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Shuttleworth's Commitment to Kubuntu and KDE
An anonymous reader writes "The Ubuntu Below Zero conference is in full momentum this week and Kubuntu has been prominent throughout. In his opening remarks at the start of the conference Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth announced that he was now using Kubuntu on his desktop machine and said he wanted Kubuntu to move to a first class distribution within the Ubuntu community. Free CDs for Kubuntu through shipit should be available for the next release if the planned Live CD Installer removes the need for a separate install CD."
Well, it goes like this
1. Adopt Gnome as default desktop for a Linux Desktop strategy.
2. ????
3. Abandon Linux Desktop strategy
"is now the only major KDE-based Linux distribution"
No.
a. SuSE is THE KDE distribution and when Novell kills KDE, Novell will not succeed with Gnome. Novell bought a KDe power house and now kills its best pratice. What Stupididy.
b. Mandriva, Linspire, Kubuntu, Knoppix, etc etc etc
"How far can they get on Shuttleworth's money, when all the big boys are throwing their money behind Gnome?"
KDE is all about great fun and it works. The infrastructure is good and consistent. KDE Desktop Linux is no promise. It is ready but it can and will do better.
Gnome means no fun, a boring looking desktop and money waste on premature technology, fixing unfinished solutions which only work 70%.
Who throws its money? I just see business announcements following the scheme above:
RedHAt, HP, SUN, and now Novell. Few days ago SUN abandoned its gnome based Java Desktop failure. RedHat does not target the desktop anymore. And Novell did a serious mistake not listening to customers.
"The major problem I can see is that the user should not even have to care whether a given app is GNOME, KDE or whatever. You set your fonts and colours in the GNOME control panel, then you start a KDE app and it looks like weird-arse shit. WTF?"
And nobody should have to pay for health insurance, and refrigerators should grow on trees. It's called utopia... I've never understood the people and culture behind KDE, never liked the KDE desktop. I prefer to use and contribute to GNOME. A lot of other contributors are just like me... They really don't have the time nor care about the way a KDE app looks on GNOME or vice versa. It simply is not that important.
"No serious open-source desktop these days can be all-GNOME or all-KDE; you need to make the mixture not affect the end user at all. They desperately need a unified look-and-feel control panel that will set this stuff consistently without the user having to care."
Yes, they can be. There's not a single KDE app that I can think of that I would want to use. I hear occasional complaints about gimp and inkscape under KDE, but personally, I don't use them much (or inkscape) at all since my professional media work really forces me into Windows and Illustrator CS or other apps. I accept this. By analogy, if I need to carpool a ton of kids, I'll drive my van, otherwise I'll go where I need to in a car. I'm not going to dedicate my time to build a van that gets the city mpg of a car unless I really, really cared about it.
Windows + Illustrator, for me, is fine in certain situations, but for most of my work, GNOME accomodates me fine. And I'm happy... So, don't expect me to fret about the KDE users.
By the way, there's absolutely nothing preventing you from stepping up to the plate, getting the necessary skills, and fixing the issues you cite... That how change happens in these desktops.
Have you actually given a solid try to Inkscape? I admit I'm not a graphic designer, but I have to do enough that I always keep a copy of Illustrator to hand, but the current version of Inkscape does everything I need except for dealing with the Illustrator file format.
And more on topic, I went Gnome 1.4 -> KDE 2 -> KDE 3 (With a few months of IceWM due to being stuck on a P120 for a while) -> KDE 3.2 -> GNOME 2.6 (running 2.10 IIRC). I still have two KDE apps that I run, konsole (can't stand anything else), and K3b (I know there are gnome ones out there, just haven't tried them).
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Except that breaks having a single-cd installer, one of the fundamentals of Ubuntu, and it's something they'll hold on to for as long as possible.
Now what they might do is use free space on the live-cd as storage for any KDE packages they can't fit on the main installer CD.
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Oh, ffs, there you go again. Another bullshit comment from our beloved Elektroschock. At least this time you got the mod you deserved, seeing how you once again failed to back your claim that KDE is an absolute requirement for any desktop linux with actual facts (or at least any real arguments). All you have there is "I think KDE looks better".
You can't expect anyone to take your comments serious this way.
Nobody said that GNOME completely lacked i18n support, as you appear to be suggesting.
What was clearly stated was that relative to KDE, the support of GNOME is inferior. The GNOME translations do not have the same high quality of the KDE translations, for instance. But that's not surprising, considered that GNOME is mainly developed by American developers working for American companies, while KDE is a far more international effort (with a bulk of the work being done in Europe and Asia).
Please try to read the posts before you respond to them with factually incorrect information.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
"I think technically, KDE is a good desktop, and it is popular in Europe. But no matter how good it is, KDE is simply is not going to happen as a mainstream commercial desktop as long as Qt is available only under the GPL and a commercial license" Certainly KDE has the lead in DEs, but lets not forget the behaviour of Trolltech and the licensing of the Qt library, they did it once, and I've not doubt in my mind that if it wasn't for GNOME they'll be charging everybody for the use of Qt. It's plain and simple they could change the licensing of Qt4 or Qt5. They are not trustable, unless they license the Qt library ONLY with the GPL and do it for the foreseable future, if this doesn't happen I'm glad to have GNOME. I believe GNOME is the counterweight that refrains Qt became totally proprietary software. Good news for us. One more point, the healthy competition of KDE and GNOME is in the spirit of free software, the best code will prevail, I like and use both, but as I've said before due to these small details, I use more GNOME, and I think it has improved a lot, I hope that it gets better.