Submitted by This edition covers: writing custom widgets using GTK+ 2.8, a closer look at GnomeMeeting, and includes an interview discussing the a recent 5,000 Gnome desktop deployment.
New Edition of Gnome Journal
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
ROTFL
the shortest ezine i’ve ever seen
there are only 2 articles and one big
sing song GNOME marketing press
Is quality not quantity.
he’s probably a kde fanboy who want lots of everything (eg clutter, bloat, RAM usage, etc), but with no quality.
>ROTFL
>the shortest ezine i’ve ever seen
>there are only 2 articles and one big
>sing song GNOME marketing press
Its a monthly… Check the archives.
Article about Cairo/GTK+ is a good one.
I find the articles quite well written but for the Macedonian deployment I don’t see any positive coming out of it. Sure for Macedonia it might be interesting to get a cheap operating system solution specially now after the years of war and the slowly restructuring of their economy open source might be the right way to go.
But I am not sure whether GNOME is the correct choice for the Schools and the demands and requirements that such schools have. The problem I see is that Darko has a personal preference that he says is GNOME and his decision to deploy the schools is based on is personal preference rather to what might be technological a better choice (summed up).
The problems here is GNOME which from my experience as former contributor is far away from being in a state where it fullfils requirements of the schoolars. Specially in the education sector GNOME lacks a lot of useful software as well as in other areas it lacks completenes of these software.
I think also the reasons brought up like “simplicity” and “cleaness” reminds me of the dozens of marketing announces made by GNOME and sounds more like a programmed opinion rather than a real objective opinion of what exists these days.
If we look over to KDE for a moment then I must say that it has by far more to offer specially for schools and education than GNOME. If we happen to have a look at “kdeedu” for example:
http://edu.kde.org/
Then we see a lot of useful programs specially for kids to learn lessons in vocabular training, in percentage calculation, in function plotting, in geography, or chemical stuff. Please note that this is just a value free comment, because it’s urgently required to take the best out of the best (a slogan that I learned from the times where I supported GNOME that it’s always important to use the best software existing).
Not just that but I also know that KDE is the by far more feature complete and coherent Desktop to accomplish exactly these needs much better and much more efficient than what GNOME has to offer. It simply works and get the pupils their work done.
And this is by far a reply from my side that is miles away from what I really know about GNOME and what really reflects my very personal opinion. Going into details here would probably generate a flamefest with people again which I am trying to avoid since people are inconvinceable.
Though this said. Darko is quite confident that he can generate new “Developers for GNOME”. This is quite a honourable wish but personal own experience for many years with myself as person and many others that I known have proven that “generating new Developers for GNOME” and “have those become part of GNOME and fully accepted” are two pair of shoes and knowing their elbow community of developer proves that this will be getting a really rough task and only leads into frustration.
I also question whether that what gets installed is also that what gets used by the pupils or schools later on. Once their infrastructure is getting better, people start to experiment (even pupils at home). That’s how we all learned about Linux and I doubt that the 468 schools and some 182 computer labs continue staying with GNOME once they find themselves trap into many problems that they can not solve. I think from the 5000 Desktops that are planned – only half of them will remain with GNOME (in best). The other half will continue piracing Windows or switch to something else. It’s also not clear that this project leads into success since there are two sides of a project. One that was successful and the other that was a mistake and failed. Both valid project with different ending.
By the way, it would have been nice to have an official announcement from them. It would be good to read an independant article about this totally free from any value or personal opinion. It’s hard for me as reader to track down whether this is a real project or just a well written marketing writing specially set to show a new chess move in the game for the best Desktop.
Anyone has some independant source to confirm this ?
you are ignoring one very important factor in their choice – gnome has good usability, while kde has poor usability.
You are offtopic and please stop moderating down everything. By the way you should get a closer look on this link:
http://www.osnews.com/meta/read.php/1133478132/chapter_three:_regis…
It’s there on purpose and I hope some of you abusive people get removed pretty soon. It’s really inacceptable what happens here recently.
if i could mod you down, i would. have you read this part of the link that you’ve just linked to:
“We are serious when we say we want to clean up osnews.com and get rid of the troll problem.”
now read back to youself the crap that you have written.
