No GNOME For Solaris 9

Nailer writes: "Subject says it all really. A (very brief) Linuxgram article claims GNOME 2.0 won't be ready for Solaris 9 and the OS will ship with CDE and Motif as defaults. I'm just waiting for the inevitable announcement the GTK port of OpenOffice has been cancelled."

Damn

[O]

This is really a shame. I use solaris at work, and CDE is really bad. Also, there is a big hole recently discovered in CDE, and Sun has yet to release a patch. Gnome would have been so nice.

Re:Face it, GNOME is dead.

[plastercast]

Why? Because KDE now has a larger number infront of it? That really doesn't make it any better or worse. The fact is that the user level differeces between KDE2 and 3 will be much less than GNOME1 to GNOME2 (fixing gtk-flash-bug, aa text, pango, and so on). I can't help but think that if the GNOME project upped the release number everytime I see a new GNOME-related file in sid, everyone would be saying that KDE was dying and GNOME was developing amazingly quickly.

BTW, this should not in anyway be taken as a knock against anyone who use/develop/etc KDE, just those who feel the need to bash the alternative.

Does anyone see a troll?

[jmauro]

Read Linux gram's article. It says in a feature incomplete pre-beta demo of Solaris 9 there is no GNOME 2.0. There is no GNOME 2.0 ( just an alpha version) for shipping versions of redhat, let alone for pre-beta versons of Solaris. This article is just placed here to pull traffic to LinuxGram and doesn't really add anything.

Qt+KDE Runs Fine On My Sun Box

[Lethyos]

Qt compiles without a hitch and so does KDE. And if you want the official word, Trolltech's web site indicates [trolltech.com] that Qt will compile fine on Solaris, or pretty much any box running some form of X11. The KDE project has also made accomodations to run properly on Sun's OS. Sun doesn't have to do any work other than compilation and making packages. What's so hard about that? At the very least, they could make it an option.

Re:no offense but...

[grammar nazi]

In this particular instance, Gnome was smoked by CDE! Now that's saying something.

Finally, on a grammatical note, please refrain from refering to Gnome as 'they'. Gnome is a desktop environment and should clearly be referred to in a singular sense.

On my personal preference, use the word very rather than really. If you do, then you'll sound twice as intelligent as you currently do.

I'm just trying to improve the quality of Slashdot with this post, so please don't mod me into oblivion.

Re:Disappointed

[buysse]

Please, don't use this version. It can suck a golf ball through a garden hose.

Try the Ximian packaging (www.ximian.com). It's quite a bit better. I still don't like everything about it, but it's a hell of a lot better than Sun's packaging. If you're going to evaluate Gnome, give it a fair shot.

5 substantial reasons why GNOME is obsolete

[AirLace]

1. Technology: GNOME is based on the GTK+ library, which was fine for its day, but is now decidedly outdated. The basic design, themability and functionality simply haven't changed in years. It doesn't offer exciting components like KParts, KDE's analog to COM. The closes thing to that will be Bonobo, but its development is far behind even GNOME 2's release schedule and won't make it in until at least 2003.
   
2. Browsers: The GNOME project depends on Mozilla for its browser component. While Galeon makes the experience quite pleasant, page loads are still slow. In contrast, Konqueror is under heavy development, supporting both Mozilla and KHTML as its viewer component, the latter of which is its greatest strength. The W3C recommends [w3.org] Konqueror for having the most complete CSS2 implementation in the world.
3. Lack of modern features: XFree86 in itself is not that fast in implementing modern OS facilities. But when the XFree86 team did finally implement XRender (some 10 years after amigaOS could do antialiasing), they did it right. Trolltech team, thanks to the component based design of Qt, were able to implement text antialiasing and alpha channels with just a couple of screens of code. The same implmenentation for GTK+/GNOME, in contrast, is only possible as either a hack (render text large and sale it down) or potentially by major redesign, which will be done with GTK+ 2.
   
