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.
Not so bad! (Score:5, Interesting)
If Todd of Dropline and Patrick work together this could be pretty good for both projects. Of course there is PAM integration in Dropline that Patrick dislikes and therefore he won't include it in the "official" CD set. Slack with Dropline is in fact the best Desktop-Linux Experience I ever had.
Let's hope Todds servers can handle all the load following a slashdotting.
As a long time GNOME user... (Score:5, Interesting)
GNOME still has nominally better applications in certain key areas compared to KDE, for example, Ximian Evolution. However, again, KDE has made enourmous progress in this area, all in the last year. It boggles my mind to see how quickly this gap has dissapeared in one area - compare Instant Messaging in KDE and GNOME two years ago (nothing vs Gaim) to now, Kopete has developed so quickly it's just amazing.
One thing I did miss in KDE was Mozilla. But now, we can even use Gecko as a rendering engine in Konqueror, so even, like me, if you considered that KHTML was inferior to Gecko, this "advantage" for GNOME has now dissapeared (also thanks to Apple and Safari).
I still think KDE needs some work, especially in the ease-of-use department (too many settings presented to the user, some intelligent hiding would be appreciated) - but this is improving. And, even as a GNOME user, I have to admit that C++ as a basis is a much superior choice to C, especially considering the kludge that seems to underly GNOME, separate libraries for GTK and GNOME applications with surprisingly few applications taking advantage of the GNOME-only libraries.
If you look at the distributions on the shelves, SuSE is KDE, Mandrake is KDE, Linsipre is KDE (with modifications). You can't buy Fedora at PC World. Any new user getting interested in Linux would probably go here first, and by consequence they're going to get KDE.
So whilst I will keep GNOME around for a while yet, and I think the "race" is far from over (who says there has to be a winner anyway? The whole concept of a "war" is just completely silly), if KDE goes on to become the defacto Linux desktop, then I won't shed that many tears. Of course, GNOME, I'm sure, will be around for a long while yet.
HIG (Score:2, Interesting)
I think having multiple GUI environments is an asset to linux, but as for me and my house, I'll take GNOME for it's beauty and interface. K3b is the only KDE app that GNOME seems to lack a real counterpart to.
now back to your regularly scheduled flames and trolling.
I miss Gnome 1.4 (Score:1, Interesting)
I switched to KDE. It's much cleaner. So much cleaner. I'm now tempted to build Mozilla with QT.
The sky is falling! The sky is falling! (Score:5, Interesting)
All in all, this is not a final decision, it's just a rumor . As long as Patrick Volkerding has not removed Gnome and annouced it either on the Slackware website or in the ChangeLog, I won't believe it...
And this was typed on a Slackware 10 machine running XFCE... Which, IMHO, is so much better than Gnome...
Who cares what a few distros pick for WM (Score:1, Interesting)
That didn't happen.
This whole corporate cut throat mentality is so ingrained in people that they immediately apply it to everything and the fact is, it doesn't really matter in open source.
The only thing that would endanger Gnome would be if computer storage suddenly began to shrink and it was no longer possible to offer several windows managers. That's hardly the case. Hell, LiveCDs that come on old fashioned CD-Rs usually have room for KDE, Gnome, IceWM and a half dozen others. Even these stripped down distros are still unable to take advantage of the now cheap DVD-R because it's just too freakin' much space. It's just not necessary to use all the space that is available.
This isn't a winner-take-all market based development model. There's room for twenty, no make that a thousand, more windows managers.
Re:As a long time GNOME user... (Score:5, Interesting)
As a long time KDE user, I've recently realised the opposite. I tried out GNOME and found all the crap I'd read about it was totally untrue.
For a start, Evolution was simply in a different league from apps like Kmail... *if* you want to do anything more than simple POP3/SMTP email. Kmail is badly broken when you try anything ambitious with it, and I was rather shocked to realise how many bugs and crashes I was subconciously working around. Evolution was a, forgive the choice of words, a revelation.
As for the developer GNOME experience... I was up and coding with GTKMM (the c++ wrappers for GNOME and GTK) in no time. In fact, I found them better organised than much of KDE -- even though the underlying Qt is a fine class library and well documented. The KDE code above is... well... less than satisfactory. I've been quite surprised to find how well organised, designed and coded most of GNOME is. I really shouldn't have listened to all the slashdot bullshit over the years.
