“I used KDE as my primary desktop from 1996 through 2006, when I installed the GNOME version of Ubuntu and found that I liked it better than the KDE desktop I’d faced every morning for so many years. Last January, I got a new Dell Latitude D630 laptop and decided to install Kubuntu on it, but within a few weeks, I went back to GNOME. Does this mean GNOME is now a better desktop than KDE, or just that I have become so accustomed to GNOME that it’s hard for me to give it up?”
I’ve used KDE for 7 years and last year I switched to Gnome for several reasons. Everything in Gnome seems more polished, more simple, more straight-forward. I tried KDE4 earlier this year, and I like it less than the 3.x series so I’ve settled with Gnome for the time being.
Were we just talking window manager plus applications, it would be a tougher decision. However, my desktop will look like this: multiple browser windows, a mail client, and about a dozen terminal logins grouped into tabs or screen sessions, a calendar, and an IM client.
As of now, KDE and OSX are the only environments that truly show UI consistency and common configurability between the typical applications. When you load up Gnome and then Firefox, and then put in a custom setting for Gnome for keyboard shortcuts or such, will Firefox adopt that change? No. Neither will any other application that is not fully compliant, and it is more common for Gnome users to use applications that are merely GTK-based.
KDE’s kitchen-sink mentality does mean more code re-use and more consistent compliance with user preferences in the end. By the time I’m going full blast on my desktop, the shared resources and integration tends to give me a more consistent and responsive environment. The same goes for the Mac, and despite the initial superficial resemblance between Gnome and the Mac, with a little customization to KDE I find myself shifting gears much less switching between it and OSX.
KDE 4 is certainly gaining a cleaner look, and it looks like GTK 3.0 and future Gnome improvements will close these gaps, but my own individual preferences have been better served by KDE or OSX for years.
Are you saying that Firefox will do that in KDE? Epiphany is Gnome’s browser. I use Epiphany and it works just fine with any site that works with Firefox. Gmail… Google Apps… My online banking.
Konqueror is a no go with all three of those… and more. I’d rather have the sites work than the custom keyboard shortcuts, any day. But with Epiphany, I have both. 🙂
And when Epiphany moves to webkit, watch that disappear…
Epiphany won’t move to Webkit, it will add Webkit backend. Gecko one isn’t going anywhere and, for example, Ubuntu just renamed epiphany-browser package to epiphany-gecko.
Text shell FTW
is that you are a human who’s preferences can’t be predicted by a scorecard of features or styles in an OS, just like the rest of us.
But, oh well, here’s to yet another KDE vs Gnome flame war where we all use our anecdotes and predilections to prove which one is better…
But before it turns into that I’d like to point out the best quote of the article:
Windows feels a lot more Linuxlike to me than Mac OS. In many ways it seems as if it’s a slightly clumsy knockoff of KDE.
😀 That’s more like it! A KDE vs Windows flame war could actually be entertaining.
No need for a GNOME vs. KDE flame-war, he’s using the DE that he finds more comfortable. If I had to guess, I’d wager that 99% of us using FOSS on the desktop do the same. Now, as to the Ubuntu vs. Fedora debate, I do find that occasionally one will work better than the other with my hardware, so I use it until it breaks and/or the other catches up. My desktops pretty much look the same in both as they share a common home directory. And the winner is.. ME
I have used GNOME for years, then I decided to try KDE on my laptop. I seriously tried to like it and I didn’t even have any GNOME apps installed, I wanted to try all the KDE replacements. Yet, I just didn’t like KDE. It is just so darn full of needless cruft.. Gazillion menu entries in every single app, right-clicking on anything brings up a similar menu.. Oh, and there’s two things that actually started to bug me quite a lot: when I dragged a file from Konqueror window to desktop or vice versa, it always asked me what I want it to do. In GNOME it defaults to moving the file and copying it if the those two locations aren’t under the same mount point. It just started to bug me. One other thing I would odd in KDE was that if I f.ex. wanted to open a PDF file stored on my file server Kpdf had to first copy the file to local filesystem before it could open it. All GNOME apps I had used opened all files without needing a local copy of them. This annoyed me quite a bit since my laptop doesn’t have USB2 and the wireless connection is provided by a USB wireless stick..so the essential max. bandwidth is around 500kb/s.
All in all, I would have gotten used to KDE and might not have switched back were it for two things: the thing I mentioned about apps needing local copies of files, and most importantly all the needless cruft and non-polish :O
What you call needless cruft, I call useful features… But to each his own.
That is strange, as in general every KDE application is completely network transparent, which means you don’t need a local copy for most things.
There lies the problem, the features are useful to you, but clutter to others. So the interface is logical to you but full of noise for other people.
Gnome, Firefox and many other programs have a simple solution: plugins.
Now you can hand pick what features are available and not be bothered by features cluttering up the interface that only a few people use, sometimes.
No, GNOME just removes features that idiot users wouldn’t use and leaves the power users in the dust. This is not a solution. Yes, KDE 3.5 could have been a little bit cleaner with the menus, but at the end of the day, I can actually get work done in KDE and make efficient use of my desktop. The learning curve may be a little steeper (but for Windows users, KDE is actually more familiar than GNOME), but it’s worth it. Also, with KDE, I don’t feel like I’m using an 800×600 monitor because all GNOME apps make horrible use of screen real estate. KDE apps rarely have this problem and scale nicely to the resolution of my screen.
Because all Gnome users are idiots/can’t get any work done. This is the same bullshit argument used by Vi and Emacs fanboys to convince people who use “lesser” editors to switch.
But why would I switch when the editor of my choice does the job perfectly with minimal fuss?
I guess that’s the difference between KDE and Gnome.
Also, with KDE, I don’t feel like I’m using an 800×600 monitor because all GNOME apps make horrible use of screen real estate. KDE apps rarely have this problem and scale nicely to the resolution of my screen.
I didn’t notice any difference. Sure, KDE and GNOME apps looks different but atleast on my screen they all scale just fine.
No, GNOME just removes features that idiot users wouldn’t use and leaves the power users in the dust. This is not a solution.
That is basically calling all GNOME users idiots -.- I am a power-user myself too, still, an interface with dozens of needless menus, buttons and all that distracts me and hinders my productivity, not boost it. I could also say that stuffing every possible feature in an app is not a solution..but that is an opinion, not a fact.
I found KDE useable, it has some good apps and many interesting features. One example of an app that I find a lot more useable than any GNOME alternatives is Kopete. But as I said, I find myself much more comfortable in a more polished environment. And the thing that many of those apps I tried needing a local copy of a file wouldn’t be an issue on a faster connection but on this laptop is started to bother me real fast. Oh, and for some reason AmaroK doesn’t allow me to add files to the library unless they are local (or atleast mounted on the local filesystem) which I found annoying. I have all my music on the file server just so that all machines can access it at all times without needing duplicate copies.
I’m not calling them idiots. The philosophy of the GNOME developers seems to be “remove features that might be confusing to idiots”. I have run up against so many walls in GNOME and it is very frustrating.
I have to agree with you on polish, though. GNOME definitely feels more polished, even though it also feels more simplistic and less featureful (and my God, will they ever may GTK+ make good use of screen real-estate?). I think KDE 4 is moving towards a cleaner interface, but it’s so far from complete right now, which is unfortunate.
If we had a DE that had the features and integration of KDE, with the polish of GNOME, we’d be in business on the desktop. Right now, neither DE gets it right in both camps and that’s a major problem.
By and large, they were not removed. They were moved to gconf-editor. Not all features are worth cluttering up the user interface. If you have not looked at gconf-editor, you owe it to yourself to do so. Also, one other tip. If the feature you need is not immediately apparent in gconf-editor, don’t hunt all over for the option you need:
gconftool-2 -R /
will give you a list of *all* the possible keys. grep for what you want. gconftool-2 can also apply setting changes, and so is a very powerful tool for administrators. A short script lets me quickly apply any setting change I desire to any user or group of users I choose, in just a few seconds.
Gnome is a lot more polished than KDE 3.5 these days but that is hardly a fair statement seeing as you have to really compare gnome from 2 years ago to make it a fair assessment on polish.
I like gnome and kde both. But in the end I found that there were aspects to gnome that really annoyed me:
1) I use a laptop, so I have a relatively low res screen. GTK has so much empty unused space, the buttons are needlessly huge (at least of me). The worst example of this for me was the open/save dialog box which took up nearly my whole screen without doing anything particularly fancy. I’m not blind!!
2) users are Idiots mentality. Maybe some like the fact that there aren’t more options i.e. it’s cleaner. Sure it is cleaner, but in the same way a blank walls looks cleaner than a wall with posters on it. Gconf is not really a solution for this (not all apps expose useful features in it).
3) GTK is slow, not really a fair statement as qt3 is positively ancient, plus the fact that nvidia seems to refuse to acknowledge they have poor 2d acceleration leads to a less pleasant experience. after all kde 4 and Qt4 apps are slow for me (again gfx driver issues).
4) Nautilus sucks..long live Konqueror. Even Dolphin is more full featured
5) I find kwin to be a better window manager overall.
However I can live with the app crashes that occur frequently with kde and the general “roughness” of the kde desktop but others looking for things “that just work” should stay with gnome.
I fail to see what any of that has to do with my post. That said, I think it is absurd to say that you have to compare a current release of one project with a two year old release of another project to get a fair comparison. One should compare the current offerings. If one project has chosen to destabilize their release by doing the inadvisable (http://tinyurl.com/4gus), that comes with real consequences. And you cannot simply excuse the project from those very real consequences. The current stable releases of Gnome and KDE are 2.22 and 4.0.2, respectively. And those are what should be compared today. If KDE’s rewrite actually pays off in the future, another fair comparison can be made then. But be aware that the bar will be higher at that time.
