Can GNOME be brought up to par with KDE? Would the current dogma of "features are bad!" prevailing at the GNOME camp allow it? I could live with GNOME being the standard DE if they'd let *some* power user features in (c'mon, even Windows or Mac aren't so ridiculously sparse!). But we still don't have "keep on top" in metacity. Would the GNOME camp accept stuff like configurable toolbars, or dismiss them as too complex?
GNOME and KDE have a nice duality. GNOME is going the minimalist/sparse direction, while KDE is a little more willing to cater to power users. As long as both DEs are more or less equal, that duality works fine. If the commercial world just arbitrarily decides in favor of GNOME, that duality ceases to exist.
Well yay for him. If UserLinux makes it big and gives GNOME a solid lock on the enterprise market, I'm sure that KDE users will appreciate the Qt book! If Linux is to be a software meritocracy, where the best software becomes the most popular software, such important decisions cannot be made by fiat! When I became a Linux users, years ago, I did envision Linux becoming mainstream. But in a way that fundementally changed the mainstream. This is just more of the same --- pushing stale technologies because preserving the status quo is convenient.
GNOME is not a fine choice! It has the level of sophistication of NT4. Its as if all the features invented in the last several years (component technology, web-integrated desktop, file-location transparency) haven't happened. Its not a competitor for Windows 2000, much less Longhorn.
why should UserLinux give Trolltech a free gift of larger userbase? >>>>>>>>>>> Why should they give GNOME the free gift of a larger userbase? KDE is no less a community project than GNOME. Indeed, KDE is much *more* of a community project, because the community determines the direction of the project. In comparison, GNOME is designed by fiat, and the extreme oversimplifications in the 2.x series alienated a lot of users.
That doesn't make KDE bad. >>>>>>>>>>>>&g t; No, but along with RedHat and Novell adopting GNOME, it might just mean that GNOME "wins" by virtue of commercial forces rather than technical ones.
You can create closed-source apps with Qt. You've got to pay Trolltech a $2000 per-developer fee, but if you're making commercial apps, you should have no problem using a commercial toolkit!
This is one danger of commercial entities involving themselves in OSS development. The commercial companies are choosing GNOME not because of technical advantages, but because of monetary advantages (LGPL = no Qt license fees). If GNOME goes from being the second biggest DE (according to most polls), to becoming the standard Linux desktop because of something as stupid as that, that'd royally suck. Especially since, in most areas, GNOME's technology lags behind KDE's.
I just hope this isn't yet another example of great technology dying because the commercial software industry has a tendency to preserve the status quo in lieu of pushing the envelope.
1) It would be that hard. GTK+ isn't as good as Qt yet, and its been around forever. And GTK+ doesn't even do a fraction of what the Qt API encompasses (database access, networking, etc).
You dumb SOB! Just because Canopy puts them on their website does not mean that that they're somehow a part of Canopy group. The only mention of Canopy on the Trolltech website is a page showing that Canopy owns only 5.7% of the company! Canopy also lists Linux Networx as a portfolio company, which is the same company that built a Top-5 Linux supercomputer for LLNL. I'm sure they'd love a $700 per-CPU Linux tax!
we're not talking about any fundamental right here >>>>>>>> We are. People have the right to get equal treatment from their government. Why should gay marriages not get tax benifets just because they're gay?
The fundemental problem here is that the *religious* definition of marriage is being used to give people tax breaks. The religious people can define marriage to mean whatever the bloody-hell they want, but the government cannot simply use religious definitions to make laws. What if marriage was defined as only between Christians? Should the government use that definition unchanged when making the tax code?
I like what John Stewart said. To paraphrase: "I don't get this gay marriage law. Are they going to make you marry a gay person? Because my wife wouldn't like that. Otherwise, why the fuck does anybody care???"
That's a solution for which there is no problem. Nobody, except the Europeans, is having problems convincing people to have enough children. If the tax breaks for marriage went away, I doubt the number of children produced would decline measurably.
I'm as fed up with Americans butchering their own language as the next guy. But even I don't believe the government has any right to restrict how people define certain words.
So black people shouldn't demand that society modify its traditional definitions of the roles of the races? I mean, why should a racist society be forced to accept black people? Why should people be forced to serve blacks in their restaurants and why should blacks get access to the social security dollars that white people put into the system? Your argument is totally non-sensical!
