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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."
So, with the earlier announcement that Novell/SUSE is giving up KDE in favour of Gnome, does this mean that Kubuntu is now the only major KDE-based Linux distribution? How far can they get on Shuttleworth's money, when all the big boys are throwing their money behind Gnome? I would bet that whatever the advantages of Kubuntu on technical and usability fronts are, they must be years away from profitability. Can Shuttleworth alone keep it afloat until they turn the business side around?
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?
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.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
KDE vs. Gnome is not QT vs. GTK+
It is a problem of GTK+ that it does not integrate proper in a KDe desktop.
KDe is not bound to Toolkits.
Intrestingly Gnome adopts all non-QT solutions as part of its own solutions portfolio. I do not mind using Evolution under KDE etc. And I am certainly not intrested in Toolkit wars. They do not matter under Windows, so why shall they matter on Linux machines.
make CD #1 mostly a base system with xorg and the basic x apps, similar to Slackware's #1 CD, and make a #2 CD with Gnome & KDE letting the user decide to install either Gnome and/or KDE, or users can just download the #1 CD install and get a basic OS booting, and download & install either gnome or kde via ftp after installing CD #1
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I've installed both. The computer to my right is running Ubuntu 5.10. It's really a great distro. Very clean, simple, easy to maintain, and "snappy". I installed Kubuntu a few months ago, and I feel it wasn't as polished as Ubuntu is. I think both projects are really good for the community and I'd love to see Kubuntu surpass the commercial distros like Suse and Mandriva.
IMHO KDE is more useful for those who are considering migrating from Windows to Linux. So I don't see why the commercial vendors are flocking to Gnome?
A companies preference is all about politics and has nothing to do with quality. For instance in de past there was a big effort in lobbying for Gnome. Does someone still remember the manipulation of Google in favour of Gnome by Miguel de Icaza and friends? At first Novell bought Miguel de Icaza (=Gnome). Later Novell bought Suse (=KDE). Inside Novell Miguel de Icaza spent all his time killing KDE. He behaves like a cuckoo. Getting KDE out of the nest...
What are they using at UBZ to generate/maintain those schedule pages? I don't see any SW like that in my Ubuntu menu.
--
make install -not war
KDE is most widely used in Europe and Asia, due to its excellent support for non-English i18n, l12n and l12y. Relative to KDE, GNOME's support is lacking in those areas.
Remember, the European and Asian markets are huge today, and they're growing stronger as we speak. For such a new project, Kubuntu has a large following of very devoted users.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
No idea what the real reasons are, but I would guess one would be that Gnome is simply, less config options to tweak and to get wrong then KDE thus less support costs.
I find that KDE, by and large, suffers from the same sort of clutter problems that Windows does. In short, they've emulated the GUI too damn well. Gnome is a lot cleaner, but providing I can run the apps I want, I'll leave it to others to bash the two.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Just as it seems we are making progress toward at least having ONE standard DE for most of the desktops used out there, Shuttleworth pulls this out of his ass. Seriously, Ubunutu is one of the reasons GNOME has made so much progress recently with users and now we are back to square one with splitting the userbase. Stupid move. I could care LESS which one they choose, just choose ONE.
*Fortitudo, aequitas, fidelitas.*
Can you provide us with some screenshots showing the problems that you speak of? Perhaps you managed to botch your installation somehow.
If you're using Kubuntu 5.10, check the K -> System Settings -> Appearance configuration panel. Notice the "GTK styles and fonts" portion. It allows you to easily set your GTK style and fonts to those used by KDE. And it works fine for every GNOME/GTK+ app that I use.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Donno if you consider them major, but they are KDE 'based'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This is PERFECT! Now, if only the CUPS people could get their thing to work without the step in the instructions that tells me to pull all my hair out....
Slackware's CD#1 in the current 10.2 version doesn't include KDE any more, just xfce, twm and some other more minor desktop environments. And Pat has given up distributing Gnome in anything like a current model: that is well served by Dropline, and there's no point in his reinventing the wheel.
Right, Qt is GPL/QPL so to develop against Qt you must license as GPL or buy a TrollTech license.
But! kdelibs are LGPL!
So if you are only using KDE interfaces, you may license as anything you want!
I don't know for sure, but I think this is intentional - if you want to develop cross platform apps, then you buy a Qt license from TrollTech (Although I would argue that neither Qt nor GTK+ is right for the job - instead choose FLTK or Wx). If you want to strengthen the Linux desktop (specifically the KDE part of it), then you can license it however you like w/o paying anyone anything.
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
Mod parent flamebait. Or "Dumb, uniformed crap".
I don't need to explain to anyone that GNOME's a11y tools are far more mature and advanced than KDE's (kudos to Sun), do I? But you could have found that out yourself.
