A KDE developer tipped me off to a recent thread discussed in the kde-core-devel mailing list regarding interoperability between KDE and Gnome. OSNews featured an interview with the usability experts from Gnome and KDE a few days ago and we expected that the spirit of co-operation would continue to get stronger every day. Luckily this is true regarding most of these developers, but not for all of them are sharing it. Here is a commentary on the issue followed by a summary of the long thread.
It is well known to the readers of this site that I am for interoperability when it comes to the two main X11 desktop environments, KDE and Gnome. In my opinion, this is the only way forward for the Linux desktop’s massive adoption. Most Linux graphical apps are written in either Qt or GTK+. And every new platform needs as many quality apps as it can get (BeOS taught me as much at least…) to stay viable. Therefore, it is important for any Linux-based operating system company to be able to support both. Red Hat was the first distro to make the big step on trying to unify the look of the two toolkits with the use of the BlueCurve theme. Freedesktop.org goes a step closer to a more real integration that would bring an end to the problems we get today between the two environments (major app behavior differences, no full DnD support for all apps, different dialogs, UI HIGs, menu system, notification area etc etc).
All these differences are a huge pain for the average user. Expert users, or users with a ‘religious’ background (against the one or the other DE) will assert loudly that they don’t mind having a different breed of apps running under the same desktop while others will assert that they either run GTK+ apps or only Qt apps and that they don’t bother with the “competitor’s” offerings… Sorry, but the big Linux companies I know ALL want to have full interoperability and same app behavior and looks for both their Gnome and KDE and the same goes for the average user. Why? Because it makes sense! The userbase these companies are trying to capture are Windows users who are used to seeing apps that work and look the same, no matter the toolkit or language they were written on or compiled with.
The Linux platform today is not necessarily the 1996-era 2-hour afternoon hacking project by Joe Developer from his bedroom somewhere on the planet. There are still some elements of this, and Linux is still a great OS for hacker projects, but all in all it has become more corporate. Not acknowledging that fact would be a mistake. The largest pieces of code for the main OSS projects today are written by companies who have adopted OSS as their business, not Joe Developer. Joe is still there, but more and more code is coming from these companies.
These companies do not necessarily have the same needs as the hobby hacker team might have. Joe might not care about Gnome, and Joanne might not care about KDE, but Red Hat, Mandrake and SuSE care for both of them, because the Linux applications their users want to load happen to run on both of them. So interoperability is a must for them. They either do whatever is necessary to build the user experience in a way that will please their users or, both themselves and the Linux platform in general are going nowhere in the desktop. Plain and simple.
Take Apple as the example. They have support for 3 different toolkits, Carbon, Cocoa and Java. And applications written in each will look and behave pretty much the same way when they’re run. And that alone is a reason for someone to switch to MacOSX. Same goes for Windows’ three supported main APIs. All look and feel the same. Even Qt and Tcl/Tk and wxWindows are careful to offer support for the Windows look and feel for their Windows versions, simply because it is important to do so.
And this is what Red Hat, Mandrake (with their new Galaxy theme), Freedesktop.org and even SuSE want to have. There is nothing weird about it. It is business as usual and in fact, it is business that would help the whole Linux platform in the long run, not just the individual distro in question.
I believe that the real problem in co-operation between Gnome and KDE (as I see it in the mailing list discussion) are the people who don’t work for these companies. These people (thankfully not all of them 🙂 don’t view the world with the eyes of someone who wants to make a better (commercial) product. They view the OSS world with their own political agendas, which sometimes go back to 1996 for issues that are completely resolved now. They view the “competitor’s” project with skepticism and distrust and they are the ones who separate this OSS project from the other OSS project. These hackers are doing a lot of work for free, and the community is grateful for it, and I am too. But what I don’t like is allowing these independent hackers get in the way of evolution because of their own political/religious agendas. That would be a major mistake for the further adoption of the Linux platform as a viable desktop alternative. In fact, some think that KDE (or Gnome) is already an almost perfect alternative to Windows or Mac — while this is just not true. And very thankfully, most usability engineers that happen to work on Mandrake/SuSE/Red Hat (the big three), agree with me. There is a lot to be done yet, and this road goes through the unification of the specs and sharing of code between apps that are depending on Qt and GTK+.
Some said that trying to do all this “sharing” work could put a break on the two DE’s effort on adding more features. However, do you rather have Linux never get adopted by the desktop market just because our hackers were enthusiastic to add more features (and more pref panels 😉 instead of doing the tedious work of modifying things under the hood (that the users can’t see with a “naked eye”) but which will enable them to go forward as a whole? Point is, there is work to be done and by postponing this work at this critical point that the Linux platform stands today, would be a mistake. Both camps will need to make sacrifices and might even change libraries or code that a dev really likes a lot but for the good of the interoperability, it is something that has to be done.
Back in the ’80s Unix lost its unity and the leading Unix companies could not agree on specs, standards or on fair competition between each other. That was one of the reasons why Unix became weak in the early ’90s and Windows started to take off. Don’t let the same happen today, as the Unix philosophy has a second chance with they sustained hype around Linux. Unity will make the whole platform strong, fragmentation will destroy both of you. Let history give you a lesson and don’t redo the same mistakes over and over again over religious matters…
And make no mistake: “the common standards that were defined up to now didn’t make KDE nor Gnome lose their individuality”. Choice is good and choice will remain. Nobody is saying to make Gnome and KDE the same project! What is needed are just some common standards that will make the life easier for the user and the application developer. Each project will retain its individuality, but instead of having, for example, a Gnome item working via the notification area in the gnome taskbar just fine and then you run the same app under KDE and you get the notification little app as a real window and not on KDE’s notification area, that is very bothersome for the user. Or when DnD doesn’t work. Or when copy/paste doesn’t work correctly for some apps still (despite the X standard). All of these issues need to go away. It is the only way for users to stop criticizing how “clunky” XFree is, while XFree has nothing to do with this whole issue…
The second biggest problem in the cooperation of the two projects is poor communication. I would advocate that the core developers and usability engineers of BOTH projects should join a kde-gnome mailing list, or simply subscribe to freedesktop.org’s mailing list, and start writing the code required.
However, it is not all “hacker’s fault.” Don’t get the wrong idea please. Companies need to communicate better with the hacker community as to what they have in mind on doing next. And also communicate with both projects! Red Hat should be more active in the KDE list and SuSE/Mandrake should be more active in the Gnome list. They include these projects in their products so it only makes sense to be the driving forces on both camps regarding peaceful co-existence and co-operation. And they should give equal chance and support and respect to both projects. They should be the bright example. (However that doesn’t mean that the KDE ‘About Box’ should be present on each and every Qt app. That’s duplication of information and as KDE is free software, modifications are allowed as long they don’t violate their license. This is to say that companies will modify things sometimes that might be disturbing to the project’s line, but might make absolute sense in the company’s line. I am personally ok with this because I understand the needs and HIGs involved – as long they are legal.)
However, if no middle ground is to be found between Gnome and KDE (I pray that this won’t happen though) we might see forks from the really big distros. And that won’t be good for anyone. If a company is forced to take such actions (simply because their customers are asking for it) that can only be a bad thing for the forked project. And if that company which might do a fork has become in the meantime a 800pound gorilla, then after a few years the original project would be forced to comply with that company’s modifications/standards anyway, as it will be seeing its userbase fleeing and they will be the ones who will suddenly become “non standard” funnily enough. What I described here is a long shot, but it could happen. Just pray that it won’t.
I can only suggest that Gnome and KDE developers keep open minds, think outside of the box and most importantly: think about the long run, not just the “today.” The Linux platform today has different needs that it had 5-6 years ago. People expect a lot from it, expect it to live up the the years of hype. The big three are trying to deliver the goods with the help of many “enlightened” individual hackers, but others are just stuck in their own agendas and “traditional/romantic” way of seeing things. These “backwards” people can become the culprits for holding back wider adoption of the Linux desktop. People overall will have to think more broadly, trust, work together and communicate better.
At the end of the day, there is no Linux distribution company which would like to see its Linux-based products get hurt (except SCO maybe ;), so by helping out the “bigger, more important plan” can only help everyone, not just those few that you might like or dislike.
The whole thread started when a KDE developer asked the rest of the developers in the list what they would think adding Glib as an (optional or not) library by the kdesupport’s dependencies.
“I think that the adoption of glib for certain tasks within KDE will make it easier to achieve such consistency. — Waldo Bastian
Naturally, others didn’t have the same opinion on the matter though…
“We can’t very well gain consistency by disobeying our own standards, so GNOME adoption of KDE standards is the only way to get more consistency. — Neil Stevens
Waldo replied back:
“As the discussion became more heated, the C/C++ issue came about: Your reasoning is solely based on gross generalisation. In most cases C++/Qt is superior to C/glib, however that doesn’t rule out that in _some_ cases C/glib is a better choice. In those cases KDE should use it.
[…] Especially in areas where the KDE standards are more de facto standards rather than documented standards, this can be very helpful to improve consistency. I am not so much thinking in terms of visual appearance here, but more in terms of behaviour, e.g. the opening of a browser to open a URL, the sound-server to use to play a sound.glib can be helpful there by providing commonly needed functionality without repeatedly duplicating that functionality (which you would need to do if you didn’t use glib or Qt) and without introducing rather large dependencies (C++/Qt is a much larger dependency than C/glib). As such I think that glib can offer the right balance in those situations. — Waldo Bastian
The thread continued about component interchange strategies:
“So as some components of these might be inferior compared to other components, I think its unlikely that at any point in time, a user will get the optimal set of all applications and services from only KDE or only GNOME ; thus, it would be better if code sharing could be improved And yes, adopting glib for KDE is only the first step. [optional] — Stefan Westerfeld
Which of course is not an easy thing to do:
“It is relatively easy to use common icons or a common system for installing .desktop files. But unifying things like KPart/Bonobo, DCOP/CORBA and the underlying APIs is almost impossible without a re-design of a lot of things. And unifying common dialogs, like the file dialog, would require 100% code duplication and huge coordination problems (because they must be synced all the time – if you change the Qt dialog you must change the Gtk/Gnome dialog at the same time).
If your goal is to unify Gnome and KDE, you would better spent your time on improving Gtk++/Gnome++ and port your applications to it. But maintaining two complex system and keeping them inter-operable at every level is crazy. — Tim Jansen
Then, it was Havoc Pennington’s turn to explain why this interoperability between DEs is very important for the platform and that by interoperating KDE and Gnome, will NOT mean that KDE and Gnome will be the one and the same (which is something that some people think, sadly enough):
“The applications should be orthogonal to the user environment (choice is good, platform fragmentation is bad).
To me whether GNOME and KDE should “merge” hinges on the question of UI unification. Say you merge the human interface guidelines and general approach/goals. Then at that point you may as well start merging implementation (say porting GTK+ to Qt or vice-versa).
However, if you don’t, there is still value in ensuring that the apps interoperate – same help system, font system, MIME system, etc. i.e. even if we offer *choice* of user interface, we should avoid *fragmentation* of platform.” — Havoc Pennington
One of the most active KDE developers, George Staikos joined the discussion soon thereafter:
“I fully agree that choice and interoperability are far preferable to fragmentation. Believe it or not, I do agree that pkg-config is in general a good thing. What I don’t agree with, however, are the approaches and implementations we see presently.
1) Communication, here in The Internet Age, gets an F. Most KDE developers have never even heard about DBUS, at least not until this past week.
