slackware still the only commercial distro that makes a profit? I don't see it going anywhere. Even if Pat said "the hell with it!", I think the user base is strong enough to keep it going-- just like debian and Gentoo...

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.

GNOME

[hackus]

Issues that caused me to switch to KDE circa Redhat 8...

1) Miguel de Icaza.

I will never forgive him for beginning work on Mono, fracturing the limited number of developers for the GNOME Desktop. Setting it back probably years behind KDE. For What? A Microsoft red herring planted there strategically to insure any Linux Desktop application framework built on Mono could be stopped easily using copyright, DMCA and patent law....SHOULD it become too popular.

2) The Lack of decent or equivalent KDE development tools. KDevelop? KDesigner? KCacheGrind? KDevelop Assistant? The list is endless and the above applications will squash anything the GNOME community has like a grape to develop fine bugfree native Linux applications.

If you do not have a coherent development framework how the hell can you develop anything decent? No wonder the Distro/End User GNOME community is fundamentally stressed out. These sorts of complaints do not exist in the KDE community.

There are different ones. :-)

But they do not involve resorting to talk out in the open about dumping a desktop linux initiative such as GNOME. This is VERY serious.

The last gaffe that happened of this sort was xfree86....which is now relegated to the dust bin of history. But, AT LEAST it was reborn better than ever!

Perhaps, what is required....is a FORK of the GNOME Desktop project? A fork of GNOME may breath new life into addressing some of its ill's...one of which is listed below...

3) The Object Oreintation Thingy. I am really sorry if a lot of the GNOME developers think OOD when it comes to the GUI apps is so passe' I think GObject library is a throw back to the stone age, personally. I mean for Christ sake, if your going to reinvent the Object Oreintation of your GUI framework just because you cannot/do not/will not learn C++, you get the build complexity we keep reading about that is killing the GNOME release cycles.

This is a CLUE: Adopt, understand and learn how to build a OOD/OOP conceptual framework for your interfaces and DUMP GObject. Stop reinventing what C++ already gives you. With that RANT I present Exhibit A:

#include

struct GTypeModule;
struct GTypeModuleClass;
gboolean g_type_module_use (GTypeModule *module);
void g_type_module_unuse (GTypeModule *module);
(ad naseum)

I really FEEL for you if you have to deal with the kind of crap above.

4) Finally, though I am not a GNOME fan by any means, I would hate to see the distro's...drop GNOME. It is too early to decide on a Linux Desktop architecture, per se, because there are not enough mature options out there. If you cut too many options out too early you kill a lot of innovation. That is something I feel will happen if distro's start telling people we are not supporting GNOME, if you want it go somewhere else and get the RPM's....and GOOD LUCK! We need options to fight Microsoft when they start excercising their massive patent portfolio. Which IS going to happen by the way when they start running out of money....which won't be too far off into the future. Most American companies in the software biz can't innovate their way out of a paper bag, so expect Microsoft to radically step up the Patent attacks in early 2006.

Don't ask how I know that year either.

I won't tell. :-)

-hackus

Re:BS detector

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

Wrong. SUSE supports Gnome but is seriously KDE oriented.

My gripe isn't so much about gnome or KDE but libs

[dangermen]

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.

Gnome is the future

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome has dramatically improved in terms of less bloat, better performance, and stability and is becoming very popular. Fortunately distros like Gentoo, Fedora, or Debian are committed to supporting Gnome.

Re:actually

[Shulai]

I was actually willing to mod you down, but as I didn't feel ignorance as a fair reason (and neither in the modding list)...
BenjyD refers Slack as a one-man distro just because Pat created it and is mostly its only maintainer and official packager. When Slackware was supported by a CD distributor (it was Walnut Creek?) he had a few lieutenants, but I guess he currently does the job alone.
On the other hand, I guess Slackware ALWAYS has multiuser, as Linux by design always was, and only in the very early days the Linux init sequence was just to start bash (and that doesn't means that multiuser capability wasn't quite there).
I didn't see that, but I'm booting Slack since 1995 and I never heard anything such a non-multiuser Linux distro, besides those end-user oriented new distros as Lindows.

Guh...

[soloport]

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...

Re:Guh...

[1000StonedMonkeys]

gn0!

Re:Guh...

[kai.chan]

Well, considering that there are so many variation of a type of software (ie. calculator, edit, etc), I think this naming scheme is not "retarded" at all. This naming scheme is very useful in pin-pointing the exact software that one is referring to.

Re:Guh...

[RiffRafff]

* gimp"

Huh? What do you think the "g" in "gimp" stands for??

Re:Guh...

[JamesHenstridge]

Sure there might be an executable installed as /usr/bin/gcalctool, but it is exposed in the menus simply as "Calculator". The title bar for the calculator also says "Calculator" as opposed to "Gnome Calculator" or "Gcalctool". The "Gcalctool" name is shown in the about dialog, but that is it.