You are a pathetic person. My posting is ontopic and correct and seriously. Get a life !!
The only one who’s pathetic is you.
It’s pathetic if someone spends his days scanning the internet in order to troll every discussion about Gnome.
It’s funny otoh if the person who spends his life doing this is telling someone else to get a life.
It’s sad though that someone with your knowledge doesn’t do something useful instead.
P.S.: In case anybody is wondering who IP: 84.129.249.— is, here’s his homepage:
http://www.akcaagac.com/index.html
The first GTK+ Cairo widget example is depressing. All that code and all those macros for an example that does nothing. My favorite lines:
G_BEGIN_DECLS
#define EGG_TYPE_CLOCK_FACE (egg_clock_face_get_type ())
#define EGG_CLOCK_FACE(obj) (G_TYPE_CHECK_INSTANCE_CAST ((obj), EGG_TYPE_CLOCK_FACE, EggClockFace))
#define EGG_CLOCK_FACE_CLASS(obj) (G_TYPE_CHECK_CLASS_CAST ((obj), EGG_CLOCK_FACE, EggClockFaceClass))
#define EGG_IS_CLOCK_FACE(obj) (G_TYPE_CHECK_INSTANCE_TYPE ((obj), EGG_TYPE_CLOCK_FACE))
#define EGG_IS_CLOCK_FACE_CLASS(obj) (G_TYPE_CHECK_CLASS_TYPE ((obj), EFF_TYPE_CLOCK_FACE))
#define EGG_CLOCK_FACE_GET_CLASS (G_TYPE_INSTANCE_GET_CLASS ((obj), EGG_TYPE_CLOCK_FACE, EggClockFaceClass))
typedef struct _EggClockFace EggClockFace;
typedef struct _EggClockFaceClass EggClockFaceClass;
struct _EggClockFace
{
GtkDrawingArea parent;
/* < private > */
};
struct _EggClockFaceClass
{
GtkDrawingAreaClass parent_class;
};
GtkWidget *egg_clock_face_new (void);
G_END_DECLS
The completely equivalent Python code?
class EggClockFace(GtkDrawingArea):
pass
Whoever says “you can do OOP in C!” is delusional. C’mon people, it’s 2005. Why is everyone so content with such a bloody primitive API? Do we still have to define line after line of macros just so the program can figure out the type of an object? The single most salient aspect of GTK+ as an API is that it’s designed to be easily bindable to languages that suck less hard than C for GUI coding.
Edited 2005-12-03 05:14
“Why is everyone so content with such a bloody primitive API? Do we still have to define line after line of macros just so the program can figure out the type of an object? The single most salient aspect of GTK+ as an API is that it’s designed to be easily bindable to languages that suck less hard than C for GUI coding.”
Congratulations, you just answered your own question… your price is a lollipop.
How? Looking at all the apps on my desktop, 99.9% are still coded in C!
Congratulations, you just answered your own question… your price is a lollipop.
Congratulations. You get a sack of coal for Christmas.
To actually bind to different languages somebody has to actually write code in C because that’s what the base language is. All bindings do is mask that from you, they don’t solve the problem. That’s why just about everything is written in C with Gnome, even with all of these now famous Gnome/GTK bindings people keep happily telling us about.
“Congratulations. You get a sack of coal for Christmas.”
it would better for you to have it, segedunum – it would be the perfect upgrade for your brain, segedunum.
it would better for you to have it, segedunum – it would be the perfect upgrade for your brain, segedunum.
Thanks for the really informative reply. I seem to get a lot of them.
I couldn’t help poking fun at the article. It’s of course an interesting read. But I can’t help thinking that there are much better choices out there to do drawing than using C.
Being a REBOL guy, I wrote my own version of the article in REBOL here:
http://www.hmkdesign.dk/rebol/gtkclock/index.html
Please OSN Staff do something agains the moderating abuse!!!!
—
I find the articles quite well written but for the Macedonian deployment I don’t see any positive coming out of it. Sure for Macedonia it might be interesting to get a cheap operating system solution specially now after the years of war and the slowly restructuring of their economy open source might be the right way to go.
