Slackware Likely To Drop GNOME Support 708
An anonymous reader writes "After Hewlett Packard, who jumped off of supporting GNOME, Red Hat has followed by splitting their Desktop Linux out to Fedora which is community driven, and now distributions like Slackware have started to drop GNOME entirely in favor of KDE. Read more about their decision here. It looks like companies as well as distributions start focusing towards one solution." Patrick Volderking's quoted message doesn't announce a final decision to drop GNOME from Slackware, however -- and as the followups in that thread note, it could be interpreted as an endorsement of the good job done by Dropline in packaging GNOME for Slack.
I like GNOME... (Score:5, Insightful)
Choice is good, but if we're going to have a million different distros, then we don't need every single one to have all million software packages too.
Might be a good idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Being more partial to KDE than GNOME, I don't really see a problem with it, but packaging it is the way to go. If it's a package, that can be 'apt-got' (just for example
Excellent... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've used KDE and Gnome before, even somewhat recently, but just can't stand the overhead. They both look great, but I'm much happier in Fluxbox. All I do is work in xterms all day anyways.
From what I've heard, Dropline Gnome really is an excellent package. Makes sense for Slackware to drop Gnome support, if there's already an excellent source for a Gnome package for Slackware.
Kudos to both Patrick V. and the Dropline Gnome maintainers! This is how open source should work.
ya got it wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I like GNOME... (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate KDE (Score:2, Insightful)
Not to nitpick..... (Score:5, Insightful)
HP and Redhats actions are completely different. HP sponsored SCO's roadshow, so we know how relevant their opinion is. And Redhat's Fedora uses GNOME by default!
Sure, slackware is considering dropping gnome support, but this isn't some kind of mass migration away from GNOME, look at what Novell & Sun base their linux desktops on.
Kudos to the submitter for successfully trolling the editors
Unmasked! (Score:3, Insightful)
I thought this rejoicing had something suspicious to it...
More seriously, this whole thing sounds sensationalist to me... RedHat adopting a community model with Fedora, and one fed-up maintainer for a redundant Slackware package do not a mass defection maketh. The HP bit might be worrisome, but.
Most of all, I fail to see how one environment 'getting the upper hand' can possibly be construed as a Good Thing. Nobody serious clamors for less operating systems, less trouser styles, or less pencils. And GNOME is definitely the more professional and efficiently designed, from a purely UI perspective, of the large Free desktop environments.
bah red hat! (Score:2, Insightful)
An Opinion on GNOME (Score:5, Insightful)
Until Pat weighs in on this publically I'm not certain about the validity of this claim.
Gnome has long ago lost focus on its goals. It used to be geared towards linux users. It was meant to be a fast and customizable linux DE. Somewhere between 1.4 and 2.0 Gnome development changed. It lost sight of those goals and became geared towards newbies and end-users.
Frankly, it never was as good as KDE at that. Being "user friendly" meant changing the reasons so many of us used and liked Gnome, alienating their base. Gnome became difficult to compile and even more difficult to package. Why can't Gnome install nicely using "make install DESTDIR=~/pkg"?
Pat mentioned in that e-mail that about a third of his time is spent trying to support Gnome, which given the entire size of Slackware is apalling. Spending a third of your time supporting what is around a twelth of the system's size will wear out anyone.
My personal hope is that the Gnome developers will wake up, get their asses in gear, and realize that they're not going to beat KDE on usability for newbies. They need to return to being the fast, custimizable linux DE. I suspect that most of Gnome's old users are now using a plain window manager or Xfce (good stuff).
You know you don't have to install *EVERYTHING* (Score:5, Insightful)
Pat's arguments (Score:5, Insightful)
This was Patricks' argument for dropping GNOME. Instead of dropping GNOME support, why not communicate with the GNOME community to resolve the issues? This is really a minor technial issue, and I'm sure things can easily be done to make including GNOME as easy as KDE.
Anyway, I'm sure Slackware will never drop GNOME support. People will stop using the distribution in a second!
This is probably why having a single "dicator" maintaining a distribution is a bad idea: He has very little contact with the community. It's not possible for other's to get involved with the development process either. It would be a trivial task to make someone else maintain the GNOME sources in Slackware.
