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Linus Switches From KDE To Gnome
An anonymous reader writes "In a recent Computerworld interview, Linus revealed that he's switched to Gnome — this despite launching a heavily critical broadside against Gnome just a few years ago. His reason? He thinks KDE 4 is a 'disaster.' Although it's improved recently, he'll find many who agree with this prognosis, and KDE 4 can be painful to use." There's quite a bit of interesting stuff in this interview, besides, regarding the current state of Linux development.
I first read the summary wondering why anyone cares what Linus uses, but then I noticed that he agrees with the general consensus that KDE4 isn't turning out as well as everyone had hoped...
Here's to KDE doing better with v5.
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Linus will be back. KDE 4.2 is turning out very nice and I'm sure he will give it a try. By upgrading his Fedora he was more or less forced to choose between GNOME 2 or KDE 4.0. Fedora should not have chosen KDE 4.0 over KDE 3.5. Only now with version 4.2 has KDE reached an acceptable level of quality again.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
Linus has plenty of other things to say in this interview. Why focus on this less important aspect of the discussion?
Because LT doesn't like how KDE is right now? That's his choice, just as it was to like KDE more than Gnome before.
Software is not perfect and it only achieves usefulness by stages, as LT himself mentions in discussing Git. A living project is a changing project. Not everyone is going to like the changes.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
My favorite, of course, is how they made it so that cursor blinking is a global setting. It doesn't matter if you use gconf or not, either your cursor blinks everywhere, including the terminal, or it blinks nowhere. That is, neither setting is acceptable.
Wow. If that is your favorite thing to complain about, I guess Gnome must be pretty good...
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
There are six pages of interview with Linus. Him now using Gnome instead of KDE is covered in three and a half paragraphs. Come on, this is a little sensationalist, picking on this rather minor issue for the headline, isn't it? No, I'm not new here, I just like to point out how childish that seems.
Linus says KDE 4.0 was a "half baked release". Yes it was. He complains he got the update pushed through Fedora and that it "was not as functional". I'm sure it wasn't. He also might want to reconsider his choice of Linux distribution if he isn't happy with their update policy.
We've been through this a million times here and on most any other tech site on the whole of the web: KDE 4.0 wasn't ready for general use, KDE themselves said so, it might have been a mistake to release it anyway, or not, the communication could have been a lot clearer, yada yada yada.
Linus thinks so, too. Fine. Also, yawn.
Not quite. Back when Linus advocated KDE over GNOME, he was right on. KDE3.5 or so was vastly superior to GNOME in terms of features and polish. However, KDE 4.x has taken a step backwards, and shows no convincing signs of progress, which is why I've switched back to GNOME as well (having not used it since about 2.2). Linus is promoting the best option available at the time, without bias. Which is perfectly sane, and valid.
Basically, KDE has great tech. BUT core developers seem to have some sort of arrogance about listening to the community and some sort of project-deathwish which manifests in a horrible release process, minor versions that don't work until x.4 or so, and poor support for non-core developers. Moreover they've alienated some of the very groups they tried to encourage early in the KDE 4 brainstorming process. Finally, they generally seem to suffer from lack of manpower, which they have never really tried to solve. If you believed the hype the core devs were spouting, KDE 4 was going well, and no help was needed, until the product actually appeared as a release and everyone saw the real situation. KDE technology is great. If 4.4+ rocks the way 3.4+ did, and they don't make the same mistakes with 5.[0123], then they still have a chance. But for now, frankly, it's been terribly mismanaged.
I used to be a KDE user spending hours tweaking my Desktop. Nothing wrong with that -- there are some cool setups out there. For the last couple years though, I've been using Gnome. Not because it's better or anything like that, it's just that I got tired of tweaking the look of my Desktop and I like Gnome's defaults better than KDE's.
