Most people go with the default when installing those distros too, so GNOME has a high probability of being the most used Linux Desktop.
Alas, that doesn't actually seem to be the case, and we've had a few desktop surveys over the past few years that have gone totally against this grain - despite some peoples' best efforts;-). Additionally, the fact that people are still talking about KDE and KDE 4 still seems to be able to generate excitement for some reason means that something isn't right..
You know what? I just find it exceptionally sad when a new user comes into the open source community to look at what free desktops he/she can use, and the only reason anyone anyone can give him/her on various forums to use Gnome is "Oh, it's the default on all these enterprise distros that few people use and on Ubuntu [which for some unearthly reason is some kind of desktop benchmark for some people], so you're stuck with it." It really doesn't say much for, or give a terribly good impression of, the quality of free/open source desktops, and I'd say it's holding things back.
Since all recent popular Linux distributions uses Gnome by default, does this really matter anymore?
The relevant question(s) here is: "Since a handful of supposedly enterprise desktop distributions have defaulted to Gnome for a while, has this actually made any difference whatsoever to anyone using free desktops at all? If this is the case, why does anyone even talk about KDE anymore?"
Yer. Close down the coal mines and flood them so that all your natural resources are tied up (thanks Thatcher), and start burning gas at an insatiable and unsustainable rate in power stations which uses up your own supplies and makes you totally dependant on other countries! Brilliant idea.
Yer. I would imagine the web would work brilliantly, and would have taken off the way that it is over the last 15 years, if it was wrapped up in lots of DRM stuff so people didn't have access to any information. Yer, that would really have worked.
I had a scan through the PDF document, and couldn't really believe what I was reading. They're yet another company being pussy-whipped by Hollywood and the whole DRM issue (and it has now been demonstrably proven that widespread DRM can never work), rather than looking at the realities of the technology and working out how to make money from it. This is a very bizarre section to read: Commercial Constraints of the Web and Video ecosystems:
In their vast majority, neither the digital video standard implementations nor the encoded content are "free". The forms of payment vary greatly: patent royalties are folded into the device/software prices; content fees (both for patent use and copyright royalties) are part of the subscription fees a consumer pays (i.e. for cable TV), absorbed through advertising, by governments (e.g. public radio/TV stations), and so on.
Nokia doesn't seem to understand that the W3C is not in the habit of recommending technologies as web standards that are patented and proprietary and that mean that implementation is restricted.
The perhaps astonishing part of the story is that all these royalties have, however reluctantly, be accepted by the
market, and have not significantly hindered the adoption of digital video.
Digital video over the web has been severely hindered, because it is not as widespread as content available through HTML.
Compatibility with DRM. We understand that this could be a sore point in W3C, but from our viewpoint, any DRM-incompatible video related mechanism is a non-starter with the content industry (Hollywood).
No other W3C standard takes into account DRM. Nokia seems to misunderstand the role of the W3C.
Reasonable content fees, including provisions for royalty free content from non-professional sources.
Non-professional sources?
Anything beyond that, including a W3C-lead standardization of a "free" codec, or the active endorsement of proprietary technology such as Ogg,..., by W3C, is, in our opinion, not helpful
I think that should confirm that this document is junk, and that Nokia doesn't have the faintest idea what it is talking about.
MP3 has been ratified in 1991, and that also sets a certain target year (not too far in the future) from which on one can be reasonably certain to be able to use this technology without financial compensation. The disadvantage of this approach is clearly the use of technologies that are two decades old, but that may be at least partly offset by the commercial advantage. And, these codecs are very lightweight on the computational complexity aspect.
This is just downright bizarre.
At first, I wasn't not so sure that Nokia was concerned about keeping Hollywood happy, as they are about keeping the current status quo of proprietary video and audio codecs, additionally restricted by patents if required. However, I haven't got the foggiest what Nokia are arguing. They just seem to be squirming over Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora for some reason.
...the apparent popularity of the Lord of the Rings films - the biggest pile of overrated shite ever. People are told that they're good, so they go along with it.
That's the best solution I can come up with. The web right now is stagnating under a ton of HTML and JavaScript that has been around since the web began, with very, very little improvement apart from some patchwork Ajax stuff.