I like Slackware, running slack 10 now, but this makes me change my mind.
Re:I hate KDE (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You know you don't have to install *EVERYTHING* (Score:5, Insightful)
No, but I have to learn what a million different things ARE just to pick what I want.
Do a minimal install. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's what I do with Debian.
non sequitur (Score:5, Insightful)
"After Hewlett Packard, who jumped off of supporting GNOME, Red Hat has followed by splitting their Desktop Linux out to Fedora which is community driven, and now distributions like Slackware have started to drop GNOME entirely in favor of KDE."
Obviously GNOME sucks... (Score:5, Insightful)
Fedora and Redhat Workstation default to using GNOME for the desktop. Novell hasn't cancelled Ximian's GNOME efforts, and is in fact working on improving GNOME in SuSE. Solaris and Sun JDS both use GNOME.
Not that KDE isn't doing very well for itself as well, with SuSE being a very nice KDE oriented distro, not to mention Mandrake, and many others.
Both are doing just fine - the prospect of some distros focussing on one is not surprising, but I'd hardly call it significant. The whole DE flamewar is mostly rather silly. FreeDesktop.org is doing a good job and increasing cooperation and shared functionality between, not just KDE and GNOME, but XFCE, WindowMaker/GNUStep, and even, to some extent whatever new DE Enlightenment eventually turns out. There are different desktop needs, and different DEs pursue very different goals. As long as FreeDesktop.org manages to continue its efforts to define some good shared base standards things will work just fine.
Jedidiah.
Re:packagin (Score:3, Insightful)
It's better to have the world think you're a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
Slackware's package manager doesn't give a damn about DESTDIR. Let me repeat that. pkgtool et al don't give a damn about DESTDIR. DESTDIR is just a nice way of placing all files compiled to be put into /usr into another directory that can then be packaged up. This is immaterial to the package manager, no matter what damn package manager it is.
Really, what's happened to the linux community? The trolls used to have some idea of what they were talking about.
Re:You know you don't have to install *EVERYTHING* (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course add to this an install that doesn't explain what the differences are, dependencies that fill your hard drive, stuff that fights with each other when you just tell it to install everything because you don't know what else to do and frankly it rapidly becomes a useless marketing exercise.
QT costs too much. (Score:3, Insightful)
Try getting your manager to approve such a large purchase these days when GTK is free. It is very difficult.
Re:bah red hat! (Score:4, Insightful)
Check online polls, KDE always comes out as no 1.
Look at awards, KDE usually wins the award for being the best available desktop environment
So in terms of the majority of the Linux community, KDE is de leader
Heck, even Linus likes KDE over gnome
Re:I'd consider switching (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, the fileselector is much better than the old gnome-file-selector.
Now with gnome 2.8 and udev+dbus+hal the new fileselector rocks! Navigation is much quicker (due to the "directory buttons"). Try it a while, you will love it if you just forget the Microsoft/KDE training you had.
Re:QT costs too much (bullshit). (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:bah red hat! (Score:3, Insightful)
If you are low on resources, neither KDE or Gnome is an option if you care about speed. I use KDE on my desktop, but for my elderly PII laptop, I use XFCE [xfce.org] that is much less resource hungry.
Re:I like GNOME... (Score:2, Insightful)
Why not? the software is free, bittorrent is fast and unlimited, blank CDs or DVDs cost pennies, and the smallest hard drive on sale these days in an average box will be at least 10 times the size of the largest install possible. I personally have 320gb in this box I built myself and I didn't even splash out on it. I'd much prefer to have a linux distribution contain everything i might need (on a DVD) than to go out on the web searching for each application individually.
Re:I like GNOME... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:As a long time GNOME user... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I like GNOME... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, I'm waiting for them to unleash a similar level of vitriol against Slackware too since I know how shocking they find it for a distro to pick one desktop. Think I may be waiting a while.
Re:Unmasked! (Score:2, Insightful)
>efficiently designed, from a purely UI perspective,
>of the large Free desktop environments
this is simply not true, Gnome started off later and never managed to keep up with KDE. The final blow was when they killed off gnome 1 and redesingned the whole thing.
I can see why people are unhappy - Gnome is constantly changing:
They had balsa and gmc, they changed to evolution and nautilus. Abiword was dropped for openoffice.
