Actually, no. KDE, from the beginning, has been a UNIX desktop, not a Linux desktop. GNOME was the "Linux desktop" from the start, at least until Sun got their hands on it and started to weed out the Linuxisms in their code so that they could actually build their desktop on Solaris.
(If you want, you can pull a copy of the KDE web pages out of CVS from the appropriate dates - KDE 1.0 was released on July 12, 1998, so the web pages from those days are what you'll probably want to look at.) All of the graphics and text specify KDE as a UNIX desktop, not a Linux one.
KDE has historically been more portable than GNOME. We've been working on AIX, IRIX, Free/Open/Net BSD as well as Solaris and Linux for years. GNOME has only more recently started to focus on properly supporting non-Linux systems, with a pretty obvious focus on Solaris.
If you'd bother to use a version that isn't almost a year old (hint: KDE 3.2, we've had alpha and even beta releases out for a few weeks now) you'd know that it does pass. At least, it sure looks like it does to me. Granted, the CSS isn't quite perfect (the floating box in particular looks like its offset from the right edge is incorrect) but Konq is surprisingly good these days. And rendering errors like this one are getting fixed all the time.
-clee
I like sending out messages in a bottle.
on
Message in a Battle
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
<pixistix> I like sending out messages in a bottle. <pixistix> But I'm creative. <pixistix> "I have been shipwrecked at sea, while bringing an important message." <pixistix> "Do not, under any circumstances, allow President Kennedy to go to Dallas"
For what it's worth, GNOME applications launch faster, but their runtime performance seems to be (subjectively) slower to a lot of people.
A common issue is the "menus paint slowly" issue - it seems and _feels_ like GTK+-based applications have slower menus because they delay the pixmap instantiation until the first menu rendering, and then the pixmaps get pulled off of the disk and actually put into RAM. So dragging your mouse across a menu bar in a GTK app right after you launch it (and waiting for each menu to render) feels laggy. Also, resizing seems to be slow in GTK+, probably due to some unoptimized routines in Pango. And the fact that they double-buffer everything that they draw has a distinctly negative effect on performance, as well.
Qt applications, and by way of inheritance, KDE applications, on the other hand, tend to be the exact opposite - slower (on average) to launch, which is being solved piece by piece at the system level (caching of vtables with things like prelink and newer smarter glibc versions has had a wonderful effect on startup time with C++ applications), and faster while running, because more things are loaded into memory at startup. Not every widget in Qt is double-buffered, as well, which makes rendering less complicated and thus faster. Also, smarter KDE developers than me have come up with some very neat tricks to make KDE applications launch and run faster, especially with KDE 3.2, so any comparison of GNOME with KDE 3.1 is going to be very out-of-date soon.
Well, I'm glad my post wasn't interpreted as a troll:)
I have friends who work for Sun, both locally and in other countries, so like I said - I have a lot of respect for everyone who does work there. It's just that I'm not personally too impressed with the JDS yet.
Of course, if you want to take this conversation private or just have an email address to forward to your coworkers (especially any who might be on the JDS team, as I'd love to chat with them) please, feel free to send anything relevant to clee@kde.org.
Actually, GNOME isn't "ahead" in any of the areas that you've listed except for _perhaps_ a11y (not a10y as you wrote, btw).
KDE has been about components since Day 1. KDE2 introduced the first real component-based architecture, and it took us a while to make it fast and to make it as stable as it is today, but the design that we had originally (with KParts, DCOP, KIO, and KHTML) is pretty much the same thing that we had from an API standpoint back then. Design it right first, and implement it better every chance you get - it's the same thing that Apple's been doing with OS X, and they've had nothing but praise for it. (well, except that they cheated since 10.0 was so slow that it could _only_ get faster:)
But GNOME isn't ahead in any of the areas that really matters. KDE has always had a head start (what with us being around for well over a year before GNOME even started), and we've maintained that lead for quite some time. GNOME-VFS was obviously inspired by KIO, and GTKHTML was based on our OLD (as in KDE1) KHTMLW code. The "GNOME" technology to compare with KHTML is Gecko, which is C++ anyway for one, and not even developed by anyone working on GNOME anyway for two.