Edited 2008-03-22 17:27 UTC
I completely agree. No release in several years does not excuse one from comparison to more recently updated software.
I think it’s funny that you compare KDE 4 to the rewrite of Netscape/Mozilla. Sure it took a while, but Mozilla is now an undeniably successful browser engine. Impossible to tell if that would have happened if they had stuck with the old codebase.
Indeed. Of course, you are probably aware that there is a lot of talk in the Gnome camp about breaking API compatibility in a serious way with GTK3. You see, eventually the incremental approach just can’t go on forever, no matter which toolkit you’re writing for.
Leos, I’m not sure how long you have been observing, but when Netscape released the source code in 1998, their browser had 70% market share and IE had a paltry 22.7%.
http://tinyurl.com/g6e7u
It was because of the *4.5 years* that Mozilla spent rewriting and getting that rewritten code base into a competitive state, during which time they basically had no product, that IE was allowed to completely overwhelm the market. Arguably, it was more like 6.5 years, because face it, Mozilla Suite was a nonstarter with respect to market share. It was not until Firefox that things even started to improve.
We’ve crawled back up out of the gutter over the last few years and are cheering the 15% or whatever that Firefox has gained back… after falling from 70%. And just how clean and high quality is the resulting FF code base, anyway?
So you see, the Mozilla story is an excellent example of why rewriting is a bad idea. Even today, 10 years later, we have only just begun to recover, and likely never will fully recover what we lost due to impulsive decisions made by overconfident developers in 1998-1999.
There is some talk about incrementally breaking the GTK API in certain ways, and in a controlled and orderly fashion. Getting from here to there is very likely to be an evolutionary process. API changes are, indeed, necessary for progress. But dramatic, sweeping changes, and complete rewrites are for the foolhardy and overkonfident.
Edited 2008-03-23 01:42 UTC
overkonfident
lol.
Moving to Qt4 changed too much of the api…so a lot of the kde libraries would have to be adapted. At some point it makes more sense to rewrite the whole system.
Whilst I agree that kde4 is ambitious (so much so that 4.0 is pretty much a dud in my eyes). I think trying to transition would be even more time consuming as kde3 libs would have to be ported and then again further down the line in order for them to bring new features.
The advantage gnome has is that they have a lot more control over what happens with regards to gtk. with gtk3 the transition will be a lot slower and there will be less breakage but applications will still have to be ported or fixed.
In fairness, you’re taking kind of a revisionist POV on the history there. IE 4.0 was groundbreaking, regardless of what people say. That’s the point at which I quit Netscape, because believe it or not, IE was fast and sleek (funny how things change, though) whereas Communicator had become a big download. It absolutely smoked Communicator/Navigator by that point, which had become a bloated monster. Look at how rapidly Netscape lost usershare in such a short period of time, on that very graph you referred to.
Why was it a bloated monster? Because while MS was furiously re-engineering their browser with each version, Netscape just kept tacking more and more code on without really doing anything differently.
So you’re trying to argue that Netscape “lost” because they chose to re-engineer, while I would argue they lost because they waited too long to re-engineer. Though at that time MS was pouring cash into development and literally hiring hundreds of developers simply to engineer a better browser, and that can be difficult to content with. But regardless, Netscape blew the browser wars. They were focused on building a business around their server software, since they were aiming at a future where everyone was deploying applications on their own proprietary web servers for use with their wildly popular web browser. That’s the whole reason MS went to war with them in the first place, it had nothing to do with control of the internet, they simply didn’t want Netscape providing an alternative platform for applications.
So point being that Netscape took their dominance in the browser area for granted, and focused their attention elsewhere. And Microsoft ate their lunch for them.
I think there’s a lesson to be learned there, because when you assume that your dominance is assured, it’s easy to become complacent with making the hard decision about when to take the necessary steps to truly innovate your product, at the short-term risk to disruption or inconvenience for your users, and simply assume you don’t need to… and that’s when your competitors will ultimately strike. Doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about FLOSS or commercial software.
So I agree your analogy is valid, I just don’t agree with the interpretation…
Not revisionist at all. Of course there was fierce competition. And Netscape had nothing to fight back with. They dragged creaky old communicator along with what few resources were not engaged in the complete rewrite. And their only hope of salvation lay on the floor in pieces for over 4 years.
The mistake that Mozilla made was in deciding to tackle the whole thing at once. As Joel suggests, they could have prioritized, planned, and renovated one subsystem at a time. Improvements to Communicator would have been incremental, but real. The end result would have been better because resources would not have been spread so thin. They could focus on the part they were working on. And they would never have been without a viable product. Instead, they caked more and more makeup onto the face of Communicator until it looked more like Tammy Faye Bakker on a bad hair day than a viable competitor to IE. Meanwhile, we the faithful downloaded Mozilla nightlies, made brave sounding noises about how IE was going to be toast when this baby was ready… and used Communicator 4.x as best we could to get our real work done. The rest of the world knew nothing of this, used IE, and called it “The Internet”. (And still do.)
Sure, Netscape waited too long to start renovating. But it does not follow that they should then make the worst decision possible and rewrite everything at once.
I’m sure that when the decision was made, they did not expect it to take so long. No one ever does.
Yes, and then Microsoft used their monopoly to push IE on the masses. If you have a closer look at the market share for browsers, you will see that by 1998 Netscape was already on a rapid decline. The slope is pretty much constant there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Layout_engine_usage_share.svg
No. That is one theory, but to say that the rewrite lost them the browser war is a stretch at best. It possibly contributed, but you have absolutely no way of knowing how it would have went if they would have just continued to try and improve it incrementally. A browser is not exactly black magic, and microsoft can make a decent one when pushed to do so. Microsoft would still have used their monopoly to push IE on people, and if there had been more competition that IE would have been better.
Haha. C’mon. An API break is an API break. There is nothing more or less orderly about what Gnome are planning than what KDE decided to do several years ago.
Since when is KDE4 a rewrite? The only thing that was rewritten was kicker/kdesktop. And that decision was made by the guy that had been maintaining it for several years, so he probably know more about the state of it than you or I. Everything else was simply ported and had a few features added. Even dolphin existed in KDE3.
Hmm, I don’t really have time for that sort of thing. Having a quick look through some config dialogs I can handle, but gconf-editor is way more in-depth than I want to get just to figure out if I can change something, or if a particular feature exists. Yes, useful keys exist, but they are lumped in with lots of truly esoteric settings that really should never be changed, and differentiating between the two is not exactly my idea of fun.
Concerning cruft and bloat:
I was just doing a comparison of Konqueror and Iceweasel.
Iceweasel has 6 buttons:
– Back
– Forward
– Reload
– Stop
– Home
Konqueror has 13 buttons:
– Back
– Forward
– Up one level in directory hierarchy
– Home
– Reload
– Stop
– Print
– Search current page
– Increase font size
– Decrease font size
– Encryption indicator (is just in a different place in Iceweasel)
– Download Manager
– Clean URL bar
From the Konqueror buttons I almost never use:
– Print
– Download manager
From both browsers I never use:
– Home
That’s 3 unused buttons in Konqueror, and no feature missing, and one unused button in Iceweasel and the following features missing which I use very often:
– Up one level in directory hierarchy (very good in FTP mode)
– Increase font size
– Decrease font size
– Clean URL bar
So for me, Iceweasel is a usability nightmare (just try to highlight a text URL and paste it into the URL bar of the browser, using UNIX-style copy-on-highlight and middle-mouse-paste). Tried it? Found out, that you have to select the text in the URL bar first, delete it, then highlight the new URL and middle-click in the URL bar? Now you understand, why I miss the “clean URL bar” button in Iceweasel.
Other people may have different needs, and for them the features I deem necessary would not be used anyway and are (rightly) seen as bloat.
I think it is nice to have the choice, and would hate to see the two desktops converge towards the same usability paradigms.
Using a MySQL database on the remote server won’t work?
Firefox has this solution, there I agree with you. Gnome does not. Since when do many Gnome applications have plugins? Can I add plugins to give me a global menu bar? Can I add a plugin to give me a better file dialog? Can I add a plugin to integrate all apps with a global spell checker? Gnome has a set of features and for the most part they can’t be modified much. There certainly is nothing like the extension system that Firefox has.
And 99% (PFTA statistic) of users will never be aware of what the software is capable of and not be able to take advantage of it. It’s one solution, but it also has its downsides.
Sure not all of Gnome have plugins, but more and more programs do. You can add functionality to Gedit, Totem and Rhythembox through plugins, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see more programs adopt this.
And besides that many applications DO have an integrated spell checker.
And what’s wrong with the file dialog?
And it’s such a simple solution that several KDE applications have had the ability for years, so stop writing nonsens.
Applications like Kopete, K3B, Digikam, Kate, Kdevlop, Amarok, KTorrent all uses plugins. And that’s only applications I know of, there are more.
Konqueror has always been able to use plugins, thats since 2000, so it’s not exactly a revolutionary concept foregin to the KDE developers.
If you compare many application to all text input fields, there are a slight difference 🙂
Ok… But individual plugins is not the same as an extension system like Firefox has. And plugins have existed in applications for ages, in all toolkits/desktops/OSes.
It’s nicer to have a global one. Less code duplication, and I don’t have to teach each spell checker the same new words.
It’s slow, has broken autocomplete, you can’t do many common file operations in it (like rename), and the location bar is unintuitively hidden (last time I checked).
[q]And what’s wrong with the file dialog?[./q]
For one thing, it doesn’t support .hidden files.
Files listed in a .hidden file should behave just like any other normal dot file.
For those of you that are not famillar with the .hidden feature in Nautilus, it makes it possible to hide files/folders in a folder by listing them in a file named .hidden.
