> They are happy to say good things about KDE, but when it comes to write their own software, they invariably choose GTK due to licensing issues. The single exception to this rule that I can think of is Kylix.
Well, if the company is only in the UNIX industry and they don't care about releasing source, then the Qt/GPL fits their needs well.
Note that companies like Borland and Opera are in neither of these catagories, and they picked Qt. They probably chose it for a greater support guarentee. It's like people buying commercial versions of Redhat.
The Linux distros themselves tend to pick tookits based on licenses AND preferences. SuSE likely picked Qt for yast for #2. Redhat probably picked Gtk for #2. Mandrake probably picked Gtk for #1.
> I certainly agree that QT is likely to go anywhere, but savvy developers have realized that in most cases there is a useable alternative to QT that is under a more friendly license than the GPL.
Yeah, there is usually tookits that have more friendly licenses in most situations. However, strictly from anecdotal evidence, I've found that small companies who have made primarily Windows applications (especially in a contractual basis) in the past tend to find Qt first and buy/use it. On the other hand, people who have had experience with X11 tend to use an alternative toolkit, mostly wx/Windows. I've seen very few people use gtk for propreitary development in Windows, but maybe that's just me. I think perhaps this will change with gtk2, but then again, it might not.
And I'm mostly talking about C/C++ developers. Java people will just use Java across the platforms. SWT is great for this, and I hope it gets adopted more. Delphi people would just use Kylix (duh).
> I don't see Troll Tech as doing so spectacularly well. Yes, they have managed to attract commercial developers through dual licensing. But many commercial developers are wary of the commercial tie-in and the high licensing fees compared to other commercial and free systems.
You're looking at it from a UNIX-only standpoint. Most commercial Qt developers I know don't even use Qt on X11. Most of them are recent MFC converts who needed to port an app or two to OSX. Qt fit their needs perfectly. The thing is that with proprietary development of Qt in Windows, you'll never know what's a Qt app unless you disassemble the application with a commercial disassembler like IDA Pro. Even then, you'll need special FLIRT signatures (I made some for Qt+VS6).
> The commercial desktop UNIX world is pretty clearly moving towards Gnome and Gtk+--Sun, IBM, or HP have no interest in handing a market to a small company somewhere.
IBM seems to be pretty neutral between KDE and GNOME. The only program I can think of that uses GNOME by IBM is Eclipse. Of course, there is always intreast to have a Qt or KDE frontend to Eclipse/SWT as well.
HP and Sun (especially Sun), seem to clearly lie to GNOME, but on the other hand, companies like Borland choose Qt in Kylix and Opera in Opera.
> And I think that pretty much decides the long-term fate of Qt--it will hang around, but it won't become the dominant toolkit on UNIX and Linux desktops.
I don't think it'll be dominant either. But the parent poster never said it was. There is room for both Qt and GTK. It looks like, especially from the last two years, that neither of them are going to go away.
I was just trying to point out that most people who prefer KDE to GNOME usually don't replace the RH GNOME with Ximian GNOME.
Ximian, last time I checked, only makes Ximian GNOME, not Ximian KDE. In order to compete with Redhat's bluecurve approach, in order to see if it was successful, bluecurve (both GNOME and KDE), would have to be replaced with a Ximian solution that replaces both GNOME and KDE in Redhat.
> Linux had 10 years to try and come up with a viable stable platform of a desktop.
Uh, Linux is not the same as KDE or GNOME. KDE and GNOME run on a variety of Unix and Unix-like operating systems, including OSX.
As for "stable platform of a desktop", there have been many. KDE, GNOME, CDE, xfce, etc.. They are all pretty stable here.
> The only ones that come up with a plaform kde and gnome are unorignal. Apple is the only one to step forward with a desktop that is both stable and forward thinking.
Forward thinking doesn't always offer users. Microsoft was quite unorginial with Windows and they have more than 90% market share of the desktop market.
Mandrake should have it by Mandrake 8.1, Suse (who employs Keith Packard, author of xft) should default to it in UnitedLinux 1.0.
If you can't wait, you can always install gtk-cvs or a patched Qt 3.0 (3.1, which is coming out soon, should have it). Visit Keith Packard's page at http://fontconfig.org/
> I'd love that feature to come over to KDE and Gnome, subject to user preference of course.
This has been discussed many times in both the KDE and GNOME mailing lists, and the common concensus is that it's a horrible feature usability wise. Many new users of Office2k or XP, for example, can't tell where the "close" menu item is, since they've never clicked on it, and it's hidden by default.
> The discussion we had lately about bluecurve is much better understood when you try Red Hat 8.0. KDE and Gnome look so much the same that most people would probably want to choose the default (Gnome)
I finished installing RH8 nearly a hour ago. Pray tell, how is GNOME listed as DEFAULT anywhere? They seem to receive pretty much equal treatment in psyche.