KDE is simply is not going to happen as a mainstream commercial desktop as long as Qt is available only under the GPL
QT is licensed GPL. The GPL is the best Free Software license because it contains strong copyleft provisions that require derivative works to also be Free and Open Source. This is in the interest of users (like me) so I have absolutely no problems with QT or anything else licensed under the GPL.
Why exactly do you care about proprietary, closed source, non-free software anyway? So you can lock users in your product, prevent them from making modifications, restrict their rights, control what they can and can't do with their computers? Proprietary software is immoral, and if that's what you're developing, then you SHOULD be penalized by having to pay licensing fees.
It's almost too bad that Shuttleworth is throwing his weight behind another project, instead of doing one thing and doing it well. Too bad, because the same effort could be used to make Ubuntu and the software that constitutes it even better. Almost, because it seems nobody else can make a distribution like Ubuntu*, so this move may give the KDE-lovers the same gift a lot earlier than if it had been left up to the rest of the world.
* Certainly, nobody had managed to make a distribution that is as polished, hassle free, and freely available, before Ubuntu came. And it's not because of technical difficulties, Debian has had apt-get for ages, and other distros have had good installers for ages, and most of the software on Ubuntu has been around for quite some time, too.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Great news, thanks Mark Shuttleworth, we need more people like you.
I look at them all as variations on Debian which are KDE-focused, though I tend to stick with Xandros.
Kubuntu Breezy should not be mailed out for free until it is fixed. Any Linux distro that always fails to save the LAN gateway address you type in isn't worth the CD its burned on. Plus the dialogs that cannot be fully viewed on an XGA screen (with plenty of empty space in the dialogs) plus a host of other problems I ran into within the first 90 min of use. (Yes, I filed those bugs. You're welcome.) So in short, they didn't test it.
Kubuntu is *very* nice looking though. That aspect is top-notch.
OTOH even as a KDE fan I'm glad Novel chose one desktop, Gnome. Every distro should chose one desktop. Its unnerving when you try out a distro as prestigious as SuSE 10 and you can't delete any files from Konqueror because "Protocol 'Trash' does not exist".
As a Corel-> Xandros Linux user going back to 1999, I can say that watching the lack of focus and sloppy execution on these other 'portentious' distros (you know who they are) has been absolutely comic.
I have to wonder if Ubuntu will suffer by elevating KDE to the level of Gnome.
I think it's a bad mistake for Ubuntu to support KDE on equal footing with Gnome; for the Linux desktop, the best thing is if people standardize on Gnome for now. I thought the point was to make Linux more poular rather than less popular. Restricting the choice of window mamager would certainly be a step backwards IMVHO and would limit the appeal of Linux for many. Personally I prefer KDE but I'm not going to force anyone to use it.
Mepis also ships with KDE, and I would consider it a major distribution, being on the top 5 in distrowatch and all.
"... 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."
:-)
Maybe not. But where does your reasoning come from? Companies can buy into it just like the software they are used to (if they want to be that stupid). People (like me) can freebie their way into it because they know it's not going to get taken away if QT disappears. Exactly where is the problem for anybody? Were it GPL-only, you'd have an argument. Were it commercial licenses only, you'd have an argument. But it's both. That solves pretty much everything you could want in a product.
"Gnome may be worse, but it isn't so much worse that it makes a difference to real-world users."
Gnome may not be any better or worse, I've compared both and personally I prefer KDE (it seems more modern but not too artsy, easier, sleeker, not so clunky. Gnome still reminds me of old DOS GUI's in places, or those Borland-written dialogs and menus you used to have on Windows. Nothing *wrong* with them, they just feel completely out of place).
However, from a technical side, there are many considerations. Gnome is still a pain in the arse to manage for a distro. That's the primary reason that Slackware has dropped it from the distro.
Quotes from the changelog:
[[
gnome/*: Removed from -current, and turned over to community support and
distribution. I'm not going to rehash all the reasons behind this, but it's
been under consideration for more than four years.
Please do not incorrectly interpret any of this as a slight against GNOME
itself, which (although it does usually need to be fixed and polished beyond
the way it ships from upstream more so than, say, KDE or XFce) is a decent
desktop choice. So are a lot of others, but Slackware does not need to ship
every choice. GNOME is and always has been a moving target (even the
"stable" releases usually aren't quite ready yet) that really does demand a
team to keep up on all the changes (many of which are not always well
documented). I fully expect that this move will improve the quality of both
Slackware itself, and the quality (and quantity) of the GNOME options
available for it.
Folks, this is how open source is supposed to work. Enjoy.
]]
I have to agree with the last sentence.
"I think it's a bad mistake for Ubuntu to support KDE on equal footing with Gnome; for the Linux desktop, the best thing is if people standardize on Gnome for now."
Nope. Not in an open-source world. The point is to take EVERYTHING on an equal footing, get the best out of both and ditch the cruft. It's like software evolution. Whoever wins out of KDE and GNOME will, by definition, be the better system. However, to do this you have to start them both off on an equal footing. Welcome to open source. The fact that I can run GNOME binaries on my KDE desktop and vice versa means that there's no reason to choose any one of them yet and no need for standardisation. It's just another set of libraries for now.
