> I just had to compare Linux Mailclients for an article and the only KDE app in competition was Kmail wich simply falls short compared to Evolution, Balsa or even Sylpheed. No need to use it except you like KDE integration. This counts for many KDE apps (maybe not k3b).
Erm, what basis did you compare them, and what version of kmail? From my experience, kmail is definatly more advanced than balsa and sylpheed (which are good in their own ways), and the latest version in 3.2 even gives Evolution a run for it's money.
Erm, when Sun chose GNOME, it was at a time (gnome 1.2->gnome 1.4) that:
- gtk had *very primitive* internationalization - didn't support much unicode at all, and certainly had no framework for using it internally. - gnome had little to no accessibility support, in fact, Sun played a great deal in contributing that. - gnome had quite bad usability. Yes, Sun helped in this regard as well. KDE has actually had a much longer standing committment to usability and consistancy on it's desktop in this area. Yes, there has been large feature creep that have hindered parts of the desktop experience, but in general, you'll see a large amount of work being done in that area as of late. KDE 3.2 already has a large amount of usability changes, and 3.3 will have even more.
Your comment wrt 'hacks' on the desktop is on the verge of trolling. Gnome's panel supports fake transparency and Gnome's terminal also supports fake transparency. Why is this any more evil than anything KDE does?
Sun's commitment to accessibility in Gnome is quite commendable, but KDE isn't standing still in that area either. Qt 3.x (and hence KDE 3.x) already has a quite capable accessibility API, just not on the X11 platform (it hooks to existing solutions on Windows and MacOSX..) At the time that Qt 3.0 came out, there was no proven equivalent on X11, and Sun changed that. Qt 4.x (and hence KDE 4.x) will support accessibility on X11.
I don't think Fedora will remove Gnome from Fedora, or even make it non-default, but being a community distro, their KDE support should get better. I've found that community distros (Debian, RedHat), have some of the best versions of KDE. That's quite ironic considering all of the time SuSE, Mandrake, Lycoris, Lindows, Xandros, Connectiva, TurboLinux, et al. spend on polishing KDE. Hopefully Fedora will join suite.
> the fact remains though that kde has been throwing hacks into their desktop for ages with no real substance.
Fake transparency is certainly a hack, but the GNOME folks are as guilty as the KDE folks for using it. Both KDE and GNOME support fake transparency in their terminal apps. GNOME supports it in it's panel, and KDE supports it in it's menus. Other window managers even support fake transparency in their titlebars (like kahakai, afterstep). Tell me how again how KDE has thrown more hacks into their desktop versus others?
> And as far as kde goes with adopting standards they tend to be very against taking any freedesktop work and using it although i guess they may have other reasons than "its the KDE way or no way" D-BUS comes to mind as one such standard.
Uhm, there have been around fifteen standards put out by freedesktop.org. KDE has implemented nearly every single one. You provided one example (D-BUS), that isn't, but might I remind you that D-BUS isn't part of GNOME, or xfce, or ROX either. There has not been a firm agreement or disagreement on the KDE side to use D-BUS or not, because it could only be done in KDE 4.0, which is still a bit far off.
but it'd nice to have a history of things before 1996 (i.e, pre-voodoo cards). Video card history between 1996-2000 was very well documented, perhaps thanks to all of the articles that came out near/after 3dfx's demise, and most of us remember everything within the last three years.
oh really? that's not true at all. check out the freedesktop.org's xdg (X Desktop Group) mailing list (formerly known as gnome-kde-list).. https://listman.redhat.com/archives/xdg-list/
Erm.. not really. IBM's perferred Linux is, and always been SUSE. In fact, they are said to use it internally as well, as well as have strong contacts with SUSE. IBM's 50 million dollar investment in Novell right after they bought SUSE and their various smaller investments in SUSE are also pretty much telltale signs.
Oh yeah, they do support RH too, just not as much as SUSE.
Funny.. my 11 year old sister can handle that combination fine. Perhaps it's a question of his familarity with Windows and everything else being alien and complex to him?
Sun hardly has the funds right now (in relation to IBM, HP, Cisco, etc..)-- Sun itself might make good aquisition to another company a year or so from now.
Erm, how about people who voted for KDE __and__ gnome?
I did. I voted for KDE, GNOME, and OpenOffice. The KDE and GNOME communities aren't mutually exclusive for any means. Many people just voted for software that they consider important.
If nothing else, it spells out trouble for RedHat, relying solely on the enterprise market where SuSE and Ximian are very strong in (SuSE in Europe, and RedHat using bundleing Ximian tools)
Expect to see Evolution support for RedHat drop somewhat and Ximian Desktop cancelled for RedHat.
> Will Novell/SuSE continue to develop using the KDE desktop or will they more likely shift SuSE to use the Ximian Desktop? Will SuSE, who had historically been somewhat "less free" than Red Hat, become even more "less free" with its acquisition by Novell?
