Heise.de reports (English translation) that after talking with its customers, Novell decided that both KDE and GNOME will be equally supported in all its products, even though GNOME will be the default for the enterprise/server line. Opensuse instead will feature KDE (English translation) as the primary desktop. Both will be however developed further in the future.
I feel better now. I have nothing against Gnome or those who use it, but as a KDE user, SUSE (in my opinion) had the strongest KDE implentation out there. I’m glad to see that it isn’t going to be thrown out the window.
If they want to push forward with Gnome development, I’m fine with that. Just don’t take away the main reason I started using SUSE to begin with. Linux is all about choice. Maybe a stronger Gnome will entice more Gnome users to come aboard as well. We can all have it our way.
I’m glad they listened to their customers. Too bad they didn’t ask them first. Maybe the last few days of flamewars could have been avoided.
Well, other than Novell doesn’t like all the paying customers (long time SuSE people are most likely KDE users) complaining?
I wish they had stated
– If investment/development of new technology will be equal in both KDE and Gnome
– If the extremely talented Ximian people will still be put in charge of all SuSE KDE development as rumored
Now people will stop bitchin about it.
The great majority of the current Suse customers are KDE users. Suse used to be the home of the most important KDE developers, and Novell pisses that asset away?
I used to be a great Novell fan, but since they decided that a Linux kernel is better than a NetWare kernel for NetWare, I sensed that politics took over. Gnome over KDE is also a political choice.
isn’t it a waste of resources for companies to have to maintain/support two guis?
It probably is, but I think that Novell didn’t really understand Linux’s desktop when they invested at the same time on SuSE a KDE’s distribution and on Ximian!
*Sigh*, those guy in these luxurious office don’t tend to understand those “little technical details” .. except when their customers tell them! ROFL.
That depends on how many customers they’d lose by dropping KDE. If the loss of revenue of dropping KDE is greater than the cost of supporting KDE then it isn’t a waste of resources.
And anyway one could hope that most of their work could/should be desktop agnostic meaning that if they’re smart the underlying technology they develop should be easily applicable on both desktops with the minimal amount of work.
Personally I prefer Gnome, but I have to say that there are quite a few elements in KDE that I’m sorely missing in Gnome.
Since FLOSS is a matter of choice, I believe Novell has taken the right decision.
My dream: KDE with Gnome flavour… or more correct: Gnome based on QT, and with much fewer deps than today
My dream: KDE with Gnome flavour… or more correct: Gnome based on QT
How about Knome, or is it Gnokde (how do you say that??).
And here is a list of the favorite apps from out new desktop:
—-Kvolution for mail
—-Monqueror for the web
—-The Kimp for photos, drawing
—-and our favorite panel, Gnicker, for launching apps
LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Definitely a possibility.
I’m not sure about the naming though
but I’d really like the approach 
. o O ( Monqueror… Gnicker… huhu… I can’t help laughing )
It would indeed be a divine combination. The technical excellence and ease of programming of QT, combined with the superb usability and interface design of Gnome!
About the deps: KDE apps indeed have fewer deps, but the deps that it has are just much bigger than their Gnome counterparts.
Uuhhh… yes. Exactly my idea.
Combining QT with the Gnome HIG and the ease of use from Gnome.
I’m not worried about big deps, I’m more worried about many deps, since I’m using LFS, so I’m manually handling all the deps (quite a PITA)
But oh man… KDE and Gnome combined is like a wet dream
This is nothing more than posturing and backtracking. How can you equally support both desktops when the KDE people are going out the door left and right. Novell has seen how upset people are about SUSE having KDE ripped out of it, but don’t fall for the hype. No company has the resources to equally support two desktops. Mandriva does a decent job with KDE and Gnome, but you’d be foolish to think that KDE wasn’t their primary target.
Novel is trying to save face, but if you’ve chosen Gnome over KDE, then just throw all your efforts into creating a version of Gnome that even the KDE lovers can appreciate. We don’t need any more posturing, just stick to giving users straight talk about where you want to take SUSE. The Open SUSE project will always be supported by the KDE lovers anyway, so why make more promisses about “equally” supporting both desktops, that we all know they can’t keep?
majority of people of linux user use kde
everybody know then kde is more easier to use and more advanced then gnome
if novell want to keep their customer they need to continu to invest in kde otherwise people will switch to mandriva
Everybody know then kde is more easier
I don’t agree with that.