"The KDE developers should seriously think about developing the next generation Linux desktop, based on a an entirely new toolkit and new approach to doing things."
Maybe. But what to start from? Where to get those ideas? Where to find those approaches? How to determine which of the new approaches works and which was better off the old way? By putting them all together, fighting it out (by a vote of user popularity) and, as if by magic, a victor will appear. They can take bits of each other, they can "steal" each other's ideas but they shouldn't be written off just because you don't like them. Many, many people do.
Without KDE, I'm sure myself, my friends, and my company would be using Windows.
Gnome doesn't do enough for the end user. Too many settings required mucking around in either the registry-like editor, or just plain command line things.
I remember trying to use Gnome is SuSE 9.0, and not being able to figure out how to specify which app to use for which mime type. Someone politely informed me that this was the procedure to set default apps for various mime-types.
Yeah, that's noob friendly. Apparently, wasn't 'fixed' in 2.10, either. Is it fixed now?
Either way, lack of simple things like that, plus KDE's KIOslaves (which are beautiful, come on, who doesn't love fish:// or klik://), plus a far superior file browser (I've seen the gnome when I'm forced to load up a GTK app, which is rare).
How do I open from a network location in gnome? Can it be done? (In the file browser?)
Why don't I 'contribute' to the gnome project to make these things better? Simple: KDE already does them correctly for me.
Do I mind that other people are happy with gnome, or prefer gnome? No. But all you gnome-heads should stop stomping on other people's Desktop Environments. Seriously; Gnome doesn't work for some of us.
If the next OpenSuSE (which is my current distribution) has inferior KDE support, I'll be thrilled to move to a thriving Kubuntu.
There's nothing wrong with Gnome, for those who use it. But for some of us, gnome just doesn't cut it. Gnome may be different, Gnome may be more 'unix'. But some of us who actually use Linux as our sole operating system rely on KDE, and couldn't imagine switching to gnome.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
No I am not joking.
It is a strange ideology on Linux to bundle DE to toolkits.
The only real question is whether the software written in a toolkit integrates into the chosen desktop environment, it could KDe, Gnome, Windows, Mac OS whatever.
On Windows applications are created by many different APIs and toolkits. And when you have a close at Windows applications look you will observe it. Nobody cares because they are more or less integrated and look at least similar.
Run Evolution with a QT style theme and Crystal Icons and it looks like a KDE app. Further patch the file dialog and standardize behaviour.
Perhaps this is one of the things that the good fellas at freedesktop.org could do, being a nonpartisan standards development group. If as much as possible could be made desktop-independent, that would surely be good; features could be used by applications from either side of the fence, and maybe some kind of consistency would be possible.
For instance, if one uses Tango icon themes (implementing a fd.o spec, the same icons can be found both by KDE and GNOME desktops and applications.
'Course, that's just icons, but maybe it's possible to do that with themes.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The real issue is who is going to pay for the next generation of KDE development if SuSE isn't going to pay.
Mandrake, Kubuntu/Mark Shuttleworth, Trolltech seem realize the value of KDE's superior architecture, on which many must-have KDE apps have been built. These apps don't have any gnome equivalents that are nearly as useful and feature-rich:
AmaroK music player -- Steve Jobs' nightmare, the single greatest threat to Itunes on the Free Software platform.
K3b -- Best CD and DVD authoring program with intuitive wizards, on the fly transcoding between WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, normalization of volume levels, CDDB, DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding, Save/load projects, automatic hardware detection/calibration and much more.
DigiKam -- The most feature-rich application for digital photo management.
Wireless Assistant -- Most user-friendly app for connecting to wireless networks. Managed Networks Support, WEP Encryption Support, Per Network (AP) Configuration Profiles, Automatic (DHCP, both dhcpcd and dhclient) and manual configuration options, Connection status monitoring, etc
KDE Education -- Educational (Science, Literature, Geography, etc) programs for children. Could play a big role in whether school districts decide to use Free Software in their classrooms.
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)
KDE Control Center -- Centralized location for desktop control. Controls _all_ common aspects of the KDE applications: language, power settings, special effects, icon and window themes, shadows, shortcuts, printers, privacy, etc. This is what makes KDE so well integrated -- all KDE apps respect changes made here, so they all have the same feel. SUSE has even made YAST a module of the KDE control center so users can access distro-specific settings from here. Compare this to the dismembered approach Red Hat (and other gnome distros) have been forced to adopt in the absence of a centralized gnome control center. (ie. a bunch of individial programs named redhat-config-**** that nobody can ever remember)
Seamless, transparent network file access on SMB, FTP, SSH and WebDav networks from _any_ KDE application.