This is would have been very useful to hide technical stuff like /etc, /dev, /proc, /boot,/usr, /lib, /bin, /sbin from non technical users like accountants and HR persons.
So, if you can have these files hidden in Nautilus, why not in file dialogs as well? After all the space to display them is much less in a file dialog than in a Nautilus window, and may even force the user to scrol and thereby slowing him down.
no, he’s right, afaik the KIO systen in KDE 3 needs a local copy. Fixed in KDE 4 of course 😉
Yes, this is really annoying. It breaks the natural workflow. Draging things from one point to another fits well in the Desktop metaphore, while linking and copying stretches the concept a bit. The menu that pops up have four items:
“Move Here”
“Copy Here”
“Link Here”
“Cancel”
Now consider this:
On most computer systems I have worked with, the number of links usually is around 1/1000 of all files in the system, and most of them are created by scripts.
Now ow many times do we actually want to cancel a drag operation when it have gon as far as we hold the file(s) over the drop target?
This means that two of the four menu items will be used very or even extremely seldom, while of the remaining two one (“Move Here”I most likely will dominate. E.g. consider sorting files from a digital camera into different folders depending on subject.
In other words every time we move a file we are asked what we want to do even though some of the alternatives are so much more probable than others.
Another thing, if you actually want to make a link, the “Link Here” behavior is completely hidden, i.e. the only way to find out that the functionality is there is to drag and drop a file. How would a blind person find this out, as the easiest way for him to move or copy files would be to use copy and paste from the ordinary konquere window menus.
The only environment that does this good is actually windows, here simple drags and drops can be performed with the left menu buttons, but if you hold down the right menu button and drag a file, you get a menu similar to that in KDE. Not to mention that in windows the the “Link Here” behavior is not hidden
It is also something that makes it stand out against most other desktop environments available, making a transition from e.g. windows to KDE harder.
This shoudl really be configurable in KDE, they can hardly argue that this would have resulted in too many optioions, as there are allready so many options for things that are far less groundbreaking differences in beheavior.
Not being able to configure this in konqueroer or dolphin is also inconsistent with KDE itself, as a similar menu exists in Kmail, where you actually can configure if you want the menu or not.
Even worse the problem remains in KDE4 and dolphin. In fact the problem gets worse. If you drag a file from a Konquerer or Dolphin window to the desktop a plasmoid is created on the desktop without any menu popping up as it do if you drag it to another konqeror or dolphin window.
The following is unfortunately all in the realm of “anecdotes and personal preferences” (as a previous poster put it), but as I can only speak for myself I don’t know what else I could do.
In other words every time we move a file we are asked what we want to do even though some of the alternatives are so much more probable than others.
I use “link here” all the time. I can also be a spaz and realize I’ve dragged something over the wrong directory (never mind when I didn’t actually mean to drag something in the first place). Being able to cancel is welcome.
Now from what I read about dragging with the middle mouse button in Gnome, they have a nice solution for that (one I didn’t realize until now, despite using Gnome for a few months now). I’d be satisfied with that for linking, though I’m left with the question of visibility, given that I had no idea that option was there.
Even worse the problem remains in KDE4 and dolphin. In fact the problem gets worse. If you drag a file from a Konquerer or Dolphin window to the desktop a plasmoid is created on the desktop
The desktop in Plasma is broken (see my initial disclaimer).
Edited 2008-03-22 21:19 UTC
I totally agree! This is just as bad as the hidden “link here” menu item in KDE, in fact its even worse as it is assigned to the middle button, and many people doesnt have three button mice.
However the idea of just getting the menu, when you actually need it (just like in windows) is good.
What GNOME and KDE should do is to make it possible to create links from the application menu. E.g. they could introduce a “Paste Link” menu item in the edit menu so that people could use “Copy” and “Paste Link” actions to create links.
Naturally, Gnome could keep the current middle button drag menu as an extra short cut for powerusers with thre button mice. It is a very nice short cut for those who know about it.
“In GNOME it defaults to moving the file and copying it if the those two locations aren’t under the same mount point.”
Guess what… that is exactly one of the things that annoy me in GNOME. I prefer to be asked what I want to do whit that file.
Then middle click + drag and stop whining. You’ll get the same menu as KDE gives you by default, but only when you want it, not every time you attempt to copy a file.
The great myth perpetuated by you and others is that GNOME isn’t configurable. The truth of the matter is that sane defaults are used and prominent, whilst geeky or rarely used functionality is left to the geek to track down. Power users and desktop tweakers will possess the knowledge (and let’s face it, time) to hunt down the proper settings (typically in GConf).
I’m not in any particular “camp” regarding the Desktop Jihad, but uninformed arguments like yours do nothing to further the development of either platform. GNOME’s file drag ‘n’ drop behavior is an excellent example of UI design for both geeks and mortals. If this is the great flaw of GNOME, we need more failures like it. If this is your argument in favor of KDE, I’ll stick with WMII, thank you very much.
Middle-clicking onto a file is unintuitive to anyone who uses the middle mouse button to paste something. It would feel subconsciously like “overwrite the file with whatever is currently in the buffer”.
I know this is illogical, but to me it feels like that.
In Windows I often move stuff when I wanted to copy it, but I admit that the popup menu of KDE can be annoying.
For the dumbed-down configuration dialog and the gconf editor:
It is unproductive.
Why?
Because configuring Gnome to my liking takes approximately 3 times longer than configuring KDE to my liking.
In KDE I can walk through the whole configuration dialogue within approximately two hours. I will find every thing I want to configure on this walktrough.
In Gnome it is a 5 minute walk through the dialogue, then a 3 hour search for other dialogues or hidden configuration options, only to find out that there are none. Then it is a horrible search through the gconf editor guessing which keyword does what, trying to change, see if the right keyword was changed, finding out that it was not the right keyword, try others which might be the right ones, and after 5 minutes we have the first of 20 necessary changes.
KDE shows that it need not be like that.
For Gnome maybe one simple button labeled “Expose all options” and a config tree similar in size as KDE’s appears, would solve this issue.
I can accept simple and clean interfaces for the applications themselves, I agree that for applications less is more, as long as whatever is left is enough, and possibilities to add what is missing are available.
But for configuration dialogues more is more, because people should not spend time learning how to correctly set things up in gconf. A configuration dialogue is rarely opened, usually once or twice. For rarely used stuff the “no learning required” paradigm of graphical user interfaces have their biggest advantage over the “it’s fast when you already know what to do” paradigm of a command line interface.
I think the Gnome usability guys were wrong when they decided to make Gnome configuration complicated.
Want my advice? Well, I’ll give it anyway. Normal users are going to be pretty happy with the defaults. So we’re talking about using Gnome like a geek, here.[1] So I’ll give you the straightforward geek advice. Run through the config process once, and for each change you make, add a gconftool-2 line to a script and save the script in a safe place. Next time you need to configure Gnome, just run the script. You’ll be able to tweak Gnome to exactly the way you like it in five or ten seconds.
Out of curiosity, does KDE have such a facility?
—
[1] Why regular users are capable of getting real work done with the defaults, while geeks insist that they are unable to do so without tweaking the hell out of their desktops, I’ve never understood. To me, it suggests a certain rigidness of mind, an unwillingness to learn new procedures, and a penchant for painting the bicycle shed.
Yes, one can use kwriteconfig for this. But I agree that the KDE3 (I didn’t use 4 yet) defaults are suboptimal in a lot of ways.
Absolutely. Normal users are also perfectly happy with Windows.
Pretty much. Although even non-geeks do change the occasional setting. And you can’t predict which setting that will be. Jensen Harris has a very insightful series of posts here: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/tags/Why+the+New+UI_3F00_/def…
where he talks about the rationale for the Office 2007 interface redesign. Basically one of the very important points that he makes is that the whole breadth of features in office actually get used quite widely. Office has thousands of features, but they are all there due to customer demand. In other words, you can’t remove features without negatively impacting someone, and you can’t make simple software that will still work for a lot of people.
Too much effort. I’m a geek, but not that much of a geek.
I generally just copy the config files if I have to reinstall. Haven’t bothered to find out if there’s another way because that’s about as easy as it gets.
It’s not that I can’t get work done, it’s that I feel more comfortable using the computer when it works as I like it to work. Realistically, if I didn’t want to put effort into computing I would still be using Windows, which is absolutely the path of least resistance. But Windows forces me to adapt to how it thinks I should work, and since I’ve made the effort to switch to an operating system with more freedom, I am absolutely not prepared to enter the same situation. KDE lets me make my own choices about how I use my computer, while Gnome still gets in my way. I don’t have the patience to put up with that when I know I don’t have to.
I administer about a hundred Linux desktops on XDMCP/NX servers. And believe me, copying around config files to change settings is *not* as easy as it gets. Not granular enough. I need more control and fine-grained configurability than that.
I use gconftool-2 scripts. But for larger chunks of config, I believe you can –dump particular branches of gconf to xml and then load them to various accounts. For example:
gconftool-2 –dump /apps/evolution > evolution.xml
gconftool-2 –load=evolution.xml
Or say you just wanted calendar settings:
gconftool-2 –dump /apps/evolution/calendar > calendar.xml
Copying around config files sounds like something out of the DOS dark ages.
You’re arguing that gconftool is somehow slicker than cp .kde/share/config/whatever destination. Different strokes for different folks.
In fact, to be pedantic, if you’re administering multiple clients, then KDE’s Kiosk infrastructure is optimized for that, and has been for some time. That’s why the config file structure is set up the way it is. It has a hierarchy that gives you the adminstrator granular control over the user setup, and application configurations, and the extent that they can change it.
I guess it’s the difference between copying chunks of gfconf settings and pasting them into multiple accounts, or simply setting up one or more profiles and applying it to multiple accounts. Again, different strokes.