What does integrated mean? I love it when zealots throw around buzzwords. >>>>>>>>>>> Integrated means that its all designed in one way, with one set of conventions, documented in one place. The GNOME API is built out of different components that are different in origin, and thus do not always behave the same.
Because ABIWORD doesn't use GNOME-VFS, whereas Ximian's version of OpenOffice does... what's your point? >>>>>>>>>> What use is GNOME-VFS if nothing uses it? GEdit doesn't appear to use it either, and its an app released by the GNOME project! In KDE, all KDE apps use KIO, because its basically a requirement for using the file dialog.
That Abiword isn't too clued up? Are we comparing apps or infrastructure. >>>>>>>>> The apps are a function of the infrastructure. If the infrastructure is high quality and easy to use, apps will use it. GNOME has more developers than KDE, yet KDE apps are far more likely to use niceties like KIO. Tell me why that is, if not because the KDE technologies are better/easier? This was basically the problem with Bonobo. It was so complex and overengineered, that no apps really wanted to use it. If apps don't want to use the infrastructure you provide, that infrastructure is flawed.
No, it is not. >>>>>>>>>>>> Yes it is. Aside from application load time, Qt's handling of redraw is a lot better than GTK+'s. Check out the gnomedesktop.org thread on the Dec. 7 GNOME summary. There are a lot of GNOME'ers complaining about GTK+'s performance. Also check the gnomedesktop.org thread about the interview with Owen Taylor, he gets a question about GTK+'s performance. Also, the guy who wrote Sylpheed complained about the huge performance drop from GTK 1.x to GTK 2.x, and was reluctant to port Sylpheed to 2.x because of it.
WTF? GTK is a graphics toolkit, not a bloated attempt to make all platforms look alike, unlike Qt. Compare like with like... or crawl back into your zealot hole. >>>>>>>>>>>> Qt has more GUI-related features too. Just take a look at the GTK+ 2.4 feature plan. Qt + KDE has pretty much all of these already! Stuff like (edits mine):
File selector (we have to get this one) (#29087) Combo widget (#50554) New action-based menu API (#55393) Toolbar improvements (#55393) (ed. editable) Autocompletion and history for GtkEntry(#69613) XCursor support for GDK. (#69436)
No, it's not... no more than DCOP is modelled on the dozens of other simple component systems that went before. >>>>>>>>>>> Geez. Learn what you're talking about! Neither DCOP nor D-BUS are component systems. They're IPC mechanisms. And D-BUS was modeled closely after DCOP because a lot of KDE people had hand in D-BUS, and since KDE was the only desktop that used IPC to any significant degree, to make it easy to switch over from DCOP. Havoc Pennington said on a mailing list message that D-BUS was so similar to DCOP that it would be harder to get the GNOME developer onboard than the KDE ones. And if you believe that DCOP is simplistic, than don't hold any hope for D-BUS, because D-BUS's functionality is just an extension of DCOP.
Well, a good way to check would be to run GNOME and then take a look at Gconf's app schema. But then, you've never actually run GNOME, have you. >>>>>>>>> I have it installed right now. I check it out every time a new release comes out to see how it has improved. For a moment with 2.4, I thought the speed issues had been fixed, until I realized that they were only mas
I was referring to this. Also, OpenOffice was a much more touted member before the GTK2 ports of Abiword and Gnumeric. I remember the previous website, anyway, had much more prominent references to OO.
While KDE may be *distributed* in a monolithic manner, it certainly is not coded that way. The KDE code is highly flexible and modular. Pretty much everything is broken into components with well-defined interfaces between them.
On the other hand, the KDE folks do have a habit of reinventing the wheel when existing wheels are insufficient. In some ways that's a good thing (the lightweight KHTML fits KDE much better than Gecko), and in some ways that's a bad thing (GNOME basically just adopted OpenOffice as GNOME Office, and now everyone things that OOo is a GNOME app).
Don't kid yourself. Take look at the feature list of GTK+ 2.6. Its basically just stuff KDE has had for years. Even GNOME 2.4 can't handle a candle to KDE in terms of integration and power. Usability, yes, GNOME is definately more polished and streamlined, but the underlying technology just doesn't measure up. Examples:
- GnomeVFS vs KIO: How come I can't open files from remote directories in Abiword-GNOME? Or pretty much any app except Nautilus? Supposedly, this feature is coming with the new GTK+ file selector. So in another year (6 months for GNOME 2.6, plus another 6 for all the major apps to be recoded to use the new file selector API), GNOME will be up to KDE 2.0. Wonderful.