Kaffeine -- The most polished FOSS movie player.
MythTV -- The most advanced analog and digital TV viewer/recorder in the Free Software world (built using QT).
Baghira -- A native QT style that faithfully imitates OS X eyecandy, aimed at new users coming from the Mac world.
Klik -- Gives non-expert access to bleeding edge versions of apps without requiring any compilation or permanent installation.
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):
Kdevelop for syntax highlighting, application templates, and project organization.
QT designer for GUI development
Quanta -- Rich web development environment for PHP, CSS, DocBook, HTML, XML, etc with advanced con
Oh, and on the linux desktop thing...
Do you know how many people get a new computer with Windows and spend an hour choosing their wallpaper, screensavers, IM avatars etc.? Loads. Look and feel and customisation is important even to the least tech-savvy person.
If Linux is to ever take off, it's got to out-choose Windows. This is where the big push is coming from... those people who choose not to run a crippled, expensive system but a cheaper more which might take a little more of a push. The people who choose to use an antivirus scanner that's free compared to one that's constantly bugging them to upgrade. The people who choose to run on an older PC than have to upgrade AGAIN.
Choosing between Gnome, KDE and every other window manager is a vital part of any linux desktop system. You like Gnome, I like KDE, the system I make to go on an old 486 might run much nicer with something else entirely. The fact that, at install time and later on, I can choose what I want to use based on what I like or what I want is a plus point. It HELPS newbies, not hinders them.
The only fly in the linux desktop ointment at the moment is the fact that there's very little to help a brand new user. Help files DO NOT GET READ. I work in six schools, I assist nigh-on 100 members of staff and hundreds of children and not once has anyone every clicked on, read, or bothered to consult a help file when something went wrong or they needed help. Stupid things in Windows like that little bouncing arrow that points to the startbar are HELPFUL to people, even if only for the first time the desktop is shown.
We need to get Gnome, KDE and all the others around to make silly tutorials, videos, help files, tooltips, and all the other gumph that users need to adjust. Remember the Windows 3.1 "how to use a mouse" tutorial? It showed click-and-drag and everything because it was NEW to the users. Linux is new to people. It's very similar to Windows in terms of usage (or can be very easily made to be) but it needs to show that that's the case. The simple fact that KDE loads up with five icons in the bottom left doesn't help a new user. They don't know that they have to press the K to find the programs. They could GUESS it but users don't like to guess. The newer the desktop, the more "fancy", the more modern, the more abstract, the harder it is for people to adjust.
How do they find their files? It has to be explained that the Home folder holds all their documents. How do they get on the web? It has to be explained that they can use lots of browsers but that IE isn't there.
When you have someone to demonstrate the fact, it takes two minutes to get them into a word processor and printing off their stuff. When they get to the stage where they are BUYING this stuff in PC World, they need to be able to have a go themselves with some confidence of what to expect. This doesn't mean make it like Windows, it doesn't mean that they should be stuck with "GnomeKDE" the new merged desktop, it means that every project that wants a piece of the desktop has to think of the users.
That's where linux desktop currently falls down. Yes, for me it's nice that I can configure my middle button to do any of twenty different things depending on context but that shouldn't get in the way of the user who's trying to work out why he can't reverse his mouse buttons for left-handed use. Once you have that in place, the Gnome/KDE/other issue becomes a user choosing his "theme".
...and didn't like it. Unfortunately, the Ubuntu version of KDE did not "just work" right out of the box. Certain programs were broken...some internet interactivity was lost...and it screwed up my gnome based ubuntu sessions!
That being said, I think the real reason I didn't like Kubuntu is that it wasn't "ubuntu"-like. It wasn't brown...and it didn't feel as homey, so to speak, as gnome does on Ubuntu. And it didn't feel as user friendly as gnome.
Why isn't there an Xfce version of Ubuntu? There are tons of lightweight shells out there that work perfectly well ontop of Ubuntu...without breaking it like KDE does.
All that being said...Gnome is like an older Mac interface...KDE is sorta like windows...and it seems to me that Shuttlesworth is trying to capture Windows users...so using a KDE interface seems like a good idea. But, honestly, KDE is too complicated for most windows users, IMHO.
It will be interesting to see what happens.
If that were true, Linux itself would be failing spectacularly in favour of the BSDs.
Gnome may be worse, but it isn't so much worse that it makes a difference to real-world users.
It does make a difference. If gnome was the standard linux desktop I would be using windows.
I think it's a bad mistake for Ubuntu to support KDE on equal footing with Gnome; for the Linux desktop, the best thing is if people standardize on Gnome for now.
Why? Gnome introduced the whole desktop wars, if they wanted standardisation they would either not have started, or certainly would have disbanded when their original aim became irrelevant. As a desktop they are inferior. From a customer's standpoint there is no reason to standardise on gnome, ever.
The KDE developers should seriously think about developing the next generation Linux desktop, based on a an entirely new toolkit and new approach to doing things.
