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Linux-Mandrake best product of the year @ LWCE
Daniel Stone writes "Linux Mandrake won the best product of the year award at LinuxWorld. It's bound to be a contentious discussion about what deserves the awards-but Nick Petrely's comments speak for themselves.
What Slashdot shamelessly tried to ignore on its front page:
The significance of the Linuxworld Editors' Choice Awards lies not so much in that Mandrake won product of the year, but in that KDE and Qt swept all relevant award categories:
1. Product of the year.
Both Mandrake 6.0 and the runner-up Caldera 2.2 put heavy emphasis on KDE; Caldera's installation lizard is built with Qt (with help from Troll Tech). So KDE/Qt win both 1st and second place;
2. Distribution/Server.
Mandrake wins again! (OK, this award has less to do with KDE directly but still, the term `Mandrake' inextricably invokes KDE);
3. Distribution/Client.
This time Caldera 2.2 wins with Mandrake second! Again, not directly related to KDE but see 2 above; a KDE-oriented distribution wins both places;
4. Desktop Environment.
Winner: KDE 1.1.1
Runner-up: GNOME 1.0.9/Enlightenment 0.15
Need we say more? Well, as a matter of fact, yes:
"KDE is what Microsoft's Active Desktop should have been. It has all the power of Active Desktop and much more -- but without the inconsistencies and instability of Windows 98. KDE 1.1.1 is unsurpassed for simplicity and ease of use. And while it isn't the fastest desktop
available, it's no slouch in the speed category, either. "
5. Programming Library/Tools
Winner: Qt 2.0
"Qt 2.0: Qt 2.0 is a library of functions and widgets for creating intuitive, easy-to-use applications. The strength of Qt 2.0 is in how much it simplifies the task of programming graphical applications for Linux. The KDE desktop was built using Qt 1.4. Qt 2.0 adds several new classes and extends the flexibility of the libraries. GTK is the primary competitor to Qt, and although GTK is an excellent library that is arguably more flexible than Qt in some respects, Qt has by far the more elegant object-oriented library of classes. Qt excels because it is a more abstract class library than GTK, which minimizes the amount of work the programmer must do in order to write applications."
6. Productivity Application/Suite
Winner: StarOffice 5.1
Runner-up: WordPerfect 8
Neither of these awards are directly related to KDE, but StarOffice is well-known for being KDE-compliant, and the makers of WordPerfect 8 for Linux are making a KDE(and Debian)-based distro!
The significance of this should be obvious to any reporter worth his salt. If GNOME (which I wish all success) had had a similar day at the awards I am sure Slashdot would have been quick to point the obvious significance on the front page!. In this case, however, Slashdot shamelessly ignores this on its front page. I cannot help but think that the KDE/Qt success may have deterred a front page story listing the awards. Too bad: I thought that we had matured past these kinds of slights.