Absolutely. Try setting Suzzie’s default home page, and make her pdf viewer default to full screen using cp.
No. Necessary granularity and flexibility for the admin.
Perhaps. But the DE needs to work for both the admin and the users. KDE might be great for me. But although I keep an eye on it, try out each new release, and respect some of the technology, it is nowhere near suitable for my users. And I would not subject them to it.
Edited 2008-03-23 18:46 UTC
sed is your friend assuming you want it only for one user. $I if you want it global.
familiarity perhaps but a entry in a config file is just as granular as a gconf value.
I won’t disagree with you since you know your users. For one thing converting from gnome to KDE would be traumatic and unnecessary. Assuming you were starting from the beginning though, without a trained user base, what features in gnome make it more suitable than KDE3 in the environment you run? I am not fighting for KDE here. KDE4 is utterly unsuitable for now and KDE3 is on the way out. I am just curious what the limitations you hit are. The one obvious distinction that comes to mind is Epiphany versus Konqueror. Konq is nice but also crash happy, especially if flash is involved. I also can understand the argument for gconftool, though I would say that it is a matter of familiarity more than granularity. What else?
Ah well, maybe we could revisit the subject in about 2-4 years after KDE4 has had a time to claw its way into the sunlight.
I hope that was intended as a joke. :-0
Sure, one could do it with sed. But why?
I mentioned gconftool-2 because someone claimed that it took them 3 hours to configure a Gnome desktop, and I was recommending an easy way to record and load a configuration and make fine adjustments to one or more users’ config all in one go. To save them that 3 hours per desktop that they were wasting, you see. And then someone else said you can do all that by copying config files around. That’s where the granularity topic arose.
It’s not so much limitations. It’s the total disregard for usability and the fact the the devs seem totally oblivious, complacent, too busy playing with transparency, or whatever they are that causes them not to care about UI quality.
Well, yes there is that. I’ve certainly seen too much of the KDE crash dialog. But my number one problem is sites that only work with IE. There are more of those in the realm of business related sites, like manufacturer warranty claim processing, than you see in everyday web surfing. It’s a damned pain. The webmasters of these sites don’t even listen. And Konqueror would be an absolute disaster. Even if I *were* going to set someone up with KDE, Konqueror would be dismissed out of hand. If KDE goes with WebKit, I would test and reevaluate. I’ve heard conflicting reports on the plans, or not, for that. And I’m not sure if it would be suitable or not.
See above. And I, personally, would not object to switching tools if it were to move to something that was better for my users. But that’s really a side issue. (There have been quite a few side issues in this thread.) And besides, someone said that KDE has equivalent functionality in… I believe it was called kwriteconf.
I’ve been a KDE advocate in the past. (From pre-1.0 through 2.x it was the best.) And I may well be again someday. But it’s going to take more than fancy libraries to win me over.
Edited 2008-03-24 01:55 UTC
unfortunately not. I find sed and grep to be an easy and efficient way to make one line adjustments to files.
to which my response is that if it is an entire config for an app copying a file is easy. if it is an individual element sed will do the trick.
It was that thought that actually motivated me to respond. Why on earth configure each individual separately if it is the same configuration? Set it in the default config and be done with it.
Can you expound upon the usability problems? I like kde3 and have few problems with it.
never heard of it but that is not too surprising I guess.
This last pass with KDE3 is the first time I have ever used KDE for a prolonged period. I ran FVWM for the longest time (testing other WM/DEs occasionally), then started bouncing from one WM/DE to the next for a few years. I am holding judgment on KDE4 for the moment. Having done a bit of work with the plasma APIs lately I think there is more to KDE4 than fancy libraries. Unfortunately the desktop is in such a sad state that it overshadows the good things that are possible. I just hope they can pound out a better desktop than the one I see developing presently. As scary as the thought might be if they don’t give me what I want I might just try and write it myself. It is either that or start looking for a new primary DE.
Edited 2008-03-24 03:15 UTC
Not to put down sed, grep and awk, because they are quite useful. But wouldn’t it be nice if sed knew about section headers and about the difference between key names and key values? You could modify it so that is did, but by the time you finished writing the handy mods you would have rewritten gconftool and kwriteconf. Why use a multifunction tool when there are specialized tools available that do the job more quickly and easily.
Because they are not the same. Different users need different icons, different email configs, different browser home pages, etc.
Well, as both a user and an admin, the things that I need are not the ability to plug in a headphone and have the sound automatically move to that output and the other fancy-shmancy stuff that the KDE devs seem so excited about. I need better MS Office file format compatibility. I need fewer sites that cater to IE only and the ability to just use one browser, instead of this Epiphany/Opera/Crossover IE fall back sequence that I’m stuck with now. I need a makeover of the OpenOffice UI that isn’t so obtuse. I need Evince/Poppler to handle all the PDFs that Adobe Acroread does, and do it correctly.
Basically, I need things that don’t necessarily have to do with the desktop itself. The desktop itself is pretty feature complete and is getting ready to go into featuritis mode. And the things that are desktop issues are really too boring for the KDE devs to concern themselves with. So when I see devs blogging about how cool it is to be able to plug in a headset and have the sound automatically get transfered to that output… I feel about the same as if Imelda Marcos was blogging about a beautiful new pair of shoes she just bought. It simply does not intersect with my world. And it doesn’t impress me.
I care about features that are useful on a business desktop. For the immediate future, Linux is a nonstarter for home desktops, and no amount of wishful thinking is going to change that. Our next desktop frontier is the business desktop. And I’m optimistic on that front. And I’m putting all my efforts behind it. And that necessarily influences how I evaluate a DE’s value. If someone can make a solid business case for Phonon and Plasmoids I’m listening. Skepitical… but listening.
You care about the business desktop, so you want everyone else to drop the idea of the home desktop too? Instead of wishful thinking, the devs are actually trying to make something better for the home user, which may eventually win more of them over (or not, no way to tell at this point).
And here’s the business case for phonon, and solid, and plasmoids, and all the infrastructure in KDE4. It makes applications easier to write. OSS is at an inherent disadvantage, because there is no one big company that can direct efforts and pour developers on a project. Especially in KDE, most of the apps are written by volunteers (Going by commits, it’s about 13% commercial devs). Well volunteers don’t have infinite time, and anything that makes apps easier to write, and have less code is a huge advantage.
If you don’t have good frameworks, you eventually hit a wall with applications, because the complexity and size of the codebase has outgrown the available manpower. The only way to get around this is to either attract more developers (and developers like nice APIs) or to create more frameworks to take the load off application devs. So eventually, these kinds of technologies allow the business desktop to advance.
That’s very interesting. I’ve made a note of it:
/Little corporate interest in KDE development, according to KDE advocate./
I believe he meant as in paid developers on the kde desktop.
If corporations want to make use of kde, they’re welcome to. If there is some feature they want, but isn’t provided by current development, they’re welcome to add it.
but telling volunteers what they should work on is never going to work. If someone decides its not for them then so be it.
I always thought that making apps easier to develop is a win for everybody…shows what I know
I’ve lost track of what this thread is even about! 😉
It’s been a sort of free association game.
You twist it around to make it sound bad, but I like that about KDE. It’s a true OSS project, and if the company funds dried up tomorrow, it would take a hit, but would continue with no major problems. They have an amazing framework that makes application development easy enough to be sustained by volunteer developers.
I don’t have stats on commercial involvement in Gnome, but I get the impression from reading planet.gnome that it is a lot more (perhaps you can provide insight into this). Even with all that money being poured into it, it’s more or less even with KDE. Better polish, less configurability, to put it in coarse terms.
I imagine the lgpl of gtk is quite attractive to commercial companies. Whereas for Qt to create something proprietary you need to pay TT.
That aside, most of the large vendors that that provide distro’s tend to be gnome based, canonical with ubuntu, redhat with fedora and not to mention that novell wanted to focus suse on gnome. These companies tho understand open software so it could almost be considered sponsorship and many of the bloggers on planet gnome work directly on gnome based frameworks for these companies. Its not really a bad thing but I sense that is one of the reasons that gnome is generally considered more conservative.
I don’t think that gnome will ever consider scrapping or attempting new frameworks between versions. I hear that they plan the transistion to gtk3 over years.
KDE is the hare (took a nap while making kde4) and Gnome is turtle slow and steady…however neither is ever gonna get to that finish line.
Sure, if you ignore the 250+ Trolltech employees. At no point in time have there ever been 250 paid GNOME developers.
What we do see is a combination of volunteers and a myriad of small(ish) GNOME-centric companies. If a company goes out of business (something which has happened a couple of times during the lifetime of the GNOME project), there’s still a healthy ecosystem of volunteers and companies driving development forward.
Edited 2008-03-25 10:49 UTC
99% of which don’t work on KDE. Most of them aren’t even developing Qt directly. And Qt is supported on more than just Linux, so the devs spend a lot of time on issues entirely unrelated to Qt on Linux.
All work on Qt applies directly to KDE, so a Qt developer is a KDE developer.
Trolltech is a company that’s completely dedicated to Qt, and all work that Trolltech does goes directly into improving the Qt platform, hence 250+ KDE developers right there.
Wrong. Qtopia is a huge focus for them as well. More so now that Nokia has bought them out.
Yes, which runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, WinCE, etc.. Only the Linux part of Qt is directly relevant to KDE (and slowly Windows/Mac is becoming more important as KDE is ported to those platforms).
How can you not tell the difference between Qt and KDE? Not all work on Qt is useful for KDE. 10 GTK hackers does not equal 10 Gnome hackers either.
