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Normal ordinary people who want to contribute or come up with an idea are treatened with disrespect and kicked with the bare foots. One day a friend of mine also a valuable member of the GNOME community came up with an idea (together with his girlfriend) to shave "GNOME GIRLS" he brought up that idea on the mailinglists (iirc) but everyone told him to go away, and that his ideas aren't great. But then some months later some girls from Red Hat have shown up with a brilliant idea (guess what, yes) to create "GNOME GIRLS" and voila they have been getting mailinglist acces, cvs access, all permissions granted everywhere and everyone called it a great ide. Why ? We talked about that for quite a while and concluded that this is due to the Red Hat position they keep wearing. Same applies with other companies that have been founded around GNOME, they immediately been granted warm seats in the foundation, in the board, while others (no company related ones) have been left out and ignored for years. How comes and how can GNOME still be called a community project and why do people still defend their practices ? GNOME totally lost it's roots and focus for users and users needs.

Well trying to come to an end here. What I want to say is that there are a lot of issues inside GNOME, it starts from many small and bigger bits of GNOME as desktop itself. From broken architecture, as well as not getting people on one table to have the work together (HIG is an example here) or to have simply basic stuff working good enough to get at least the basic things done. Over to the problem with the acceptance of people inside the community as well as the abuse everywhere.

That's why I recommend everyone these days to go with KDE. Their entire community is by far more friendly, the people are great, the developers are totally differently compared to the ones working on GNOME (its like day and night). Bugs are fixed immediately, patches are accepted. The framework (once you deal with it a bit more) is so great, things simply work. Sure sometimes problems occour on KDE as well, nothing is perfect, but the amount of problems is by far minimal if we consider how big that project is.

KDE from rough guess is 3 times bigger than GNOME (also a lot of translations stuff, source code). It's easier to build, it's all based on C++, no need to deal with different languages or getting upset or split an entire community because someone is using C, other C++, Python, Perl, Mono, Java (this will cause a lot of problems in GNOME camp too once the transtion to GNOME III starts. Already now a lot of people aren't really happy about all this). KDE works, offers great tools, looks mature.

KDE isn't much bigger than GNOME actually, on my system a normal KDE installation consisting of these tools:

qt-copy arts kdelibs kdebase kdeutils kdenetwork kdegraphics kdemultimedia kdegames kdepim koffice kdesdk kdevelop kdewebdev kdeedu kdetoys kdeartwork

Requires around 650 mb including headers and stripped binaries. The same amount I get with GNOME installed + Firefox + Evolution + headers etc. But I get much more tools for KDE. Sure I don't need all of them, but maybe I will need one of them one day and I would be happy if it's there.

Also whenever I hear GNOME devs talking about integration (like the evolution-data-server integration in the calendar/clock applet) I need to start laughing. It's no real integration, just some "hack" which was rewarded with money. Real integration is shown on KDE for example. Share of addressbook data across all applications (and it works today already). Oh and there is so much more.

Well I gave you an idea Novell. I really wonder who set that itch in your head to make GNOME the default. Was it a politics decision or a rational technology one ?

I am quite unhappy that all this politics stuff is being done on the heads of users, customers and people. Linux is a great System, KDE is a great environment many times better than GNOME and the momentum damage you caused with the recent announcements will stay in peoples head for a long long time. I feel sorry for your decision on making GNOME default regardless if you steer back now. Please consider again and listen to your customers. These are who feed your children, clothe your family and make you pay your rent and car.

I have no issues with GNOME, I do like GNOME and it deserves its place. But what I don't like is the bad practices around GNOME, e.g. the bad marketing, lying to their customers and then the agressive marketing that GNOME is so much ready for the corporate desktop. I really hate this. I hate being lied as customer and I hate it as developer who spent years of his time in GNOME and being not asked whether I like that GNOME is being sold that way.

Corporate have needs, they rely on working things, they spent a lot of money, they want the things to simply work and not toy around in things first.

To say the truth, all this talk about evil Microsoft (yeah there are people who try making a competition out of it) is pure bullshit in my opinion. Windows isn't a bad Operating System (regardless of the practices of Microsoft). It offers a lot of tools and its still being used everywhere and it still leads the desktop. I really dislike seeing GNOME as the default desktop in the Linux world because I know that things will not change. If it hasn't been changed by now then it probably will never ever change at all. GNOME has a long way to go, a very long way, and that long way only to catch where KDE is today, not to speak about catching up with Windows or even MacOSX. So please don't decide about political stuff, decide of what works. KDE these days is used by 2/3 of all Open Source Desktop users and these values (as often seen everywhere in polls) are speaking for itself.