Hmm.. well, desktop-neutral software is neither an issue for KDE or Gnome, so that point is moot.
Maybe not for the KDE or Gnome projects, but the point is certainly not moot for their users, who often wish to use these apps and have them integrate nicely.
And, incidentally, they're both horribly bloated and sluggish applications. Frankly, I think KOffice and Konqueror/KHTML have a better long term future, especially now that KOffice will be using the OpenOffice XML document formats and Apple is helping to develop KHTML for their own browser
That's nice, but my (desktop neutral) project website stats show Konqueror usage to be about 3-4% typically, with Gecko based browsers taking about 60% and the rest being Internet Explorer, so it's not there yet. The hypothetical desktop of the future is nice, but the desktop of today is dominated by Mozilla and OpenOffice, for better or worse.
OpenOffice and Mozilla are both projects where old, tangled proprietary code was thrown at the community. KOffice and Konqueror, in comparision, are fresh starts.
Well, I would quibble with that on two points, the first one being that Mozilla was in fact a fresh start itself, and the code, while not always a thing of beauty, isn't as bad as is often made out (I've written patches for Mozilla). OpenOffice, yes, quite probably, but then again it takes time and effort to accrue all those features and filters, and there's no guarantee that had KOffice gone through years of development and got all the features of openoffice that it too would not be seen as bloated and complex.
On the other hand, the apparent technical and usability advantage of KDE at this point does make me question why GNOME still needs to exist as a seperate project. Is there truly a good reason to not roll them into one unified desktop environment at this point?
Certainly, there are many. For one, not everybody agrees that KDE has a technical and usability advantage. I know quite a few people who find Gnome easier to use, more elegant UI wise and so on, and I know quite a few people who find the KDE frameworks more technically elegant than Gnomes.
More to the point, attempting a merge, or cutting off one project, would lose the community a lot of dedicated and smart hackers, a loss we really can't afford.
I'd be careful with that line of reasoning - the relative success of Linux vs the Hurd has a lot more to do with technical design and leadership, not licensing. The binary only kernel modules thing is interesting but ultimately does not give anybody control over the direction of the kernel, in the same way that building a desktop on a non-free toolkit would have given TT control.
The main problem with depending on KDE for apps like Wine, OO, Mozilla is that they wish to remain desktop neutral - remember the large number of people who use neither KDE nor Gnome. Depending on one desktop is not in their best interests, in many ways and depending on non-free code is definately not.
Some people like to paint it as a black and white "KDE wanted to get things done, the fanatics started GNOME to destroy them", but that's blurring a lot of important details to my mind, and over simplifying the history of those times. I say that as somebody who has not hacked on KDE or GNOME to any great extent, but has worked a lot on Wine and autopackage, both of which have to remain desktop independant.
Invoking things via shell scripts is all well and good, but to actually integrate with the desktop you need access to the KDE classes, as they are the canonical implementation, and that means linking with kdelibs and Qt. I guess you could expose everything through little command line apps, but that's even lowest-common-denominator than having a C library for it.
What kind of message would that have sent? That the KDE developers could do what they wanted, and those who cared about free software would have to race to catch up? Qt isn't small you know, and the KDE guys weren't willing to rule out using TrollTechs version.
No. That would not have been an acceptable solution. If you're going to do something as big as a desktop, you need to get your priorities in order, and if there was a need for a toolkit then there was a need and meeting it should have been the first priority. Otherwise, you'd have a desktop riddled with non-free libraries today and lots of teams struggling to clone them and keep up, always two steps behind.
Which is? IMO KDE delivers a complete desktop without any major shortcomings. Could you come up with an example?
Well, the most obvious one is that's something of an all or nothing proposition. You're either a KDE app (which almost always means C++) and have access to the infrastructure provided, or you aren't. That poses problems for Wine, OpenOffice, Mozilla - not to mention all the desktop neutral software out there like XMMS, Gaim, mplayer and so on.
There are people of course who use KDEs replacements for all those apps, and *only* use KDE software. But I don't know many - typically people want to use the best, and get on with things, not keep a "pure" desktop.
Also GNOME was started because at that time QT was not GPLed and the goal was to replace KDE/Qt.
"Replace" means "destroy" in the software world which isn't a very good start for cooperation.
That's one side of it, a valid side. But really, the KDE guys made it inevitable when they chose to give two fingers to the philosophy that had made the free software movement possibly in the first place. Having built an entirely free software platform, there were a lot of people who weren't pleased with the idea that it might be compromised by Qt.
