SUSE Linux used to be a very KDE-centric distribution. Then Novell came around, bought SUSE and Ximian, and slowely but surely they turned the now-openSUSE distribution into effectively a GNOME-centric distribution with KDE as its sidekick. The openSUSE community, however, doesn’t appear to be particularly happy with KDE being a sidekick.
It all started around the time when Novell bought SUSE and Ximian. Before that, many KDE developers ran SUSE, people inside SUSE ran KDE, and KDE was the default. After Novel had acquired both SUSE and Ximian, things started to change as people inside Novell had the idea of ditching KDE and laying off the KDE developers inside SUSE. This idea wasn’t very well received within the SUSE community, so Novell had to learn to live with KDE.
Still, KDE was no longer the default. First, KDE was atop the list of desktop environment to choose from during installation, but not long after GNOME was placed atop that list. SUSE doesn’t actually have a default desktop, though.
This arrangement is not acceptable to many within the openSUSE community. Last year’s user survey shows that 68.3% use KDE, while only 26.9% use GNOME. The community also has a feature request service with voting capabilities, called openFATE, and here we see that the feature request “Make KDE the default desktop” is by far the most popular feature request.
And now Novell has put itself in a precarious situation. They want to turn openSUSE into a fully community managed project, and that community – quite clearly – wants openSUSE to be a KDE-centric distribution. Novell, however, as we know, is very GNOME-centric, so I’m sure they wouldn’t be particularly happy with such an arrangement.
Reasons to set KDE as the default desktop environment for openSUSE go beyond the simple “most users want it”. It’s confusing for new users to have to choose a desktop environment at install time, because they have no information to go on. In addition, focussing on KDE would give openSUSE a unique selling point in a world dominated by GNOME-centric distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora.
Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, community manager at Novell, disagrees with these ideas. He says that by setting a default you limit choice; a point well-countered by Gerald Pfeifer, Director Product Management at openSUSE: “Choice is not (necessarily) about not having a default; it is about the ability to choose.” Even if you provide a default, the choice is still there.
In addition, Brockheimer believes that going KDE wouldn’t be that much of a unique selling point. He points to Kubuntu, while saying that the ability to choose between desktop environments is a unique selling point in its own right. I think Brockheimer should take a look at Kubuntu himself, though, as I found it the most horrible KDE experience I’ve ever tried.
Personally, I think the openSUSE community should take all this a few steps further: ditch GNOME altogether. Forget about it. Stop wasting resources by trying to cover both desktop environments, and go 100% strictly KDE4, and build the best possible KDE experience in the distribution realm today. Kubuntu is nothing more than a glorified excuse for Canonical to be able to say “Look, we do KDE too!”, and Fedora is focussed on GNOME too. There is a lot of room for a SUSE/Fedora class distribution strictly dealing with KDE.
It will be interesting to see what happens. By ignoring the strong community cries for KDE as the default, Novell and the people in power on the openSUSE team once again show their clear preference for GNOME, without taking their users’ wishes into account. As Lubos Lunak puts it: “Since now openSUSE positions itself as an open community distribution, refusing this openFATE request would also be an action that would further stress the perception that the KDE community is not as welcome in openSUSE as the GNOME community and that openSUSE can again choose to hurt the KDE majority despite the obvious preference.”
So what is stopping this “community” from giving up on Novell, taking what is known as OpenSUSE, and make a “real” OpenSUSE with KDE only.
If CENTOS can get redhat sources and compile something…maybe a bad example.
Remember KDE for redhat. What happened to that? How about KDE for SUSE.
I am unhappy that there isn’t an awesome KDE distro as I would have liked to see the potential that exists in the KDE environment.
Well come on, starting a whole new sub-distro would be a bit of a major undertaking, surely? It would be much better if the community could convince Novell to focus on KDE
I agree with you that it would be great to have a big distro supporting KDE. The closest that come to this are Mandriva and Pardus, which are both good, but not really as visible as Fedora, Ubuntu or SUSE. I personally doubt that SUSE will want to make the jump to KDE, because it’s really too big of a change and I think there isn’t enough to be gained, from their perspective. But I agree with what Thom says and I definitely hope the community can convince Novell to change.
It’s a shame if the kde-redhat project is dead. It looks like it hasn’t been updated since 4.1, or maybe the’ve just forgot to update the home page (http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net/)? That project was a life-saver when I was stuck on RedHat EL 3, which only had KDE 3.1 pacakages.
Thankfully kde-redhat is far from dead!
The currently available version in their repository is 4.3 RC3. Their mailing lists however seem to have moved to http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/fedora-kde/
lists.fedora
Is there some kind of lists viewer. The interface is butt ugly. How are we non-tech meant to communicate with them.
Is kde-redhat a part of the fedora project now?
Want an awesome KDE environment? Check out Mandriva. It’s the best KDE 4 implementation there is.
Personally, until KDE4, KDE was my number one choice. Then I moved to GNOME (Ubuntu) as I found KDE4 highly undesirable. However KDE is improving and their latest version does seem somewhat better and now thanks to GNOME’s latest announcement (hiding the icons rather then fixing the issue), I am going to switch back to KDE so opensuSE should make KDE their default desktop.
Since we are on the KDE topic: Linux Mint KDE has been released. Now *this* should be interesting (considering their GNOME desktop is seriously polished): http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=05605
Edited 2009-08-04 11:10 UTC
Let the user choose. Where is sense stealing these opportunity?
Users coming from a “Windows” PC background do not choose. They take what’s coming by default (or preinstalled). 🙂
Basically, I agree with you that the desktop environment should be choosable. But keep in mind that preconfiguring and integrating the DE into the OS is much work. And this work increases rapidly when other DEs are requested by the community, for example “Why not have openSuSE with XFCE?” Because the DEs are mostly incompatible to each other (in terms of configuration), there’s lots of work to be done.
On the other hand… when we assume that users (from a better educated background) choose their distribution based on the DE it primarily features, then why have two different openSuSE disstributions? There are other distributions that do KDE a lot better than SuSE, as it seems.
Finally, and that’s my very individual opinion and it doesn’t apply to english (native) speakers at all: I found that the german internationalisation of Gnome is much better than the language quality of KDE, so Gnome would “sell” better in Germany. German users get scared when presented an error message in english, and when they once click on “Deutsch”, they want to have every program in german – with no exceptions. That’s something that works better in Gnome than in KDE. But please, note that I’m not using one of them on a regular basis.
“Personally, I think the openSUSE community should take all this a few steps further: ditch GNOME altogether.”
Yeah, sure.. nice way to lose 26,9% of your user base 🙂
We also should focus on one and only one distro, and one and only one package manager, right? Forget it dude… it’s open-source. Get used to diversity.
