“The future of the Linux desktop?
At least, I hope the new unified look and feel of Red Hat 8.0 is a hint at the future that the Linux desktop is moving to. There has been some adverse reaction from the Linux community toward the new interface. I am not one of the detractors. I appreciate that Red Hat is making a contribution to Linux and I also believe that it is the direction that the Linux desktop should be taking.” This is a look at Red Hat 8.0 that focuses on the direction it sets for the future of the Linux desktop. Read the full article at Librenix.
Bluecurve is nice, but the rest of the OS is still pretty messy and has a bitter corporate taste to it.
Oh yeah, Gnome and KDE are slow as hell too – I wish they would realise that already…
do you really need to link to that sort of website, seems a bit trashy to me.
article titles:
why software sucks
linux is not gnu/linux…
humm are there troll wars looming ahead??
if you like “gnome interface” and don’t want different interface from time to time, then just stick with that.
if you like “KDE interface” and don’t want different interface from time to time, then just stick with that.
As long as these two excists and as long they don’t come together, i don’t see how a unified look (à la Redhat) is needed.
More important is that the applications works well in both and you just stick to the interface you like best.
When Linux is ready for the masses, the customers will choose what they prefere
Unifying window manager decorations makes indeed few sense but application’s first look makes a little because like you wrote applications work under both desktops.
That was one THIN article, less then a A4 worth of “article” reading and it was far from enlightning to read it.
But! within the article there is a link to a OSnews RedHat Psyche review (which I somehow had missed and never read before) so I went ahead and enjoyed that instead.
By theming both KDE and GNOME to look the same, you are giving a more professional and consistent look. You, a geek, and me, a geek, may not use a product just because of that, but to some manager that doesn’t know the difference between a VCR and a TiVo, Red Hat looks much more professional and therefore more attractive.
Slow? I detect a BeOS/Fluxbox/Blackbox/IceWM/WindowMaker/something-of-that-sort user.
Besides, it has a “bitter” corporate taste because it was made solely for the corporate enviroment.
Redhat 8.1 beta has considerable performance improvements for KDE and GNOME. Uses KDE 3.1 and GNOME 2.1.x. I run both GNOME and KDE on my desktop at the same time on top of Metacity. KDE’s konqueror is an excellent file manager and GNOME has some nice apps. I’m finding I can put most of my themes in my home directory, which I keep synced up between my work, laptop and home desktop systems. One of them is using slackware with dropline GNOME, but still syncs up with my home directory very nicely. Perhaps I can’t install binaries cross-platform, but at least I can run them on my redhat box and display them on my slackware system through an encrypted tunnel.
KDE and or GNOME may be slow compared to a lightweight window manager, but most people can’t use a lightweight window manager, and I prefer the ease of use of windows or OSX when I’m just trying to play my mp3s or read email. That’s why I use both GNOME and KDE.
I can only imagine what it’ll be like then they finish adding features and decide to improve stability, security and performance. Its like the slow ball effect, and its starting to get big.
Agreed. Unless there’s something under the hood of Bluecurve that adds real value, I don’t see the point of putting a lot of energy into appearance. That’s what the dozens of existing window managers and desktops are for. I don’t like ‘blending’ KDE and Gnome, either. They are very different, in appearance, style, function, and construction.
I also agree with making it work better, instead of slapping a pretty face over the same old flaws. RH8 is extremely bleeding-edge, what with going to Unicode (utf-8), the good anti-aliasing, and some other cool things I forget at the moment. On the downside, multimedia sucks, their new graphical package manager only works for the CDs, hardware 3D acceleration is still a big fat pain, font management is still horrid (they use xft, but it is poorly documented), the CD automount gets stuck and sucks up system resources, and it is boggy and slow.
Everyone says ‘don’t use .0 Red Hat releases’, which is another tradition I’d like to see retired.
“I also agree with making it work better, instead of slapping a pretty face over the same old flaws.”
What’s funny to me is that Linux folk like to accuse MS of doing more to make a pretty graphic clogged OS than a good OS, yet all the major Distro players do pretty much this exact same thing. Example, RedHat has a nice to look at interface, but is very slow (slowest *nix of any kind I have used) and has a terrible package management software. Mandrake has a really attractive looking installer, but stability problems and a lot of packages that it comes with don’t work.
Pretty graphics will only impress until the user tries to drag a window or clicks on a non-working app that brings the system down.
Don’t you think that maybe having a consistent system that is easy to use and works, but might not have the most extravagent interface might impress people more? I guess that’s why we have FreeBSD then.
-Matt
>> “Mandrake has a really attractive looking installer”
And that’s the only thing about Mandrake that looks attractive.
My wish would be a faster X.