Even the configuration changes all the time...
This is a pain if you are a distro that tries to actually support it.
that said, i really hope this serves as a "wake up" call to gnome developers. They have to get it together and stop this "let's start over","let's start over again" nonsense, *soon*.
>Nobody serious clamors for less operating
>systems, less trouser styles, or less pencils
there are still many excellent desktops out there, if they get some attention from the developers they could prove more than a match for KDE.
Re:I hate KDE (Score:2, Insightful)
It feels like Windows, which is what I'm TRYING to avoid...
I don't understand this. When you first start KDE you are given the option of Windows-like defaults, Mac-like defaults, or UNIX-like defaults. There's also nothing in KDE that makes it "feel like Windows" any more than GNOME or XFCE, they all have the same basic features. And I don't get the "it's similar to another desktop environment therefore I must avoid it" attitude - is it some form of snobbery?
Re:I hate KDE (Score:5, Insightful)
No it can't. I want KDE to be simple a simple UI that has all the options I use and nothing more. Unfortunately there's still no options for "only show me the important widgets" or "death to sidebars" or "simplify these menus" or "Just make stuff work, and get out of my way dammit!".
When the KDE developers realize that 80% of the widgets on their screens are utterly worthless, a clock applet doesn't need 5 tabs full of options and a file manager is not the same thing as a web browser, I'll go back. Until then, Gnome does almost all of what I want, with less frustration and fewer wasted pixels.
Re:I hate KDE (Score:2, Insightful)
What do you mean "unlike Gnome"? In my experience, GNOME is mostly as customizable as KDE. Things are different and some things are harder to change, but at least they're stable (unlike say the 'remove only' options in Konqueror's toolbar).
IMHO, GNOME and KDE both need to work. But why choose one or the other? Why not use Kwin or Konqueror in GNOME, or how about gnome-panel or Metacity with KDE? Sometimes it feels like everyone associated with KDE or GNOME think their desktops are the greatest things since sliced bread. Little attacks - such as "foo unlike bar" when bar arguably is like foo - seems pretty petty to me.
Re:Pat's arguments (Score:2, Insightful)
mmmmm... Why should we?
When I use Slackware, I use it because it is tight, small and fast. I use it because I like compiling my own stuff when necessary. Why should I stop using it because they no longer have something no longer revelant? If I'm using Slackware, I'm already using Windowmaker et al., not Gnome.
IMHO, I don't want sixteen different editors and 10 different GUIs. One good one is enough (fvwm95?), if I need something else, I can go and get it from someone who supports it with binaries or compile my own.
Slackware is not a starter distro, although I did start with it with its very early versions (when you still had to download them on floppies), I wouldn't give it to someone to learn Linux nor I would install it on someone's machine if they intend to use Gnome. Mandrake/Suse/FC is what's that for.
Re:As a long time GNOME user... (Score:3, Insightful)
But is it still true that there's about ten different configuration tools for the desktop, some of which do the same thing as the other? In addition to that, there's a preferences editor which suspiciously looks and feels like regedit. Or how about the "Ok" and "Cancel" button order?
Oh well, at least anything is better than KDE's menu system. I think I've found at least five different locations it references, and the shorcuts and directories aren't in the same place. And then you have some crap in XML in a third location, etc.
My gripe isn't so much about gnome or KDE but libs (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Unmasked! (Score:5, Insightful)
That aside, Evolution and OpenOffice are not even part of GNOME (at least by 2.6), nor was abiword. Concerning OpenOffice at the least, mentioning it in this context is absurd.
I'll take an environment with clear human interface guidelines, an elegant line, and a determination to do things in what they consider to be the Right Way over one with flashy buttons, millions of features and a commercial-consistent evolution any day.
For GNOME's thought-out interface design and commitment, I'm ready to overlook occasional upgrade pains (and I've had them), some changes I dislike (eg the new file selector, superior in many ways and inferior in some), and an outdated language (yes, I know QT is C++). I don't ask anyone else to do so, and I don't see why I myself should not.
We don't need a grand unified desktop.
Re:About freakin' time (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:QT costs too much. (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, if your idea of a product is 100 copies at $10, it's a lot of money but that's a hobby and not a business.
