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Moving Toward a Single Linux UI?
Anonymous writes "With the releases of Fedora 9, Hardy Heron and OpenSuSE 11 so close together, it's looking more than ever like an evolution to a common interface for major Linux distributions. Here's a compilation of screen shots and descriptions that make it appear to be the case. Would this be a good thing or a bad thing?" There are plenty of other options out there, of course, even considering only Linux distros that are based on Gnome and KDE, and plenty of wilder (or at least less common) desktops to choose from besides.
Ouch, Slackware, never gettin' no respect. Slackware 12.1 was recently released as well.
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Another lame blog
are also popular Linux distros and both also had recent major releases which the article neatly ignores. Oh well. Lots of choices.
In any case, let's place bets if the thread degenerates into KDE vs. Gnome... ug!
I love command line, but why use default 80x25?!
Add this to your boot prompt in grub on the
vga=775 and get some good 160x60 loving 1280x1024.
This is temporary, and is a common complaint about KDE 4.0. The idea with KDE 4.0 was to ship what they had to encourage further application development. There are lots of changes to KDE, including using a new version of QT (the underlying toolkit).
The basics are there, but customizeability, as you noted, is lacking. From what I understand, that flexibility (especially in terms of the main panel) will return with KDE 4.1, to be released this July.
KDE 4.0 isn't for everybody. After reading about some of these limitations, I decided to wait until KDE 4.1 before upgrading my Kubuntu laptop's KDE version. As I understand it, KDE 4.1 will bring applications like the PIM framework up to speed, and I should be able to make my desktop look and work like I'm used to with KDE 3.5 (a substantial alteration from the default).
KDE hasn't abandoned the philosophy of a very flexible user interface, it's just taking time to re-implement the features in the serious overhaul that is KDE 4. I can wait.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Oh please, give us a break.
Rather than potentially BREAKING the GUI on a significant number of machines, the last SEVERAL releases of Mandriva have it ready to use and integrated with one click on "3-D desktop". Having it as the "default" isn't necessarily a good thing, nor does it make it the sole domain of Ubuntu.
Mandriva has been around before there was an Ubuntu. It is just as or more pretty, powerful, flexible, stable, easy to use, and polished. It was distributed on HP's and several other hardware vendors long before Ubuntu was offered on Dell. Unlike Ubuntu, a single Mandriva DVD can install a default KDE or Gnome or combined (or other) system... they don't seem to have the need to have separate Gnomedriva and KDEdriva distro versions. Of the people I know that use both (*untu and Mandriva) regularly, they all tend to like Mandriva better. That doesn't mean that Ubuntu isn't wildly popular nor deserving of praise. But people should not feed it credit and sole spotlight for things common to other if not many distros.
Every time I see ANY article/posting refering to something that applies to all Linux distros under a single distro name, it is almost always Ubuntu users who do it. It is tiring, arrogant, and insulting to users and developers of other distros.
Keep in mind that you are the one trying to turn this thread into an Ubuntu vs. Mandriva thread. My point was that you should not use the term "Ubuntu" instead of "Linux distros" when it is something that really refers to many, most, or all distros.
In the meantime GNOME and KDE both have Human Interface Guideline documents that spell out how applications should work to be consistent, and, oddly enough, most applications for the respective desktops hew to them rather well. You can certainly expect a more consistent environment than Windows apparently is these days (even if you stick to MS software)!
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4.0.4 adding support for multiple panels, I believe. Also, each release has added some more configuration options (though most are going into 4.1).
I believe having 2 major environments is best. People always have disagreements on how things should be done, with two major environments it's easier to try your different options, and often times one will win (like DBUS being based on DCOP), or things where people don't really disagree on anything a single standard is formed (icon theme naming). A major rearchitecturing like KDE4 probably wouldn't have been easy to convince people to attempt if everything relied on it. During KDE4.0's development KDE 3.5 was still being developed in a mostly bugfix mode, but it'd likely have caused a fork with a single environment which might have taken years to end (look how long GTK 1 apps have stuck around... XMMS was only recently killed off).
Now that it's starting to appear like the major rearchitecturing of KDE4 is paying off, the Gnome/GTK camp have begun discussing a GTK3 that breaks binary compatibility. The Gnome camp and the KDE camp are constantly competing with each other, yet at the same time working together (generally under the banner of FreeDesktop.Org). It's really the best of both worlds, as they try to one-up each other, but there's no problem for a dev from one camp to go up to a dev in the other and ask about how they implemented something, or how they worked around certain problems with the implementation. A monopoly is a bad thing, regardless of whether it's a giant corporation behind it, or a free software project (this is one of my criticisms with Mozilla... they've mostly had a monopoly on the Linux desktop so have been prone to neglect it... now with WebKit becoming very popular people have a choice and Mozilla has proper motivation to improve Gecko's modularity and Firefox's integration and performance).
How thin are you talking? KDE 3.5 runs pretty good on my K6-3/333MHz laptop with 384MB of RAM, and it's actually fast on my Eee PC at 630MHz.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
"The problem is, of course, that Windows and OS X both threw away decades of work and started from scratch"
MS released the first version of Windows in 1986, and previews of NexStep (which is the foundation for OS X) began in 1986 too, so development work on both was pretty much concurrent with the original MIT version of X (1984, with X11 appearing in 1987). It's not therefore correct to say that either threw away decades of work.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.