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Gnome Removed From Slackware
Anonymous Coward writes "After long consideration, Pat Volkerding has removed GNOME from Slackware. Pat mentions in the
-current ChangeLog that GNOME takes a lot of time to package, so this move should allow more time to be spent on the rest of Slackware." From the changelog: "Please do not incorrectly interpret any of this as a slight against GNOME
itself, which (although it does usually need to be fixed and polished beyond
the way it ships from upstream more so than, say, KDE or XFce) is a decent
desktop choice."
Gnome has been dropped and KDE 3.4 added? Wow. That says a lot in itself about the current state of the 2 leading Desktop Environments in Linux...particularly in a conservative --not--bleeding freaking--edge distro like Slack.
This guy is way out there
How ironic, seeing that Gnome tries to be the simplest and easiest to use full-featured desktop on Linux. I guess easy to use doesn't mean easy to package.
Gnome was wicked a couple of years ago. Now the damn desktop is in such a state of flux that you don't know which widget set is going to be used next, and when they're going to get around to building a damn file browser that won't slow the machine down to a halt.
I'm calling it: In two years it's going to be KDE versus a lightweight WM like xfce or something. Gnome will be for people who like to punish themselves.
Before you all go freaking out, let me suggest something.
Build Linux From Scratch. Then try adding some common desktops. KDE is quite easy to add to LFS. Gnome is an absolute bear to add.
At one point, I had a printout of all the deps for Gnome. It was a huge spiderweb of tangles that had to be decoded and followed exactly to get Gnome to build.
Anyway, Gnome is lots of work.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
...because that's the only reason I can think of to include it. I don't know anyone who runs Gnome or KDE on slackware. I run fluxbox, some people I know run Afterstep, some run Windowmaker, a lot run xfce, but nobody runs KDE. Admittedly, most people keep the kde and gnome library packages installed, so that we can run programs that require them, but as for the UI -- well, I've just never seen it.
I'd be interested to hear anecdotes from Slackware users who run Gnome or KDE. This change just won't affect me much.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
It's about damn time, it's been pretty clear to me that gnome is a mess, and I feel sorry for anyone trying to package it, It is probably one of the nicest fully free desktops available, but that seems to be all it has going for it, feature wise, app wise, and functionally, KDE has it beat everywhere. gnome needs a major cleanup, to just stop adding new stuff, and do a rewrite from scratch, it has some really solid idea's, but it's just crufty, and microsoft has pretty clearly demonstrated that building new and cool stuff on top of crufty old stuff hits a brick wall and causes serious problems.
KDE is a whole lot better to use. gnome's time has come, can we please have a decent #2 now?
"Including GNOME is too hard"? Putting the "slack" in "Slackware".
Maybe this will pressure GNOME to become more installable. I find it worth the effort, but we'd all be better off if it were easier. Including GNOME, whose user/developer base would expand.
--
make install -not war
I'm gonna give an amen to that. I moved to Xfce I think in Fedora Core 2 when it was included as a standard desktop option, and i haven't looked back. It is fast, easy to use, small, powerful, I've got gnome and kde libs on my machines to run kde and gnome apps, but I love Xfce all the power of gnome or kde, loads in less than 5 seconds (as opposed to 30+ for either kde or gnome) and uses much less ram. All in all I really like it.
Welcome our new KDE overlords and wish them luck in removing gnome from every other distrobution.
Humor (or lack there of) aside. KDE 3.4 made me return to KDE from XFCE. I had converted from using gnome and kde on various systems to everything XFCE for awhile now. KDE 3.4 is just amazing. I can see why Pat wouldnt have any problem removing gnome and putting in KDE 3.4.
Now I hope they drop KDE too.
What I hate most about these bloated Windows-wannabe environments is that some good software unncessarily depends on them.
I use Fluxbox and ROX for a lightning fast desktop with all the features I want, but I'm sure there are other good desktop alternatives out there.
Try MiniSlack
y =20050325224633845
http://minislack.slackplanet.org/article.php?stor
It's pretty neat, 400MB, KDE is optional
I don't use slackware, or gnome, or kde, but I was a hardcore flux/fvwm user, until I found XFCE Just the good parts of a DE, without every single application in the world with a stupid gui and a G/K stuck on the front
Setec Astronomy
The "choice" obsessed people would beat them down. They want every OSS effort to be splintered and fragmented, so that I have to install and load two entire desktop environments just to be able to run each other's apps.
In addition, if I dare load up Firefox and OpenOffice, that's two more GUI libraries in memory, so now I get to have four entire GUI libraries all doing the same thing.
And before someone replies with "Microsoft Office does that too," no it doesn't. Those are called owner-drawn controls, where you override a standard Windows control's draw event with your own function. It's still a standard Windows control and not an entire desktop GUI library.
I have news for you, people who know how to make things work go into construction, not programming. People go into programming because they want to dick around.
I happen to like Gnome, but then again, I also liked Unix windowmanagers circa 1995. They do X and they do multiple desktops, two things that were always a hassle on Windows. Other than that, Gnome is still waiting for a third compelling application. It's just a prettier version of TWM, or FVWM, or whatever you were using way back when the internet was born.
I think GNOME is in this hackers limbo, they separate more pieces and appeal to the hackers but they are also trying to make a polished end-user oriented platform. That's tough. I also think that the whole mono thing, while producing great stuff and well intentioned, split some powerful people out of the GNOME leadership. Then there was that phase of "rapid expansion" where mozilla was going to be intergrated (it actually was for a while) and openoffice was going to become the GNOME office suite and this and that and everything was going to be part of it; that's always bad for business. All isn't lost, it's opensource so it never really is, but KDE is kicking ass right now and GNOME seems to be kind of drifting.