You might have some other legitimate reason for preferring Gtk, like for example your coders don't know C++, but blaming license cost is a joke.
Re:You know you don't have to install *EVERYTHING* (Score:1, Insightful)
Guh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you mean "retarded", like:
* gnibbles
* grip
* gaim
* gnome-about
* gnome-bug
* gnome-calculator
* gcalctool
* gnome-character-map
* gnome-desktop-item-edit
* gnome-dictionary
* gnome-dump-metadata
* gnome-font-install
* gnome-gen-mimedb
* gnome-gtkhtml-editor-1.1
* gnome-keyring-daemon
* gnome-moz-remote
* gnome-name-service
* gnome-open
* gnome-panel
* gnome-panel-preferences
* gnome-panel-screenshot
* gnome-print-manager
* gnome-pty-helper
* gnome-search-tool
* gnome_segv
* gnome-stones
* gnomevfs-cat
* gnomevfs-copy
* gnomevfs-info
* gnomevfs-ls
* gnomevfs-mkdir
* gnomine
* gnotski
* gimp
* gimptool
etc., etc.
I love the smell of flaimbait in the morning...
Re:I like GNOME... (Score:2, Insightful)
Besides the QA risk that additional undertested packages pose, there's also a security risk, too. The distro creator will need to watch for security bulletins and other nasties.
I think for Linux to be more successful on the desktop, it will need to focus on a core set of applications and do those really well. The "really well" part includes testing and documentation. One desktop environment is fine for most people, just as one web browser and one office suite are too.
I'm a developer, and yes, I know that it's much more sexy to go off and create your own little fiefdom rather than having to toil on someone else's design (dude, that soooo corporate). But most folks only care about the outcome and not the route.
Ludicrous. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:QT costs too much. (Score:2, Insightful)
That's not right. The GPL does impose overhead. If you use libraries that are GPL, then your code must be GPL, too. And that is what the parent of your post was talking about. QT is GPL. GTK is LGPL, which allows some usage of it in non-Free applications. The thing with QT is that if you want to develop closed source applications, you have to purchase a license (it's dual-licensed).
Re:I hate KDE (Score:3, Insightful)
Complex "environment managers" are usually a bad idea: when they break, they break so badly they leave you crippled. For example, what idiot decided to make various Gnome tool installations dependent on installing that CPU pig Nautilus?
Re:Guh... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Unmasked! (Score:5, Insightful)
When you write code, you find small bugs that you didn't predict, and you write small bugfixes for them. As these small bugfixes pile up, it starts to look like just "messy" code. A year later when you rewrite everything ("I'll do it cleanly this time!"), you've forgotten all those small bugfixes and it takes another 3 or 4 iterations to get them out again, by which time the code is again "messy".
That said, if your entire design is horrendously flawed, starting from scratch is less of a bad idea..
Re:Unmasked! (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't know where you managed to pull that one out of, but given that Slackware is now well over 10 years old, and in common use as a server platform, that hardly seems like a statement connected with any reality I have seen.
Re:Not to nitpick..... (Score:4, Insightful)
QT might be "better," but IMHO compatibility is more important.
Re:An Opinion on GNOME (Score:2, Insightful)
Gnome has long ago lost focus on its goals. It used to be geared towards linux users. It was meant to be a fast and customizable linux DE. Somewhere between 1.4 and 2.0 Gnome development changed. It lost sight of those goals and became geared towards newbies and end-users.
No. I believe its goal is usability. There is a big difference from "newbie friendly" and "usability". Ideally, a computer interface is usable for everyone, from newbies to experts. This is a challenging but not impossible (I hope) goal.
Now, whether or not GNOME can or will achieve this is a different question entirely. But I know they are not trying to cripple so called power-users.
Childish nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
If the biggest thing you can find to bitch about is whether all the names start with a G(nu) or Gnome vs. K(de), then I'd say both desktops have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
Personally I use both, but I use Gnome for my personal account. GTK is cross platform; so is Qt. My guess is Qt might be better for Windows porting, but as far as Linux itself goes I don't really see much difference. In both cases I just configure until it works the way I want.
Programming is another issue, but I haven't done enough with either to say which is truly "better", and it would just be my personal opinion anyhow. After working with 2-3 other GUI toolkits over the years, I realized they all basically work the same, some just have a cleaner programming interface or more default/standard widgets.