Heh. That’s not an argument I seem to remember some people using over five years ago when Suse would have lost a hell of a lot more users than 26.9%.
OpenSUSE is sponsored by Novell and used as the basis of SLED and SLES. It would be totally unrealistic to expect them to be happy with total removal of their preferred desktop. If any attempt was made to do so I would expect them to withdraw their support, and OpenSuse would have trouble surviving without that help. I would like to see OpenSUSE giving more love to KDE 4, and that is something that is achievable.
That said, my money is on Mandriva for the best current KDE 4 experience that I have tried. While they, like Fedora and OpenSUSE, offer both KDE and Gnome, it is obvious with all three where the greater balance of polishing has gone (though none of them are as horrible as Kubuntu, which is a fine example of how *not* to provide a KDE distrobution).
Her is where you get the issue all wrong, nobody is about to remove anything.
The question is to make KDE the default in the selection, rather than no default as is todays situation. Since the majority of OpenSuse users prefer KDE anyway, this makes rather good sense.
openSUSE has always been an excellent distribution, but has never been helped by its community of stupid noobs, often beginners coming from the Windows world.
I don’t mean everyone inside their community is idiot, but there are certainly more of them than in any other distro.
So Novell will never let KDE be the default in OpenSUSE.
There are limits to “community” in vendor sponsored communities. This is also true for Ubuntu and Fedora.
imagine how happy both (joke!) big buisness that use SLED would be if you changed their default desktop..
It must have been painful moving from Windows to gnome, why make another transition. Simply put these companies would not upgrade.
A linux community is, as a whole, like hurding cats. Everyone wants a different feature for their own specific reasons. For anything to get done then there HAS to be a ‘leader’ pointing in a direction.
If you don’t like the direction, feel free to fork or join another project that matches your requirements. This is the great benefit/curse of open source development
openSUSE != SLED.
True, but the marketing pitch for SLEx would be a lot harder:
“Use Gnome, our community distro on which SLEx is based uses KDE”
That said, I think Frank and Sebas are pushing this issue mostly for political reasons. It is kind of silly when KDE devs that are on Planet Ubuntu think they should tell the OpenSUSE community what to use as a default.
The major issue is that KDE has no big support from a major vendor. Canonical, Novell and Red Hat are Gnome shops at the end of the day. So a lot of KDE devs are searching for a distro. Kubuntu seemed to be the solution for some time, but now Aaron and a lot of other KDE devs left and use SUSE, but that isn’t a real solution to the problem that there is no distro with a lot of devs that focuses on KDE. (I know about Pradus etc, but they don’t have the devs like Novell, Red Hat or Canonical.)
novell support kde, they have some kde dev, you can install kde with sled
Every openSUSE x.1 version is practically the same as SLED x.0.
As long as Novell employs GNOME developers, what does openSUSE gain by not shipping it?
fedora != Redhat
but, we all know that in reaity it is used by redhat to test technologies in the real world before intergrating them into its flagship product. Stability in fedora is not as high a priority from Redhats perspective.
To seperate SLED and openSUSE would be equally misleading as to the real worl situation
Well, in the same way that Fedora isn’t RHEL, I suppose. But SLED is the raison d’être for OpenSUSE, no matter how much community participants may protest or deny that reality. It makes no sense for OpenSUSe to have a default desktop which is totally unsuitable for SLED.
…and it makes no sense for SUSE to be centred around a desktop the community doesn’t care about.
It goes both ways.
Putting it all together… it may not make sense for OpenSUSE to have the community it does… which is really the larger problem for everyone. And I’m glad I’m not personally involved in *that* particular pickle.
The problem for Novell there though is that SLED is insignificant junk. It’s not doing anything that any other distribution isn’t doing, there is no installed application base, there is no means of getting one, developing anything for it (a must in all those ‘enterprise environments people bang on about) is a PITA and there is nothing there that is competing with what Windows or OS X is doing today and will do tomorrow. They’ve even managed to f–k up the sound stack right up to the desktop and applications like every other distributor. SLED, as it is today, is an insignificant joke like every other ‘enterprise’ desktop distribution.
It makes sense for your community participants to wake you up to that reality and let you know how people on the ground feel no matter how safe you might feel by declaring a ‘default’. Hell, show us the users of SLED, because a damnsight more use OpenSuse I’ll bet and they’re the only ones saying anything.
Heh. Show us the applications. Show us the developer technology to produce those applications. Show us the resolution independence. Show us the features that will convince all those ‘enterprise’ users to use it rather than Windows or OS X. Those are the only things that matter if you actually want people to use your desktop.
People can bitch, scream and hide behind the words ‘professional’, ‘usability’ and ‘accessibility’ all they want but the current defaults just aren’t getting the job done and what’s ‘unsuitable’ obviously needs a reevaluation. That’s the reality today.
Edited 2009-08-04 17:40 UTC
SLED ultimately provides the direction for OpenSuse (however you want to capitalise that), and what goes into it technology-wise.
Given that Novell’s default desktop move a few years ago for SLED, and ultimately OpenSuse, has done zilch for Novell and has probably held them back, zilch for desktop Linux in general and has just labelled them as a Red Hat wannabe then it’s a question certainly worth asking given OpenSuse’s userbase. There’s just no differentiator that will get people, and customers, interested over Red Hat or even Ubuntu. At a time when the haemorrhaging of Netware customers shows no signs of slowing they need to come up with differentiators that will get Windows Server admins interested and actually create a desktop Linux market.
There must also still be a fair few paying customers and a use for KDE at Novell because they still employ some pretty competent KDE people. The complete Gnome switchover at Novell doesn’t appear to have happened how some people imagined it a few years ago. We just appear to have got complete stagnation.
Edited 2009-08-04 15:25 UTC
No, they are quite similar. Not equal, but very much related.
“Personally, I think the openSUSE community should take all this a few steps further: ditch GNOME altogether. Forget about it. Stop wasting resources by trying to cover both desktop environments, and go 100% strictly KDE4, and build the best possible KDE experience in the distribution realm today.”
Linux is about choice and removing the choice of desktop environments in openSUSE is just crazy. openSUSE may have more KDE users but I bet SLED is around 100% GNOME on desktop/workstation installs.
Actually openSUSE is already wasting developer time supporting KDE becasue Novell already has GNOME devs that do the work. Of course that statement is illogical, as was the one qouted above. Sometimes you have to fight bad logic with bad logic.
Also, Mandriva is considered by some to be the BEST KDE experience in all of linux land AND they manage to support GNOME very well.
Sure, IMHO the KDE4 usability is very good now.