I do like how Konqueror will let you just type "ssh://SOMEADDRESS" and act as nice file browser with all the drag and drop joy you get locally, and maybe Nautilus will let you do that -- it does let you set a server connection over SSH which obviates the need to type out "ssh://SOMEADDRESS" every time, but I still like Konqueror's functionality. Also, remote launching Konqueror works great, but remotely launching Nautilus is a disaster.
All that aside, I've simply grown tired of tweaking my Desktop. Half my computers still have the default wallpaper from whatever distro I installed. Luckily, the linux world has something for everyone -- KDE for tweakers, Gnome for the lazy or tired, xfce for the agile, Enlightenment for -- I dunno -- etc. etc. etc.
Use what makes you happy.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I love KDE, I have done from the start, but there is no getting away from the fact that the way the switch to KDE 4 has been handled is a completely disaster (I've been using KDE 4.1 for a few months now). I can sort of see why the team directing KDE have done this but I'm sure it could have been handled a lot better than it has been.
Hind sight is a perfect science but before I radically changed KDE I would have made damn sure that the most popular software that relies on KDE was going to have a version ready about the same time KDE was released. Not having a KDE 4 version of Amarok for example is terrible.
Over all I think KDE will end up stronger for this change. The bits that are working are really nice I'm just worried that it will take 5 years to get to the point where full advantage can be taken of the effort that has been put in. In the end I think KDE will be the dominant desktop but Gnome must be seriously gaining support at the moment.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
I think Linus is right on this one. I have been using KDE based linux desktops on my primary computer for ~7 years now. KDE 4 is a huge step back. The even bigger problem is that linux distros (Kubuntu and OpenSuse) are happily pushing KDE4.1 as the default KDE desktop. In fact with Kubuntu 8.10, there is no option. For KDE 3.5 you have to use 8.04. KDE 4 takes the GNOME approach to desktops (i.e. user's IQ is equivalent to a mostly dead rodent of unusually small size and any options would confuse poor afore mentioned user and therefore options are bad). Before the GNOME loving flames begin, yes I know there exist external tools to start fiddling with options, but the amount of flexibility is not the same as KDE 3.5.10.
/rant
KDE 4 unfortunately takes the GNOME approach, and removes flexibility. Worse still, all the developer time for KDE 4 is now going into polishing the interface (which while shiny is no better or more intuitive than KDE 3.5) while not bothering fixing apps people actually use. For example, on KDE 4.2, if you add a webdav calendar from a https source which has a self signed cert, you will be prompted every time it reloads, whether you want to accept the cert or not. Yes thats right, even if you click accept cert permanently, the DE is incapable of understanding it. This has been outstanding for a while, but all recent activity seems to be towards fixing desktop effects or making the kicker work. Its ridiculous.
Legally obligatory sig : My opinions are my own... etc etc
It seems that nobody remembers the transition between KDE 1 and KDE 2. KDE 2 was a major redesign over the 1 series, and at the beginning had the same issues that KDE 4 right now has. But eventually it grew up into the beautiful 3.5 series. So I think we'll have what we're expecting from KDE 4 around 4.5 version. Go KDE! Just my 2 cents.
You could always just grow a brain and use gconf,
Or I could be lazy and use KDE, which, instead of forcing me to use arcane commandline utilities and XML, provides me with a nice GUI and a much simpler, much more UNIX-y set of config files. KDE4 screwed it up a lot, but it's still nowhere near as bad as GNOME.
I'll remind people one of the older reasons Linus chose KDE: There's a nice GUI for configuring what each mouse button on the title bar of a window does. In GNOME, this functionality simply wasn't available. I assume it wasn't in a config file either, because Linus ended up having to write a patch. Once he wrote it, he couldn't figure out where to send it.
Now, if Linus fucking Torvalds can't figure out where to send a patch, you have a problem.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
What is wrong with having the options? And there is a very good reason why the terminal should have a separate setting for textfields: it's not a textfield and it doesn't act like one. I don't want an annoying blinking box of a cursor in my terminal. It is, however, nice to have a blinking cursor in textfields.