The whining about package dependencies is just that -- whining. Go ahead and try and install something that requires IE components under Windows and see how far you get if you manage to remove IE. The same goes for Gnome's "Bonobo" CORBA support or Qt under KDE. If the package was built with particular software in mind it will need to have it installed.
Or is everyone going to start crying about all the HTML display components that require Mozilla as well? Perhaps you'd like to get rid of glibc because you like another ANSI C library?
Wah.
Wah. Wah. Wah.
What about dropline gnome? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Guh... (Score:3, Insightful)
Huh? What do you think the "g" in "gimp" stands for??
RE: We don't need a grand unified desktop. (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't need to be unified but it does need to be standard, that way we're all on the same page, which cuts a lot of redundancy out of writing consumer level books and tutorials. That will help Linux move into the desktop. When someone says it should look like this it should, rather than the author having to give 10 examples of how it might look and finishing with "Check your documentation" at that point novice users put it down and go buy Windows.
I also think that by having a grossly popular desktop more gifted developers can focus on more than one project, rather than having to worry about being a GTK or QT expert they can just learn whatever everyone is using and there by make software easier, that's the number one reason Windows even took off in the first place. This would mean when someone makes a good calculator we can call it calculator and not gtkalc or Kalculator or something. I'm not saying variety doesn't have it's merit but standardization has huge merits aswell
Re:Guh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure there might be an executable installed as /usr/bin/gcalctool, but it is exposed in the menus simply as "Calculator". The title bar for the calculator also says "Calculator" as opposed to "Gnome Calculator" or "Gcalctool". The "Gcalctool" name is shown in the about dialog, but that is it.
The user doesn't need to care about what the underlying executable name is. This is what the parent post was probably refering to.
Now if Gnome did install executables with names like /usr/bin/calculator, people would complain because it would make it more difficult to integrate into a distribution because of file name conflicts.
GNOME is a difficult for sys admins (Score:5, Insightful)
I might get mod down for this... but here it goes.
My company recently made the switch to Linux, replacing most of our Windows desktops with Linux (servers are all already *NIX).
I was invovled with the project since the planning stage, and everyone seemed to agree that GNOME was the best choice because at the time (and it might still is), GNOME was the default desktop for most commercial distros. We thought to ourselves: "Oh well, these guys must know something that we don't." Most of us ran KDE, we gave GNOME a small test drive, decided that it looked easy enough and voted for it.
Big mistake.
First of all, GNOME lacked documentation on how to customize it. For gconfd, the GNOME web site only provided 2 links [gnome.org], one of which is dead, and the other was last updated in the year 2000. I asked around on IRC, posted on forums and newsgroups, emailed the GNOME developers, but I did not get any responses. I ended up taking apart all the %gconf.xml files myself, and saving a profile and writing an ugly script to convert it for every user. I am sure there is a better way, but either no one has done it, or nobody cared to share.
What's worse, are the bugs. There are minor bugs that really put a dent on the overall Linux experience, especially for those users that we just switched over. Some of them have already heard about how great Linux is, and how "stable" it is. This only makes them angrier when their Nautilus window craps out and leaves them a core dump (shows up as a little bomb). I looked up some of the bugs, most were already filed, but none fixed. Just a little while ago, there was an email [gnome.org] on the nautilus list asking people to help fix bugs, so I think some of the developers agree with me that there are way too many outstanding bugs. When I asked some of the GNOME developers, the response I got then was to "upgrade to 2.6, it is much better than 2.4!". Sounds familiar? Yup, Microsoft told me the same thing.
The similarity doesn't end there. I installed 2.6 and tested it. In my opinion, it was worse. Yes, the spatial view is kind of cool, but you know what it reminded me of? Windows 95. And there is no easy way to turn it off (I would have expected to have it as an option in the drop-down menus). It was not more stable either, but I WAS running an early build of it. I, again, complained to some people about how 2.6 did not quite live up to my expectations, and the answer? "Wait for 2.8, it's GREAT!"