[…]Compiling C code with a C++ compiler just gives us the inefficiencies of the C++ compiler of the day, with the loss of power that was available. Are the other desktops prepared to accept C++ as a core requirement, and use C wrappers to the C++ code? Or is KDE to be the one to bear the burden of wrapping C code with C++ to fit the development model? Will we even have to use C# backend code at some
point?
Standardization and sharing technology are noble goals indeed. I do in fact support this. I do not support the means to this end right now. I need answers, procedure and compromise, and I think the rest of the desktop developers need this as well; KDE, Gnome, XPDE, and more.
I sincerely hope that we can discuss these issues more at OLS and perhaps even come to some agreements.” — George Staikos
Havoc continued by explaining that what needs to be done at this first stage leave the vast majority of existing GNOME/KDE code unchanged. No reason to think about interchanging C++ APIs to C or the other way around. Basic (but important parts) interoperability can be a reality between the two projects without major architectural changes.
“Note that my list is mostly the hardest stuff; the easy things are already in-progress or done and just need maintenance over time.” — Havoc Pennington
He later explained the difference between choice and fragmentation.
“Keep in mind though – the problem with duplication is choice vs. fragmentation, not the mere existence of duplication. As I said before, people *like* choosing from multiple email clients. What they don’t like is say not being able to choose the best email client, because of their choice of web browser. Or losing possible users due to choice of devel platform. Or having to set up MIME handlers 6 times.
I think the open source community is inherently going to have 30 efforts in every category, just because there are lots of programmers in the world and they all have their thing they want to try. And in fact users have different needs. That’s not necessarily a problem in itself. It gives users choice, and it gives us “failover” (if one project fails we have others to pick up the slack). The problem is when the stuff is not orthogonal/interoperable. If the Linux desktop slows down due to duplication, it will be because of fragmentation (because we had to provide feature completeness in one fragment or the other rather than in some combination of the two halves), not due to choice (if extra apps exist as an option, that doesn’t matter).
[…]It is simply not that hard to get good interoperability; the list of to do items is very finite and very limited in size compared to the full size of GNOME/KDE. In fact we’ve already solved more problems than remain unsolved. I’m optimistic about our chances for that reason.
There’s no progress or plan to be communicated. All I’m listing here is my personal opinion on what’s a good idea or how it could be done, that’s it.” — Havoc Pennington
Knee Jerk reactions where part of the show too but thankfully they were kept to minimal.
Replies regarding the Red Hat choices followed:
“Ultimately open source software is driven by lots of independent hackers doing what they think is right.
[…]I don’t think this is a productive conversation. I can say “well we care about features XYZ and business concern ABC” and some of those things will be very debatable; there are plenty of judgment calls involved. So those people who are inclined to think we’re evil will
not believe any of it anyway, and in the meantime we’ll have a huge list thread on unresolvable religious issues.” — Havoc Pennington
Scott Wheeler continued the discussion (which now has turned into whether DBUS is a good choice instead of using DCOP):
“I don’t think it’s fair to expect the KDE community to link to the core libraries of the Gnome project while saying that the Gnome project is not willing to link to the core libraries of the KDE project. I know, I know, “tainted by the GPL” or whatever, but that just doesn’t seem like the way that things are supposed to work.” — Scott Wheeler
And two more must reads, one from Havoc and one from George Staikos.
You have lost a lot of credibility in my eyes for disparaging those of us who do not work for commercial companies. Just because we do not wish to see the gradual erosion of our work into some lowest common denominator does not mean we only have ‘political motivations’.
For all of you who are clamoring for so much interoperability … you are missing the point. GNOME, KDE, MacOSX, Java/Swing, Motif, Windows are all different platforms with different reasons and motivations. The Free platforms *should* strive to interoperate where appropriate and where there are trivial differences. Shared specs as long as the design fundamentals of both groups are respected should be developed.
That does not mean that they should be merged or ‘nullified’. People who advocate this are secretly wish that Linux only had one desktop and bemoan the fact that several different applications with surface similarities exist such as KOffice/OpenOffice and Konqui/Mozilla. This wealth of applications and choices are a good thing and the same can be said of desktop/software platforms. While I am a KDE fan and only really use KDE apps, I recognize and respect that others prefer GNOME and it necessarily follows that GNOME is a good thing because it satisfies some segment that KDE does not! Choice is good!
Don’t be fooled by all of these who call for the gradual merging of everything. They are either corporations or employees of corporations that are to scared to make a choice OR they wish to control/have a hand in, all of these projects and hence don’t have enough time, money to get there hands in on everything … so they try and ‘nullify’ it all.
KDE has strengths and I don’t want to see them go away just so that it can agree with GNOME on a lowest common denominator.
GNOME has strengths and I don’t want to see them go away just so that it can agree with KDE on a lowest common denominator.
All of those who are of like mind … both KDE developers and GNOME developers have good reasons and you shouldn’t try and play them down just because you like RedHat and what they are doing. It is an insult to the community.
I think both have benefits / disadvantages. However the main disadvantage, and what I feel is holding back linux on the desktop, is the differences in implementation and general “My x is better than your y“.
What I would ideally like to see is something like UnitedLinux with the desktops. But rather than just the standards (like freedesktop), instead implement a new UnitedDE based on contributions from Gnome, KDE, xfce etc. The dominant coding hackers who aren’t elitist about their DE can contribute to this environment as well as their DE of choice.
This is the only way we are ever going to see a truly unified Linux Desktop for the masses IMO.
Could anyone name two PC audio workstation programs that look the same?
Logic has a totally different gui and widgets to Cubase, which is nothing like Sonar, which is nothing like Pro tools. They all have different key bindings, different menus etc etc.
If four programs that do the same basic task can have completely different widget sets and guis, but be totally acceptable to their users, why is there so much emphasis on apps all looking the same?
Sometimes, the best interface for a program is the one works best for that task, not just the one provided by the OS you use.
> You have lost a lot of credibility in my eyes for disparaging those of us who do not work for commercial companies.
First of all, only SOME of you are getting the hot cake from my article. There are plenty of individual hackers who are very cooperative and they “get it”. But others don’t.
Linux has become commercial a lot, it is naive to think otherwise. Some rules have changed over the years. And personally, I find that positive for the Linux platform adoption.
>just because you like RedHat
Knee jerk (non)thinking. Sorry.
I don’t “like” Red Hat, neither I “like” Mandrake or SuSE. None of them is paying for my monthly rent. Heck, I don’t even use Linux as much as I use XP or OSX (which I prefer for desktop operations).
But what I wrote is SIMPLY what I believe it should be done if you want to see Linux as a desktop platform having more than 0,40% of the market. If you want to leave things as is, that’s fine for me. But IF Linux platform wants to get more users and PROVE all that hype it’s got, then you better co-operate.
>why is there so much emphasis on apps all looking the same
It is not just about that. “looking” the same, is just one of the 20-30 more things they have to be done in addition.
As for the audio apps, traditionally these apps have “cool” non-standard interface. It is mostly a tradition kind of thing, while other times they just emulate devices, so they try to make their GUI look like these devices. However, a desktop environment does not bent on that rule.
Sigh..
– Why don’t they create a general HTML library out of KHTML that could be used by KDE (std widgets), Gnome (std widgets) and Apple (Safari)?
– Why don’t they (KDE/Gnome) use one big library for STL-like stuff? (lists, queues, hash tables, string support, etc)
– Why am I replying to this article while I know the previous stuff will never happen?
(altough I would really like that, just take the good stuff of both environments and create _general_ desktop libraries out of them)
Wishful thinking..
“I believe that the real problem in co-operation between Gnome and KDE (as I see it in the mailing list discussion) are the people who don’t work for these companies. These people (thankfully not all of them
don’t view the world with the eyes of someone who wants to make a better product.”
Ok, so all of us who care for and develop these projects in our own time should just go away so the corporations can turn our stuff into something that is ‘usable for the masses’. How can you state that non-commercial developers don’t wish to make the software better? Why don’t you keep a list of non-commercial VS commercial developers whenever you use a piece of Free Software and see which is column is longer.
You should reread those lists and you’ll find that many have *no problem* with shared specs and standards when no major disagreements exist in the implementation. Many disagree because so many view these common specs as one step towards holding integration across platforms above all else!
Quote from the article:
> But what I don’t like is allowing these independent hackers get in the > way of evolution because of their own political/religious agendas
While I also am for integration, I also know this:
What you like or don’t like is worthless in principle. The hacker’s political/religious agendas, on the other hand, are important by default.
Why, because they are the ones spending effort on creating the thing in the first place. Sure, you are “grateful” for their work. But you also say you don’t like that they spend their effort furthering their own goals!
Appreciation the means while condemning the ends is, of course, stupid, because the ends are the final cause of the means. If the hackers decided that their ends (their “political/religious agendas”) could not be efficiently advanced by their work (the means), the work would stop in a jiffie.
And what would you be left with? Whatever commercial companies could afford to develop. Which, in the current situation, is very little.
My guess is that path leads to dead OSs, like OS/2 and BeOS, if history is any guide.
So, stop pretending that the current free software is somehow an unexpectedly good side effect of the hackers, it is provided to you ONLY by them, and if they didn’t have those “political/religious agendas”, they wouldn’t have provided it to you.
If you want to influence what they are giving you, the smart course of action is embracing them and convincing them, kindly and politely. And the sentence I quoted above is definitely a stupid course of action.
http://dot.kde.org/1047362149/1047555753/
No, it was not an insult. The wording is “better product” as in “commercial product” not “better software”. Of course and you DO want your project to be better, but not necessarily in the same ways a commercial PRODUCT would want to be.
Sorry for the wording mix up there.
> You should reread those lists and you’ll find that many have *no problem* with shared specs and standards when no major disagreements exist in the implementation.
Of course!!! This is why the title says SOME people. NOT all. Don’t generalize more than I did, please.
>What you like or don’t like is worthless in principle.
Sure. But this was an editorial, so I speak for MYSELF.
[First of all, only SOME of you are getting the hot cake from my article. There are plenty of individual hackers who are very cooperative and they “get it”. But others don’t.
Linux has become commercial a lot, it is naive to think otherwise. Some rules have changed over the years. And personally, I find that positive for the Linux platform adoption.]
And all those who don’t fall in line with what the corporations want some how ‘don’t get it’. No, I think I understand you just fine.
[Knee jerk (non)thinking. Sorry.
I don’t “like” Red Hat, neither I “like” Mandrake or SuSE. None of them is paying for my monthly rent. Heck, I don’t even use Linux as much as I use XP or OSX (which I prefer for desktop operations).]
“…RedHat and what they are doing.” If you are going to quote then at least do it in context. So, you don’t like what RedHat is doing? You don’t identify them as the champion of this ‘integrate above all else’ philosophy? Ok, Eugenia, if you don’t use Linux on the desktop then you should write Apple and tell them how they shoudl integrate Aqua with KDE and GNOME because all of these different desktops is only hurting the Unix desktop.
[But what I wrote is SIMPLY what I believe it should be done if you want to see Linux as a desktop platform having more than 0,40% of the market. If you want to leave things as is, that’s fine for me. But IF Linux platform wants to get more users and PROVE all that hype it’s got, then you better co-operate.]
Oh yah, back to the ‘it’s just my opinion’ thing again. Ok, well I SIMPLY believe that you are full of crap, insulting, and have no appreciation for what the non-commercial developers have done. Sorry. That’s just my opinion
> >What you like or don’t like is worthless in principle.
> Sure. But this was an editorial, so I speak for MYSELF.
Ok, if you enjoy spend ing your time expressing useless opinions instead of performing useful action, who am I to argue.
