If your chosen profession doesn't pay you enough to make it worth getting several advanced degrees, than don't get the degrees, or choose a different profession. Why the fuck are you entitled to a well-paying job just because you spent a lot of time in school. If other people can do that job well enough and at a much lower cost, they'd be stupid to hire you instead.
Fine, but the result of globalization is to level the standard of living ------- Not according to economists. It is possible to fall off our high-end of the see-saw, no doubt. But only if we stop competing as well as the rest of the world.
What would you rather have: - Security and stagnation
or - Some danger and the chance for a bigger economy
If you answered (1), then please go live in a country that isn't capitalist!
Um, you just described an almost perfectly competitive market. Tons of similar, inexpensive products, with no monopolies. If the cost to make them drops, than at least one of the companies will drop their prices to undercut their competitors, and a price war will lower the price to a small margin above cost. Commodities all behave this way. The only way to prevent that is industry collusion, ala the RIAA.
Wow. Me siding with a Republican. That's new. But seriously, I agree. Things are shifting. Its not like it hasn't happend before, even among educated workers. When the US slowed its space program to a crawl after the 1960's, I'm sure a lot of aerospace engineers were out of work. Sometimes, you just have to adjust.
And nobody seems to realize the inherent danger of protectionism. If we keep passing protectionist laws, we screw ourselves. We might save a few tech jobs, but we lose a lot more potential income than we save.
Its interesting you frame it that way. That's why I use Linux too, because I don't want to waste time. I spent a couple of days setting things up, and aside from the ocassional "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade" I don't have to fuss with it at all.
I use OS X quite often (its on all of our lab machines) and I just plain don't find it to be as productive. For example, I once used an OS X machine to touch up a web project once. Moving from a harmonious workflow where konsole, kate, and ksnapshot (I needed some screenshots) all worked right on the remote server via KIO, to OS X, where I had to edit locally and upload just killed my productivity.
But I suppose its to each his own. I don't dislike OS X, I just don't like how it does a lot of things. KDE might be complex and overly high-tech, but I learned it once, and have been enjoying the benefits since.
Still sucks. Until you've used Expose in SDI, you really don't know what you're missing. It's trivial to have 30+ windows open and not feel cluttered at all. Especially if you bind expose to spare mouse keys. ------ I dunno. Sounds awful manual to me. When I'm in my IDE, I just wanna see IDE windows. Sounds like it would be a pain to have to scan through 30 unrelated windows looking for the one you want. I'll reserve judgement until I try it out, I guess.
I'm not familiar with [Cocoa], what's in it? ------- I'm familiar with Cocoa, but you referred to the "Developer suite" which I thought was additional tools on top of Cocoa/XCode. Cocoa is nice, but I don't find it a development suites around. I still like PyKDE better, but that might just be because I don't like ObjC too much. Still I don't see much in the Cocoa framework that isn't in KDE's.
I try not to write GUIs at all. I try to use visual feedback tools to develop them, then let the tool generate an intermediate form I can use. I grew fond of this approach using Apple's dev stuff. ------- For the record, this is exactly what KDE can do. You can design your UI in Qt designer, which will generate XML-based UI description files. A compiler called UIC to generate C++ code from these you can link into your app. Layout of menus and toolbars is entirely handled by XML files using a system called XML-GUI. You can also build a configuration dialog in QT Designer, and use KConfigXT to automatically tie it the configuration back-end without any intermediate code.
Ultimately, the framework is a C++ system, and shows the rigidity and lack of cool dynamic features that make developer's life easier in other frameworks. ------- Examples?
For people who want to futz, tweak, and generally waste time... well that's great. ----------- I don't disagree that you have to futz and tweek KDE to get things to work (its certainly not as polished as OS X), but I disagree that its a waste of time. I only have to do the setup once. And it helps my productivity tremendously. I don't waste time futzing with menus and docks because I've got the hotkeys set up just the way I want, and memorized. I don't waste time manually managing windows (workspaces). I don't waste screen space on things I rarely use (the menu and the panel).
Of course, my work habits are probably quite different from yours. I'm not really a "GUI person" and my most-used KDE app is Konsole:) I don't like clicking and I don't like managing windows (run everything maximized) and KDE is really the only environment that lets me do that.