All of this is not helping the Linux desktop movement, especially in my company, where the management was already not really happy about switching over to an "inferior" OS. This just gives them more "evidence" to talk about: "We were right. My WindowsXP box crashed much less often. Linux IS a piece of crap!" But in reality, it was only Nautilus that was crapping out when connecting to a WebDAV mounted drive, not the underlying OS... but they won't understand that, would they?
Re: We don't need a grand unified desktop. (Score:5, Insightful)
What we need is a grand unified desktop API. One where I can call "createIcon()" or "queryIcon()" or "deleteIcon()", etc., to add, query, delete, or otherwise manipulate the user's desktop(s). Trying to support KDE 2, KDE 3, Gnome, and any other potential desktops is impossible. We have a "create icons" tool for our (commercial) product, and of those who have owned the tool, one was fired, two were laid off, and the latest just quit, all in the span of 2 years. That's actually two independant statements, completely unrelated, but it is an interesting fact to me :-)
In short, a common desktop API would be incredibly useful. From a purely commercial standpoint, it would be just as useful to have only one Linux desktop. Personally, I'd love to see the opensource competition that drives each project to become better, but there does need to be some co-operation, just like OOo and KOffice and others are standardising on common XML document formats, making it easier for not only document interchange, but for others to write to the spec. We need that programmability for the desktops, too.
Re:Unmasked! (Score:3, Insightful)
What makes GNOME "more professional and efficient"? Seriously?
Comparing how "professional" they are.... For example, KDE-folks were aware that people disliked the default style (Keramik). But they were unwilling to change it in a minor release, since change like that would significantly affect the look 'n feel of the UI. They are changing it in 3.4 though, but only after alot of forethought.
GNOME, on the other hand, had not problems changing their entire filemanagement-style in a minor release. They went from browsing to spatial filemanagement. And that is a huge change! They also changed their fileselector and god knows what other things!
KDE tends to be more conservative with disruptive changes like that. And to me, that feels like they are concerned about their enterprise-users who don't want disruptive changed in a minor release. Disruptive changes are for major releases.
As to "efficiency"... KDE seems to be way ahead of GNOME. Everything in KDE is a Kpart that can be embedded in to other apps. Take a look at Kontact. All those apps (Kmail, Korganizer etc.) are standalone apps that can be ran separately or as part of larger whole (Kontact). Stuff like that simply doesn't happen in GNOME. Evolution and Kontact are more or less comparable. But Evolution is one lumbering mass of an app, whereas Kontact is simply a framework os using separate apps stogether (in true UNIX-style).
What KDE needs is more sensible defaults and refined UI. But those are relatively minor superficial things when compared to the more fundamental changes that wait GNOME.
Re:Unmasked! (Score:2, Insightful)
-kaplanfx
Re:Not to nitpick..... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:About freakin' time (Score:2, Insightful)
Gnome means **mega** dependencies ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Sheesh - has anyone else had a look at the number of dependencies that Gnome packages (**especially** Gnumeric) have ? Arrrrgh
I mean, gee - it's all very well grabbing that (and so testing apt for the good apt-devs), but it really is beyond a joke
Just look at the nonsense with Nautilus' so-called "spatial-browsing". A great example of a solution looking for a problem. Far too much of what the devs want, instead of what the USER wants. Viva KDE and fluxbox
Re:GNOME is a difficult for sys admins (Score:3, Insightful)
My point is not "it's OK when they don't fix bugs since it's free". What I mean is: it's OK when they work on the latest release since the upgrade is free.
Story Treatment Shows Failure of FOSS Journalism (Score:3, Insightful)
There's been no verification that the remarks attributed to Slackware's Pat. V. are true. We simply have a single pseudonymous post to one online forum.
Where's the attempt to check with Pat V. to see if he actually made those remarks? Nowhere that I can see.
Slashdot, among others, lathered itself in sanctimonious glee when CBS was duped by a bogus memo. How is this any different?
Re:GNOME is a difficult for sys admins (Score:3, Insightful)
I highly doubt the time he spent upgrading all the users' desktops was 'free' for his company. You see, it's not always about up-front costs when you're not a hobbyist user. If Gnome does not Just Work, then it's definitely Not Free for entreprise customers. And this kind of flies in the face of the "Gnome is more professional" ranters. NBot to mention that it doesn't help at all with the OSS software adoption on the entreprise desktop.
Re:Guh... (Score:2, Insightful)