Now on to the rest of your points. Who does it hurt to have extra config options? If the defaults are sane, then regular users don't have to touch them, but for people who care, the options are available. I mean, I thought this was the whole point of Linux and FOSS, that you wouldn't have some monolithic entity telling you how you are going to use your computer and what is "best" for you. GNOME is the anti-thesis of this. GNOME knows how things should be. GNOME knows that you only need to care about blinking cursors globally. GNOME knows that you don't want to make good use of your screen real-estate so all themes have to have huge amounts of wasted space. GNOME knows that you don't want to change settings, so they are hidden away in gconf instead of being in a useful and documented config dialog. Etc. etc. etc.
Actually, I think the key word is missing there. The real fallacy is "argument from false authority."
As a hypothetical example: If an recognized astrophysicist says that there's something fishy about the amount of existing dark matter, that's a real authority on the subject matter, and is certainly something to keep in mind. If Obama says it, he's just not qualified to make that kind of a judgment, and it's simply something to ignore. For all his authority in politics and law, he's as qualified to talk about astrophysics as the local barber.
In this case I don't think Linus is an authority on usability or anything even remotely relevant to KDE vs GNOME. It's his personal tastes vs yours, nothing more. Unless you happen to know that his tastes accidentally match yours to the letter, it's something to thoroughly ignore.
Of course, that won't stop people from being fashion victims and trying to imitate him anyway. That's why celebrity endorsements work. That's why you see video clips with Van Damme and whatnot saying that they play WoW, for example. Because a lot of John Does out there will try to be like monkeys imitating that celebrity. Or why you see Fatal1ty branded heatsinks, although I don't think he'd know enough physics to actually judge a design, nor the experience of having tested 100 heatsinks and picked the best. That's appeal to false authority.
I don't doubt that here too a lot of people switched to KDE just because Linus blasted GNOME, and will now hastily switch back to GNOME because Linus uses it now so it must be cool.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
They couldn't because a decision was made to make KDE 4 more compatible with the future is to redesign it now and go from there.
KDE 4 is a major change and devs are trying to adapt to that change. So it's natural there are going to be some bumps along the way. Maybe V4.5 will be the version to use.
Some people don't like change at all and probably still running Windows 95.
Which isn't exactly the same thing, and probably not many people at KDE will be all that surprised. KDE4 is new, it has teething problems. It was risk, but we'll find out later if it was a risk worth taking.
You don't roll out half baked software over the top of working software. If KDE 3.5 was working for people releasing something that would cause users significant grief is simply irresponsible. We are beyond the days where Linux users were all geeks who used Linux as a learning platform, and who wouldn't care too much about broken features.
Linux is now being used seriously by people in their day job. Yes - Linux is "free" - but it is also such a vital piece of infrastructure that there is an expectation that delivery is equal quality OR BETTER THAN commercial alternatives. Open source should be an evolutionary process - you don't expect things that were previously working to become broken.
However, this whole "start fresh" idea has occured several times. It can potentially kill a project. It is not unique to open source, and every time I've seen it done its been done badly. Is it harder to refactor an existing application into shape? Yes. However, refactoring tends to be far less painful for users who will have a working system throughout.
Some people claim that if users want to keep using the old app they can. This is true, except in open source people will tend to abaondon applications not in active development. Although a new "fresh" version is on the way a project in this state looks to the external world like an abandoned project.
I know one project that took over three years to rewrite a vital library. The old version worked, but had bugs. The bugs were going to be addressed in the new version, but it took so long to do that we were forced to find something that was actually maintained.
Open source isn't a toddler any more. It has grown up, and people now depend on it. We cannot afford to be using users as our QA department. We could afford to do this in the past, and certainly there is are still hackers who don't mind installing the latest builds, but we cannot assume that all our users are going to be grateful for whatever we ship. It must be quality.