Non-newbie Linux users know that Redhat supports GNOME more than KDE, but newbies don't know that, and GNOME's not treated as special in the installer, so people have as much of a chance to miss GNOME's cool stuff as KDE's cool stuff.
Yes, gentoo was about 4% faster because of processor optimizations. Of course, it wasted more time compiling everything, so I just switched back to Debian/unstable, which just seemed to *work* always, unlike Gentoo, which broke more (admittadly, Gentoo is more bleeding-edge than Debian).
Why would Redhat (or, more generally, Microsoft) be scared of OSX? You still need ppc hardware to run it. It's certainly attractive to linux/ppc users, but Redhat users are almost completely x86 users, and most have no intention of buying PPC hardware just for OSX.
The second question is: did Red Hat pull it off well. I think we will have to wait a few months to guage how successful it has been. Ximian's Gnome2-based system will almost certianly be out soon, and I think a good measure of how usable Red Hat's GNOME desktop is will be how many people plunk Ximian GNOME down over it.
It'll prove nothing about if unifying the two was a good idea or not.
It reminds me of Microsoft's.net stylings (in Office.NET, and VS.NET), with even less borders.
On the other hand, I like the font rendering by Xft2, although it still looks blurry compared to WindowsXP. They should turn AA off for most regular point sizes.
Actually, if you've actually tried Redhat 8.0, you'll see that neither GNOME nor KDE are default. You get to pick one (or both) during the install process. GNOME is listed first, but that's probably because of alphabetical order. The descriptions of both the desktops are nearly identical. Both desktops work equally well.
Re:A users perspective of Red Hat 8 and KDE
on
Red Hat 8.0 Released
·
· Score: 2
Very nice page. I think it'll help settle some of the myths surrounding KDE and Redhat8. Hopefully, it'll be somewhat of a reconciliation between the two groups.
Slashdot Mirror
> They are happy to say good things about KDE, but when it comes to write their own software, they invariably choose GTK due to licensing issues. The single exception to this rule that I can think of is Kylix.
Well, if the company is only in the UNIX industry and they don't care about releasing source, then the Qt/GPL fits their needs well.
Note that companies like Borland and Opera are in neither of these catagories, and they picked Qt. They probably chose it for a greater support guarentee. It's like people buying commercial versions of Redhat.
The Linux distros themselves tend to pick tookits based on licenses AND preferences. SuSE likely picked Qt for yast for #2. Redhat probably picked Gtk for #2. Mandrake probably picked Gtk for #1.
> I certainly agree that QT is likely to go anywhere, but savvy developers have realized that in most cases there is a useable alternative to QT that is under a more friendly license than the GPL.
Yeah, there is usually tookits that have more friendly licenses in most situations. However, strictly from anecdotal evidence, I've found that small companies who have made primarily Windows applications (especially in a contractual basis) in the past tend to find Qt first and buy/use it. On the other hand, people who have had experience with X11 tend to use an alternative toolkit, mostly wx/Windows. I've seen very few people use gtk for propreitary development in Windows, but maybe that's just me. I think perhaps this will change with gtk2, but then again, it might not.
And I'm mostly talking about C/C++ developers. Java people will just use Java across the platforms. SWT is great for this, and I hope it gets adopted more. Delphi people would just use Kylix (duh).
I agree. The grandparent poster's attitude is what makes the GPL often impractical in non-free-beer software.
> initially recommend that they look at using Linux 8.0
Holy smokes, it only seemed like yesterday when Linux 2.4 came out. I guess the vacation this summer put me out of the loop more than I thought.
If you bought it, you'd be able to get code.
> I thought wxWindows was the de facto standard for Python GUIs now, as well?
No, pretty much tk still is. wx/Python is very good and IMHO much preferable to tk, but it's not the defacto standard.
> I don't see Troll Tech as doing so spectacularly well. Yes, they have managed to attract commercial developers through dual licensing. But many commercial developers are wary of the commercial tie-in and the high licensing fees compared to other commercial and free systems.
You're looking at it from a UNIX-only standpoint. Most commercial Qt developers I know don't even use Qt on X11. Most of them are recent MFC converts who needed to port an app or two to OSX. Qt fit their needs perfectly. The thing is that with proprietary development of Qt in Windows, you'll never know what's a Qt app unless you disassemble the application with a commercial disassembler like IDA Pro. Even then, you'll need special FLIRT signatures (I made some for Qt+VS6).
> The commercial desktop UNIX world is pretty clearly moving towards Gnome and Gtk+--Sun, IBM, or HP have no interest in handing a market to a small company somewhere.
IBM seems to be pretty neutral between KDE and GNOME. The only program I can think of that uses GNOME by IBM is Eclipse. Of course, there is always intreast to have a Qt or KDE frontend to Eclipse/SWT as well.
HP and Sun (especially Sun), seem to clearly lie to GNOME, but on the other hand, companies like Borland choose Qt in Kylix and Opera in Opera.