Basically, they knew that would cause problems, but went ahead anyway and they got competition in the form of Gnome. Big surprise. In the process both sides seemed for forget about non-KDE/non-GNOME software, and now people have to slowly pick up the pieces over at freedeskop.org so all the software that isn't affiliated with a project can interop nicely and can fit in.
No points for discoverability, but I find the fastest way to move windows around is to use the keyboard. You already know that Ctrl-Alt-Arrows lets you move around the desktop, so now try Ctrl-Shift-Arrows to move the focussed window between desktops. No mouse necessary!
I have to disagree. I spent years working with IDEs like Delphi, VB and the like, and you know what? The only thing I miss from them in emacs is context-sensitive symbol completion.
On Windows, yes, an IDE is a crucial, critical tool. I've written code for Win32 in C, with no IDE (in fact I'm doing it now), and it's a nightmare. The same is not true on Linux. You don't have insanities like pixel-based layouts to deal with, you can actually construct your GUIs in code if you so wish. Or, you can use Glade, which spits out XML files you can load at runtime. This is far, far easier than Windows.
The equivalent then to VB is something like Python with Glade/GTK, and emacs. Or it is to my mind, at any rate. These tools are not integrated into one super environment, but they don't lose anything for it in practice.
The other reason you tend to need IDEs on Windows is because Windows is not designed to be text-editor friendly. For things like COM, it's often necessary to use wizards that spit out huge amounts of auto generated code. There are no such technologies on Linux, as far as I'm aware (in wide usage).
Basically, I don't find it any harder to write software on Linux than on Windows, despite the lack of an IDE. I mentioned loss of context sensitive symbol completion - yes, that's a shame, but OTOH when in a Windows IDE I miss a proper command line, a strong and powerful text editor like emacs, and sane tools and toolkits like Glade and GTK, so it works both ways.
Oh, finally, I found I much prefer the "just get on with it" approach of emacs to the one taken by IDEs, which tend to clutter your workspace with things you don't need, like class explorers, project trees, widget palettes and so on - I like having most of my screen taken up by the text editor, as programming is mostly about editing text.
Yeah, but songs have little resale value. Who would buy an iPod in a pub for 10 grand, even if it was full of music? Nobody. Their tastes just wouldn't match closely enough.
You really think if Be had eaten Microsofts lunch, they would have used the power owning a platform gives to make the world a better place?
You're trading apples for oranges there. There's only one real way forward, that would guarantee this situation will never happen again. I'm sure you know what I mean.
.... that's where all of the "must crush Netscape" emails came from (in the context of getting the Office guys to use IE instead of Netscape). But nobody on Slashdot cares about context.
Believe that if you want. You guys had years at the trial to give the world "context", and instead chose to forge evidence, lie, drag your heels and in the end in the judges still decided that the allegations were true. Now did the judges simply "lack context" too?
I don't know if you really do work for Microsoft, but it wouldn't surprise me. I've seen incredibly talented and smart people say some shockingly naive things about the company they work for. For instance, when taken to task over the poor design of the Windows DLL loader mechanism (which involves callbacks while holding a global lock), Chris Brumme stated that "The phenomenal success of Win32 clearly shows that it provided the most value", or words to that effect.
The vast majority of us don't live in this happy clappy dreamworld where Win32 became dominant because it provided value, we live in the real world where Microsoft forced its products onto the market then kept them there artificially, and the law agrees with us.
People joke about the "Steve Jobs reality distortion field", well from what I've seen the one around Redmond are far stronger. Kool aid indeed.
Like what? We already know many (most?) of the tactics they use, the illegal agreements they have with suppliers and so on. I doubt they could have anything secret more damaging than what came out during the trial.
As much as we all like to think we have the inside track on the superior OS--and, indeed, it may still be slightly superior--it's a case of it not being so far and away superior that it's clearly so.
That doesn't really matter though, does it? Linux is clearly not a huge leap forward (well, not yet, but hey, the sky is the limit when you have all the code) - but ultimately what people are interested in is the story of how it was made, and the ideas that led to its creation. That is what makes Linux so interesting, so different. Not the technical architecture, which isn't even finished yet.
When the slogan of the ad is "The future is open", the last thing anybody is thinking about is the elegance of kernel modules.
Its great that IBM is marketing Linux, I'd certainly love to see my family and friends use it, but they are totally shut off to the idea.
They are comfortable with using Windows because they just dont have the interest in the learning curve Linux presents.
In the next few years, most Linux users statistically will not have chosen to use it. They'll be people working at the corporate desk, using Linux at work, then going back to Windows at home.
