The KDE Group – a group of KDE and/or Debian developers with a dedication to and interest in both projects – have written this detailed proposal opposing the decision to go with GNOME as the sole UserLinux GUI. Our Take: On Friday I emailed Bruce Perens on the issue, but he didn’t reply. Following is my short email to Perens, trying to suggest a solution that might become acceptable by both camps.
Hi Bruce,
Regarding your response here: http://userlinux.com/GUI.html where you state
that you want only one toolkit included in the distro: I think that’s a very limiting decision for your potential users.
Many apps out there are Qt (in fact, more apps are QT/KDE than Gnome-gtk). But instead of not including KDE, my suggestion would be to include Gnome by default because its usability is better than KDE’s, BUT to also include the KDE libs/Qt libs needed to run KDE apps (but not include Kicker and the KDE-desktop packages). This way the users get a *single desktop* — for a clean experience –, but they still get the ability to run more Linux apps if they need to.
I don’t believe this will be difficult for developers either. The whole GNU/Linux OS has many APIs, two graphical ones instead of one, won’t make the situation any worse. Mac OS X has two APIs too (but a *single desktop*), and that was never a real problem for its userbase. Windows also has many APIs, from MFCs, to Win32s to .NET, but a *single desktop*, and that never a problem either for anyone.
Please take note that I am primarily a *gnome user*, but thinking the situation from a “business point of view”, I absolutely recognize the need for KDE/Qt *applications*, simply because they are there, they are many, and they can serve users at their request. It is just a unbiased practical thought and I think I make some sense here…
Please consider this alternative (two toolkits, but a single desktop). I think it can work for both camps, and most importantly, for the users. And as the work at freedesktop.org continues to better interoperate Qt and GTK+ apps, things will only get better with time.
Best Regards,
Eugenia
An additional reply of mine here.
This really is a non-issue. If one doesn’t agree with the choices the UserLinux team is making, don’t use it.
I find it refreshing to see distros standardize on a default set of tools: If needed, KDE is an ‘apt-get install kde’ away.
I don’t understand what all of the fuss is. If you don’t like the fact that they’re using Gnome exclusively, don’t use the distribution. This choice might end up having a positive effect on Gnome and the Linux desktop itself. On the other hand, it might fail miserably; but who knows unless someone tries it.
From http://userlinux.com/GUI.html
“The two competing GUIs are each of a complexity equal to or greater than that of the Linux kernel. For developers and support staff, maintaining expertise in both of two GUIs is an expensive proposition. . . .
“The difference between one and two GUIs may spell profitability or bankruptcy for some of our service providers. In a similar vein, internal support and engineering staff at businesses that employ UserLinux would like to have only one GUI SDK to develop for and maintain.”
UserLinux is supposed to be a restricted subset of Debian that can be supported by multiple consulting companies of varying size. Perens is not trying to reduce complexity of UserLinux for the end user per se, but for the companies supporting UserLinux. Thus, having two GUI development frameworks–or SDKs–is not a Good Thing(TM).
What seems weird is that it’s not the picking of gtk as the widget set in use of UserLinux, but the total non-inclusion of Qt, while UserLinux includes non-GTK toolkits like XUL (Mozilla), and SAL (OpenOffice).
I can see why they decided to standardized on one toolkit, and I applaud them with that, but please remove any other applications, such as Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc.. that aren’t programmed with said toolkit.
Umm, I meant VCL, not SAL for OpenOffice, of course.
One could argue that Mozilla and OpenOffice have some GTK integration, but that’s not the point. They aren’t programmed with GTK at all. ISVs, when making products based on OpenOffice, won’t program with GTK, but rather with VCL. See the KDE group’s paper for this.
The One SDK argument seems silly of only one SDK is NOT included.
Assuming that UserLinux actually takes off, I think I can anticipate Bruce’s reply.
He will probably suggest that the use of KDE/QT libraries and applications is available to businesses on a case-by-case basis.
In other words, userLinux doesn’t need to supply them. If a business decides that it really wants a QT-built application it can install the appropriate files and libraries. This way UserLinux doesn’t need to keep track of the dependencies and versions and other moving targets.
KDE applications would still be available under those circumstances, but the burden of tracking them is removed from the distribution.
“What seems weird is that it’s not the picking of gtk as the widget set in use of UserLinux, but the total non-inclusion of Qt, while UserLinux includes non-GTK toolkits like XUL (Mozilla), and SAL (OpenOffice).”
Nothing weird about that at all. It’s not about having only one toolkit per se, but rather about having a subset of Debian small enough for small service providers to support, yet comprehensive enough to be useful. If there were a GNOME-based browser and office suite that were about as good as Mozilla and OpenOffice, they would be in UserLinux instead. But Mozilla and OpenOffice are the best of the lot, so they are what’s used.
I’m rather curious–has RMS thrown in his two cents regarding UserLinux (which ought to be renamed “EnterpriseLinux” or something like that, given its stated target)? I find it rather ironic that the number one reason GNOME/GTK are championed is that they are “friendly” to companies wanting to make proprietary software…when the raison d’etre for GNOME in the first place was to provide a libre alternative to the (formerly) non-free QT. What I don’t understand is why the Free / OpenSource software community should want to snuggle up to proprietary software. Isn’t that rather counter to FOSS?
I’m a KDE user, but I really couldn’t care less that Perens want to choose GNOME over KDE–so what? However, his reasons for doing so (snuggling up to proprietary software) do. He just lost major karma in my book.
The problem is that gnome and Kde are now the most important players. What could happend for example is that some start something like UserLinux, but now with KDE and no GNOME, so you only create a division. The best thing todo is to work together (between kde and gnome) and intergrate both desktops. It is nog an ideal situation. You must take in account the current situation. It is not about technical but about practical reasons.
> Nothing weird about that at all. It’s not about having only one toolkit per se, but rather about having a subset of Debian small enough for small service providers to support, yet comprehensive enough to be useful.
Ermm.. so including 4 toolkits is easy to support, but including 5 isn’t? That doesn’t make sense to me.
Eugenia’s proposal sounds good in that regard.
What I believe most of the KDE folks are worried about is that with all the recent deals by Novell, Sun and IBM all going with GNOME they fear that KDE will become irrelevant to the majority of business users. And once GNOME has conquered the business desktop, it will make it easier to make more ground than KDE in the home desktop.
I think the next year or two will be very interesting. The big corporate backers are pushing GNOME. Though I believe KDE’s technical infrastructure is much better. Just compare the level of documentation for new developer at developer.kde.org vs the gnome site. Also KDevelop is miles ahead of Anjuta.
Watch this space the KDE/GNOME war is just starting, unfortunately GNOME seems to have all the big backers. I doubt SuSE will even keep KDE as number one now they are owned by Ximian.
Interesting times ahead people…
Hi Eugenia,
I don’t see the point of bringing this up. I’m yet to see the killer Qt app that you talk of. Care to give some examples ? My dad’s 30-user office runs purely on Gnome/CrossOver, and have absolutely no difficulty.
Further, UserLinux is built on a standard Debian distribution, so getting Qt/KDE is just a command away. Remember, this is targetted towards businesses users, who aren’t going to be configuring and installing stuff (it’s left to the sysadmin).
This was a major flaw that you showed in the JDS “review,” by compiling a kernel (you forgot to include rootfs, hence the panic). A user WILL NOT be doing this on JDS. A more qualified sysadmin will take care of it.
Regards.
It’s sad that some people wish to unload their bloat on more people than necessary. UserLinux, by excluding KDE, is doing users a huge favour by reducing the number of extraneous desktop managers.
There’s nothing I hate more (besides package management) than downloading a 3-CD distro and finding fifty text editors, twelve desktop managers, and generally multiple applications for every given need. It’s obnoxious and quite silly to waste so much space.