4. Looks. Although KDE had formerly been the ugly duckling, it really has leapt ahead of GNOME. One need look no further than http://www.kde-look.org/ to see how powerful and customisable KStyle is. As a developer once said, GNOME has themes, but KDE has style! What he meant in fact is that GNOME themes are generally pixmap designs, and when they are done programatically, there is limited scope for customisation.
5. A previous post aptly pointed out that GNU always wants to re-invent the wheel. Linux is fine, but they still want to work on HURD, because Linux isn't made by GNU. KDE is fine, but they still want to work on Gnome, because KDE isn't made by GNU.

Very Sloppy

[cnladd]

Very sloppy, Slashdot. You should know better. There's a reason why I don't go to a Linux news site for news on Solaris. The claim that Gnome 2.0 doesn't appear in the Solaris 9 downloadable beta, and then extending that claim to encompass the final version of Solaris 9 is completely ridiculous. Of course, they temper that claim with by saying that Sun labels the beta as "feature complete", which is true. However, I think I'd be hard-pressed to find a final copy of Gnome. The last I saw was a news snippet on Gnome.org, dated October 11, claiming that Gnome 2.0 was "coming up fast".

Finally, for those of you who have closely followed Sun's plans for Gnome, Sun has never once claimed that Gnome 2.0 would be a part of Solaris 9. Sun's Gnome site [sun.com] provides Gnome 1.4 as a "reference implementation", and says that Gnome will be the foundation of its future desktop. According to the site, "The next major release, GNOME 2.x, is expected in mid-2002".

Already been answered...

[corky6921]

Slashdot did a story on this a while back. Click here [slashdot.org] to see what the Sun GNOME group had to say about KDE vs. Gnome. Essentially, as a highly-moderated post put it, it came down to the fact that GNOME was C-based, and the Sun GNOME team was more familiar with C than with C++.

Check the mailing lists

[Ishikawa Goemon]

As I've read some of the mailing lists every day for the past few weeks, there seems to be MAJOR activity by SUN on GNOME. Sander, Billh, Calum, and Stephen (sorry if I missed people!) are very active on the mailing lists. The Accessability Toolkit has been part of their work, but also in drafting some rather encouraging style guides and documentation, along with general hacking on various libraries and applications (including Nautilus, which was pronounced dead after Eazel went boom...). I seriously doubt they plan to drop GNOME, as I seriously doubt Solaris 9 will ship without it, considering the work they are putting into it. The DEVELOPMENT platform should be out by Christmas, with other applications ported soon afterwards.

And, for a better question, why would Sun want to pay TT for a licence for QT? Redhat? Why would any company want to pay for a widget set to develop (closed-source, mind you) for Linux? If a Symantec, IBM, Intuit, or, GASP, even M$ wanted to write Linux software, my guess is they would use an LGPL library (Gnome) over paying for QT licences. (I could be wrong, as I don't pay much attention to KDE, but their FAQ seem to say I'm not...)

Which brings me to the main point I'd like to make, IT'S BEEN ALL ABOUT THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR THE PAST YEAR!!! It takes a lot of behind the scenes work for a program such as Evolution to work, so that's what the Gnomers have been hacking on. The problem is, YOU (the user) won't see it right away!

The technologies these guys have been busting their arses on will make the applications (like Evolution already proves) kick butt.

GConf - Consolidated configuration system with multiple backends. XML or BerkleyDB for user now, hopefully ACAP or LDAP for network users soon. Who know's what's next!

ATK - Accessability Toolkit for screenreaders and such, built-in to the platform. This is important for corporate use with the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) in US, and I'm sure others outside the US.

Bonobo - Corba based REAL components, not just OLE. Look at the power in Evolution. (I'm a big fan, as if you couldn't tell, but not just for myself, but for my wife and grandmother as well. I don't think mutt would cut it for them... :>)

Pango - i18n and l10n, Right-to-Left, and such... Don't know much about this being an en-us, but I'm sure it's important!

Glib/Gtk+ - Very nice improvements, Anti-Aliased text, and so forth.