(both Gnome and KDE would benefit a lot from it, and wm’s like WindowMaker would become even faster)
“Example, RedHat has a nice to look at interface, but is very slow (slowest *nix of any kind I have used)…”
My university CS department (http://www.cs.colostate.edu) is an old Unix shop, so when they needed some cheap new computers a couple years ago, they went with RedHat on Dell P4s. When I tried these new computers, they just seemed so godawful slow – slower than my aging hardware running similar software on Debian. Could it be that RedHat does something funny that makes it terribly slow on certain hardware?
Mandrake’s installer is perhaps one of the ugliest things I have seen. And not only ugly, it is a usability-nightmare. It is hard to read the text because of the stupid colours chosen.
If Red Hat could let go of their company colours with GUI widgets, and the same with SuSE, why can’t Mandrake too?
I like the look of the Mandrake-installer and don’t like the Redhat-installer, but who the fuck cares? It’s a matter of taste and different people have …..
What i care is the functionality. For example, i have a Belgian Keyboard, but i want English language. Some distro-installers don’t allow me. And then i have wrong passwords after install and changing the keyboard. These kind of stuff is important. Same for hardware and stuff.
Another thing is when the install is so easy and even got my internetconnection (cable) right after install, but after a reboot (next day or so), no more internetconnection.
I don’t care about 2 or 5 different windowsmanagers, but i want stuff to work and applications to work.
Some distros have my sound right, others my internetconnection, others my monitor, Knoppix got my usb-scanner and webcam right, but none of them got them all right. For the masses this is important. Distros have to learn from each other, gnome got to look what kde does right, kde got to look what gnome does right, and so on.
I’m not a geek, i’m just a windows user that knows a little more then Joe. I like Linux already, but it’s not yet ready for the desktop. I’m sure it will very soon. And i keep trying. Everything is already there, now i just wait for a distro that got it all right.
And by the way, i’m pretty sure that Adobe, Macromedia, Ulead will start porting their apps to Linux. It just takes one company to start and the ball start rolling.
Sorry for my bad English! Not my motherlanguage
Are Gnomes and Trolls a related species?
“What’s funny to me is that Linux folk like to accuse MS of doing more to make a pretty graphic clogged OS than a good OS, yet all the major Distro players do pretty much this exact same thing. Example, RedHat has a nice to look at interface, but is very slow (slowest *nix of any kind I have used) and has a terrible package management software. Mandrake has a really attractive looking installer, but stability problems and a lot of packages that it comes with don’t work.”
We should differentiate between desktop and server applications. On the server end, any Linux is excellent. For the desktop, it’s a whole different ball game, you pretty much nailed it. Package management for either reeks. Except Debian. I’m a long-time Red Hat user, but since I bought a copy of Libranet, I’m quite impressed. I fear I shall become one of those annoying persons who runs around yelling ‘apt-get’ at everyone.
“Don’t you think that maybe having a consistent system that is easy to use and works, but might not have the most extravagent interface might impress people more? I guess that’s why we have FreeBSD then.”
A less extravagant interface sounds good. How well is FreeBSD suited for desktop use? Multimedia, office apps, and so forth?
Forget Red Hat 8.0 – KDE and GNOME incredible slow, glibc beta code, too corporate.
I tell you what…
LFS + XPde + User Applications = eXPo
eXPo, the next generation of a linux desktop.
Next year, in the best ftps!
http://www.xpde.com
>> “Forget Red Hat 8.0 – KDE and GNOME incredible slow, glibc beta code, too corporate”
Get your facts straight.
Gnome is not slow.
KDE is not slow.
X is.
glibc is also used for this ‘xpde’
And the most funny thing of all is that this ‘xpde’ is built using Kylix.
No, thank you, X is already slow enough.
Why does everyone on OSNews like to shout “X is slow” without providing one scrap of evidence? Fine, don’t use GNOME/KDE/X if you don’t like it… go wait for your vaporware Amiga/BeOS/whatever “revival” (which will likely never happen).
I have run both under FreeBSD, and to be completely honest, GNOME 2.0.3 is like a rocket under FreeBSD. KDE seems slower, however, that is probably not due to the coding so much, but more due to the fact that, quite frankly, g++ isn’t the nicest compiler in the world, in terms of producing quality code from c++ sources, where as, GNOME is written in C, which is GCC’s sweet spot.
People who say GNOME 2.0.3 is slow are lying, plain and simple. They’ve looked at GNOME 1.4 and assumed that there is no difference. I think it is about time the *NIX GUI bashes of the world go back find a big enough rock, and hide underneath it.