I applaud UserLinux developers for taking this step, and I hope they don’t recant just to satisfy a small group of whiners.
The only thing KDE is ‘missing’ is a lack of bloat. A cleaned up KDE could really be on top. All the underlying “infastructure” of QT/KDE I believe is much superior to Gnome/GTK.
Eugenia, your email to Bruce is pretty much _exactly_ what I (and others) originally proposed. A variety of excuses in return were offered as reasons, but discussion of those reasons was not desired. It’s unfortunate, but I hope that with greater support from people such as yourself that UserLinux will “see the light”, so to speak. Thanks for providing a voice of reason.
As to the KDE/Debian position paper, it wasn’t a “protest”, as Linux World put it. The media often makes things less positive and more sensational than the reality. The paper they quoted verbatim was written prior to the “GNOME only” decision being made. In fact, it was written as a means to add constructively to the discussion and provide evidence of many of us being willing to put our own blood, sweat and tears into seeing it happen.
The good news is that we have begun work regardless, and the progress is very exciting. From wrapping debconf in a PyKDE GUI, to work on a C lib to provide access to KIO and other such KDE facilities, to a steady stream of individuals and companies lining up behind the efforts, it’s a positive group effort. Things such as the KDE’izing of OOo via its new-ish widget-abstraction layer also help quite a bit. Feel free to join us on the [email protected] mailing list!
If you’d like to find out more about the project, I’m certain that Navindra, myself and/or others would be more than happy to submit to an online interview for OSNews… We will, of course, be making announcements as the current efforts produce results suitable for the public.
What I don’t understand is why the Free / OpenSource software community should want to snuggle up to proprietary software. Isn’t that rather counter to FOSS?
No, it’s not, because the main idea is to spread a free software plattform (Linux, GNU, GNOME, etc). However, it will never spread without ISV support. The whole idea behind the LGPL is to get free libraries accepted by everyone. Making a GPL library to support free software only makes sense if it’s some optional library which provides cool functionality which you only want other free software to benefit from, or if there exists no proprietary equivalent to this library (which is clearly not the case with toolkits, even if Qt is a particulary good one).
Stallman has once written an article that you shouldn’t always use the LGPL for libraries (and renamed the license from Library GPL to Lesser GPL) and many misunderstood that, thinking he meant “don’t use the LGPL at all”, which is just wrong.
> If needed, KDE is an ‘apt-get install kde’ away.
You guarantee that UserLinux comes with its repositories preconfigured that this will work?
I hadnt even heard about this distro until this article was posted. The only ones I’ve tried out are RedHat, SuSE Mandrake until now.
How large is it’s installed userbase anyways? If its not too large, then it doesnt matter as its not going to affect many people.
>I’m yet to see the killer Qt app that you talk of.
The “killer app” is a myth. There is no such thing except if you are talking about real AI here.
However, Qt DOES have applications that GTK+ simply doesn’t, or they are not as advanced. Examples: Scribus, that barcode app, K3B burning DVD/CD app, Kugar, DataAchitect, ReKall, Kooka with OCR. And as you can see, these ARE business apps, which is userlinux’s focus. I believe that Perens is limiting the user’s “out of the box” functionality by not including the libraries needed to run these KDE/Qt apps.
I was always in favor of only offering one DE in commercial distros, be it gnome or kde or wmaker or xfce. However, in regards to *applications*, I find it outright stupid to not include the libraries needed to ease your users’ needs to run specific apps. It is very much like MS not wanting Java by default on Windows. I know the incentives are not the same, but the result is the same. And in the case of UserLinux, it is even worse, because there are always C/C++ apps that can replace Java equivelants on Windows, while this is not the case for Gnome apps vs Qt/KDE apps. And unless Mr Perens decides to rewrite such business apps for GTK+, his decision to not include the Qt/kde runtime libs, still seems idiotic to me (no disrespect is indented for Perens, but I really don’t get him in this regard).
That’s just my line of thought without any bias towards any system. I tried to approach the matter from a “product manager/business” point of view.
he’s already come up with a perfectly good reason for the decision, maybe, rather than badgering Bruce about it, why not kick up a fuss in the general direction of trolltech and force them to LGPL Qt on linux…
It doesn’t exist yet => it has no userbase but obviously some is expected. Same as there are no 1 Million GNOME desktops in China but are supposed to be in some years.
..and it should be KDE. KDE is so much better than Gnome (sorry Sun, but it is) and Qt a vastly superior toolkit compared to GTK+. The sheer amount of Qt commercial applications should be enough of an argument.
@James Warkentin
the idea is not to put 50 text editors, 10 media players, etc. that misconception was thoroughly debunked on the [email protected] mailing list. if you are truly interested in understanding what’s going on (which i’d suggest you do before making public statements), it’s all in the archives.
@SJC
speaking only for myself, I’m not concerned about GNOME “having all the big backers”. why? because they don’t. they basically have three “big”-ish backers at the moment, Red Hat, Sun and Ximian (a division of Novell). none of those players are big in the desktop market, not even Sun with their pre-announcing millions of seats of installations that haven’t begun or even been inked in final detail. the Linux desktop currently has 1-2% of the market. the reality is that the business desktop is owned by Microsoft Windows, not GNOME, and that’s something that is going to take YEARS to change. the other important set of facts is that KDE has a number corporate of backers, large and small.
what i *am* concerned about is the marketing spin from people with vested interests in GNOME that they have all the corporate support. it’s gone so far as to claim SUSE as a GNOME distro when that clearly isn’t the case, or that the city of Largo has switched to GNOME when it hasn’t. some individuals (and i stress that it’s been individuals, not the GNOME project as a whole) have been really pretty shoddy with their publicity and at times even bordered on unethical IMO.
at the same time, KDE has not helped ourselves: we have not done enough or the right kind of public relations. we are working to address that with a revitalized enterprise.kde.org, better and more frequent updates as to the project’s status, increased communication with business and the general user public, etc.
oh, and there is no GNOME/KDE war. that’s a marketing myth propagated by a small number of fans (on both sides) and an even smaller number of very well known people who wish to see GNOME “win” what would end up being a phyric victory (though MS would appreciate it) through the misrepresentation of reality rather than technical merits or acceptance of market realities as they currently exist. those who promote the activities of GNOME and KDE as a “war” are divisive and are not a part of our community as far as I’m concerned.
we have 98% of the market to eat into, and we’re up against a very wiley and very tough set of competitors. we are best equipped to do that together as allies, not as squabbling children.
Where does he say that they won’t include Qt by default? I’ve only seen him say that they wouldn’t include KDE by default. Obviously kdelibs is another story
It has too much crud in it’s menu structure it’s baffeling. KDE needs to apply the K.I.S.S. principle (Keep It Simple Stupid) for it to be friendly. Sure, it mught have a better underlying belly (structure) but in User Land it is too overwhelming and complex to work with. Limited choice is good, unrelenting mutlitudes of choice options cluttering up the desktop is not. That is how I feel about KDE especially with it’s GUI menu structures.
Why are people so upset? I thought GNU/Linux was about choice, and clearly a choice was made: GNOME. Deal with it.
One way of dealing with it is to simply not use it. Another one is to create an easy-to-install KDE to run on UserLinux. Now that’s a trick I want to see *any* desktop environment master: Easy installation.
Anyway, I think people should stop whining and work with UserLinux and learn from it. Don’t fight it – you will only look silly.
Get of Perens back and let him have his vision, and lets see where he takes it.
If you want KDE Enterprise Linux, let him build UserLinux take his base and stick KDE on top, and market it as a different product.
I think you people are afraid that VHS may beat BETA again.
Forgot to say: Great email Eugenia. It is a very good middle ground.