Other areas where GNOME still has a long way to go: API documentation. Programming tutorials. A development environment that works for real developers and not just people writing a 'Hello, world!' app in C with GTK2. Integration of the technology that they finally DO have (Bonobo, GNOME-VFS) into the rest of the desktop. And, while GNOME still holds on tight to ORBit and CORBA in general, the whole point of _using_ CORBA is lost really. I have yet to see pervasive use of embedding different Bonobo parts into applications, and GNOME still has zero D-BUS integration. DCOP, on the other hand, has been around since KDE 2.0, and it's extremely widely used in KDE.
Not that KDE is perfect. We "suffer" from the fact that our toolkit and libraries are so easy to use that applications have started to get too many features, but it's not an insurmountable problem.
And, for the record, the Qt license does not require a "Trolltech developer tax" if you are in fact using it under the GPL. If you want to develop GPL software, you have a gorgeous, amazing GPL toolkit to do it with. If you want a free ride so that you can make money off of the work that other people have been doing without contributing anything back, then you can suffer with GTK and forget about using Qt.
It's a very funny argument, that KDE looks too similar to Windows but doesn't act enough like it.
And really, Keramik looks nothing like any other graphical style I've ever seen. (Personally, I think that's probably good, as I can't stand the Keramik look myself, but to each his own). Using my Asteroid style, things look so Windows-like that it's frightening, but even the KDE2 default was designed to look more like BeOS than anything else, and KDE1 was designed and implemented by people who had more experience with OS/2 than with Windows.
So we've never really been into the whole "emulating Windows" thing except for places where it does make sense. The fact that our architecture is flexible enough to make things extremely Windows-like is a good thing, I think, because it also means that it's very easy to make things very unlike Windows.
FWIW, even though I don't work on GNOME (and I have worked on KConfig and KControl, so I have some idea what I'm talking about in that area at least), GConf is really nothing like the Windows registry. The fact that the GConf editor _looks_ somewhat similar to Regedit is really bad for the GNOME guys because it gives the wrong impression (IMHO), but the underlying system is really absolutely nothing like the evil that is the Windows Registry.
And as far as KControl goes... trust me, work is being done to clean up the mess.:) KDE 3.2 is a pretty big step towards it, but it's not done yet, and there will be much more work to clean things up for KDE 3.3, and KDE4 will likely feature a very different configuration application altogether.
But KDE 3.3 is at least a year away, and KDE4 is (to quote Havoc Pennington) something for the Star-Trek future.
I know that I'm probably just feeding a troll here, but I just can't resist...
Look, KDE has been very involved with creating the specs at Freedesktop.org. Hell, I'm a KDE developer, and I'm also in the CVS commit list on the freedesktop server. The reason that you haven't seen Freedesktop standard support in KDE yet is because either A) You haven't tried a KDE 3.2 beta or B) You're obviously trolling.
KDE 3.2 will have support for all of the relevant standards that have moved out of the 'still in progress' stage and even some support for a few that haven't yet been finalized. KDE 3.1 was released almost a full year ago, when none of these standards was really done yet, so it isn't exactly a crime that it didn't support standards that didn't exist.
And KDE 3.3 will support even more of the specs that Freedesktop puts out, because we're involved in their creation (things that are currently pre-spec, even, like the shared MIME and Help systems).
Well, I have a lot of respect for Sun, and I think the work that they've put into GNOME for accessibility and documentation and everything else that they've done has been (no doubt) a huge boon to the project.
But the JDS is terrible, IMHO, and there are quite a few reasons why.
Nothing is "integrated" or even pretends to be.
Default choices for applications don't seem to make much sense.
The GTK engine that Sun wrote is atrocious. Menubar items aren't smooth, and there is an obvious and distinct visual difference between apps that use it and apps that don't.
Startup times for the different apps, since they all seem to be using different toolkits, is absolutely terrible.