The desktop itself was also impressively organised and simple. There are a few Nautilus niggles that irritate me... but I was up and running in no time. I even ran a small test with friends of mine, and found that GNOME's organisation and attention to user-experience was vastly superior to KDE (even the later versions).
In summary, I've spent a few years listening to crap about GNOME. I wish I'd tried it earlier. As far as I'm concerned it is now a much better desktop than KDE -- and GNOME apps (with one exception: CD burning, for some reason these apps are a bit naff under GNOME) are considerably more advanced than those I got used to under KDE.
Anonymous editorialization (Score:5, Interesting)
Just for the record - in case you aren't up on the latest news - Redhat still ships a desktop linux that uses gnome, and the Fedora project is still one of the strongest linux distributions, along with Debian and Suse (Novell), who both still include gnome and have no intentions of dropping it. Additionally, Sun and IBM are still committed to gnome.
Disclaimer: I don't like KDE. I miss my old mac.
Re:As a long time GNOME user... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:As a long time GNOME user... (Score:1, Interesting)
Slackware doesn't ship Evolution.
As for the developer GNOME experience... I was up and coding with GTKMM (the c++ wrappers for GNOME and GTK) in no time.
Slackware doesn't ship gtkmm.
In summary, I've spent a few years listening to crap about GNOME. I wish I'd tried it earlier.
Now try building it.
[ Reply to This ]
Still miss Gnome 1.4 (Score:4, Interesting)
And having dealt with the hell of compiling gnome on slack, I can't blame Pat a bit.
Funny thing is, although I still use gnome, I've got one box running XFCE and it feels much more like gnome 1.4 did -- I'll probably migrate there as long as I can count on a few GTK+ apps (mostly gnumeric, gvim, and I'll toy with giving up evolution if needed.)
KDE has just never done it for me. I can't put a finger on it, it just doesn't feel right or "open" (yes, I see the irony here.)
The main things that originally attracted me to gnome were a few well-done apps and the clean simplicity of 1.4 -- if only the gnomesters would go back to this root.
Whatever the case, I'd like to echo sentiments here (and on the forum linked to in the article) -- it'd be great if Pat would include a well-integrated Dropline package with slackware, and if Dropline would consider a second 'standard' slackware i486 distro, as this can be counted to run on practically all platforms (the i686 won't.)
I see it differently (Score:3, Interesting)
It doesn't seem like GNOME will drop off of the face of Slackware as the acticle suggest, but rather, the support for GNOME on Slackware will be off loaded to the Dropline project.
BTW, I'm currently usuing Slackware 10 with GNOME 2.6 for my Linux box. I was looking at the Dropline version of GNOME 2.8 for Slackware. Have any of you tried it?
Re:Exactly! (Score:2, Interesting)
We don't. However, if we want to help people make the switch from Windows to Linux, then making the basics familiar is a good idea. That is clearly irrelavant to you, so you picked a different DE. Hurray for choice, no need to complain about the options that were wrong for you.
A single button under which everything is nested seems unnecessary - there have to be better ideas out there.
Windowmaker moves this from the bottom-left of the screen to the right mouse button. It's really not that different. At least Linux desktops put games under "Games", not like on Windows where we have Half-Life next to Print Artist because Sierra wants us to know they published them both.
Stuck in the past? (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe I'm stuck in tha past? I've always found KDE to be slow, until I got a dual 2.8GHz Xeon PC at work. Modern versions of GNOME seem to be quite lethargic and large too. I can't afford to keep buying new PCs all the time, and I'm afraid my athlon XP2000+ will have to do me at least another year.
I have an old PC in the house running Slackware 9.1 and GNOME 2.4 which is quite slow. The GNOME terminal runs like treacle on a cold winter's morning. If I fire up a traditional xterm, it's nice and fast.
I really wish I had time to delve through the source to see just where all this bloat and slowness is coming from. It used to be that KDE was the fatty boom boom of desktop environments, but the GNOME people seem to have out-done the C++ folks in plain old C.
What the heck is going on?
Anyway, life's too short to look at boring desktop environment code. Life's also too short to run a bloaty, slow desktop environment.
