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.

Comments

Slackware?

[MikeDawg]

Ouch, Slackware, never gettin' no respect. Slackware 12.1 was recently released as well.

Re:They already have a common UI.

[BrookHarty]

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.

Re:Winners and losers

[proxima]

Anyone looked at KDE 4.0?
  I cranked it up in a VM and had to look twice to be sure it wasn't GNOME. Most of KDE's signature customizability is gone, and (like GNOME) it's not just a matter of missing GUIs for tweaking settings; the settings themselves are gone into hard code.

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.