Everybody wants to go beyond HTML and create something new and flexible that everyone can feasibly implement, like the early days of the web. Naturally, Microsoft doesn't want to go down this route with IE. Also, people will continue to use what they know will work everywhere - sort of. The legacy counts for a lot, and the Internet Explorer versus everyone else stand-off is keeping things the way they are.
Getting through the encryption is not the story here. What they want to do is this:
"There are no discussions with Skype. I don't think that would help," he said, adding that he did not want to harm the competitiveness of any company. "I don't think that any provider would go for that."
If you are talking about getting to data after encryption, or before, why wouldn't you talk to Skype?
Ziercke said there was a vital need for German law enforcement agencies to have the ability to conduct on-line searches of computer hard drives of suspected terrorists using "Trojan horse" spyware.
This is completely unrelated to being able to tap encrypted communications. This is on a whole different level, and contravenes many laws brought into many countries for spyware and data protection.
These searches are especially important in cases where the suspects are aware that their internet traffic and phone calls may be monitored[?????!!!!!!] and choose to store sensitive information directly on their hard drives without emailing it.
God only knows what this means.
Ziercke said worries were overblown and that on-line searches would need to be conducted only on rare occasions.
How would they propose to do this, and get 'software' installed undetected?
"We currently have 230 proceedings related to suspected Islamists," Ziercke said. "I can imagine that in two or three of those we would like to do this."
Well, being an Islamist or belonging to some other group is not a crime, and I dare say if you searched many peopless hard drives for stuff about bombs and explosives then you could find something. That doesn't mean that they're going to do anything.
This is yet another old and decrepit security services organisation, worried about its future, worried about its funding, people who are worried about their jobs and worried about its place in the world.
This is absolutely meaningless. It doesn't address what will be changed, or that things will change at all. It's another rant at IBM when what we want Microsoft to be doing is talking about their own standard and format. He then goes on to talk about how ODF is not perfect, which is basically a back-of-the-hand excuse for when very few changes are made to OOXML - if any at all. Yes ODF is being added to, but the issue with OOXML is if it can be implemented as it is right now. ODF was and is. I've seen this language before, and it hasn't changed.
And this is precisely the reason why I asked for a comparison of the current versions of KDE and GNOME.
You miss my point. The reason why people have been looking at performance issues in Gnome is because everyone knows they're there. You can't try and spin this.
The article that you linked to is based on measurements done with GNOME 2.12 and 2.14, released released respectively in early September 2005 and April 2006. GNOME 2.12 is more than two years old. The comparison was against KDE 3.5.2 + patches from April-May 2006.
I'm afraid you don't get out of it like that. Gnome has had a track record of performance problems, and although small incremental improvements have been made, mostly in places like fontconfig, it hasn't become efficient and a speed demon overnight. It still have redraw, efficiency and memory issues in many areas.
Contrary to what you claim, I have done some measurements myself, using the standard desktops (no compositing or GL hacks, no C#/Mono applications). But I have to admit that I was comparing KDE 3.5.6 (released in January) against GNOME 2.18 (released in March) and later upgraded to 2.20.
Then release them and we can pick them apart.
But just a few hints: from a cold start, the GNOME desktop was ready 6 to 10 seconds earlier than the KDE desktop;
What do you mean 'from a cold start'? Gnome is not an operating system. Your terminology is bollocks before you even start. If you mean when logging in, absolute bollocks. No one in a month of Sundays is going to believe that because it doesn't happen, and I've logged in to umpteen Gnome and KDE desktops on lots of distributions. Funny no one else has picked up on this glaring performance difference anywhere.
after starting basic applications like KWrite/Gedit and Konqueror/Epiphany, KDE was usually using 5 to 10 MB more than GNOME;
What were you using to measure this? I'm afraid if you look at Lubos Lunak's figures and technique for doing this, you'll find that the figures he gets and the random figures you have got vary so much that you can't blame this on a couple of point releases.
opening the main menu was twice as fast for GNOME without the icons, but a bit slower with the icons.
Measurements?