KDE4 4.0 vs KDE4 4.3
is the same as
Vista vs Windows 7
try it, feel it, use it…
On which distro?
Arch Linux. You can also try the Chakra Project (http://chakra-project.org/), which provides a live cd with Arch Linux as a base and KDE4.3 (maybe the livecd doesn’t include 4.3, but you can upgrade after you install). You can’t go wrong…
Chakra is in the shit right now, since they are still Alpha, would be better to install Arch base and then add the KDEmod repo, but also, with 4.3, the KDE packages will be split, so it is similar (not the same) as KDEmod (Chakra).
I’d agree with some of this to some degree, but have you looked at Kubuntu Karmic Koala (which will become Kubuntu 9.10 at release)?
The Alpha 3 pre-release version is out now, and I am trialling it as I type this, and it seems to me to be pretty good. It is remarkably stable for an alpha pre-release version. The desktop is KDE 4.3 RC 3, but in a few days time no doubt this will be updated to the final release version of KDE 4.3.
https://wiki.kubuntu.org/KarmicKoala/Alpha3/Kubuntu
There is also an interesting new variant specifically for netbooks that will be available for the first time with Kubuntu 9.10
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu-netbook/daily-live/current/
https://wiki.kubuntu.org/KubuntuKarmicNetbook
NOTE to Kubuntu: It would be better if this variant was released as an .img file so that it can be directly copied (using the dd command) to a spare USB Flash memory stick which would then be bootable directly on the netbook machine.
Kubuntu Karmic pre-release is better right now than the Mandriva 2010 Aplha 2 pre-release, and yet Mandriva is a distribution that does primarily lean towards KDE.
http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=05601
PS: For people with newer ATI graphics cards in their systems, it is beginning to look like there just might be an open source 3D driver available by the time of the next round of distribution releases.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzQyNg
That will be of great help to people wanting to run KDE 4, which can take good advantage of such a driver to accelerate rendering of the desktop.
Edited 2009-08-04 12:18 UTC
The reduction in distributor commitment to KDE has made me sad for years now. Before Novell bought SuSE there was a proper, big name, well-supported distro based around KDE. Mandrake/Mandriva was another, although not quite so big. I seem to recall some hints of discord among key employees when Novell switched the SuSE desktop to GNOME. I certainly wasn’t happy to see yet another distro become primarily GNOME-based, when I could already choose Fedora / RHEL / Ubuntu for that.
Kubuntu … well, it’s good that you can get the Ubuntu package set whilst also getting KDE. But realistically, developments happen first on vanilla Ubuntu, the development direction is pushed by them and the Kubuntu developers just don’t seem to have the resources to cope. Users expecting “Like Ubuntu but based around KDE” will be disappointed, despite the literal truth of the statement. I have had trouble with bugs under Kubuntu’s KDE but I’m hesitant to blame too many of these on the distro given the hacked-about nature of my ancient install. On the plus side, Kubuntu does typically offer packages of new KDE releases very quickly.
Overall, though, it feels a bit like the market moved away from what was a strong section of userbase for partially political reasons (e.g. in this case Novell wanting to leverage their Ximian investment, not the existing investment in SuSE/KDE they had purchased) 🙁
With Novell you can almost understand … by buying Ximian they ended up with a fair amount of sway with regard to GNOME, but almost none over KDE.
I have no idea why Canonical opted with GNOME however. KDE is where the “wow” is undoubtedly at.
Not to worry, there will be some good KDE options re-emerging soon … Mandriva (now) and PCLinuxOS (one day they will go to KDE4, but they haven’t as yet) for RPM-based distros, Fedora has a good KDE option, and MEPIS (one day they will go to KDE4, but they haven’t as yet) for a solid Debian-based distro.
Linux Mint 7 ‘Gloria’ KDE has just been released (based on Ubuntu 9.04 and KDE 4.2.4).
http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=986
http://www.linuxmint.com/rel_gloria_kde_whatsnew.php
I am about to trial that one when the torrent finishes downloading.
For cutting edge (rolling release) “roll-your-own” KDE4 distros, try Sabayon or ArchLinux KDEmod.
http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=05566
http://forum.sabayonlinux.org/viewtopic.php?f=60&t=17483
http://chakra-project.org/
It’s pretty clear why they opted for Gnome – this decision was made long before Qt license change, like it was for all the other distros.
Focusing on kde 4 would be a gamble well worth making at this point in time. It’s not going to happen with Suse/Novell, though.
Sadly, all these hobbyist distros (apart from Fedora) are pretty irrelevant in the big picture. Ubuntu has the mindshare, community, …; so the popularity of KDE 4 will live or die with Kubuntu. And it’s not like working together to improve Kubuntu is forbidden by Ubuntu code of conduct.
Here’s to hoping that Kubuntu will rock on 10.04 LTS.
That’s totally false. Distributor support was not reduced, but rather shifted.
Pardus is a relatively new distro that fully supports KDE. Western users may not have heard about it. It’s a Turkish distro. Several people work full time on it.
KDE also has a great reputation on Arch with KDEmod.
No, it really is Kubuntu to blame. Kubuntu has the buggiest KDE packages I know of. No Kubuntu release ever shipped with non-broken translation files for KDE. KDE also is less stable there.
Well, you may disagree but I really meant that total distributor resources seem to have reduced. There are smaller distros providing a good KDE experience, which is good, it’s just a shame that the really big financial backers of the project seem to have switched resources to GNOME to a greater or lesser extent.
I’ve heard good stuff about Pardus, yeah.
Right. I seem to recall, quite early on, a (the?) lead Kubuntu developer complaining about the lack of commitment from the Canonical mothership, so I’ve always had the impression they were somewhat overworked / understaffed.
I’ve seen various visual problems I see with my KDE4 also blamed on Kubuntu’s version of the packages.
I have been considering using Konstruct to build KDE from source, rather than rely on their packaged version. I wonder if it’s becoming worth it.
Can’t afford to reinstall my desktop machine right now but on my netbook I run Mandriva – it’s a heavy distro in RAM usage and disk usage (not ideal for a netbook) but it has a good KDE and excellent support for that hardware. I couldn’t run Mandriva on my desktop though, it seems to have packages for too few of the apps I’m interested in.
I used to run KDE on Fedora using RPMs from the KDE-Redhat project and found that reasonable. The main awkwardness about Fedora in those days was that I couldn’t figure out a way to enable MP3 support under KDE *without* using the kde-redhat RPMs. The other thing which niggled was that all of the config software they provided was GNOME-based, although it did have the nice feature of being usable on the terminal too.
When Novell acquired SUSE and Ximian, no resources were shifted away from KDE towards GNOME.