Edited 2008-03-25 22:27 UTC
And Qtopia Core is the embedded Linux port of Qt 4, so a large part of Qtopia is Qt. All the Qtopia work towards making Qt faster, smaller, and more efficient directly benefits KDE.
Which is exactly the point: thanks to the efforts of Trolltech, porting KDE to those platforms is actually possible, and all the porting work directly benefits KDE.
The difference is merely academic. KDE would never be possible without the Qt platform and its continued support and development by Trolltech.
Really? What work on Qt isn’t useful for KDE? All work on foundation libraries is beneficial to the higher levels. That goes double for KDE which is so tightly integrated with Qt.
I’d argue that it does. All the work that goes into GTK+ and supporting libraries (glib, gobject, gio, cairo, libxml, etc.) certainly benefits GNOME directly.
Edited 2008-03-25 23:00 UTC
Indirectly at best. This is a really tangential benefit. You must realize there are shades of grey here. Aaron Seigo working directly on KDE technology is obviously very beneficial to KDE. Thomas Zander working on Qt printing is also quite directly beneficial. Lorn Potter working on Qtopia on the Neo, not so much. There is some potential for some really indirect benefits in the form of performance tuning, but that’s really stretching it. You can’t compare all these people like they were directly involved in KDE hacking.
Once again, indirectly. Yes it benefits KDE to a certain extent, but it’s nowhere near the benefit as if that effort went directly into KDE development.
If you loosen the definition of beneficial enough to be meaningless. Porting Qt to WinCE is of very little use to KDE, for example.
Anyway, your 250 hackers working on Qt is completely bogus. Trolltech has 250 employees TOTAL. A whole ton of those are managers, marketing, tech support, janitors, whatever. http://trolltech.com/pdf/TrolltechASAQ42007report.pdf
I don’t know how many employees are actually developing on Qt directly, but I counted 20 unique names in the first 5 pages of the trolltech blogs. < 50 is probably a more accurate guess.
Ok, fine… there are shades of grey. 🙂
Although not directly involved with the coding; the “corporate support staff” (managers, tech support, accountants) do fill important functions in the work towards improving Qt. Primarily they allow the developers to focus on code… but I’ll concede that they’re not KDE developers. However people working on documentation and artwork do count.
It does sound odd though, that a company of Trolltech’s size only employs forty or so core developers.
However, it’s difficult to make a proper distinction. When Novell acquired Ximian in 2003 it was largely seen as a GNOME company, although its major products were the Ximian Desktop, Mono, Evolution, and the Exchange connector — and Evolution wasn’t even a part of GNOME proper at the time, it was just a GNOME 1.x application. How many of the 50(-ish) Ximian employees should be counted as GNOME developers?
Well.. I guess it’s because Qt is so cool it doesn’t require many devs
either that or norweigans are just nuts.
True.
Hmm.. I don’t think I would count anyone working on Mono as a Gnome dev, unless they’re making gnome bindings or something. Evolution… well it was included into Gnome later so probably. And the Ximian desktop was basically Gnome + addons, but I don’t know how many addons made it into Gnome proper.
Hard to estimate either way I guess. Not that it really matters. I think this horse is dead
Fine, I’m not the right person to ask about KDE tools to support your need (I’m sure it can be done, but I’m not a systems administrator). We’re talking home users here, not systems administrators.
For a single user, it’s way easier. You don’t really expect a home user to bother to learn the syntax of some random config exporting tool do you? Most users will just setup their environment manually after a reinstall, and the next easiest thing is to copy config files (I just copy the whole .kde directory). A dedicated tool is more powerful, but no one but system admins would ever use it, so it’s not really relevant to the discussion.
The topic was geek users who think they need to be able to tweak every conceivable setting. And you just changed it to Aunt Tillie.
Aunt Tillie is just fine without gconftool, gconf-editor, *or* the several kitchen sinks in KDE.
And a geek who can’t handle gconf-editor is a pretty feeble geek, IMO.
Edited 2008-03-23 04:52 UTC
She is certainly fine without gconftool, but she may not be fine if a feature she needs is missing from the software.
It’s not about not being able to handle it, it’s about having better things to do with my time.
Like what, specifically? Name a few things that she’d want to do that are inaccessible to her in Gnome 2.22.
And here we come to the impasse. Because Tillie has better things to do with her time than to continually waste time hunting through a glut of kitchen sink, bathroom sink, basement sink, and portable camping sink options in KDE when all she wants to do is something very simple and basic. And so do I. That’s speaking as a user. As an administrator, I have better things to do than hunting around finding things *for* my users in a rat’s nest of options, and explaining that no, they probably do not want to open that page in Cervesia.
Edited 2008-03-23 17:14 UTC
Off the top of my head (I don’t use Gnome fulltime so I’m going to just list a few things I’ve experienced personally).
Configure screensavers https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-screensaver/+bug/220…
Configure some basic printing options (like draft mode) https://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/desktop_architects/2005…
Rename a file/folder in the file dialog
On a high level, everything you can do in KDE, you can also do in Gnome. I’m sure I can configure the printers and screensavers manually in some config file or gconf, I can turn off the spatial mode, I can open nautilus when I want to rename a file, I can use devilspie when I want the window manager to work properly. But by that line of reasoning, every operating system and environment is the same. Of course, everything you can do in KDE, you can also do in Windows 98, but that doesn’t mean I’d want to use Windows 98. It’s about how things are done, not if they can be done or not.
You provide no evidence that features and options make work more difficult. However there is plenty of evidence that users demand features/options, and use them to make their work easier (have a look at the Microsoft link I posted earlier).
Configure screensavers https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-screensaver/+bug/220…..
That is hardly a serious issue.. -.- Even less for an average Joe.
Configure some basic printing options (like draft mode) https://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/desktop_architects/2005…..
Umm, that’s been possible atleast on my machine for quite a while :O
Rename a file/folder in the file dialog
This might be a good addition, but it’s just not anything earth-shattering.
So, anything that actually is a big deal, or even exists? Or are you just trying to list things where GNOME and KDE are different?
You provide no evidence that features and options make work more difficult. However there is plenty of evidence that users demand features/options, and use them to make their work easier
And there is lots of evidence that people do get distracted by too many things on the screen, and some people just have trouble remembering and navigating through dozens of menu entries or configuration options.
Edited 2008-03-23 18:16 UTC
Not serious, no. But average joe’s are exactly the kind of people that like to mess around with stuff like screensavers, change colors, etc.
Well I could go on about the things that annoy me, but the question was about things that the average joe might miss, which is actually impossible to answer without a survey, now that I think about it.
References?
Tillie would neither know nor care. I would not particularly object to the functionality being added. But that’s a pretty weak example, at best.
Ancient history. Photo/Normal/Draft. All the options are there. Options get added and removed based upon whether or not users are asking for them. (BTW, can you resize, move, hide, or do anything at all with KDE’s panel yet?)
This would be nice, and would probably be worth while.
But are these really the *best* examples you could come up with?
None of it is anywhere *near* worth wading waist-deep through a haphazard slew of options *everywhere just to make sure one does not miss out on being able to change the number of stars visible in a screen saver. On the servers I administer, my clients prefer that I lock it at “Blank” anyway so that people aren’t tempted to waste time fiddling with them.
And you’re basing this on?
Off the top of my head, from the last time I used Gnome a couple months ago, yes. There are lots more like it, which reminded me why I don’t particularly enjoy using it. Of course you haven’t provided a single example or any evidence whatsover to support your points. All you’ve given here is wild hyperbole and false statements..
Like that one for example..
Luckily, I do not work for your clients. Would probably look for another job where I’m not treated like an imbecile.
Except I can’t middle click drag on my laptop. Same goes for resizing windows. I think Gnome requires me to hold alt + middle button and drag to resize a window, which is impossible with a trackpad.
LOL… You’ve got to hand it to you gnome fanboys. You can turn any missing function into a “usability” advantage and actually believe it.
Worse, when KDE has a feature that gnome lacks like global spellchecking, well we’ll just call that clutter.
You are totally owned.
Drag and drop functionality in gnome is just deranged.
How is a user to know how it works? What if you don’t have a middle mouse button like 90% of laptops?
Gnome is an abomination.
Just like on MSWindows, you can use the standard keyboard modifiers. Start a drag-n-drop and press shift to move, ctrl to copy, or alt to open a context menu.
If anybody actually bothers to read the article, they will notice that Robin Miller’s biggest issues were not kde-specific, but distribution specific.
Had he used Mandriva or Opensuse, most of his “KDE issues” would have vanished.
He does have a point: habits are hard to break and most people do not want to have to learn something new.
But I also have a point to make: breaking a habit is a liberating experience. Challenging yourself in any area in life to go beyond your cognitive laziness and explore new ways of doing things is very enriching and worthwhile.
For what is worth, KDE works for me, although I have used Gnome at times and been generally productive with it too.
Concur with this. For usability, each has advantages & quirks.
In the future, once KDE 4 matures a bit, KDE will have the far more solid framework. KDE also has no mono dependencies, and KDE is licensed as GPL v3, so it has far less patent risk than GNOME.
For me, this means that KDE is the way to go of the future, without doubt.
Now if we could only convince Mozilla & Sun of that truth, so that Firefox & OpenOffice both gained better integration with the KDE desktop.
Except Gnome doesn’t have Mono dependencies.
Stop spreading the FUD.
Edited 2008-03-22 02:24 UTC
A number of the desktop utilities that “go with GNOME” have mono dependencies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)#Software_developed_with_Mono
Beagle, Banshee/Muine, FSpot & Tomboy notes are the main offenders.
Here is another good site to monitor for applications to avoid:
http://www.mono-project.com/Software
Beagle in particular will give a lot of GNOME-based desktops a dependency on mono.
Going with strigi (as used in KDE 4) would be a far better and safer choice.