I've thought about this sort of advertising before. The problem is that in the timeslice you have in an advert, it's basically impossible to communicate exactly what Linux is, why it's good, how it's different - consider that many people don't understand the concept of an OS (and why should they?), and you see the difficulties.
The best way to get the word out then, is to get people interested. "What is Linux, Morpheus?" If they are naturally curious, they can seek out people they know and trust who can explain it better than a TV ad ever could.
So IBM have the right idea here. Try and get across the basic philosophy of Linux, namely, openness and sharing - the rest is just minor technical details ultimately of interest to few. Everybody can related to the human story though.
Actually, the guy is partly right. XFree has a tendancy to starve apps of scheduler cycles inside the X server at just the wrong moment, making especially opaque moves and resizes feel laggy.
Toolkits being slow to process Expose events doesn't help either, but this is more due to the increased visual complexity we've seen recently (antialiasing, unicode support, better themes etc).
I believe the primary problem with threading on NT based kernels is that they are allocated a meg of stack space, meaning that if you run 1000 threads you just exhausted a gig of virtual memory. Once you get above a certain number of threads, you no longer have enough address space left.
IIRC context switches are somewhat heavyweight on NT kernels too, though the reasons for that are unknown to me. The original poster was not just karma whorign though, Microsofts own employees have written about the problems with thread scalability. That doesn't necessarily mean that Windows doesn't scale however. Don't confuse the two.
Indeed indeed - if you read MS blogs, you'll also know that some of that DCOM code dates back from the 80s. When the DCOM exploits came out, they had programmers who had never even seen the code before trawling it.
Oh, Wine will get there one day. It basically boils down to a matter of manpower. More to the point, with a bit of elbow grease you can improve Wine to the point at which it can run nearly any app - this isn't so great for end users who aren't developers and who want to use Linux at home, but it's often an acceptable scenario for businesses who want their custom software to run on it, and can afford a hacker for a bit.
Most of the problems people have with Wine these days boil down to one or two "hotspot" areas, often related to installers, and setting it up. Both are solvable, and the aim is to solve them for the 0.9 release
You have plenty of other options if you want to chat outside of Microsoft's servers...
.... but not if I want to continue talking to friends and family over the net.
Or what. Do you really think that they will *all* start to use another chat program and network, just because I don't use Windows? I'm sure somebody will make a sharp comment about true friends here, but remember - they have their own friends I've never met who also use MSN Messenger, and they have their friends... it spreads out, and the inertia is massive.
So painting this as the workings of a free market is simply naive in my opinion. It's not a free market, I'm not free to go elsewhere if I want to talk to my friends (which is the service they provide). I can and will break into their network if they lock me out.
They do cheat, yes. There is no need to break backwards compatability, in fact the protocol already has what's needed, it's mostly a matter of XFree engineering and getting it effecient enough to not kill performance. If you want GTK apps to run sweet over a modem even, look into NX compression. Again, no need to break X.
How about Google? They use Linux in very large quantities, and have traditionally wanted to do the right thing, their top brass (Sergey Brin?) typically has strong moral views on right and wrong.
I think it'd be worth a shot. Who wants to email Sergey?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe not for the KDE or Gnome projects, but the point is certainly not moot for their users, who often wish to use these apps and have them integrate nicely.
And, incidentally, they're both horribly bloated and sluggish applications. Frankly, I think KOffice and Konqueror/KHTML have a better long term future, especially now that KOffice will be using the OpenOffice XML document formats and Apple is helping to develop KHTML for their own browser
That's nice, but my (desktop neutral) project website stats show Konqueror usage to be about 3-4% typically, with Gecko based browsers taking about 60% and the rest being Internet Explorer, so it's not there yet. The hypothetical desktop of the future is nice, but the desktop of today is dominated by Mozilla and OpenOffice, for better or worse.
OpenOffice and Mozilla are both projects where old, tangled proprietary code was thrown at the community. KOffice and Konqueror, in comparision, are fresh starts.
Well, I would quibble with that on two points, the first one being that Mozilla was in fact a fresh start itself, and the code, while not always a thing of beauty, isn't as bad as is often made out (I've written patches for Mozilla). OpenOffice, yes, quite probably, but then again it takes time and effort to accrue all those features and filters, and there's no guarantee that had KOffice gone through years of development and got all the features of openoffice that it too would not be seen as bloated and complex.
On the other hand, the apparent technical and usability advantage of KDE at this point does make me question why GNOME still needs to exist as a seperate project. Is there truly a good reason to not roll them into one unified desktop environment at this point?