Nautilus - Darin and others have been optimizing and working out the bugs in this for a while. It has it's problems on the bleeding edge, but it's comming along! I'm not sure about the extent of his involvment, but tigert has been showing up on the list. If he is working on it, we can expect quite a bit in the way of jaw-dropping eye-candy...

Glade/libglade/bonoboui(?) - XML UI descriptions at runtime. RAD UI development at it's best... This is very important.

GStreamer - While not Gnome platform, per se, it has ALOT of infrastructure in place in the A/V dept, and once ported to 2.0, will make for a nice multimedia API/Application Toolkit. (If memory serves correctly, it's been a while since I checked up on this one...)

And a plethora of other platform tidbits. Sure, YOU (user) won't see any radical differences between 1.4 and 2.0, other than AA text and such, but just wait until 2.0.1, 2.2, or 3.0, and so on. It took YEARS for the infrastrucure of Linux to become what it is. Now, it is proven solid. The infrastructure of Gnome is REALLY fleshing out. And need I remind you of the 1.0 - 1.2 hurdle... I imagine 2.0 will come out with eveyone trashing it, much like 1.0, then 2.2 come along with much the same reception 1.2 had... Sure, not good for PR, but... :>

NOT that this takes anything away from KDE. Infact, it's what I recommend to my non-developer friends. To my developer and/or sysadmin friends, I show the horsepower under Gnome's hood. So far I've had nothing but ooos and ahhhs from both camps. Later, I'm sure I'll be showing Gnome all-around.

And finally, CUT THAT "GNOME'S DYING" CRAP OUT! Not only does two projects not hurt, it HELPS! We need all the competition we can get, because that's what causes innovation! We've all seen M$ resting on their laurels, because they've had no competition! WE DON'T WANT THAT! And aside from some notable exceptions, the DEVELOPERS OF BOTH PROJECTS SEEM TO UNDERSTAND THIS!!! Take a look at this happy bday congratz to KDE on Gnome News [gnome.org] and PLEASE, BE THANKFUL TO EVERYONE.

For my part, thanks Havoc, Owen, Michael, Seth, Darin, Sather, Ian, Jacob, Alex, Maciej, Calum, Bill, George, Chema, and all I've left out for your hard work. Don't let the ignorance of a few make you at all hesitant in your work. It is greatly appreciated!

Chris

Re:Does Solaris Need Gnome?

[Alien Being]

It needs something better than CDE.

Solaris workstations are still used with a lot of bigbuck capital equipment. A modern desktop would help Sun protect their piece of that market.

Another thing to consider is thin client computing. An E10k could serve up lots of GNOME or KDE desktops.

Re:Does anyone see a troll?

[DNS-and-BIND]

Yah, I noticed that the beta Solaris 9 didn't include GNOME *or* OpenWindows. It's nice that OW is finally deprecated, but I expected to see GNOME alongside faithful CDE.

An aside to you CDE-haters: it's not how pretty the desktop is, it's all about the function. CDE stands for "Common Desktop Interface", and it's true that one can go from a Sun to an HP to an IRIX box, and, using CDE, be productive on each platform. I've been there.

Re:Do we need a Solaris 9 right away?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahem. SunOS 5.8 brought: IPV6, IPsec, LDAP client support. Live Upgrade, Web Start Flash. IP Multipathing. Reconfiguration Coordination Manager. Role-Based Access Control. Higher quality, better performance. Support for all the shiny new Ultra III machines, including the 106-processor 15K. That seems pretty worthwhile.

There's no mention in the release notes that SunOS 5.8 will be the last to support Sun4m architecture, which according to Sun would be a necessary condition before they could drop it in SunOS 5.9, and in fact Solaris 9 beta loads and runs just fine on SPARCstation 10s and 20s. (They do say that support for sun4d is going away -- sorry, SPARCcenter 2000 fans.)

Re:5 substantial reasons why GNOME is obsolete

[fault0]

1). Well, I think that the main thing that's kept GNOME alive is the number of gtk1 apps. This will change with gtk2.

2). I agree, both mozilla and khtml are very standards compliant.