Beagle in particular will give a lot of GNOME-based desktops a dependency on mono.
GNOME does support tracker also, it is not dependant on Beagle. It’s just merely the fact that distro providers usually choose Beagle for one or another reason. Blame the packagers instead
GNOME desktop itself isn’t dependant on Mono (thank God), and removing Mono doesn’t remove any major functionality either. There’s alternatives to all those Mono apps, like f.ex. I always use Rhythmbox, not going to touch Banshee/Muine.
Ubuntu Gutsy wisely uses Tracker rather than Beagle as as its default metadata database. However it is distributed with the Mono libraries and the F-Spot and Tomboy applications installed. Nice applications but hardly essential. No great loss to uninstall them.
But I’m perfectly happy with Mono based software.
Having Mono around is a good thing because it means programs get developed quicker, and that there are more programs to choose from.
Sure, one day Microsoft might kick up a stink, but what does it matter when it’s only non-trivial programs that are written using Mono? And besides, when Vala is ready you’ll be able to port Mono programs to Gnome without having to worry about this.
Is that true? Or is it propaganda? Beagle, a Novell project which uses Mono and had the indexing framework, the core of the project, handed to them on a silver platter in the form of Apache Lucene, which only had to be ported from jave, is currently being passed up by the small and unsponsored team of developers working on Tracker, and writing in C. Mono needs some actual evidence to back the “faster development” hype. And the current line-up of Mono apps does not provide that. Quite the contrary.
I don’t follow. If the programs written in Mono are non-trivial, wouldn’t that make it worse if MS decided to make trouble?
True, theoretically. But that’s still a lot of effort. I don’t think you’ll see a lot of people porting Mono apps to Vala in a hurry.
Agree about KDE4’s framework.
Disagree about the v3 thing, this has been beaten into the ground too many times. v2 and v3 have the same patent provisions, the only difference is that v3 uses about 10,000 extra words to clarify them in no uncertain terms.
And neither Gnome or KDE have mono dependencies, but they both have C# interfaces.
I prefer KDE too, but let’s keep the arguments away from cliches and FUD… We can simply bask in the fact it’s a better performing, superior framework with multi-platform capability…
That, I can’t argue with…
Firefox’s integration with Gnome is weak at best, it uses it’s own toolkit framework just as OOo does. And convincing Sun, who have their own vision of what a multi-platform application framework should be, to endorse Qt, which has an alternate vision for what a multi-platform application framework should be, won’t happen any time too soon…
The main difference is in Microsoft’s apparent attitude to GPL software … Microsoft seem to believe they can FUD about GPL v2 and they also believe they have found a “wedge” within v2 they can use to split up the FOSS community.
Strictly, this is correct. However, on a KDE default install you could quite likely find no mono libraries at all, but on a GNOME desktop you would “take out” a number of desktop utilities if you removed mono libraries.
I however think it is valid enough to warn people that going with a GNOME desktop is more likely to see them end up in mono-derived hot water.
That, I can’t argue with…
Herein lies a problem, then.
Would it be ethical and advantageous perhaps for KOffice 2 to fork some of the legacy input filters for MS Office from the OpenOffice codebase?
It’s a natural question, and it’s come up in the past. Certainly it would be advantageous and would be within licensing guidelines. Ethical? I’ll let the philosophers argue that point, other than to say I don’t think it would be unethical.
But from what I gather, the devs have run into two core problems with the OOo2 source; first, it’s somewhat of a spaghetti mess of code that is difficult to work with, some of it dating back a decade or more, and second, that the nature of the way OOo2 manages document formats is structurally different from KOffice, and would require a major refactoring (basically a re-write) in order to adopt the MSO compatibility. So they’ve looked at it, but determined it’s not feasible.
This does suck, because I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place. I vastly prefer KOffice to OOo2 because I find it much “lighter” and far better integrated with KDE, but yet the minimal MSO compatibility is a deal-breaker since I have no choice but to deal with MSO files at work. Yet OOo2 I find to be a very clunky and somewhat dated app to use, though with more useful functionality than KOffice. The worst part is that neither works well enough for what I need, so I’m stuck with VirtualBox and Office2003. Would that it was otherwise…
Well, both Koffice and OpenOffice 3 look very promising.
If anybody actually bothers to read the article, they will notice that Robin Miller’s biggest issues were not kde-specific, but distribution specific.
Haha, another one of those ‘he was using the wrong’ distro arguments. IMHO, if the type of distro you’re using can determine whether or not you can use the GUI to properly configure your network options, there is a fundemental problem somewhere. And even if he switches to Mandriva (or whatever) and this stuff works, there’s probably gonna be other stuff that doesn’t work.
As for desktop environments..
I can see how global hotkeys might change between desktop environments, but I would think that once you set things like your networking options and default mail program, that stuff ought to just work no matter what desktop environment you’re using.
Edited 2008-03-22 00:05 UTC
The key factor is there is actually 3 choices for the Desktop Manager now.
That is what keeps everything on the cutting edge, competition from Gnome, KDE and XFCE.
Gnome has some nice apps, KDE has some I use at work on a daily basis and it is nice just to switch to KDE at work sometimes for a change of pace.
In the end, the user community wins because it allows the end_user to enjoy the benefits of both.
I am a Fedora/Red Hat advocate so Gnome or KDE is good for me.
Why choose? I use both. In fact, I use xfce and icewm from time to time. To me, it’s like do I want to wear my red shirt or my blue shirt today?
but within a few weeks, I went back to GNOME. Does this mean GNOME is now a better desktop than KDE?
Yes.
This is just another example why Canonical should just really stop supporting Kubuntu in the half ass manner they do. People will compare it to Ubuntu and it just isnt as polished. If you want a polished KDE just look elsewhere.
Sad truth, but it is the truth.
This is why KDE users should give up and stop whining about Kubuntu and use Mandrake or SUSE.
I’ve never seen a GNOME user complaining about the shitty suppor of Mandrake towards GNOME.
Unfortunately kubuntu is one of the few high quality deb based KDE distros around (I should give sidux a go tho). I kinda dislike rpms but I hate openSUSEs packaging system everytime I try it I have to add external repos just to get things like non crippled ktorrent.
Inevitably the sheer amount of external repos leads to loads of packaging conficts. The dialog box that pop’s up is just plain hideous. Not to mention zypper and yast are damn slow.
With mandriva I couldn’t find 64 bit downloads without getting the dvd image…sigh…
Other than that I would say that SUSE and Mandriva are more polished than Kubuntu, but the packaging issue is a deal breaker for me.
FWIW, you actually have another *buntu option. Install regular Ubuntu. And then instead of installing Kubuntu-desktop, install kde-base instead. (Or is it KDE desktop? Well, it’s some kde metapackage that isn’t kubuntu-desktop.) I know that some people prefer that. Last I tested, there was a *dramatic* difference in memory consumption and performance on lower memory machines. And, like I say, some people simply prefer it to going the Kubuntu route. I’m writing this from my Fedora 8 Gnome desktop. But I don’t blame you for wanting to stick with apt. Package management under Fedora is excellent. But it’s really hard to beat the polish of apt.
Sheer amount? There’s one external repo now, since the previous two merged into one as of 10.3. Anything else you could want is likely available in the build-service, which compiles packages against the various core versions of openSUSE, and automatically recompiles when a dependent package changes, specifically to bypass potential dependency issues. It is, frankly, a superior way of managing packages that the other distros are only starting to implement themselves. The only way to run into dependency issues is by mixing repos from different versions of openSUSE (which, sadly, people do), and the same thing will happen on any distro, dep or rpm. If you do happen to run into a dependency issue, it’s a bug with the packaging that should be reported to the developers, as with any distro, deb or rpm.
If you want to complain about the the performance of Yast/zypper, that’s fair enough, since even the devs have acknowledged it and reworked the backend for 11.0 specifically for (significant) performance improvements, but is it possible to have a discussion about deb vs rpm without falling into the long-extinct “dependency hell” issues? If you run into dependency issues on a modern system, it’s a packaging error, and it’s not like Ubuntu hasn’t had similar issues with their hastily repackaged Debian debs in the past.
This just isn’t true. In the combined ubuntu distros I actually have almost every library I need.
In the suse distros there’s at least a half dozen missing. I’ll even list them since you seem to be interested in fixing it.
bdb c++ bindings and headers for the version required by Ice
zeroc’s Ice (all the bindings)
player/stage/gazebo
lame (yes that lame)
Actually, if opensuse had all those. I’d be using opensuse instead of shoddy kubuntu right now. Seriously. Ice has been sitting on the wanted list forever now though, and there’s even a srpm available from them. Yet no one has bothered to modify it and fix it for opensuse. I would personally if I had the time and knowledge of rpm spec files (which seem pretty aweful).
Fix it please. And fix the crappy media playback situation as well. And the super long install times. And the zypper “I don’t know what to do now” issues where it asks me, and I have no clue of course.
I won’t argue against corner cases for packages that don’t exist, particulary if you’ve opened a feature-request and the devs have ignored it.
Of course, if you were comfortable with .spec files (and there are both openSUSE howtos and irc-based packaging “days” for assistance), then you’d be able to put the package into the build-service yourself, for the availability of everyone. What better way to help contribute to the community?
I have never mixed different versions of repos. Nor would I call it dependency hell. Its just damn unfriendly, I can usually resolve these issued when that idiot box full of red and yellow highlights full of garbage text (incidentally zypper does the same but without the pretty colours) pops up telling me that there a conflict in packages that have been supplied by another repo. Its also fairly annoying that all the yast programs are separate.
Maybe I just like synaptic or adept and their speed too much. Searching for packages in adept is even faster than synaptic.
On the whole I would describe the apt system and the gui related tools in (k)ubuntu as being much more streamlined and more importantly easy for new users.