Certainly, there are many. For one, not everybody agrees that KDE has a technical and usability advantage. I know quite a few people who find Gnome easier to use, more elegant UI wise and so on, and I know quite a few people who find the KDE frameworks more technically elegant than Gnomes.
More to the point, attempting a merge, or cutting off one project, would lose the community a lot of dedicated and smart hackers, a loss we really can't afford.
The main problem with depending on KDE for apps like Wine, OO, Mozilla is that they wish to remain desktop neutral - remember the large number of people who use neither KDE nor Gnome. Depending on one desktop is not in their best interests, in many ways and depending on non-free code is definately not.
Some people like to paint it as a black and white "KDE wanted to get things done, the fanatics started GNOME to destroy them", but that's blurring a lot of important details to my mind, and over simplifying the history of those times. I say that as somebody who has not hacked on KDE or GNOME to any great extent, but has worked a lot on Wine and autopackage, both of which have to remain desktop independant.
Invoking things via shell scripts is all well and good, but to actually integrate with the desktop you need access to the KDE classes, as they are the canonical implementation, and that means linking with kdelibs and Qt. I guess you could expose everything through little command line apps, but that's even lowest-common-denominator than having a C library for it.
No. That would not have been an acceptable solution. If you're going to do something as big as a desktop, you need to get your priorities in order, and if there was a need for a toolkit then there was a need and meeting it should have been the first priority. Otherwise, you'd have a desktop riddled with non-free libraries today and lots of teams struggling to clone them and keep up, always two steps behind.
Well, the most obvious one is that's something of an all or nothing proposition. You're either a KDE app (which almost always means C++) and have access to the infrastructure provided, or you aren't. That poses problems for Wine, OpenOffice, Mozilla - not to mention all the desktop neutral software out there like XMMS, Gaim, mplayer and so on.
There are people of course who use KDEs replacements for all those apps, and *only* use KDE software. But I don't know many - typically people want to use the best, and get on with things, not keep a "pure" desktop.
Also GNOME was started because at that time QT was not GPLed and the goal was to replace KDE/Qt. "Replace" means "destroy" in the software world which isn't a very good start for cooperation.
That's one side of it, a valid side. But really, the KDE guys made it inevitable when they chose to give two fingers to the philosophy that had made the free software movement possibly in the first place. Having built an entirely free software platform, there were a lot of people who weren't pleased with the idea that it might be compromised by Qt.
Basically, they knew that would cause problems, but went ahead anyway and they got competition in the form of Gnome. Big surprise. In the process both sides seemed for forget about non-KDE/non-GNOME software, and now people have to slowly pick up the pieces over at freedeskop.org so all the software that isn't affiliated with a project can interop nicely and can fit in.
Oops yes, quite right, thinko, it's alt+shift
Wait until the Gecko Runtime Environment is wide spread, then see how many packages apt wants to remove to let you get rid of it. Same thing.
No points for discoverability, but I find the fastest way to move windows around is to use the keyboard. You already know that Ctrl-Alt-Arrows lets you move around the desktop, so now try Ctrl-Shift-Arrows to move the focussed window between desktops. No mouse necessary!
On Windows, yes, an IDE is a crucial, critical tool. I've written code for Win32 in C, with no IDE (in fact I'm doing it now), and it's a nightmare. The same is not true on Linux. You don't have insanities like pixel-based layouts to deal with, you can actually construct your GUIs in code if you so wish. Or, you can use Glade, which spits out XML files you can load at runtime. This is far, far easier than Windows.
The equivalent then to VB is something like Python with Glade/GTK, and emacs. Or it is to my mind, at any rate. These tools are not integrated into one super environment, but they don't lose anything for it in practice.
The other reason you tend to need IDEs on Windows is because Windows is not designed to be text-editor friendly. For things like COM, it's often necessary to use wizards that spit out huge amounts of auto generated code. There are no such technologies on Linux, as far as I'm aware (in wide usage).
Basically, I don't find it any harder to write software on Linux than on Windows, despite the lack of an IDE. I mentioned loss of context sensitive symbol completion - yes, that's a shame, but OTOH when in a Windows IDE I miss a proper command line, a strong and powerful text editor like emacs, and sane tools and toolkits like Glade and GTK, so it works both ways.
Oh, finally, I found I much prefer the "just get on with it" approach of emacs to the one taken by IDEs, which tend to clutter your workspace with things you don't need, like class explorers, project trees, widget palettes and so on - I like having most of my screen taken up by the text editor, as programming is mostly about editing text.
