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."
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:> This will make Gnome users become productive faster
I didn't made that experience. Actually I had a lot of problems using GNOME specially all the basic features don't really work. Printing, Mailing, Crashing, Weak apps and so on. I always have to seek for KDE alternatives to get my work done.
> Lessened costs is one of the thing Novell, and other
> commercial Linux distros tries to offer their
> customers.
That's whyt many companies aquiring licenses and support from Trolltech to get their software ported and working. They don't need to waste hours of manpower to google for GTK+ solutions, they simply call up Trolltech and continue doing their work. Even the OOP approach of QT allows rapid application development.
> So from a business point of view this makes sense.
Exactly! It makes a lot of sense as we can see on Trolltechs portfolio they have a lot of really known companies who use their work. It speaks lectures.
Member since:2005-07-06
> This will make Gnome users become productive faster
I didn't made that experience. Actually I had a lot of problems using GNOME specially all the basic features don't really work. Printing, Mailing, Crashing, Weak apps and so on. I always have to seek for KDE alternatives to get my work done.
I think we are talking about different things. I talk about how Gnome is supposed to work, you are talking about bugs.
Up until Gnome 2.6 or even 2.8 I would agree with you, that the basic functions was too bug ridden to be of any use for real work.
It was not long ago I always found myself going back to KDE to get work done after trying Gnome, but after using late Gnome distros such as Ubuntu and Fedora I would say Gnome is shaping up rapidly. This time I will not switch back on the grounds that Gnome is technically substandard.
Exactly! It makes a lot of sense as we can see on Trolltechs portfolio they have a lot of really known companies who use their work. It speaks lectures.
I agree with you that Trolltech technology is superior to gtk, but unfortunately the best technology doesn't allways win. Just remember the case of the much better Sony Betamax being beaten by the mediocre VHS VCR systems.
Sure, QT makes development faster, but Gnome/Gtk is not that bad if you use e.g. gtkmm/glade. The problem is that KDE lacks so much in the usability and accessability department that it doesn't make up for the better development process in KDE.
After all, in most cases there are more users than developers. Just look at the old MacOS, it was hell to developers but even so Apple is still alive and kicking today.
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
"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.
Member since:
2005-07-06
Standardizing on Gnome seam to be a very good idea. I'm by no means saying that KDE is a bad desktop, on the contrary it is very good, but Gnome is good enough. A standardized look of the commercial Linux desktop is more important than the additional bells and whistles KDE would have offered.
The notion of a standard will make it easier to convince companies to port applications to Linux as they will only have to offer support to one desktop.
To Novell this is important, as the more applications that becomes available the easier it will be to sell subscriptions.
Chosing Gnome over KDE as the standard is rather obvious. First we have the licensing problems of QT, not that a the cost of a QT license is that high, but it makes it harder for semiprofessional developers to enter the market.
Another problem is the KDE configurability and notoriously bad defaults. Being able to change everything and sit down and make it just right for days, is fine for the geek home user who even might find this process fun. However, when you have to pay somebody for doing that, instead of having that person doing productive work it is not fun anymore. Windows suffers from the same problem by the way.
In Gnome simple things are kept simple. This will make Gnome users become productive faster, and will require less training costs. Lessened costs is one of the thing Novell, and other commercial Linux distros tries to offer their customers. So from a business point of view this makes sense.