And another thing I forgot to mention: Lots of distros are KDE-only (IIRC: MEPIS and KNOPPIX) or at least very KDE-biased. Why isn’t anyone making a fuss about that?
that KDE has decided to bundle all their applications into one big package.
that means if you want something like Kate, you need to install all of KDEbase. I mean, if the UserLinux folks want to split up the KDE app, then fine, but if a use wants just one app, it is impossible.
having the QT libraries is good for a development environment, but not from a business environment. a business is going to build GTK+ apps because the LGPL is “safer” for them.
There are a lot of KDE linux out,KDE has gone to far with the MS Windows look.If the distro is to be UserLinux!the default does need to be Gnome.Some well have the need for a light desktop but two heavy weights is useless.
> KDEbase. I mean, if the UserLinux folks want to split up the KDE app, then fine, but if a use wants just one app, it is impossible.
Some engineering to remove specific ‘uneeded’ parts of KDE for the UserLinux’s focus will have to be done indeed. What should be installed by default is anything that will allow people to compile or install KDE/Qt apps without missing dependancies or headers (even Kate itself as an individual package from a third party).
Nobody said that this solution wouldn’t require some engineering. If big distros don’t do some engineering, they are dead out of the water anyway. Engineering is required at many levels. It is software we are talking about here.
Mozilla and OO.o are NOT as comprehensive as QT or GTK+. you are comparing a tool kit for a DE to a tool kit made specifically for an application. an application tool kit is far less complex than a system wide toolkit.
oh, and there is no GNOME/KDE war. that’s a marketing myth propagated
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
While I agree that’s true now, I don’t know how long that is going to last. While KDE and GNOME compete with each other, as they have for years now, purely on technology and product quality, there is no war. But now, politics are getting involved. The minute politics gets involved, some of the spirit of free competition is replaced with the spirit of war.
People seem to underestimate the power of politics. While ideally product quality is all that would matter, the unfortunate truth is that a little bit of politicking can overcome a lot of good engineering. The KDE developers seem to not want to give politics its fair consideration, while the GNOME developers (or their corporate backers) seem perfectly willing to do so.
It is this political saavy that lead the GNOME camp to basically adopt OpenOffice under the GNOME Office umbrella (a purely political move that has lead to minimal real integration). Same thing for Mozilla. Now, a large percentage of the market percieves OpenOffice and Mozilla as being GNOME applications. GNOME was born because of politics, and to this day, it seems that the people pushing GNOME are comfortable playing that game.
So there might not be a war between GNOME and KDE, but it would be dangerous to look at the situation as being purely a matter of friendly competition. There is a very real, if somewhat remote, possibility of KDE becoming marginalized and ceasing to be a viable competitor to GNOME. KDE, like any open source project, cannot die, but it can become irrelevent, like Apple, continuing to churn out great products that are only used by a small niche. History is full of products that were technologically superior but failed for political (or marketing) reasons.
I don’t get what you’re all whining about. Perens chose Gnome because the toolkit is free. It’s that simple. If a Userlinux wants KDE instead, let him/her learn to type: apt-get install kde3
Problem solved.
why are KDE groups getting in a tizzy about this when Gnome does not get all fussy when KDE is chosen over Gnome?
Lycoris, Xandros, Lindows, etc.
> Why are people so upset? I thought GNU/Linux was about choice, and clearly a choice was made
It’s about you having choices not other making choices for you. I think you are really satisfied with MS Windows and Microsoft making choices for you which competitors to their own product you only can use with problems?
> why are KDE groups getting in a tizzy about this when Gnome does not get all fussy when KDE is chosen over Gnome?
Because GNOMErs don’t believe they have a chance on a home user desktop? KDE people do believe they have a chance on the business desktop.
Exactly. Does the Gnome team whine because Lindows, Xandros, Lycoris, … doesn’t have Gnome? No.
Besides, there’s already a KDE Userlinux project started.
Was here mentioned on OSnews some days ago.
All this fuss is a non issue and not worth any of anyones time.
Regardless of why Bruce Peren decided to exclude KDE/QT, I believe he made the right decision for OSS.
Result of his actions:
1. KDE fans and developers will want to prove him wrong with
deeds (more codes)
2. Deficiencies in gnome will be addressed (more codes)
3. Increased healthy competitions between gnome and kde.
In the end more code of higher quality will be written in a shorter period of time.
> that means if you want something like Kate, you need to install all of KDEbase. I mean, if the UserLinux folks want to split up the KDE app, then fine, but if a use wants just one app, it is impossible.
It’s possible for Debian as shown with their packages but impossible for UserLinux (by chance based on Debian)? I don’t get it.
there is a very important reason Corporations like Gnome over KDE.
the LGPL. Gnome uses it for the tool kit, KDE uses the GPL.
the LGPL was designed to be business friendly but at the same time be GPL friendly. it is a free toolkit that will not force companies to open up the code to the program that uses the tool kit.
uhh…because Trolltech wants to MAKE MONEY. the GPL can not be used by companies in a tool kit if they want to make a closed application. the LGPL can. what good will the LGPL do except take money out of trolltechs pocket? besides that, trolltech duel licenses its tool kit so if you are selling your QT app, you have to buy a QT license.
>It’s about you having choices not other making choices for you. I think you…
Nobody is forcing anyone to use Userlinux. If you don’t like the fact that Userlinux will be GNOME only, there are plenty of other distros to choose from.
but i think this is quite non-sense.
where is the freedom?
oh for crying out loud.
if you want a KDE package that is part of the base Desktop environment, you must instal KDEBase to get at it. I am not talking about K3b or some other app.
if you don’t know what you are talking about please keep your comments to yourself.
Im amazed at some of the discussion here. Some people are clainimg that “well if they want KDE people can just type a command and you will have it.” And thats why the world is on Firebird right? Because they actually thought to look at alternatives? Oh right people don’t do that and just go with whatever is on their desktop, just look at Windows if people actually bothered to look at alternatives way more people would be using Firebird on windows. The problem is people are lazy regardless of what OS you are using.
I hate this “we like GNOME so we won’t include KDE” thing apparently going on. The fact is if you want to push Linux to the masses most people are going to use KDE, because most people I try and introduce Linux to find GNOME way too simplistic and start looking for something else after they realize GNOME can’t meet their needs. Plus the fact that GNOME can’t be nearly as customized as KDE can be, people won’t like that either. KDE may have way to many options, but it’s always better to have more options than too few.
I use Mac OS X 90% of my time and Linux the other 10% of the time so when I get on Linux I just want to simply get straight to a task and work on it and be productive. I can be 100x more productive on KDE than GNOME, I just can’t switch around to different apps and controls as fast on GNOME.
I like some GNOME/GTK apps like Gnumeric,etc but I just can’t do any meaningfull work on GNOME DE itself.
and Eugenia can back me up here.
GTK+ uses the LGPL. that means that companies can use it for free with out having to worry about duel license schemes, or opening up the Logic of their application.
if a company was to use QT, the application would have to be NON COMMERCIAL , i.e. FREE, or they would have to pay Trolltech for a QT license.
that is why Gnome was picked. it allows companies to make and deploy apps with out worrying about paying some 3rd party for the right to do so on the Machines and Operating system they bought!!!
freedom for who? the person building the distro or the end user who choses the distro?
your idea of freedom is that you want Distribution builders to be constrained to having both DEs? how is that freedom?
you can ignore them, and Userlinux IS ignoring them.
read my comment to the people on this board to get a prospective on why the choice was made.
As stated before, if you don’t like it don’t use it. If you don’t like it don’t develop for it. It’s a project, it’s not the end of the world.
@John Blink: VHS vs Beta works, but I was thinking of some other examples.
The early 1990s was a tremendously exciting time for the computer industry. There was the promise of so many cool technologies. PowerPC and Alpha promised to end the Intel hegomony. CORBA, SOM, and OpenDoc promised componentized software systems and transparent access to documents. Taligent (the result of an alliance between IBM and Apple) promised to create a powerful object-oriented OS that would allow for rapid development of applications. Microkernels of all forms promised to end the stability problems with existing OSs.