Or will they shift Ximian completely to SuSE's KDE offerings? They just might, since Ximian still using GNOME will only help augment RHEL, which Novell must try to kill off.
> I miss "view source" in the context menu on a webpage
While it's probably gone forever from the context menus (which have been shortened even more between alpha2 and beta1), someone could write a konqueror plugin to add it to the context menus again. Hell, just take "kuick" from kdeaddons (the konqueror plugin that adds "move to" and "add to" to the context menu), and modify it a little bit and there you go.
> The usuability studies will eventually reveal statistics as to what gets used most often by the majority of the people
The problem with this is that usability studies need money to be done. KDE, simply put, doesn't have any money. Companies (as in every commercial Linux distro except for RH) that use KDE as their main environment probably should shell out money to do usability studies. Very few people have unfortunatly.
Note that the KDE developers have often responded quickly to usability studies. For example, Relevantive AG did a study comparing WindowsXP and KDE on Linux. They said in their study that users were confused by the difference between "folders" and "directories" in KDE. Recently, pretty much all mentions of "directory" was changed to "folder" within all of KDE. This is part of KDE 3.2.
> Why do you want to force them to open up the rest of the code?
Well, that's the terms of the license. Either release the ENTIRE program under the GPL (which he wouldn't have to if iTerm was LGPL), remove the code, or get the author to private relicense it for you. Until they do one of these things, CocoaTech is in violation of the GPL, and distribution of PathFinder can be stopped and damages can be sought.
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> I just had to compare Linux Mailclients for an article and the only KDE app in competition was Kmail wich simply falls short compared to Evolution, Balsa or even Sylpheed. No need to use it except you like KDE integration. This counts for many KDE apps (maybe not k3b).
Erm, what basis did you compare them, and what version of kmail? From my experience, kmail is definatly more advanced than balsa and sylpheed (which are good in their own ways), and the latest version in 3.2 even gives Evolution a run for it's money.
Compare that list to... for example, Microsoft. You'll see that Apple is relatively clean*
* except for brutally crushing Apple clones. But. they were almost bankrupt in 1998.
Erm, when Sun chose GNOME, it was at a time (gnome 1.2->gnome 1.4) that:
- gtk had *very primitive* internationalization - didn't support much unicode at all, and certainly had no framework for using it internally.
- gnome had little to no accessibility support, in fact, Sun played a great deal in contributing that.
- gnome had quite bad usability. Yes, Sun helped in this regard as well. KDE has actually had a much longer standing committment to usability and consistancy on it's desktop in this area. Yes, there has been large feature creep that have hindered parts of the desktop experience, but in general, you'll see a large amount of work being done in that area as of late. KDE 3.2 already has a large amount of usability changes, and 3.3 will have even more.
Your comment wrt 'hacks' on the desktop is on the verge of trolling. Gnome's panel supports fake transparency and Gnome's terminal also supports fake transparency. Why is this any more evil than anything KDE does?
Sun's commitment to accessibility in Gnome is quite commendable, but KDE isn't standing still in that area either. Qt 3.x (and hence KDE 3.x) already has a quite capable accessibility API, just not on the X11 platform (it hooks to existing solutions on Windows and MacOSX..) At the time that Qt 3.0 came out, there was no proven equivalent on X11, and Sun changed that. Qt 4.x (and hence KDE 4.x) will support accessibility on X11.
> Surely 80% of the Instant Messaging market is the only asset AOL have that's worth anything to anyone?
Actually, by most recent estimates, there are more users on MSN than AIM these days. Perhaps it was Windows Messanger being integrated into XP.
I don't think Fedora will remove Gnome from Fedora, or even make it non-default, but being a community distro, their KDE support should get better. I've found that community distros (Debian, RedHat), have some of the best versions of KDE. That's quite ironic considering all of the time SuSE, Mandrake, Lycoris, Lindows, Xandros, Connectiva, TurboLinux, et al. spend on polishing KDE. Hopefully Fedora will join suite.
> that RH is _not_ going to come with MP3 support until the IP situation is sorted.
Alright. Fine. How about Fedora however? Is it really a community distro or just a puppet of RH's commercial interests?
> I'm pretty technically inclined, but I am a complete Linux newbie.
Fedora (and RH) were never made for such people. Try Mandrake.
> the fact remains though that kde has been throwing hacks into their desktop for ages with no real substance.
Fake transparency is certainly a hack, but the GNOME folks are as guilty as the KDE folks for using it. Both KDE and GNOME support fake transparency in their terminal apps. GNOME supports it in it's panel, and KDE supports it in it's menus. Other window managers even support fake transparency in their titlebars (like kahakai, afterstep). Tell me how again how KDE has thrown more hacks into their desktop versus others?