I'm sure that there are more reasons to like the desktop and such, but... for a few examples - Why go with a GNOME2 desktop, and still ship GTK1 applications? Especially big applications - the JDS demo CD that I have uses a GTK1 version of Evolution. Why Mozilla, instead of something else using Gecko (like, say, Galeon, or Epiphany?) I understand why Epiphany would not have been the default choice - hey, it's not like it's been around very long, and it probably wasn't even announced before Sun started working on the JDS, but it's not like Galeon is exactly "new" and it's always been at least as stable as Mozilla whenever I've tried it. And, for more toolkit fun, RealPlayer _still_ uses Motif. Not to mention the fact that some of the actual Java apps are written using the Metal look'n'feel, _some_ of them seem to use some sort of GTK1 wrapper around their GUI, and one of them actually appears to be using GTK2.
One of the benefits of having a standard desktop environment is that your applications all follow the same interface guidelines - it's a nice feature of the GNOME2 series, and something that we've always had in KDE. But you absolutely destroy that whenever you break the metaphor - once you break it, users have to start building much more complicated mental models in their heads about where things are located in the menus on their different applications, etc.
The JDS has some nice ideas, and Looking Glass will be an absolutely killer feature once it's actually in a shipping product, but the current implementation is so disturbing that I'm absolutely shocked that I haven't heard some backlash from the GNOME community - users OR developers - about all of the things that Sun has done wrong to their GNOME desktop.
And this is coming from a KDE developer. (One who didn't actually care much about Bluecurve in RH8, but did mind the fact that they used non-standard patches to give Xft support to Qt and a few other little niggles that resulted in bugs that we couldn't reproduce with our sources. But that's another story entirely.)
Well, there have been speedups across the board, but the really impressive ones that I've noticed:
Konqueror is much faster in quite a few areas where it wasn't before. KHTML is now much faster (and includes Safari code; this is the first KDE release to have it). Maksim Orlovich put a ton of effort into profiling and debugging the slow parts of Konqueror's startup code, and it's really made a difference.
KAddressBook has been improved by two or three orders of magnitude, speed-wise. The usability is also much improved, although I don't know if the usability improvements are quite as impressive as the speed improvements.
The kio_imap code was pretty thoroughly vetted for performance issues and is now much better, resulting in a noticeably snappier KMail. Also, KMail blocks much less on output from other programs - some emails used to cause it to choke for long amounts of time when it was waiting for gnupg to return information, but these cases have been eliminated and/or much improved.
Part of the changes for speed have been some fixing of the base code in the KDE libraries, benefitting all applications - stuff like XML-GUI and DCOP.
I know that there's more that I'm missing, but these are some that came to mind first.
Well, the FreeDesktop.org X server has the new xcompmgr program (the X composition manager) which cuts the shearing down quite a bit here, although I'm sure that someone with a cautious eye could probably pick it up. However, with the compositing stuff in the fd.o X server, shearing will be a thing of the past as well; all we really need at this point is a proper way to know when the monitor is refreshing, and syncing the paint calls with that timer is a pretty easy step.
At the KDE conference in Nove Hrady, the university supplied tons of water bottles for us and they all had the label "Dobra Voda" which we found quite amusing for a variety of reasons. Namely, 1) The water was actually not that good, and 2) Some of the water was carbonated, which made it taste really interesting, especially when we weren't expecting it.
Well, as a KDE developer who isn't afraid to put his name behind his statements[1], that's what I've seen in the community. Very few of the original Eazel employees who worked on Nautilus do so now; as far as I can tell, most of the current Nautilus development is driven by Dave Camp, who works for Ximian/Novell.
If you're a prolific GNOME hacker then I'm sure I've heard of you and probably even talked to you on IRC once or twice. However, most of the GNOME devs I know don't actually spend much time on Slashdot (hell, neither do I, but today I'm bored and the ACs are in full bloom).
So if you're not even willing to sign your name to your statement, why exactly should anyone believe you?
[1] For what it's worth, if I turn out to be wrong - say RedHat lays off all of the GTK+/GNOME hackers it employs and Novell gets rid of all of their Ximian employees, and all of them continue working on GNOME regardless - I'll gladly eat my words. However, from what I've seen with Eazel, and from discussions I've had with GNOME devs (including Havoc Pennington) once Eazel went under most of the Eazel people just disappeared; some of them got snatched up by Apple, a few went to work with other Linux companies, and a few found other jobs, but none of them contribute to GNOME anywhere near as much as they used to.