I will be watching for improvements in the future
I keep hearing people imply dependency issues, yet they can never provide examples. If there are dependency issues, it’s a bug in the packaging that the developers should be made aware of.
The other problem is reckless abandonment when it comes to adding repos from the build-service; some of them are clear in purpose, but adding sources from the experimental or developmental areas will result in conflicts, and that’s by design, since those packages are often designed to replace core components.
As for the external repos, namely packman and guru, they are packaged specifically to not interfere with core packages. The only time a conflict will generally occur is if you try to update packages while having those sources disabled, which can cause conflicts since zypper can only resolve against the core packages that are obsoleted by the external repos.
I won’t argue that dependency issues don’t occur, in fact there is a common one with the KDE4 packages as the devs try and work on communal existence with KDE3, but I’d also say that in 9/10 cases where I’ve seen users run into dependency or unresolvable issues, it’s because they’ve installed sources that should not really have been installed, so I’m admittedly cynical when I see blanket complaints about dependency issues. Particularly since I abuse my own system, with various OBS sources, and even intentionally mixing repos from stable and development, without running into the “frequent” dependency issues other people seem to with a standard config.
Yast is a management infrastructure. Package management is one small part of what Yast provides. If Yast didn’t separate the applications and functions, it would be a little cumbersome from a useability POV to have single application managing packages, security configuration, firewall settings, samba, apache, ssh, ftp, nfs, ldap, mail services, dns, dhcp, user management, sudo settings, network devices, audio hardware, display settings, bluetooth configuration, system updates, modem settings, isdn, pptp, desktop preferences, kernel settings, PCI settings, disk partitioning, LVM, bootmanager config, backups, harware profile management, and a few dozen other areas I have overlooked.
Yast is a complete environment, even with multiple programming interfaces, for supporting system management applications. Dismissing it because you don’t like the package management is like dismissing Gnome because you don’t like Nautilus or dismissing KDE because you don’t like Konqueror. They’re important components, but not solely representative of what the entire infrastructure can provide.
.deb will always have an advantage there, since it’s a package format that is basically proprietary to debian. It wasn’t designed for non-Debian based systems, it doesn’t have the file-based dependency system that rpm does (which frankly makes rpm a better “universal” solution that works without requiring an arbitrary set of packaging guidelines), so it doesn’t have the same amount of meta-data to parse. I’ve used .deb on Ubuntu, and I won’t deny it’s “faster”, but if RedHat and openSUSE decided on their own proprietary packaging formats specific to their own platforms, they’d have the same advantage.
This I won’t argue, I’ll be the first to admit that Yast package management could be a little more intuitive, and it’s age is showing. But that is something they’re looking at.
I never saw Mandrake pledge support for GNOME, and promise to make it a “first-class citizen”, as Shuttleworth did for KDE. But of course that move followed the debacle over Novell maybe-or-maybe-not dropping KDE, and since they did an about face on that, he simply forgot about it. It’s all about the marketing and generating blog points.
But I do agree with your point. Use the distro that has the best-implementation of the desktop you prefer. Riddell is an extremely talented and high-profile KDE dev, but there’s only so much he can do for Ubuntu as a one-man team. If Ubuntu won’t invest in KDE, then people should just move on, or make the effort to contribute themselves. Same holds true for distros that may not focus on Gnome, many other alternatives exist. Choice is a wonderful thing.
Yup kubuntu is second class in the ubuntu world. I wish it were different, but what is interesting is that some estimates point at 30% of *ubuntu users are kubuntu users, which is a larger userbase than many kde dedicated distros.
There are alternatives that are better out of the box like Mandriva and openSUSE but we still stick with kubuntu even whilst we’re abused by lack of support.
I wonder what makes us stick to kubuntu? is it cos of the ubuntu kool-aid? or is it because kde users generally are more advanced, hence more able fix problems?
For me personally, is that I guess I like debian but can’t be bothered with it (bad I know) and ubuntu tweaked kernels usually work better for me. Another part I guess is a similar familiarity that keeps driving me back even when differences in distro workflow are negligible.
Would canonical bother if all kubuntu users mass migrated to other distributions?
What I don’t get is how come the KDE guys don’t seem to offer more help with Kubuntu. I know back in the day and maybe even now that SuSE or FreeBSD were the reference Distro’s for KDE. But I’m sure if they put a bit more support for the integration of KDE with Ubuntu then there would be a bit more positive feed back. It should be noted it is often cited that Kubuntu is not a well supported project.
I think someone should try the KDE and Gnome equivalent applications and find which ones he likes best.
e.g. K3B vs Gnome Baker, Gwenview vs. gthumb etc
Then pick the desktop environment he feels 70% comfortable with.
Comparing applications in features and ease of use is much more rational than comparing teams and tastes.
As for me… I usually prefer KDE applications although I run them from Gnome 😎
Edited 2008-03-22 09:27 UTC
I did. The winners are K3B and gthumb. And Firefox and OpenOffice.
And the winner is… no DE.
>think someone should try the KDE and Gnome equivalent applications and find which ones he likes best.
e.g. K3B vs Gnome Baker…
i have done it and the winner was… no one!
For me CD/DVD burning apps are one of the big mistakes in the software world!
At the time the first CD recorder came up people started to ask “how do i use it” and the first reaction was “write a application”. But in my eye this was a mistake. We don’t have a special app to write to a floppy, we don’t have a spcial app to write to a memory-stick, we don’t have a special app to write to a memory-card, etc. So why should we have a special app to write to a CD/DVD?
Writing to a CD/DVD should be as normal as writing to any other storage. This means: burn files to a CD/DVD? Use the filemanager. Burn a Audio-CD? User your Jukebox. Burn a Video? Use your Video app. etc.
GNOME is going this way: You can burn your data right from nautilus without open an extra app and you can burn your music directly from rhythmbox without open an extra app.
Sure the current GNOME solution is far away from beeing complete and perfect. But i’m sure that’s the right way to go. An extra app to burn CD/DVD is a basic design error. This should happen where the data are like for any other stoarge medium too.
Edited 2008-03-22 14:31 UTC
You might want to look at these links
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Rainier_(packet_writing)
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Packet_Writing_on_CD-RW http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Packet_Writing_on_CD-RW_Media
and apply/adapt them to your system.
Edited 2008-03-22 17:09 UTC
Because writing to a CD is more complicated than either a floppy, hard drive, or USB disk. Now I have no objection to integrating CD burning into a file manager, to allow people to put a couple files on a CD quickly, but that does not negate the need for a dedicated burning app. You still need to be able to burn CD images, you need to be able to set options like disk at once or similar, you need the ability to burn video discs, etc.
Awesome. So now we need every application to be a jack of all trades. No thanks, I don’t want my video player to be a burning program as well. Even if one video player had that capability, not all of them would, so you still need a burning app. I like my apps to be reasonably lightweight. I play music all day, and burn a CD maybe once a year. Definitely doesn’t justify the extra bloat, both code and UI wise.
No you don’t need every application to be the jack of all trades, you just need Nautilus.
Rhythmbox is a special case, and using it to burn a CD makes quite a lot of sense and cuts down on much of the fuss.
you don’t need a special burning app…
burn a image? Right click on the image -> burn to CD; Done!
options? A small dialog which ask you the necessary questions.
video discs? As i said: Do it from the video-player or/and give the filemanager a special option where you can define Data-CD or Video-CD if only video files are in the “burn window”.
No you just need one burning-library and use it from every app you need it. Like you have gstreamer, phone, etc. which you use from every app that needs e.g. sound support.
Edited 2008-03-23 12:59 UTC
But you still need the UI for it, because CD burning is not as simple as writing to a rewriteable medium, where everything can be undone. So every media player has to think about how to integrate a cd burning UI into their interface. Do we want to burn audio discs, or do we just want to put mp3s on it? We need to expose the concept of “finalize” where the burning actually takes place. It all ads to a much more complicated UI than you need for writing a music file to a USB disk for example. Sure, some apps can integrate this stuff and become big music managing things, but a lot of apps have no need for it. I’d much rather have one dedicated app to do the burning for me, which I only load up once in a blue moon when I need it.
burn a image? Right click on the image -> burn to CD; Done!
options? A small dialog which ask you the necessary questions.
video discs? As i said: Do it from the video-player or/and give the filemanager a special option where you can define Data-CD or Video-CD if only video files are in the “burn window”.
There a huge problem with your idea actually…Burning a video-cd is INHERENTLY much more complicated thing than just burning a few random files/folders to a CD, or writing the whole CD at once from premade data. First of all, there are different kinds of video-CD formats available, like VCD, SVCD, Movix etc.. Then about the input files: if they are not in the correct format the app would have to first convert them, if they are not the correct size they would have to be either cropped, stretched or add black bands around the picture. Then there’s any subtitle streams, one might also want to add several audio streams on such a disc, and how about PAL vs NTSC? No, it would be just plain stupid to try to stuff all that into a file-manager app! A video-player app is not any better for that, video-players are for playing video, they are not meant for tweaking the video, adjusting it to NTSC/PAL standards, then converting it from one format to another..
No you just need one burning-library and use it from every app you need it. Like you have gstreamer, phone, etc. which you use from every app that needs e.g. sound support.
Mkisofs + cdrecord. Does that say anything to you? Well, that is an often used combination of standard tools for writing files on a writable CD or DVD. They can even burn image files too. But even they still need proper data to be submitted to them, so you’d still have to convert your video files somewhere to a proper format and to a proper disc layout. A cd-burning-library is not the right place for such stuff.
While there was KDE 3.x and Gnome 2.x available users generally were balanced between them with some small amount of people that wanted something more, like XFCE, Fluxbox or dozen of other solutions, but KDE 4.x broken this “market share”.
