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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.'"
Granted, I'm on OS X user who uses Linux servers, and I really don't give a rats ass about Gnome versus KDE - I just look at whatever I'm using and launch the app I need.
For Novell to work on one interface isn't saying "Oh, Gnome is the Hawt and KDE is not!" - it's just a cost saving move, and I can agree with that. The question is: will this help lead to a "one Linux Desktop" future where the de-facto standard is Gnome. When that happens, will more apps be Gnome based, or will we continue to see the dual-track desktop development?
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
RedHat, Sun and Novell all now standardize on Gnome, correct? Do any major distros standardize on KDE anymore?
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
...as far as style and eye candy, take a look on gnome-look.org!
I've customized my Ubuntu 5.10 with the metacity theme "Blended 1.5", the "NuoveXT" icon theme and the grass wallpaper from one of the leaked longhorn/vista betas. Try it!
May be somethink like this, you can see some names from Novel
http://tango-project.org/
what's the best KDE-centric desktop distro now?
I don't want a KDE-centric distro anymore than I want a Gnome-centric distro. Personally my favorites are Ubuntu/Kubuntu for the latest desktops, Debian for server/workstation machines that need to be rock stable. And they both should do a good job at running Gnome apps in KDE and KDE apps in Gnome.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
SuSe is a KDE distribution and SuSE customers want KDE. Desktop-Linux means KDE in Europe. So what do some managers of Novell do? Listen to Ximian which is a developer's booth without a market.
Unbelievable. They ruin a distribution.
A real company would listen to customers first, then allocate the ressources to development. Suse was very good on that in the past.
A bad company is driven by engineering. The role of marketing is to sell what the developers invented or want to create.
The second approach is doomed to fail.
It's interesting to note that Novell open sourced SUSE, is now cutting 20% of Novell jobs and is standardizing on Gnome. I've heard speculation that the SUSE acquisition was to remove a competitor and they could proceed with Novell plans.
I'm not advocating that, I'm just noting that Novell has done a 180 and seems to be regressing. SUSE has always been considered one of the best distros out there, and at least OpenSUSE will continue with community support.
Kubuntu, which is a KDE version fo the wonderful Ubuntu distribution, which incidentaly standardised on GNOME also. If you wait long enough, I expect you will see a supported version of Novell's distribution, but with KDE as the desktop.
Any fool can talk, but it takes a wise man to listen.
This is not good news. SuSE was one of the big beasts that helped develop and improve kde in a distro, and is one of the main reasons I used it in the past. I did get sick of RPMs in the end though.
Why is that so many people prefer kde over gnome, yet redhat, debian-based distros like ubuntu and now SuSE use gnome as their primary? What main distros will be left that uses kde in preference? I can only think of mandriva now.
I'm not criticising gnome, it's a fine project and a good desktop environment, but I really like the unified desktop, reusable kparts and configurability you get with kde. I'm far from alone, as the vibrancy of kde-look.org shows. 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?
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
When Novell Linux Desktop was released, we as Novell Partners started using it, and used it's default desktop (Gnome 2.6) as our desktop. Having used Gnome in the past year or so is my biggest computing life's error. Everything have been problems for us. Nothing works as expected, session management is a mess, gconf crashes a lot, esd is still there and nautilus is inflexible. Gnome is being guided towards being a Desktop for dummies, but it's weird behaviour only make users unconfortable with that Desktop. Now I'm going back to KDE, and I am currently remembering what was to have fun in the desktop.
Also, we support some clients with NLD9, and everything are problems, from mime types to gconf. Our support team has started to hate Gnome a lot. Our roadmap for our clients is to switch them to KDE, but with this decision, it will not be a Novell "official" product, it will be probably OpenSuSE.
With Novell having bought Ximian, it's logical that Novell standarizes on Gnome, but with this decision, SuSE only losses, and so does Novell. Will have to think twice before suggesting a partner renewal... They still have cool products, but they are taking the grown decisions (again and again)
------- The last Sig. got fired.
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.