- GConf vs KConfig: The API's are similarly powerful, but what apps use GConf? Every KDE app uses KConfig, but only the standard GNOME ones use GConf.
- GTK+ vs Qt: Qt is faster, has more features, better documentation, and better supporting tools (Designer, Linguist, KDevelop).
- GNOME API vs KDE API: The KDE API is tightly integrated, while the GNOME API is loosely integrated. If Linux wants to compete with the app-frameworks available for other OSs (.NET for Windows, Cocoa for MacOS), it needs the former.
- KParts vs Bonobo: Read Miguel's comments on the failure of Bonobo. Do this day, the fact that AbiWord can embed a Gnumeric sheet is big news, while in KDE land its been old-hat since 2.0.
- DCOP vs ?: Eventually, GNOME will get D-BUS (which is modeled on DCOP, btw) integration but KDE has the same features *now*. That means integrated scripting for every KDE app.
- aRts vs ?: Gstreamer is not yet stable, nor widely used. aRts, flawed as it may be, is at least universally used by KDE apps. Which means that they have transparent access to all aRts-support audio and video formats. Yep, another year for GStreamer support to become universal, and for GNOME to catch up to KDE 2.0.
Then there are just all the little things. Unified toolbar and menu handling via XML-GUI. Universal mouse gestures support via KHotkeys and DCOP. Support for putting the menubar in a panel (tremendously useful on laptop screens). GNOME can't *touch* KDE on the technology front.
"I do, however, feel some sort of sympathy with all of you Clinton haters. I never realized before that you really could hate a president so much. Both as a person (religious bigot, weak, stupid) and as the institution (horrific, extremely dangerous foreign policy). After four years of GWB administration I'm beginning to understand the paranoia and hate with which certain people reacted to Clinton administration."
Damn. I'm printing that out and framing it. Describes me to a T.
Actually, I've found KDE to be much faster in all areas except application load time. It does take more memory, though, but GNOME is hardly svelte. And my desktop does not look like Fisher-Price
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What the *fuck* is going on in Linux-land? It keeps getting trippier and trippier.
Can GNOME be brought up to par with KDE? Would the current dogma of "features are bad!" prevailing at the GNOME camp allow it? I could live with GNOME being the standard DE if they'd let *some* power user features in (c'mon, even Windows or Mac aren't so ridiculously sparse!). But we still don't have "keep on top" in metacity. Would the GNOME camp accept stuff like configurable toolbars, or dismiss them as too complex?
GNOME and KDE have a nice duality. GNOME is going the minimalist/sparse direction, while KDE is a little more willing to cater to power users. As long as both DEs are more or less equal, that duality works fine. If the commercial world just arbitrarily decides in favor of GNOME, that duality ceases to exist.
Well yay for him. If UserLinux makes it big and gives GNOME a solid lock on the enterprise market, I'm sure that KDE users will appreciate the Qt book! If Linux is to be a software meritocracy, where the best software becomes the most popular software, such important decisions cannot be made by fiat! When I became a Linux users, years ago, I did envision Linux becoming mainstream. But in a way that fundementally changed the mainstream. This is just more of the same --- pushing stale technologies because preserving the status quo is convenient.
GNOME is not a fine choice! It has the level of sophistication of NT4. Its as if all the features invented in the last several years (component technology, web-integrated desktop, file-location transparency) haven't happened. Its not a competitor for Windows 2000, much less Longhorn.
why should UserLinux give Trolltech a free gift of larger userbase?
>>>>>>>>>>>
Why should they give GNOME the free gift of a larger userbase? KDE is no less a community project than GNOME. Indeed, KDE is much *more* of a community project, because the community determines the direction of the project. In comparison, GNOME is designed by fiat, and the extreme oversimplifications in the 2.x series alienated a lot of users.
That doesn't make KDE bad.
>>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;
No, but along with RedHat and Novell adopting GNOME, it might just mean that GNOME "wins" by virtue of commercial forces rather than technical ones.
You can create closed-source apps with Qt. You've got to pay Trolltech a $2000 per-developer fee, but if you're making commercial apps, you should have no problem using a commercial toolkit!
This is one danger of commercial entities involving themselves in OSS development. The commercial companies are choosing GNOME not because of technical advantages, but because of monetary advantages (LGPL = no Qt license fees). If GNOME goes from being the second biggest DE (according to most polls), to becoming the standard Linux desktop because of something as stupid as that, that'd royally suck. Especially since, in most areas, GNOME's technology lags behind KDE's.
