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.'"

Comments

Why are 90% of Slashdot articles flamebait?

[typical]

I have a friend who stopped reading Slashdot about a year ago. He really enjoyed it at one point, but the proportion of articles that are simply rabble-rousing has reached simply ridiculous levels. I've finally started using an RSS reader, and Slashdot just doesn't warrant fitting on the thing.

I don't mean that article titles like "Emacs sucks Donkey Balls" show up -- mean that you see summary bodies that strongly imply that, for instance, emacs is going to stop being used by anyone, and deliberately lets users draw wrong conclusions.

The problem with this approach is that it isn't sustainable. Yes, readers that are alarmed and upset make for attentive readers. For a while. After a bit, trying to read Slashdot, I start to feel numb from the sheer amount of useless content flooding by.

On my current front page, I see:

"Unisys: We No Longer Have A Way Out". This article implies that some company has completely switched directions and admitted that Linux is better than Windows. Even without reading the article, I am quite sure that the actual situation is a lot less black-and-white. It's nothing more than a summary intended to let people get a bit of Microsoft-smearing in.

"Hardware: Unsecured Wi-Fi to Become Illegal?" Of course, unsecured Wi-Fi isn't going to become illegal on any kind of significant scale. There would be huge numbers of simply uninformed consumers facing penalties. This article is simply present to get people posting about how the big telcos are trying to suppress independent network access, and so on and so forth. It's trying to get people scared. It's absurd.

"Linux: Linspire CEO Offers S. Korea To Replace Windows" Summary implies that Linux is about to replace Windows across a country. Of course, nothing like that is actually going to happen; this is a PR ploy that at best might generate some revenue for Linspire and a few more Linux users.

There is a *huge* amount of interesting news for nerds out there, if you look across the entire world. There are countless people to interview, who would be more than happy to show up on Slashdot. Technocrat.net covers much of the same stuff as Slashdot, and *they* manage to avoid pointless flame-generating articles. Maybe a GIMP how-to with pretty pictures. A walkthrough of a new programming language. I haven't seen coverage of interesting anime stuff for a bit, and I refuse to believe that the anime world is simply dead. A review of a new Linux distribution.

Instead, I see more and more articles that tend more towards propaganda than interesting news.