Most of these projects were successes technically, but all have been failures in the commercial market. They were killed by such things as mundane as market forces and political alliances. Today, we look forward and see no end in sight to the reign of x86; we see component technology relegated to loading IE into KaZaA; we see microkernels occupying a few niches like nuclear power control; and we see Java and C# still fumbling to catch up to where Apple’s Dylan was in 1993!
@Blah: Actually, you don’t need kdebase to install any KDE app. You just need kdelibs and qt. Distributions can ship KDE apps seperately. In fact, since UserLinux is to be based on Debian, no engineering would be required, since Debian ships KDE apps individually.
AAron gave a very detailed, logical and interesting response to bruce Peren’s reply (though Bruce has taken his reply down and shortened it).
PLEASE READ IT HERE: http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/view/270
It really is a great read and accurately cancels all of Bruce’s points.
I’m not happy with Mr. Perens’ decision, but I’ve finally come to the conclusion that it really, really won’t matter in the long run.
Why?
Well, first of all, by opening this whole religious war to begin with (whether he chose KDE, Gnome or TWM), Mr. Perens’ has alienated a large part of the community. Sure, the KDE developers can do whatever they want, but if it ain’t in the distro, it won’t get installed. If the repositories are set up, sure, maybe apt-get can be used, but realistically who is going to do that in the environment that this distro is targetted for.
Which brings up the second point…this distro is supposed to be targetted for the “enterprise” environment. There is no way that most medium to large enterprises are going to touch with with a ten meter pole without a support contract from somebody with a corporate “name”. If they do Linux at all, it’ll be from Novell or RedHat. So absent community buzz about this being the next best thing since the microprocessor (and see above for what he has done to that), I don’t think we’ll see this making any significant inroads into the “enterprise” space.
And even if you say that this is pointed at consultancies who provide services to small to medium “enterprises”, again, without the buzz and community support, the adoption rate against “real” Debian or Mandrake or another “free” distro will still likely be small.
So, it doesn’t really matter…UserLinux will be either stillborn or crippled at birth, and will end up as just another line down towards the bottom of the Distrowatch database.
The idea is to not have a load of different stuff for the same task and a new user sitting there confised not knowing what to choose or having him read a load of docs to make a decision. The idea is to keep things simple. that includes having only a single desktop suite.
Sometimes the press seems very efficient (biased?) to let KDE shine in bad light by careful wording of the headlines, time to publish, etc.
I think the KDE team could use a “business warfare” graduade from this famous Paris school. 😉
They continue to add bloat and new features version after version, they never cease to add new options and tweaks.
And what’s more important it’s buggy and more unstable than GNOME which is far inferior in terms of features or toolkit (QT rules).
But “ces’t la vie” better something good enough wich works, than something mega sophisticated which never finishes to work properly.
And by the way, 99% of people is use to doubleclick, this alone is x-tremely annoying.
I don’t recall Kate coming separate from KDEbase.
I say drop the discussion alltogether, and use XFCE4 as default.
Maybe that will get the message through to the zealots on either side of the camp that there are other considerations into play than project size and application bloat.
I say, stick to a simple, fast, coherent desktop, on which either gtk+ or qt applications will run without having to deal with an astonishing amount of programming layers, service providers and “frameworks”. Personally, I think both Gnome and KDE go way over the top into trying to be the end all solution to every problem in existance. If you want to poke through into the corporate desktop market, you better cater to the administrators which are to implement and maintain the beast. Offering a nice product while
keeping it simple for them to modify, lockdown and administer desktop computers will gain you serious karma points. Microsoft has an insane headstart in that area, but maybe Novell has some tricks up its sleeve as well.
Anyway, at least this discussion shows that most camps definately see a bright future for the whole UserLinux thing. Else they wouldn’t put so much energy into having their favourite stuff included into the initial package choice. I don’t recall this much fuss over e.g. knoppix. I hope the project doesn’t collapse under the pressure though, it would truly be a waste.
In Debian, kdebase is a metapackage that will install all the programs that come in the KDE base system. The actual programs like kate, kwrite, kcontrol, even kwin, come in seperate packages.
Actually, one of the things that make KDE so easy to maintain is the integration. It makes it easy for KDE Kiosk to lock-down the configuration in a fine-grained manner. It makes it easy to whip up DCOP scripts to accomplish mundane tasks for users. It also means that configuration information is all in one place.
One GUI must become the one!! and Gnome is a very good choice, needs to evolve more though. just do it faster, 2006 is coming!!
> that means if you want something like Kate, you need to install all of KDEbase. I mean, if the UserLinux folks want to split up the KDE app, then fine, but if a use wants just one app, it is impossible.
have you ever used Debian in which UserLinux is based on? KDE is completely split up there. I’m not sure why more distros don’t split up KDE. Mandrake and Debian only do.
yes I have and did use Debian up to the Time FC1 was released, however I never looked for Kate since it came installed already. the only time I ran into Kate issues was in FC1 where I did not install KDE, but did install the libs, and just wanted kate and it insisted on installing KdeBase. I then investigated and found that Kate was part of the KdeBase package that KDE distributes in source. so, I put 2 and 2 together. I guess I was wrong.
back to debian I go!!! but perhaps it will be user Linux 🙂
“This really is a non-issue. If one doesn’t agree with the choices the UserLinux team is making, don’t use it.”
Actually there was NO such team that made a choice. It was Bruce Perens himself who (in the middle of a discussion) made a decision. A decision that he already made on his own long before the conversations begun. The people where in the middle of a conversation raising the pros and cons of both desktops but from following the entire Thread (well the entire Mailinglist) the attentive reader may have figured out on his own that Bruce Perens had a bias towards GNOME only which made clear that the whole ‘We want to teamwork’, ‘your opinion matters’, ‘which one is technically better’ was nothing else than pure waste of time.
There were nearly 30 developers of KDE subscribed on their mailinglist. All people who are willing to discuss about the technical aspects and on the otherside only 10 (in it’s best) GNOME users who permanently bash about KDE. who raised points about GNOME which are technically questionable.
To sum this up. If you want to talk about the technical benefits then you need to have people from both sides who actually know the technical weaknesses and advantages of both sides and these people are usually developer who at least wrote a shitty ‘Hello World’ window. These people at least spent 1 day into reading some documents.
But having a conversation with Developers who understand their plattform with normal Users who only bring up the same old junk (free license, QT == non freedom (which is wrong), GNOME more polished (who totally missed some UI reviews) and things like that can NOT being taken serious.
If you want to talk about a ‘developers’ distribution for corporate business for people that you want to get to a plattform then you definately need to offer them good solutions.
Follwoing just GNOME here and ignoring KDE is imo wrong. They both have advantages as well as disadvantages. The one more the other less. But as long as the selfdeclared teamleader is not willing to have a normal conversation about something as long it doesn’t make sense to stay there and waste time.
One DE to rule them all, One DE to find them,
One DE to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
(Oh wait! That sounds like windows :-0 )
Perens: We wants it, we needs it. Must have the Precious Gnome.
>freedom for who? the person building the distro or the end user who choses the distro?
>
> your idea of freedom is that you want Distribution builders to be constrained to having both DEs? how is that freedom?
Sorry for saying it not clear.
“this” in my “this is quite non-sense” means
the protesters not the decision of distro maker.
MY IDEA of freedom IS, it should be for EVERYBODY.
distro makers have freedom to choose DEs (any combination or just one).
end users have freedom to choose distros.
As long as the distro makers tell the end users,
what their distros have and what they don’t have,
I see no problem.
—-
May be it just like a nutrition facts/ingredients label on food packages.
Once we know what there are in the package, to eat it or not — just our choices.
(Unless you gonna sueing McDonald because its BigMac made you fat!!