Also, the start-up time for both desktops could be much faster, especially if you shut down your computer at night and do not want to use suspend-to-disk.
That all depends on your distro. It really depends on what you mean by 'start up' time.
So there is still a lot of work to be done on both sides. But please do not look at old data and assume that nothing has evolved since then.
This is not old data. There are many glaring differences between memory usage that they haven't been solved in a few point releases, and writing 'various performance improvements' on a changelog doesn't mean a thing;-).
If you can do what Lubos has done to let us all know that things have changed, then that's great. As it is, just because you've rambled on about your own anecdotal personal experiences in order to let as all know how 'snappy' and memory efficient Gnome is, it doesn't mean any of these things people have widely talked about for years have changed.
Microsoft and the ECMA might be posting responses to these questions, but I would like to know is is the standard or the format going to be changed and overhauled as a result of these comments? The responses I've seen on Microsoft's blogs and elsewhere in response to some of the well known objections and problems leads me to believe the answer to that will be 'NO'. The responses also degenerate into general 'This isn't a problem' or 'This is all just an IBM conspiracy in order to attack what we're doing' arguments that are utterly baseless and don't address the actual objections.
Let's try the opposite: most benchmarks and testcases show the same apps run faster, and use less memory on GNOME than KDE.
Which you've never done.
Once you have reliable statistics based on the current version of each desktop, you might be surprised about which one is faster and consumes less resources.
When I have equivalent and functional applications open for the tasks I'm performing? I doubt it sweetheart:
Why do you think there has been a general feeling with Gnome users that performance has been a problem, and why do you think that people like Federico Mena-Quintero are feeling the need to trawl Gnome for performance related issues - full-time?
At least a small part of it is because KDE apps look nice in Gnome, but I could never get Gnome apps to look decent in KDE. And Firefox and Thunderbird were outright atrocious.
Since KDE uses QtGTK and is able to get Gnome to use the KDE/Qt theme, how on Earth did you manage this? I cannot for the life of me understand how KDE apps look good for you in Gnome, since the reverse is not true.
"As we stand at present, every taxpayer in Britain has something approaching £900 of their money at stake in this small mortgage bank following the £24 billion loan (which excludes the less controversial £18 billion in deposit guarantees).
I hear this bandied about time and again, but there is no way the BofE handed over £24 billion to Northern Rock. It doesn't have £24 billion of loose change for a start, and it isn't taxpayer's money. What will have happened is where the BofE says "OK, we think you will be solvent and 100% OK and we think you're viable. We're going to create some money that you are then going to pay back to us at a penalty rate."
This is exactly what the lender of last resort system is for, so please, don't give me any of that media-oriented bollocks about how many Millenium Domes you could get for this, OK?
Everybody knows who Nikola Tesla was now, and he has been a character in many films, books, games and in the media. His name is synonymous with electricity. Let's face it, Tesla is a far cooler name than Edison. I know it shouldn't count, but it does.
Yes, he was screwed over a few times, but he formed his own company, filed many important and innovative patents, had money to follow his interests and different projects and he lived as he wanted. He certainly could have had very, very good money if he wanted. The guy was an undoubted genius (he was also a practical rather than a theoretical man as well, and very logical) and he will live on throughout history.
How exactly does one define 'hate speech', and separate it from freedom of speech (one man's free speech is another's hate speech), and how exactly does one separate home chemistry sets from bomb making equipment, and mere discussions on bombs and explosives (they're not exactly secrets) from people who are actually going to use them?
I'm also not sure how collecting data on all passengers will help them with the small minority they want to track.
Although some will have differing views on this, I agree with him in many ways. Pharmaceutical companies will only make something if they feel that it will make a big profit, and then they simply milk the income. You can't blame them for that, but it doesn't equal progress.
Academic researchers are the worst though. Many people who I have met who have existed in a pure academic world, especially in the medical world, are quite simply, utterly detached from the real world and solutions that have a practical application. I have seen academic, medical research first-hand. It never ceases to astonish me how seemingly intelligent people just cannot work out how to apply their knowledge to what is actually going on in the world. Many medical people seem to think that it is enough that they are just simply there. How many billions have been poured into medical research worldwide? How many major discoveries have we really had over the last few decades? Most academic research groups are there to collect their grants, and to come up with a discovery every now and again when their grant is up or their survival is threatened. Thinking of fund raising for medical research? Think again. It's a bottomless well.
