Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 13th Dec 2005 09:47 UTC
Without tip-toeing around the matter, Linus Torvalds made his preference in the GNOME vs. KDE matter quite clear on the GNOME-usability list: "I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE. This 'users are idiots, and are confused by functionality' mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don't use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do. Please, just tell people to use KDE." Also, "Gnome seems to be developed by interface nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doing something is not 'it's too complicated to do', but 'it would confuse users'." Update: More of the discussion here.
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Member since:
2005-07-09
"And I do believe that the WM in a Linux distribution is the number one factor of its success. Not only its success, but Linux success."
I'm curious as to what your metric for success is. According to this:
http://distrowatch.com/index.php?language=EN
Rank Distribution H.P.D* (Hits per day)
1 Ubuntu 2623
2 Mandriva 1686
3 SUSE 1611
4 Fedora 1082
5 MEPIS 937
I think we could safely say that Ubuntu tends to be Gnome centric. Granted these numbers don't tell the whole story for a couple of reasons. Distrowatch isn't the only source on the planet for finding a distribution (but I'd say it's a major one).
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=distrowatch
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,820,000 for distrowatch. (0.10 seconds)
People can also change the WM to whatever they want once it's installed.
You then go on to say:
"Finally, you really do have to pick up a KDE centric distro but they are rare these days (enterprise level)."
Maybe there are some valid reasons for that. I could give you mine, but it would be speculation on my part and might be completely off, or may give an impression of my personal bias that I don't wish to convey.
IMHO your entire comment came off as a tirade to me. What was your point? Gnome is the suXorz because it's too simplistic and less "Enterprise" distributions are supporting KDE? Gnome/GTK centric distributions make using KDE/QT have crappy integration? All of the above?
And finally:
"Oh, and don't tell me it's all about QT. There are way to get around this issue. SUSE got over it and Mandriva as well so I don't know why RedHat wouldn't be able to get over it as well. Licensing isn't really a problem with everything remain open source..."
SUSE has always been over it. Mandriva, back in the days when it was called Mandrake, was born due to Red Hat 5.0 only coming with Gnome for a DE (even when it was utter crap. Basically a panel and used FVWM for a Window Manager (its only redeeming feature IMHO)). Mandrake Linux's initial claim to fame was as a Red Hat compatible distribution that came with KDE by default (very nicely configured). In short, Mandrake/Mandriva has always supported KDE/QT to begin with. There was nothing for them to "get over" either.
Red Hat's commitment to Gnome has been because they have so much stake in it as far as money/developer time/promotion (which all equate to money, really). IIRC, until Red Hat 7.0 came out, if you wanted KDE on it, you had to either download third party RPM's (some were better quality than others), or compile it from scratch. Either way, it fell on the user to do post install.