I'll just stick to a plain window manager and some xterms.
Re:QT costs too much. (Score:3, Interesting)
I did, and it was not difficult at all. The amount of development and more importantly code maintenance time saved by using Qt over competing solutions (wxWidgets and especially GTK+) is largely worth the license cost.
You may find it interesting to know that a number of companies actually request that Trolltech does not publish the fact they're using Qt, because they see Qt as an essential competitive advantage they don't want the competition to be made aware of.
All I want now is a Qt equivalent of GtkAdjustments, please. Adjustments are cool.
Re:Damnit (Score:1, Interesting)
There's a gconf key that power users can use to disable the icons, in which case, GNOME still has its own internal background setter in the style of Xsetroot that it will use. (Unless you disable THAT as well, through a different gconf key)
You can put this in at the run dialog box or the terminal to instantly turn the desktop icons off:
gconftool-2 --type boolean -s
And if you actually want gnome to never even touch the root window with its own internal background setter, you can use this command:
gconftool-2 --type boolean -s
Re:You know you don't have to install *EVERYTHING* (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Slackware is kind of becoming irrelEvant. (Score:3, Interesting)
Simplicity has always been Slackware's strong point.
And as for not having Gnome losing software, I don't think Gnome or KDE are the same exactly between any two distros.
Further, isn't Slackware still the only commercial distro that makes a profit? I don't see it going anywhere. Even if Pat said "the hell with it!", I think the user base is strong enough to keep it going-- just like debian and Gentoo...
Re:Might be a good idea (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Unmasked! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:As a long time GNOME user... (Score:3, Interesting)
There won't be any "defacto Linux desktop": people have too many different ideas for where to take the desktop. And that's a good thing. KDE has two additional strikes against it: the license of the underlying toolkit (dual GPL/commercial) and the fact that it's C++ based.
Re:Damnit (Score:1, Interesting)
Absolutely not. KDE doesn't emulate the Windows-like behavior of having the file manager take over the desktop. The code for 'seamless file-manager integrated icons' is shared between KDE components, be it for managing files, managing the desktop, displaying file dialogs, etc. There is no technical reason to have it constrained to one single application.
This kind of a-posteriori justification for design mistakes is exactly what has given GNOME fans a bad name. *Please* investigate things, when you're not sure. Honest. Sharing knowledge is what open source is all about. It's also never too late to fix Nautilus' current behavior, either.
GNOME (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Miguel de Icaza.
I will never forgive him for beginning work on Mono, fracturing the limited number of developers for the GNOME Desktop. Setting it back probably years behind KDE. For What? A Microsoft red herring planted there strategically to insure any Linux Desktop application framework built on Mono could be stopped easily using copyright, DMCA and patent law....SHOULD it become too popular.
2) The Lack of decent or equivalent KDE development tools. KDevelop? KDesigner? KCacheGrind? KDevelop Assistant? The list is endless and the above applications will squash anything the GNOME community has like a grape to develop fine bugfree native Linux applications.
If you do not have a coherent development framework how the hell can you develop anything decent? No wonder the Distro/End User GNOME community is fundamentally stressed out. These sorts of complaints do not exist in the KDE community.
There are different ones.
But they do not involve resorting to talk out in the open about dumping a desktop linux initiative such as GNOME. This is VERY serious.
The last gaffe that happened of this sort was xfree86....which is now relegated to the dust bin of history. But, AT LEAST it was reborn better than ever!
Perhaps, what is required....is a FORK of the GNOME Desktop project? A fork of GNOME may breath new life into addressing some of its ill's...one of which is listed below...
3) The Object Oreintation Thingy. I am really sorry if a lot of the GNOME developers think OOD when it comes to the GUI apps is so passe' I think GObject library is a throw back to the stone age, personally. I mean for Christ sake, if your going to reinvent the Object Oreintation of your GUI framework just because you cannot/do not/will not learn C++, you get the build complexity we keep reading about that is killing the GNOME release cycles.
This is a CLUE: Adopt, understand and learn how to build a OOD/OOP conceptual framework for your interfaces and DUMP GObject. Stop reinventing what C++ already gives you. With that RANT I present Exhibit A:
#include
struct GTypeModule;
struct GTypeModuleClass;
gboolean g_type_module_use (GTypeModule *module);
void g_type_module_unuse (GTypeModule *module);
(ad naseum)
I really FEEL for you if you have to deal with the kind of crap above.