)
These KDE project members need to back off. They’re doing UserLinux and KDE more harm than good. Perhaps they should have got a little more concerned about the corporate desktop a few years ago.
This is just stupid, and has definately resulted in me losing a lot of respect for the KDE project. This is ONE DISTRO. ONE. How many KDE based distros are there? I’d put the figure at at least 70% of all Linuxes. No substantial company is even backing it. UserLinux will be lucky to gain 10% of the Linux market, let alone the PC market.
Did you see the GNOME folks cry when Lindows chose KDE? No. How about Knoppix? No. What about Red Hat 8, which castrated GNOME just as much as KDE? No. Hell, at least KDE was there. But that wasn’t good enough.
Wondering why Sun chose GNOME? Wondering why Red Hat sticks with GNOME? Maybe it is because no-one wants to deal with a project who can’t behave like adults, let alone do business like adults. Perhaps consider that next time you start kicking up a fuss over a distro using GNOME.
This is just stupid, and has definately resulted in me losing a lot of respect for the KDE project.
>>>>>>>
Why would you lose respect for the KDE project? They pushed for KDE in UserLinux, and when Perens made his decision, they formed a group to do their own KDE+Debian+Enterprise project. This proposal is not a protest (did you read it?), but a plan for a solution. KDE users bitching is a seperate issue. KDE users are bitching because they can’t do anything else, except have their say and hope they can change enough minds to get Bruce to change his.
Did you see the GNOME folks cry when Lindows chose KDE?
>>>>>>>>>>>
Did you follow the documents Bruce released about UserLinux? UserLinux was supposed to be this grandiose project with huge corporate backing that would get OSS into the Enterprise. Now, we find out that KDE is being left out of all of that. UserLinux was supposed to leverage the community, and was thus different from the product of a single company like Lindows.
How about Knoppix?
>>>>>>>>>>>
Knoppix is a LiveCD! And they did start a seperate project (Gnoppix) based on GNOME.
What about Red Hat 8, which castrated GNOME just as much as KDE?
>>>>>>>>>>>
RedHat 8 did no such thing. They changed things around a lot, but GNOME in RedHat is still fundementally GNOME-flavored. But KDE in RedHat is also fundementally GNOME-flavored. Most importantly, GNOME in RedHat works properly, while KDE in RedHat does not. SuSE and Mandrake heavily customize KDE as well, but nobody complains because their KDEs work properly and don’t lose the fundemental feel of the desktop.
Hell, at least KDE was there. But that wasn’t good enough.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It wasn’t good enough because it was broken! SuSE, as KDE-biased as it is, doesn’t make Konqueror the default browser when the user *chooses* to make GNOME their desktop! Why would a RedHat user who *chose* to use KDE (GNOME is the default, remember) want to still use all the GNOME apps?
Wondering why Sun chose GNOME? Wondering why Red Hat sticks with GNOME? Maybe it is because no-one wants to deal with a project who can’t behave like adults, let alone do business like adults.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Sun chose GNOME because its GUI people were more familiar with C. RedHat chose GNOME because a lot of GNOME employees worked at RedHat. Its as simple as that.
I think the majority of people simply have no clue what they are talking about (no personal offense or bad feelings now). Most of the pro GNOME replies here are made by people who can say what about GNOME ? None of them here are able to speak about the bottom framework of either GNOME or KDE. Regardless of what. Their aim is to publicly verbally killing a project. What does GNOME offer to the public ? Most of the things are half done, broken, unpolished and not really finished. Speeding things up doesn’t mean that the programs work better afterwards, are better implmenented or at least usable for the tasks it should do.
I think the points about Novell, Red Hat, SUN using and highly supporting GNOME is nothing else than a big Public Relations machinery. 90% of the PR you read on various pages are pure ‘bullshit’. It does sound like SUN, Red Hat or Novell are putting millsions in the GNOME project. Actually none of the free volunteers who work their butt off on that project ever saw a penny of that. So where is the money floating in ? Why, after such announcements, should people continue working on GNOME if the big PR made clear that these volunteers are mainly ripped off for their work. You people should really think about the PR for a moment. SUN, Red Hat, Ximian/Novell may be names but they stay names. The project is driven by the community and not companies. But hey I still belive no one understands this.
This is a non-issue, the fact is it is bruce’s decision and if the KDE camp can’t stomach it then too damned bad. Their proposal was proposed and rejected. END OF STORY
I have a question for people who have bought a car: Why did you choose that model? You see, all cars, like desktop environments, do the same basic stuff, and do it well: They all have wheels, and steering wheel, doors, seats, and really do get you from here to there.
However, there are lots of variation. One is bigger, one is smaller. One comes with a fancy radio, and another comes with a GPS.
Now, as a consumer, I make a choice: I don’t want the fancy sliding roof, but would like the nice radio with good reception. So I choose based on what is on offer. I don’t choose based on the radio alone, but choose a package. Desktop environments (and distros reall!) are exactly like that. They all have wheels, doors and seats. I choose the PACKAGE that suits me most. I am VERY HAPPY to let Mercedes or Ford tie me to their choices and the way they do things. Why? I trust them. I don’t care if their radio is Brand X or Y, or who makes the tires, but still it is a good car. Using other components, other car makers make equally good cars but I like one more than the other. Simple.
Bruce, like every other distro maker out there, is making a choice. The desktop environment coders (when they are not whining but strutting their stuff in C/C++) gave Bruce lots of spoils for us to choose from. Bruce thinks he has a good stab at getting his vision implemented with GNOME, so why whine about? It’s not that he’s not grateful, but for his ideas, GNOME fit better. It’s not the end of the world.
…and I was to create my own distribution, and I had decided to use either KDE or Gnome, I would chose Gnome as well. I think Bruce P. made the right decision to exclude KDE.
To me, KDE is nice enough, but it is a cluttered mess. I’ll just use Konq vs. Nautilus as a file manager for an example.
Konqueror may more flexible (altohugh personally I would argue that point), but it is configurable to the point of becoming useless and stupid. I have seen more new users completely fail to get the ubiquitous left-side tree view/right-side detailed view file manager idiom configured than I would care to count.
Usually, one ends up with either a two window detailed view of different places in the file system, or a tree view/detail view where the node selected on the tree view is entirely disconnected from the detailed view; which is not what the user had in mind.
Nautilus, on the other hand, by default uses the idiom that most users are already familiar with, so there is virtually no learning curve for inexperienced Linux users to overcome.
In my opinion, there are many such comparisons to be had between Gnome and KDE.
Also, asthetically speaking, KDE is clunky looking and is far too busy. I’ve installed Linux for many new users, and a common sentiment expressed by these users is that at first glance, KDE is very intimidating while Gnome just “looks easier” and gives them more confidence in using the system.
It seems to me that the Gnome developers have a plan and are working towards a pre-determined end. On the other hand, KDE is taking the big-bang, splatter-shot approach to programming and including everything but the often neglected kitchen-sink.
Anyway, I’ll shut up. As I said before, I think Bruce Perens has made a decent choice.
that means if you want something like Kate, you need to install all of KDEbase.
That is no longer true. KDE packages are now split up among major apps.
And about the person who complained that menus in KDE are too complex/have too many entries, well, pardon my frankness but that’s a really stupid reason not to include KDE. It is very possible (like Mandrake and other distros have done) to restructure menus the way you like, whether it’s task-based or whatever, and you can includeas little or as many entries as you want. That’s the beauty of KDE, its customizability.
Personally, I think it’s a mistake to not at least include the KDE libs.
In Debian, kdebase is a metapackage that will install all the programs that come in the KDE base system. The actual programs like kate, kwrite, kcontrol, even kwin, come in seperate packages.
That’s cool. Do you know if that is the same with Gentoo?