> And I think that pretty much decides the long-term fate of Qt--it will hang around, but it won't become the dominant toolkit on UNIX and Linux desktops.
I don't think it'll be dominant either. But the parent poster never said it was. There is room for both Qt and GTK. It looks like, especially from the last two years, that neither of them are going to go away.
Ah, I see. I always do custom installs :-)
> But, the bottom line is: there will be no Gnome or KDE desktops in 5 years.
I agree that in 5 years, this will hopefully happen. However, it's not true right now, so I think my point still stands.
I was just trying to point out that most people who prefer KDE to GNOME usually don't replace the RH GNOME with Ximian GNOME.
Ximian, last time I checked, only makes Ximian GNOME, not Ximian KDE. In order to compete with Redhat's bluecurve approach, in order to see if it was successful, bluecurve (both GNOME and KDE), would have to be replaced with a Ximian solution that replaces both GNOME and KDE in Redhat.
> Linux had 10 years to try and come up with a viable stable platform of a desktop.
Uh, Linux is not the same as KDE or GNOME. KDE and GNOME run on a variety of Unix and Unix-like operating systems, including OSX.
As for "stable platform of a desktop", there have been many. KDE, GNOME, CDE, xfce, etc.. They are all pretty stable here.
> The only ones that come up with a plaform kde and gnome are unorignal. Apple is the only one to step forward with a desktop that is both stable and forward thinking.
Forward thinking doesn't always offer users. Microsoft was quite unorginial with Windows and they have more than 90% market share of the desktop market.
> And what gives *you* more credibility than Mosfet?
I'm not making blanket comments about a distro that I'm not using.
> He contributes things to Open Source, do you?
Yep.
Yes, sorry
Mandrake should have it by Mandrake 8.1, Suse (who employs Keith Packard, author of xft) should default to it in UnitedLinux 1.0.
If you can't wait, you can always install gtk-cvs or a patched Qt 3.0 (3.1, which is coming out soon, should have it). Visit Keith Packard's page at http://fontconfig.org/
> (1) the speed. Nautilus fles, it's actually usable now,
:-P
Well, this is because of GNOME 2, not rh8
> the fonts look *far* better than anything before it
Yeah, it's xft2, which will be in the next update versions of all the major distros.
> I'd love that feature to come over to KDE and Gnome, subject to user preference of course.
This has been discussed many times in both the KDE and GNOME mailing lists, and the common concensus is that it's a horrible feature usability wise. Many new users of Office2k or XP, for example, can't tell where the "close" menu item is, since they've never clicked on it, and it's hidden by default.
Easiest would be mandrake.
:-)
I would recommend Debian, Gentoo, or slackware, though.
Or if you want a challenge, LFS
> The discussion we had lately about bluecurve is much better understood when you try Red Hat 8.0. KDE and Gnome look so much the same that most people would probably want to choose the default (Gnome)
I finished installing RH8 nearly a hour ago. Pray tell, how is GNOME listed as DEFAULT anywhere? They seem to receive pretty much equal treatment in psyche.
Non-newbie Linux users know that Redhat supports GNOME more than KDE, but newbies don't know that, and GNOME's not treated as special in the installer, so people have as much of a chance to miss GNOME's cool stuff as KDE's cool stuff.
Yes, gentoo was about 4% faster because of processor optimizations. Of course, it wasted more time compiling everything, so I just switched back to Debian/unstable, which just seemed to *work* always, unlike Gentoo, which broke more (admittadly, Gentoo is more bleeding-edge than Debian).
Why would Redhat (or, more generally, Microsoft) be scared of OSX? You still need ppc hardware to run it. It's certainly attractive to linux/ppc users, but Redhat users are almost completely x86 users, and most have no intention of buying PPC hardware just for OSX.
You should have written:
The second question is: did Red Hat pull it off well. I think we will have to wait a few months to guage how successful it has been. Ximian's Gnome2-based system will almost certianly be out soon, and I think a good measure of how usable Red Hat's GNOME desktop is will be how many people plunk Ximian GNOME down over it.
It'll prove nothing about if unifying the two was a good idea or not.
It's xft2. Don't worry, most distros should have it soon.
It reminds me of Microsoft's .net stylings (in Office.NET, and VS.NET), with even less borders.
On the other hand, I like the font rendering by Xft2, although it still looks blurry compared to WindowsXP. They should turn AA off for most regular point sizes.
Actually, if you've actually tried Redhat 8.0, you'll see that neither GNOME nor KDE are default. You get to pick one (or both) during the install process. GNOME is listed first, but that's probably because of alphabetical order. The descriptions of both the desktops are nearly identical. Both desktops work equally well.
Very nice page. I think it'll help settle some of the myths surrounding KDE and Redhat8. Hopefully, it'll be somewhat of a reconciliation between the two groups.
It doesn't look or feel like WindowsXP. It feels much more like Windows2000 or 98.
Of course, many people still use Windows2k, so this might not be a bad thing.