It’s just that the article gave me the impression that you thought it was worth something.
>So, you don’t like what RedHat is doing?
Depends about what you are talking about. I like BlueCurve’s aims and I like interoperability that RH is pushing. I like these qualities.
However, Red Hat is a corporation, so not everything is fine… 😉
>you are full of crap,
Hardly.
> insulting,
Maybe. Maybe not.
> have no appreciation for what the non-commercial developers have done
Quote from the article: “These hackers are doing a lot of work for free, and the community is grateful for it, and I am too.” But that won’t mean that I will AGREE with you on each and every topic. Because I don’t.
Instead of quibbling over the mechanics of 2 seperate DE’s couldn’t some of that energy be funneled into a OSX clone? I would love OSX/QE on x86 hardware but i cannot get by with KDE’s kludgy UI, nor gnome’s appearance. With all the freshmeat projects and talent you would think someone would be willing to waste time on replication of OSX. i use deb for servers, 2k/xp for desktop.
.. for every style.
The religious Gnome and KDE types can have their own peculiar systems, and those that want a unified look can have that too.
And the cli people don’t have to install either.
There seems to be a distro available for every taste.
So what is everyone getting all huffy about?
If you don’t like what someone else is doing, do it yourself or don’t install it.
> Ok, if you enjoy spend ing your time expressing useless opinions instead of performing useful action
My job over here is to write articles, not hacking KDE’s or Gnome’s code.
>It’s just that the article gave me the impression that you thought it was worth something.
It is an editorial. It worths as much as every other editorial. I expect no less and no more.
Eugenia, since Aqua is your favorite desktop then why aren’t you pushing KDE and GNOME to integrate with MacOSX and pushing apple in the other? Don’t you see it as critical if Unix desktops are ever going to break 0.4%? And don’t say no because KDE and GNOME are linux desktops … they are not. They work on many if not all the major Unix like systems including MacOSX/Darwin.
If Redhat has such a problem with the QT licenses, why don’t they just clone QT, release it LGPL then join KDE? That would be a lot less work than building a parallel environment.
I do agree that it is not in Linux’s best interest to have a core GUI kit require licenses($$) when writing non-GPL code.
>since Aqua is your favorite desktop
It is not!
My favorite desktop is something between XP and BeOS (with some OSX touches here and there). In other words, it doesn’t exist.
>why aren’t you pushing KDE and GNOME to integrate with MacOSX and pushing apple in the other?
I hope you are just being sarcastic here, because that comment is simply idiotic and non-logical. Aqua is not part of the Linux platform, neither is open, neither Apple wants it to be. It’s theirs. But KDE and Gnome are open and everyone’s. There is a difference.
>why don’t they just clone QT, release it LGPL then join KDE?
Because it took Trolltech 10 years to bring Qt in the state there is today. Do you think that RH or anyone else has 10 years to spend and sit around and wait?
>Because it took Trolltech 10 years to bring Qt in the state there is today. Do you think that RH or anyone else has 10 years to spend and sit around and wait?
Redhat could simply buy Trolltech and change the license.
>Redhat could simply buy Trolltech
Trolltech’s main business are not Red Hat’s business and we should not forget that Trolltech is also an embedded systems company, a sector of technology that had better results than others these days after the dot com boom. In other words, Trolltech can prove more expensive that Red Hat can handle. And buying them, wouldn’t change much anyway for RH, so there is no good business reason to try and buy them.
See, the biggest problem that GNOME has is their time is running away, the powerusers are running away (those that could be GNOME developers are developing KDE apps nowadays), GNOME’s own people are not necessarily happy, Miguel de Icaza and Havoc Pennington have both admit that KDE is far better. Comparing the GNOME newspages you read all sorts of things like ‘KDE and GNOME finally agreed on unifying the HIG’, ‘KDE and GNOME finally agreed to work together’ and ‘KDE and GNOME finally agreed on unity’. And beliving in this the same people announce this happy cooperation on various news pages only to suggest the readers that there are big things going on. While on the other hand reading the KDE pages shows the exact opposite. Even the unified HIG page is stagnating and places such as freedesktop.org are only a nice breakfast discussion forum. Knowing the fact that GNOME has all these issues there are some poor attempts from Seth Nickel and Havoc Pennington getting the KDE developers into cooperation. But you are missing some points here. The KDE people are in no need to create standards because they already made a working consistent Desktop while GNOME still suffers from simple things such as Filechoosers. This kind of cooperation will only throw the serious development process of KDE significant back and re-implementing all the things the way GNOME developers like to see it will put the Desktop back for another 2-3 years on Linux. See, KDE are the first one with a working Desktop and KDE today are the leading forces on bringing the Desktop on Linux and KDE is 5 years ahead of what’s on GNOME today. They are not in the need and not in the mood (from reading the kde-core-devel Mailinglist) to re-invent all sort of libraries or adapt poorly designed GNOME components in KDE. Havoc Pennington is arguing on named List that people should not care wether they use OpenOffice, Evolution, Mozilla and other components on whatever Desktop but the real point is that we on KDE have no real need to run these applications because we already have powerful counterparts for them. We use KDE because we want unified integrated applications, regardless the fact that they are better or worse than other apps. We understand that GNOME lacks serious Office suites and really nice integrated Webbrowsers but that’s not our problem. See, they came to us (KDE) and we not to them. You have and must understand that KDE has a wide acceptance even in the german government and most major Distributions offer KDE as default Desktop. We deliver the Desktop and the Tools for a wide area of people including real business and corporations. What does GNOME have to offer that we couldn’t offer on KDE ? What business applications (that don’t crash) can GNOME offer for business ? See, we are not in the bad position after all. KDE since the version of 3.0 has a stable, documented and working framework and we offer a lot of applications for business today. Application development is a rapid process these days. People need half (if not a quarter) the time than GNOME need to develop applications. Not to mention the poor documentation of the libraries and the lack of poor programming manuals will make it take 5-6 times longer than normal because GNOME developers need to spent more time finding out how things has to be done before they can do it for their own programs. Why should GNOME and KDE cooperate to work together what reasons are there? GNOME is comming to us all the time so if they don’t like fragmentation then simply join KDE and develop on one desktop. This will stop fragmentation, this will offer good documentations for development, this will offer a far better framework and offers more applications than existing on GNOME. It’s after all as simple as this.
>>why don’t they just clone QT, release it LGPL then join KDE?
>Because it took Trolltech 10 years to bring Qt in the state
>there is today. Do you think that RH or anyone else has 10
>years to spend and sit around and wait?
Perhaps the real question we should be asking is why didn’t Redhat, a company that claims to be interested in desktop market, take some of the $700,000,000+ they spent on a compiler company and some questionable dot coms and use it to buy out Trolltech an standardize on Qt (thus settling this issue once and for all)? It would have given them an extremely integrated, high-quality API that is written in an object-oriented language, is very cross-platform, and has decent embedded prospects.
Linux Corporation vs. Linux Volunteer Developer is a silly battle; both sides are equally stupid and inept.
You need to learn to read the articles before you open your yap and spew out some knee-jerk reactions. The editorial AND the thread summation that followed were basically about interoperability, not about “merging” and “nullifying,” as you put it. In fact, there was at least one point where it was mentioned that this was NOT about “merging.” The editorial also made it clear that Linux really is still a great OS for the individual/private hacker, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Go do what you want–I truly wish you all the best. But ignoring the big picture–that Linux is headed straight for the consumer and business desktops–is absurd. And your last post just shows that you’ve run out of ammo and are just grasping at rhetorical straws.
> why didn’t Redhat, a company that claims to be interested in desktop market, take some of the $700,000,000+ they spent on a compiler company
When they did that, Red Hat had all the money they needed from their IPO. It is not 1999 anymore, remember?
Additionally, Red Hat only became interested in the corporate desktop market only last year, especially after their contracts with Sun.
So as you can see, you have to think a bit with “timing” in order to answer this question.
Thank you Captain Chris!
Eugenia said: “My job over here is to write articles”
OK, but what is your goal. Is writing articles what you want to achieve? I doubt it. I mean, it would be shallow. Just out of curiosity, if you would like to share, what is the bigger goal, what is the final purpose of the article-writing?
Is there such a purpose? Or are the articles just random expressions without an objective?
I simply disagree with the idea that Linux will die due to Unix-like splintering.
If we have a choice of compromising KDE or GNOME in order to achieve “unity”, then I’d rather not have such inferior unity. To me, what makes Linux fun is not “taking over the world”, but OPTIMAL PERFORMANCE – and the moment I see “unity” as lowering OPTIMAL performance, I say screw “unity”.
That brings us to: what happens if KDE and GNOME continue as they are? Will they die like UNIX? NO. This I think is the main mistake of the editorial. I happen to think that IN FACT, Linux can have success with KDE and GNOME as completely separate. Like OSX and XP – those are separate, but together they are 98% of the desktop. Why can’t one day KDE be (for example) 60% of the desktop, GNOME 30%, Win 5% and Mac 5%?
Who says Linux cannot “take over the world” with KDE-centric distros and GNOME-centric distros co-existing?
Finally, have you heard of Darwin? That may make this whole discussion pointless. By evolution either KDE or GNOME may pull ahead and the other simply die a natural death. By the looks of today, GNOME is the slower ship. Let them drift… and one day, KDE will be 90% of the Linux desktop, and THERE YOU HAVE YOUR ONE ENVIRONMENT, which is after all your goal with “unity”, right? Not “unity” for its own sake! Maybe GNOME will be the dominant species, maybe KDE, but it can happen naturally. After all, didn’t Windows take over quite on its own, without Apple having to “unify” with Windows? And Windows ended up with 95% of the market. Same can happen to either GNOME or KDE. No need to “unify”.
You underestimate Linux if you think it’ll die or NOT EXPAND TO CHALLENGE WINDOWS, just because KDE and GNOME remain ununified – Linux is much stronger than Unix because it has the enthusiasm of developers all over the world, so it won’t die a splintered death like Unix. Linux can AFFORD to have both KDE and GNOME and thrive. Remember crucially, in the end it is the hackers who are key – if they work best by having two separate desktops, LET THEM DO IT, because they are the ones doing the work, and the reason they do it, is because they love OPTIMAL performance – take that away and put them into some kind of Stalinist “unity” and lower standards, and they walk away. So it will NOT happen, and I’m glad it won’t.
Redhat is forced into creating Gnome. RH can’t go into a commerical account and make a sale of their big $$$ products and then say: “Oh by the way, you need to go buy licenses from Trolltech for all of your internal developers”. This is politically impossible. Sun and IBM won’t do it either.
QT has to go LGPL or RH will keep build Gnome.
I doubt that Trolltech is worth more than $200M, probably less. RH could easily acquire them. What are Trolltech’s revenues?
That Adam dude is one of the core authors and developers of KDE. Treaten him like shit won’t help and backup your arguments either. It’s sad from Eugenia forcing her opinions on others just because she runs a news site.
>I simply disagree with the idea that Linux will die due to Unix-like splintering.
NOBODY said it will “die”. But it will have much SLOWER market adoption!
>To me, what makes Linux fun is not “taking over the world”, but OPTIMAL PERFORMANCE
Why are you not using Solaris or IRIX then?
>That Adam dude is one of the core authors and developers of KDE. Treaten him like shit…
Nobody is treating him like shit. He brings that upon himself by generalizing and talking non-logical statements (aqua) and by not understanding the bigger picture that I try to present. He is exactly the type of guy I mention in the article about religions, so he doesn’t like to hear about it. And he naturally gets pissed. I am grateful for all his work, but that doesn’t mean we agree on everything about strategy.