There a limitations in medical research, and you can't quite have a time-to-market slant on things as the computer industry does, but medical research from various groups is relatively stagnant.
It might be just me, but there seems to be an awful lot of blog posts coming from Redmond employees these days based on the new tactic of "If we get enough people banging on our blogs and rubbishing it enough, and then claim that we're the victims in all of this when someone raises a valid point, maybe people will believe that it's true!"
The GNOME Foundation does not support ISO standardisation of OOXML. But whether or not that happens, we're still going to have to support Microsoft document formats, just like everyone else. Should we let Microsoft shove OOXML through ECMA without challenge? Hell no. That's why we have one of our best hackers in there, holding their feet to the fire.
Basically, he's telling us that OOXML is easier to support than ODF because they're just mapping the old binary format on to the new format. It comes off as an advertisement, which Stephane Rodriguez fortunately pours some cold water on. Microsoft is also using this to claim, extremely incorrectly, that Gnumeric has rich support for OOXML ( http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/08/07/iwork-08-supports-the-open-xml-formats.aspx ), and is using Gnumeric as a poster for OOXML support:
But whether or not that happens, we're still going to have to support Microsoft document formats, just like everyone else.
Yes, we have to support an existing and widely used binary format, because that's the format most documents are in...............it doesn't mean we have to support yet another format that is basically the same as the old one, except different, which very few people actually use. Let's concentrate on getting people off the old binary format and into ODF.
Just because Microsoft uses something, it doesn't mean that anyone else has to support it. The paradox is that if they do start supporting it then they really will end up having to support a new Microsoft format, again, because it's just boosting it's popularity and installed base. Microsoft then starts using this as evidence that OOXML is an open standard that others can fully implement. We need to get out of this ridiculous cycle.
Trolltech engages in dual-licensing shenanigans and co-opts ownership of other peoples code to place in closed source devices in the same letter-not-the-law tradition as MySQL and ProjectMayo.
Not entirely sure what you mean by co-opting other peoples' code. That's BS.
It's called dual-licensing, and in the case of Qt it's a two-way process. Open source projects get a hell of a lot out of Qt that would take them years to write themselves as well as significant resources, and using Qt gives Trolltech a lot of publicity and testing.
If you don't know that Java is going through the motions of being fully open sourced, I can't help you. I'd advise you to look through the ECMA spec as well as to what you can implement from it:
Surveys are not statistically random samples. They have a tendency to bring out the weirdo's.
Well, the people who vote in these surveys year after year are the best metric we have as to who the userbase actually is. If you think they're weirdos, then fine. The common rebuttal is to tell everyone that these are not normal users, but no one ever defines what a normal user is or provides any evidence that these users, whoever they are, are even using Linux distributions widely. All we have is what people say they are using. In the absence of anything else, I'd tend to go with that.
Slashdot Mirror
You know what? I just find it exceptionally sad when a new user comes into the open source community to look at what free desktops he/she can use, and the only reason anyone anyone can give him/her on various forums to use Gnome is "Oh, it's the default on all these enterprise distros that few people use and on Ubuntu [which for some unearthly reason is some kind of desktop benchmark for some people], so you're stuck with it." It really doesn't say much for, or give a terribly good impression of, the quality of free/open source desktops, and I'd say it's holding things back.
Yer. Close down the coal mines and flood them so that all your natural resources are tied up (thanks Thatcher), and start burning gas at an insatiable and unsustainable rate in power stations which uses up your own supplies and makes you totally dependant on other countries! Brilliant idea.
Makes you proud to be British!
I had a scan through the PDF document, and couldn't really believe what I was reading. They're yet another company being pussy-whipped by Hollywood and the whole DRM issue (and it has now been demonstrably proven that widespread DRM can never work), rather than looking at the realities of the technology and working out how to make money from it. This is a very bizarre section to read: Commercial Constraints of the Web and Video ecosystems: Nokia doesn't seem to understand that the W3C is not in the habit of recommending technologies as web standards that are patented and proprietary and that mean that implementation is restricted.