KDE 4 is something like Vista of the UNIX world, its still alpha quality and do not bring any reasonable improvements beyond some useless eye-candy (rotating icons on desktop? please …)
KDE3 was in maintenance mode lately (while Gnome was gaining more polish and new features). Of course this was because of KDE4, which will should start to shine later this year or next year.
Anyway, I use Gnome now, but I’m of the opinion, for example, that KDE has much better applications for playing music and burning CD/DVD’s, as opposed to Gnome’s too-simplistic apps for the same purpose. Menu in gnome also isn’t the best designed piece of softwsre.0 I hope they have something better in the works.
OTOH, Gnome at the moment looks visually nicer and less cluttered (and I also dislike KDE3 icons, Oxygen is great though).
I had a good laugh about this statement:
Windows feels a lot more Linuxlike to me than Mac OS. In many ways it seems as if it’s a slightly clumsy knockoff of KDE
It very well summarizes my own feelings about the Windows desktop.
Windows would not need much to become a good desktop. Add virtual desktops, a decent shell which works better in the Windows environment than cygwin and a Filebrowser with the capabilities Konqueror has. I could increase my productivity to almost the level I can reach with KDE now.
Gnome is not intrinsically better than KDE, nor is KDE intrinsically better than Gnome. It really depends on the user, how he likes to work, and what he does.
For users who tend to stick with the defaults (voluntarily or due to corporate desktops), or only change things a little I would rank the DEs Gnome, XFCE, KDE. Gnome presents a usable desktop out of the box without risking overload from options. KDE can also present a usable desktop but it is not as visually appealing IMHO and does present more options to the user upfront. From a personal perspective I do not understand or see the argument that the menu options for KDE apps are too busy. I honestly do not find them at all confusing or cluttered. Enough other people on this board have made the comment though that I will accept it as a limitation. Kicker on the other hand can get outrageous if you install a lot of software and do not prune the menu. In contrast the Gnome menu seems to stay clean by not presenting the user with all installed options.
Conversely if you are a person who wants maximum control over appearance and behavior of your environment I would rank the DEs KDE, XFCE, Gnome. This is not to say that Gnome can not be changed around, or that the amount of changes allowed by Gnome are not enough to satisfy many users. What I am arguing is that KDE allows more options than Gnome. My situation is an example of a user who hit limitations in Gnome. First and foremeost I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts, some multi-key, and of late some even dependent on what window has focus. Gnome’s ability to set hotkeys for application launching and macros are extremely limited compared to KDE. Short of installing a 3d party application I could not find a way to set global shortcuts for arbitrary applications, much less contextual shortcuts. Even then I could not find one with a friendly UI.
Next came another limitation. I like my desktop to be completely empty by default, no visible toolbars or icons. While Gnome could do this I was having a problem where even when hidden the panel was acting as a strut and apps would not take the whole screen. KDE on the other hand let me:
a) set the panel to not act as a strut even when visible,
b) only become visible when I hit a corner (versus side), and
c) set the panel to be visible for a timed setting once the mouse left the area.
Sure these are minor things but I spend a lot of time in front of my computers and the little things like this make a difference to me. Then there came windows options. I prefer for my windows function buttons to be on the left of the toolbar and the context menu on the right (similar to OS X). I could not figure out a way to do this in Gnome whereas in KDE it was quite simple. Then I narrowed the size of the menu bar, set transparency levels for certain programs, and so forth. Again the options might not matter to many but there are users who like to have this scope of configurability not only available, but apparent without searching.
In the end it really comes down to the user, his personality, and how he likes to operate on a computer. There is no right or wrong answer. The question should not be whether Gnome or KDE is better but which is better for how you use a computer.
On a side note: sbergman27. I would think KDE would be easier to administer for a XDMCP setup. Yes you can use a 2 line gconftool script to push down changes and that is nice. You can copy the corresponding config file for KDE in one line. For that matter in a shared setup you can specify some config options to be immutable at the system level and change it on one location for all users (while letting them change setthings that make sense to set for the individual.) You would need to know what config file controls what, but you had to learn what settings in gconftool controlled what at one time as well. This is not a dig or an attempt to refute your statements, merely my thoughts. On the other hand I have never tried maintaining such a configuration for a group of users before. There are probably some tools to help administer accounts in mass in Gnome that I have not used and do not have an equivalent in KDE, gconftool does not count though.
Edited 2008-03-23 21:31 UTC
This functionality has been built right into gconf from the very beginning, and you can use gconf-editor or gconftool to set any keys as default or mandatory (provided that you have write-access to /etc/gconf/).
I don’t use GNOME or KDE. Xfce is my favorite desktop for its lightweight power, and I am also a fan of Fluxbox. Why should I use a bloated and junky DE such as KDE or GNOME when there are better choices?
IMO, GNOME needs improvement, and it would be wise to drop the mono bits.
See one opinion here:
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/12068_3736091_1
For the most part I concur, but my final conclusion is a bit different … I would go with KDE 4 when it becomes a bit more mature, and give up on waiting forever for GNOME improvements.
Use Gnome all the time = now.
Used KDE when first learning linux.
Continue to download distros based on KDE and try them all out.
Never have been able to get comfortable with it.
Then I tried Ubuntu and based on Gnome really enjoyed it.
Oh well.
I still read about KDE developments, but I just can get around to using it. Something in my brain just fits better with the Gnome environment.
Summary of Mono’s Danger to GNU/Linux and the Free Desktop :
http://boycottnovell.com/2008/03/24/mono-danger-to-linux/
Patent Alert: Is GNOME Growing a .NET Dependency? :
http://boycottnovell.com/2007/07/23/gnome-mono-dep/
Caveat: This material is admittedly from a biased source, but that bias in and of itself does not necessarily mean that the basic message is wrong.
See here: http://www.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9900817-16.html
http://www.mono-project.com/GtkSharp
Edited 2008-03-25 09:22 UTC
As a test, install Fedora 7 using the defaults, then (post-install) try to remove the gtk-sharp and mono-core packages. Chaos ensues. It rips out half the system.
Doesn’t that just mean that the packagers have done a poor job if you can’t remove mono without messing up your GNOME installation >_< It’s not the fault in GNOME itself!
It’s only a matter of time before the Gnome core libs will be mono dependant, I’d stake my life of that fact. I’m ready to ditch Gnome permanently.
Not going to happen. That would be a remarkably stupid move. And why would they even do that?
This guy seems to believe a raving lunatic here, and should choose his sources better. Tomboy is considered part of the GNOME desktop, but it is in no way a particularly important app and removing Mono will only make Tomboy defunct. It does not cripple the whole DE in any way.
I haven’t read all of these, and I repeat my earlier caveat that this comes from a biased source, but there is a potential “follow the money” reason why Novell & hence SLED in particular would want to see a mono dependency in the Linux desktop:
http://boycottnovell.com/2007/06/19/mono-moonlight/
http://boycottnovell.com/2007/06/24/moonlight-pet-project/
http://boycottnovell.com/2007/07/01/novell-sets-focus-on-net/
http://boycottnovell.com/2007/09/09/mono-patent-novell/
http://boycottnovell.com/2007/10/01/novell-mono-patent/
http://boycottnovell.com/2007/11/05/gnome-mono-yelp/
Novell alone amongst the major players has a “patent covenant” from Microsoft for its Linux distribution.
Just as you can only get Windows from Microsoft, Novell would (apparently) very much like to make it so that you could only get (US legal) Linux from Novell. The major thrust for achieving this comes via the major push towards siverlight that Microsoft is undertaking at this time.
The hope is that in order to view online content, one would need siverlight (or moonlight on a Linux desktop). To get moonlight, one needs mono. Microsoft will claim mono as one of the technologies for which Microsoft owns patents (not siverlight itself, because they are trying to push THAT as a web standard and a cross-platform technology). The idea is that you will need mono on a Linux system in order to run moonlight or any of a number of programs that are written in .NET and are currently Windows-only but could be ported to Linux via mono.
This is all part of Microsoft “interoperability” push. To Microsoft, “interoperability” means other desktops using Microsoft proprietary interfaces (and paying a royalty to Microsoft), rather than Microsoft supporting open standards (such as ODF and Ogg Vorbis, etc).
… at least, that is the way that the theory and the FUD goes, anyway.
There is a logical consistency to this argument, and a strong correlation to Microsoft’s tactical moves, that makes it carry more weight than just being a “lunatic rant”.
Edited 2008-03-25 10:39 UTC
I haven’t read all of these, and I repeat my earlier caveat that this comes from a biased source, but there is a potential “follow the money” reason why Novell & hence SLED in particular would want to see a mono dependency in the Linux desktop:
Thanks for the links in your post, I got the laugh of the day ^^ <3 “â€Therefore the core of Gnome is now Mono dependent, just as I predicted it would eventually become.“” written in biiig bold characters just so no one would miss the FUD
No, Yelp is not dependant on Mono :3 Yelp can be used just fine without having Mono installed 
And I don’t really understand all this fuss about them adding support for Beagle…It’s there to make searching for files or words easier, and they support Tracker too nowadays.
Sure, Novell may wish for Mono to be widely adopted and even become a hard-dependancy for GNOME core. But it just won’t happen. Not all GNOME developers work for Novell, and not all of them support Mono. If those developers were “fired” it would cause such an uproar and huge negative PR throughout any Linux-related website that Novell/GNOME wouldn’t be able to hide it.
Beagle support I can understand, it is a handy utility. It was not chosen because of it being Mono-app, it was chosen because it works well. And even then it is a soft-dependendy, not a hard one. I just can’t even imagine GNOME devs being so inherently stupid to somehow make the core libs or apps Mono dependant when it is still not clear if it is safe or not.