Let’s not go there. We already have a couple of threads like that.
KDE vs. GNOME is not a war that can be won, at least not today, and certainly not here.
This is about Novell changing their minds after getting feedback from their users.
This is about KDE and GNOME users both getting what they want.
If they will stand behind their latest pledge, we are all winners.
Why don’t we leave it at that?
Edited 2005-11-10 22:31
Nothing in the previous article has changed with this position. It was said that both KDE and GNOMe would be included and that there would still need to be support for KDE. If anything this is non-news because it’s just putting a spin on a position that as far as I can tell, they were already holding.
Support is too vague a word. Do they mean technical support, or do they mean dev support? Will they be actively developing KDE further, or will they simply take customer service calls regarding KDE and GNOME equally?
Edited 2005-11-10 23:07
Of course Novell have to continue to support KDE. It’s a central part of their existing, paying products in SLES and OES, and the YaST graphical tools and installer are built around it. They simply don’t have an option. They will have to support SLES for another three or four years, and OES beyond that, as well as writing new tools that work seamlessly with the old ones with their chosen new development software. Quite how Novell are going to convert existing products, that people are already using, to Gnome and GTK as a default graphical environment midstream us mere mortals can only guess at, but those Ximian people are so clever!
Why do you think Hubert Mantel was laughing his backside off as he went through the door? The Suse people are going to leave people at Novell well and truly holding the baby. Considering the KDE people who maintain Suse’s desktop and graphical tools have all left, or will all soon be leaving, plus most of the really critical people who actually maintain Suse as a distribution and an operating system as we know it, operationally, Novell is going to slide down the toilet very quickly. I hardly think the Ximian and Novell people are going to get any training or have anything left behind for them to help them either.
The next few months are going to be funny. This new COO really hasn’t done his homework, has he? It’s a classic mistake many companies just don’t understand – the people factor.
The move won’t affect Novell, spokesman Bruce Lowry said. “He was one of a large number of people on the kernel team. It doesn’t impact our strategy or our ability to execute on it,” he said.
ROTFL.
Wait, were you wrong? Is Novell really switching to GNOME after all?
Wait, were you wrong? Is Novell really switching to GNOME after all?
No I wasn’t wrong (certainly not two years ago), and I’m still not wrong because they’re going to have to support their existing core product lines SLES and OES) – and that means KDE. They’re not going to replace everything with another toolkit by tomorrow morning.
I think with some of the stuff that has happened, and some of the decisions that may or may not have been made, I think it’s fair to say that Suse’s people will now force Novell to move to Gnome because they’re not going to be around to do otherwise. They’re going to force Novell to do it whether they realise that it’s a bad decision or not later.
However, as always, you’re avoiding the issues brought up ;-).
I’m not nor do I ever ‘avoid the issue,’ I just don’t care what your opinion is. Apparently though your assertion that the people at Novell are ‘full of brown stuff’ was actually correct. And who would have guessed that the other day when they said that they would still offer support after a transition to GNOME that they would come out and say they’re going to offer support. How prescient!
It’s nice to see that you won’t fall on your sword, though. Keep lobbing fireballs over at those Ximian people.
P.S. To people that don’t care about either desktop environment or the Mono people (that for whatever reason get tossed in with GNOME) this is all really boring, except for the theatrics which are just annoying.
Edited 2005-11-11 03:53
I’m not nor do I ever ‘avoid the issue,’ I just don’t care what your opinion is.
I don’t much care what your opinion is either really (it’s all opinions round here!), but it’s possible I could have just completely misread you. Sometimes people do, as do I.
And who would have guessed that the other day when they said that they would still offer support after a transition to GNOME that they would come out and say they’re going to offer support.
Well no, someone said they would support KDE in OpenSUSE, but they then realised that they actually had existing products that brought in money that depend on KDE. Of course they’re going to have to offer full support – or at least try to. They have existing products and software that uses KDE and Qt fairly tightly. It would be the same if they used Gnome and wanted to move to KDE. You can’t just do it overnight like many people seem to think, and however desperately you want to move to your own chosen little bit of software.
It’s clear that with some political manoevring they’ve managed to initiate a medium to long-term change to Gnome (perhaps, it needs to be done yet!), but it’s another question entirely of how they get there. If I was an investor in Novell I would be a bit more worried about the future than I was when all those other investors wrote all those letters complaining of the current (then) strategy! What’s happened is the boat has been rocked severely to the point where the day to day running of their business is threatened.