Well, my email is in fact clee@kde.org, so make of that what you will.
You're absolutely right, though; spending time on Slashdot is in fact much more useless than spending time improving KDE. However, we're pretty frozen right now what with KDE 3.2 being near release.
As far as arguments... I'm not looking for an argument. GNOME has strengths and weaknesses, as does KDE. I'm not interested in flamewars, but Ars-Fartsica's comment about SUSE being the "last bastion of vendor-supplied KDE distros" was just egregiously wrong.
However, I've been using Konqueror since before even KDE2 was released; back in the day, when I made that my sig, it was in fact quite an achievement to get Konqueror to work on Slashdot.
(In case I change my sig eventually and people are wondering what this AC is talking about... my sig was "This comment posted with Konqueror.")
Well, it's very nice that you ignored more than half of the distros that I listed, but that's fine.
Lindows is still one of the very few distributions that has bona-fide preloaded installations, even if they're only available on Walmart PCs.
Xandros may not be a popular consumer desktop but they're not targeting the consumer desktop anyway.
And re: core GNOME hackers doing it for a living - well, it is much more of a minus when their company goes under (see: Eazel) and they no longer have time or inclination to work on the project since they aren't getting paid to do it anymore. And your numbers are off, as far more than "some" of the core GNOME hackers are getting paid for their work.
Not that I'm jealous; I mean, it'd be great if I got paid to work on KDE, but I don't, and that's fine. But I'll keep working on KDE, whether I get a paycheck or not; I can't say the same for the GNOME hackers.
The only distribution to ever ship GNOME as the default desktop was RedHat and they have decided to back out of the consumer desktop market.
Novell hasn't exactly made inroads because of the user-friendliness of their desktop software either; they are famous for being prolific in K12 environments and some older corporate networks that picked them before Microsoft started shouting about Active Directory. They have some really neat server-side stuff, but every single person I've talked to about their client software complains to no end about how clunky and buggy and crashy the applications are.
Also, something else that may be interesting to some of the Slashdot crowd: the vast majority of GNOME hackers do it because they get paid to do it. If their companies stopped paying them they would stop working on GNOME. On the flipside, the vast majority of KDE developers are volunteers who do not receive a paycheck.
I find your comment about the "last bastion of vendor-supported KDE distros" to be pretty amusing, to tell you the truth. Mandrake ships KDE default. Lycoris ships KDE default. Xandros ships KDE default. Lindows ships KDE default. Knoppix, while not technically a distro, only has KDE. Slackware, Debian, and Gentoo all ship KDE as well as GNOME. SUSE still ships KDE default; Novell has yet to ship an actual distribution so far, so we'll see what they end up distributing, but for now it's just vaporware. Sun's Java Desktop System is obviously not getting rave reviews.
As a KDE developer, I think it's worth pointing out that there is a 'This document needs to be saved!' hint that KDE uses for KDE apps at least. I don't know about it being a FreeDesktop.org standard or anything, but it's definitely there. (Try opening up the source code to a web page in Kate, and then making a change. Notice how the little floppy icon pops up on the taskbar, and the window title adds the text '[modified]'?
(KDE has so much cool stuff that it's hard to keep track of.::sigh::)
Ah! One other thing I almost forgot about. In KDE 3.2, we actually have a real MacOS-style menubar for KDE applications. GNOME has a system menubar (at least the Ximian version does) but the application menubars are always in their windows; there's no global menu bar that changes with the active application. KDE has it.
I'm sure that others have already suggested this to you before, etc etc, but as far as a pragmatically neat distro that is 'Viva quality!' I'd suggest checking out Gentoo.
They maintain a pretty nice set of packages and they aren't completely anal about things that don't matter. For example - if you do an 'emerge qmail' you get a full installation of qmail installed exactly the way that you would if you were to install it following the directions at lifewithqmail.org. If you use Gentoo's kernel packaging system (which is really very easy to do) or - even if you compile your own, all you have to do is symlink your linux source tree to/usr/src/linux - installing the NVidia binary XFree86 drivers is as simple as 'emerge nvidia-kernel nvidia-glx' and it's done.