Framebuffers are so passe! Modern hardware doesn't like you accessing its framebuffer. It prefers to work at a higher level. Consider the OpenGL rendering model:
Applications write drawing commands to a buffer. When the buffer is full, the GL library makes a system call, and uses a special ioctl to DMA the command buffer into the graphics memory. The graphics card than carries out those commands.
That's very similar to how the X protocol works! You know why? Because both were designed to be abstract and network-transparent from the very beginning!
Not only that, but it may very well be the first technology to come out with fully OpenGL-accelerated 2D. OS X doesn't do it yet (Quartz "Extreme" uses GL only for compositing) and Longhorn won't do it until it comes out in 2006.
Mozilla looks fine on my Debian machine, and on RedHat 8+. I don't use Mandrake, so I can't comment.
However, you're not comparing things fairly. OS X can be a hodge-podge too, it depends on what you install. If you use a lot of MacOS Classic apps, along with IE (which just plain looks weird compared to other OS X apps), then OS X doesn't look so consistent. If you use Safari, the iApps, etc, then everything looks nice and consistent. On the other hand, if you stick to all KDE apps, or all GNOME apps, things are the same way too!
Actually, I like OS X's UI quite a bit. I don't like it better than KDE, but I don't dislike it. I use OS X machines very often, we have a lot of iMacs over here. The font rendering really bugged me, so I'm glad to see that its improved.
Overall, I like Mac Classic a lot m omre than OS X, though.
Apple has a unified hotkey system. ----- It's not just a unified hotkey mechanism, but a unified mechanism (and UI) for adjusting keybindings.
Apple's text widgets are configurable in the extreme. This can be accomplished both at the application level, or at a global level. ----- Last time I used OS X (10.2.8, haven't used Panther yet) it had nothing comparable to the auto-completion capabilities of KDE's text widgets. Its probably possible for the application to do this stuff, but KDE apps get this function automaically.
KDE's MDI suffers from the general problems of MDI everywhere. ------- Have you used KDE 3.2's IntelliJ-inspired IDEAL MDI mode? I didn't like MDI at all (my primary OS for a long time was BeOS, which was agressively SDI). But IDEAL mode kicks ass.
When it was designed, it was 20 years ahead of its time, and no one else has even begun to catch up. -------- I'm not familiar with it, what's in it?
As a developer, I balk at C++ frameworks. Sorry, C++ is rapidly becoming more of a nuisance than anything else. -------- So why not use the Java, Python, or Javascript bindings? C++ is a fine language for implementing the framework, especially because Qt and KDE are examples of properly-done C++ code. However, there is no reason you have to use them for your apps.
Well I understand its a very subjective thing, and I have no problem with Apple taking that path. But my post was about why I used Linux/KDE rather than OS X, and that's because I prefer the sheer power of KDE to the "One Consistent Way" of OS X.
If I ruled the world, I would create a multi-paradigm (object-oriented, generic, functional, and modular support) strongly-typed low-level language that let you program at a high-level. A second high-level langauge that was loosely-typed, garbage collected, and could be interpreted or natively compiled. Then I would define a standard to interface the two languages. ---------- You just described Scheme/CL/Dylan.
Actually, I'm a big fan of Scheme and Dylan. Very simple and very elegant. Just a few, well-chosen, orthogonal primitives. Can't get much simpler than some suger over lambda calculus, can you?
I believe in the idea of small, powerful, general abstractions. Consider lambda. With that one feature, you can replace delegates, generators, and anonymous functions. Or CL's macros. They made one of the most powerful object systems around, without changing the language itself!
Higher level functionality should be built on top of the language, not designed in from the beginning. That's why I can't stand Java and C#. They have several slightly different features where one would suffice. Java, in particular, makes some things special and breaks orthogonality. For example, why can the string class overload operator+, but I can't???
C++ may be kinda low-level, but KParts and whatnot aren't "emulations" (like the original poster implied) just because they are not built into the language. If something like KParts can be built on top of the language, its better to do it that way instead.
Oh, a couple of other things I forgot (because they are only in the 3.2 betas):
- Extreme configurability. KDE is the only desktop I've ever gotten to behave exactly the way I want it. I've got an OS X style menu at the top, and an OS X style dock at the bottom, but they behave like NeXT's dock in that windows can overlap them. They pop up when I move my mouse to one edge of the screen. This is a lot nicer than autohide, because when you are not running full-screen, you can still keep the menu and panel in view at all times (like OS X), and when you are, you can save that extra vertical space (I've got a 15" LCD).