> It’s sad from Eugenia forcing her opinions ..
That’s funny.
> QT has to go LGPL or RH will keep build Gnome.
Why do you think QT has to go LGPL ? The creators of QT did a big gift to the public already by GPL’ing the code and I personally have no issues with it. Let RH contibue working on GNOME the natural darwinism selection will let the strong and fast one survive in this case KDE because GNOME will need a bunch of years to keep up at least with 5% of the functionality that KDE offers today.
IMPORTANT REQUEST
I would welcome everyone to change the objective of this conversation and that we start looking behind GNOME and KDE, let’s compare both systems from developers view of things, this will clear up all sorts of understanding problems. Let’s compare both desctops for their documentation, clean implementation, code, speed of application creation and other things.
>When they did that, Red Hat had all the money they needed
>from their IPO. It is not 1999 anymore, remember?
>Additionally, Red Hat only became interested in the corporate
>desktop market only last year, especially after their
>contracts with Sun.
>So as you can see, you have to think a bit with “timing” in
>order to answer this question.
My point is that if a company has for years been unwilling to spend the time and resources to make a quality desktop product and has constantly devauled usability issues, they should stay in the server closet where they belong.
“Time” or “we’ve suddenly discovered the linux desktop” is simply no excuse for these people.
Interoperability is the key!.
The problem only obstacle is ‘religion’ with a pinch of ego. You know the ‘my religion is better than yours’ kind of thing or ‘if we use their technology then it means we acknowledge its worth which is true but we really don’t want to say that’.
Those complaining about the effort should answer this:
How would you feel if every app has its own unique clipboard and file selector, and the coder decided to set the app font to his favorite font ‘Courier’? Before answering this, remember he has the right to do it and according to some posters, since MacOSX and WinXP are different why shouldn’t apps be allowed to look and behave differently also.
If you are honest with yourself, then you would answer that, because they have to follow guidelines? But why do they have to follow guidelines? According to some posters, why should all apps be forced to the same common denominator, when the coder may want to do his own things?
The answer is obviously so the the apps interoperate with each other. If interoperability is permitted within one DE, why should it not be permitted accross DEs then?
The answer then boils down to ‘religion’ and egos. You start hearing things like:
I don’t think it’s fair to expect the KDE community to link to the core libraries of the Gnome project while saying that the Gnome project is not willing to link to the core libraries of the KDE project. I know, I know, “tainted by the GPL” or whatever, but that just doesn’t seem like the way that things are supposed to work.
How are things supposed to work then Scott? Do you look at the value of the library and the benefits, or at the fact that it is a GNOME library? This is pure religion and will not take us anywhere. Statements like these just feed the trolls.
Please GNOME and KDE developers, stop this bullshit and start thinking out of the Box.
Minkwe, THAT’s the spirit!!
I think your point is very, very important to any Linux company expecting to make inroads into the commercial desktop operating system market. Developers of commercial desktop applications won’t be too thrilled to have to shell out significant sums of money to TrollTech in order to develop and sell commercial KDE based applications on the Linux platform. GNOME is LGPL so it allows this particular use so is more ‘commercial software friendly’.
Naturally none of the free software developers or hacker community really give a shit about this issue, because they only care about free software or open source software so commercial software for Linux is of no consequence for them (and hence a common later between KDE and GNOME also). And theirin lies the problem. Linux is at a cross roads right now with the tug of commercial developers pulling it one way and the tug of the original free software and open source developers tugging it the other way. The two ways are simply not compatible, and IMHO is the primary reason why Linux cannot succeed in the desktop space.
Why not let one pull ahead of the other? Would you advocate that MSFT drop everything they’re doing, so they can “unify” with Amiga? And saying that having KDE and GNOME separate will slow down the adoption of Linux is bull. What will slow things down is for KDE to try to “unify” with GNOME. Gnome is falling behind – let them die, it is faster this way. Or let KDE die. Just because RH can’t bring themselves to deal with KDE doesn’t mean the whole Linux community needs to drop everything and “unify” so that RH can be happy. Sorry, let RH learn to deal with KDE – buy Trolltech if they have to, whatever. But don’t cripple KDE (or GNOME) in the name of “unity”. How would this sound: “hey windows users, here, we have ONE desktop, that won’t confuse you, sure it is mediocre as a result of “unity”, but hey, it is only ONE”. No thanks.
[>since Aqua is your favorite desktop
It is not!
My favorite desktop is something between XP and BeOS (with some OSX touches here and there). In other words, it doesn’t exist.
]
“… I use XP or OSX (which I prefer for desktop operations).”
Ok, so XP or Aqua is your favorite desktop that *actually exists* (See: not in fairy tale Eugenia land). Excuse me for failing to read your mind and see the wonderful desktop you dream of at night ;P
[I hope you are just being sarcastic here, because that comment is simply idiotic and non-logical. Aqua is not part of the Linux platform, neither is open, neither Apple wants it to be. It’s theirs. But KDE and Gnome are open and everyone’s. There is a difference.]
I am not and it is not. Differences … that’s my point! Yes, Aqua is different *and* so are GNOME and KDE. They have different technologies different goals different people different motivations/histories and different applications. You and RedHat wish to make them into the same thing for all intensive purposes. That is the point RedHat wishes to nullify the differences and that is the root motivation behind this push by Havoc.
[The editorial AND the thread summation that followed were basically about interoperability, not about “merging” and “nullifying,” as you put it.]
No, the threads and arguments that Eugenia’s article are referencing make quite clear that ‘nullifying’ is the goal. That is what RedHat has attempted. Some do not want to see any cooperation or shared specs between the desktops. I am not one of them. However, others are hoping to merge the two desktops. They view interoperability and integration to be king. I am not one of them either. RedHat and Eugenia are. They wish that all of the differences between KDE and GNOME that are visible to the end user to just go away.
@Unknown … my contributions to KDE are piddly and I don’t deserve any special consideration whatsoever. But as one who has contributed a tiny bit and one who wishes to contribute more to my favorite desktop … thanks for the sentiment
>Why not let one pull ahead of the other?
Because that will take YEARS and the Linux distros don’t have the time for these kind of silly races. They need to do work and they need to satisfy their customers. And TODAY, their customers want both Qt and GTK+ apps. They don’t have the luxury to wait.
> Would you advocate that MSFT drop everything they’re doing, so they can “unify” with Amiga?
That’s silly now, please.
Developers of commercial desktop applications won’t be too thrilled to have to shell out significant sums of money to TrollTech in order to develop and sell commercial KDE based applications on the Linux platform.
Now think again about this stupid sentence of yours. You take the rights of one to make money but allow the other to do so ? Or said differently the Developer of commercial applications shouldn’t pay to Trolltech for one shitty license but still like to make money from his product ? Your comment is so what disqualified.
>Some do not want to see any cooperation or shared specs between the desktops.
This is exactly what I want.
> I am not one of them. However, others are hoping to merge the two desktops.
This is NOT what I want. NEITHER Red Hat wants that. Read Havoc’s article again please the one he speaks about Choice and Fragmentation. He outlines it fine there.
> They view interoperability and integration to be king. I am not one of them either. RedHat and Eugenia are.
No, this is not nullifying. This is what you just said: “interoperability and integration”. This is NOT merging.
I think this is where all your understanding problems lie Adam. You don’t understand the levels of changes that need to be done. You *think* that KDE won’t be KDE anymore and Gnome won’t be Gnome anymore. This is wrong. You are overreacting I guess.
[Nobody is treating him like shit. He brings that upon himself by generalizing and talking non-logical statements (aqua) and by not understanding the bigger picture that I try to present. He is exactly the type of guy I mention in the article about religions, so he doesn’t like to hear about it. And he naturally gets pissed. I am grateful for all his work, but that doesn’t mean we agree on everything about strategy.]
Ok, two things:
1. You can not say ‘no one is treating him like shit’ and then say ‘he brings it upon himself’ and then expect anyone to take you seriously when you claim that *I* am illogical. For the record, the first part is true: no one is treating _me_ like shit, but Eugenia is insulting to Free Software developers in general
2. I don’t have religion about this and I disagree with you. Claiming that I am religious just because I disagree is stupid. We disagree about the future of the Unix desktop. You feel it won’t go anywhere unless all the choice and cool differences are eliminated and I feel otherwise.
Luckily, I am helping to make my version of the future happen while you just write stupid articles and hope others will listen to your ‘big picture’. Another notable difference between you and I … I use a Free Desktop every day and you are still stuck using your closed system.
I point out the fact that he’s misread/misunderstood the article and I’m treating him like shit? Grow up.
And how the hell is it physically possible to force one’s own opinioins on others? Did Eugenia somehow magically make you believe what she was saying? If so, you’re an idiot and shouldn’t be allowed to operate motorized vehicles or handle money.
You want me to back up what I say more fully? Ok, Big Boy:
In her editorial, Eugenia mentions “interoperability” no fewer than four times. She mentions that companies can and should “support both” (or words very much to that effect) no fewer than seven times. Not one time does she espouse “merging,” “unifying,” or anything to that effect. In fact, the following quote should clear things up:
And make no mistake: “the common standards that were defined up to now didn’t make KDE nor Gnome lose their individuality”. Choice is good and choice will remain. Nobody is saying to make Gnome and KDE the same project! What is needed are just some common standards that will make the life easier for the user and the application developer. Each project will retain its individuality, but instead of having, for example, a Gnome item working via the notification area in the gnome taskbar just fine and
then you run the same app under KDE and you get the notification little app as a real window and not on KDE’s notification area, that is very bothersome for the user.
Did you get that? “Choice is good and choice will remain”? “just some common standards”? “Each project will retain its individuality”?
I didn’t bother going over the thread summary, because I have a life. But everything I said in my earlier post about what the devs said is true, too. Read it.
That backup enough for you, Sport?
Usability experts from Gnome and KDE!?!?
WTF!?!?
HAHA!!
That is hilarious!!
I have never particularly found either to be intuitive, consistent, or really anywhere near as usable as even Windows 3.1!!!
OMG!!
Yikes..
BTW, eugenia:
http://looncraz.tripod.com/
I will soon be posting some shots of some Zeta decors that have been previously allowed to be shown.
I have done some repairs that you didn’t even bring up, but was by others.
And one that was astonishly inconsistent with what should be. hehe.. such as rounding ONE inside corner..hmm.. oops ;-). Though when y’all finally see the type of coding that goes into this, it will be understandable by the masses..
–The loon
Because that will take YEARS and the Linux distros don’t have the time for these kind of silly races. They need to do work and they need to satisfy their customers. And TODAY, their customers want both Qt and GTK+ apps. They don’t have the luxury to wait.
Exactly that’s why this cooperation sucks this will throw both desktop significant back for YEARS if they need to merge stuff or work on unified standards. They are too different from programming, from framework, from code and from implementation. KIOslaves are not GNOME-VFS, DCOP is not CORBA and so on. Please see it from a programmers perspective for a moment, this kind of cooperating is simply not possible anymore.
This is NOT what I want. NEITHER Red Hat wants that. Read Havoc’s article again please the one he speaks about Choice and Fragmentation. He outlines it fine there.
And here is the problem Havoc speaks for himself not for the whole community and not for KDE itself. While his idea has some points the core problems are differently. The way Havoc likes to see things means that KDE or GNOME has to change sigificant code. Say they both agree that gnome-vfs and kioslaves have to go, they now create knome-vfslaves, the code may be new a core component shared by both, now can you imagine how much work this requires for both to change ? GNOME is in a nowhere position because they don’t offer something productive at all to say their Desktop suxx while the one from KDE is really usable and productive. Now the question:
a) why should KDE agree with GNOME to do something new
b) can you imagine what work is required to change all this just because Havoc thinks it’s right ?
c) What purpose or what reason is there for KDE to unify with GNOME while GNOME has to offer nothing. It’s their project, their shit and their code not the ones from KDE.