> And as far as kde goes with adopting standards they tend to be very against taking any freedesktop work and using it although i guess they may have other reasons than "its the KDE way or no way" D-BUS comes to mind as one such standard.
Uhm, there have been around fifteen standards put out by freedesktop.org. KDE has implemented nearly every single one. You provided one example (D-BUS), that isn't, but might I remind you that D-BUS isn't part of GNOME, or xfce, or ROX either. There has not been a firm agreement or disagreement on the KDE side to use D-BUS or not, because it could only be done in KDE 4.0, which is still a bit far off.
Composition isn't window manager or desktop environment specific anyways-- all of them will use the X Server's compositor.
but it'd nice to have a history of things before 1996 (i.e, pre-voodoo cards). Video card history between 1996-2000 was very well documented, perhaps thanks to all of the articles that came out near/after 3dfx's demise, and most of us remember everything within the last three years.
> None of the projects work together
oh really? that's not true at all. check out the freedesktop.org's xdg (X Desktop Group) mailing list (formerly known as gnome-kde-list).. https://listman.redhat.com/archives/xdg-list/
> IBM's prefered Linux is Redhat.
Erm.. not really. IBM's perferred Linux is, and always been SUSE. In fact, they are said to use it internally as well, as well as have strong contacts with SUSE. IBM's 50 million dollar investment in Novell right after they bought SUSE and their various smaller investments in SUSE are also pretty much telltale signs.
Oh yeah, they do support RH too, just not as much as SUSE.
Funny.. my 11 year old sister can handle that combination fine. Perhaps it's a question of his familarity with Windows and everything else being alien and complex to him?
pros:
stable, fast networking. solid overall. ports rock.
cons:
less hardware support than linux, generally (having more SATA success with linux than freebsd myself)
yesm, you can run linux binary programs. i do run a quake3 server myself, for example =)
Sun hardly has the funds right now (in relation to IBM, HP, Cisco, etc..)-- Sun itself might make good aquisition to another company a year or so from now.
Erm, how about people who voted for KDE __and__ gnome?
I did. I voted for KDE, GNOME, and OpenOffice. The KDE and GNOME communities aren't mutually exclusive for any means. Many people just voted for software that they consider important.
If nothing else, it spells out trouble for RedHat, relying solely on the enterprise market where SuSE and Ximian are very strong in (SuSE in Europe, and RedHat using bundleing Ximian tools)
Expect to see Evolution support for RedHat drop somewhat and Ximian Desktop cancelled for RedHat.
> Will Novell/SuSE continue to develop using the KDE desktop or will they more likely shift SuSE to use the Ximian Desktop? Will SuSE, who had historically been somewhat "less free" than Red Hat, become even more "less free" with its acquisition by Novell?
Or will they shift Ximian completely to SuSE's KDE offerings? They just might, since Ximian still using GNOME will only help augment RHEL, which Novell must try to kill off.
Every X replacement for UNIX has pretty much failed. FAILED. failed.
Why? There is a huge investment in XFree86 in things like drivers. It would take *ages* to implement all of that again.
X was made to be very small, clean, and extensible. It still is today.
> I miss "view source" in the context menu on a webpage
While it's probably gone forever from the context menus (which have been shortened even more between alpha2 and beta1), someone could write a konqueror plugin to add it to the context menus again. Hell, just take "kuick" from kdeaddons (the konqueror plugin that adds "move to" and "add to" to the context menu), and modify it a little bit and there you go.
It's already been in portage for a few days, actually. It's masked so you need to run emerge on it manually.
Yes, but rhythmbox is a itunes clone pretty much. juk isn't.
Of cours,e that begs the question, why doesn't anyobody make a itunes clone for KDE? Oh wait..
> The usuability studies will eventually reveal statistics as to what gets used most often by the majority of the people
The problem with this is that usability studies need money to be done. KDE, simply put, doesn't have any money. Companies (as in every commercial Linux distro except for RH) that use KDE as their main environment probably should shell out money to do usability studies. Very few people have unfortunatly.
Note that the KDE developers have often responded quickly to usability studies. For example, Relevantive AG did a study comparing WindowsXP and KDE on Linux. They said in their study that users were confused by the difference between "folders" and "directories" in KDE. Recently, pretty much all mentions of "directory" was changed to "folder" within all of KDE. This is part of KDE 3.2.
Yup, not to mention that the icons were LGPL anyways, and that it's covered under fair use.
> Why do you want to force them to open up the rest of the code?
Well, that's the terms of the license. Either release the ENTIRE program under the GPL (which he wouldn't have to if iTerm was LGPL), remove the code, or get the author to private relicense it for you. Until they do one of these things, CocoaTech is in violation of the GPL, and distribution of PathFinder can be stopped and damages can be sought.