- System-wide mouse gestures and hotkeys. Very powerful when you tie a mouse gesture to a DCOP script.
- System wide password manager.
- System-wide spell-checking.
- Nice UI touches like configurable auto-completion in text-entry widgets. Setting Konqueror's address bar to automatic completion mode has almost eliminated typing in URLs. Its nicer than Mozilla/IE's popup version, because you don't actually have to select the resulting item, if its correct, you can just hit enter. So I usually just type in the first few letters and hit enter.
From a user's perspective, KDE has lots of features like KIO that are really useful. Its also got stuff like a unified hotkey mechanism and toolbar configuration. And component technology is KDE is pervasive, which actually makes for a nicer user experience. For example, you can you can embed VIM in KDevelop (or KMail for that matter), if that's the editor you're used to. Because of the underlying framework, KDE has features like Kiosk that allows very fine-grained control of locked-down configurations.
From a developer's perspective, it just has an extremely rich framework. 3.2, for example, has a unified MDI dialog that brings IntelliJ's very cool MDI mechanism to any app that wants to use it. It also makes code reuse very easy thanks to KParts. The framework is just plain well designed. All menu and toolbar entries are handled through XML files, which makes modifying the UI very easy.
As for development tools, have you tried KDevelop3 and PyKDE? KDevelop might not be as mature as XCode, but its very powerful. Qt Designer is also an excellent GUI layout editor.
Actually, they couldn't do as much. They'd have to throw another 4GB of RAM in there, as well as buy the expensive Mellanox Infiniband interconnect. To get the same total price as the VaTech cluster, they'd have to get each machine at around $2500.
1) KDE, while less polished than Aqua, is much more powerful.
2) Linux has a better, more advanced kernel. The original article author is wrong. The OS X kernel is not FreeBSD, but rather Mach 3.0 + 4.4BSD-Lite2. There are pieces imported from other BSDs (buffer cache, networking), but pieces like the block-IO, scheduler, and VM are still pretty outdated code.
He said nothing about uniformity. He was bitching about "ugly widgets" and Qt (and maybe GTK+ if you like that look) widgets are most definately not ugly.
As for uniformity, my KDE desktop is a good deal more uniform than a OS X desktop would be. I've only got one app (gtkpod) that uses different widgets. Meanwhile, on OS X, Finder and Safari use different-looking widgets than the rest of the OS!
They emulate all sorts of advanced object oriented features with cumbersome, unsafe, low-level workarounds. ---------- What the hell do you mean by "emulate"? Just because the features are not built into the language doesn't mean they are emulated. Languages should have as little built in as possible, not as much as possible!
They make up for deficiencies in the underlying operating systems with hokey libraries like KIO and VFS. ----------- How is KIO hokey???
The "features" you named are indications of how limited and backwards Gnome and KDE both actually are. ------------- So these "features" are just a figment of my imagination??? I'm really not using them, it doesn't matter that MacOS and Windows don't have them, because neither does KDE???
Any desktop environment primarily written in C/C++ was outdated and technically obsolete the day it started development. ------------ I agree. We should ditch them and write everything in Dylan (seriously)! But that's not going to happen anytime soon. If you are talking about Java or C#, on the other hand, then there is little they can do that C++ can't, except for bind the hands of the programmer.
What IBM ships as part of SuSE or RedHat doesn't matter since it's not under their control. ---------- When you buy a Linux machine from IBM, it comes with either KDE (SuSE) or GNOME (RedHat) as the default. That's what customers care about.
But as I understand it, IBM is going with Gnome for AIX in the long run. ------------ Link please? AIX doesn't even exist in the long run. According to IBM, it will eventually be replaced by Linux.
More importantly, they are also using Gnome/Gtk+ as the basis for things like SWT and other UI efforts. ------------- A group *within* IBM picked GTK+ (which is not GNOME!!!) for SWT. That's it. That's hardly the same as IBM declaring GNOME the default IBM desktop, like Sun did.
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If your chosen profession doesn't pay you enough to make it worth getting several advanced degrees, than don't get the degrees, or choose a different profession. Why the fuck are you entitled to a well-paying job just because you spent a lot of time in school. If other people can do that job well enough and at a much lower cost, they'd be stupid to hire you instead.