The user doesn't need to care about what the underlying executable name is. This is what the parent post was probably refering to.

Now if Gnome did install executables with names like /usr/bin/calculator, people would complain because it would make it more difficult to integrate into a distribution because of file name conflicts.

Re:Guh...

[Couldn'tCareLess]

Um...

Gnu Network Object Model Environment.

Perhaps this will help: About the Gnome project

Re:Guh...

[mightypenguin]

Yes, that's wonderful. And since gnome hides the actual program name, actually killing the process if it runs away or starting up one via shell or remote X session is more fun! Let's all give three cheers for Gconf while we're at it too. There's nothing like changing your default fonts and such in a registry editing tool. You see, users are too dumb, so we'll make it so they use a registry editing tool to make basic changes. The reason gnome is cool is because of all the GTK apps out there, but KDE is starting too allow better themeing & such with GTK apps so my hope is that the gnome DE will eventually die, while people are still free to create all those buggy quick & dirty ubber 31337 C apps that use GTK.

Re:Guh...

[JamesHenstridge]

Well, the "System Monitor" app matches up application icons to processes in the process list, so the user should be able to work out the name if they need to. However, they shouldn't need to for a few reasons:

• Applcations shouldn't need manual killing in the first place :)
• If an application has hung, you can use the close button in the window title bar. The Metacity window manager uses the _NET_WM_PING window manager protocol to see if the app is alive. If the app isn't responding, it asks the user if they want to kill the app (using XKillClient and if it is a local process kill() as well).
• If you want to find out what the executable name a particular menu item will launch, you can right click on it and choose properties. This should be discoverable enough for users who know how to run remote X applications.

Now as for GConf, it is an abstraction for storing and retrieving preferences, and getting notification of changes to preferences. The gconf-editor program is simply a program that uses the GConf API.

I'm not sure why you thought it necessary to use gconf-editor to change your font though. The fonts control panel is pretty easy to find (it is "Font" under the desktop preferences menu). Was there some other basic preference that you were thinking of?

Ludicrous.

[jensend]

One thing I did miss in KDE was Mozilla.

Why? You aren't forced to use Konq when you use KDE any more than you're forced to use Galeon when you use Gnome. Mozilla doesn't depend on any Gnome libraries, and even if it did, you could still run it under KDE, just as many run Evolution under KDE. If a programmer's choice of API determines users' choice of application, something's wrong.

I still think KDE needs some work, especially in the ease-of-use department (too many settings presented to the user

So in other words, you want KDE to travel down the same "I'm sorry, I can't let you do that, Dave" user-hostility path which has been ruinous for Gnome?

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.

There are also loads of apps which use QT but no KDE libs. This is not a kludge, it's the only smart decision. If your project has little or no use for the vast DE-specific libraries- you just need a toolkit and a few associated niceties- why depend on the DE libs? For political reasons (like those of a gnocatan developer who fanatically and laughably claimed "even if we find we have no need for the Gnome-specific libs, we should depend on them anyway to try to keep anybody who uses a non-Free Software platform like Win32 from being able to use the program")? This has, of course, nothing at all to do with the choice of language for core components, and I have no idea what makes you think it does.

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.

It's fairly rare to see any linux distributions on the shelves, and when you do, you usually see RedHat EL more than anybody else. Furthermore, while Linspire and Xandros could be said to be KDE distros, it makes little sense to apply that moniker to Mandrake or SuSE (especially since Novell bought Ximian and SuSE), which are fairly DE-agnostic. But that's irrelevant anyway- shelf sales of Linux are just about never to new desktop users, regardless of distro, and that doesn't look likely to change any time soon. People first try out Linux in other ways.

If KDE goes on to become the defacto Linux desktop, then I won't shed that many tears.

I will- and not because I dislike KDE (though I do). Why should every app be chosen for you when you choose a task bar/pager/launch menu or a way of displaying desktop icons? Fundamentally, that's all a desktop environment ought to be, and with standards like some of those developed at freedesktop.org determining how applications can expect to interact and depend on or provide specific resources, rather than which DE the user has installed determining that, hopefully things will move in that direction. People need to get past the megalomanical viewpoint where the desktop environment subsumes everything else under the sun. It leads to overengineered frameworks of frameworks, an unmaintainable monolithic environment, and uninformed end-users making decisions about and squabbling over things they don't understand at all (such as your bias for C++ over C based on something which was not only utterly irrelevant but entirely wrong).

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:Distros and Packaging

[losinggeneration]

Swaret and slapt-get are similar package management tools for Slackware for those too lazy to compile from the source. Sure it only pulls packages from slackware-current but everything else is usually trivial to install from the source because most packages needed will be installed from the base and updated by swaret or slapt-get

... the end? ...

[splint3r]

I used Gnome since around 1.4 and am of the same disposition most people who started using it at that time are. I don't want to rant about how there's no freedom in Gnome anymore etc., that's been done. In fact I don't even have a point, just some thoughts.