Digital video over the web has been severely hindered, because it is not as widespread as content available through HTML.
No other W3C standard takes into account DRM. Nokia seems to misunderstand the role of the W3C.
Non-professional sources?
I think that should confirm that this document is junk, and that Nokia doesn't have the faintest idea what it is talking about.
This is just downright bizarre.
At first, I wasn't not so sure that Nokia was concerned about keeping Hollywood happy, as they are about keeping the current status quo of proprietary video and audio codecs, additionally restricted by patents if required. However, I haven't got the foggiest what Nokia are arguing. They just seem to be squirming over Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora for some reason.
...the apparent popularity of the Lord of the Rings films - the biggest pile of overrated shite ever. People are told that they're good, so they go along with it.
That's the best solution I can come up with. The web right now is stagnating under a ton of HTML and JavaScript that has been around since the web began, with very, very little improvement apart from some patchwork Ajax stuff.
Everybody wants to go beyond HTML and create something new and flexible that everyone can feasibly implement, like the early days of the web. Naturally, Microsoft doesn't want to go down this route with IE. Also, people will continue to use what they know will work everywhere - sort of. The legacy counts for a lot, and the Internet Explorer versus everyone else stand-off is keeping things the way they are.
If you are talking about getting to data after encryption, or before, why wouldn't you talk to Skype? This is completely unrelated to being able to tap encrypted communications. This is on a whole different level, and contravenes many laws brought into many countries for spyware and data protection.
God only knows what this means.
How would they propose to do this, and get 'software' installed undetected?
Well, being an Islamist or belonging to some other group is not a crime, and I dare say if you searched many peopless hard drives for stuff about bombs and explosives then you could find something. That doesn't mean that they're going to do anything.
This is yet another old and decrepit security services organisation, worried about its future, worried about its funding, people who are worried about their jobs and worried about its place in the world.
This is absolutely meaningless. It doesn't address what will be changed, or that things will change at all. It's another rant at IBM when what we want Microsoft to be doing is talking about their own standard and format. He then goes on to talk about how ODF is not perfect, which is basically a back-of-the-hand excuse for when very few changes are made to OOXML - if any at all. Yes ODF is being added to, but the issue with OOXML is if it can be implemented as it is right now. ODF was and is. I've seen this language before, and it hasn't changed.
I'm afraid you don't get out of it like that. Gnome has had a track record of performance problems, and although small incremental improvements have been made, mostly in places like fontconfig, it hasn't become efficient and a speed demon overnight. It still have redraw, efficiency and memory issues in many areas.
Then release them and we can pick them apart.
What do you mean 'from a cold start'? Gnome is not an operating system. Your terminology is bollocks before you even start. If you mean when logging in, absolute bollocks. No one in a month of Sundays is going to believe that because it doesn't happen, and I've logged in to umpteen Gnome and KDE desktops on lots of distributions. Funny no one else has picked up on this glaring performance difference anywhere.
What were you using to measure this? I'm afraid if you look at Lubos Lunak's figures and technique for doing this, you'll find that the figures he gets and the random figures you have got vary so much that you can't blame this on a couple of point releases.
Measurements?
That all depends on your distro. It really depends on what you mean by 'start up' time.
This is not old data. There are many glaring differences between memory usage that they haven't been solved in a few point releases, and writing 'various performance improvements' on a changelog doesn't mean a thing
If you can do what Lubos has done to let us all know that things have changed, then that's great. As it is, just because you've rambled on about your own anecdotal personal experiences in order to let as all know how 'snappy' and memory efficient Gnome is, it doesn't mean any of these things people have widely talked about for years have changed.
Microsoft and the ECMA might be posting responses to these questions, but I would like to know is is the standard or the format going to be changed and overhauled as a result of these comments? The responses I've seen on Microsoft's blogs and elsewhere in response to some of the well known objections and problems leads me to believe the answer to that will be 'NO'. The responses also degenerate into general 'This isn't a problem' or 'This is all just an IBM conspiracy in order to attack what we're doing' arguments that are utterly baseless and don't address the actual objections.