But I am not sure whether GNOME is the correct choice for the Schools and the demands and requirements that such schools have. The problem I see is that Darko has a personal preference that he says is GNOME and his decision to deploy the schools is based on is personal preference rather to what might be technological a better choice (summed up).
The problems here is GNOME which from my experience as former contributor is far away from being in a state where it fullfils requirements of the schoolars. Specially in the education sector GNOME lacks a lot of useful software as well as in other areas it lacks completenes of these software.
I think also the reasons brought up like “simplicity” and “cleaness” reminds me of the dozens of marketing announces made by GNOME and sounds more like a programmed opinion rather than a real objective opinion of what exists these days.
If we look over to KDE for a moment then I must say that it has by far more to offer specially for schools and education than GNOME. If we happen to have a look at “kdeedu” for example:
http://edu.kde.org/
Then we see a lot of useful programs specially for kids to learn lessons in vocabular training, in percentage calculation, in function plotting, in geography, or chemical stuff. Please note that this is just a value free comment, because it’s urgently required to take the best out of the best (a slogan that I learned from the times where I supported GNOME that it’s always important to use the best software existing).
Not just that but I also know that KDE is the by far more feature complete and coherent Desktop to accomplish exactly these needs much better and much more efficient than what GNOME has to offer. It simply works and get the pupils their work done.
And this is by far a reply from my side that is miles away from what I really know about GNOME and what really reflects my very personal opinion. Going into details here would probably generate a flamefest with people again which I am trying to avoid since people are inconvinceable.
Though this said. Darko is quite confident that he can generate new “Developers for GNOME”. This is quite a honourable wish but personal own experience for many years with myself as person and many others that I known have proven that “generating new Developers for GNOME” and “have those become part of GNOME and fully accepted” are two pair of shoes and knowing their elbow community of developer proves that this will be getting a really rough task and only leads into frustration.
I also question whether that what gets installed is also that what gets used by the pupils or schools later on. Once their infrastructure is getting better, people start to experiment (even pupils at home). That’s how we all learned about Linux and I doubt that the 468 schools and some 182 computer labs continue staying with GNOME once they find themselves trap into many problems that they can not solve. I think from the 5000 Desktops that are planned – only half of them will remain with GNOME (in best). The other half will continue piracing Windows or switch to something else. It’s also not clear that this project leads into success since there are two sides of a project. One that was successful and the other that was a mistake and failed. Both valid project with different ending.
By the way, it would have been nice to have an official announcement from them. It would be good to read an independant article about this totally free from any value or personal opinion. It’s hard for me as reader to track down whether this is a real project or just a well written marketing writing specially set to show a new chess move in the game for the best Desktop.
Anyone has some independant source to confirm this ?
Please OSN Staff do something agains the moderating abuse!!!! A compliant about the abuse of moderation has been filled some mins ago!
—
I find the articles quite well written but for the Macedonian deployment I don’t see any positive coming out of it. Sure for Macedonia it might be interesting to get a cheap operating system solution specially now after the years of war and the slowly restructuring of their economy open source might be the right way to go.
But I am not sure whether GNOME is the correct choice for the Schools and the demands and requirements that such schools have. The problem I see is that Darko has a personal preference that he says is GNOME and his decision to deploy the schools is based on is personal preference rather to what might be technological a better choice (summed up).
The problems here is GNOME which from my experience as former contributor is far away from being in a state where it fullfils requirements of the schoolars. Specially in the education sector GNOME lacks a lot of useful software as well as in other areas it lacks completenes of these software.
I think also the reasons brought up like “simplicity” and “cleaness” reminds me of the dozens of marketing announces made by GNOME and sounds more like a programmed opinion rather than a real objective opinion of what exists these days.
If we look over to KDE for a moment then I must say that it has by far more to offer specially for schools and education than GNOME. If we happen to have a look at “kdeedu” for example:
http://edu.kde.org/
Then we see a lot of useful programs specially for kids to learn lessons in vocabular training, in percentage calculation, in function plotting, in geography, or chemical stuff. Please note that this is just a value free comment, because it’s urgently required to take the best out of the best (a slogan that I learned from the times where I supported GNOME that it’s always important to use the best software existing).