Adam = Adam Treat, or manyoso on Slashdot. I had a fun thread with him and a few others the other day on the subject of glib/gobject.
Unknown = oGALAXYo.
Trolltech’s GPL does more than stop commercial developers. It also stops the BSD/MPL class of license too – ie. the ones that say open source/commerical, I don’t care.
The kernel’s GPL is fine because it has the linking exception which more or less turns it into the LGPL. Trolltech on the other hand does not allow the linking exception and thus will become an equivalent to a “Microsoft tax” on every non-GPL Linux developer.
Non-GPL developers are a fact of life, banks are never going to GPL their internal applications. People with GPL blinders on always seem to forget about internal apps. In the overall market 90% or more of developers write internal apps. (No one is going to buy the GPL it and don’t distribute it arguement either).
For Linux to have broad acceptance we can’t have a tax on a majority of the potential development community. Having the tax just turns Trolltech into another form of monopoly. So either QT has to change it’s license or we get an alternative like Gnome.
Bottom line it is the Qt GPL that is the splitting desktop.
[No, this is not nullifying. This is what you just said: “interoperability and integration”. This is NOT merging.
I think this is where all your understanding problems lie Adam. You don’t understand the levels of changes that need to be done. You *think* that KDE won’t be KDE anymore and Gnome won’t be Gnome anymore. This is wrong. You are overreacting I guess.]
Hey Eugenia, I understand things quite well thank you very much. I was involved in those conversations and I’ve stated many times that shared specs and so on are fine with me. You are wrong when you say that RedHat is not interested in nullifying the desktop because they are. They view any differences that are not superficial to the user as being bad and lead to fragmentation. They are different platforms and they have different goals and design ideals. They can not be completely integrated without the merging and this is what they are looking for.
Havoc has called for KDE and GNOME to adopt an underlying ‘Star Trek’ layer that would sit underneath all of the object platforms between the two desktops and Qt/Gtk+ would wrap this ‘Star Trek’ layer. He has said that he wants a common component framework, object model, messaging system, multimedia system, configuration system, … all of it merged! Others have said that we should stop calling ourselves KDE developers and GNOME developers rather KDE/GNOME developers and have spoken of all these shared specs only as the ‘first step’ into eventual merging of the two. Go read *and* understand the lists and then start talking…
In his world the two desktops would be the same and applications would integrate equally well with each other. Gtk+ components embedded into KOffice and so on. Others have called for the same. Never mind the huge *hack* this would be and the sheer ugliness of all of it and the fact that it is not going to happen … It doesn’t change the fact that this is precisely what Havoc is saying.
So please, don’t lie in these little posts and articles and claim that this is not what is going on and what is being said. The lists are open and everyone is free to go see this for themselves.
Another way to look at it: If Redhat bought Trolltech, LGPL’d QT, and stopped funding gnome – how long would it be before gnome collaped?
Havoc has called for KDE and GNOME to adopt an underlying ‘Star Trek’ layer that would sit underneath all of the object platforms between the two desktops and Qt/Gtk+ would wrap this ‘Star Trek’ layer. He has said that he wants a common component framework, object model, messaging system, multimedia system, configuration system, … all of it merged! Others have said that we should stop calling ourselves KDE developers and GNOME developers rather KDE/GNOME developers and have spoken of all these shared specs only as the ‘first step’ into eventual merging of the two. Go read *and* understand the lists and then start talking…
Exactly that is what Havoc is trying. I read exactly the same out of all the writings on kde-core-devel. That’s an insane task and I don’t see the points why KDE should throw all their stuff and their workign desktop in the trash only to follow an insane vision from a visionaire. He should have thought about this years ago and joined KDE development. Years ago this may have been possible but today both Desktops are simply to different and one of them needs to throw components for their System away only to support some new standards. This throws the whole Desktop back some years.
[So either QT has to change it’s license or we get an alternative like Gnome.]
Oh, the irony is a killer!
Jon, are you aware of the history of the these two projects? Do you understand how absolutely hilarious/tragic your statement is?
That’s partly correct. Having two different desktop platforms is brain damage, and pisses off virtually all 3rd party developers who aren’t tied to any one desktop.
3rd party developers, who just want to write software and for all Linux/FreeBSD users to be able to use it, hate the current situation. It’s a mess. You either write things twice, or you write it once and it doesn’t integrate as well as it should.
It’s even worse if you want to share code. I want to write an object once, and have it usable by all developers, regardless of whether they use Qt, standard C++, C, Python, Ruby or their own personal dialect of lisp.
We can’t do that currently, and it’s annoying. A solution would be most welcome.
So when people talk about merging the VFS systems, yeah, rock on. That doesn’t mean KDE has to use an implementation written in C, it can have its own in Qt/C++ if it likes. No problems by me, as long as we can write plugins for it in whatever environment we want.
The point is that pretending KDE and GNOME are separate is dumb. People don’t want to target KDE or GNOME, they want to target Linux, or even free operating systems in general. Havoc has the right idea here.
To be honest, you’re just coming off as sounding paranoid, and worse, it sounds like you think the current status quo is OK. It’s not. It needs to change. These flamewars seen on the lists are the winds of change.
Having two different desktop platforms is brain damage, and pisses off virtually all 3rd party developers who aren’t tied to any one desktop.
Exactly, why is GNOME being created then ? They should have thought 6 years ago about this issue and we wouldn’t have all these flamages these days. They made the mistake in splitting up the community by creating another Desktop for Linux and today exactly these people who created GNOME 6 years ago whine on other peoples irc channel about KDE being far ahead over GNOME.
… What a sad reality eh ?
No, that’s the wrong way around.
KDE split the desktop IMHO. Fact is, they ignored the reality of the political situation. By using Qt, they caused horrible flamewars which split the community clean down the middle.
Because really, the shared licensing of the code is what we all have in common. It’s the ideological glue that keeps this whole ship sailing. By ignoring that, by pretending using non-free code was OK and ignoring those who pleaded with them to switch to a free toolkit, or write their own they made the creation of GNOME inevitable, because the freedom of the code is what started the creation of the movement and is the whole reason for its existance.
If Ettrich had his head screwed on back then, he’d have realised that no matter how much he liked Qt, the cost of using it was too high. In fact, we’re still counting the cost of that bad decision years later, we’re still picking up the pieces.
So really, you have it totally the wrong way around. If KDE had used a free toolkit from day one, GNOME probably wouldn’t exist. Now, there would still be other desktops, and standards would still be needed (rox, enlightenment etc). But to say, “this situation would be solved if GNOME hadn’t been started” is extremely stupid, because its creation was an inevitable consequence of bad decisions on the part of the early KDE team.
The point is that pretending KDE and GNOME are separate is dumb. People don’t want to target KDE or GNOME, they want to target Linux, or even free operating systems in general. Havoc has the right idea here.
No. This is what you (and other freeloaders) want free DE developers to do. All KDE system developers (and GNOMEers too) have the right to spend the time in their lives they donate to the free software world developing any code they wish, to any language, library or spec they choose.
Hopefully, the recent spate of outside whining will not change that. It’s great you like Havoc’s ideas – many do not. I encourage you to join that project and try to make it better.
Also, diversity is a GOOD thing. Too many years with your throat under the Microsoft boot have apparently taught you (and Eugenia) to fear having more than one choice.
mike, why are you focusing on who Adam is and who Galaxy? Why don’t you deal with arguments, instead of “personal” – your comment brought ZERO to the discussion. Focus on what the person has to say, not who they are.
Adam, while I agree with you in many ways, please try to be more civil toward Eugenia. I don’t always agree with her (in fact here I DON’T), but she is not the “enemy”. So don’t say: “lies”, “shit” etc. Disagreement – I can disagree with friends, it is only fanatics who see disagreement as enmity.
Re: RHAT. This whole “unity” thing has a stench of RHAT about it. I have nothing against RHAT, but I don’t like when they try to destroy KDE just because they were slow in getting into the desktop market. Seems to me, KDE and GNOME have been at it for awhile. RHAT was asleep at the switch when it came to the desktop (or simply had different priorities, or couldn’t do server and dk simultaneously) – and now, they woke up, and glommed on to GNOME because of the Trolltech issue. Sadly, GNOME was a bit behind. So, now what they’d like to do, is slow down KDE and “absorb” them into some kind of frankenstein with GNOME just so they can go to their corporate clients and say: here, this is THE linux desktop… they can’t really do it, with a crippled KDE, and with KDE racing ahead at great speed – KDE is making their GNOMish desktop look silly and behind the times. So, they’d like to slow down KDE… which is NOT IN THE INTEREST OF LINUX AT LARGE, it is only in the interest of RHAT. I say, screw them. If they want to dominate the linux market, let them do it honestly – make GNOME the greatest and the bestest, not by crippling KDE. Bottom line, KDE has nothing to gain from this, and the linux community can afford to support both GNOME and KDE – this “unity” thing seems mostly in the narrow interest of RHAT.
Nobody owns KDE – and if *some* developers try to push this “unity” thing, well, others will just take KDE and fork it. So there. I don’t think that would be in the interest of THE ONE AND ONLY. Let linux alone – it is doing quite all right with both KDE and GNOME separate.
Could you please _stop the FUD_ about GPL? You _can_ use QT GPL code to develop your in house app, I repeat, you _can_ use QT GPL code to develop your in house app. You don’t have to share the code with Trolltech.
Read the GPL. You only have to share your code if you distribute it. And only to whom you distribute. (For example, your parent company).
So the GPL only affect companies that want to SELL software.
This almost make me puke. After years saying that KDE was not free enought (with good and bad arguments), people now are saying KDE is too free (with terrible arguments).
It is possible and safe to develop in house apps with QT. Know better before you start creating myths about a project so important as KDE is.
Give me a real life exaple why not.
Eugenia, what do you think?
To quote the KDE people:
But it is for the user benefit. Right now, KDE is pleasing its users. Some people wish us to throw away things that are working and pleasing people in order to court people who by definition aren’t using KDE so much.
I ask you: What does replacing KDE tech with plain C tech do to benefit
people who use KDE? Not users of GNOME apps, but users who actually use
the apps we ship?
I think he is absolutely right. Gnome has very little to offer KDE, it is the inferior product by most reasonable measures. Unix has had window managers that allowed applications to communicate with each other for many years before KDE came along. But a GUI is more than a window manager and KDE was the first full featured Unix gui. Introducing more than just surface support for Gnome into KDE would render KDE as little more than a window manager for KDE apps.
Lets assume “the worst case” and that the GUIs continue to develop along a natural path to the point that Gnome apps are virtually unusable in the KDE gui and that KDE apps are virtually unusable outside the KDE gui. OK what is so horrible with that? Some distributions become KDE based (like Mandrake was in the early days) and others are more flexible. “Linux” is a kernel not a product and it doesn’t need to worry about branding. Distributions like RedHat, Suse and Mandrake should be branded. I would hope that in the future that IBM relases an AIX-Linux and IBM’s AIX-Linux looks and acts just like AIX, which means all sorts of “Linux standards” are violeted but all sorts of AIX standards are maintained.
I’m going to respond Rich’s example to show how destructive this unity push is:
– Why don’t they create a general HTML library out of KHTML that could be used by KDE (std widgets), Gnome (std widgets) and Apple (Safari)?