The Qt toolkit is still the best-looking toolkit on Linux, and the kde approach has given us the best desktop environment around. Full steam ahead for KDE.
I am trolling
I've been using KDE since 3.3.0 and it's grown incredibly in the last few releases. It's not just about a window manager and widgets, there are apps of consistently high quality for practically every purpose there, a well-thought out control panel, an unprecedented level of integration between applications, a great file browser, u.s.w.
KDE is, thus far, closest to achieving the ideal of a feature-rich, user-friendly and stable Linux desktop. It is, in my most humble opinion, miles ahead of Gnome.
Gnome winning the desktop wars would almost certainly mean more stuff for linux being pay-for rather than free software. If users are used to paying for their software, they might be more willing to pay for upgrades from their commercial linux vendors. Just a guess.
I am trolling
What Novell said is that they will focus on gnome on NLD and SLES. ..
That means its still there on (open)suse desktop
You just need separate GTK->Qt and Qt->GTK shim libraries, so your KDE apps look like Gnome and your Gnome apps look like KDE. Just don't use them both at once or you will let the magic smoke escape from your box.
Do you know how many people get a new computer with Windows and spend an hour choosing their wallpaper, screensavers, IM avatars etc.? Loads. Look and feel and customisation is important even to the least tech-savvy person.
Realistically, Linux has no opportunity to be sold to this kind of user. It's going to be a long time before Linux is any sort of serious retail consumer solution.
Linux desktops tend to be positioned towards managed IT solutions, dull functional and accessible, where disabling this sort of customization is more important than having it.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I'm not undertstanding the whole Kubuntu vs Ubuntu concerns about Gnome and KDE, Ubuntu just uses gnome as its basic install, but you can select KDE installed and use it over Gnome and it works perfectly. Kubuntu is just making the integration smoother between config files, theme and toolkits. I havnt had any issue with KDE on ubuntu.
As far as polish goes, I'd say KDE looks smoother, SuSE shows KDE's strengths. Though I'd like more GTK1/2 theme tweak's native other than a checkmark box under KDE"s preferences. (I said native not 3rd party application.)
Hell, mostly I perfer icewm, give me anti-aliased fonts, theme compatability and a taskbar+quicklaunch and thats desktop for me. I find KDE/Gnome areas of Icon and file management the biggest improvements, which for file browser and dialog boxes really need to become a standard. But is that really a WM issue?
Gnome people, this is not the time to freak out. Just because Mark is using KDE as his desktop and he wants to put more resources into KDE doesn't mean that the Gnome side of Ubuntu is going to suffer. There could be many reasons for his new found interest in Kubuntu.
1.From the beginning it seems that Mark felt a little guilty that he had to pick one desktop to really do well. I know a lot of people think "just do one thing and do it well" is an admirable philosophy, but in the GNU world that is the path to weakness. The Linux Desktop is chaos and unless you want to spend enough to harness that chaos you HAVE to make some big decisions like that. When he first started with Ubuntu, he had no idea how successful it was going to be. He had not idea if the whole thing would be a waste of money, or that no one would care. But now that Ubuntu is making a huge splash in the Linux world and is making noise across the globe Mark has decided that he is willing to commit more of his resources to the entire Ubuntu project. He set up the Ubuntu foundation and gave it $10 million to begin with. So a new commitment to KDE and Kubuntu DOES NOT MEAN THAT UBUNTU WILL HAVE LESS, just that probably he will be willing to give more overall to help the KDE side as well.
2.Despite its relative popularity, the Kubuntu side of the project has not had nearly the resources the other side has gotten so far. The Kubuntu maintainer- Jonathan Riddell - did a lot of the work in its free time. At first he was only given a smallish contract at the end of releases to help get them in better shape. I bet that if Mark is serious about Kubuntu it will finally have a full time developer (if that is not already the case).
3.A big goal of the entire Ubuntu project for Mark is his Edubuntu side project. Well in all honesty Kubuntu might be a better fit for that project than Ubuntu for a few reasons: the The KDE Edutainment Project is the single best educational software on the GNU desktop and is far more developed than anything on the Gnome side. Plus KDE uses less RAM (this is my own opinion) so it might be a better fit for the older computers that many schools might have today. Gnome hates to have less than 256mb, and you can't build a user friendly desktop around XFCE (and it would probably take less resources to make Kubuntu better than to fix all of Gnome's RAM problems single handily). So a better KDE is better for the Kubuntu project.
4.The entire Ubuntu community has been trying better to make the KDE side seem like an equal ever since it was announced. On the Official Forums we have separated KDE and Gnome areas for the Breezy release, and beyond that a forum independent forum was made by a third party for Kubuntu. So in some ways Mark is just catching up to the rest of the community.