For some odd reason, Mono hasn't really taken off. I think the idea of integrating java and mono more tightly is the way to more and better apps. It also seems like there needs to be more cohesion in their APIs... Especially if you're going after the java/c# crowd, they never write that much code, they just assemble other people's work... There aren't a lot of desktop type apps that have really taken advantage of java/c# that are also open source, eclipse does but if you look at the free plug-ins, most are just shit. The apache stuff is awesome but it's all server side.. That leaves GNOME with Mono which is getting there but still baking and KDE with a really nicely made C++ framework where they are leveraging a lot of reuse.
HP made a big noise about supporting Gnome on HP-UX 11i. They made no noise at all about scrapping the project. IIRC, I had an open trouble ticket on their help desk for over a month before they'd admit it.
This was back when they were wedged on Secure Linux 2.0 forever. HP's Free/Open Software efforts have always been, shall we say, high-entropy.
with ubuntu i switched to gnome. it looks a bit oldfashioned. but thats much better than having trillions of useless features like in kde. kde seems to become the "marketing driven" equivalent to windows xp and what longhorm will be.
the whole desktop business became "marketing driven". edward tufte once told that in the early days userinterface designers never thought about that they would have to do what marketing guys tell them. an independent linux community should show people how a simple desktop improves the working conditions.
OS X has been doing it since the first release, AFAIK (the first one I used was 10.1).
I agree that OS X does render fonts more nicely than either MSWin or X11, but that doesn't have as much to do with the use of subpixel rendering as the actual shapes of the fonts, which are just...well, they just seem more polished.
GNOME's been slipping for some time now, really. They've always been more bloated than KDE, and they've even admitted so. For instance, a gconsole tab uses 300K, while a konsole tab uses 50K. The user experience has also been slipping. Their usability engineers, if they have any, aren't doing any usability studies. Mind you, KDE aren't either, but their usability seems better.
The drawback to eliminating GNOME is not the loss of the GNOME UI, but the loss of the GNOME libraries, which allow one to run GNOME apps under KDE. But it IS a huge reduction in what has to be built and packaged, a huge reduction in disk usage, and a huge reduction in memory bloat.
GNOME people need to get on the stick, cut the fat, improve the quality of the user experience, and make their system easlier to use.
I think part of their problem is over-dependence on RPC. Too many things are done by launching another process, and then calling a procedure in the other process. I suppose the RPC interface itself isn't that bloated (or is it?), but just think about the overhead!
When will we see the KDE hordes slagging off Volkerding? I do clearly remember their jihad against UserLinux when Perens decide to concentrate on GNOME. They loudly proclaimed that UserLinux should give their users choice... and shipping just GNOME was a deeply wrong action for a distro. The result was months of vicious slagging off of Perens and every Linux board was filled with moronic obsessives telling every kind of lie and libel against Perens.
Oh... what's that I hear, the sound of silence. Strange. It's couldn't be that those KDE developers responsible (you know who you are) are a bunch of raging hypocrites, could it?
Truth be told, this isn't a surprise. No-one seriously uses slackware anymore. It was a distro of note back in the early-mid 90s. Now it's essentially irrelevant and no-one cares other than a few zealots. The Linux desktop world is rapidly splitting into the relevant large-scale distros (Red Hat, Sun's JDS, Novell's business systems) who all use GNOME, and the minor irrelevant fanboy distros that hardly anyone uses... who mostly choose KDE. Over the next years or so, we will see more of this until the desktop war is over... and KDE will only be a curiousity -- an externally (outside of the main distro) maintained lump of code in a package repo for Fedora, RHE, JDS and Novell), and the default for a few all-but-irrelevant distros for the average hopeless wannabe-l33t types (Gentoo for example).
So yes... this sort of thing is inevitable. With the blatant dropping of any kind of "balanced" inclusionary policy (both GNOME and KDE) becoming the norm for distros, it'll become a straightforward war of attrition. One one side is GNOME with it's huge commercial deployments and more liberal licensing -- and one the other, KDE with it's SCO/Canopy (who are part owners of TrollTech) Qt cuckoo and awkward and expensive licensing. Next sign -- watch Novell carefully. They currently still ship KDE on their "consumer" SuSE distro -- this is pure legacy stuff from their purchase of SuSE. It's in for the chop as it doesn't bring in the real money. The business stuff is where the money is, and that's all GNOME.
I think we are basically on the brink of saying goodbye to KDE as any kind of important force in the Linux world.
And the sad thing is it gets this with 100x the footprint of libraries. I'm assuming that's why gnome's logo is, in fact, a footprint. Because it is huge.
I ran gnome-1.x on my desktop for quite a while. I didn't care for KDE. Gnome had all the knobs to turn to tweak it and it wasn't terribly bloated. After Gnome-2.x came out, all the knobs to tweak things were gone and the dependancies were even worse. It was like a light weight window manager with all the requirements of a heavy weight one. I tried KDE and felt it was way, way better than the 2.x series of gnome. I kept trying each new gnome release and found them all to be seriously deficient in the user experience arena.
If they had just kept running with the 1.x methodologies, we wouldn't be seeing distros dropping it. It seems like all it took was one focus group giving poor recomendations to bring gnome to it's knees. Pretty sad.