I am not, although KDE is a good interface, I have always favored GNOME. So to me, seeing SUSE carry GNOME right there along with KDE was good and is now one of the reasons why I now run SUSE 10. The other is SUSE 10 supports my 54g wireless card.
But I suspect there is more to it. Proprietary Qt libraries inside of KDE have always plagued KDE adoption. And quite frankly, I like programming in the GNOME/GTK+ environment and usually have no trouble to move such works to Solaris x86 or Sparc.
Qt is KDE's achilles heel.
Posters here on Slashdot and all over always wonder why Linux hasn't made more of an impact in the desktop world. Well, this is the biggest reason (or representative of it, at least). In the Windows world or even the MacOS world, no regular users give a hoot what window manager they run. They don't care which packaging system they use, either. All they know is that they buy the OS and it works, and that programs written for the platform just work. And if they go out and buy an off-the-shelf program for their computer, it just installs. The underlying technology is irrelevant. Windows users don't really care about the difference between InstallShield and .MSI files - they just know that they double-click on SETUP.EXE or INSTALL.EXE and it installs the darned program. Mac users know they either double-click to run an installer or just drag a program into their Applications folder. And yes, I know there's ways to run X11 apps on both Mac and Windows, but basically the user doesn't have to know the difference between, for instance, Carbon apps and Cocoa apps. They don't choose between competing windowing systems. They just use the computer.
Linux systems are more or less founded on choice. Which is a great thing, but has no relationship with user-friendliness or consistency. Remember part of the original motivation behind GNOME - it was because a crew of folks was unhappy with the QT licensing. So they reinvented the wheel to deal with it. That's what's great about both Open Source and Free software, but it's also why a wide-open platform is not going to gain mainstream use anytime in the foreseeable future. Even if either KDE or GNOME shut down all their development efforts tomorrow, someone would pick up the dropped torch and keep it going. And then competing vendors would still have to pick one or the other.
The day Linux desktops start spreading is the day all the big projects decide they need to focus less on eye candy and more on making the system as simple, consistent, and reliable as possible. Kind of like OS X.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I distinctly remember submitting this as "standardising"... only to have it edited and Americanized (both in the title and most irritatingly in the text itself). What a thoughtful action from a website with editors that wouldn't know the correct spelling of a word if a dictionary was violently shoved up their arses.
We all know that crap is king
Give us dirty laundry!
Honestly I don't even know the reason, maybe it is the Dark Side of the Force, or maybe the panels just have less clutter, maybe stuff just works better. I don't miss the transparency, the shadows, the SVG icons of KDE, at first I thought they were great, but after a while it didn't matter. Maybe it is also less stuff to configure and less options to worry about. Sometimes I think in UI design "less is more", but of course it is still very much a subjective thing, so I am glad there is the choice and the options for everyone KDE, GNOME, Blackbox, Xfce and others.
Novell is making a huge mistake by attempting to shove a Desktop down the throats of consumers and businesses. Some like KDE and others like Gnome it is the purchaser that should have the choice.
Funny, I've always felt the other way around. To each his own...
As it happens I just installed SUSE 10 and I quite like it. I'm using KDE right now but even the integration efforts of SUSE can't paper over the cracks. Just seeing 6 menu items in a row in Konq that say "Configure" just makes me shudder. If I had a choice I would use GNOME, but the GNOME integration in SUSE is terrible (where is the input from Ximian?). Therefore it's a surprise to hear they're now going to favour GNOME. I guess they've decided its better to go with Ximian than with SUSE.
libraries should be LGPL
Until a month ago, I would have agree with you
However, I switched to dual monitors, and they just don't work under kde (t's probably just me, I'm NOT flaming the kde developers). So I've been using gnome for the last month, and, surprise - it's a LOT better than it used to be, and it runs faster than KDE.
Te KDE apps work just fine (Kontact and KWallet are running all the time on this box).
My only question is - do I try to install a 3rd monitor (I've got 2 19" ones, but I could still use a smaller one for keeping a small to-do list, etc., front-and-center.
The exact opposite was the reason I stopped using SUSE. I hated that I had to use KDE to do certain things. To me KDE is a busy mess that reminds me of all the reasons why I don't use Microsoft Windows.