….. the example with the Car is perfect. But would you buy a car which is rusty (wrong framework), which has 3 layers of iron welding on the car body only to close a hole (fixing bugs ontop of a bad framework), whose interior decoration looks like a charm (nice icons) but when looking under the chair cover you see big cigarette holes (not as polished as you first thought after you looked closer to it). About the nice Radio (GStreamer), the radio is perfect but unfortunately whenever you driver over a hole or bumper you hear dropouts because the wires aren’t connected correctly (GStreamer integration in GNOME). What you buy here is a 20 years old dodge which is polished like mad but whose bottom components start giving up. What would be cheaper for you ? Restauring the entire old car with new components (e.g. rewriting a huge chunk of code in GNOME) or buying a new car where you get 10 years warranty (KDE which has the better framework, where people can come and start developing new applications knowing in their mind that the framework fits).
See, the car example is perfect. GNOME has a bunch of issues in it’s framework which is *slowly (if ever)* being fixed. During the process of fixing these issues, new applications are being written ontop of a broken framework. The application author assumes that this framework can be used once he started writing his app but then from GNOME version to GNOME version realized that huge chunks of the code he has written are now worthless because the framework ‘is being slowly fixed’. The app author is stuck in re-writing major parts of his program during that time instead of concentrating to write new features and better implementations. The result is a permanent catchup with the changes happening in GNOME. During that time where the author is going to fix huge chunks of his app the app itself is becoming usless to the ones who urgently need that app to do their business.
KDE while having a few issues (no doubt) is much cleaner in this thing. You can write an application in a fraction of the time than you need to write the same app under GNOME (costs of an engineer (man hour)), the app can be consideret to work in further versions of KDE as well and in case some components change you can be sure that through the OO design a lot of stuff is easy to fix. Due to inheriting objects you can be sure that the bugs are mostly the same through all apps which you can easily fix in one go within a fraction of a time as well. The resulting applications DO look consistent, integrates perfectly due to it’s nice framework.
What people do here is just the attempt to kill a technically far supperior product which is definately KDE. Once again in men history people kill a better technology due to being unknown what they say. It’s the same way how the US Administration has fooled their citizens for many months (because they heard false things over and over until they believed it) now after the end most people woke up and realized how wrong they were. Sorry for making these paralells here but the same thing is going to happen right now in the open source world.
Bruce Perens didn’t want to make his own distro. He wanted to work in team with other people (which is clear because such a huge project can hardly be driven by a single person). It was him who wanted teamwork thus he needs to follow his own rule to play in a team. This means that he should have made a normal conversation with the people. Put a poll up somewhere and have the participants make their choice in that poll. But making a choice of his own by ignoring all the hundert participants on the mailinglist is everything else than teamwork or fairplay it’s the dicator way of doing things. Anyways I’m not in the position to argue about Bruce Perens here but it had a reason why he was thrown out in a handful of companies because he seem to be a queer kind of person in real life.
Are you honestly believing what you write here or are you writing it only for the professional attempt to kill something ?
There are a lot of technical problems around GNOME that hardly can be fixed with simple patches. You said you use Nautilus over Konqueror because of whatever reasons you named. But I seriously doubt that you use Nautilus for anything else than copying a bunch of files from your directory to other places. Have you ever used Nautilus’ full potential or Konquerors full potential ? I can easily copy a whole directory from any FTP server from A) to B) using Konqueror and drink coffee in the meanwhile without to fear that it misses half of the stuff that I want to get copied. Do this with Nautilus and you see strange things like ‘copying file 82 of 12’ or half of the stuff that I want arrived in full size on my harddisk.
Well do you see what I write ehre. UserLinux is more a corporate solution. A coprorate solution means that they must offer solutions to the audience with stuff that simply WORKS. Not of personal preference or personal bias. They need to offer things that have less problems and less bugs. If GNOME as is now (which still is in an early stage stuck between alpha and beta software) is being chosen to do this thing then Linux will use a lot of companies because they will judge it as not ready for the Desktop. You need to offer them things which are still familar to Windows (which marketshare is still over 90%), which they need less of time to get into (KDE is quite close and in some cases far supperior to Windows, differently than GNOME which is close to nothing) and which offers the users as well as developers an unified consistent look, stability (and YET AGAIN STABILITY) and where they know that it won’t change over night as e.g. Nautilus has changed over night from normal Hierarchic mode to Spatial mode. Instead having Nautilus, gnome-vfs and other components fixed to become rock stable for the normal audience they totally made a big mess out of it now. And I can tell you that there was NO serious usability tests going on before this decision has made.
I after all the years haven’t seen a clear roadmap in GNOME it’s just hacking as the day feels from one day to the next. With your best will you see some sort of structures going on but there is still no roadmap half of their users and developers actually know what the left hand does and what the righ hand does. Some are talking about PR, Marketing, India, Ximian/Novell while the majority of people do not even know what the hell they are talking about. There is so much PR bullshit going on.
The headline is clearly stupid, this is not a protest as Aaron already pointing out in the beginning of the thread, although it seems like noone listened or cared.
Yes, some users, and perhaps a few developers, on both sides are flaming away, and this is very much true in this thread as well.
I don’t see the contents of the proposal discussed at all, but only see (mostly) pointless flames going both ways.
Clearly the KDE developers accepted the fact that they aren’t part of UserLinux and they think that an enterprise kde solution would be a good thing, and have hence responded by starting their own separate project, for which they are already contributing code.
But i guess people are too busy flaming to actually try to understand whats going on. But i guess some people would think that the KDE folks would just sit back and watch the gnome crowd trying to take over the enterprise market? Just like the original gnome developers just sat back and watched the kde crowd try to take over the unix desktop, right?
“I can see why they decided to standardized on one toolkit, and I applaud them with that, but please remove any other applications, such as Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc.. that aren’t programmed with said toolkit.”
We had a debate over which Web Browser to use, or to use Mozilla itself. Obviosly, we are trying to get everything we can in GTK+, and just about have with the only real exception being OpenOffice as Mozilla can use GTK+ if compiled with specific options.
Actually, you can make a complete distro w/o KDE but you simple can’t do one w/o GTK, why? applications like GIMP, Evolution, etc. Kontact its to premature and doesn’t have may features Evolution is already using, and GTK applications have the licence advantage, something thatnis not in qt toolkit.
Im sure UserLinux will be a great distro for enterprises.
.. I’d only whish you would know what you are talking about.
And we still have people here wondering why Linux isn’t moving forward on the desktop. Just look at this for the number one problem; too many egos, too much RMS-like arrogance and no one putting the goal ahead of their own “visions”.
Whether people like it or not, there needs to be a standardise desktop environment which will most likely be GNOME due to the royalty free nature of the toolkits that are on offer and IIRC, GTKMM 2.6 will be 100% feature for feature comparable to the C counterpart.
We *could* have had two but neither side are actually sitting down, creating a unified HIG and actually sticking to it so instead we have hundreds of programmings chucking hissie fits, forking code and re-inventing the wheel for the hundredth time.
Both side insisting on re-enventing the same technology, placing menus in different locations, different themeing technologies. Its one big bloody mess and I’m sorry, if I were an ISV I would scream in horror over the lack of any clear direction set down by vendors.
“Actually, you can make a complete distro w/o KDE but you simple can’t do one w/o GTK, why?”
Why is this sentence wrong ? Because he is not knowing what he is writing about. I understand that people have their own opinion. But opinions are usually backed with some facts of truth. That is: A Ferrari is more expensive than a Mercedes is a true statement and people have the tendendy to have an opinion abotu expensive prices. At least it’s an example that other people can believe into.
“Kontact its to premature and doesn’t have may features Evolution is already using”
Wrong. I believe that Kontact is at least as mature as Evolution. All their components Addressbook, KMail, Scheduler etc. are as well standalone applications as well as bound under the hood of Kontact. That is you do not need to start one application and have all the other not needed things loaded as well. Say you use the addressbook and the emailer for 100% of the time but you do not need the scheduler but Evolution loads them all. But regardless of this it’s not the REQUIREMENT a enterprise Desktop is up to. You seriously misunderstood the requirements here.