I just hope this isn't yet another example of great technology dying because the commercial software industry has a tendency to preserve the status quo in lieu of pushing the envelope.
1) It would be that hard. GTK+ isn't as good as Qt yet, and its been around forever. And GTK+ doesn't even do a fraction of what the Qt API encompasses (database access, networking, etc).
2) Qt is OSS! It was GPL'ed long ago.
You dumb SOB! Just because Canopy puts them on their website does not mean that that they're somehow a part of Canopy group. The only mention of Canopy on the Trolltech website is a page showing that Canopy owns only 5.7% of the company! Canopy also lists Linux Networx as a portfolio company, which is the same company that built a Top-5 Linux supercomputer for LLNL. I'm sure they'd love a $700 per-CPU Linux tax!
we're not talking about any fundamental right here
>>>>>>>>
We are. People have the right to get equal treatment from their government. Why should gay marriages not get tax benifets just because they're gay?
The fundemental problem here is that the *religious* definition of marriage is being used to give people tax breaks. The religious people can define marriage to mean whatever the bloody-hell they want, but the government cannot simply use religious definitions to make laws. What if marriage was defined as only between Christians? Should the government use that definition unchanged when making the tax code?
I like what John Stewart said. To paraphrase: "I don't get this gay marriage law. Are they going to make you marry a gay person? Because my wife wouldn't like that. Otherwise, why the fuck does anybody care???"
The US has a 50% divorce rate. Gays couldn't do much worse if they tried.
That's a solution for which there is no problem. Nobody, except the Europeans, is having problems convincing people to have enough children. If the tax breaks for marriage went away, I doubt the number of children produced would decline measurably.
I'm as fed up with Americans butchering their own language as the next guy. But even I don't believe the government has any right to restrict how people define certain words.
So black people shouldn't demand that society modify its traditional definitions of the roles of the races? I mean, why should a racist society be forced to accept black people? Why should people be forced to serve blacks in their restaurants and why should blacks get access to the social security dollars that white people put into the system? Your argument is totally non-sensical!
No matter how hard you try, you'll never "improve" an SUV tire to fit on a Porsche. Sometimes, you just gotta start over.
What does integrated mean? I love it when zealots throw around buzzwords.
>>>>>>>>>>>
Integrated means that its all designed in one way, with one set of conventions, documented in one place. The GNOME API is built out of different components that are different in origin, and thus do not always behave the same.
Because ABIWORD doesn't use GNOME-VFS, whereas Ximian's version of OpenOffice does... what's your point?
>>>>>>>>>>
What use is GNOME-VFS if nothing uses it? GEdit doesn't appear to use it either, and its an app released by the GNOME project! In KDE, all KDE apps use KIO, because its basically a requirement for using the file dialog.
That Abiword isn't too clued up? Are we comparing apps or infrastructure.
>>>>>>>>>
The apps are a function of the infrastructure. If the infrastructure is high quality and easy to use, apps will use it. GNOME has more developers than KDE, yet KDE apps are far more likely to use niceties like KIO. Tell me why that is, if not because the KDE technologies are better/easier? This was basically the problem with Bonobo. It was so complex and overengineered, that no apps really wanted to use it. If apps don't want to use the infrastructure you provide, that infrastructure is flawed.
No, it is not.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
Yes it is. Aside from application load time, Qt's handling of redraw is a lot better than GTK+'s. Check out the gnomedesktop.org thread on the Dec. 7 GNOME summary. There are a lot of GNOME'ers complaining about GTK+'s performance. Also check the gnomedesktop.org thread about the interview with Owen Taylor, he gets a question about GTK+'s performance. Also, the guy who wrote Sylpheed complained about the huge performance drop from GTK 1.x to GTK 2.x, and was reluctant to port Sylpheed to 2.x because of it.
I've also written about it several times:
Here (last comment on page)
And here (search for 21:26:30 on the page)
WTF? GTK is a graphics toolkit, not a bloated attempt to make all platforms look alike, unlike Qt. Compare like with like... or crawl back into your zealot hole.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
Qt has more GUI-related features too. Just take a look at the GTK+ 2.4 feature plan. Qt + KDE has pretty much all of these already! Stuff like (edits mine):
File selector (we have to get this one) (#29087)
Combo widget (#50554)
New action-based menu API (#55393)
Toolbar improvements (#55393) (ed. editable)
Autocompletion and history for GtkEntry(#69613)
XCursor support for GDK. (#69436)
No, it's not... no more than DCOP is modelled on the dozens of other simple component systems that went before.