Not just that but I also know that KDE is the by far more feature complete and coherent Desktop to accomplish exactly these needs much better and much more efficient than what GNOME has to offer. It simply works and get the pupils their work done.
And this is by far a reply from my side that is miles away from what I really know about GNOME and what really reflects my very personal opinion. Going into details here would probably generate a flamefest with people again which I am trying to avoid since people are inconvinceable.
Though this said. Darko is quite confident that he can generate new “Developers for GNOME”. This is quite a honourable wish but personal own experience for many years with myself as person and many others that I known have proven that “generating new Developers for GNOME” and “have those become part of GNOME and fully accepted” are two pair of shoes and knowing their elbow community of developer proves that this will be getting a really rough task and only leads into frustration.
I also question whether that what gets installed is also that what gets used by the pupils or schools later on. Once their infrastructure is getting better, people start to experiment (even pupils at home). That’s how we all learned about Linux and I doubt that the 468 schools and some 182 computer labs continue staying with GNOME once they find themselves trap into many problems that they can not solve. I think from the 5000 Desktops that are planned – only half of them will remain with GNOME (in best). The other half will continue piracing Windows or switch to something else. It’s also not clear that this project leads into success since there are two sides of a project. One that was successful and the other that was a mistake and failed. Both valid project with different ending.
By the way, it would have been nice to have an official announcement from them. It would be good to read an independant article about this totally free from any value or personal opinion. It’s hard for me as reader to track down whether this is a real project or just a well written marketing writing specially set to show a new chess move in the game for the best Desktop.
Anyone has some independant source to confirm this ?
You can use kedu in the gnome desktop with no problems. It’s been done before:
http://www.edubuntu.org/tour.html
That’s the answer to the only valid, non-flamebait point on your post.
[… usual trolling …]
If we look over to KDE for a moment then I must say that it has by far more to offer specially for schools and education than GNOME. If we happen to have a look at “kdeedu” for example:
http://edu.kde.org/
Then we see a lot of useful programs specially for kids to learn lessons in vocabular training, in percentage calculation, in function plotting, in geography, or chemical stuff. Please note that this is just a value free comment, because it’s urgently required to take the best out of the best (a slogan that I learned from the times where I supported GNOME that it’s always important to use the best software existing).
Not just that but I also know that KDE is the by far more feature complete and coherent Desktop to accomplish exactly these needs much better and much more efficient than what GNOME has to offer. It simply works and get the pupils their work done.
[… usual trolling …]
you want an answer? compare these two links:
http://i18n.kde.org/stats/gui/stable/mk/index.php
http://l10n-status.gnome.org/gnome-2.12/mk/desktop/index.html
Glad to see you “usual trolling” get OWNED, nice one.
I voted this one down and this is certainly no abuse.
When I mod your post down I get asked for my reason. Well I chose spam, because that’s what you do here. You constantly keep reposting your stuff and people are just tired of you spamming in the osnews comments.
See, I don’t care if you post the cure for cancer or the solution for world hunger. If you keep reposting over and over again, I will mod it down too.
http://www.oluyede.org/blog/writing-a-widget-using-cairo-and-pygtk-…
If you know anything about software development and integration you know why Gnome is now at a dead end.
Gnome/GTK have no structure whatsoever. It’s just a bunch of api’s throw on top of each other. Just look at rayiner sample.
Look at the Gnome bounty system for “Desktop Integration”. The funny thing is that there is no desktop integration. Nothing. It’s just a couple of hacks done at every simple application of a Gnome desktop that wants to share information with other applications. This makes pipping and text parsing between unix applictions look like the best thing since sliced bread(which it is not).
If Gnome is the future of desktop on Linux then quite frankly I want to know where have we failed.
If Gnome is the future of desktop on Linux then quite frankly I want to know where have we failed.
They haven’t failed – both desktops are quite successful.
Gnome and KDE are both the future of the Linux desktop but the smart money is on Gnome because third party development (RealPlayer, NVidia, Adobe et al) are choosing GTK as their platform of choice (probably due to licensing reasons rather than technical features).
The reality is that Gnome has the corporate backing and more industrial support than KDE so its more likely to succeed on the enterprise desktop.
Out side of enterprises, you may well find KDE becoming the desktop of choice so I think you need to bear in mind that both Gnome and KDE will be successful but probably in different markets/segments/areas.
Out side of enterprises, you may well find KDE becoming the desktop of choice
What do you mean, ‘outside of enterprises’? All Linux desktop usage is outside of enterprises, apart from people, individuals and small businesses who’ve specifically gone out and done it. All the evidence from that direction is that most are not using Gnome.
Gnome does not have corporate backing because no corporates are using it. They’re using Windows, and they aren’t going to change unless something spectacular happens. That something spectacular is going to involve having good technology and languages, a framework and desktop infrastructures they and ISVs can actually use to drive it forwards.
Repeat after me: “Gnome’s corporate backing is bollocks and is something a handful of people have bandied around”. I just wonder when people are going to realise that after several years of absolutely nothing happening.
What do you mean, ‘outside of enterprises’? All Linux desktop usage is outside of enterprises, apart from people, individuals and small businesses who’ve specifically gone out and done it.
http://live.gnome.org/MarketingTeam_2fGnomeDeployments
Cases specially interesting: Siemens Business Group, Munich, Allied Irish Banks, National Health Service (UK), Zumiez Zumiez, The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
The GNOME Marketing team should clearly go and update their web site.
I still been reading that HP supporting GNOME while they’ve been dropping it two years ago or so:
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/16/2016221&tid=…
http://h21007.www2.hp.com/dspp/bus/bus_BusDetailPage_IDX/1,1252,481…
There’s also some facts that the CHINA deployment is no more since SUN has dropped their JDS, which also means that they dropped CHINA. It’s mentioned within the article. Also affected is IRELAND who can’t benefit from the JDS migration anymore. UK’s National Health Service is also affected by this.
http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/46502/
Belgium Dupedi in the official announces they speak about migrating to Linux but not that they’ve been using GNOME. Only on an independant information of the GNOME mailinglist it has been mentioned that they’ve been using GNOME 1.4 (no words about GNOME 2). I can not confirm this as long as I haven’t seen it.
Germany Siemens, I also can’t read anything about GNOME in their article. But I read this. The company is rolling out its first Linux pilot: SUSE Enterprise Linux (SLES) 9 from Novell Inc. SUSE == KDE.
Sao Paulo’s telecenters – I can’t read any sentence about GNOME in that article.
Pembroke School, Adelaide, South Australia the article is gone or not working anymore. Probably means they decided differently again.
Canada Silverorange speaks also about some happy KDE users and who knows whether it’s not more of them already ?
I mean no offense. But I spent some time reading the stuff and further links provided here:
http://live.gnome.org/MarketingTeam_2fGnomeDeployments
I hardly read that the companies involved or organisations are prefering GNOME. Most of the time I read that they plan to deploy debian or ubuntu, it’s not clear whether they’ve been using KDE or GNOME. On some links I can read that they have mixed systems. On two or three links with screenshots I can clearly say they use GNOME. The Java Desktop Solution that some companies refer to doesn’t exist anymore and the contracts hasn’t been fullfiled till now. A few links are dead and not working. One GNOME 1.4 announcement.
Sun may have said such things about JDS on Linux, but JDS on Solaris is very much still alive from what I hear.
Cases specially interesting: Siemens Business Group, Munich, Allied Irish Banks, National Health Service (UK), Zumiez Zumiez, The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
Well, you can strike the NHS in Britain off your list. At best it was a trial of the JDS and it has come to absolutely nothing. It certainly isn’t being used. Makes you wonder what substance there is to any of the other stuff on there…….
more industriall support (and i don’t even think they have that much more support) doesn’t mean they are the best for the endusers. linux is no commercial software – projects depend on users and developers, not money. all these companies will have to spend enormous amounts of money just to let gnome keep up with KDE. i don’t think it’ll work out…
“all these companies will have to spend enormous amounts of money just to let gnome keep up with KDE”
“keep up with”!? thats looks like very strange terminology to me to describe the actual state of affairs. i think you’ll find its very much the other way around. as an example, have you not seen those 2 links some posts back showing just how far behind kde is in terms of internationalisation? pbviously not.
> as an example, have you not seen those 2 links some
> posts back showing just how far behind kde is in terms
> of internationalisation?
This is not entirely true. It only shows a small aspect of what has been translated. As you can see it’s just the ‘macedonian’ language that KDE lacks (which I must admit). But if you look at these two links:
http://i18n.kde.org/stats/gui/stable/index.php
http://l10n-status.gnome.org/gnome-2.12/index.html
You will see that KDE has much more languages supported, more words that got translated and the number of countries with bad support is in overall terms far less than GNOME. Not to mention that KDE also offers translations for audio files, special logos (images) as well as internationalized special pages and documentation.
You need to see the whole thing in relation here. GNOME as a project that is basicly 1/3 the size of KDE with lesser languages supported still has a lot of languages badly supported. Looking over to KDE they do have some languages less supported but due to the complexity of KDE they have translated far more than GNOME.
This is not entirely true.
[…apologetic blah blah blah…]
…You will see that KDE has much more languages supported…
[…more apologetic blah blah blah…]
You need to see the whole thing in relation here…
[…some more apologetic blah blah blah…]
Looking over to KDE they do have some languages less supported but due to the complexity of KDE they have translated far more than GNOME. (PS:WHAT DOES THIS MEAN???)
KDE: 10 languages over 99%, 23 languages over 80%, 37 languages over 50%
GNOME: 30 languages over 99%, 43 over 80%, 56 over 50%
numbers are numbers
Edited 2005-12-03 23:52
> KDE: 10 languages over 99%, 23 languages over 80%, 37 languages over 50%
> GNOME: 30 languages over 99%, 43 over 80%, 56 over 50%
This is still wrong from relation. From the pages above I see that GNOME has:
07/09/2005 release date
95 languages to be translated
32909 words to be translated to reach 100% for each language.
32909 x 95 = 3126355 words alltogether.
From the pages above I see that KDE has:
29/11/2005 release date
83 languages to be translated
93051 words to be translated to reach 100% for each language.
93051 x 83 = 7723233 words alltogether.
The relation here is that KDE has 2/3 more to translate than GNOME and these are just the *.po files. Not to speak about special language dependant movies, voice speeches, titles for programs etc. that KDE has to offer. The other relation is that it’s less than 1 week ago that KDE 3.5 is released compared to GNOME 2.12 which is released 4 months ago, giving people a lot of time translating the stuff. It’s easier for GNOME to translated just 35k words for one language than KDE who has to translate 95k words for one language.
This also speaks about the complexity of KDE, which offers 2/3 more of professional stuff than GNOME offers. Just because a desktop is perfectly translated, still doesn’t mean that it’s also a perfect desktop to use and get work done.
“The relation here is that KDE has 2/3 more to translate than GNOME and these are just the *.po files.”
So what? The user dont care who has “more to translate”, he/she cares about *if* it’s currently translated or not.
“This also speaks about the complexity of KDE, which offers 2/3 more of professional stuff than GNOME offers. Just because a desktop is perfectly translated, still doesn’t mean that it’s also a perfect desktop to use and get work done.”
Just because a desktop is complex still doesnt mean that it’s also a perfect desktop to use and get work done.
> KDE: 10 languages over 99%, 23 languages over 80%, 37 languages over 50%
> GNOME: 30 languages over 99%, 43 over 80%, 56 over 50%
This is still wrong from relation. From the pages above I see that GNOME has:
07/09/2005 release date
95 languages to be translated
32909 words to be translated to reach 100% for each language.
32909 x 95 = 3126355 words alltogether.
From the pages above I see that KDE has:
29/11/2005 release date
83 languages to be translated
93051 words to be translated to reach 100% for each language.
93051 x 83 = 7723233 words alltogether.
The relation here is that KDE has 2/3 more to translate than GNOME and these are just the *.po files. Not to speak about special language dependant movies, voice speeches, titles for programs etc. that KDE has to offer. The other relation is that it’s less than 1 week ago that KDE 3.5 is released compared to GNOME 2.12 which is released 4 months ago, giving people a lot of time translating the stuff. It’s easier for GNOME to translated just 35k words for one language than KDE who has to translate 95k words for one language.
