Rumors circulating that Novell is going to kill off its popular Linux desktop lines are completely false. [However,] Novell is making one large strategic change. The GNOME interface is going to become the default interface on both the SLES and Novell Linux Desktop line. KDE libraries will be supplied on both, but the bulk of Novell's interface moving forward will be on GNOME. "The entire KDE graphical interface and product family will continue to be supported and delivered on OpenSuSE."
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Member since:"I don't think the majority of KDE users are aware that developers making commercial applications have to pay a royalty if they use the QT toolkit. For me this is a good enough reason to avoid KDE."
Correct me if i'm wrong, but I believe there is an option to avoid royaltoes IF and only IF you release your program under the GPL. In that cae I fully agree and understand that commercial distros move away from KDE.
/Lennart Fridén
Member since:2005-07-07
Yes, you are right. Anything else but GPL app requires you to buy commercial development license.
And prices are insane. Insane high, I mean.
http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/pricing.html
Not everyone writes GPL software, there is much more shareware than freeware, and how can one afford to even think about proffit if he has to pay 2630EUR for one workstation development desktop license? Well, in case of buying some comercial product you get cheaper license, but that doesn't mean that you can use newer Qt if any.
For example Kylix is still at Qt 2.0 (ok, there is a FreeCLX project that will support newer, but... read forward to know why but exists here) and owners of older licenses will be able to write commercial apps with 2.0 only where it doesn't matter if 4.0 is out. But on the other hand these same people will be able to write GPL software with 4? Wow, that is a real deal for anybody who bought Kylix, basically he can stick FreeCLX somewhere where the sun doesn't shine if he would like to write closed applications.
Life sucks, doesn't it?
Member since:2005-07-10
There are no royalties involved if you code with Qt. To quote the KDE myths page:
There are no per-product or per-sale fees associated with Qt development on X11, Windows or MacOS X, open or closed source.
You do have to pay a per-developer license fee, however horrible it is to have to pay for service and support. It must really suck having to spend money to make money...
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces."But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance."According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.
Member since:
Way back when I first used Linux I tried Mandrake and it was installed with KDE as the default desktop. After trying Gnome 2.12 on Fedora 4 I fell in love with it. Man has Gnome improved a lot. I recently removed KDE as a startup option since I found I didn't need it anymore. I find the latest version of Nautilus is cleaner than KDE's Konqueror. I use Firefox for browsing so I dropped Konqueror. I think other people and Novell have caught onto these improvements and there is always that KDE licensing problem with applications. I don't think the majority of KDE users are aware that developers making commercial applications have to pay a royalty if they use the QT toolkit. For me this is a good enough reason to avoid KDE.