Hot on the heel of his recent
interview with the BBC, Miguel is in a RealPlayer inteview, talking about how
Gnome is helping Linux grow up in the desktop market. Check out the full
interview at NMTV. And if you need RealPlayer, check out our recent
story about RealPlayer for Linux.
Thats funny, because I was told elsewhere that as GNOME becomes more and more complete, it will be more stable but still use the same amount of resources. And I wouldn't know where to even begin... why would a stupid little panel app take up 33% of my 127MB swap space, not to mention most of my 32MB of memory? All the other GNOME apps aren't such hogs, and KDE's panel doesn't even come close... Not to mention my Wharf in AfterStep, while being huge, takes up even less resources that both...
-- My neighbors dog has a four inch clit.
X) I can't understand what "Gnome uses C bindings" means.
OK then, I'll deconstruct it for you: "Bindings" is a term used by programmers to refer to the information needed by a program called "the linker" to make it so an application can call functions and access data in an external collection of code and data called a "library". "C bindings" then, are bindings which designed for use with programs written in a programming language called "C".
Y) It is as out as GNOME was a couple of months ago: beta state
Which is to say "not out yet".
Z) 3) Gnome uses CORBA
This is true
Hooray!
The archive is at http://www.gnome.org/mailing-lists/
Don't make statements yourself if you are not willing to research them. I am not here to hand-hold your way to a clue.
Yeah, people are pissed.
m e-kde-list/1999-May/
http://www.gnome.org/mailing-lists/archives/gno
I forgot to mention that I discovered some hoops you have to jump through to watch. First you have to login (user/pass = cypherpunk/cypherpunk worked for me). Then there's getting the funky javascript link to work. Here's the URL I had to hack together to make it work at 128K.
You can get it at http://www.silicon.com/html/2_ desktop200599sl.rm.ram
At least, I think that's it. I got the new version of RealAudio, but when I go to play stuff, it just makes a lot of noise. Only when I have the volume setting down to the lowest notch do I get something vaguely resembling speech (still quite staticky). Anyone else have this problem?
F0 07 C7 C8
He is a pretty smart kid.
Now that I have my new G2 realplayer, I can view the interview no problem! Cool!
1) QT is C++ centric while Gnome uses more language neutral C bindings
I can't understand what "Gnome uses C bindings" means. Anyway: Miguel has said (I don't know if he did it in this interview, but he did in the BBC one) that KDE "forces you to use C++", which is blatantly false.
2) the open source QT isn't out yet
It is as out as GNOME was a couple of months ago: beta state. You can get it at www.troll.no.
Also in the BBC interview he said "KDE is not totally free yet". If you go to the kde-gnome list archives you will see him saying "KDE is free".
I suppose he changed his mind.
3) Gnome uses CORBA
This is true. GNOME 1.0 doesn't use it for anything where CORBA is *needed* but it does use it (for panel applets).
Is it just me who thinks that quite some people in the Free Software area are more promoting themselves than Open Source?
Linus always tried not to raise his profile over what was neccessary, buth newer figures are less shy about that.
I was a bit uneasy about the way Eric Raymond celebrated himself, but at least he has done a considerable amount of work both as developer and author.
And, he created the IT buzzword of(at least) the year.
But Miguel?
He started a copycat of an already existing project, as he disagreed with the tools (=widget lib) used.
The alternative, helping out Harmony/FreeQT and writing C bindings, was probably not as prestigious...
(And no, the technical differences between Gnome and KDE are not that big besides the C/C++ issue)
He has written a fair amount of code, but not more impressively so than many other free sw developers.
What upsets me most is the way Miguel acts in public:
Saying he is the saviour of the sw world may beOK for RMS, but for Miguel it's just ridiculous.
He makes pejorative remarks about competing projects, lies about the curent status of his programs (e.g. gnumeric is far from complete) just to produce commercial-style hype.
He does not give enoughcredit to other contributors, and acts arbitrarily like a dictator sometimes (without having earned the same legimite position as Linus).
Take the premature Gnome 1.0 release for LinuxExpo: Just about everybodyin the Gnome team was against it for technical reasons, but for the sake of marketing hype Gnome decidede to actively mislead the users.
Consequently, some reviews dismissed Linux as a whole, as the UI was so flawed...
If Miguel can't change his attitude, it wuold be worthwhile for the Gnome team to think about replacing Miguel as a leader.
This would also help KDE-GNOME cooperation immensely.
Also, I *think* gnumeric is written in python.
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
(currently testing something about signatures here)
Many people pronounce GNOME wrongly. A gnome is a garden ornament and is pronounced with a silent 'G' so you say NOME rather than G-NOME.
It's one of the more strange aspects of the English language.
Yeah, I had a problem even in this interview, when the girl asked him about KDE, he mentioned that you can program in any language for Gnome, but KDE is only C++.
Aren't there bindings for other languages for KDE as well as Gnome?
Also, merely the fact that there are bindings for other languages doesn't change the fact that Qt is mainly for C++, and GTK is mainly for C. If he was going to mention differences, I think he should just have mentioned that.
Other than that though, this interview was a lot friendlier towards KDE than some of the other stuff I've seen.
The GNOME team is always seeking to reduce resource usage, and welcomes your detailed suggestions on ways to do this.
List the above claims and show where and when Miguel made them. I won't be trying to second guess your thought chain.
