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Novell to Standardize on GNOME

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the rollin-with-my-gnomies dept.

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.'"

1 of 599 comments (clear)

  1. KDE must-have apps by billybob2 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.