This also speaks about the complexity of KDE, which offers 2/3 more of professional stuff than GNOME offers. Just because a desktop is perfectly translated, still doesn’t mean that it’s also a perfect desktop to use and get work done.
“As you can see it’s just the ‘macedonian’ language that KDE lacks (which I must admit). ”
That would be kind of an important issue for *Macedonia*.
Do you run on Energizer? They should seriously contact you, you just keep going on and on and on and on about stuff noone cares about.
its hard to say who is better in this regard, imho. kde 3.5 is just out, and over 20 languages are at 80% or more. gnome has over 40 languages over 80% ready, but has been out for some time…
On the translation question, I believe it is unfair to compare a KDE 3.5.0 with a GNOME 2.8.n.
Because it is the policy of KDE to release updated translations in the forthcomming point releases.
Also, the (unfinished) translation you gave as an example represents more strings translated for KDE. So probably, You can have a desktop that is more complete than the equivalent GNOME, perfectly translated, plus some apps that are not translated.
So technically, KDE wins, here
Please OSN Staff do something agains the moderating abuse!!!! A compliant about the abuse of moderation has been filled some mins ago!
—
I find the articles quite well written but for the Macedonian deployment I don’t see any positive coming out of it. Sure for Macedonia it might be interesting to get a cheap operating system solution specially now after the years of war and the slowly restructuring of their economy open source might be the right way to go.
But I am not sure whether GNOME is the correct choice for the Schools and the demands and requirements that such schools have. The problem I see is that Darko has a personal preference that he says is GNOME and his decision to deploy the schools is based on is personal preference rather to what might be technological a better choice (summed up).
The problems here is GNOME which from my experience as former contributor is far away from being in a state where it fullfils requirements of the schoolars. Specially in the education sector GNOME lacks a lot of useful software as well as in other areas it lacks completenes of these software.
I think also the reasons brought up like “simplicity” and “cleaness” reminds me of the dozens of marketing announces made by GNOME and sounds more like a programmed opinion rather than a real objective opinion of what exists these days.
If we look over to KDE for a moment then I must say that it has by far more to offer specially for schools and education than GNOME. If we happen to have a look at “kdeedu” for example:
http://edu.kde.org/
Then we see a lot of useful programs specially for kids to learn lessons in vocabular training, in percentage calculation, in function plotting, in geography, or chemical stuff. Please note that this is just a value free comment, because it’s urgently required to take the best out of the best (a slogan that I learned from the times where I supported GNOME that it’s always important to use the best software existing).
Not just that but I also know that KDE is the by far more feature complete and coherent Desktop to accomplish exactly these needs much better and much more efficient than what GNOME has to offer. It simply works and get the pupils their work done.
And this is by far a reply from my side that is miles away from what I really know about GNOME and what really reflects my very personal opinion. Going into details here would probably generate a flamefest with people again which I am trying to avoid since people are inconvinceable.
Though this said. Darko is quite confident that he can generate new “Developers for GNOME”. This is quite a honourable wish but personal own experience for many years with myself as person and many others that I known have proven that “generating new Developers for GNOME” and “have those become part of GNOME and fully accepted” are two pair of shoes and knowing their elbow community of developer proves that this will be getting a really rough task and only leads into frustration.
I also question whether that what gets installed is also that what gets used by the pupils or schools later on. Once their infrastructure is getting better, people start to experiment (even pupils at home). That’s how we all learned about Linux and I doubt that the 468 schools and some 182 computer labs continue staying with GNOME once they find themselves trap into many problems that they can not solve. I think from the 5000 Desktops that are planned – only half of them will remain with GNOME (in best). The other half will continue piracing Windows or switch to something else. It’s also not clear that this project leads into success since there are two sides of a project. One that was successful and the other that was a mistake and failed. Both valid project with different ending.
By the way, it would have been nice to have an official announcement from them. It would be good to read an independant article about this totally free from any value or personal opinion. It’s hard for me as reader to track down whether this is a real project or just a well written marketing writing specially set to show a new chess move in the game for the best Desktop.
Anyone has some independant source to confirm this ?