The current GNOME team is mostly the same as the old Ximian team — located in the USA.
The KDE team is basically the same as the old SUSE desktop team — located in Germany and the Czech Republic.
When Novell laid off personnel a few months ago, I think the GNOME team was even hit harder than the KDE team. If I’m right, from the KDE team only Stephan Binner had to go, while from the GNOME team Hubert Figure and another one were affected (my info could be wrong, I might add).
Red Hat never really supported KDE. AFAIK they employ one person that makes sure the packages make it into Fedora, but that’s about it.
I have no idea what the current amount of Mandriva contributions is. I know that one Mandiva guy works on Kopete. Due economic pressure on the company, Mandriva may have shifted some KDE resources to GNOME in order to have a wider audience.
Canonical may have quite a lot mindshare with Ubuntu, but their actual contributions are not that big. It improved in the last few months, though. GNOME AFAIK has an advantage in man power there.
That however should be compensated by Pardus’ and PC-BSD’s KDE devs.
What you are forgetting is Nokia. Nokia started to be a GNOME contributor with Maemo. Then Nokia bought Trolltech and more and more resources were shifted towards Qt development which peaked in the announcement to switch Maemo to Qt. That in turn helps KDE.
Overall both KDE’s and GNOME’s developer base is increasing steadily. Both communities are in extremely good shape
Their contribution to KDE are high. A quick look at some of their employees tell the tale, with two being Sebastian Trueg(K3b and Nepomuk) and Laurent Montel (the KDE4 Commit Champion).
As I’ve said before: Debian. Their focus is equal for KDE and Gnome, since Debian’s development model is distributed. Wherever they’ve got a talented and motivated bunch of developers taking care of the packages, Debian’s support is top notch, and the developers taking care of KDE are obviously very good at what they do.
To get cutting edge Debian with a KDE4 desktop, perhaps the easiest method is to download and install Sidux.
http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=05580
http://sidux.com/module-News-display-sid-519.html
Edited 2009-08-04 14:10 UTC
I tried Sidux a while back, I think I stopped using it in March or April. At that time, KDE 4 still hadn’t actually made it into the main software repository. If there was some secondary repository that had it, I sure couldn’t find it. If they’ve picked it up since then, good for them!
Personally I liked KDE 3.5 but I just can’t get a warm fuzzy for any of the 4.x variants. KDE just doesn’t feel “efficient” anymore and the design goals don’t appear to be consistent in the organization. I got used to Gnome with Ubuntu and Fedora so I will just stick with that.
Just my two cents.
It’s dead easy to install KDE. And It is now also dead easy to make a live CD/install CD with KDE with the new web front end for openSUSE.
I think you’re looking (and choosing) the wrong battle. It isn’t anymore between KDE and Gnome, it is between Moblin and whatever Nokia will make based on QT.
The strange thing is that this will not hurt Gnome one bit, they already moved on creating more and more the services a Desktop needs to perform and less on the front-end, GTK+ and now also Clutter and QT based. Sure GTK 3.0 will be important for Gnome but not to much.
As matter of fact I wouldn’t cry victory if I were you when Gnome disappeared, you soon would be whining about Moblin and/or Maemo. The desktop is becoming a different beast on Linux, less driven by what Windows does and I for one welcome the new paradigma, because it is modular, just as a *nix should be.
They call it Maemo Harmattan.
Given NOvell’s Ximian investment, plus their 100% backing of Mono, I don’t see them moving to KDE anytime soon. There would be too much involved really to move to it, as a good deal of Novell’s other technologies would have to have more bindings and the like for KDE and would have to go through an extensive testing period. It would be more trouble for NOvell than it would be worth, considering that OpenSUSE is to SLED as Fedora is to RHEL. Sled is not going to move to KDE, so neither will OpenSUSE.
Too, given they have several developers employed to work on accessibility features such as those for Mono and other GNOME technologies, it wouldn’t make sense from that perspective either… and if they ever hope to have U.S government contracts, they need to keep their system accessible (or at least accessible enough). KDE would be a non-starter when you add that into the equation on top of everything else already.
Show me the money, as they say. Despite Novell’s much vaunted support of Mono I don’t see it used very much at all in any of Novell’s administration tools or development kits across their range of paying products. They might have written some stuff for .Net on Windows but that’s not the same thing. It just seems to be a vain, hopeful addition so that some people will move their .Net applications and run Novell’s Linux, and few of those will need GTK, Gnome and GTK#. They’ve written a music player, a photo application and a soon-to-be completely replaced indexing and search system with it and that’s about it. I’m sure Novell, GTK and Gnome would survive without those things.
Mono has bought them very, very little.
They already do use it and it already is supported because they ship it. They also still support SLES and other customers where it certainly was the default. There’s little to tie Novell to Gnome because they have a pretty much non-existant developer and application base with it. One might ask why.
They already ship it, have done for years and that testing process is already in place. What’s being discussed here is a default for focus given the stagnation that we have right now. That’s a different thing.
SLED is an insignificant little enterprise desktop distribution that isn’t raking in any money because there is no differentiator and nothing to get excited about whatsoever. Do the maths.
Why would that be when KDE 4 and Qt 4 supports ATK/AT-SPI? I always have a bit of a chuckle when people start scraping the barrel for things like accessibility, which while certainly important, is a fairly insignificant piece of the jigsaw when compared with what your desktop actually does.
People care about what your desktop does, and that means functionality and applications. If you don’t have those things then nobody wants to use you and that’s a far bigger mountain to climb than any accessibility regulations.
Edited 2009-08-04 22:30 UTC
Excuse me, but I think I have more experience with accessibility than you do given that I use it on a daily basis.
QT claims to support ATK/AT-SPI. However, Trolltech at the time of QT4’s inception decided to communicate with at-spi over the Dbus protocol… which, naturally, at-spi of course didn’t support and still doesn’t (at-spi uses CORBA). There is work happening on this, but who knows when, or if, it will be completed. Meanwhile, QT4 apps are just as inaccessible as they always were and just as inaccessible as QT3 before them.
I do not like being called a liar, particularly by someone whose facts are blatantly misleading. This isn’t the first time you’ve made these half-truths either. You love QT and KDE, good for you. I might love them too, if they were of any use to me. But do not misrepresent the current situation just because you like one environment and toolkit over the other.
Wow. I was not aware of that. Certainly that should exclude KDE from government agencies and the bulk of private companies. In fact, I’m wondering how any Linux distro which claims to support freedom and equal opportunity for users could default to it in good faith until such time as that issue is resolved.