The last thing any Gnome fan and Ubuntu user needs to think is that "the sky is falling." This is a GOOD thing for you Gnome fans. Why? A better Kubuntu will bring more people to the distro and that could help build the overall community. A better Kubuntu will help establish the entire project as THE Desktop Linux which would help with gaining support of third party application makers that won't release for anything not called Red Hat. A better Kubuntu shows that Mark is becoming even more devoted to the project, and considering the man makes more off of investments than the entire Linux service industry more of his support means that the entire project is is better shape. Finally, a better Kubuntu means that there is more choice in the community and that the entire project is maturing. Its a good time to be a Desktop Linux user.
Open Source Sushi
AmaroK music player [kde.org] -- Steve Jobs' nightmare, the single greatest threat to Itunes on the Free Software platform.
Not to troll here, but how exactly is an OSS Linux music player a threat to iTunes?
Does Amarok run on Windows or MacOSX? (no)
Does iTunes run on Linux? (no)
How much does AmaroK cost? (FREE)
How much does iTunes cost? (FREE)
Does Amarok allow easy updating/syncing of an iPod? (no)
How many people will abandon their cache of Fairplay DRMed music for a new application?
(kind of a trick question, given neither player will run on the other's platform)
Saying Amarok is a threat to iTunes is like saying an independant movie theater in Russia is a threat to a U.S. movie theater conglomerate. It's also like that often repeated phrase "iPod Killer": a claim often made, never delivered.
I disagree. I personally believe that Gnome is far better for new users than KDE. Why? Because its REALLY different. It gives the Linux desktop a distinct look that is different from Windows or OSX. The chameleon KDE can be made to look like them both or neither but this is bad for a new user because it does not give Linux Desktop a distinct look.
You might say "but that's better because then you can make KDE look like the Windows in which they are most familiar with." This is a BAD thing because if you make Linux look like Windows than people will expect other parts to be like Windows.
When you put a new users on a default KDE and they have the menu in the lower right corner and they have a control panel and whatever else that is like Windows XP they user thinks "hey this is just like what I'm used to." But then they get confused when this new OS- which seems to be almost exactly line Windows to them- can't install their old Window programs or is missing a option in the Control Panel that they were used to seeing.
But when you put a user on a default Gnome desktop it is so different that it forces the user to think differently (to steal a little from Apple). Just the fact that the menu is in a different place forces them to say to themselves "whoa, this is different" which then sets the attitude that applies to the rest of their experience. The differences in the entire Linux operating system seems annoying to a new KDE convert ("it looks just like XP, why can't it act like XP") but is more readily accepted by a Gnome convert ("it looks way different, so I can understand how it acts differently").
It might be nice theoretically that KDE can be made to look like Windows to help users get over the initial shock but until Linux can be a full Windows replacement (aka install Window programs WITH EASE) that just makes Desktop Linux seem like a crappier version of Windows that can't do as much. Gnome on the other hand is so different by default that it forces users to think differently and be able to accept the differences- like with OSX. With Gnome instead of Desktop Linux being a Windows XP copy that can't do as much as Windows XP, its a whole new OS with new challenges and a very distinct look.
That is the reason why Gnome is better for new users.
Open Source Sushi
Sheesh! You silly moderators! It's obvious that the AC submittor was making a play against the "BSD is dying" joke. It's not a troll in any way, although of course originally the "BSD is dying" folks were seriously trolling. Now, "X is dying" on slashdot isn't meant to be taken seriously. Basically, they were trolling, yes, but not for people to reply, but instead for humorless moderators to mod them down.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Well golly, good for him, but why should I care? Last year he was all for Gnome and perhaps next year he'll be all for Xfce. Fine. Great. But are Ubuntu's users going to make some nice, rational choices of their own or is that the sound of stampeding hooves I hear as the herd swerves off after new horizons?
There's an opportunistic streak to Ubuntu and, imho, they've yet to show they've got what it takes for the long haul. To some extent they've taken advantage of disarray within Debian and now it looks as if they are taking advantage of disarray in the desktop environment sphere as the more established, kitchen-sink distros realign a little. However, announcing that you are up for something just after a putative rival has canned it doesn't really amount to much. I use Ubuntu on my laptop. Excellent distro, though I confess it still isn't a rival to the full Debian I use on my desktop. Maybe in a couple of years it will be, but not now.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
Wasn't he the well-endowed lord of the dark-side?
"it looks just like XP, why can't it act like XP"
They could also say, "hey this looks like XP, but it does this differently... hmm.. I kinda like this better. Sweet!"
For Gnome, you say a user might say, "it looks way different, so I can understand how it acts differently." However, many new users to OS X still make comparisons and are annoyed with its differences to XP. You just don't know how a new user might react. Period.