They do a lot of neat stuff with their distro. There are some small annoyances (building from source if you don't grab the GRP CDs is a pain in the ass sometimes, especially for big packages or packages that have a ton of dependencies) but overall I've been really happy with how well the distro works.
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Actually, no. KDE, from the beginning, has been a UNIX desktop, not a Linux desktop. GNOME was the "Linux desktop" from the start, at least until Sun got their hands on it and started to weed out the Linuxisms in their code so that they could actually build their desktop on Solaris.
(If you want, you can pull a copy of the KDE web pages out of CVS from the appropriate dates - KDE 1.0 was released on July 12, 1998, so the web pages from those days are what you'll probably want to look at.) All of the graphics and text specify KDE as a UNIX desktop, not a Linux one.
KDE has historically been more portable than GNOME. We've been working on AIX, IRIX, Free/Open/Net BSD as well as Solaris and Linux for years. GNOME has only more recently started to focus on properly supporting non-Linux systems, with a pretty obvious focus on Solaris.
Anyway. Just thought I'd point that out.
Actually....
If you'd bother to use a version that isn't almost a year old (hint: KDE 3.2, we've had alpha and even beta releases out for a few weeks now) you'd know that it does pass. At least, it sure looks like it does to me. Granted, the CSS isn't quite perfect (the floating box in particular looks like its offset from the right edge is incorrect) but Konq is surprisingly good these days. And rendering errors like this one are getting fixed all the time.
-clee
<pixistix> I like sending out messages in a bottle.
<pixistix> But I'm creative.
<pixistix> "I have been shipwrecked at sea, while bringing an important message."
<pixistix> "Do not, under any circumstances, allow President Kennedy to go to Dallas"
This comment just got you added to my Friends list.
Seriously, funniest thing I've read on this site. Ever.
For what it's worth, GNOME applications launch faster, but their runtime performance seems to be (subjectively) slower to a lot of people.
A common issue is the "menus paint slowly" issue - it seems and _feels_ like GTK+-based applications have slower menus because they delay the pixmap instantiation until the first menu rendering, and then the pixmaps get pulled off of the disk and actually put into RAM. So dragging your mouse across a menu bar in a GTK app right after you launch it (and waiting for each menu to render) feels laggy. Also, resizing seems to be slow in GTK+, probably due to some unoptimized routines in Pango. And the fact that they double-buffer everything that they draw has a distinctly negative effect on performance, as well.
Qt applications, and by way of inheritance, KDE applications, on the other hand, tend to be the exact opposite - slower (on average) to launch, which is being solved piece by piece at the system level (caching of vtables with things like prelink and newer smarter glibc versions has had a wonderful effect on startup time with C++ applications), and faster while running, because more things are loaded into memory at startup. Not every widget in Qt is double-buffered, as well, which makes rendering less complicated and thus faster. Also, smarter KDE developers than me have come up with some very neat tricks to make KDE applications launch and run faster, especially with KDE 3.2, so any comparison of GNOME with KDE 3.1 is going to be very out-of-date soon.
-clee
Well, I'm glad my post wasn't interpreted as a troll :)
I have friends who work for Sun, both locally and in other countries, so like I said - I have a lot of respect for everyone who does work there. It's just that I'm not personally too impressed with the JDS yet.
Of course, if you want to take this conversation private or just have an email address to forward to your coworkers (especially any who might be on the JDS team, as I'd love to chat with them) please, feel free to send anything relevant to clee@kde.org.
Actually, GNOME isn't "ahead" in any of the areas that you've listed except for _perhaps_ a11y (not a10y as you wrote, btw).