When I have equivalent and functional applications open for the tasks I'm performing? I doubt it sweetheart:
http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/desktop_benchmark.html
Why do you think there has been a general feeling with Gnome users that performance has been a problem, and why do you think that people like Federico Mena-Quintero are feeling the need to trawl Gnome for performance related issues - full-time?
This is exactly what the lender of last resort system is for, so please, don't give me any of that media-oriented bollocks about how many Millenium Domes you could get for this, OK?
Everybody knows who Nikola Tesla was now, and he has been a character in many films, books, games and in the media. His name is synonymous with electricity. Let's face it, Tesla is a far cooler name than Edison. I know it shouldn't count, but it does.
Yes, he was screwed over a few times, but he formed his own company, filed many important and innovative patents, had money to follow his interests and different projects and he lived as he wanted. He certainly could have had very, very good money if he wanted. The guy was an undoubted genius (he was also a practical rather than a theoretical man as well, and very logical) and he will live on throughout history.
Are there any advantages to DC current?
---> You
---> Sarcasm.
How exactly does one define 'hate speech', and separate it from freedom of speech (one man's free speech is another's hate speech), and how exactly does one separate home chemistry sets from bomb making equipment, and mere discussions on bombs and explosives (they're not exactly secrets) from people who are actually going to use them?
I'm also not sure how collecting data on all passengers will help them with the small minority they want to track.
Although some will have differing views on this, I agree with him in many ways. Pharmaceutical companies will only make something if they feel that it will make a big profit, and then they simply milk the income. You can't blame them for that, but it doesn't equal progress.
Academic researchers are the worst though. Many people who I have met who have existed in a pure academic world, especially in the medical world, are quite simply, utterly detached from the real world and solutions that have a practical application. I have seen academic, medical research first-hand. It never ceases to astonish me how seemingly intelligent people just cannot work out how to apply their knowledge to what is actually going on in the world. Many medical people seem to think that it is enough that they are just simply there. How many billions have been poured into medical research worldwide? How many major discoveries have we really had over the last few decades? Most academic research groups are there to collect their grants, and to come up with a discovery every now and again when their grant is up or their survival is threatened. Thinking of fund raising for medical research? Think again. It's a bottomless well.
There a limitations in medical research, and you can't quite have a time-to-market slant on things as the computer industry does, but medical research from various groups is relatively stagnant.
It might be just me, but there seems to be an awful lot of blog posts coming from Redmond employees these days based on the new tactic of "If we get enough people banging on our blogs and rubbishing it enough, and then claim that we're the victims in all of this when someone raises a valid point, maybe people will believe that it's true!"
http://blogs.gnome.org/jody/2007/09/10/odf-vs-oox-asking-the-wrong-questions/
Basically, he's telling us that OOXML is easier to support than ODF because they're just mapping the old binary format on to the new format. It comes off as an advertisement, which Stephane Rodriguez fortunately pours some cold water on. Microsoft is also using this to claim, extremely incorrectly, that Gnumeric has rich support for OOXML ( http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/08/07/iwork-08-supports-the-open-xml-formats.aspx ), and is using Gnumeric as a poster for OOXML support:
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/08/15/why-there-s-no-microsoft-in-open-xml.aspx
Yes, we have to support an existing and widely used binary format, because that's the format most documents are in...............it doesn't mean we have to support yet another format that is basically the same as the old one, except different, which very few people actually use. Let's concentrate on getting people off the old binary format and into ODF.
Just because Microsoft uses something, it doesn't mean that anyone else has to support it. The paradox is that if they do start supporting it then they really will end up having to support a new Microsoft format, again, because it's just boosting it's popularity and installed base. Microsoft then starts using this as evidence that OOXML is an open standard that others can fully implement. We need to get out of this ridiculous cycle.
It's called dual-licensing, and in the case of Qt it's a two-way process. Open source projects get a hell of a lot out of Qt that would take them years to write themselves as well as significant resources, and using Qt gives Trolltech a lot of publicity and testing.
Look for the Base Class Library, that is needed.
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-335.htm
You won't find the classes you need to get a compatible