3). antialiasing is not out with Qt 3.0. It was first implemented by Keith Packard (the writer of xrender) as a patch for Qt 2.2.2. It was introduced into base qt in 2.3.0. Since then there has been 2.3.1 and 3.0 now. It was first implemented in Qt over a year ago.

And, GNOME 2.0 and QT 3.0's timetable is NOT the same. GNOME 2.0, according to Sun's website, will comeout MIDDLE of NEXT year. While Qt3 is out NOW and kde3 will be out in a few months (feb 2002).

Re:Check the mailing lists

[dj.dule]

It is not true that Sun should pay TrollTech for Qt. Only if you use it for commercial/closed source development:
You can find QT library under 2 licenses, here is part from theirs FAQ:
What kind of licenses exist for Qt?
The Qt toolkit is available under two different licenses: The Professional and Enterprise Editions for commercial use on all platforms, and the Free Edition for developing free/open source software for the X platform.
KDE is open source project, so noone should pay to TT for usinq QT with KDE.

Gnome is available for Solaris already

[louissypher]

I hate to be the one to point out the obvious, but Gnome 1.4 is already available for Solaris 7/8. So you don't *have* to wait for it to be included with solaris by default to use it.

http://www.sun.com/gnome

Pretty much blatant misinformation

[nullity]

Marking "-1": blatant misinformation

1. Bonobo has been distributed with GNOME since GNOME 1.4. It is a more flexible comprehensive architecture than KParts, and implements a lot more features you'd find in something like COM than KParts. The tradeoff is complexity...Bonobo is based on CORBA which has bright points, but also can make things more difficult for the programmer at times. Bonobo has undergone a lot of revisions for GNOME2 and promises to be even better than before. KParts is not an analogue to COM, it is basically an embedded rendering system with added smarts (which is very useful, but not really like COM). WRT to GTK....this is why we are about to release GTK2, which is a major rewrite. Bot the technical aspects, and user aspects, of the widget system have been redone and improved. Incredible font and internationalization support for "unusual" languages have been added through Pango, and a great accessibility framework have been included, making *nix environments accessible to still more users.
   
2. GtkHTML2 should be a major option for the GNOME2 desktop. GtkHTML1 already exists for light rendering. The Mozilla component is still the most comphrensive solution for browsing the web, but KHTML is putting on the heat. Good stuff, glad to see some competition in this arena.
   
3. KDEs ability to use XRender had little to nothing to do with "components". It had to do with KDE applications already making use of a font wrapper in QT rather than directly manipulating X fonts (probably a result of TrollTech having markets outside of X and hence needing this sort of system detail wrapped). GNOME anti-aliasing fixes have been very slow in the coming, but they're running just fine on the machine I'm typing on, and will be a part of the default environment in GNOME 2. "rendering large text and scaling it down" is sometimes called ANTI-ALIASING . Anti-aliasing is any sort of filter function that removes or alleviates artifacts caused by by aliasing, including scaling down. Nautilus uses freetype to do its anti-aliasing and it works just fine.
   
4. I really think this point is debatable either way. *shrug* I think GNOME is much prettier, but I understand why some people disagree. I suppose it all depends on your taste.
   
5. Yeah, that's whats going on. I work on GNOME because I'm trying to further the evil plans of GNU. Most of us have little or no affiliation with the free software foundation or the GNU system other than using the GPL license.
   

There are lots of points with great merit comparing and contrasting GNOME and KDE, so you really shouldn't have to resort to this sort of misinformation. I think the biggest thing KDE is doing right that GNOME is sucking at is having quick release cycles. We wait too long to get changes out to users, which tends to make user improvements to the core desktop more sluggish than they should be. We're gunning for a really quick turnaround release for GNOME2 - GNOME2.2 with primarily user improvements (using a lot of the new architecture that has been rewritten and/or added). Also, significant usability assesments and rewriting of problem areas is being done, both for GNOME2 and post GNOME2, which should improve the reach of the desktop to a whole range of new non-technical users in the years to come.

-Seth (Nautilus hacker, GNOME2 Release comittee, GNOME UI Lead)