“and GTK applications have the licence advantage, something thatnis not in qt toolkit.”
I bet even if 1000 people would tell you that you are wrong you still continue repeating this nonsense. I think it’s people like you who are not correctly informed who spread a lot of wrong things in the public. There is one big problem right now in the open source world. That is PR bullshit and the other big problem is people like you who are not really informed about what they spread in the public. Both things that totally hurt the open source movement and the believ in total freedom.
Now regardless of some stupid licensing issues (which seriously are NO issue after all) I still do believe that people will continue finding ways to ramble and bash about KDE regardless if it was offered on a golden table to them. The same way people bash the biggest nonsense about Microsoft Windows, the same likes of people are now found on open source plattforms rambling the same nonsense.
What you should be thankful for is that there are people at least sitting down many thousands of manhours writing these applications for you. You are a real unthankful person to say it that way. Do you believe that the KDE people are clueless morons ? They are all capable and skilled persons, some with a diplom in their bags and some sitting in higher position with good skills, long years of experience. These people are sitting there day in, day out to offer free software for a growing and unthankful community.
Before you start to reply maybe you first start writing some own stuff before making such statements in the public, they sound immature, they are wrong and they are only proving how much of a psycho you are.
> And we still have people here wondering why Linux isn’t
> moving forward on the desktop. Just look at this for the
> number one problem; too many egos, too much RMS-like
> arrogance and no one putting the goal ahead of their own
> “visions”.
>
> Whether people like it or not, there needs to be a
> standardise desktop environment which will most likely be
> GNOME…
You see what ? Look in the mirror.
look, GTK+ is LGPL, QT is GPL for non commercial applications.
what does that mean? that means that if a company used GTK+ they do not have to worry about buying a license from another company or giving their software away for free.
that is a fact and if you want to accept it or not, that is up to you.
if it is feature for feature with GTK+ 2.6 that will rock!!! I bet that many new apps will come to Gnome at that point.
Gnustep. And as far as the whole “war”. Cut it out everyone. There are people who are tired of the “whole thing”. It doesn’t matter who started what, or pushed whom down the stairs. They are simply tired, period. It will not take too many more of these for people to say “The H**l with you!”
“AAron gave a very detailed, logical and interesting response to bruce Peren’s reply . . . . PLEASE READ IT HERE: http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/view/270 “
I wasn’t impressed. Seigo gets too many things wrong.
The flow of Perens’ white paper article at http://userlinux.com/GUI.html is as follows:
1) Selecting GNOME as the sole GUI framework generated a lot of protest and flamage.
2) Rhetorical question: Why play favorites when Debian (on which UserLinux is based) doesn’t, interoperability between GNOME and KDE apps is pretty good, the right GUI theme can make GUIs look alike, and users don’t care about the underlying toolkit?
3) Answer to rhetorical question: Because not playing favorites between KDE and GNOME means supporting two large and complex GUI development frameworks, and the smaller UserLinux suppliers only have the resources to support one such framework.
4) Ok, given the answer to the above question, one must choose which large complex GUI development frameworks, KDE or GNOME, to support.
5) All software providers, free and proprietary, should be able to develop against UserLinux without having to pay.
6) Only GNOME fits the above constraint.
7) No consensus on the choice of GUI framework was possible, so the Gordian knot was cut by fiat, and GNOME was chosen.
8) Miscellaneous points about not being an anti-Qt ogre, blah, blah, blah.
Here’s where Seigo has problems:
A) He misunderstands the rhetorical question posed in (2), asserting that Perens said that his decision to choose GNOME as the sole GUI framework “[d]oesn’t affect users.” Rather, Perens pointed out that the needs of the end user are not what drives the need to choose one GUI framework.
B) He discounts the idea that a relatively small shop might just manage to support “LDAP to web serving to databse servers to email services to groupware to desktops to web browsers” all in-house. Judging from the some of the posts in the UserLinux mailing list archives, this possibility is not as unreasonable as he makes it out to be.
C) He assumes that the not having Qt or KDE will make it infeasible for Qt- or KDE-based apps to be deployed on UserLinux. This neglects that UserLinux is designed to be a subset of Debian to which further software such as Qt and KDE can easily be added if necessary. Perens even says this outright in his white paper: “Of course any of the service providers can make their own support choices from the full set of software in Debian, for their own paying customers, overriding our choices. . . .” Seigo pays a token acknowledgment of this being part of the UserLinux plan, but then refers to it as “unnecessary variation and forking” rather than as what it really is, namely a building on top of an well-defined yet extensible base.
D) He distorts Perens’ position about proprietary software. Seigo: “I also find it curious that he states that we ‘need’ to create a large pool of closed source software for enterprises. What are we doing writing all this Free Software then? Wasting our time?” Perens pointed out that if businesses come to depend more on free software, then free software advocates will have more leverage on legislative issues, such as software patents or DRM. For businesses to become dependent on free software, the free software used will have to mix with proprietary software, which enterprise users will nigh inevitably use and develop. It is in this context that Perens asserts, “So, in order to get any Free Software into businesses, our Free system must promote the creation of a large collection of proprietary solutions that do not exist today. If free software becomes the foundation for important pieces of proprietary software, then businesses that create and use said software will be loathe to allow laws to pass that threaten that free foundation. The more proprietary vendors there are that depend on free software, the more proprietary vendors there are to pressure and bribe^Wlobby Congress. Seigo’s line, “Closed source software is not ‘cost sharing'” is particularly egregious, as Perens made clear that UserLinux itself is what is funded by cost sharing.
I’d have to say that it is Seigo’s piece that is misleading, not Perens’.
Yeap I said that bcuz’ that is very far from Linux in nature, freedom and free selection. Why KDE group would be loudly, it is non-sense. Imagine that What is happening if xcfe, then fwvm and fluxbox and so on makes protests to force userLinux put their owns as default. Meanwhile, the Linux desktop on market < 2%, *DE have battled roughly, oh this is a comedy for WindowsOS.
If ya like KDE, ya can install KDE even on UserLinux and make it as default, thats it. If ya do not feel good as using gnome, remove it. Oh make the life simple my buddies.
I like slackware, i am using slackware, even though RH Linux owns 70% Linux market, or more..who care!
I think you are the one missing something here. I don’t know whether you have followed the UserLinux Mailinglist but from the replies there one goit the impression that Perens has decided for GNOME long before planning UserLinux as such.
If you paid attention to the last couple of replies you have figured out that Perens made the decision without even taking into account what the partitcipants of the Mailinglist want. They were in the middle of a conversation both sides raising points about pros and cons and in the middle of that he backed out and decided for GNOME on his very own. The Mailinglist had nearly 30 subscriptiants from KDE developers willing to help, answer and do all the techtalk and on the otherhand there were only 5 GNOME people most of them regular users not even knowing a difference between a GNOME-Application window and a BonoboUI window who slammed a lot of bullshit in the ML.
It would have been wise from Perens inviting a couple of fine GNOME developers as well as KDE developers in a private ML conversation where both sides bring up good points rather than having a single sided conversations with some psychos who were more up to present KDE in a very bad light rather than talking about the serious pro’s and con’s … The licensing issue is really cut out of the hair. Even if there wouldn’t be any issues people still try to find NEW ways to put KDE in a very bad light. And why ? for what ? We all know that technically KDE is far supperior.
> And we still have people here wondering why Linux isn’t
> moving forward on the desktop. Just look at this for the
> number one problem; too many egos, too much RMS-like
> arrogance and no one putting the goal ahead of their own
> “visions”.
>
> Whether people like it or not, there needs to be a
> standardise desktop environment which will most likely be
> GNOME…
You see what ? Look in the mirror.