:)
KDE has been about components since Day 1. KDE2 introduced the first real component-based architecture, and it took us a while to make it fast and to make it as stable as it is today, but the design that we had originally (with KParts, DCOP, KIO, and KHTML) is pretty much the same thing that we had from an API standpoint back then. Design it right first, and implement it better every chance you get - it's the same thing that Apple's been doing with OS X, and they've had nothing but praise for it. (well, except that they cheated since 10.0 was so slow that it could _only_ get faster
But GNOME isn't ahead in any of the areas that really matters. KDE has always had a head start (what with us being around for well over a year before GNOME even started), and we've maintained that lead for quite some time. GNOME-VFS was obviously inspired by KIO, and GTKHTML was based on our OLD (as in KDE1) KHTMLW code. The "GNOME" technology to compare with KHTML is Gecko, which is C++ anyway for one, and not even developed by anyone working on GNOME anyway for two.
Other areas where GNOME still has a long way to go: API documentation. Programming tutorials. A development environment that works for real developers and not just people writing a 'Hello, world!' app in C with GTK2. Integration of the technology that they finally DO have (Bonobo, GNOME-VFS) into the rest of the desktop. And, while GNOME still holds on tight to ORBit and CORBA in general, the whole point of _using_ CORBA is lost really. I have yet to see pervasive use of embedding different Bonobo parts into applications, and GNOME still has zero D-BUS integration. DCOP, on the other hand, has been around since KDE 2.0, and it's extremely widely used in KDE.
Not that KDE is perfect. We "suffer" from the fact that our toolkit and libraries are so easy to use that applications have started to get too many features, but it's not an insurmountable problem.
And, for the record, the Qt license does not require a "Trolltech developer tax" if you are in fact using it under the GPL. If you want to develop GPL software, you have a gorgeous, amazing GPL toolkit to do it with. If you want a free ride so that you can make money off of the work that other people have been doing without contributing anything back, then you can suffer with GTK and forget about using Qt.
It's a very funny argument, that KDE looks too similar to Windows but doesn't act enough like it.
And really, Keramik looks nothing like any other graphical style I've ever seen. (Personally, I think that's probably good, as I can't stand the Keramik look myself, but to each his own). Using my Asteroid style, things look so Windows-like that it's frightening, but even the KDE2 default was designed to look more like BeOS than anything else, and KDE1 was designed and implemented by people who had more experience with OS/2 than with Windows.
So we've never really been into the whole "emulating Windows" thing except for places where it does make sense. The fact that our architecture is flexible enough to make things extremely Windows-like is a good thing, I think, because it also means that it's very easy to make things very unlike Windows.
FWIW, even though I don't work on GNOME (and I have worked on KConfig and KControl, so I have some idea what I'm talking about in that area at least), GConf is really nothing like the Windows registry. The fact that the GConf editor _looks_ somewhat similar to Regedit is really bad for the GNOME guys because it gives the wrong impression (IMHO), but the underlying system is really absolutely nothing like the evil that is the Windows Registry.
:) KDE 3.2 is a pretty big step towards it, but it's not done yet, and there will be much more work to clean things up for KDE 3.3, and KDE4 will likely feature a very different configuration application altogether.
And as far as KControl goes... trust me, work is being done to clean up the mess.
But KDE 3.3 is at least a year away, and KDE4 is (to quote Havoc Pennington) something for the Star-Trek future.
I know that I'm probably just feeding a troll here, but I just can't resist...
Look, KDE has been very involved with creating the specs at Freedesktop.org. Hell, I'm a KDE developer, and I'm also in the CVS commit list on the freedesktop server. The reason that you haven't seen Freedesktop standard support in KDE yet is because either A) You haven't tried a KDE 3.2 beta or B) You're obviously trolling.
KDE 3.2 will have support for all of the relevant standards that have moved out of the 'still in progress' stage and even some support for a few that haven't yet been finalized. KDE 3.1 was released almost a full year ago, when none of these standards was really done yet, so it isn't exactly a crime that it didn't support standards that didn't exist.
And KDE 3.3 will support even more of the specs that Freedesktop puts out, because we're involved in their creation (things that are currently pre-spec, even, like the shared MIME and Help systems).
But the JDS is terrible, IMHO, and there are quite a few reasons why.