Good reason. KHTML uses QT which is a GPL app which means KHTML must be GPL. Gnome as a matter of philosophy does not bundle libraries under the GPL because they want to leave the floor open to commercial development (something KDE is opposed to). If you think the HTML library in kdelibs is better than the one in Mozilla then you are KDE user.
– Why don’t they (KDE/Gnome) use one big library for STL-like stuff? (lists, queues, hash tables, string support, etc)
Many of the data structures for KDE are provided by their standard widget set, QT. Gnome was designed to not use QT; Gnome has no permission to take Trolltech’s code and relicense it under the LGPL.
– Why am I replying to this article while I know the previous stuff will never happen?
(altough I would really like that, just take the good stuff of both environments and create _general_ desktop libraries out of them)
Because you didn’t know why they wouldn’t happen. You probably thought it was people being stubborn not that it would be essentially illegal.
____________
Finally on the issue of commercial developers.
1) Companies should have no problem GPLing their internal code. Banks were given as an example. Banks should be trilled to work together on designing better internal systems. I think it would be great if Bank of America, Wells Fargo, First Union, Chemical Bank… could work together on their internal systems. Writing the same system 200 times over doesn’t benefit any of them.
2) If you want to write for KDE and don’t want to pay the trolltech tax then write a pure X app. There are still tons of good libraries that just bind at the X level and would work fine with either KDE or Gnome. By picking GTK or QT you are and should be selecting a GUI.
Ok, so everyone look … here is someone who wishes to see the two projects merge for all intensive purposes. Ok, Mike I understand and respect your opinion. I also disagree
IMO, KDE and GNOME are capable of producing whole complete desktops with significant differences while living side by side. Not everyone wishes to eliminate choice. Some people value choice.
It is also true that third party developers hate the current situation with the different distros. They would like to see RedHat join UnitedLinux and decrease fragmentation. I’m sure some would rather that the other distros just go away and only RedHat remain. Still others (like me) wish that RedHat and other distros would agree where appropriate/reasonable and disagree when sound technical/practical reasons exist and where the differences lead to better software and enable us to see the large and appealing range of choices. RedHat is all about nullifying the desktop… while some third party developers would likely wish to nullify RedHat.
[The point is that pretending KDE and GNOME are separate is dumb.]
No, claiming that they are the same is dumb. They are not and they shouldn’t be. Many prefer KDE and many prefer GNOME. Merge the two and many will suffer.
[To be honest, you’re just coming off as sounding paranoid, and worse, it sounds like you think the current status quo is OK. It’s not. It needs to change. These flamewars seen on the lists are the winds of change.]
To be honest, you’re coming off as arrogant and sounding egotistical, and worse, it sounds like you think KDE and GNOME are the same. They are not. The debates seen on the lists are an ill wind being whipped up by some arrogant people, some missguided people and some commercial people. Move along.
“3rd party developers, who just want to write software and for all Linux/FreeBSD users to be able to use it, hate the current situation. It’s a mess. You either write things twice, or you write it once and it doesn’t integrate as well as it should.[…]To be honest, you’re just coming off as sounding paranoid, and worse, it sounds like you think the current status quo is OK. It’s not. It needs to change. These flamewars seen on the lists are the winds of change.”
Extremely well said, Mike. Unfortunately, so many hackers don’t look at the end result from two very important points of few: that of the third-party developer and that of the end user. Why are hackers going to all the trouble of creating a product, investing thousands of hours, if they don’t care if it gets used or not? Learn from BeOS, NeXTStep, and whatever other cool OS’s didn’t pan out as planned: LOTS of apps need to be developed, and LOTS of users need to want to use the entire system. If not, Linux eventually goes the way of OS/2: around, but off in the shadows (no offense to you OS/2 users out there!).
[KDE split the desktop IMHO. Fact is, they ignored the reality of the political situation. By using Qt, they caused horrible flamewars which split the community clean down the middle.]
All history anyway, but …
GNOME split the desktop, IMO. Fact is, they chose to develop a new desktop when they could have worked on making a free Qt replacement like Harmony. By focusing on Qt and making a new incompatible desktop, they caused horrible flamewars which split the community clean down the middle.
Because really, the shared licensing of the code is what we all have in common. It’s the ideological glue that keeps this whole ship sailing. By ignoring that, by pretending using non-free code was OK and ignoring those who pleaded with them to switch to a free toolkit, or write their own they made the creation of GNOME inevitable, because the freedom of the code is what started the creation of the movement and is the whole reason for its existance
Listen to the commercial developers today. QT is free and they still aren’t happy because they want BSD style free. Well they had that with X 10 years ago, before X broke into 20 different incompatable implementations as a result of the MIT license.
I didn’t disagree with RMS’s Jihad against KDE at the time, and I believe he made the right choice. But now that the problem in licensing is fixed; but the problem with Gnome being really truly inferior is not. I don’t see any reason to consider Gnome a coequal desktop to KDE. I personally use Windowmaker I don’t expect every app designer to target my choice of windowmanager or to integrate well.
KDE is the Linux standard GUI (especially outside the United States). If commercial developers want to create hooks in GTK so that they can use an LGPL library and at the same time share information with other apps I don’t see that as primarily KDE’s responsibility. That strikes me as as much more of a Gnome issue. Much worse is for Gnome to claim that KDE should self cripple because Gnome can’t use GPLed code while KDE can use LGPL code.
GNOME split the desktop, IMO. Fact is, they chose to develop a new desktop when they could have worked on making a free Qt replacement like Harmony.
Harmony were started at the same time for the same reason. Either project could fail and if the other was succesful the situation could be salvaged. In actually history Harmony did fail and Gnome was succesful. I don’t think RMS made the wrong choice in starting two projects at the time, I just don’t see much point in Gnome today.
KDE split the desktop IMHO. Fact is, they ignored the reality of the political situation. By using Qt, they caused horrible flamewars which split the community clean down the middle.
Sorry, I don’t share your opinion here (and I mean the whole reply of yours not just the quote above). If the community is really so much flaming KDE and QT then why is it used by most people today ? 5 times more developers, 5 times more users, acceptance in german government, acceptance on most majory distributions.
Am I missing something here ? Oh and for the nonargument of yours related to QT. Instead creating a new Desktop these people could have helped creating a Free-QT clone. Instead writing GTK+. GTK+ could be the Free-QT today.
i can’t stand the notion that you are the one here with political intentions.
the kde people want to make the best desktop.
you want to rise some ominous market share.
I like to let you know that I’m standing fully behind you. Your arguments and replies are making much sense to me and I’m happy that many others have the same opinion.
Extremely well said, Mike. Unfortunately, so many hackers don’t look at the end result from two very important points of few: that of the third-party developer and that of the end user. Why are hackers going to all the trouble of creating a product, investing thousands of hours, if they don’t care if it gets used or not? Learn from BeOS, NeXTStep, and whatever other cool OS’s didn’t pan out as planned: LOTS of apps need to be developed, and LOTS of users need to want to use the entire system. If not, Linux eventually goes the way of OS/2: around, but off in the shadows (no offense to you OS/2 users out there!).
They are doing it for the same reason that 10 years ago they started creating free server applications. To permanently end the artificial ecoomy created by intellectual property law in software. Linux is not a product it is a social revolution. It is no victory for Linux is everyone were to use the Linux kernel with a commercial gui to run commercial apps.
By creating an alternate sociology of software construction you allow agencies with similar goals to cooperate with one another and thus drastically reduce the cost of software construction while at the same time making all software available to all people who want it.
Servers came first; desktops didn’t come until years later. The battle on the server side is a long way from being won (except perhaps on webservers). The battle on the desktop side has barely begun.
So they do want people to use their desktop; but they aren’t going to win the war by just being a product.
[Harmony were started at the same time for the same reason. Either project could fail and if the other was succesful the situation could be salvaged. In actually history Harmony did fail and Gnome was succesful. I don’t think RMS made the wrong choice in starting two projects at the time, I just don’t see much point in Gnome today.]
I also would agree with RMS and others starting the Harmony project. It is important to note that RMS has no problem with KDE/Qt today and views Qt and Trolltech as a success story for Free Software.
If the current crop of Mergers, Integrators, Nullifiers, and Embracers — (MINE developers/cheerleaders) really have a problem with Qt’s licensing (incredible to me, but whatever) then they can start work on Harmony again and have all the merging they want.
IMO, KDE and GNOME are capable of producing whole complete desktops with significant differences while living side by side. Not everyone wishes to eliminate choice. Some people value choice.
Yes, me too. You have to distinguish between desktop and platform. My beef is with platforms. I don’t mind what desktop people use, and as a developer, I don’t want to have to mind. I just want to write code, that’ll seamlessly integrate with whatever desktop the user is using, whether that be KDE, GNOME, E17, ROX, OpenBox, whatever.
It is also true that third party developers hate the current situation with the different distros.
You’re distorting my words. That’s not what I said. I didn’t mention distros, I was talking about desktop platforms, which both KDE and GNOME (and e17) provide.
RedHat is all about nullifying the desktop… while some third party developers would likely wish to nullify RedHat.
Here we go again with the FUD and paranoia. Red Hat are trying to ensure the user doesn’t have to care about the existance of KDE and GNOME. And why should they? Why should they know of, or care about, these little “wars”. They just want to get on with their work. If KDE/Qt apps use Keramik and GTK2 apps use Mist and GTK1 apps use the default, that is strange and confuses people, so you have Red Hat specific themes and artwork.
You’ll note I never mentioned Red Hat once in my post, so I’m not sure how you ended up flaming them.
Has anyone actually purchased a software package that requires the use of KDE or GNOME? Every commercial software program I have bought in the last few years seem to be more concerned about which version of Glibc rather than what window manager you were running. TCL/TK anyone?
Your comment about a large fork forcing the original developers into merging the source trees down the road? Has this occured to samba or wine?
After reading the article, it is obvious that you really do not have a high opinion of the open source effort as it relates to a “polished commercial product”.
Microsoft did not take over the desktop by “unifying” its products with it’s competitors, they did so by making their products similar yet cheaper and more accessible then their competitor’s products.
> is obvious that you really do not have a high opinion of the open source effort as it relates to a “polished commercial product”.
As a user (not as a geek) and when taking the seat of any Windows user who would like to try out Linux as an alternative, the fact that something is open or not, makes little or no difference.
I have high respect on the OSS movement, but when it comes to user experience and the market share, it doesn’t matter one bit. These potential users need a BETTER environment than Windows and you currently don’t offer them that.
This is why I will ALWAYS compare the OSS efforts to their commercial counterparts. Always! Because I use computers to do my job, not because of some religious GPL thingie. What matters to me is to do the job well, not badly (but hey “it’s Free”).
We see things from different eyes, I see it from my brother’s non-computer literate user and you see it is as a geek. Too bad my friend, but the 99% of the people on the planet are not computer literates. And these are the people who buy and the people who can put Linux “up there”. Their sheer numbers. Geeks (that 1%) don’t matter in this business, because, Linux is now a business. It has become corporate, you like it or not. Money talks. Ask IBM.
[Yes, me too. You have to distinguish between desktop and platform. My beef is with platforms. I don’t mind what desktop people use, and as a developer, I don’t want to have to mind. I just want to write code, that’ll seamlessly integrate with whatever desktop the user is using, whether that be KDE, GNOME, E17, ROX, OpenBox, whatever.]