Is it any wonder that the wider computing world thinks that a lot of people touting open source desktops are a bunch of masturbating monkeys? There’s nothing more hilarious when you see someone absolutely steadfast in their belief that a new lick of paint on the poop deck is what’s needed as water gushes in through a gaping hole below decks.
Government agencies, and especially private companies ((!) What planet are you on?), use totally inaccessible applications and set ups all the time. Why? Because they have functionality that they want. If you start touting something to them that cannot run those applications, and has no developer base whatsoever to provide them, then you’ll get drop kicked out of the door before anyone even thinks that accessibility is an issue. Organisations cross accessibility bridges when they come to them, and they do it by buying in software most of the time. Now where’s that potential developer platform…………….? There’s no guarantees and there’s a lot of work to do, but KDE as a default desktop cannot make the situation any worse on that front.
Has SLED or any other ‘enterprise’ Linux distribution’s total inability to gain any traction whatsoever not sunk in anywhere? Something has to give sooner or later.
1. Because he’s wrong.
2. Trying to deny the inevitable and claim that we need to keep rearranging deck chairs in the meantime is not going to get OpenSuse, SLED or desktop Linux anywhere.
But……..we’ve had this brain dead nonsense for the best part of a decade now.
Edited 2009-08-05 12:04 UTC
Oh, KDE4 has the water gushing in through a gaping hole below decks, as well. I certainly haven’t missed that. The poop deck paint simply happens to be the topic of this thread. And it needs that too.
Regarding your claim that Darknexus is wrong… please present some evidence. Darknexus, who needs and uses these kinds of facilities everyday (and whom I’ve usually found to be fair on these matters) has a hell of a lot more credibility than you do (whom I’ve often found to be a bit of a shill). Stop your desktop cheerleading for long enough to actually think for a bit about real users who need accessibility.features.
Edited 2009-08-05 12:21 UTC
Try reading. It usually helps. Here’s a summary:
1. He claims that Qt doesn’t support AT-SPI. It does.
2. Qt 4 supports the newer D-Bus AT-SPI interfaces. This project has been in existence for around three years. Gnome and GTK are still stuck with CORBA usage and haven’t done enough work to update to it. I really can’t imagine why they’d drag their heels…. This is seemingly a problem when it comes to compatibility between different applications (no surprise there) such as Orca – which is the root issue he seems to be driving at – and he’s got the impression that that is all KDE and Qt’s fault. I can’t imagine why.
3. Simply supporting AT-SPI doesn’t mean that you are ‘accessible’. You need magnification, developer support, transparent application support, device support, guidelines…….. You also need other organisations filling the gap with their own software. I can’t imagine where he’s got the impression that simply supporting AT-SPI and having it work with some Gnome/GTK applications meets some supposedly hard prerequisite for getting your software used…..anywhere. Puzzling.
All he probably knows is that his software doesn’t work. We need to find out why ;-).
I realise that it’s a tough chew to swallow…… The time for politics over who supports what is finally going to come to a close at some point in KDE 4’s cycle in favour of straight comparisons between open source desktops and the proprietary competition. Straight jackets at the ready. I can’t wait to be honest. We’ve seen this incessant crap for nearly ten years now.
Alas, it’s probably not a PC thing to say but the userbase coming off the back of accessibility and for applications like Orca is very small and there is limited manpower when compared with what needs doing. Banging on about a single area won’t increase open source desktop usage, and it hasn’t. You need application and developer support and with that accessibility gets dragged along. That’s how companies like Dolphin make a wide variety of add-on accessibility products. Until that support starts happening then arguing about who’s more ‘accessible’ just sounds plain sad.
I’ve already explained why it doesn’t work, but it’s useless to explain to someone who is being deliberately deaf. I’ll recount it one more time, in terms that you can hopefully grasp.
1. QT4, thanks to Trolltech, at the time of its inception, was programmed to use at-spi over the Dbus protocol.
2. At-spi does not support the Dbus protocol. It didn’t as of several years ago when QT4 (not KDE4, but QT4) was released, and it doesn’t now, There’s a branch of at-spi that is switching to Dbus, but this has only started to be worked on recently. See here:
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Accessibility/ATK/AT-SPI/AT-SPI_o…
This means that, as of the moment, QT4 apps still do not work with at-spi/atk although it allows Nokia to claim that they do. It’s not a matter of GNOME taking years to switch over their implementation, it’s a matter of Trolltech at the time choosing a method they knew full well would not work with the current implementation. Further, because they did such, even once the at-spi-dbus work is completed we face a period of extensive testing because they programmed against a theoretical rather than an actual implementation of the protocol. In trying to future-proof it, they denied us accessibility in the present for years. I don’t just know that my software doesn’t work, I know why the QT4 software I’d like to use doesn’t work. I, unlike you, have followed this very closely for years.
Have I explained it well enough to you, or do I need to start demeaning your intelligence which you seem to want to do to me when you have no counter argument?
Actually I think they do.
You can’t assume that GNOME/GTK+ can switch to the new implementation that fast, however, it is one of the important tasks for GNOME 3.0 (as part of the Bonobo deprecation effort, see http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/BonoboDeprecation)
Qt had the advantage of starting to implement its accessibility bridge on Linux at a point where it was already decided to use D-Bus instead of CORBA.
So a system using the deprecated AT-SPI setup works better with GTK based applications, a system using the newer AT-SPI setup will work better with Qt based applications. As written above, this difference will be removed in the near future when Bonobo deprecations is completed.
It does support it and more to the point it has an accessibility framework that meets requirements on many levels. Whether it is compatible with Gnome and GTK applications is another matter, but that doesn’t make it inaccessible.
Yes because CORBA is crap and some people need to pull their fingers out and get their D-Bus support up to scratch, but it’s more an issue of application compatibility. It’s more of an issue for AT-SPI and Gnome and their support of the various interfaces through D-Bus. The framework is there in Qt to support it. It’s also nice when you have technology that allows you to magnify with a reasonable level of detail ;-). Just supporting AT-SPI doesn’t mean you’re accessible nor that your apps will use it.
Actually it does (the project has been around for three years), but it means that there are two separate interface systems – one over D-Bus which Qt uses and one over CORBA that Gnome uses. Naturally that makes compatibility difficult but is orthogonal to the issue of whether a desktop is ‘accessible’ or not.
Mind you though, talking about supposed accessibility deficiencies seems to be some sort of mental disease that people get themselves into. As I’ve said, accessibility matters little when you have no applications and no functionality that people want. I daresay that there are thousands of off-the-shelf and custom applications running in governments that don’t use any accessibility framework whasoever even if it is there, so Gnome’s accessibility support isn’t helping to win customers and users there. There are a lot of barriers to overcome before getting excited about accessibility.