I'm sure that there are more reasons to like the desktop and such, but... for a few examples - Why go with a GNOME2 desktop, and still ship GTK1 applications? Especially big applications - the JDS demo CD that I have uses a GTK1 version of Evolution. Why Mozilla, instead of something else using Gecko (like, say, Galeon, or Epiphany?) I understand why Epiphany would not have been the default choice - hey, it's not like it's been around very long, and it probably wasn't even announced before Sun started working on the JDS, but it's not like Galeon is exactly "new" and it's always been at least as stable as Mozilla whenever I've tried it. And, for more toolkit fun, RealPlayer _still_ uses Motif. Not to mention the fact that some of the actual Java apps are written using the Metal look'n'feel, _some_ of them seem to use some sort of GTK1 wrapper around their GUI, and one of them actually appears to be using GTK2.
One of the benefits of having a standard desktop environment is that your applications all follow the same interface guidelines - it's a nice feature of the GNOME2 series, and something that we've always had in KDE. But you absolutely destroy that whenever you break the metaphor - once you break it, users have to start building much more complicated mental models in their heads about where things are located in the menus on their different applications, etc.
The JDS has some nice ideas, and Looking Glass will be an absolutely killer feature once it's actually in a shipping product, but the current implementation is so disturbing that I'm absolutely shocked that I haven't heard some backlash from the GNOME community - users OR developers - about all of the things that Sun has done wrong to their GNOME desktop.
And this is coming from a KDE developer. (One who didn't actually care much about Bluecurve in RH8, but did mind the fact that they used non-standard patches to give Xft support to Qt and a few other little niggles that resulted in bugs that we couldn't reproduce with our sources. But that's another story entirely.)
I know that there's more that I'm missing, but these are some that came to mind first.
-clee
Well, the FreeDesktop.org X server has the new xcompmgr program (the X composition manager) which cuts the shearing down quite a bit here, although I'm sure that someone with a cautious eye could probably pick it up. However, with the compositing stuff in the fd.o X server, shearing will be a thing of the past as well; all we really need at this point is a proper way to know when the monitor is refreshing, and syncing the paint calls with that timer is a pretty easy step.
-clee
It's sort of an inside joke.
At the KDE conference in Nove Hrady, the university supplied tons of water bottles for us and they all had the label "Dobra Voda" which we found quite amusing for a variety of reasons. Namely, 1) The water was actually not that good, and 2) Some of the water was carbonated, which made it taste really interesting, especially when we weren't expecting it.
Well, as a KDE developer who isn't afraid to put his name behind his statements[1], that's what I've seen in the community. Very few of the original Eazel employees who worked on Nautilus do so now; as far as I can tell, most of the current Nautilus development is driven by Dave Camp, who works for Ximian/Novell.
If you're a prolific GNOME hacker then I'm sure I've heard of you and probably even talked to you on IRC once or twice. However, most of the GNOME devs I know don't actually spend much time on Slashdot (hell, neither do I, but today I'm bored and the ACs are in full bloom).
So if you're not even willing to sign your name to your statement, why exactly should anyone believe you?
[1] For what it's worth, if I turn out to be wrong - say RedHat lays off all of the GTK+/GNOME hackers it employs and Novell gets rid of all of their Ximian employees, and all of them continue working on GNOME regardless - I'll gladly eat my words. However, from what I've seen with Eazel, and from discussions I've had with GNOME devs (including Havoc Pennington) once Eazel went under most of the Eazel people just disappeared; some of them got snatched up by Apple, a few went to work with other Linux companies, and a few found other jobs, but none of them contribute to GNOME anywhere near as much as they used to.
Well, my email is in fact clee@kde.org, so make of that what you will.
You're absolutely right, though; spending time on Slashdot is in fact much more useless than spending time improving KDE. However, we're pretty frozen right now what with KDE 3.2 being near release.
As far as arguments... I'm not looking for an argument. GNOME has strengths and weaknesses, as does KDE. I'm not interested in flamewars, but Ars-Fartsica's comment about SUSE being the "last bastion of vendor-supplied KDE distros" was just egregiously wrong.