Fine, but the result of globalization is to level the standard of living
-------
Not according to economists. It is possible to fall off our high-end of the see-saw, no doubt. But only if we stop competing as well as the rest of the world.
What would you rather have:
- Security and stagnation
or
- Some danger and the chance for a bigger economy
If you answered (1), then please go live in a country that isn't capitalist!
Um, you just described an almost perfectly competitive market. Tons of similar, inexpensive products, with no monopolies. If the cost to make them drops, than at least one of the companies will drop their prices to undercut their competitors, and a price war will lower the price to a small margin above cost. Commodities all behave this way. The only way to prevent that is industry collusion, ala the RIAA.
Wow. Me siding with a Republican. That's new. But seriously, I agree. Things are shifting. Its not like it hasn't happend before, even among educated workers. When the US slowed its space program to a crawl after the 1960's, I'm sure a lot of aerospace engineers were out of work. Sometimes, you just have to adjust.
And nobody seems to realize the inherent danger of protectionism. If we keep passing protectionist laws, we screw ourselves. We might save a few tech jobs, but we lose a lot more potential income than we save.
Supply and demand folks. The supply of educated folks seems to be outpacing demands. Thus, prices (wages) are falling.
Not necessarily. OpenGL works just fine over the wire, given a good network connection.
Its interesting you frame it that way. That's why I use Linux too, because I don't want to waste time. I spent a couple of days setting things up, and aside from the ocassional "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade" I don't have to fuss with it at all.
I use OS X quite often (its on all of our lab machines) and I just plain don't find it to be as productive. For example, I once used an OS X machine to touch up a web project once. Moving from a harmonious workflow where konsole, kate, and ksnapshot (I needed some screenshots) all worked right on the remote server via KIO, to OS X, where I had to edit locally and upload just killed my productivity.
But I suppose its to each his own. I don't dislike OS X, I just don't like how it does a lot of things. KDE might be complex and overly high-tech, but I learned it once, and have been enjoying the benefits since.
Still sucks. Until you've used Expose in SDI, you really don't know what you're missing. It's trivial to have 30+ windows open and not feel cluttered at all. Especially if you bind expose to spare mouse keys.
:) I don't like clicking and I don't like managing windows (run everything maximized) and KDE is really the only environment that lets me do that.
------
I dunno. Sounds awful manual to me. When I'm in my IDE, I just wanna see IDE windows. Sounds like it would be a pain to have to scan through 30 unrelated windows looking for the one you want. I'll reserve judgement until I try it out, I guess.
I'm not familiar with [Cocoa], what's in it?
-------
I'm familiar with Cocoa, but you referred to the "Developer suite" which I thought was additional tools on top of Cocoa/XCode. Cocoa is nice, but I don't find it a development suites around. I still like PyKDE better, but that might just be because I don't like ObjC too much. Still I don't see much in the Cocoa framework that isn't in KDE's.
I try not to write GUIs at all. I try to use visual feedback tools to develop them, then let the tool generate an intermediate form I can use. I grew fond of this approach using Apple's dev stuff.
-------
For the record, this is exactly what KDE can do. You can design your UI in Qt designer, which will generate XML-based UI description files. A compiler called UIC to generate C++ code from these you can link into your app. Layout of menus and toolbars is entirely handled by XML files using a system called XML-GUI. You can also build a configuration dialog in QT Designer, and use KConfigXT to automatically tie it the configuration back-end without any intermediate code.
Ultimately, the framework is a C++ system, and shows the rigidity and lack of cool dynamic features that make developer's life easier in other frameworks.
-------
Examples?
For people who want to futz, tweak, and generally waste time... well that's great.
-----------
I don't disagree that you have to futz and tweek KDE to get things to work (its certainly not as polished as OS X), but I disagree that its a waste of time. I only have to do the setup once. And it helps my productivity tremendously. I don't waste time futzing with menus and docks because I've got the hotkeys set up just the way I want, and memorized. I don't waste time manually managing windows (workspaces). I don't waste screen space on things I rarely use (the menu and the panel).
Of course, my work habits are probably quite different from yours. I'm not really a "GUI person" and my most-used KDE app is Konsole
They probably were :) I actually meant to write "desktop" not "technology", and was referring speficially to the Win/Mac/Lin desktops.