I don’t. I care about applications. I care about a development platform that will get us those applications. I care about functionality. I care about what open source desktops do with respect to competing with Windows and OS X and getting there. The current status quo we have with ‘enterprise’ Linux desktop distributions has totally and utterly failed to address those issues, and as such, no one uses them and no one cares. Trying to box yourself into a niche with accessibility and regulations as cover for falling totally flat in other areas is just a bit…….sad.
Whether they’re of any use to you is neither here nor there. If you don’t have the features and applications then no one uses you regardless. That’s what counts. It’s become pretty clear that we’ve got total stagnation on that front. Expect the situation to get ever worse.
I’d advise you to do likewise. There is a bundle of reasons why I prefer one over the other, and it doesn’t come down to blind faith and desperation when they fall short.
Be careful what you ask for, you might get it.
Novell’s Mono-mania is the one thing that distinguishes it, so I don’t see Mono disappearing from Novell’s agenda any time soon.
I don’t see Novell being married to GNOME. Sure GNOME’s focus on simplicity over glitz is more business friendly, but it is possible to create a simplified KDE default if Novell put in the effort.
The key thing is, Mono is built on Gtk+ which has better integration with GNOME than KDE. Mono can, and has been ported to Qt, so in theory it should not take much effort to have Mono’s ecosystem shift to KDE if Novell decided to do so, and treat the Gtk+ buildings the way they currently treat the Qt bindings (i.e. they exist but there’s no reason to use them).
So KDE SUSE would be fully Mono-fied, and KDE would both have to put up with the “KDE is infected with Mono” FUD and the “Mono apps rulez KDE apps droolz” crap from Mono fanboys and the “How dare you reimplement Mono apps in pure Qt!” taunts from Mono fanboys and the “Mono should be a part of core KDE” from Mono fanboys.
Does the OpenSUSE community *really* want to go there? As a GNOME enthusiast, I’d love to have the Mono monkey off GNOME’s back. But I wouldn’t wish it on KDE.
No such thing. Mono isn’t built on Gtk+ at all, and doesn’t need porting to Qt, any more than, say, gcc needs porting to Qt. It’s just a runtime and compiler, completely agnostic to what desktop you’re running.
What you’re probably thinking of is that most Mono-based *applications* are written using the Gtk# bindings, which is a different matter entirely.
“doesn’t appear to be particularly happy with KDE being a sidekick.”
Me too.
I can remember being awed at the polish of Suse’s live CDs version of KDE back when it was a paid install. I still have it around somewhere. If you wanted the best KDE – Suse was your distro, if you wanted the best Gnome – Red Hat was your distro (Fedora and Ubuntu didn’t exist yet).
Then Novell bought them and made OpenSUSE. It’s KDE version was good for a few releases, but Gnome as the default was the final straw. Novell didn’t seem to acknowledge its user base, so I jumped to Debian back in ’05 (along with other reasons).
To chip it in, one thing I really dislike about KDE is that it generally doesn’t play nicely with non KDE/QT apps. In general, you can mix Gnome, XFCE and GTK-general apps, and have everything behave more or less sanely — Nautilus and PulseAudio in Blackbox also worked pretty well for me. Not so with KDE: you can use GTK-family apps, but they won’t integrate well — they may not even render or lay themselves out correctly or usably. You have the same problem with system-service type things that really should be DE-independant: on my Ubuntu lap-top, the wireless network-manager app works fine in Gnome and XFCE, but the KDE equivalent doesn’t function, for example, and I’ve also had questions I couldn’t get answered about the sound system — like, can I get KDE to use Pulse Audio as Phonon’s back-end, so that I can have multi-channel sound, and GTK apps will be happy? I don’t know if this is an issue that is actively considered, but I bet, if you give distro-maintainers the choice between “the KDE universe” and “everything else,” they’ll choose the larger “everything else” community, and for good reason.
(This was supposed to be a top-level comment, not a reply, sorry. I don’t know what I did.)
Edited 2009-08-04 19:21 UTC
Gnome and XFCE are both GTK based.
…yes, hence the repeated use of the phrase “gtk-family,” or why I mentioned that this also affects lower-level things like the sound-server system or network management service. Or why I pointed out that you can use Gtk apps in BlackBox and not have them look fugly.
With KDE, I have found installing a packaged called gtk-qt-engine works well. Its a theme engine using Qt for GTK+ 2.x. It translates GTK calls into QT calls and makes most GTK apps look more KDE-like.
I take the old fashioned way out where I can. I configure sound from alsa and wireless from the command line (editing /etc/network/interfaces).
I think you have it completely wrong.
KDE does EVERYTHING to integrate better with GNOME and other desktop environments. GNOME does relatively nothing to integrate with KDE.
GNOME programs that do not integrate with KDE is the fault of GNOME, not KDE. KDE programs that integrate very well with GNOME is not because of the glorious work of GNOME but because KDE tries to integrate the programs into GNOME.
Please try to understand that integration comes from all sides. KDE uses GNOME technology. What KDE technology does GNOME use?
That’s about the size of it. The KDE guys came up with QtGTK (a theming engine to make GTK apps fit into KDE moderately well). Did the GTK guys jump on board and make KDE and Qt apps fit into Gnome for users? Nope. The Trolltech guys had to do that work:
http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/09/05/qgtkstyle-now-part-of-qt…
Yeah, it is a pity these application developers don’t know how to use GTK’s facilities correctly to adapt to the environment they are running in.
Well, assuming that GTK has, just like Qt, facilities to allow application to be as native as possible depending on the environment they are running in.
You should probably consider contacting their respective developers to inquire whether their poor integration is something they decided not to care about or whether their technology stack doesn’ provide the necessary features.
No, because Pulse Audio doesn’t provide the required functionality, i.e. it isn’t a multi media framework.
However, I am pretty sure that all multi media engines currently being used for Phonon Backends, e.g. GStreamer, Xine and mplayer, have the capability to output to Pulse Audio.
Maybe the one being used by you didn’t get configured correctly if you are experiencing apps blocking each others sound output.
True. But surely it is only a matter of time before someone notices this and writes a new sound server, to replace PulseAudio, which addresses that deficit.
Edited 2009-08-04 20:36 UTC
The facilities to theme kde apps like gnome apps is a feature of qt (through qgtkstyle), and the facilities to theme gtk apps like qt is a project driven by a guy not in the gnome community.
That’s the fault of the app developers, not the KDE devlopers. GTK doesn’t play nicely with anything except GTK.
Yes it does. In KDE3 you use network-manager-kde. In KDE4, you use the Network Management plasmoid. They both hook into NetworkManager, giving you access to the same config database that network-manager-gtk and the cli version use.
