Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Tue 16th Jul 2002 20:01 UTC
OSNews is pleased to host today an exclusive interview with Waldo Bastian, the well known KDE developer and SuSE employee. Waldo has been involved pretty much in all levels in KDE's code, from Konqueror to kdelibs, to games and Kicker. Waldo speaks today about the success of KDE, its future, UnitedLinux, development and much more.
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Eugenia is always quoting statistics on desktop share in a "leading" manner, to imply or flat-out state the Gnome may as well pack it. Where do her statistics come from? The figures I've seen show Kde with around 50% and Gnome with around 25% but I don't think the sample base is large enough to mean very much.
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I think interest in Gnome is growing, especially among developers, in spite of the fact that kde has more of a sense of community for developers and users. Kde is also installed by default by more distributions. But it's fate is sealed by a dependency on Qt, which is tightly controled by a proprietary vendor, Trolltech. That will prove disasterous.
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Kde is clunky an slow compared with Gnome, and that's not all or even mostly because of GNU's substandard C++ compiler and linker. C++ applications developed with toolkits other than Qt on linux are quite responsive. Part of the problem it Qt and part is bloat added by Kde. Kde does look more "commercial", though. Evidently that attracts the type of person who wants a desktop to look more like Mac OSX or Microsoft Windows, but these people are always switching back and forth between Kde and Gnome on the basis of superficials. Mostly teenyboppers trying to go with the flow. So, I don't think Gnome has much to worry about in the long term. In the short term it doesn't help much for kde boosters to be making a big deal about statistics. That will come back to bite them before much longer.
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More important are the figures on linux desktop usage overall. Some put it at around 1% of desktops worldwide, others at around 5%. If someone could direct me to a website which keeps reliable statistics on such things it would be appreciated. What is the percentage of total desktops running linux or any of the free unices? Any estimates? This would include machines which dual boot windows or some other system, so long as linux is actually used at least part of the time on that machine.
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Waldo handled himself very well in the interview. Much better than other kde developers who get nasty or vindictive in their responses.