OSNews

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.