I switched to KDE3 after Gnome 2.6 (I was kind of heading for the door at 2.4 but I thought I'd give their new direction a try at least). Initially KDE3 was heaven; everything was configurable. But then it was hell; everything was configurable. I went in search of an old flame, Enlightenment, but that flame had died out, I just hadn't noticed.

Then I discovered XFCE4, just the right balance of configurability and simplicity (for me at least). Now I use 10% Gnome, 60% KDE, and 30% other (rox mostly). I have the best of everything and it all fits together beautifully. XFCE4 is so unopposing that everything can live together in harmony.

Maybe people are right and there should be one common desktop, but for all the people like me out there who like neither Gnome or KDE entirely, I'd like to recommend XFCE4, it's kind of rad.

Fight the enemy, not ourselves

[michaelzhao]

We, as an open source community need to stop squaballing about the inclusion of GNOME or KDE. Truth is, average computer user doesn't know how to use "make install DESTDIR=~/pkg" they need their hand held. As a open source community we need to make software simpler to ultimately achieve the goal of converting more people to Linux. This must be done without sacrificing usability. This way people of all skillsets from the average Joe to SysAdmins and effectively utilize Linux, something XP hasn't done yet. If we can beat the enemy to this point, then we win a major battle. As for KDE or GNOME, I think both are very good. I'm more partial toward KDE myself (being a big SUSE fan) but I can easily use GNOME myself. Please do note that Pat hasn't made a decision, if he does, please remember that he will be thinking about an open-source commmandment... "OPTIONS ARE ALWAYS GOOD!!!" until then, we'll have to sit back and watch.

Childish nonsense

[msobkow]

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.

Re:Childish nonsense

[superpulpsicle]

While I prefer KDE on just about every version of linux I tried, GNOME was never that far behind.

It was just a matter of preference that I stuck to KDE. GNOME was every bit as good functionality wise.

What about dropline gnome?

[tutwabee]

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.

RE: We don't need a grand unified desktop.

[GoClick]

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

GNOME is a difficult for sys admins

[kuom]

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?

Re:GNOME is a difficult for sys admins

[jcrowly]

There is some very good documentation on gconf written from a sys admin point of veiw. And while the main web site does not scream about it existance is is there. http://www.gnome.org/learn/

The most usfull part of these docs it how it explains the way gconf merges the users own gconf files with the manditory settings and the defaults.
Gconf from a sysadmins point of view is quite a usfull tool and allows a good degrede of control. Does KDE have a equivalent.

Re:GNOME is a difficult for sys admins

[eldacan]

I agree with a lot of your points and hope that Gnome developpers will try and fix them, but it's really unfair when you say "they told me to upgrade to 2.6 just like Microsoft!". You see, unlike Microsoft, Gnome is free (and Free). Hopefully developpers move forward. I don't want them to spend their time fixing bugs in 2.4 that don't apply to 2.6 (and now 2.8), I want them to enhance Gnome (this means also fixing bugs, of course) so that I can get a better desktop... for free!

My point is not "it's OK when they don't fix bugs since it's free". What I mean is: it's OK when they work on the latest release since the upgrade is free.

Re:GNOME is a difficult for sys admins

[Too Much Noise]

You see, unlike Microsoft, Gnome is free (and Free).

I highly doubt the time he spent upgrading all the users' desktops was 'free' for his company. You see, it's not always about up-front costs when you're not a hobbyist user. If Gnome does not Just Work, then it's definitely Not Free for entreprise customers. And this kind of flies in the face of the "Gnome is more professional" ranters. NBot to mention that it doesn't help at all with the OSS software adoption on the entreprise desktop.

Re: We don't need a grand unified desktop.

[Tanktalus]

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.

Re:kde licensing

[dbIII]

Thus, Trolltech appears to either be blatantly prejudiced against Windows users

They are very different environments. Open source is scarce in the MS Windows world, and shareware is almost unknown (know anyone that paid for xv?) on various breeds of *nix. It's simple, if you make money with someones work they will want you to give them something, and while the *nix developers usually aren't selling the apps the MS Windows developers are.

Besides, I recall the recent Qt book had a CD with a MS Windows version of Qt for non-commercial use, I bet it could be found on their website in a couple of minutes as well.

The whole licence thing was RMS saying "use no other licence but mine" and Trolltech trying a couple of other licences like XFree86 had and Ghostscript has and CUPs has but then they settled on the GPL. Storm in a teacup to anyone that ever read their licence or has read the licence with ghostscript or CUPs or XFree86. Troll was just the convenient target since they were a rival to the new gnome. It was sorted out even to the satisfaction of RMS years ago.

Gnome means **mega** dependencies ...

[no_sw_patents123]

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 ... :-)

Story Treatment Shows Failure of FOSS Journalism

[reallocate]

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?

Yes.

[Illissius]

Kiosk.