UserLinux Will Support KDE 326
kollum writes "Bruce Perens has revealed that UserLinux will now support KDE commercially. It seems there is a demand for a KDE plan afterall."
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UserLinux Will Support KDE
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Nothing is finished until the paperwork is done.
Re:Nothing new here (Score:5, Insightful)
Something has changed. This customer will not have to go out of his way to get Qt/KDE onto his systems, as Perens LLC will make sure that they are preloaded.
We all should be painfully aware of the power of preloads vs. the weakness of non-preloads. All desktop systems should be have both GNOME and KDE preloaded and ready, as neither desktop has a lock on desirable applications, and both desktops have higly useful applications.
The only predictable result of not doing so is a large segment of somewhat pissed users who will claim that Linux is hard because it makes users work too hard to get the basic libraries in place for the applications they want to run.
Reality 1. Bruce 0. (Score:2, Insightful)
It was stupid not to in the first place.
Bruce's decisions about UL and the exclusion of anything Qt has undergone numerous transformations. First, it was because Qt couldn't produce a 'cottage industry' of commercial support. When this was pointed out to be demonstrably false, Bruce retreated into the, 'but Qt isn't free' argument... knowingly choosing to obfuscate the old 'Free (libre) VS free (gratis) canard of the community. When Free Software developers called him on this reprehensible tactic, Bruce retreated into the, 'but we just can't possibly support everything' argument.
Now, Bruce is learning from real commercial companies that KDE/Qt support is mandatory and he's having to distance himself from the craving anti-Qt trolls on his own list. The sad thing? Bruce missed a valuable opportunity to really work with KDE developers and the broader community by choosing instead to cater to his own bias and that of his sympathetic community of anti-Qt trolls. Now, he has lost a lot of his credibility in the eyes of many.
Commercial Customers.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Rus
Re:Perens LLC, not UserLinux (Score:4, Insightful)
KDE is technically not AS GOOD as GNOME, no it's far supperior over GNOME in many ways. Something usually developers can talk about since they offer the technical skills to do so.
The normal people usually bash about what they prefer to use rather than giving good constructive feedback.
> So why are only a select few distro's using it as the default WM?
First of all, neither KDE nor GNOME are Window Managers, they are Desktop Environments. A complete different thing but important word to say. People usually talk about GNOME and KDE but don't even know the difference about WM's and DE's and thus it makes me wonder why they talk at all.
Actually KDE is being used in a wide range of distributions and the amount of distros using KDE as default Desktop Environment is far higher than you want to make us believe here.
Please first learn the difference between WM and DE and then come back talking and judging about KDE.
kettle calling pot black (Score:3, Insightful)
Ignore KDE and I ignore userlinux, its that simple.
Re:Perens LLC, not UserLinux (Score:4, Insightful)
So it would seem that there are more distros useing KDE as default than there are distros using GNOME as default.
Which will be news... (Score:3, Insightful)
Look. (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, I believe that both should be offered from the get-go.
Re:Choice is good... (Score:3, Insightful)
It should not be the responsibility of the distro to package every piece of software a user could conceivably want. In fact, the more software a distro includes, the less confident I am that they can maintain it properly.
While a distro should include the libraries necessary to run KDE, GNOME, and Motif applications, it's fine for it to standardize on one desktop environment / window manager. After all, one aspect of choice is choosing a distro in the first place.
Re:Perens LLC, not UserLinux (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because YOU don't happen to know anyone who uses those distros, doesn't mean that they are not used. Hell, I don't know anyone who uses Red Hat, so I guess Red Hat is not videly used, eh?
Re:Reality 1. Bruce 0. (Score:5, Insightful)
Can't believe the outrage (Score:5, Insightful)
The minute someone tries to create a GNOME-only desktop system, like UserLinux, a flock of people (slashbots) go mental about it. What is the point? There is plenty of room for an integrated GNOME-only desktop.
Choice is good people say, but including both desktop-systems make integration issues a lot more difficult, and resources could be better spent elsewhere.
Plus if choice is good, then having the choice of a GNOME-only desktop is good. Include KDElibs and Qt, and people can still run their KDE-apps.
Debian (Score:2, Insightful)
If there is an attempt to create such a distribution, it should at least have a firm base. Support for new hardware is one of the factors preventing Windows users migrating to Linux, such a project should not use a distribution as outdated as Debian.
Re:Perens LLC (Score:1, Insightful)
Are you kidding? He makes a living being the Jesse Jackson of the open source movement.
Count on Bruce Perens to promptly get in front of every open source parade that's already left without him.
Re:Perens LLC, not UserLinux (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't understand the super-simplification that is being done with the more recent Gnome editions. Now I don't pay close attention to implementations, so this is understandable, but in an earlier version there were lots of choices where now there aren't any. One can easily argue that there were too many choices before, but the current approach is much too far the other way. I think this is a Window Manager issue, and I understand that it's still possible to replace MetaCity with SawMill/Fish. But it's easier for me to switch to KDE. (Well, I have both installed anyway, and occasionally use both. But KDE has come to predominate, where that isn't what I would have predicted a year and a half ago.)
Licensing issues are important, and I can understand why companies that develop commercial software would prefer the Gnome libraries. It offers the promise of cross-platform development without the payment of license fees. But as an end-user (and one who intends his software to be GPL) that's not too significant. More significant is that more alternates find it easy to link with C code than with C++ code. Yes, it OUGHT to be significant. But it isn't. I doubt that I'll have significant penetration on Linux, and I sure don't want to try to support MSWind. (OTOH, the preference for a C linkage style is also an argument in favor of the Gnome libraries. So I didn't need to consider the other factors.)
As an end-user, however, I prefer the KDE desktop by a sizeable margin. (OTOH, this is not an insurmountable margin. But since most distros are roughly equal, pluses and minuses tending to cancel out, lack of KDE would be a sizeable enough block that I probably wouldn't even look seriously at it.)
I don't see any change in his position. (Score:4, Insightful)
He is NOT saying that KDE will be included with UL.
He never said that KDE could NOT support a "cottege industry". What he had said was that he wanted to give anyone setting up a "cottege industry" the option to do so without having to pay any license fees to anyone.
He never said that QT wasn't free. He said that, in this instance, he wanted the LGPL instead of the GPL. Again, this is for his "cottege industry".
He has still NOT changed his choice to limit the software included in UL. He still isn't including KDE, but his company will add it on FOR A PRICE.
Hey, if you don't like UL, then don't use it. If it was based on poor choices, then it will fail.
For my part, seeing that Bruce ALREADY has a PAYING CUSTOMER lined up for his company, it seems he has made the correct choice. Bruce will have credibility amongst the people who use UL. I'm sure he doesn't lose any sleep over what other people think.
Re:Reality 1. Bruce 0. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Reality 1. Bruce 0. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A bit sad (Score:1, Insightful)