Yes. In KDE4, you go into System Settings, into Multimedia, and set the preference for output in the Xine/Phonon config to use PulseAudio. You can also change the Phonon config to use GStreamer instead of Xine if you want.
Problem with that philosophy is that it’s backwards. KDE devs bend over backwards to make KDE apps integrate and play nicely with GNOME technology. GNOME devs (seemingly) couldn’t give two shits about making things work well with KDE technology.
I have actually found it to be the other way around. You can set qt apps to draw it’s widgets through GTK (native GTK widgets, and thus fully using the gnome themes).
It is the gtk apps that won’t play with others. The “outside” theming is a PITA (gtk-qt-engine is as good as it gets – no really native stuff there).
It is not the KDE guys that are responsible for GTK running nicely with KDE – it is GTK. And of cource the other way around: It is not gnomes responsibility to make sure that Qt apps run good in gnome.
I run both things, and it is A HELL LOT EASIER to make sure KDE apps look native in gnome, than making gtk apps look good in kde.
Install gtk-chtheme under KDE. Install some GTK themes. Run gtk-chtheme as a user, and again as root. From the list of those available select the GTK theme that best matches your preferred KDE theme. Select the same font for GTK as your KDE theme uses.
How hard is it?
PS: copy the .gtk2rc file (or some name like that, I can’t recall exactly what it is) to the directory /etc/skel and subsequently all new users will have he correct GTK+ theme selected by default.
Edited 2009-08-04 23:58 UTC
Setting the GTK theme is easy, I recommend gtk-kde4 (http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php/gtk-kde4?content=74689). But is hard to find a GTK theme that matches the KDE theme (e.g. oxygen or bespin).
Qt4 apps can look exactly the same as GTK ones.
Edited 2009-08-05 01:03 UTC
That is not playing nicely. As I said, qt apps can use GTK to draw widgets (it does not emulate). The best ones I have seen yet is gtk-qt-engine, but that severely f–ks up som gtk apps (some ff additions
As I run both KDE and gnome and use apps from both under both, I have fiddled around quite a lot to make stuff look seamless. KDE apps under Gnome is waaaaaaaay easier. Using QGtkStyle (that renders qt apps using gtk) even makes the apps use gnome dialogs (you can do the opposite with kgtk, but that is a quite ugly hack that only affects some of the apps)
I don’t get why Novell bought SuSe AND Ximian. It’s like they had no idea what they were doing and had money burning in their pocket.
They would have been better off just buying Ximian and built (or buy) a gnome based distro. I guess they were afraid of looking like a Red Hat clone. They could have gone the Debian route to avoid looking too Red Hat’ish.
Ximian Enterprise Linux by Novell
The issue is they bought into two different and competing desktops, Ximian (a “polished” Gnome desktop with their in house apps) and SuSe (a KDE centric distro with Suse developed apps).
No matter what DE they choose someone was going to feel bitter.
Reliance on surveys of that type are always flawed.
Not only are they usually only available in a single language, but they only give you accurate results for people that opted to take the survey.
The group of people willing to take the survey, that could understand it, and that want to run a specific desktop is likely different than the real usage numbers.
And yes, I would say that regardless of which desktop came out on top (and I don’t use OpenSUSE for the record).
I really don’t see where the issue lies, other than simple fanboyism.
Take a look at the ‘desktop selection’ screen from openSUSE DVD install:
http://en.opensuse.org/INSTALL_Local#Step_5:_Desktop_selection
I don’t think that it clearly ‘defaults’ to GNOME. Just because GNOME is the first listed, does not mean ‘default’. Where are the XFCE nuts screaming about how XFCE is not the default? Simple, XFCE fans are not as narrow minded as KDE fans.
I’m tired of repeating myself but, choice is good and choice is the foundation of the linux community. I don’t understand why KDE nuts want to squash out GNOME and rid the Earth of it. Some people actually do like GNOME. Get used to it.
Indeed. Even as far as live cd images go there’s a choice of which environment you want to download and openSUSE still has a reputation of being one of the better polished KDE distros out there so I’m really not seeing where KDE is getting shirked at all.
Seriously .. why is ppl so obsessed with Kubuntu, Fedora and OpenSUSE?
Red-Hat never gave a dime for KDE (as they have always relied on GTK/GTK+ given that they didn’t have control over Trolltech and Qt development), so why looking there?
Kubuntu is probably the best example of how KDE shouldn’t be compiled, packed, implemented and distributed, yet still, it some how manages to set some sort of standar of what “KDE” is.
Novell abandoned KDE to persue the incipient “corporate market” Red-Hat was making inrods with (the very same reason why Canonical went with Gnome for Ubuntu .. Red-Hat depends on it and that guaranteed a big corp was backing Gnome. Or did you think Mark chose Gnome just because ?) and .. come on .. SuSe has always been (and will always be) a behemont distro, KDE or not.
Mandrake/Mandriva was, from day one, a KDE based (even accused of beign KDE “centric”) distro and as of today they are the ones who can provide a user with the best possible KDE experience, yet every KDE naysayer bases his/her rants on his/hers experience with KDE on Kubuntu/Fedora/OpenSUSE which are all “KDE is a second class citizen” distros.
Nobody looks at Slackware, wich took they right path a long time ago: pass Gnome on to the community and let them deal with it.
Do you really want to check how KDE is supposed to look, feel and work?
Well then, here you go: Mandriva, PC-BSD or Slackware if you want it out of the box, FreeBSD only if you are serious about it and you know what you are doing.
my 2 cents
KDE’s slowness would be a perfect match for YAST. Great way to make your computer crawl!
Seriously though, I have that “test” laptop (mobile P4, 512MB RAM, intel 845 gfx) and every once in a while I try out the latest (K)Ubuntu on it. Gnome + Compiz work great on that box, everything is smooth. The latest Kubuntu though… so slow it looked like a web desktop.
Now I know it’s not as bad on a brand spanking new quad core with gigs of memory. But frankly a OS and its GUI should make themselves as discrete as possible so that applications can use the full power of the hardware.
I really like the polish that KDE4 has, but it’s not an excuse for it to be a resource hog.
Once again, members of the KDE community continue to amuse us by proving to the world that they are whiny crybabies. 🙂 I know of no other community filled with such self-righteous feelings of entitlement.
Off the top of my head, here are some some of the hissy fits that members of the KDE community have thrown over the past decade:
– Google chooses GTK+ as a basis for Chrome on Linux
– Canonical chooses KDE3 for the 8.04 LTS release (“KDE4 is ready”)
– Fedora chooses KDE4 for Fedora 9 in April 2008 (“KDE4 isn’t ready”)
– KDE 4.0 != KDE4
– “[Canonical|Red Hat|Novell|etc.] devotes more developers to GNOME than to KDE”
– “[Ubuntu|Red Hat|Suse|Fedora|etc.] should use KDE by default”
– “KDE is bending over backwards to seamlessly integrate GNOME-apps, GNOME should reciprocate.”
– The Linux Standard Base is unable to support Qt due to the GPL license
– Novell proposes to drop KDE support from Suse
– Red Hat 8 ships with a custom KDE theme (“OMG, they changed our precious defaults!!!”)
– Debian and Red Hat refusing to ship KDE due to licensing issues
There’s a clear pattern here: certain members of the KDE community are very keen on telling other people what to do. That energy could be put to better use by improving KDE instead… but I’m just thinking out loud here.
You got that one wrong. Canonical did not chose KDE3 for the 8.04 LTS release, as recommended by KDE, but chose to not include KDE for the 8.04 release.
But I guess it suites your list so why let facts get into its way.
Pretty obvious, isn’t it?
4.0 is one of the release of the KDE4 series. One would expect that later released add or improve things. Seems to be that way for other projects as well, e.g. GNOME 2.28 will have improvements over GNOME 2.26.
The LSB contains both Qt3 and Qt4.
Getting creative to get more list entries?
It still suits my list since hissy fits were thrown about somebody elses decision. KDE:ers doing what they do best! 🙂
Qt has been in the LSB since 2006:
http://dot.kde.org/2006/04/26/qt-included-new-lsb-desktop-standard
When the LSB was hesitant about supporting Qt a few years ago KDE:ers, true to form, threw hissy fits about it. Here’s a summary of the discussion (which lasted several years):
http://www.linuxbase.org/futures/ideas/issues/libqt/
I love some of the QT apps but hate the look of them.. I am so glad that qt can now be wrapped to look like gtk and vice versa. I think people need to get over the whole wah my desktop is better than yours BS. Gnome and KDE are quickly becoming gnome/kde a hybrid rather than two seperate desktops. I think distros should just push to have both included and if people want to jump onto one or the other simply force gtk to adopt qt styles or kde adopt gtk styles based on which desktop environment the distro chooses to back. I know gnome has no answer to rosegarden or google earth. and KDE has no answer to hydrogen or GIMP. End of the day you use the app for the job and the theme wrappers handle the rest. Now could someone please finish the (qt4) Thorn release of rosegarden? I want all my kde apps to blend into gnome, the sooner the better. QT4 should be commended for that effort.
Meanwhile I think we in the open source community do overlook things too much. There are far too many applications missing from the linux desktop stack. Sure there are some under represented game genres but worse than that are applications which are missing or have horrible UI issues in their open source versions.
Why aren’t open source game engines getting the tools needed to mod them effectively? Blender’s UI is horrific. The gimp has had people hammering on about how bad it is for 10+ years, I should know since I’ve been following the platform for that long (I actually do like the gimp but only on my 30″ lcd. Horrible app on a smaller screen.)
Why can’t I find a lan client that can scan samba/ftp ports and connect to those shares (on multiple computers at the same time think tabbed browsing) to download directly? Windows has had this for years. I shouldn’t need to use my file manager which keeps crashing (nautilus or konqueror both crash) or my web browser (firefox can be a download tool but frankly it sucks at queing and multi file transfers.)
The point I’m trying to make is whilst we squabble about the desktop environments. Real users are using the apps they need on other platforms and getting things done. I want Linux to succeed but without apps it won’t. The DE doesn’t matter. Application functionality does. (I had to make patches to gnome-mplayer before I would accept a gui based media player as being sufficient on linux. there are a hell of a lot of apps still missing which I use CLI for.) Just once I want audio to work and not jam up/be slow when switching songs/using the player (rhythmbox is being a bit stupid right now) /rant
Edited 2009-08-05 15:46 UTC
LOL. I’m the exact opposite. I like how QT looks and I hate how GTK looks. To each their own, I guess. And wrapping apps does help to some extent, but it doesn’t change behavior. But it’s not like you can fix that very well with a wrapper (for instance, using gtk applications with a wrapper, you’re still stuck with the gnome file dialog).
people still use OpenSuse after they did a deal with the devil?
I have to see anyone give actual evidence that the Novell/Microsoft deal has had any negative impact on Linux – other than bickering over it. I mostly use gentoo these days, but OpenSuSE is still a great distro. It’s what I use when I don’t want to have to deal with a source-based distro (like at work where I need a stable environment and can’t afford to fix much time fixing problems after upgrades).
Of course, you’re free to shun OpenSuSE for “making a deal with the devil,” but there are plenty of people out there who still use it because they like it and it fits their needs.
The only negative effect I see is that it questioned the legality of whether linux infringes on Microsoft’s Intellectual Property.
By getting involved in agreements to not to sue each other involving patents and what not it gave Microsoft more clout (true or not, IANAL) that linux does infringe on MS’s IP. So politically and legally it just raised some eyebrows.
Technologically speaking, the deal has been has been harmless, in Novell’s case it has probably been beneficial.
I started out using Linux with SuSE 9.3 IIRC. It wanted me to choose between KDE and gnome. I didn’t even know what they were. And asking friends about i, didn’t help much (explaining the differences between them is hard; explaining it in a way that will actually inform someone enough to make a truly informed decision is next to impossible). The only real way to figure out which one you want to use is to use both. I tried both, and I decided on KDE, and I’ve never looked back.
But making a new user choose which DE to use is insanity. Coming from a Windows or Mac background, do you even know what a DE is? They’re totally integrated into Windows and Mac. You don’t choose your DE there. I’m totally for allowing the user to choose, but when they don’t even know what they’re choosing, it’s just confusing.
For someone coming from a non-Linux background, having to make complicated choices like which DE to use is just too much. I’m sure that there are many people who have given up at that point simply because they had no clue what was going on and their interest in trying out Linux didn’t outweigh the effort that they were going to have to go to to install it.
OpenSuSE has done a number of things over time to make their installer easier for newcomers. You don’t have to understand the ins and outs of using YAST’s package manager to install packages because they have sensible defaults. Expert users can still tweak everything, but you don’t have to. Why can’t they just make KDE the default like they have defaults for everything else?
Any barriers to entry for a new user are going to seriously reduce how many people who enter (see this great article: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html ). Having to choose a DE is a barrier to entry for new users – a big one. Other big distros have a default. It wouldn’t hurt for OpenSuSE to have one and there appears to be a lot of support for it.
I know that I would have been happier when first trying out Linux if there had been a default DE rather than having to figure out what a DE even was.