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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
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
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?
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.
I was recently talking to a Japanese colleague. He was describing how he ran into all sorts of problems using GNOME on FC4. I recommended that he ditch Fedora, and try Kubuntu 5.10. So he did, and he was quite surprised by how well it worked.
But when you consider how KDE was born in Europe, and now heavily developed in Europe and Asia, it's not surprising that it has such fantastic support for non-English languages.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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....
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.
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.
"... 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
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".
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.
That's not KDE's fault, it's Ubuntu's. KDE works perfectly fine on many distributions without breaking them.
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 may be too complicated for the typical windows user (though I would dispute even that. The KDE defaults are sensible, it doesn't diminish your usage experience any to have the preferences there for if you need them), but the target market is not the typical windows user but a windows user who is willing to try a new OS. Which is more likely to be a power user who wants things to fiddle with.
I am trolling
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
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?