I use Ubuntu now just for it's great working Gnome. I do miss YaST but I am learning a lot using the command line and editing config files.
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
The "pushy blowhards" are KDE proponents--people who were so out of touch that they invested hundreds of man-years in developing a desktop before they even noticed that they had a massive (and obvious) licensing problem on their hands. Now, they are still pushing an unworkable dual licensing scheme for the toolkit. When will these idiots learn?
It's good that the SuSE distribution is moving to a desktop developed by people who dotted their i's and crossed their t's before shipping. Getting rid of KDE as the default is the best thing that could happen to SuSE.
But SuSE is no longer a European company. They're a Utah company now. And thus things like the fantastic i18n, l10n, and l12y capabilities of SuSE no longer matter. Indeed, it most likely will be their downfall. The quality of GNOME's support for such technology falls short of that of KDE.
But when the feeble die, young blood arises to continue on. And in that case it will be distros like Kubuntu.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Also, a KDE-centric distro means that default software packages offered for installation are KDE-based. So you get JuK rather than Rhythmbox, and your OpenOffice will have Qt native widgets rather than Gtk ones. Again, nothing a user can't do on his own, but why should he waste time on finding out how?
It works the other way around, too. When have you last seen a distro which doesn't provide base Gtk and GNOME libraries for the same reason? As for vast majority of applicatons being written in Qt... please. You certainly can have an all-Qt desktop, but just as well you can have an all-Gtk desktop. However, Gtk is currently the dominant widgetset for Linux; see the numbers for yourself here and here. This implies that GNOME is only good as a replacement for Qt, and does not have merits of its own, which is obviously false. On a side note, have you noticed that most Linux commercial applications lately are also favouring Gtk and GNOME? RealPlayer, Acrobat Reader, Nero... I wonder if it is because of LGPL, or because they see that GNOME is a de facto standard for a Linux desktop these days.Baghira [sourceforge.net] -- A native QT style that faithfully imitates OS X eyecandy, aimed at new users coming from the Mac world.
Have you ever used OS X? Baghira doesn't come close. It sortof gets the look, but the feel very poor compared to the real thing. Try OS X for a week or so, then see if you think Baghira comes anywhere near it. I'm posting on a PowerBook (w/ Tiger), BTW.
Kdevelop [kdevelop.org] for syntax highliting, application templates, and project organization.
Eclipse? KDevelop used to be my IDE of choice until I started using Eclipse.
Kaffeine's cool, though it'd be nice if I could close it without having to killall -9 it afterwords. It seems that every time I close it, it instead goes into the background and starts taking up all the processor. Latest version, multiple distros. If they could fix that it truely would be an awesome player.
QT designer, I'm not going anywhere near that. I'd like to have the option to dual license my work some time in the future...
AmaroK is awesome, I can't praise that enough. Whenever I'm away from Linux I have to get by with iTunes (Mac, Win).
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
This is yet another classic example of an American Corporate being totally out of touch with the customer base out here in the Rest-of-the-World. Message to Novell:- "Enjoy the continuing death experience". Message to shareholders:- "Cash up quick before they stuff up completely and blow all your dough".
AmaroK music player
Banshee, developed by a Novell employee, is leaps and bounds ahead of any existing music app for linux.
DigiKam
F-spot, also by a Novell employee.
As far as all of the other applications you mentioned, each has a gnome equivalent that in many cases does a better job.
QT does, which you'll be developing for if you use qt designer. If you develop something with the free version it has to be under an approved license. You also can't later use that code with the commercial version:
"Please note that it is necessary to choose either the Open Source or Commercial license at the outset of development. Trolltech's commercial license terms do not allow you to start developing proprietary software using the Open Source edition."
http://www.trolltech.com/company/model.html
It's not like I'm planning on doing proprietary software, who knows what I'll be doing a year from now. I'll probably release some of the stuff I develop internally as GPL (I hold the copyright) but do a ghostscript-like scheme for a few parts of it (release it under GPL after a certain time). If I go with QT, even after I pay their $1800 I wouldn't be allowed to do that under the license.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks