LinuxAndMain is hosting a story, describing the begining up to today the growing problems between the KDE Project and Red Hat. Apparently, the latest news is that Red Hat sees KDE as “kde* crapland”.Our Take: In my not so humble opinion, both sides are correct and wrong at the same time. KDE is definately not a “crapland”, although someone might call it a bit too “loaded”. KDE is not perfect and Gnome is not either. Neither Red Hat is.
On the other hand, the KDE guys should not get angry if Red Hat is making changes to the default KDE to change the single click to double click etc. Their software is GPL and everyone is free to do whatever he/she wants with it, as long they provide the changes back. Now, Red Hat is trying to enter the desktop market and very correctly, they have figured as much that they need to “unify” looks and behaviors of the two popular DEs, Gnome and KDE. This is for their best interest as a company and for the best interest of their users in the long run. KDE developers want Red Hat to use KDE “as is”, which is simply not an option for a modern desktop distro, that tries to make a difference, mostly for consistency issues with Gnome (Gnome also received changes, not just KDE). I am with Red Hat on this particular UI/usability issue. If I had a company that needed to make things right, I would try to unify the two DEs too and provide a sensible desktop to my users. Red Hat has the money and resources to make that possible, and they are going for it. End of story.
Where Red Hat is wrong is in their well known arrogance. Calling KDE a crapland, really deserves to change the KDE license to something like: “It’s GPL for everyone, except for Red Hat, Inc. We ask $5 million if you are Red Hat and want to use our code, please. Huh!”
Well KDE is the best of the bunch, so that doesn’t say much for the other desktops. Suppose they like Gnome (ewwww…)
Hehe, why do both the 2 “main” unix desktops look like Win95 knock offs?
Actually I’m being a bit harsh, although I am a WindowMaker user (knock off of NeXTstep).
Well, gnome beats kde in almost every area.. by far.
they have figured as much that they need to “unify” in looks and behaviour the two popular DEs, Gnome and KDE….
While I agree with this in principle, I think the bone of contention here is that Gnome is taking precedence. Ultimately, if unification is taken to its logical, extreme conclusion, then Gnome will look and feel exactly the same as KDE. In this case, would Gnome still be Gnome and would KDE still be KDE? Probably, the way RedHat seem to be doing things, Gnome would still recognisably be Gnome, but KDE would look and feel like Gnome.
The point I’m trying to make is, that if the things which make KDE recognisably KDE (single click, menu applets etc) are changed because the end user experience doesn’t match the GNOME end user experience, then what kind of KDE are we left with?
Oh, even on this area?
http://members.csolutions.net/zayda/osnews/img/1280/gnome4.jpg
You know, the whole story it is NOT about if KDE or Gnome is better than each other anymore… It is about people not thinking straight…
Well, gnome beats kde in almost every area.. by far.
Substantiate this comment please
Look, personally I like KDE more than Gnome.
However, if Red Hat feels that Gnome is better for their customers and they want to unify the two, and in the process they are ending up with a more Gnome-ish look than a KDE one, I am ok with that. In my view, the important thing here is modifying both to something that makes sense and is truly unified. Even if I prefer KDE to most areas, I would still welcome Red Hat’s changes towards Gnome-ish.
Even if I prefer KDE to most areas, I would still welcome Red Hat’s changes towards Gnome-ish.
So, what is the point of including KDE if it’s going to be Gnome-ish? My personal opinion is that RedHat shouldn’t include KDE at all – their entire desktop strategy is based on Gnome2, we all know that, and in that scenario, a Gnome-ish KDE isn’t a true alternative. Maybe they should just include the KDE libs and QT so that their users can use the KDE apps.
hey wait, I’m using Gentoo. Who cares about Red Hat ?
About usability and else, see my post in forum #4.
About the story: Red Hat is doing a Good Thing, in a Bad Way, end of the story.
> So, what is the point of including KDE if it’s going to be Gnome-ish?
None. If Red Hat prefers and believes that a Gnome-ish interface is better, more power to them. I believe that they SHOULD NOT include a second user interface in there. And take that from a (mostly) KDE user. *Consistency* is more important as a principle, than some of my personal preferences that I might or might not have.
As you say as well, I believe that it is IMPERATIVE to include the Qt/KDE libs there, because otherwise the application base for them will be small. Everyone would like something like Koffice in addition to the other offices suites, or Aethera or Kapital… By having the ability to run KDE apps, they immediately enrich their application base, which is a good thing for their business.
So, yes, the Qt/KDE libs should be there, and the KDE apps should behave and look EXACTLY the same as the Gnome ones (or simply, the other way around). This is the way to go forward on the desktop!
And if Red Hat would have picked KDE instead of Gnome, I would still be happy. The important thing here is integration. The user should not know or even CARE if underneath is Qt or GTK+ that powers his desktop. The user’s business is only to make sure he does his job nicely.
There are not many Windows users that know what GDI is, neither they care, neither they should care as long it works…
why should redhat *not* include KDE as some have suggested? A “Gnome-ish” KDE is just as much of an alternative as KDE. IMO, I’d much rather have a KDE that took the good ideas from GNOME than a KDE one that didn’t.
But that doesn’t matter. All it comes down to is that, if you want a stock KDE, install it. No one is stopping you, just get the RPMs.
If anything else, Linux companies like RH have strategies based on giving people options, often too many half-assed options (whereas a company like Apple gives people few, but great options). Doesn’t seem out of line for RH to keep on providing these many options. They’re other behavior isn’t exusable though.
>why should redhat *not* include KDE as some have suggested
Read my above comment why not. If you still do not get it, it is because you are thinking too much as a traditional Linux geek. Think out of the box for a second as to what makes sense for a dekstop OS.
>if you want a stock KDE, install it.
Exactly. No one stops the GEEK user who knows how to install stuff or compile stuff from installing KDE, the “right way”. But for the rest of the Joe Users out there, there should only be one option.
Remember, “defaults matter”… 😉
Be it KDE or Gnome, it does not matter. There should be only one, which ever that might be chosen to be. 🙂
Heh…
I think that the main issue here is something that people tend to forget — the EXTREME difference in the missions of KDE and Red Hat:
The KDE project is out to make what they believe to be the best desktop for X11 possible. Red Hat is out to make money. Red Hat has to listen to, and/or anticipate the whim of its customers. KDE does not. Now, I’m not saying that that either of them do or don’t, just stating which one is REQUIRED to, in order to stick around.
As a former RH employee, let me tell you that there were much harsher words than “crapland” used back when QT was not under any GPL… The RH people are entitled to their opinions, no matter how unsavory they are. If Red Hat sees the need to ship both KDE and GNOME, as there is no universal consensus to the “desktop wars” for Linux, then they are, in my opinion, doing the right thing by making KDE and GNOME more alike on their distro.
The fact is that neither KDE nor GNOME is “perfect” for everyone. In my opinion, I think that there lies a happy medium somewhere in the middle of what both projects are doing. Personally, I’d like to the see the consistancy, and ease of use and development that KDE has, with more of the flexibility when it comes to PLAF that GNOME has. I think that KDE’s dialogs and FONT support are better than GNOME’s while GNOME’s panels are nicer than KDE’s. It’s all a matter of taste and opinion though…
The bottom line is this:
– While I find the RH engineer’s comments unsavory, he is entitled to his opinion, no matter how uncouthely expressed.
– KDE, however, should not castigate Red Hat too much. I think that KDE owes a great deal of its popularity to the extent that Red Hat has helped popularize Linux.
Don’t make too much of this coffeehouse arguement…
Cheers,
Ken
I contacted Red Hat
Dear Sirs,
I like the KDE Desktop as a desktop environment and I like to use Red Hat servers and wish that you would support KDE more as it is nicer, cleaner and more fully featured that Gnome. As a software developer I prefer KDE because I appreciate the time and level of detail that has gone in to it.
Thanks
Andrew Smith
This editorial content of this site becomes more and more like that of a low quality tabloid newspaper by the minute (and I fully expect to be told to go elsewhere by the ‘editor’ for expressing this opinion).
Where Red Hat is wrong is in their well known arrogance. Calling KDE a crapland
You’re apparently having difficulty distinguishing between a RedHat employee and RedHat as an organisation. Furthermore, I don’t see any evidence of this alleged “well know arrogance”; perhaps you’d be kind enough to highlight it for us? @_@
The way I see it, in every company the man/woman who is in sharge for “Desktop” prefer either one or another. Red hat made all tools in gtk so why not make Kde gnome like if someone consider Kde for main desktop and using gnome tools within? If you don’t like it you can change it, you have all the themes you want. And then again if you consider Linux for desktop, install it you want to use it right a way, don’t care ’bout desktops it’s all open source why flame, enjoy
>between a RedHat employee and RedHat as an organisation.
I never seen an Apple employee or a Microsoft or a Sun employee sending emails to people saying how crap this or the other product is. Face it, no matter if Red Hat is a GPL company or it is a closed source company, it is still a company. And employees should be careful of what they say, because at the end, it always falls at the back of the company itself, especially in situations that the SEC might get involved… This is why companies should educate their employees as to what they can say and what not. And don’t give me that Freedom of Speech stuff… money and risk talks today for a company.
> perhaps you’d be kind enough to highlight it for us?
I am in the “business”. I hear things all the time. No always I will have URLs for you, but sometimes you might need to trust me, for a change. I have nothing against Red Hat and I would not have written this if I did not know more than I write publicly.
>money and risk talks today for a company
And what I mean by that is because of this innocent “KDE* crapland” Red Hat loses more than 10% of their userbase, just because some KDE users will get pissed at Red Hat, that costs MONEY to them. A lot of money.
In my opinion, and this is something that I had never really said in the past about no one, that employee should be fired for putting the company in such a risk. (note: I have no idea who actually said that)
The engineers between them, are all ok to discuss about a bad algorithm, or a bad programmer or a bad project and have a laugh on it… But NEVER make such trolling public. It can cost money to the company. Trust me, I have heard cases of innocent comments by employees that put whole companies at risk.
“I never seen an Apple employee or a Microsoft or a Sun employee sending emails to people saying how crap this or the other product is.”
It was an internal mail that was leaked. That’s quite a big difference to a Red Hat employee trashtalking in public.
As for the whole topic, it’s quite entertaining again.
I just need to get some popcorn. Maybe a pizza will do. Yummi.
> It was an internal mail that was leaked.
An internal Red Hat email somehow leaked to the INBOX of a **SuSE** employee? Please.
There are only two logical options:
1. This was indeed an internal RedHat email but there is a SuSE mole at Red hat who needs to be undetinfied and procecuted.
2. That was not an intenral email, but rather it was a Red Hat employee emailing his developer friend, a SuSE employee, discussing about KDE, because everyone knows everyone in this development community, especially among the Mandrake, Red Hat and SuSE employees.
I vote for No 2.
> I just need to get some popcorn. Maybe a pizza will do.
I am joining in.
An email message, said to have been written by a Red Hat employee, was forwarded to Waldo Bastian, a leading KDE developer.
it is all hearsay.
Why doesn’t RedHat mind their onw bussiness ?
If KDE is crapland then Gnome should be …
Yeah, quite entertaining. Maybe one day when people grow up they behave professionally. Even for an internal mail that is quite unprofessional. They are doing a job there. KDE is playing a big part of the community.
Why can’t they communicate? Is it so hard for them to sit down and talk about their issues?
From an open-source point of view: what’s the big deal!?! I mean, isn’t it all about freedom? Freedom to change something if you don’t like it? Don’t people always say: here is the code. It is free, do as you please. I wouldn’t consider removing the About KDE box as not giving credit to KDE developers. You don’t have to do it in the application itself. Plus, there is always another About box there anyway. BTW, is it against the GLP to remove these? I don’t think so. It is not nice, I guess.
If I rip KDE apart, change stuff around, do this and that, what’s so bad about it? You have to accept the power the GPL puts in the hand of developers. Don’t waive the GPL flag whenever it is in *YOUR* interest. This time it is in the interest of someone else. Tough luck.
(I thought it would be written KindergarDen in England/US. I know how it’s spelled in german, beeing german and all
)
“An internal Red Hat email somehow leaked to the INBOX of a **SuSE** employee? Please.”
That’s exactly what Waldo said. Another Red Hat employee forwarded him the mail. AFAICT there isn’t even proove that this mail exists. So it’s either a mole or nothing. I don’t think it’s really a mole, just a Red Hat employee who has friends at KDE. I’m sure there are many, like Bero (not saying that KDE could have forwarded it, that would be too obvious).
BTW, I liked this response of a KDE developer (Rob Kaper) quite a lot:
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-cafe&m=103059846509229&w=2
Now I agree with the concept of unification, and as has been said, the problem is that they’ll look the same and behave differently. Now, here Redhat have shown what they want, made a group of annoyed customers, and long-term it’s good for their distro because the complaints are valid.
Incidental Linux Users… the small group of incidental linux users can’t tell the difference right now. They’ll click once here, and twice there, and blame themselves or the system for changing – not knowing to look out for 1% colour changes and one-pixel-off-corner widgets. Most people can’t or don’t learn the differences between the Windows Office toolkit and OpenOffice and the default (snigger) toolkit. Users will blame, some will go on themselves, some will go on Redhat, some will go on Gnome and KDE. Regardless of whose at fault, it is a problem for casual… incidental users.
There are also linux geeks.
Blending the appearance has created a short-term problem, I believe that Redhat did it intentionally to bring the festering problem to the surface. This isn’t about crushing innovation, it’s about the pointless differences in toolkits. Redhat have, IMO, a history of similar stunts to get The Community to respond in a way they want. This is a good thing.
Will it accelerate the ironing out of pointless differences? Absolutely.
The differences that make each desktop unique shouldn’t be exposed in a single desktop session though – yes?
It probably simplifies support if you think about it.
The first question doesn’t have to be “Which DE are you using?” As “Another Matthew” pointed out – most incidental Linux users wouldn’t care/know.
The support person now knows that the menus are arranged the same. The same apps will be the defaults. The same click behavior etc. It really is much simpler to handle. That way there won’t be (or at least much less) frustuation on the customer’s part.
In regards to the screenshot you posted, (http://members.csolutions.net/zayda/osnews/img/1280/gnome4.jpg), how on earth can you commend KDE? Interesting that it sits directly next to the XP dialog, since it’s an absolutely brutal and undeniably flagrant rip off! This kind of cloning makes me sick, especially having it as deeply rooted in a desktop environment as with a stock dialog! Granted, the functionality far exceeds that of the GNOME dialog, but that’s hardly an excuse for the complete and total lack of innovation. Don’t even get me *started* with Evolution, btw….
> Interesting that it sits directly next to the XP dialog, since it’s an absolutely brutal and undeniably flagrant rip off!
SO WHAT?
It works worlds better than this primitive Gnome thing.
A user does not care about patent infrigments and “rip offs”. He/she cares how well it works.
And one thing is for sure: The Gnome Open/Save dialog sucks geese.
Why don’t you stop buying Redhat products then,
Oh, wait you are all cheap basters who don’t want to pay anything for you free beer yet you want to dictate to the brewer what blend of barley you want.
Redhat is doing a great job in molding linux into a useful product for mothers and grandmothers…yet you still have to complain.
linux vs M$
gnome vs kde
M$ vs gnome linux vs kde linux vs ……..
M$ wins, it is simple military strategy
> The Gnome Open/Save dialog sucks geese.
Heh.
/* If I had a company that needed to make things right, I would try to unify the two DEs too and provide a sensible desktop to my users.*/
I think you should start a company to modify KDE and Gnome. It would be interesting to see what the interface would look like. It would be cool since your a BeOS fan like me.
I think Gnome is like the MacOS of the Linux world and KDE is the Windows of the Linux world. Gnome tends to have the menu panel at the top of the screen and seems to have a less windows feel to it. Personally the first thing I do when I get a new OS is to move the trash to the bottom right and the hardrive to the top right of the screen.
I think red hat shoould keep both desktops because won’t some applications require the KDE libs? If so make KDE look like Gnome or vise-versa so a user won’t be able to tell if they are using either. I can’t remember what a Gnome app looks like when it’s booted from KDE. I’ve killed my 4th Linux box. Linux hates me.
I am writing this from the RH null beta using KDE and Konqueror. Great work by Redhat, I have even selected Keramik as my theme. RH has done a good job.
I wanted to try Gnome 2.0, my previous experience was that KDE was far superior to Gnome. Unfortunately Gnome does not work. I boot into Gnome and it takes 10 minutes to load. No I am not joking something must have messed up in the install because the previous beta worked fine. Tried to reinstall but the same problem. Kind of ironic that KDE should work but Gnome failed
Hmmm
If Redhat hates is so much, Why dont they just create their OWN User Interface?
Anyone?
Open Source saves you from re-inventing the wheel. Now maybe there’s a case for not calling it Gnome or KDE anymore, but that’s it.
Well the good thing about the RedHat / KDE feud is that its good for Mandrake and might get them back on the ball with focusing on KDE. RedHat / Gnome vs. Mandrake / KDE allowed both desktops to develop more cleanly. KDE apps and Gnome both work well in either window manager or even unrelated window managers (I use WindowMaker).
Given how offensive the KDE group finds these changes, and given the fact that a good relationship is in RedHat’s interest I think the best thing for RedHat to do is to ship with Gnome as their standard desktop; support what apps from KDE office they want and make them look like gnome apps when running inside of gnome. Offer KDE as a pure environment with all the apps looking native but in the “alternate desktops” (or whatever they want to call it). That way people who want KDE but also want Redhat can run KDE and not this RedHat hybrid desktop. I know I’d be furious if Redhat changed Windowmaker to fit in with their interface guidelines; especially since rpm -e would be unlikely to work because of dependencies.
The Redhat people are being very arrogant in this case.
KDE and GNOME being free software projects, which one you
guys think is the best doesn’t really matter. Everybody
can do whatever they want with it. BUT but but but, Redhat
being the big corpo machine they’ve become, and the open-source
community being what it’s always been, I’m very disapointed
in the general attitude both parties have adopted lately.
Redhat should understand they represent us in the mainstream
field, and that their decisions should never result in such
a violent argument, they’re hurting the whole open source
community by doing so. This whole situation smells like
shit…
But what I don’t understand is, that nobody of those KDE devs who complain about this issues actually tried Null for himself. We see all this comments like “they crippled KDE”, etc while on the other hand those people who actually DID try it constantly say “calm down, it’s great”.
I ask, is there anyone here who tried Red Hat Null and found the KDE desktop to be crippled or sub-par to a vanilla KDE installation?
So if customers like what they do, why should they remove it? Red Hat is _not_ trying to kill KDE, you can see that everywhere. Actually Red Hat and especially Havoc Pennington are very active in driving the freedesktop standards forwards. While it might be good for the Red Hat desktop in the short term to drop the KDE desktop shell alltogether (but not the apps), it would be very bad for possible GNOME/KDE integration. I like that Red Hat is pushing this. We really need to get to a point where the differences between those desktops are mostly in implementation and technological excellence.
“I never seen an Apple employee or a Microsoft or a Sun employee sending emails to people saying how crap this or the other product is”
Your right its wasn’t Microsoft’s underlings it was their CEO who out in the open and to the press called a competitors product a Cancer.
More OT this is really a much ado about nothing. The people who are loyal to Redhat will continue to use it and those who can’t do without KDE proper will migrate to Mandrake or Suse. When Gnome finally does catch up with KDE which I honestly think some day it will, Redhat will drop KDE completely. If by then companies like Adobe and Intuit haven’t ported their products to Linux will it really matter anyway? Redhat choosing this or that Gui is NOT the make or break issue for the linux desktop. ISV and OEM support are.
[i]Offer KDE as a pure environment with all the apps looking native but in the “alternate desktops” (or whatever they want to call it). That way people who want KDE but also want Redhat can run KDE and not this RedHat hybrid desktop. I know I’d be furious if Redhat changed Windowmaker to fit in with their interface guidelines; [i]
Exactely.
That’s how you would felt if you saw others (RedHat) dumbing down your project (say WindowMaker — my favorite too) to make it worst (or only as good as) then Gnome.
I mean “single click” and change pointer ‘hoover’ on KDE is quite nice, no such thing on Gnome, if I’m not mistaken, there no icon changing possible).
Seems like Microsoft startegies —– >> but backwards!
and with the same (classical) RedHat – MS arrogance.
We really need to get to a point where the differences between those desktops are mostly in implementation and technological excellence.
Why? Why not the traditional Unix model where everyone uses the window manager they like and become an expert on it. Different window managers become more and different than one another specializing for taste and function. Light window managers running on poor hardware (which cell phones and PDAs will be for a long time). Light but highly functional window managers for powerusers who want speed. Heavy highly functional window managers for people who want the maximum in flexability and functionality and are willing to spend for the extra hardware to support it. Window managers that work via. voice for the blind. Window managers with limited options for corporate desktops….
I see no reason to unify window managers anymore than there is a good reason to unify programming languages. C, Perl and Java all have areas of specialization and having all 3 available is a major net good to everyone. Why force all programmers for all time to make the choice between static and dynamic typing? And if you aren’t going to do that why force all users for all time to choose between highly configurable and easy to use window managers for all time?
Because we aren’t talking about window managers but about desktop and development environments (no, this isn’t nitpicking).
And don’t forget that standards in a free software world doesn’t mean that projects breaking this standard aren’t allowed. Everyone is free to try something different but a standard helps big projects to get better interoperability.
Because we aren’t talking about window managers but about desktop and development environments (no, this isn’t nitpicking).
And don’t forget that standards in a free software world doesn’t mean that projects breaking this standard aren’t allowed. Everyone is free to try something different but a standard helps big projects to get better interoperability.
What exactly do you mean by interoperability in the context of the changes RedHat is making?
Hi everyone.
I think, KDE/GNOME are just raw material for a good UI. It’s
not finished, not polished yet to be acceptable for the avarage user and the geek as well.
Both KDE/GNOME needs a maintainer who would polish these two
products according to the UI standarts (I beleve we have
such standarts). Why do we need it ? My answer – because
authors of KDE/GNOME are *developers*, but KDE and GNOME
are targeting to the average user’s market.
Let’s make it light, simple and user will love it.
That’s the most important part in DE’s success. We all know
BeOS. That’s the best example of UI simplicity – Joe user
needs no “magic passes” to use it.
And I think we need a special commitee for that – make “KDE/GNOME dev” to “KDE/GNOME user” evolution.
Regards,
…get the whole install/ update thing better and not to improve the look and feel which is not the problem #1 in the Linux world!!
Just my 2 cents
Thoems
>Ask, is there anyone here who tried Red Hat Null and found
>the KDE desktop to be crippled or sub-par to a vanilla KDE
>installation?
Me, and yes as a developer I found it crippled. Why? Not because of the Look&Feel. I still can choose under NULL the theme which I like most. That is a non-issue, although people here like to discuss their prefered look&feel to death.
I found Null’s KDE crippled because they changed all KDE service names. That caused some of my own KDE stuff to function no more. Maybe it’s possible to use KTrader in such a way that the renamed service names are no issue, but I have yet to read more API documentation and example code. My worry is that RedHat’s KDE is in same aspects incompatible to KDE. I bet this is very cool if you are a GNOME fan or have big money in that pot. As a company you don’t want to have a product which can be easily swapped with something else. You want to have a product which your customers depend on.
Red Hat is sadly not working WITH KDE. They made so many patches, some are IMHO really good (as the ktray changes), some a very bad (kde services), some are just wrong implemented (some code changes they made are not needed at all, it would suffice to change some .desktop files). Why on earth don’t they subscribe to the kde devel mailing lists and discuss their development stuff and their changes with KDE developers? Not all KDE developers are Red Hat haters. Better communication would save so much hassle. But alas, I realize that friendly communication with others doesn’t always further long-term financial interests.
Cheers,
Andreas
i personally used to love gnome but my feelings about it are not the best ones. the projekt started as a fun projekt and today companies like redhat and sun are directing it. gnome 2 really started to suck. most evil things are done and implemented by havoc pennington. but i am quite sure that redhat pushed him to ‘fuck up’ gnome the way it is today. userfeedback is not welcome either.
i think i switch to kde now.
It is clear (from the way you write) that you’re not Spark, the Gnome supporter.
Now tell us, do you really think faking someone’s identity is the best way to promote your favorite desktop? Have you no shame at all?
I understand RH: they need to unify the interfaces for having something consistent to propose to the end user. And the GPL gives them the right to do so.
On the otherside, that’s an aggressive business approach, well, in the embrace and extend way: Joe User (or Jean Dupont, or Sven Svensson etc…) will learn to use RH’KDE, its behaviors, and will be disappointed when he will use KDE as design by its authors, and available in Mandrake and SUse. So, he can say “I’m disappointed by KDE, I’ll buy another RH box.” I let you imagine the impact at the corporate level.
————–
http://korbinus.fr.st
First and foremost, if Red Hat verbally assults KDE I can’t see why KDE should ANYTHING for Red Hat ever again. I know myself that I won’t touch anything from Red Hat unless I have to, there are plenty of much better distributions out there.
Having that said, here comes the real reason I wanted to write something:
What KDE should do (in my humble opinion) is to contact all the distros who wants KDE in them, and start making a customization system so that each distro can brand their KDE installation. If you install directly from KDE you get the generic version which is tailored by the KDE people, if you install from distro X you get X’s version which might have different behaviour and different look as default.
This is nothing new or strange, this is very common in the industry. Let’s take a computer geek friendly example. Quake. Quake 3 Arena is tailored for ID’s game that they released. Later on they sold their engine to other companies, which made other games. They have a different look and a different content, some add some special features, but all in all it is still the Quake3 engine. What was needed to make this easy is a customization kit.
This is what KDE needs, and the nice distro people should cooperate here, together with KDE.
I find it appaling that with all the talk about GPL, free software and all that so many fails with the most important part. Being nice. The free software world is even worse than the corporate one, which is all upside down.
> So, he can say “I’m disappointed by KDE, I’ll buy another
> RH box.” I let you imagine the impact at the corporate
> level.
I guess it’s time to buy some Red Hat stocks 😉
Cheers,
Andreas
Implement QT using GTK!
That will make everyone except TrollTech happy, but who gives a dammm
I am in the “business”. I hear things all the time. No always I will have URLs for you, but sometimes you might need to trust me, for a change. I have nothing against Red Hat and I would not have written this if I did not know more than I write publicly.
Excuse me? How are you “in the business”, other than running a second rate gossip site? I’m “in the business” – and by that I mean I actually work with these companies and projects on a daily basis – and I’ve not seen any evidence of arrogance from RedHat.
FWIW, I’m extremely disappointed by the behaviour of some of the KDE developers. The changes RedHat have made to KDE aren’t that invasive and do help to unify the two desktop environments. They’ve also modified Gnome with eg. a new icon theme which looks fairly similar to the bubbly default KDE look.
Red Hat’s suits have woken up to trademark issues. For example, others may redistribute Red Hat’s GPL’d software, but they can’t call it Red Hat.
KDE has had a brush with trademark problems: think KIllustrator. It would not have been worth Adobe’s while to sue KDE, because KDE has no money; but Red Hat has lots of money, so they are a target for lawsuits. Sadly, anyone with money in the bank is a target for this legalised extortion, even if the lawsuit has no merit.
It is in this context that I read the memo from Red Hat:
“Trademarks got to go:
“Ktron
“Kasteroids
“Kbattleship
“kblockout
“Did anyone working on KDE even *bother* to look? These are friggin obvious ways to get us in deep shit.”
As for the final insult:
“Please audit the entire kde* crapland for more.”
this admittedly ignorant suit may simply regard any large external project as a *legal* crapland, which it undoubtedly is.
A final thought: the mail might not have been leaked by someone sympathetic to KDE (e.g. the hypothetical SuSE mole), but by a GNOME supporter who fears KDE’s adoption by Red Hat, and who is trying to widen the rift between Red Hat and KDE. Why should the KDE camp take this bait?
> The changes RedHat have made to KDE aren’t that invasive
> and do help to unify the two desktop environments.
Wrong. The service and the Xft2-Qt patches for example are very invasive. Look at the code!
How is disabling an about dialog (which gives credit to the KDE project) or changing all KDE service names and possible making Redhat KDE INCOMPATIBE to KDE helping to unify anything? No, please don’t answer. I don’t want to know.
>FWIW, I’m extremely disappointed by the behaviour of some >of the KDE developers
Of course – offensive people can be found in any large enough group. But I think the fact that Red Hat is continiously very offensive to KDE is not less disappointing.
Cheers,
Andreas
“i personally used to love gnome but my feelings about it are not the best ones. the projekt started as a fun projekt and today companies like redhat and sun are directing it. gnome 2 really started to suck. most evil things are done and implemented by havoc pennington. but i am quite sure that redhat pushed him to ‘fuck up’ gnome the way it is today. userfeedback is not welcome either.
i think i switch to kde now.”
>>>
Is that you Spark? I think not. Cause the Spark I know doesn’t talk like that at all… He’s a very good natured person and loves gnome2
So please stop impersonating him
Sometimes ago, I had a thread with a very polite guys who explains me that’s every shell tab completion worked on the gnome fileselector (the one you show us is a gtk one, it works well too)
so type *.png and tab and you’ll see what happens
for the prev fields, it seems you’re not using the gnome 1.4 version, because my fileselector doesn’t look like your…
But I agree, the gnome fileselector sucks compared to the windows ones…
And I like Null just fine, only I just hate what they done with kdelibs, kschedule etc. – breaking quite a lot of my apps. The KDE community shouldn’t bash Red Hat for changing the default UI of KDE and its apps. It should bash Red Hat if it insults them and/or make incompatible changes that break apps.
Besides, Eugenia, I think you better moderate http://osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=1637&offset=45&rows=57#34254 down. It isn’t Spark.
1) he supports KDE in the message – impossible.
Yeah, boobleboy, I think it is Spark, unless for this entire thread, someone is pretending to be Spark… (check out the IP address).
“What exactly do you mean by interoperability in the context of the changes RedHat is making?”
They did quite a few changes to KDE to make it more compliant with the freedesktop.org standards.
I don’t know about the service renaming, that’s weird. I just wonder why people immidiately jump to conclusions (again) instead of asking Red Hat first why they did this.
And yes, the Spark over here is a fake. The hostname is unfortunatly from T-Online and most people from Germany use this provider so it doesn’t tell much (other than that there are some incredible sad people in Germany).
Registration wouldn’t hurt.
This is just frickin’ silly. I fully understand that RedHat doesn’t want a lawsuit because some KDE-based gamewriter couldn’t think of a more creative name than “Ktron” etc.
Sheesh, some people just need some time off, it seems. In both “camps”.
Spark: And yes, the Spark over here is a fake.[…]
Dang! He got my hopes way way high
Well I kinda assumed that that Spark was fake.
You can’t assume a lot from a generic hostname like that. The heavily anti-gnome sentiment, the spelling, the swearing. Nope…
Looking at the changes atleast some of it is good.
-Patch KIconLoader to handle the new icom theme spec proposal
– Support systray spec.
Supporing standards is Good!
– Use double click
Single click on what most users have always doubble clicked on is really annoying.
– Icon on buttons
Nice
– Kicker icons
Nice
– Patch menu code to prefer the descriptions over app names
Much nicer. They really shouldnt remove the appnames _as well_ though.
>If Redhat hates is so much, Why dont they just create their OWN User Interface?
They are working on it. Its called Gnome. So far Gnome is a piece
of crap for users. But if the Gnome developers get their act together and fix the many small but yet very annoying issues of Gnome, as well as a few missing apps (namely Gonqueror), write goode API docs, I actually thing Gnome will be a way better desktop than KDE. But there is a long way there, and KDE might come up with better things during that time.
Honestly, I don’t like the Gnome save dialog, or the KDE save dialog, or the Windows XP dialog.
I would much prefer the drag-to-save dialog like the Rox-desktop, with the addition of the Favorites thingie of Macos.
I want to save a file, not manage my entire freaking file-system.
I doubt that any kde lover will want to use Redhat after all this. The default installation doesn’t install KDE, so a newbie installing Redhat doesn’t know/care about KDE. So, heck, remove KDE from Redhat, and spend all that development energy in making things fast, and further improve the desktop.
Let there be no mistake about it, I use Redhat null. It is by far a better linux desktop than I saw in any other linux distribution. (and I tried alot of them, suse, mandrake, slackware, debian, gentoo, lycoris, lunar-linux, …)
KDE and Gnome are two fundamentally different desktops, with fundamentally similar goals. Do the teams really expect us to believe that a desktop is defined by the particular way that it looks? Why is KDE configurable at all, if they want to stop RedHat from making KDE look like Gnome?
The only fundamental differences between KDE and Gnome are in toolkit used, language, and packaging. There are many other incompatibilities, such as with drag-and-drop, but those are currently being fixed by the freedesktop.org project.
The last item, packaging, is the easiest to deal with. KDE feels that every important program should be included with the distro, and if you’re not in, you’re toast. Gnome is exactly the other way around. But nothing’s stopping them from offering two different packages, one “bloated” and one not, right?
Toolkit is also not too hard. KDE and Gnome, if a merger happened, could go the Abi/Moz route – write everything in a cross-platform wrapper library that converts code at compile-time from that wrapper to GTK, or Qt, or Win32, or BeAPI, or anything else. Or, because Qt and GTK are both GPLed, they could merge them together into a superior toolkit, replacing GTK, and let TrollTech mind its own business. Or they could help develop the Fresco project, and then use it. Either way, there’s a solution.
Finally, language. This should be the hardest to deal with, but it doesn’t have to be. KDE uses C++. Gnome uses C, an inferior language, and encapsulates it with glib to make it usable, but Gnome has the advantage of being “language-agnostic”. So obviously, the solution would be for the Gnome team to port everything, including the language-agnosticism, to C++; making a faster, cleaner desktop for all, that still works with any language. It might take a bit of conversion work on behalf of the KDE team, but I think it’s possible.
So there you have it, the three fundamental differences between the two teams, and a very easy solution to all three. Now if only they could actually work together before it’s too late…
“I would much prefer the drag-to-save dialog like the Rox-desktop, with the addition of the Favorites thingie of Macos.”
Yes, that was talked about! It’s very likely that the GNOME file save dialog will work like this (somehow a mixture between the MacOS save dialog and the ROX DND saving).
I also expect the new file load dialog to be pretty simply, mostly including a Nautilus folder view and maybe support for bookmarks (and some basic navigation of course).
I like the latest mockup (at least the basic idea) of this one:
http://home.wanadoo.nl/sbm/
But this is nothing “official”.
I don’t understand why you need to resort to personal attacks and insults against people here, particularly without ever offering anything constructive. No one is going to be replacing Eugenia anytime soon so if you don’t like her on a personal level then there is not much you can do about that, is there? Why not go start your own website and see if you can work your way up to 1.5 million page views per month (like OSNews gets) if your opinion is so damned important that you have to post it to a site that you don’t even respect?
Eugenia shot down your entire point about “employees views not representing the views of their companies” quite handily because she is absolutely right, what an employee says comes directly back to reflect on his employer in these cases, which is why that RH engineer should watch his mouth if he doesn’t want to make trouble for his company. That would be common sense for most people.
Of course, with your primary point being thoroughly skewered so nicely, you ignore this fact completely and blissfully continue on to attack her professional status, etc. The fact is Eugenia/OSNews conducts interviews with various project leaders and high-profile individuals in the OSS community and with the network of connections she has of friends who work at other newsites (Slashdot, Newsforge, etc.) and other similar people she is in contact with, she is very well qualified to be “in the know” about how the *industry* players behave and what their reputations are, etc. Because of this, her reputation deserves at least a measure of respect by default – certainly moreso than some arrogant Red Hat apologist like you.
Prediction: If Phil responds at all he will completely ignore my questions and proceed directly to personal attacks.
Thanks for posting the link to the mockup. The mockups are a big improvement over the previous Gnome dialogs.
My main complaint is the “Advanced Options” checkbox. Is it really necessary? It seems almost silly in the open dialog (it took me a second to spot the change it caused). I would much prefer the advanced view all the time. It doesn’t seem really “advanced”, just more informative. I don’t see the value of the stripped down versions.
My other suggestion is that I like the location outline in the save dialog (it helps guide my eye) and I think it would help in the open dialog too.
Please excuse my ignorance and the off topic question, but what are emblems? (I’m not currently a Gnome user, but am considering it for the future)
WRT your mockup suggestions you better mail the author directly.
His email (from the mailinglist) is m.menheere at gmx.net.
“Please excuse my ignorance and the off topic question, but what are emblems? (I’m not currently a Gnome user, but am considering it for the future)”
Those are little… well… emblems
which are placed on an icon. For example you can have a folder and use the sound emblem on top of it so you can faster find it when looking for your music folder. This way you can mark important documents, folders, etc it’s really handy. And they look cool. 
Red Hat makes KDE looks like GNOME (actually, they made both KDE and GNOME look different that the default), the swearing and the cursing happens on the mailing list at KDE. When Lycoris or Xandros makes something that makes KDE looks like Windows – nothing happens.
A huge double standard here.
No one is going to be replacing Eugenia anytime soon so if you don’t like her on a personal level then there is not much you can do about that, is there?
I have no problem with Eugenia on a “personal level”. I do have a problem with the integrity of her reporting, however, and I see nothing wrong with pointing this out.
Eugenia shot down your entire point about “employees views not representing the views of their companies” quite handily because she is absolutely right, what an employee says comes directly back to reflect on his employer in these cases, which is why that RH engineer should watch his mouth if he doesn’t want to make trouble for his company. That would be common sense for most people.
She absolutely did not do that. The alleged opinons of one RedHat employee do not necessarily represent the opinions of the entire company. What he/she said might well come to reflect on the company, but that doesn’t change the fact that the opinons are those of an individual, not official company policy.
blather about some old boy style network
Sure, whatever; you fail to realise that the OSS community is basically transparent. If RedHat were arrogant, there would be ample evidence demonstrating it. Furthermore, I don’t care how many people someone claims to know if they’re speaking rubbish, or spreading tabloid gossip.
Prediction: If Phil responds at all he will completely ignore my questions and proceed directly to personal attacks.
You asked no questions, merely spewed vitriol in a fantastic display of hypocrisy. I hope you’re proud!
If the kde people get this pissed off about basically nothing, then why don’t redhat just ditch kde completely – kdelibs and possibly qt too. It sounds drastic, and someone mentioned before that you need to keep kdelibs for compatibilty with apps – I have to ask what apps?
There are no kde apps that are compelling to use if you are a gnome user – not one (start a kde app from gnome and you’ll see a whole bunch of services started – it takes so much time that it’s wuicker to use OpenOffice than Koffice, with the advantage that it saves to useful formats – .doc/xls anyone?) Put simply there are _no_ kde apps that stand out as really good, even good QT apps are hard to come by – Opera’s reasonable but you have to pay for it if you don’t like the huge advert, and galeon renders pages better and doesn’t crash.
I really don’t see what you lose if you ditch kde and QT completely – I leave it in at the install but remove it after a while beacuse it just takes up space and never gets used.
I like Gnome better than KDE because it just looks simpler. KDE is annoyingly cluttered in almost every resepct, including the dialog boxes that Eugenia mentioned. I think that maybe the Gnome dialog could use some work to make it a little better, but I’d rather see a simple Gnome dialog on my screen than a huge, clunkly, ugly KDE window. I just can’t stand how many buttons and widgets and junk pops up in those windows.
I like Gnome better than KDE because it just looks simpler.
I’m inclined to agree. I used to love KDE, and to a certain extent still do (from a programmers perspective), but i detest these bubbly, curvy aqua style themes that everyone seems to rave about. Give me a nice, minimal thinice theme any day.
phil: I’m inclined to agree. I used to love KDE, and to a certain extent still do (from a programmers perspective), but i detest these bubbly, curvy aqua style themes that everyone seems to rave about. Give me a nice, minimal thinice theme any day.
I dislike Keramik too, but I don’t see how it looks like Aqua. (BTW, I use QNiX or QNX For KDE 3.0, very minimalist).
One thing I’m getting more and more annoyed with KDE is that it is getting more and more cluttered. I’m not saying less is more, but I’m saying it needs a UI overhaul like KDE 2.0. I remember KDE 2.0 and 2.1 was nice and simple and not cluttered, albeit slow.
(Besides, as for UI overhaul goes, I’m not for a total change like KDE 1 to KDE 2, just to rearrange tools, make the UI more, well, practically).
When OSnews had less pageviews, the discussion was more civilised and informative. Now the site is much more popular (and that’s good), but this means that interesting stories like this one quickly degenerate into a flame fest, where most posts are either of the form “My [OS/Desktop/Distribution/License] is better than your [OS/Desktop/Distribution/License]”, or are just personal abuse.
What can we do about it?I suggest adjusting the moderation system. Posts could be ruthlessly moderated down if they are Off-Topic, particularly if they are “Off-Topic: Story is not about comparing A with B” or “Off-Topic: Personal Abuse”. This is not about silencing criticism, but just trying to make people be a bit more civil.