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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.'"
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.
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!
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.