Framebuffers are so passe! Modern hardware doesn't like you accessing its framebuffer. It prefers to work at a higher level. Consider the OpenGL rendering model:
Applications write drawing commands to a buffer.
When the buffer is full, the GL library makes a system call, and uses a special ioctl to DMA the command buffer into the graphics memory. The graphics card than carries out those commands.
That's very similar to how the X protocol works! You know why? Because both were designed to be abstract and network-transparent from the very beginning!
Not only that, but it may very well be the first technology to come out with fully OpenGL-accelerated 2D. OS X doesn't do it yet (Quartz "Extreme" uses GL only for compositing) and Longhorn won't do it until it comes out in 2006.
:)
That'd really shut the anti-X11 folks up
Mozilla looks fine on my Debian machine, and on RedHat 8+. I don't use Mandrake, so I can't comment.
However, you're not comparing things fairly. OS X can be a hodge-podge too, it depends on what you install. If you use a lot of MacOS Classic apps, along with IE (which just plain looks weird compared to other OS X apps), then OS X doesn't look so consistent. If you use Safari, the iApps, etc, then everything looks nice and consistent. On the other hand, if you stick to all KDE apps, or all GNOME apps, things are the same way too!
Actually, I like OS X's UI quite a bit. I don't like it better than KDE, but I don't dislike it. I use OS X machines very often, we have a lot of iMacs over here. The font rendering really bugged me, so I'm glad to see that its improved.
Overall, I like Mac Classic a lot m omre than OS X, though.
Apple has a unified hotkey system.
-----
It's not just a unified hotkey mechanism, but a unified mechanism (and UI) for adjusting keybindings.
Apple's text widgets are configurable in the extreme. This can be accomplished both at the application level, or at a global level.
-----
Last time I used OS X (10.2.8, haven't used Panther yet) it had nothing comparable to the auto-completion capabilities of KDE's text widgets. Its probably possible for the application to do this stuff, but KDE apps get this function automaically.
KDE's MDI suffers from the general problems of MDI everywhere.
-------
Have you used KDE 3.2's IntelliJ-inspired IDEAL MDI mode? I didn't like MDI at all (my primary OS for a long time was BeOS, which was agressively SDI). But IDEAL mode kicks ass.
When it was designed, it was 20 years ahead of its time, and no one else has even begun to catch up.
--------
I'm not familiar with it, what's in it?
As a developer, I balk at C++ frameworks. Sorry, C++ is rapidly becoming more of a nuisance than anything else.
--------
So why not use the Java, Python, or Javascript bindings? C++ is a fine language for implementing the framework, especially because Qt and KDE are examples of properly-done C++ code. However, there is no reason you have to use them for your apps.
Well I understand its a very subjective thing, and I have no problem with Apple taking that path. But my post was about why I used Linux/KDE rather than OS X, and that's because I prefer the sheer power of KDE to the "One Consistent Way" of OS X.
If I ruled the world, I would create a multi-paradigm (object-oriented, generic, functional, and modular support) strongly-typed low-level language that let you program at a high-level. A second high-level langauge that was loosely-typed, garbage collected, and could be interpreted or natively compiled. Then I would define a standard to interface the two languages.
----------
You just described Scheme/CL/Dylan.
*cough* garbage collection *cough*
Actually, I'm a big fan of Scheme and Dylan. Very simple and very elegant. Just a few, well-chosen, orthogonal primitives. Can't get much simpler than some suger over lambda calculus, can you?
I believe in the idea of small, powerful, general abstractions. Consider lambda. With that one feature, you can replace delegates, generators, and anonymous functions. Or CL's macros. They made one of the most powerful object systems around, without changing the language itself!
Higher level functionality should be built on top of the language, not designed in from the beginning. That's why I can't stand Java and C#. They have several slightly different features where one would suffice. Java, in particular, makes some things special and breaks orthogonality. For example, why can the string class overload operator+, but I can't???
C++ may be kinda low-level, but KParts and whatnot aren't "emulations" (like the original poster implied) just because they are not built into the language. If something like KParts can be built on top of the language, its better to do it that way instead.
Oh, a couple of other things I forgot (because they are only in the 3.2 betas):
- Extreme configurability. KDE is the only desktop I've ever gotten to behave exactly the way I want it. I've got an OS X style menu at the top, and an OS X style dock at the bottom, but they behave like NeXT's dock in that windows can overlap them. They pop up when I move my mouse to one edge of the screen. This is a lot nicer than autohide, because when you are not running full-screen, you can still keep the menu and panel in view at all times (like OS X), and when you are, you can save that extra vertical space (I've got a 15" LCD).