That's the only serious difference between standard Ubuntu and Kubuntu, except the installation is the worst POS since two Debian distros ago. Unless you have one drive of one type, I guarantee you Grub will not boot properly. I have to use a FreeBSD boot manager FFS just to get to the Grub screen because it won't load off the SATA MBR properly. Another warning: if you don't expect to RAID your disks, make sure the install realizes that, because it never asks you, it just sets up md whether you like it or not. Fortunately no permanent damage was done. But despite all that, when it gets going, it's the most stable KDE environment I've ever had, and that's saying something after three years of it under Debian. Just don't expect any documentation when you run into trouble. Or want to understand why they set the system up that way.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
Isn't FOSS all about choice? Isn't there supposed to be strength from diversity? Haven't the dangers of a monoculture been pointed out repeatedly? Many years ago, Xaveria Hollander recounted in "The Happy Hooker" (THAT got your attention didn't it?) how, when she was growing up, one day a week up her family spoke nothing but a foreign language. I always thought this was an excellent idea. Occaisonal immersion in alternative viewpoints. Different viewpoints is what gives us the ability to detect depth of field, discriminating near objects from more distant ones from difference in parallax. Surely this is more preferable to Gatesian railroading philosophy?
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
And this Windows user found it was just the opposite:
... well, limiting and discouraging. Whereas KDE's very "familiarity" encourages me to work past its sticking points.
KDE is enough like Windows that it was immediately usable, with a relatively painless learning curve. Most stuff was where I expected it to be, and behaved pretty much how I expected it to behave. What was different was only a little different, not shockingly so. Hence the differences were only transient annoyances, not show-stoppers.
Conversely Gnome reminds me of MacOS (more so now than in the past!), and I find it nearly as baffling. I spend too much time looking for stuff and sometimes never do find it. Get that enough times, and it becomes a show-stopper.
Now, the relatively novice Windows user might not notice, because Windows itself isn't truly all that familiar to him, and all he really wants is for the office suite and the internet stuff to all "just work". And Ubuntu's incarnation of Gnome seems perfectly good for that. IOW, for the user to whom ALL desktops are foreign and scary, identity of the desktop or OS doesn't matter so long as it's simple to use.
But to myself, an advanced Windows user who is used to making Windows jump thru hoops, Gnome's unfamiliarity seems
[Even so, I firmly believe both have their place, and that both should be available.]
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Very true, which is why it is better to give users a choice. But if you're going to restrict people to one desktop environment, KDE gives you a choice of looks at the start, wheras with gnome you get one look and you better like it. (Yes, you can get your own themes for either, but that's more effort than the typical user will go to).
IMHO, GTK2+/Gnome beats the pants off of KDE in both looks and usability. KDE looks like a cheap knockoff of Microsoft Windows and is just about as stable.
Now see, to me KDE looks like what windows is trying to do but done right. Gtk is in its default look just oppressively dull and grey, and looks more like an old version of windows in terms of the actual widgets - the scrollbars and dropdown menus are identical, the buttons look pretty similar and are too rectangular visually. It's at once dull and harsh. As far as usability's concerned, all I've seen of the gnome usability focus is confirmation dialogs switching the buttons around making me overwrite a file I didn't mean to, a filemanager spawning new windows all over the place and no way to stop it short of manually editing the registry, having to make an extra click before I can actually choose where I want to save a file, and some ridiculous button naming to learn. (What does "save" do in the context of a preferences dialog? Will it dismiss the box? Will it apply the changes? The answer seems to vary from application to application. I've even seen one with save/apply/cancel/ok. Ok/Apply/Cancel is a standard buttonset that I'm used to and know what it does, whatever happened to the principle of least surprise?) And I've never had any stability problems, that sounds like fud from here.
But then again, I've only been using Linux since 1995, and *nix since 1975. What do I know.
I suspect this makes you more minimalist as goes UIs than the average person. CDE would have driven me insane if I had to use it for extended periods, the grey would have got to me. Flashy widgets do make it easier to use the thing, not because they do anything different but because it's more pleasant to be looking at them.
I am trolling
This doesn't mean make it like Windows, it doesn't mean that they should be stuck with "GnomeKDE" the new merged desktop, it means that every project that wants a piece of the desktop has to think of the users.
Most of the stuff in Linux distros were never made for first-time users. It was primarily made by developers, for developers. It also happens to be quite usable for other powerusers, but that's pretty much it. Most of the "userfriendly" software comes from distros who are trying to dress up a poweruser system in a newbie-friendly wrapping. Nothing wrong with that, but don't expect many apps to care. For example, I'd much rather the GIMP tried to catch Photoshop rather than make another of those overly friendly mini-photo apps that comes "free" with every digicam.
Does that mean the barrier to entry will be significant? Yes. Is it because I want to be elitist? No. But as it is today, you have to expect some things to be difficult because Linux is not an accepted platform, and there's a lot of proprietary and/or patented formats it won't read out of the box, and there's quite a few quirks regarding drivers and the like. You need to be something of a poweruser to work around that.