Come on, are you really as dumb as you post? please. Read what I wrote. I clearly stated “there needs to be a
standardise desktop environment which will most likely be
GNOME”, which DOES NOT mean that I want it to be GNOME, but lets be completely honest, how many companies right now are pushing KDE as a desktop? IMHO, although it is the superior alternative, it is unfortunate that an inferior one will be the one at the fore-front of the “Linux desktop revolution”.
You really need some comprehension lessons, or is this another terrific example of your countries education system in action?
“but lets be completely honest, how many companies right now are pushing KDE as a desktop?”
I give you a fair answer on this. The difference between KDE and GNOME is that the KDE people wanted to stay independant from companies influence because they believe that KDE should stay a community driven project. The community, developers and users are those who should decide about KDE and not a company. This doesn’t mean that companies are not welcome – They are. But they should be threatened as equal partners. Look at the Kompany for example or SuSE who supports them. They work on the project as equal partners but not creating bad feelings outside of the community like they would control, rule or direct the project.
GNOME has changed and a lot of changes happeing in GNOME are scary. I for my own am perpelx by times with all the stuff I need to read. I read stuff like Marketing in GNOME from one day to another and I ask myself ‘wtf’. I read things about ‘corporate Desktop’ and I ask myself again ‘wtf’. I read things about ‘Novell put millions into GNOME’ (where I more believe that this is pure PR bullshit by Miguel and NAT) but anyways I ask myself ‘wtf’.
I am doing some minor development around GNOME with my own projects. I know a lot of people who are directly tied to the GNOME development and I do know other people around it as well and do you really believe that the hundrets of people contributing to GNOME every day do have a clue wtf actually is happeining behind ? Most of the people developing for GNOME, doing translations or fixing bugs are normal people like you and I, they want to have a stable, usable and freaking cool Desktop environment. They do not care about the personal interests of Ximian/Novell, SUN or Red Hat. These people see them as people who contribute to GNOME the same way like others contribute to KDE as equal partners. You can imagine that a SUN person is not coming to me or to an translator pissing him off when he made a mistake in his own code or own translation. No they come up, nicely reply that there may be some mistakes and if you like to fix it. There is no such thing like control, big player, corporate desktop.
When you look back (if you seriously do this) in the past 2 months then you only see Miguel de Icaza or Nat Friedman making such announcements in the name of Novell. But you forget that they are not GNOME, Novell is not GNOME, Red Hat is not GNOME and SUN is not GNOME. GNOME is the community of many individuals. The corporate stuff is nothing else than a big PR bullshit made by a bunch of people.
You and others need to accept that GNOME is communitywork there is no primary influcense by companies. Although if you read all this PR bullshit outside one will definately get the wrong impression that large player such as Red Hat, SUN or Ximian/Novell is backing them with lots of money. Most of us people who contribute to GNOME have not seen one penny of all this immaginary cash that has been floating. I would more get the tendency to say that part of that cash is floating into the pockets of those making a lot of noise with this ‘Enterprise Desktop’ or ‘Corporate Desktop’. I wonder how many people actually exists that have an usage with these words. Not to mention that the volunteer driven project GNOME has a mad mixture of people from different countries, skills, education. Not all of them are aware of what that all means.
And honestly If it’s really the case that GNOME is being sold that way by a few people who think they can control or own GNOME then sorry. Then I must tell you that GNOME is not the project anymore that it was aimed for all the years. Then I must tell you that GNOME is nothing more than eyewiping and fooling people. Although I have noticed a huge change in the internals of GNOME itself like free volunteer workers are leaving the project for doing MacOSX development or other projects. Even if new people are to come they will realize these things on their own sooner or later.
We all have chosen open source and free software because we believe into this, we believe into the community, we wanted to get off of being ripped off for our work. Sadly to see that the name GNOME is shamelessly abused for such things. Is GNOME the same freedom as it used to be or has it matured into a big Money Making Machine ? I for my own do not want to play the free volunter dumbass sitting at home fixing bugs, writing my own software and doing translations for a big Marketing Machine. I then could spent my time on doing commercial business on alternative systems such as MacOS where I write my shareware applications that I can sell on my own for a few bucks only to buy a new book or a new laptop or whatever.
Hope you understand this.
The Debian folks feel threatened by the whole Fedora thing. Bruce Perens decides he needs User Linux, based primarily up his obvious dislike for RedHat.
Bruce starts out with flawed reasoning that there is something wrong with Enterprise Linux, and for companies who might want to develop and invest in such a product and get paid for delivering and supporting such a product.
Bruce correctly identifies a real problem area and that is the present situation where there is no single standard for the linux desktop. Bruce chooses Gnome based on it’s license.
The KDE folks now get very upset because this is just the latest in a series of setbacks for them, and they believe they may lose out to Gnome.
I wish the User Linux project well. I’m a Gnome 2.4 user and look forward to increased development and improvement to Gnome and it’s apps.
“You really need some comprehension lessons, or is this another terrific example of your countries education system in action?”
No need to act unfair here. You need some lessons in humanity and interpersonal behaviour. You realized that I’m not an aussie like you, thus you could have shown some more respect to those not 100% familar with your native language.
“The KDE folks now get very upset”
I don’t know if they are upset but I assume so. And they have a very good reason to be upset. They are upset because they didn’t get a real chance by a projects leader to talk about KDE. The arguments these people have brought up were the same old things which has been explained over and over and over again. Always the same QT issue, always the same uglyness issue etc. Things that people have catched up from others saying and now repeat over and over again. The KDE people made all these points clear many many many times and yet the same crowd come up with the same nonsense. You won’t feel pissed ?
No matter if they are right or wrong. Only matters is you repeat the standard bullshit over and over again until the last one repeats it. They are upsed about all the bullshit not about the clueless people.
This is the one thing I disagree with Bruce Perens on as well as Eugenia, KDE is the best desktop environment for the corporate user. In a business environment usability and security features are paramount and this is where KDE wins my vote everytime. Undoubtedly KDE is also a better choice for what Eugenia points out, there are more apps available for it and they tend to be of better quality and more usable than GNOME applications. This is one instance when I think bruce Perens doesnt even know what he is doing.
While I personally agree with the GUI decision, another aspect I find quite disturbing.
That is the limitation of interpretive language.
As I see it there are three major languages python, perl and php, and each tends to be used for different things, so I would see this as similar to having c,c++, cjj instead of just C compilers.
From KDE’s point of view I think the worry could be that KDE end up as Netscape. If it becomes a trend that major distro’s not bundle KDE then user’s will eventually stop adding it on – that is those that know how-to in the first place.
I don’t know how much Trolltech cares. I think they are making their money from licenses in the embedded market.
A big company could buy Trolltech and set Qt free. But why? It would be like SUN and Java and SUN is not making much money off of Java.
“No need to act unfair here. You need some lessons in humanity and interpersonal behaviour. You realized that I’m not an aussie like you, thus you could have shown some more respect to those not 100% familar with your native language.”
Love your words. aussie or yankee or whoever, i dun think it is a matter. It is upon you whether you have open heart and an open mind or not. Cheers
“From KDE’s point of view I think the worry could be that KDE end up as Netscape.”
Don’t forget that Red Hat has dropped their Desktop plans and created the Fedora community project.
Don’t forget that Hewlett Packard jumped off of supporting GNOME.
All major Distributions have some sort of KDE as default don’t forget Lycrosics, Lindows, SuSE, Mandrake, Conectiva etc.
There have for some time now been distros without Gnome (like Xandros and LindowsOS) and no public cry has taken place. Why is it so awful when somebody decides to dump KDE in favor of Gnome?
My own take is that by 2005 all major distrubutions have dumped either KDE or Gnome and go with one windowing system alone.
Eugenia, no offence but your petition was really not meaningful.