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Novell to Standardize on GNOME
Motor writes "In what must be one of the least unexpected announcements of recent times, Novell says that they are standardizing on one desktop rather than supporting two different codebases. From the article: 'Novell is making one large strategic change. The GNOME interface is going to become the default interface on both the SLES (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server) and Novell Linux Desktop line. KDE libraries will be supplied on both, but the bulk of Novell's interface moving forward will be on GNOME.'"
Mandriva is still firmly standardized on KDE.
The GNOME interface is going to become the default interface on both the SLES (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server) and Novell Linux Desktop line.
All that is happening is that the distributions they are pushing to corporations will use Gnome as the default. Big deal. SuSE Personal/Professional/whatever will continue as normal.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
How come gnome, which is not *that* much superior to kde (some would argue that it's inferior at the moment) is making all the headway?
Usability. It's that simple.
I mean, it's not the lack of a kparts equivalent, being programmed in a 70's language - c++ is a bad OO language, but C is much worse as "OO language" still gnome went with C (and you have to admit those even if you're a gnome zealot)
Fortunately, KDE 4.0 is focusing in usability. The reasons that keeps many people away from KDE is usability, anything else. KDE is great, in some aspects their technology is ahead of other desktops and not just gnome (I love kparts). Bring usability to kde (ie: wait for kde 4.0) and you'll see lots of users switching to kde
I think a lot of Suse customers will not be so pleased.
Of course SUSE customers won't be pleased. There are many must-have desktop apps built on the KDE framework that don't have any good gtk equivalents:
AmaroK music player -- Steve Jobs' nightmare, the single greatest threat to Itunes on the Free Software platform.
DigiKam -- The most feature-rich application for digital photo management.
Konqueror File Manager" -- Embeded image/PDF/music/video viewing (via KMPlayer) and a tree-view arrangement of the filesystem familiar to Windows users (Nautilus doesn't come anywhere close)
Seamless, transparent network file access on SMB, FTP, SSH and WebDav networks from _any_ KDE application.
Kaffeine -- The most polished FOSS movie player.
Baghira -- A native QT style that faithfully imitates OS X eyecandy, aimed at new users coming from the Mac world.
KDE and QT also make up a technically superior platform for developers, drastically lowering the learning curve for programmers new to FOSS development. KDE apps can be built from the ground up using the best development tools in the Free Software world (which also happen to be built on QT/KDE):
QT designer for GUI development
Kdevelop for syntax highliting, application templates, and project organization.
BKSys environmentfor a complete replacement of the autotool chain (libtool+automake+autoconf+make) that will make dependency a whole lot more simpler and efficient.
Gnome is way behind KDE with regards to these features. The only reason Redhat's doing so well with Gnome is because they're targeting geeky sysadmins who don't care about having a good-looking desktop. The other 99% of the world does care, and gnome just doesn't fit the bill.
Mandriva, of course.
KDE is the "default GUI" for a basic install, although Mandriva also comes with Gnome, IceWM and others.
I use Mandriva/Mandrake since it has always provided such a great support for KDE, "everything just works" approach for hardware, easy system administration (both GUI or command-line) and urpmi, the best package manager for rpm. As good as "apt-get".
Everybody seems so "Ubuntu" centric today, singing praise to Ubuntu's "new stuff"... when all that "new stuff" has been in Mandrake/mandriva since version 8.0 (and we've had 8.1, 8.2, 9.0, 9.1, 9.2, 10.0, 10.1, 10.2 and now 2006.0; one release every 6 months). So, you see, all that "new" stuff is "old news" for the Mandrake crowd.
And then, KDE is an almost alien part of Ubuntu (Kubuntu)
Ubuntu is all hype.
Anyway, back to my boring Mandriva (yes, boring as all works, and all has been working for so long...)
Peace