/mill
CORBA is great as a standard IPC mechanism. Rather than writing your own IPC or networking protocol, you can use a nice standard one.
I could just as easily argue that KDE's koffice does not require CORBA. They could have invented a totally new IPC mechanism for communication between components. You could of course argue that it makes sense to use a standard IPC mechanism like CORBA in this instance though (and I would not argue with you).
As you can see, you can say that CORBA is not needed for any IPC tasks.
I could turn things round and say that a new IPC mechanism is NOT needed for use with panel applets, since there is CORBA.
In one post he says "I have been told I have gone to far and they are right".
Miguel admitted on gnome-kde-list@gnome.org that he was not thinking.
Here they are in context:
I don't think KDE has a future at this point, it's not completely free yet and it's bound to a single programming language in Unix.
Not all FUD comes out of Redmond...
TedC
You need to look at when gnome development was started. A year after KDE, and a lot later then afterstep or windows. ;-)
Open source dev goes faster, but not that fast.
And using gnome is mostly a question of tuning, mixing versions for example does amazing things. And one big nono I lived to regret was using gmc, which accounts for most of gnome's instabilities.
If you want to compare gnome to another window manager take the kde of a year ago. Not many people actually thought it was useable back then, and look at how it progressed.
Ok, there are still lots of people who don't consider kde useable, but the progress is there
Or take the windows version that was two/three years into development. I believe that was windows/386. That's a whole new experience. Believe me !
Anyway, it runs smooth as silk on my box (gnome I mean), so I really can't complain about it. Well, except for the one time the menu editor corrupted a menu entry and locked me out of my X for an hour. (until I deleted the corrupt file)
Taco, what did you do to tick off the CIA Script Kiddies?
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
- QT is C++ centric while Gnome uses more language neutral C bindings
- the open source QT isn't out yet
- Gnome uses CORBA
He took a noticeable pause to think before he started off on that topic. Perhaps he has learned from past experience that inflammatory comments on that score are counterproductive. You will grant that this is possible no?The CORBA applets I hear can chew up memory. That can make the panel a hog/unusable at 16mb. At 32mb, it fine. I actually decreased my swap to like 64mb, probably could have done with 32mb sds
He said "you are pretty much stuck with C++" not that it was only C++.
/mill
The reason this interview seems friendlier is because now you can actually hear exactly what he says instead of getting it interpreted for you by a journalist. You just interpreted it yourself and voila "pretty much" disappeared.
Media is a powerful tool. Unfortunately it is in the hands of journalists.
Which is of no use whatsoever to those of us on non-Intel platforms. Has someone got this in a sensible format somewhere?
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Those quotes are taken out of context.
It's all there.
Put it this way: there isnt a single GNOME application that wasnt written in C.
Check also, that Miguel appears at the CNN, yesterday night. Also he is at "CNN en espaniol"
as leadership of the nest milenium.
Overlord
This is not true. Many of the apps in gnome-admin, gnome-network, and gnome-games are written in different languages.
For example, Aisleriot, our customisable solitaire engine, is mainly written in Guile (scheme), gulp, our printer utility, is mainly written in Objective C, and AbiWord, our word processor, is written mainly in C++.
Obviously, things in gnome-core are written in straight C, for the same reason that things in gnome-libs are.
And most of KSpread is written in python and most of KSirc in perl...
Now, I'm not posting this to start a flame war about which Desktop Environment/Window Manager is better, but I do have something to say about GNOME.
Ever since I upgraded to RedHat 6, I decided I'd install GNOME, thinking it would be further along than it was when it was relesed with RH 5.2. Boy was that a mistake, GNOME hogs resources as much as Windows 95 does and it crashes even more often than that. Now, I know GNOME is actually a set of tools and blah blah blah, but I'm talking about the whole Panel interface, It craps out on me on a regular basis, both on my box at home and on my box a work. I've tried to compare how it adds up to KDE on both my machines. On my computer at work (Pentium 233, 32MB RAM, 127MB Swap), it crawls along at the pace that Win95 does on my the other box in my cubicle (A Pentium 100 for crying out loud! Also with 32MB RAM mind you). And more than that, GNOME uses 33% of my 127MB swap file! Don't get me wrong, I think GNOME is hella-slick, and I use it on my computer at home, since its a PII 450, with 128MB RAM and I got 127MB Swap, there's plenty of resources to spare. Now KDE runs A LOT smoother on my 233 at work, almost no slowdown, if any. For some reason though, I don't particularly care for KDE, and GNOME is just such crap, that I revert to using my dearly loved AfterStep. I do use the GNOME programs in AfterStep, and it works just fine.
But my comment is this: I thought the whole reason things were OpenSource was so that we could get away from badly written programs that hog lots of resources (Win 95, for example), and that's exactly what GNOME is. Why are RedHat software and so many others pumping all this manpower and time and money into such a huge pile of crap?
It just sucks so much, cause if GNOME worked properly, and ran smoothly, without hogging resources it would be the most awesome thing.
Sorry if I'm bringing up a subject that's been discussed before, but I haven't really read to much about this particular subject, I'm just talking from my experience. A good tip for someone who doesn't like KDE and doesn't have 128MB RAM would be just to use your favorite GNUstep window manager using the various programs that come with KDE and GNOME, that seems to work best with me..
-- My neighbors dog has a four inch clit.
I'm impressed. He's knowledgeable, articulate and diplomatic.