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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.'"
dang, KDE was a reason to like SuSE too, so what's the best KDE-centric desktop distro now?
To an extent, one could see this coming. SUSE 10 was the first edition of SUSE to treat both desktops equally. Rather than having YaST default to KDE, it now prompts users to select either GNOME or KDE with no indication of prejudice. They've also been adding GNOME-centric things like Beagle. Novell's own NLD chose GNOME over SUSE's KDE for NLD 9. SUSE 10 was one of the first distributions to support GNOME 2.12 (beating Ubuntu while Mandriva which came out significantly later still uses GNOME 2.10).
While I'm still a bit surprised to see Novell give such a slight to KDE this soon, there were signs that they were becoming a GNOME operation.
In a shocking turn of events, Novell goes with the desktop founded by one if their key employees. I really thought that Ximian purchase was just a ploy to take the top Gnome developers out of the game so that KDE could flourish. I guess it was because they actually like Gnome. Go figure.
It isn't GNOME thats interesting it's Mono. Novell needs to standardize on one platform in order to create a single homogenized environment. My guess is that they plan to sell their commercialized applications using Mono. Since Mono uses GTK for it's toolkit it's going to look odd to have one desktop using one toolkit and their tools using another toolkit. It creates a disharmony.
As for customers, they won't care what the desktop is as long as it does what they want it to do. Corporate customers are not addled and opinionated like us FOSS types. They don't have a favourite distro. It's whatever it takes to get the job done. If they do have opinions by in large it's going to be a miniority. As you say, as long as Novell listens to it's customers they can put resources into extending GNOME to do what customers need. The desktops are not that different, perhaps one provides more customization than the other but there is nothing that can't be added since it's all open source.
sri
Yes, you can run Mono under KDE. Yes, Novell could get strong KDE bindings into Mono. But Novell develops apps for Mono, and Mono plays better under Gnome on Linux.
The announcement does not mean that Novell is stopping the support of KDE on the desktop, it means that Gnome is the default on the desktop. One could speculate that it is also (implicit) permission for the Novell application developers to stop caring about KDE, but I dont think they ever did.
In one of his typical prima-donna rants earlier this year, Jamie Zawinski (one of the "popular kids" here at Slashdot High) spoke of Netscape's acquisition of Collabra, and how the Collabra people ended up forcing their culture onto Netscape from the bottom up -- eventually destabilizing and destroying the company by sending them in all the wrong directions.
It's clear now that the exact same thing is happening to Novell. The acquisition of Ximian was a BIG mistake. It added absolutely no value to Novell (I think it happened because "someone knew someone" in Massachussetts and they did it to keep Ximian's investors from losing all their money) and what happened next? Slowly but surely, the Ximian people are taking control of Novell. This latest move proves it -- SuSE was well known as a KDE powerhouse. They did more for KDE than any other single company out there (except maybe Troll Tech). Now, the Ximian people have dismantled SuSE's KDE leadership, and are probably well on their way to dismantling any other strategic advantage any other part of Novell may have had.
So long Novell, it was a grand run, but you're letting the wrong people take charge and even though you may not realize it yet, you're in a downward spiral.
And since I know Miguel and Nat are reading this -- listen up, guys, stop being a couple of pushy blowhards and do the right thing for your company. Let the grownups run the show please.
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Actually i think usability is a 'small' part of the corperate move towards gnome .. Its accesability!
Gnome has had a lot of contributions from Sun to improve accesability, high contrast/large font options, screen reader support, screen magnifiers, style guides and a lot of things refering to US and international accesability specifications that software needs to live up to before its acceptable to some goverment- / organisations. (great internationalization & font support thru pango, flexible text directions, etc must play a factor too)
I think a lot of the big projects choose gnome/gtk for this reason too, and its definatly why redhat picked gnome, so they can sell to those markets, and its probably why Novell decided to pick gnome as well
Big organisations and goverments have different demands, and gnome seems to fit them well; Home users might have different demands (though some do require the accesability!), but with all the $ flowing to gnome, the area's where its not up to spec yet, it will be soon i guess
From what I have seen - unscientifically - KDE has been steadily gaining more market share then Gnome. I subscribe to the linux journals monthly desktop orientated pdf and they seem to agree. I have nothing against Gnome - I just happen to like KDE. Back in '99 I thought it was better for me and I have really liked KDE's progress ever since.
Where to go from here? First, I hope this is all wrong - I'm an enthusiastic Suse user. Kubuntu I suppose, but its a tough sell for my clients. Kooler heads prevail and I hope Novell is smarter than this, but somehow I doubt it. History shows Intel let the engineers create Itanium, and Novell has in the past bought Unix for top dollar and sell it to SCO for a huge loss, along with Corel etc.
Say it aint so, novell.
iksrazal
Imagine the sales pitch when they tell the customer that they have to retrain all their staff for the next upgrade. Microsoft, RedHat and every other competitor probably opened a bottle of LouisXIV 1714 in celebration =)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
The problem is that QT is GPLed while GTK is LGPLed. That might not seem like a big difference but it is a huge difference to the commercial software developer. I can create commercial closed source software using Mono+GTK. Mix in QT and I either have to purchase a commercial QT license or I have to create GPLed applications.
Novell is finally realizing that it doesn't make sense to develop and maintain two completely separate desktop environments (that don't interoperate particularly well) when it can simply choose *one* environment (the same one that the rest of the commercial Linux world has chosen) and save a pile of money while giving its sales folks a simple message to sell.
basically the user doesn't have to know the difference between, for instance, Carbon apps and Cocoa apps.
Just to check, I started up a Gnome app while running KDE. No problem. The other way works fine too. The only things developers and users are forced to choose are what toolkits or what user interfaces they prefer.
It always seems to be pundits like you who complain in the users' names about choice - users either don't know there is a choice (because they're using whatever was default on their distribution) or don't care there is a choice (because the existance of one compatible choice usually doesn't make the other any worse). Do you know any real users who don't like having choices? Tell them I ordered them to use Gnome. There, no choice anymore, it's all better.
Different packaging systems are a much better example of problems caused by choice, because there you can have some incompatibility - I can't double-click-install every SuSE package or Mandrake package on my Fedora system, and I can't install *any* Debian package without digging into "Alien" howtos. That means more work or less compatibility for software developers, and that's a bad choice... but, of course, it's the same bad choice that developers are forced to make when they choose to write OS X applications or Windows applications. It's not even that bad, since Linux developers can statically link all libraries and make a self-installing install.sh script to be compatible with every distribution (or can distribute source code to be compatible with a dozen other Unices), but OS X or Windows developers who want to be compatible with OSes from multiple companies need to use crossplatform API wrappers from day one.