KDE is a desktop *and* a platform. As a developer the platform part of KDE is important for me to rapidly create an application that seemlessly works with other applications on the same platform. As a user the desktop part of KDE allows me to use my applications in a seemless way that is very powerful and very nice.
Try as hard as you like, you will not be able to merge all the platforms you mentioned and the result if you did would be so horrible as to be beyond sufficient words. Those platforms are *different* and for many reasons, some which are good and some which are bad. Fine, we agree let’s get rid of the dumb/bad differences, but do not suffer any illusion that these platforms will merge! Luckily, because the result would be horrible and frankenstein.
I am not trying to distort your words and I think you’ve missed my point. I was making an analogy between RedHat’s attempts to nullify the desktop (how is this FUD and paranoia again?) with the wish of some that RedHat the OS were nullified. Both are ludicrous.
You are also being missleading. I do not argue that common themes like Geramik are bad. I argue with your wish to see RedHat make all of these ‘Star Trek’ (See: frankenstein abomination) layers. Havoc is the chief proponent of this and he is a top RHAT developer.
Eugena, if there was a XP/BeOS type desktop (with some OSX touches here and there) you could run on top of a MS kernel, would you use it as your main desktop? Based on your earlier suggestion, I think you would. It will, however, never be, as you pointed out, because MS has total control over how the desktop looks. Compare that with the flexibility of KDE to mold your desktop experiance. It sounds like you want the best of both worlds, consistancy, yet your own private Idaho.
Here we go again with the FUD and paranoia. Red Hat are trying to ensure the user doesn’t have to care about the existance of KDE and GNOME. And why should they? Why should they know of, or care about, these little “wars”. They just want to get on with their work. If KDE/Qt apps use Keramik and GTK2 apps use Mist and GTK1 apps use the default, that is strange and confuses people, so you have Red Hat specific themes and artwork.
Mike, I was trying to explain this to you earlier but you usually avoid replying to me. I assume this has to do because your lack or arguments against my replies.
Look, the KDE developers wrote KDE because they had one vision in mind. The vision of having a full integrated Desktop Environment. The same intentions were made during the GNOME process but changed later and today someone changed the idea once again with arguments like yours.
The user should not care, the user should not know about war (which war ?), the user should run all his apps that look the same. Exactly KDE offers exactly this, I don’t see why GNOME needs to change their orientation once again with this have multiple applications that don’t belong to GNOME run on the GNOME plattform. With this stuff in mind I don’t need a Desktop at all and would probably use BlackBox and run these standalone applications. Your argumentations are basically worthless because KDE offers exactly an unified Desktop Environment, with equal looking applications which share the same Themes. KDE offers all applications that is required to do daily work, there is no need for KDE to have their users use OpenOffice or Mozilla because they offer already powerful counterparts which are well and nicely integrated in KDE. So where is the point ? I don’t share your opinion nor do I share Havoc Pennington’s opinion. Wasn’t it enough for him splitting the GNOME community into 2 parts itself by doing nasty things on it ? Wasn’t it enough does he now have to continue the same colletaral damage on KDE ? I don’t want a messed up KDE with mixed GNOME and KDE libs, this is the biggest horror ever and I would switch to another alternative then which may be in this case NOT linux anymore. What is GNOME today ? 5 years and still not usable. Look and compare MorphOS for example, same time of development, different plattform, includes a full OS fundament including DESKTOP far more usable and far ahead of what GNOME is today and less people worked on it.
Now I may sound rude, offensive and unfair but what actually is GNOME today if there wasn’t Eazel who horrible failed with their concepts and Ximiand with Evolution ? GNOME today would simply be a Panel, Windowmanager and a bunch of fully wrapped libraries. No filemanager, no Emailer, still no browser nothing. 5 years and nothing done while KDE on the otherhand stomped a whole working Desktop out of nothing. I know I just hurt a lot of people feelings but we need to see it that way at the end.
Don’t be fooled by all of these who call for the gradual merging of everything. They are either corporations or employees of corporations that are to scared to make a choice OR they wish to control/have a hand in, all of these projects and hence don’t have enough time, money to get there hands in on everything … so they try and ‘nullify’ it all.
<p>
OK, wiseguy, how about all the users who won’t adopt Linux on the desktop because of a dearth of comemrcial apps? The fragmentation puts off many commerical developers, and the lack of popular apps puts off many users.
The desktop wars are seriously holding Linux back, and it’s bigger than Dallas.
>The desktop wars are seriously holding Linux back, and it’s bigger than Dallas.
Haha, good one.
Good reason. KHTML uses QT which is a GPL app which means KHTML must be GPL. Gnome as a matter of philosophy does not bundle libraries under the GPL because they want to leave the floor open to commercial development (something KDE is opposed to).
KHTML is LGPL (Though I don’t know exactly what “LGPL for KDE” is supposed to mean)
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/licensing/licensing.html
If you think the HTML library in kdelibs is better than the one in Mozilla then you are KDE user.
Or maybe a Safari user
“If the community is really so much flaming KDE and QT then why is it used by most people today ? 5 times more developers, 5 times more users, acceptance in german government, acceptance on most majory distributions. “
I’d be interested to know where you got these statistics from. I’ve yet to see any conclusive figures. In fact, you’ll find that Red Hat leads in market share, both for desktop and server, by a large amount. The idea that KDE has 5 times the number of users is crack – how did you arrive at this figure, when nobody even knows how many people use Linux, let alone GNOME or KDE?
You’re strange maths is shown here too:
“I like to let you know that I’m standing fully behind you. Your arguments and replies are making much sense to me and I’m happy that many others have the same opinion.”
Many? Where are these many? 1 != many.
Harmony is history now. It was too late to solve anything, the KDE developers had effectively already told the world that they weren’t willing to co-operate. Harmony was not an answer, especially considering the sheer size of it, it was merely a “we’re not going to stop, so if you don’t like it, solve it yourself”. Ooops, bad answer.
Harmony was the equivalent of Wine – replicating a proprietary API piece by piece. Qt is enormous, it’d never be a 100% perfect clone. It was not a good answer.
I can understand all of the developers attachment to their work. When I work hard on something I don’t want someone else to come in and ruin it. However, Stefan is right that GNOME and KDE share the same goals. Therefore it is suiting that some cooperation occur. I don’t believe (from the things I’ve read) that Stefan wants a literal merge between KDE and GNOME. He simply wants everyone in both teams to understand that when you have the same goals, collaboration will help everyone.
I would never suggest gnome and kde merge because there are certain things that could never be reconciled between the two (qt vs gtk for example). However, a little bit of attention to interoperability never hurt anyone.
uhm I stand by my opinion, outsource the gui specific profiles and ui widgets to a professional designer /collective instead of these shabbylooking.. “things” you have hacked together.
and imo, bluecurve for gnome+kde isn’t more incoherent than your sketches… i’d say it’s the other way .
The truth is you guys are just being difficult to reason with and childish. I can assure you that the wheel is turning and you can’t do anything about it. In a few years, some of your statements here will make for good sigs on slashdot because they would sound extremely ridiculous and short-sighted. Only time would put you in your respective seats and shut you up, so flame and throw FUD and troll while you may.
Its just a matter of time buddies 8^)))
The desktop wars are seriously holding Linux back
Holding it back from _what_? From commercial clones of MS Clippy? From world domination? From making it easier for Mike Hearn to write software? I (and many other) DE developers I don’t care about any of those things – we want to express ourselves through software, build a great system, and perhaps help others by giving this work away. If you like KDE’s approach, join in as a user or developer. If not, find a DE you like and join/support that instead.
> I’d be interested to know where you got these statistics from.
Maybe from all the votes that got collected on various places over the months ? Sometimes things are really simple to answer such as this one.
I agree that not ALL people on this globe using Linux, KDE or GNOME participated on these votings but see it like an normal election where some serious math formulas exists doing extrapolations. Anyways look back on all these pages with votes and compare yourself.
“They are doing it for the same reason that 10 years ago they started creating free server applications. To permanently end the artificial ecoomy created by intellectual property law in software. Linux is not a product it is a social revolution.”
Funny, I thought it was a way for me to get my work done.
Look, you can be as etherial and Marxist as you want, but the fact is that more users=more apps=more users=more apps, etc. It’s a fundamental economic cycle that feeds and builds upon itself. And fewer users=fewer apps=fewer developers, etc. Usage brings about more development, and there will be little growth in usage if a product isn’t attractive (and user-friendliness is very attractive).
Just thought I’d post to defend you, Eugenia
two points (one on topic sort of)
1. Your reviews are EXACTLY what reviews are supposed to be, ie: you review things honestly from your perspective and biases. I may not always agree, but knowing where you stand I can judge better the stuff you talk about.
2. I find it laughable that all the anti-gnome/RH zealots now see you as pro-RH following a good review (BTW kudos for that after the flames you got on the phoebe list)
You have criticized RH often in the past, so one review of praise does not exactly mean you’ve been bought out by the “evil” RH
> The truth is you guys are just being difficult to reason
> with and childish.
Well I’m into serious development for nearly 20 years now. My arguments are not being shitten out of my ass.
Thus said, get some programming skills and some years expirience, then come back and participate to this conversation. If you think that changes can be done that easily the way Havoc wants then go and help him, I like to see you whining about the problems that you may face over time. Talking here on this forum is one way but practically CHANGING these things as one visionaire likes to see it is far more difficult than you can imagine. 6 years KDE can’t easily be thrown into trash just because someone dictates it. It requires manpower to change all this and it requires everyone to participating to this idea. Both is not given so forget it.
I do hope you realize that there exists 2 very different widget sets in OS X too: BrushedMetal and Aqua. So far, nobody seems to be complaining. Of course, nobody has got the right idea yet. What needs to be done is not a merging of implementations, but a merging of interfaces. Everybody codes to the C-library. Nobody complains about the single interface. Everybody is happy because there are multiple implementations of the C library (BSD-libc, uclibc, newlib, glibc) for specific requirements. Everybody codes to X, and nobody complains because multiple implementations (XFree, MetroX, AcceleratedX) exist. What needs to be done is not to make one KNOME, but to make a single binary (rather than source-level) interface that apps can code to, and automatically use the implementation the user selects. Now, the major problem here is that apps today are coded at too low a level. You can’t unify the programming interface and still allow the two desktops to maintain their significantly different personalities. The application has to be highly abstracted from the GUI, to the point where it doesn’t even know where buttons or toolbars actually are, it just knows how to request them and how to respond to events from them. This same paradigm works incredibly well for the CLI (where apps have no clue where input is coming from or where it’s going) and would not only make a unified GUI interface possible, but make GUI coding much easier overall.
Eugenia: The fact about Red Hat is that they made both GNOME and KDE the same by default in Red Hat. Don’t you consider that nullifying and destroying the differences between the two desktops? Why not call Red Hat on that instead of pretending they are innocent?
This is not what interoperability is about, and Red Hat does not get that message. GNOME could have easily used Geramik to integrate into a KDE environment while KDE could have used BlueCurve to integrate into a GNOME environment. Same goes for single/double click and other look and feel issues.
Nullifying is BAD BAD BAD.
Is it any wonder that Havoc’s words is taken with a grain of salt?
>Don’t you consider that nullifying and destroying the differences between the two desktops?
Red Hat did not do that. They simply used their right to change the defaults for BOTH Gnome and KDE on the way they think that would work best for their customers. More work remains to be done, and what they already did was 100% legal and RIGHT for their business.
SuSE also changes the default Kicker on KDE, but no one is complaining!
I like to ask if OSNews could adopt some sort of Threaded comments and reply option including preview and HTML comments. This would make reading and replying more pleasing specially when replying to certain people. I know many people asked for this already and I personally think that this would really enchance reading and reduce traffic because of the Threaded view.