4) Finally, though I am not a GNOME fan by any means, I would hate to see the distro's...drop GNOME. It is too early to decide on a Linux Desktop architecture, per se, because there are not enough mature options out there. If you cut too many options out too early you kill a lot of innovation. That is something I feel will happen if distro's start telling people we are not supporting GNOME, if you want it go somewhere else and get the RPM's....and GOOD LUCK! We need options to fight Microsoft when they start excercising their massive patent portfolio. Which IS going to happen by the way when they start running out of money....which won't be too far off into the future. Most American companies in the software biz can't innovate their way out of a paper bag, so expect Microsoft to radically step up the Patent attacks in early 2006.
Don't ask how I know that year either.
I won't tell.
-hackus
Re:QT costs too much. (Score:1, Interesting)
I've found the opposite to be true. Tiny five-man companies will have a problem with the cost of Qt, but larger companies would much rather pick a product that is well supported. I can name more commercial Qt-based software than that of Gtk. Just look at TheKompany. Is there anyone else writing that much in Gtk?
Buying Qt gets you a lifetime license and full source code that you are free to modify. This is the kind of low-risk deal that businesses want. I think if there were any serious issues with the licensing, Trolltech wouldn't still be here.
Re:Unmasked! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I hate KDE (Score:5, Interesting)
What's important to you might be irrelevant to someone else, and what's useless for you might be used every day by someone else.
Microsoft learnt that the hard way with the idiocy of their hidden menu options in Office 2000.
That doesn't mean that there isn't room to improve things - there definitely is - but just ripping out half the UI doesn't solve anything. One of the main goals behind KDE has always been that there are NO hidden options (as in not exposed somewhere in the GUI). If you ever have to edit a config file - or launch a generic configuration application that is nothing more than a thin wrapper around directly editing a text file, then it's a bug.
Also your comments about konqueror kind of show that you've never really used KDE, or you'll never like it.
You're seeing Konqueror as two different applications crammed into one. But it's not. Tt's a universal browser and viewer via embeddable parts and pluggable protocols - which enables it to handle filesystem browsing and management as well as web browsing as just two of the many things it can do - and all by simply providing a light framework for other parts to do the work.
If you don't agree with that approach, you'll never like KDE because it's fundamental to it.
Re:Pat's arguments (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, yes. Of course having a dictator is bad, which is clearly evidenced by the fact that basically the only distro run by a central dictator is also the longest running distro, one of the most popular distros, and one of the most stable distros, as well as one which tends to stay fairly well on the cutting edge.
I'm sure people will disagree with a lot of that, but that's from my experience. Three times I've had friends try setting up Linux. They all tried Mandrake first, then either SuSE, RedHat, Debian, or Gentoo. Usually Slackware was a later attempt because they wanted something easier. Then, it was the damnedest thing: Slackware worked out-of-the-box, and they got through the installer without handholding.
Slackware works damn reliably for me, and I have no serious complaints. Which is rare, because I can barely stand the bugginess of the other distos I have tried (or the bugginess of almost anything, for that matter).
speaking as a Gnome user... (Score:1, Interesting)
Also it seems there's a lot of momentum in the Linux world towards KDE and away from gnome. This kind of makes me a bit sad because KDE to me seems more like a windows knock-off. But otoh, I just don't see a promising future for gnome.
Ah well
Re:Pat's arguments (Score:3, Interesting)
Problem is, Gnome has been a pain to build from source for as long as I can remember (back in the early 1.x days). It's a tangled mass of difficult-to-resolve interdependencies among separately-distributed libraries.
KDE doesn't seem to have any fewer libraries, but they appear to be developed and packaged in more coordinated groups (e.g. the "kdelibs" project) and is, by comparison, a breeze to figure out how to build and install (and/or package).