>>>>>>>>>>>
Geez. Learn what you're talking about! Neither DCOP nor D-BUS are component systems. They're IPC mechanisms. And D-BUS was modeled closely after DCOP because a lot of KDE people had hand in D-BUS, and since KDE was the only desktop that used IPC to any significant degree, to make it easy to switch over from DCOP. Havoc Pennington said on a mailing list message that D-BUS was so similar to DCOP that it would be harder to get the GNOME developer onboard than the KDE ones. And if you believe that DCOP is simplistic, than don't hold any hope for D-BUS, because D-BUS's functionality is just an extension of DCOP.
Well, a good way to check would be to run GNOME and then take a look at Gconf's app schema. But then, you've never actually run GNOME, have you.
>>>>>>>>>
I have it installed right now. I check it out every time a new release comes out to see how it has improved. For a moment with 2.4, I thought the speed issues had been fixed, until I realized that they were only mas
I was referring to this. Also, OpenOffice was a much more touted member before the GTK2 ports of Abiword and Gnumeric. I remember the previous website, anyway, had much more prominent references to OO.
Oh the irony! The GNU Network Object Model Environment avoiding the GNU Public License. I can barely stand it...
While KDE may be *distributed* in a monolithic manner, it certainly is not coded that way. The KDE code is highly flexible and modular. Pretty much everything is broken into components with well-defined interfaces between them.
On the other hand, the KDE folks do have a habit of reinventing the wheel when existing wheels are insufficient. In some ways that's a good thing (the lightweight KHTML fits KDE much better than Gecko), and in some ways that's a bad thing (GNOME basically just adopted OpenOffice as GNOME Office, and now everyone things that OOo is a GNOME app).
Don't kid yourself. Take look at the feature list of GTK+ 2.6. Its basically just stuff KDE has had for years. Even GNOME 2.4 can't handle a candle to KDE in terms of integration and power. Usability, yes, GNOME is definately more polished and streamlined, but the underlying technology just doesn't measure up. Examples:
- GnomeVFS vs KIO: How come I can't open files from remote directories in Abiword-GNOME? Or pretty much any app except Nautilus? Supposedly, this feature is coming with the new GTK+ file selector. So in another year (6 months for GNOME 2.6, plus another 6 for all the major apps to be recoded to use the new file selector API), GNOME will be up to KDE 2.0. Wonderful.
- GConf vs KConfig: The API's are similarly powerful, but what apps use GConf? Every KDE app uses KConfig, but only the standard GNOME ones use GConf.
- GTK+ vs Qt: Qt is faster, has more features, better documentation, and better supporting tools (Designer, Linguist, KDevelop).
- GNOME API vs KDE API: The KDE API is tightly integrated, while the GNOME API is loosely integrated. If Linux wants to compete with the app-frameworks available for other OSs (.NET for Windows, Cocoa for MacOS), it needs the former.
- KParts vs Bonobo: Read Miguel's comments on the failure of Bonobo. Do this day, the fact that AbiWord can embed a Gnumeric sheet is big news, while in KDE land its been old-hat since 2.0.
- DCOP vs ?: Eventually, GNOME will get D-BUS (which is modeled on DCOP, btw) integration but KDE has the same features *now*. That means integrated scripting for every KDE app.
- aRts vs ?: Gstreamer is not yet stable, nor widely used. aRts, flawed as it may be, is at least universally used by KDE apps. Which means that they have transparent access to all aRts-support audio and video formats. Yep, another year for GStreamer support to become universal, and for GNOME to catch up to KDE 2.0.
Then there are just all the little things. Unified toolbar and menu handling via XML-GUI. Universal mouse gestures support via KHotkeys and DCOP. Support for putting the menubar in a panel (tremendously useful on laptop screens). GNOME can't *touch* KDE on the technology front.
"I do, however, feel some sort of sympathy with all of you Clinton haters. I never realized before that you really could hate a president so much. Both as a person (religious bigot, weak, stupid) and as the institution (horrific, extremely dangerous foreign policy). After four years of GWB administration I'm beginning to understand the paranoia and hate with which certain people reacted to Clinton administration."
Damn. I'm printing that out and framing it. Describes me to a T.
w00t.
Actually, I've found KDE to be much faster in all areas except application load time. It does take more memory, though, but GNOME is hardly svelte. And my desktop does not look like Fisher-Price