Anyway, just my 2 pence.
Yeah, but songs have little resale value. Who would buy an iPod in a pub for 10 grand, even if it was full of music? Nobody. Their tastes just wouldn't match closely enough.
You're trading apples for oranges there. There's only one real way forward, that would guarantee this situation will never happen again. I'm sure you know what I mean.
Believe that if you want. You guys had years at the trial to give the world "context", and instead chose to forge evidence, lie, drag your heels and in the end in the judges still decided that the allegations were true. Now did the judges simply "lack context" too?
I don't know if you really do work for Microsoft, but it wouldn't surprise me. I've seen incredibly talented and smart people say some shockingly naive things about the company they work for. For instance, when taken to task over the poor design of the Windows DLL loader mechanism (which involves callbacks while holding a global lock), Chris Brumme stated that "The phenomenal success of Win32 clearly shows that it provided the most value", or words to that effect.
The vast majority of us don't live in this happy clappy dreamworld where Win32 became dominant because it provided value, we live in the real world where Microsoft forced its products onto the market then kept them there artificially, and the law agrees with us.
People joke about the "Steve Jobs reality distortion field", well from what I've seen the one around Redmond are far stronger. Kool aid indeed.
Like what? We already know many (most?) of the tactics they use, the illegal agreements they have with suppliers and so on. I doubt they could have anything secret more damaging than what came out during the trial.
That doesn't really matter though, does it? Linux is clearly not a huge leap forward (well, not yet, but hey, the sky is the limit when you have all the code) - but ultimately what people are interested in is the story of how it was made, and the ideas that led to its creation. That is what makes Linux so interesting, so different. Not the technical architecture, which isn't even finished yet.
When the slogan of the ad is "The future is open", the last thing anybody is thinking about is the elegance of kernel modules.
In the next few years, most Linux users statistically will not have chosen to use it. They'll be people working at the corporate desk, using Linux at work, then going back to Windows at home.
I've thought about this sort of advertising before. The problem is that in the timeslice you have in an advert, it's basically impossible to communicate exactly what Linux is, why it's good, how it's different - consider that many people don't understand the concept of an OS (and why should they?), and you see the difficulties.
The best way to get the word out then, is to get people interested. "What is Linux, Morpheus?" If they are naturally curious, they can seek out people they know and trust who can explain it better than a TV ad ever could.
So IBM have the right idea here. Try and get across the basic philosophy of Linux, namely, openness and sharing - the rest is just minor technical details ultimately of interest to few. Everybody can related to the human story though.
Toolkits being slow to process Expose events doesn't help either, but this is more due to the increased visual complexity we've seen recently (antialiasing, unicode support, better themes etc).
IIRC context switches are somewhat heavyweight on NT kernels too, though the reasons for that are unknown to me. The original poster was not just karma whorign though, Microsofts own employees have written about the problems with thread scalability. That doesn't necessarily mean that Windows doesn't scale however. Don't confuse the two.
Indeed indeed - if you read MS blogs, you'll also know that some of that DCOM code dates back from the 80s. When the DCOM exploits came out, they had programmers who had never even seen the code before trawling it.
Yeah, that's basically how I started.
Most of the problems people have with Wine these days boil down to one or two "hotspot" areas, often related to installers, and setting it up. Both are solvable, and the aim is to solve them for the 0.9 release
It has near 100% penetration in Europe. I only know one person (in England) who still uses ICQ. The rest are all on MSN.
Or what. Do you really think that they will *all* start to use another chat program and network, just because I don't use Windows? I'm sure somebody will make a sharp comment about true friends here, but remember - they have their own friends I've never met who also use MSN Messenger, and they have their friends... it spreads out, and the inertia is massive.
So painting this as the workings of a free market is simply naive in my opinion. It's not a free market, I'm not free to go elsewhere if I want to talk to my friends (which is the service they provide). I can and will break into their network if they lock me out.
They do cheat, yes. There is no need to break backwards compatability, in fact the protocol already has what's needed, it's mostly a matter of XFree engineering and getting it effecient enough to not kill performance. If you want GTK apps to run sweet over a modem even, look into NX compression. Again, no need to break X.
I think it'd be worth a shot. Who wants to email Sergey?
It was closed yesterday afternoon until this morning GMT (I emailed jer to get it closed after I saw GNOME/KDE and Mono were all doing it :)
As has been said in previous article comments, SlashDot could close too, that would have a far larger ranging effect than Knoppix or Wine anyway.
Seconded.