- System-wide mouse gestures and hotkeys. Very powerful when you tie a mouse gesture to a DCOP script.
- System wide password manager.
- System-wide spell-checking.
- Nice UI touches like configurable auto-completion in text-entry widgets. Setting Konqueror's address bar to automatic completion mode has almost eliminated typing in URLs. Its nicer than Mozilla/IE's popup version, because you don't actually have to select the resulting item, if its correct, you can just hit enter. So I usually just type in the first few letters and hit enter.
From a user's perspective, KDE has lots of features like KIO that are really useful. Its also got stuff like a unified hotkey mechanism and toolbar configuration. And component technology is KDE is pervasive, which actually makes for a nicer user experience. For example, you can you can embed VIM in KDevelop (or KMail for that matter), if that's the editor you're used to. Because of the underlying framework, KDE has features like Kiosk that allows very fine-grained control of locked-down configurations.
From a developer's perspective, it just has an extremely rich framework. 3.2, for example, has a unified MDI dialog that brings IntelliJ's very cool MDI mechanism to any app that wants to use it. It also makes code reuse very easy thanks to KParts. The framework is just plain well designed. All menu and toolbar entries are handled through XML files, which makes modifying the UI very easy.
As for development tools, have you tried KDevelop3 and PyKDE? KDevelop might not be as mature as XCode, but its very powerful. Qt Designer is also an excellent GUI layout editor.
Actually, they couldn't do as much. They'd have to throw another 4GB of RAM in there, as well as buy the expensive Mellanox Infiniband interconnect. To get the same total price as the VaTech cluster, they'd have to get each machine at around $2500.
I use Linux for a couple of reasons:
1) KDE, while less polished than Aqua, is much more powerful.
2) Linux has a better, more advanced kernel. The original article author is wrong. The OS X kernel is not FreeBSD, but rather Mach 3.0 + 4.4BSD-Lite2. There are pieces imported from other BSDs (buffer cache, networking), but pieces like the block-IO, scheduler, and VM are still pretty outdated code.
3) Linux is Free!
He said nothing about uniformity. He was bitching about "ugly widgets" and Qt (and maybe GTK+ if you like that look) widgets are most definately not ugly.
As for uniformity, my KDE desktop is a good deal more uniform than a OS X desktop would be. I've only got one app (gtkpod) that uses different widgets. Meanwhile, on OS X, Finder and Safari use different-looking widgets than the rest of the OS!
That's good to hear. I haven't seen Panther yet, our lab machines are still 10.2.8. Hopefully soon, though!
They emulate all sorts of advanced object oriented features with cumbersome, unsafe, low-level workarounds.
----------
What the hell do you mean by "emulate"? Just because the features are not built into the language doesn't mean they are emulated. Languages should have as little built in as possible, not as much as possible!
They make up for deficiencies in the underlying operating systems with hokey libraries like KIO and VFS.
-----------
How is KIO hokey???
The "features" you named are indications of how limited and backwards Gnome and KDE both actually are.
-------------
So these "features" are just a figment of my imagination??? I'm really not using them, it doesn't matter that MacOS and Windows don't have them, because neither does KDE???
Any desktop environment primarily written in C/C++ was outdated and technically obsolete the day it started development.
------------
I agree. We should ditch them and write everything in Dylan (seriously)! But that's not going to happen anytime soon. If you are talking about Java or C#, on the other hand, then there is little they can do that C++ can't, except for bind the hands of the programmer.
What IBM ships as part of SuSE or RedHat doesn't matter since it's not under their control.
----------
When you buy a Linux machine from IBM, it comes with either KDE (SuSE) or GNOME (RedHat) as the default. That's what customers care about.
But as I understand it, IBM is going with Gnome for AIX in the long run.
------------
Link please? AIX doesn't even exist in the long run. According to IBM, it will eventually be replaced by Linux.
More importantly, they are also using Gnome/Gtk+ as the basis for things like SWT and other UI efforts.
-------------
A group *within* IBM picked GTK+ (which is not GNOME!!!) for SWT. That's it. That's hardly the same as IBM declaring GNOME the default IBM desktop, like Sun did.