Other than completely mentally-retarded people, I don’t think anyone expected Novell to stop shipping KDE or supporting their commercial offerings. This transition to GNOME is pretty meaningless to anyone that actually makes use of KDE (except for the ego, and perhaps long-term project financing). It makes no difference to people that use GNOME (except for the ego, and perhaps long-term project financing). And for people that just pick applications from either depending on their individual quality it means pretty much nothing at all.
If I were an investor in Novell I would sell off my shares in one of the spikes its stock goes through, and my reasoning has little to do with which desktop they use by default, or how they transition from one to another, because neither of them is in a state that’s going to create a meaningful return on my investment, and neither is an asset exclusive to Novell. I can obtain better returns elsewhere, and that’s my plan.
Oh how I loathe the day when Novell invariably finishes circling the drain and slips into the abyss, when I will have to read sixty posts about why it was because they transitioned to GNOME, rather than well, everything else.
> Of course Novell have to continue to support KDE. … They simply don’t have an option.
Of course. They can’t reneg on their multi-year support contracts.
> as well as writing new tools that work seamlessly with the old ones
This is a given also. The only question is whether the new tools will be KDE based, GNOME based, or Mono based (i.e. Gtk#) and whether they will migrate their existing tools to a GNOME or Mono. This announcement was ambigious on this point, but I suspect that they’ll focus on Mono and create hooks into KDE via DCOP or other KDE protocol. Novell’s current focus on Mono is what separates them from RedHat (which wants to have nothing to do with it).
> Considering the KDE people who maintain Suse’s
> desktop and graphical tools have all left, or will
> all soon be leaving
Do you have evidence of this or is this pure speculation? We know that *some* of the KDE people have left, but I haven’t heard of any mass exodus. If it’s speculation, then be clear about it. There’s already too much histeria on this issue.
This announcement was ambigious on this point, but I suspect that they’ll focus on Mono and create hooks into KDE via DCOP or other KDE protocol.
I’d really love to see that.
Novell’s current focus on Mono is what separates them from RedHat (which wants to have nothing to do with it).
I wouldn’t say they had a focus on it at all, and Novell’s internal stuff (web apps etc.) is very much Java. JBoss is the application server in OES and SLES, not Mono.
There’s simply no market for .Net on non-Windows platforms and Red Hat knows that very well. The non-Windows application server world is Java. That’s the biggest part of the reason why Red Hat wants nothing to do with Mono and isn’t interested. They know where the money actually is. Anyone who bets on Mono as the answer is going to end up with no revenue and a large bill for costs, which is what they have at the moment.
Do you have evidence of this or is this pure speculation? We know that *some* of the KDE people have left, but I haven’t heard of any mass exodus.
When your founder leaves in that manner and makes the comments he did it’s a sign for the rats to jump from the ship. Waldo Bastian did months ago and Chris Schlaeger has done so as well.
There’s already too much histeria on this issue.
It’s not hysteria. When the people who actually run your company are all leaving it’s a bad sign.
On DE wars: Stop. Just stop it. It is so silly and pointless to argue over which DE (KDE or Gnome) is better. It’s so subjective, and both have strengths and weeknesses.
KDE is great for eye candy, configurablity, ease of development with QT, and the plethora of “K” apps available. KDE falls short in organization, excess clutter, and intuitiviveness (subjective – a lot of people think so).
Gnome is great for ease of use, clean & simple “less is more” design, productivity, and the liberal open source licensing (LGPL for GTK+). Gnome falls short in some of it’s features (or lack there of), as well as configurability, and the plethora of dependencies (makes programming and distribution harder).
But both KDE and Gnome are great. I’ve been using both regularily ever since I first started using Linux, with an ever so slight nod in favor of Gnome (I’m more productive in Gnome, and tend to enjoy myself a bit more with it).
But who gives a flying leap what I use? And who gives a flying leap what any other poster here uses? And who gives a flying leap which DE any particular Linux vendor favors/defaults to? There are lots of choices out there. That’s one of the great things about Linux and open source – choice. So who cares if Novell decides to default/favor to KDE or Gnome? They were always going to support both, so it never mattered which one they defaulted to. So people got their boxers in a bunch over absolutely nothing.
On Novell: When Novell first announced that they were buying SuSE and then Ximian, I was a first very pleased. It meant that another huge corporation, with lot’s of partners and sales channels and marketing clout, was going to be promoting Linux. That was good.