As for X’s speed, good god! I’ve run it since the 3.x days. Sure, if you commented regarding the slow X during the 3.x days, your opinion would be perfectly valid. We’re now at 4.2.1 with 4.3 just around the corner, and 5.0 being released next year. Every one of them produce results either equaling or bettering Windows, without the downside of having the graphical display interface rammed into Ring 0 for the sack of an extra 0.0000000000000000000001 fps.
um yes, Rich, let’s see some evidence that ‘X is slow.’ KDe is slow, Gnome is slow, IceWM, XFce, and Fluxbox are fast. Red Hat is slow, Libranet is fast. On a pentium III 700, 256 megs RAM, RH 8 take about 40 seconds to boot to the login prompt. Libranet, on the same machines, takes 15 seconds.
Konqueror on KDE takes 14 seconds to start up on RH8; 10 seconds from XFce; 6 seconds on Libranet/IceWM
And so forth and so on, I won’t bore you with more of the same. So what do you mean “Gnome is not slow. KDE is not slow.
X is.” ? Come on, we’re growmups, we can handle facts.
OMG WHAT DID YOU DO TO YOUR COMPUTER?
PII400, 10 secs, RH8/GNOME
You are supposed not to reboot in a long time so where is the point guys?
Everything is slow, don’t matter how fast it is.
You are supposed not to reboot in a long time so where is the point guys?
Everything is slow, don’t matter how fast it is.
How well is FreeBSD suited for desktop use? Multimedia, office apps, and so forth?
Same as what’s in the Linux. There have KDE, Gnome, gaim, MPlayer, Xine, Gimp, Xchat, Nvidia driver and goes on..
I suppose in the overall scheme of things it’s not such a big deal how long a boot takes. Servers have to run all the time; desktop machines are different. i turn mine off at night, why waste electricity? or put more wear on the moving parts?
>> “RH 8 take about 40 seconds to boot to the login prompt. Libranet, on the same machines, takes 15 seconds.”
Uh.. what does the bootup time have to do with the speedyness of graphics??
And yes, I’ve got prove: try using DirectFB with Gnome2.
(I know X is a much larger beast but that doesn’t mean it should be this slow)
And Fluxbox, WindowMaker, whatever aren’t fast either.
I wish it were different, but it’s just not (yet?).. :/
My system (P3 933 / GeForce3 Ti 200) is able to display graphics _way_ faster using another OS (youknowwhat) and DirectFB (yes, even with badly supported NVIDIA cards, DFB is faster then X).
>> “Konqueror on KDE takes 14 seconds to start up on RH8; 10 seconds from XFce; 6 seconds on Libranet/IceWM ”
Again, you’re talking about something completely different.
These are startup times, not times that show off how fast (or slow) X is.
And it’s not my system either because I’ve already enjoyed it on several other systems too.
I’m a simple home user, and while apps may start up slowly, the memory management in Linux is great. while an app like open office might take 30 seconds to open on my AMD K6-2 350, I can also run about 15 other things without missing a beat. plus, my internet connection seems to be quite a bit quicker while using linux as opposed to windows.
sure, apps start slow….but I can run as much as I want with no problems at the same time. i typically get on my computer, start the apps I need, then leave them open the rest of time I’m on….so the app start time doesn’t bug me…much…
You got it right where it belongs. I couldn’t agree more with your comment. At least there is someone who has some understanding when it comes to using an OS.
I never actually notice any difference in speed between Linux and Windows in the case of dial-up Internet. Of course, this is probably because I use Opera on both systems or some other reason I don’t know.
Actually, Alice, the computer takes less electricity as the central heating (if it isn’t gas-powered) or the fan over your head, or that bulb or that..
The only thing I recommend offing is your modem (if internal, take off the line) and offing the monitor. Other parts don’t get weared-off simply because it is on, but rather on how much it is used. Unless of course if your machine is that old.
enough said.
It’s incredible how OSNews ignores and neglects this release of RedHat Linux. This is only the 5147th article on RedHat 8 that appears here.
We want more articles on RedHat 8! Keep it coming!
No, none at all. They have just contributed more code than all of the other linux companys combined lol.
red hate is the distro that will rip off anybody
that gets in their way and call it unifying Linux.
good grief.
this can be an interesting study. go out and read
what red hate people say about Mandrake Linux.
they are so filled with hate. study them. its amazing
what u can learn.
Mandrake Linux is Linux for the people. but u will notice
that so many of the people dont care. they would rather
red hate.
red hate may have contributed more code, probably because
they have been around quite a while and they need to
contribute to get their Linux version going.
on the other hand ripping of KDE is not contributing,
its more like stealing, but hey there aint nothing
wrong with that now is there
if u believe in freedom and actually want freedom
then stay away from red hate. they are after all the
distro that says they own Linux.
but dont listen to reality. instead spout some
clechays, sorry if the spelling isnt correct and
practice hate with the best of em.
Love is all u need and red hate doesnt have any.