Heh. A fair comment. :)
However, I've been using Konqueror since before even KDE2 was released; back in the day, when I made that my sig, it was in fact quite an achievement to get Konqueror to work on Slashdot.
(In case I change my sig eventually and people are wondering what this AC is talking about... my sig was "This comment posted with Konqueror.")
Well, it's very nice that you ignored more than half of the distros that I listed, but that's fine.
Lindows is still one of the very few distributions that has bona-fide preloaded installations, even if they're only available on Walmart PCs.
Xandros may not be a popular consumer desktop but they're not targeting the consumer desktop anyway.
And re: core GNOME hackers doing it for a living - well, it is much more of a minus when their company goes under (see: Eazel) and they no longer have time or inclination to work on the project since they aren't getting paid to do it anymore. And your numbers are off, as far more than "some" of the core GNOME hackers are getting paid for their work.
Not that I'm jealous; I mean, it'd be great if I got paid to work on KDE, but I don't, and that's fine. But I'll keep working on KDE, whether I get a paycheck or not; I can't say the same for the GNOME hackers.
Please.
The only distribution to ever ship GNOME as the default desktop was RedHat and they have decided to back out of the consumer desktop market.
Novell hasn't exactly made inroads because of the user-friendliness of their desktop software either; they are famous for being prolific in K12 environments and some older corporate networks that picked them before Microsoft started shouting about Active Directory. They have some really neat server-side stuff, but every single person I've talked to about their client software complains to no end about how clunky and buggy and crashy the applications are.
Also, something else that may be interesting to some of the Slashdot crowd: the vast majority of GNOME hackers do it because they get paid to do it. If their companies stopped paying them they would stop working on GNOME. On the flipside, the vast majority of KDE developers are volunteers who do not receive a paycheck.
I find your comment about the "last bastion of vendor-supported KDE distros" to be pretty amusing, to tell you the truth. Mandrake ships KDE default. Lycoris ships KDE default. Xandros ships KDE default. Lindows ships KDE default. Knoppix, while not technically a distro, only has KDE. Slackware, Debian, and Gentoo all ship KDE as well as GNOME. SUSE still ships KDE default; Novell has yet to ship an actual distribution so far, so we'll see what they end up distributing, but for now it's just vaporware. Sun's Java Desktop System is obviously not getting rave reviews.
And KDE 3.2 is just around the corner.
As a KDE developer, I think it's worth pointing out that there is a 'This document needs to be saved!' hint that KDE uses for KDE apps at least. I don't know about it being a FreeDesktop.org standard or anything, but it's definitely there. (Try opening up the source code to a web page in Kate, and then making a change. Notice how the little floppy icon pops up on the taskbar, and the window title adds the text '[modified]'?
::sigh::)
(KDE has so much cool stuff that it's hard to keep track of.
Ah! One other thing I almost forgot about. In KDE 3.2, we actually have a real MacOS-style menubar for KDE applications. GNOME has a system menubar (at least the Ximian version does) but the application menubars are always in their windows; there's no global menu bar that changes with the active application. KDE has it.
I think he was making a joke about the jump from megabytes to gigabytes, but .... yeah.
I'm sure that others have already suggested this to you before, etc etc, but as far as a pragmatically neat distro that is 'Viva quality!' I'd suggest checking out Gentoo.
/usr/src/linux - installing the NVidia binary XFree86 drivers is as simple as 'emerge nvidia-kernel nvidia-glx' and it's done.
They maintain a pretty nice set of packages and they aren't completely anal about things that don't matter. For example - if you do an 'emerge qmail' you get a full installation of qmail installed exactly the way that you would if you were to install it following the directions at lifewithqmail.org. If you use Gentoo's kernel packaging system (which is really very easy to do) or - even if you compile your own, all you have to do is symlink your linux source tree to
They do a lot of neat stuff with their distro. There are some small annoyances (building from source if you don't grab the GRP CDs is a pain in the ass sometimes, especially for big packages or packages that have a ton of dependencies) but overall I've been really happy with how well the distro works.
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
It looks like you guys are using a statically-linked set of Qt and KDE libraries from the KDE2 days. Is this true?
Did someone say [SA]HatfulOfHollow?