I think aiming for the newbie user is the wrong end to start at. You start with the powerusers and work your way down. There's a bit of an exception here for very simple systems where the users are just applications user of a system managed by others. My parents have two very simple Linux boxes, and they like it quite well. Particularly since the last Windows box was fubar'd (don't ask me, it had firewall, AV and windows updates enabled). But I'm the one handling any quirks. Granted, there aren't many but each and every one would be way out of my parents' depth.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Have you seen the customer list of Trolltech? Commercial support can be a big plus for companies.. They have one company to contact for support questions, instead of developers somewhere on the net.
The whole community thing means free support, but also also scares companies away. Companies who feel commercial partners are more reliable.
The best way to accelerate a windows server is by 9.81 m/s2
I( thought that I already gave you a good whip from the clue-by-four?
Indeed, you have already given us your thinly disguised marketing spiel for Troll Tech.
If that were true, Linux itself would be failing spectacularly in favour of the BSDs.
Whether a license works for a piece of software depends on how the software is used. A GPL license on the Linux kernel and Linux command line utilities means something very different from a GPL license on a GUI toolkit.
The crucial difference here is that companies can ship commercial software on top of a Linux kernel without their software falling under the GPL and without paying anybody, while companies cannot ship commercial software on top of Qt without their software falling under the GPL or paying a lot of money to TT. And you can argue that that doesn't matter, but it obviously does.
Gnome introduced the whole desktop wars, if they wanted standardisation they would either not have started, or certainly would have disbanded when their original aim became irrelevant.
Gnome is as relevant as it has always been, and Novell's decision underlines that again: KDE can never become the standard desktop for Linux. It's just not going to happen. And the sooner the KDE project members realize that, the better off we all are.
I thought the point was to make Linux more poular rather than less popular. Restricting the choice of window mamager
Who is talking about "restricting"? I just think that the logical and sensible thing for Ubuntu and other commercial distros is to focus on Gnome support.
Personally I prefer KDE
Purely as an end user, so do I. As a programmer, I think KDE and Gnome suck about equally. But as the basis for a distribution, Gnome is the only viable choice IMO.
Nope. Not in an open-source world. The point is to take EVERYTHING on an equal footing, get the best out of both and ditch the cruft. It's like software evolution
I like the concept of software evolution and have repeatedly argued for it.
But at the level of individual distributions, distributions need to make a choice where to put their resources. That's particularly true for distributions that are trying to give their users a nice desktop experience.
Whoever wins out of KDE and GNOME will, by definition, be the better system.
I disagree. I think Gnome will win this one no matter which one is "the better system", simply because the Qt dual-licensing scheme is too much of a problem. And, in the unlikely event that KDE does win, the Linux desktop is in serious trouble, because it simply ain't going to happen that a large number of commercial Linux developers are going to send their money to Norway.
But what to start from? Where to get those ideas? Where to find those approaches? How to determine which of the new approaches works and which was better off the old way? By putting them all together, fighting it out (by a vote of user popularity) and, as if by magic, a victor will appear. They can take bits of each other, they can "steal" each other's ideas but they shouldn't be written off just because you don't like them. Many, many people do.
That kind of exchange between Gnome and KDE works for incremental tweaks. But, in the grand scheme of things, the two desktops are very similar and have very similar faults. I think right now is the opportunity to do something substantially different and better.
Have you seen the customer list of Trolltech? Commercial support can be a big plus for companies.. They have one company to contact for support questions, instead of developers somewhere on the net.
Yes, and that's a nice thing and I'm not saying that Troll Tech should disappear from the face of the earth. Indeed, all the companies I have worked at have had Qt licenses for some of their developers.
But there is a difference between being a vendor a cross-platform toolkit for custom application development, and being at the core of the desktop platform of one of the top three desktop operating systems in the world. The former doesn't make you a good choice for the latter.
The whole community thing means free support, but also also scares companies away. Companies who feel commercial partners are more reliable.
Some companies indeed do want commercial support, and they can get it for both Gtk+ and Qt.
No, but then they aren't allowed to use lots of the nice things in the kernel and may have to reimplement lots of functionality that they could just get immediately if they were GPL.
while companies cannot ship commercial software on top of Qt without their software falling under the GPL or paying a lot of money to TT. And you can argue that that doesn't matter, but it obviously does.
Doesn't seem so obvious to me. If it's that much trouble they can always use another toolkit - their program will still work in KDE.
Gnome is as relevant as it has always been,
The stated aim of the gnome project is to ensure there's a Free Software desktop that's as good as KDE. It is now irrelevant to that original intention.
and Novell's decision underlines that again: KDE can never become the standard desktop for Linux. It's just not going to happen.
I could say the exact same of gnome. In a sense you're right - KDE would never become "the standard", because KDE devs believe in choice and would always make sure you can use the important bits of KDE without having to run KDE. But in terms of being the desktop that everyone uses, KDE could certainly do it.
I am trolling