I can't imagine that, having been a problem this long, that this is "a minor technical issue", nor that the Gnome folks haven't heard of this issue before, so I don't think Patrick or anyone else is going to be able to induce a major, fundamental shift in the development methodology used for Gnome, which is really what it would take to "resolve the issue". I could MAYBE see getting the glib and gtk+ (and gdkpixbuf?) folks to coordinate their releases into a single package (which would be roughly equivalent to QT), but somehow if it hasn't been done already, I don't imagine the orbit, libgnome, libgnomeui, libgnomecanvas, and whatever other individual projects there are would feel comfortable trying to integrate their projects into a more tightly integrated single project (analogous to "kdelibs"). Given that the more freewheeling, independent development style is one of the things, I think, that makes Gnome what it is (the good as well as the bad), I don't know that this issue could be "resolved" without the result slowly ceasing to be Gnome any more...
Usually when the subject of the hassles involved in compiling Gnome come up, someone will say "but the distributions pre-compile it for you, so why does it matter?". I guess it's finally getting to the point where less heavily staffed distributions might be getting tired of spending the time dealing with it. I can certainly understand Patrick's desire to "outsource" maintenance of Gnome packages for Slackware to an outside project, under these circumstances.
Note that I doubt we're talking about a complete "wiping" of Gnome-related libraries entirely from Slackware, either. I imagine glib and gtk+ would remain, for example, since those two libraries are used in many places independent of Gnome. Presumably atk, pango, and a few others would similarly be preserved for the same reason.
Re:Unmasked! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Unmasked! (Score:3, Interesting)
I found things that I thought were right in GNOME and wrong in KDE; I switched back to KDE, though, because it's a working project, not a conceptual model like GNOME.
And before you look at that UID and think "WTF does he use KDE? Did he finally just start using Linux or something?" well, cram it. I happen to like having a GUI, and as the most complete Free system for *n?x, KDE it is.
Re:As a long time GNOME user... (Score:3, Interesting)
User research has conclusively demonstrated that the OK button--which is most likely to be the one hit, and is thus the default--should be on the right hand side, since the mouse spends most of its time on the right hand side of the screen, adjusting scrollbars and the like. That's why the Mac has always had it on the right.
Windows did it bass-ackwards, unsurprisingly, and this has been blindly copied by those with no idea of what usability means, again unsurprisingly.
Re:As a long time GNOME user... (Score:4, Interesting)
Even thought I've always used Windows and barely dabbled in other systems, I've always thought that "OK" belonged on the right like GNOME does it.
To me, clicking "OK" means that I want to move forward in the application. "Cancel" means I want to back up or back out. Since most languages and grapshs go from left to right, it only seems natural that "OK" should be on the right.
Especially since a lot of applications use "Wizard"-style dialog boxes when they present a series of dialog boxes to the user. In those dialog boxes, ">" is on the right. And "Next >>" is basically the same thing as "OK"...
Re:kde licensing (Score:3, Interesting)
Besides, I recall the recent Qt book had a CD with a MS Windows version of Qt for non-commercial use, I bet it could be found on their website in a couple of minutes as well.
The whole licence thing was RMS saying "use no other licence but mine" and Trolltech trying a couple of other licences like XFree86 had and Ghostscript has and CUPs has but then they settled on the GPL. Storm in a teacup to anyone that ever read their licence or has read the licence with ghostscript or CUPs or XFree86. Troll was just the convenient target since they were a rival to the new gnome. It was sorted out even to the satisfaction of RMS years ago.
Re:Unmasked! (Score:3, Interesting)
And the gnome devs. managed to scare users away because their UI decisions got rather arrogant.
They removed the "Undo" button (amongst others) because (not the original wording, but surely close enough) "it is easy enough to undo simple changes by hand". Removing features after a release should be done carefully and may (IMHO) only be done if
a) the feature is available as a separate package then
or b) other parts of the application include the feature
Mod me flamebait for it, I was a gnome user but I'm now (since 3-4 months) using KDE. And everything works!
I still like writing GTKMM code more than writing QT GUI code(*). Hopefully, GTK doesn't disappear together with GNOME just because it is the underlying toolkit.
(*) - not that I like writing GUI code at all
Re:I like GNOME... (Score:3, Interesting)
Debian was that bad, but it's getting better (not entirely there yet).
I used RedHat to get comfy, and then switched to Debian, and I haven't strayed. Tried Gentoo for a lark on a 2.8Ghz and I hated it. Even the binary system was crud.
Anyway, good luck ahead. May the Penguin serve you well