But what has become obvious recently, as well as over the years for anyone who has followed the exploits of Novell, Novell is a stupid, poorly managed company. They’ve long been a slowly sinking ship, and through poor, indecisive management, they continue to be so. And the bad thing about it is that they might bring a fine Linux distro down with it, with many of the original SuSE people bailing.
One can only hope that when Novell finally kicks the bucket, someone will pick up the SuSE (and Ximian) pieces. Maybe former SuSE execs and employees. Maybe another distro. Maybe another big corporation (one that hopefully has it’s act together).
Oh well. In the end it doesn’t matter. There are other great distros, and there will always be other great distros (Mandrake/Mandriva and Debian are my particular favorites). It is open source after all, and in spite of Microsofts efforts against it, and in spite of Novell’s general incompetence with it, Linux (and other OSS) will never go away, and continue to grow.
> On DE wars: Stop. Just stop it. It is so silly and
> pointless to argue over which DE (KDE or Gnome) is
> better. It’s so subjective, and both have strengths
> and weeknesses.
Funny, first you complain that people argue and say that it’s subjective. Then you continue by stating your opinion (sounds like an absolute truth) on the very topics of these arguments (“falls short in organization”(?), “clutter”, more productive development, more productive use, licensing, dependencies).
Of course, if one accepts your opinion on these matters as given then the arguments don’t make sense. Haha.
What the heck was wrong with my statements?
I said it was subjective. Then I expressed my opinions about what I perceive as the relative strengths and weeknesses of KDE and Gnome. I never said, or even hinted, that my opinions were absolute truth. I even stated, quite clearly, “who gives a flying leap what I use?”.
So did it tick you off that I said something not so nice about your favorite DE, or something nice about the DE you don’t like? What is the deal?
> What the heck was wrong with my statements?
>
> I said it was subjective. Then I expressed my
> opinions about what I perceive as the relative
> strengths and weeknesses of KDE and Gnome.
Your second and third paragraph don’t sound like opinion, but like fact. Except for “(subjective – a lot of people think so)” that IIUC refers to the intuitiveness part and which I missed when I first read it, to be honest, sorry about that.
I just wanted to point out that you’re playing with fire. These seemingly simple statements of opinion (as you put it) have often enough sparked the very flame wars you complained about.
> So did it tick you off that I said something not so
> nice about your favorite DE, or something nice
> about the DE you don’t like?
No, especially since you mentioned both. And in fact I paid attention not to mention what my preferred DE is (although most regulars here probably know).
It’s worse than arguing over which desktop is better. It’s arguing about whether switching from one desktop to the other by _default_ is better or worse. It’s pretending that Novell’s decision will somehow retard a SuSE user’s ability to use KDE, because having a distribution default to your desktop environment somehow validates your own software usage and if they don’t use it by default then it’s threatened. You better switch to an entirely different RPM-based distribution that defaults to KDE immediately, before your computer stops working and you’re forced to use an abacus.
And if tomorrow Novell released YaST#, there would be more of this. “Oh I hate SuSE now. SuSE and Novell will burn in Hell! Grrr!”
kde is so intuitiviveness then 65% of linux user use it… and only 20% use gnome…
JeffS wrote: But who gives a flying leap what I use? And who gives a flying leap what any other poster here uses? And who gives a flying leap which DE any particular Linux vendor favors/defaults to?
The answer is quite simple: When considering platforms, it is more important what other people do, not what you want.
I, for example, considered switching to Linux seriously when I noticed that all IT journals started using Windows XP, only. As a Windows98 user, these journals were useless for me, and I lost a part of the fun about home computing. You can say: I didn’t give up Win98 — other peoples choices made me giving it up for they chose WinXP, reducing my ability to have fun with the former product.
The same holds for hardware: Most people don’t need the new HiEnd processor but the inability of other people to reject the new HiEnd processor makes everybody switch. Or consider grafic cards: If nobody would upgrade for the new FPS game due to rejecting an upgrade of the grafic card, its developers would adapt to the needs of the market.
This is why other peoples decisions about platform X vs. Y affect us: We fear to loose our ‘own’ platform, and the time and effort we already invested into it. We fear the unknown it represents. But usually nobody is going to admit this, thus we argue about ‘technical benefits’.
This is good, but it is still a blow to the many SUSE KDE users. I hope they do not make a default. Once they do, you know they won’t support the other one “equally”.