Geezus. Who talked about lawyers? Who talked about politics?
They made both desktops the same for no good reason. Why would you advocate that? They removed choice and at the same time tell the KDE developers they support choice. Why would you advocate them?
This is what people do not like about Red Hat. It has NOTHING NOTHING to do with interoperability. Almost everyone wants interoperability. It’s nullifying that’s BAD.
@Adam: “KDE is a desktop *and* a platform. As a developer the platform part of KDE is important for me to rapidly create an application that seemlessly works with other applications on the same platform.”
Sure, that’s fine. Unfortunately, KDE the desktop and KDE the platform are coupled. That means for instance, I cannot write a program that embeds into KOffice, without using KDE the platform. That causes me problems, because then that same component won’t embed into OpenOffice, or AbiWord, or Gnumeric…… ie, I’m shafted unless I write that same component at least 3 times (and i still don’t cover all the bases).
So, clearly something has to change. What has to change is that a layer of standards is inserted between KDE the desktop and KDE the platform. That means you can write software using KDE the platform, and have it integrate properly into GNOME, and OpenOffice, and everything else. And of course vice-versa, replace “KDE Platform” with whatever floats your boat, XUL or whatever.
“Try as hard as you like, you will not be able to merge all the platforms you mentioned”
Except I never said merge them. You’re putting words into my mouth again. I don’t know where this idea of merging platforms came into being, I think you are confusing APIs with platforms. On Windows, I can write using Delphi, or Visual Basic, or .NET, but they all use a common platform (COM, Win32 APIs, ActiveX, iexplore, menu system, control panel applets etc).
So, what Havoc wants (and what many many 3rd party developers want) is to unify the platform. That does not mean forcing you to write in GLib C, far from it. Done properly, as far as you’re concerned in fact, very little changes. See system tray protocol for an example.
“I am not trying to distort your words and I think you’ve missed my point. I was making an analogy between RedHat’s attempts to nullify the desktop (how is this FUD and paranoia again?) with the wish of some that RedHat the OS were nullified. Both are ludicrous.”
Now I’m confused. So you say you draw an analogy between two completely different and unrelated things, both of which are ludicrous?
OK, so if you’re not distorting my words, then please try and address the points I’m making. I never mentioned distros, so I’m not sure how they entered the conversation. They make a rather poor analogy or metaphor, if that was the idea.
@Unknown: “Maybe from all the votes that got collected on various places over the months ? Sometimes things are really simple to answer such as this one.”
That’s a duff answer. What votes? Where? When? Who collected them? I say there are 200 times more GNOME users than KDE users, and I have lots of votes to prove it. But, some things are so clear that they don’t need supporting evidence, so I won’t bother telling you about these polls I conducted.
“Well I’m into serious development for nearly 20 years now My arguments are not being shitten out of my ass. “
I thought you were at university? Maybe I’m wrong.
KHTML is LGPL (Though I don’t know exactly what “LGPL for KDE” is supposed to mean)
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/licensing/licensing.html
If you think the HTML library in kdelibs is better than the one in Mozilla then you are KDE user.
Or maybe a Safari user
OK the kdelibs components of KHTML in and of itself KDE are LGPL. The QT part is available under 4 licenses in particular is not available the LGPL. So KHTML itself would take on the most restrictive licensing of both parts which is GPL. Apple’s webcore removes the QT code so it is LGPL but totollly apple specific.
I’m a user and a somewhat new developer to the Linux GUI area of the arena. I want to respond to a few things I felt were totally untrue in comments made to this article.
First, many people claim that KDE under RH8 is crippled, or that it crashes all the time and is horribly slow. This *is* *a* *LIE*. The nicest thing about using RedHat 8 is that KDE and GNOME applications look so similar that it really didn’t matter which one I chose. I ended up choosing KDE simply because I liked it’s window manager better
I use KDE all day, every day, I have several applications open run music, I even use the “evil” NVidia binary/mixed source driver and Kernel 2.5.64. Guess what, my machine continues to speed right along. I also run applications targeted for several different environments, for example:
NEdit for my primary editor
Anjuta/KDevelop for my IDEs
Phoenix (Mozilla) for my Browser
Evolution for my Email
Konsole for my Shell
I like the fact that thanks to RedHat’s changes, all of those behave roughly the same window management wise, and look roughly the same as well. The above applications are all applications *I need* to get my work done every day.
Second, as a user *I* *don’t* *freaking* *care* what you think is better. I want all my applications to interoperate more. I don’t care if you think that’s technically impossible, or a bad idea. At the end of the day, this is why Windows wins on most people’s desktops. To be honest, the main two reasons I use Linux on my desktop are:
I work more efficiently because of virtual “workspaces” concept that most X Window Managers provide.
Because I don’t have enough money to shell out for a $2000 development environment (Visual Studio ala Whatever).
Because I believe in open standards.
Because I’ve spent a lot of time contributing to free software projects.
Third, the license of Qt is the main thing that keeps me from using Qt. I like Qt, but for example, right now I actively maintain a port of the Linux AGS runtime engine.
( http://drevil.warpcore.org/ags/ ) Is it open source? No. Is it freeware? YES. I ended up choosing Gtk because I cannot release the source, therefore the GPL license constraint keeps me from using it. Even though Qt is better than Gtk IMO, especially with the IDE Trolltech provides I can’t afford the outrageous price of Qt for a non-commercial project. This is where I like Gtk, because as a user I can contribute to their project, and use it for mine. You argue that “you’re just wanting to take advantage of free software”, while I’d argue that I’m not making any money off this and how is it “really free” if I can’t use it *freely* in the way I want to?
Last, I’d like to dispel the myths that RedHat did a disservice by choosing “GNOME” applications (which only one is) as the default:
Browsers: You think Konqueror is better than mozilla? GET REAL. I write commercial browser based software for a living, and over the past few years (yes, I’ve worked on it that long) and through two complete rewrites of this particular commercial application Konqueror has never even been able to even render the login screen correctly, *even though it’s always been validated by w3.org’s validator*.
This is why I use mozilla. You would say, “well that’s your fault for not spending time on improving Konqueror”. To which I would say, I don’t have time to improve someone else’s project, Mozilla worked from day one. Konqueror has never worked. Of course, I’m hoping this will change with Apple’s involvement in the picture…
Mozilla works. Plain and simple, it renders so many pages that Konqueror will not that it’s just plain stupid. Konqueror will get better, and that’s great, but until it’s at the same level of quality as Mozilla rendering wise, RedHat did the right thing by choosing to default to a browser that will give the user what they expect when browsing.
Email: KMail != (Evolution || Outlook). As a person who used Outlook Express most of my life, I tried many different email programs. I tried the KMail in KDE2.1, that was painful, I ended up using Mutt for quite a while. Then I discovered Evolution, and I’ve never looked back. Evolution is very comfortable for me as a user. I can work very efficiently and quickly in it, and I know that my mail is stored in XML format so that I can always easily move it to another program if necessary.
Now I realize that Email programs a personal preference, and it’s very subjective to judge. So there is wiggle room here, I also have not used KMail in KDE 3.1 yet.
Office Apps: KOffice != OpenOffice. KOffice does not even begin to be able to properly parse or open half of the documents the Windows people around here throw at me. Does OpenOffice do them perfectly? No. But at least I can read them. On over half the files I’ve opened with KOffice they just come up blank! What would I think of RedHat as a user when I opened up the “default” office environment only to discover that there wasn’t much “office” in the environment?
Will KOffice improve? I certainly hope so, seriously.
Last on this topic, I would like to state that *yes* I have used KDE 3.1, I also have a debian installation because of binary distribution issues due to the GCC 3.2 ABI change for the programs I distribute. KDE 3.1 is *much* better than the steaming pile I experience with KDE2, it seemed like everytime I turned around KDE2 was throwing up “bomb” dialogs. KDE3 is a very nice experience. However, for a few *subjective* reasons I still prefer RedHat’s KDE:
1) Font configuration, RH8 wins for me here
2) Themes. Keramik while pretty, isn’t really practical to work with for long hours during the day. Less “colored” themes like bluecurve are much easier on the eyes. The profesional photo backgrounds included with RH8 are a lot easier on my eyes as well.
3) Konqueror while better than it was still fails to be able to even render *VALIDATED* HTML that Mozilla and IE (Under Win32) will. It also completely renders many sites I browse daily very wrong.
Last, as a developer I’m getting soooo very tired of all of these wars and political infights. Both sides are saying “well if you’re desktop didn’t exist it wouldn’t be a problem”. That is *so* childish. That’s not the spirit of cooperation. That’s the spirit of *bugger off* I’m *holier* than thou.
Am I thankful and greatful for all the time donated by so many people around the world? YES! But I also want them to join the adult society of the software world and mature.
I don’t really care of the two desktops merge, just so long as I can run KDE apps in Gnome and vice versa. Anyone who doesn’t wish for this is simply hitting the crackpipe too hard – just like those goons (like at linuxpages.net) who don’t want a unified package manager. *PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFTTTTTT*
you’ve got no clue what I can do so don’t even go there. At least I don’t brag about it. Since you are such a coder and know everything, show me one thing that you have done that can not be floccipaucinihilipilificated.
[That means for instance, I cannot write a program that embeds into KOffice, without using KDE the platform.]
Sure you can. Just write a wrapper around it using KDE the platform. That is what you are all about right? Wrappers around wrappers around wrappers. Right. KOffice was written with KDE the platform. If you wish to use the KDE platform no one is stopping you. If you wish to right a binding for the KDE platform no one is stopping you.
[Unfortunately, KDE the desktop and KDE the platform are coupled.]
Right. However it’s clear from your previous statement that you really wish to decouple KDE applications from the platform they were written with. Uh … good luck with that.
[On Windows, I can write using Delphi, or Visual Basic, or .NET, but they all use a common platform (COM, Win32 APIs, ActiveX, iexplore, menu system, control panel applets etc).]
Wrappers around wrappers around wrappers. BTW, they do not all share the same platform. Many pieces sit on top of other older legacy pieces and many do not. You can do all the same with Linux and KDE. Just right wrappers around wrappers around wrappers.
BTW, to bad you can not understand my analogy. It is a good one, but perhaps you are to narrow minded to see it. Sorry.
OK, wiseguy, how about all the users who won’t adopt Linux on the desktop because of a dearth of comemrcial apps? The fragmentation puts off many commerical developers, and the lack of popular apps puts off many users.
Good. Linux is too young and still could easily get polluted by commercial apps. The fact that commercial apps haven’t hit the platform yet has bought tons of times for free apps to develop independently.
Already the desire to emulate Windows has hurt lots of import aspects of Unix. For example Unix had much better layout programs than Windows and IMHO LyX / KLyX would have been a much better choice for Windows word processing than the StarOffice / OpenOffice word processing commercial combo that got created.
OTOH the lack of apps particularly Microsoft apps has been a godsend. The lack of a good Linux browser hurt desktop use for years. But the result has been Mozilla which is a better browser than IE even on IE’s native platform. The lack of Visual Studio resulted in the success of QT which has given Linux far away the best set of C++ widgets available. The lack of Oracle/dB2/SQLServer gave postgres and MySQL time to develop and now they are challenging these databases on their home platforms. The lack of a good webserver bred Apache.
Great. I am happy you found the desktop and environment you wish. Luckily, I and many others have found our preference also. They are different and that is fine 🙂 So, let’s all just use and develop with our preferred desktops and applications and let the other live in peace.