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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.'"
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
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.
Debian etc. have historically rejected KDE because Qt used to not meet Debian's Free Software Guidelines etc. Those days are long over, of course, but the animosity towards KDE seems to have remained.
As for Novell... hard to say. But it's worth noting that many core KDE developers are from Germany, and SuSE is (was), too; Gnome, on the other hand, is pretty much a US development, and Novell is also a US company. Coincidence? Maybe, but I wouldn't be surprised if these things did play a role, in both cases...
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
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.
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
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."
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.
"In Europe, you cannot konquer the Desktop market with Gnome."
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
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.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
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
Commercial?
Xandros, and several other Debian based clones.
OpenSource
SimplyMEPIS, KNOPPIX, Kanotix, and a plethora of Debian based clones.
My favorite is SimplyMEPIS
But, considering that regardless of the distro the same release number of KDE behaves the same way on all distros that deploy it, any is as good as another, all other things being equal. So KDE is not a reason to choose a distro unless that distro is the first to release with the latest version of KDE and you want to move to it.
Linux distros that feature GNOME still have to install connectivity to KDE functionality because the VAST majority of applications are written using QT widgets. Companies wanting to create cross platfrom applications to enable their move to Widnows without reinventing the wheel will use QT because it is the smoothest route to take.
I find it rather ironic that GNOME was created as a GPL response to QT's propritary widget set, but after the KDE Foundation negotiated with TrollTech to continually release a GPL version of QT the reason for GNOME's existance became moot. Now, ironically, GNOME is being favored by the Linux distro makers who are selling proprietary brands and services.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
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
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.
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
woosh!
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
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.
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.
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
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.