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GNOME GUI

Gnome Development Roadmap 309

Posted by Hemos from the mapping-out-the-future dept.
dfallon writes, "A GNOME development roadmap is available over on developer.gnome.org. Highlights include: a 1.2 release targeted for April, followed by another 1.X release in late summer (1.4?), which will include Nautilus, the desktop shell being worked on by Eazel, which will lead into a 2.0 release sometime in the fall. " This is, of course, subject to the mad revisions of Nat and Miguel - but it's cool to see what the future /might/ hold.
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Gnome Development Roadmap More

Gnome Development Roadmap

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  • Surly it is about time that developers start using months for release dates. There is approximately 1 country in the world that uses Fall, most other Englsh speaking countries use Autumn.

    And also for those people not in the northern hemisphere, they are in autumn now (or very soon), so the release date is a bit meaningless.

    And of course those people in the tropics don't actually have 4 seasons, only 2, wet and dry.

    Just a though, why not start using Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4?
  • Gnome is quite nice however seems rather bloated in an almost nightmarishly windowsish way. I wonder if there can be install profiles for the various desktops based on what you want or on more terms of fuzzy logic and such with things like small, modest, large, gargantuine, bloated, and then finally windows? Also seems like the apps are sometimes not playing nicely together still and that kind of scares me.
  • Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4 only make sense if you know what gnome.org's financial year is ;-)
    --
  • Surly it is about time that developers start using months for release dates. There is approximately 1 country in the world that uses Fall, most other Englsh speaking countries use Autumn.



    What's wrong with fall? I use fall and have from the day I was born. I was born in the fall. Also it's very intuitive with things like Autumn is when the leaves "fall" and such.

    And also for those people not in the northern hemisphere, they are in autumn now (or very soon), so the release date is a bit meaningless.



    If it really matters that much I guess you can just calculate it. I have had to work with various monitary systems for doing conversion to my unit of currency does that make it wrong to have things like this. I think that if you have regional pages (kind of like debian has for languages and the like) that the maintainers of the pages should convert the times to the local time that the viewers of the page will be in: just a thought.

    And of course those people in the tropics don't actually have 4 seasons, only 2, wet and dry.



    Although you may have a rainy and dry seasons where you live that dosn't invalidate the concept of partitioning the year into 4 equal pieces in some way. I think there is (if you look at it) a slight difference between say spring rain and summer rain.
    Just a though, why not start using Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4?


    Well pardon me but I guess I don't do much in the financial sector or business but when do the various quarters occur?

  • if they were to say Q3 2000, that should abviously mean July - September.
  • But there is only one country in the world that matters. Or at least that's the impression I get. They are the only superpower now you know. And their next president could be the guy that invented the internet.
  • But there is only one country in the world that matters. Or at least that's the impression I get. They are the only superpower now you know. And their next president could be the guy that invented the internet.



    The page is made in english by a webmaster who is most likely in the US. I have dates on pages I create does that make it my priority to use for example UTC or Z on all of my official dates? Maybe because of the metric system's use (or abuse) I should be using the number of seconds from 1970 (ephoc) or perhaps the number of seconds from 0 BCE.
  • What I'm looking forward to is seeing how Mozilla will be intergrated into Gnome. I think that eventually the layout engine from Mozilla will be used as a component for Gnome, through Bonobo or some such thing, making possible viewing HTML or XML content in the new file manager, help browser, or any other Gnome application where it would be usefull.
  • What I'm looking forward to is seeing how Mozilla will be intergrated into Gnome. I think that eventually the layout engine from Mozilla will be used as a component for Gnome, through Bonobo or some such thing, making possible viewing HTML or XML content in the new file manager, help browser, or any other Gnome application where it would be usefull.



    Could someone point me out to a professional web site that uses XML in it's layout or rendering with say IE 5 (browser I just happen to be using)? I would like to see it at it's best.
  • Makes sense, doesn't it? "Fucking" is the result of love, "bloody" is the result of war.
  • Nah, there's a script to do that. I don't have a link handy. But I do have one to the highly amusing Katzdot [torsion.org]: "News for Geeks, Fluff that Matters."

    Sample generated Katz headlines:
    "The Hidden Music Industry, Digital Democracy and Cyber-Terrorism"
    "Why Do Sexbots Feel Pain?"

    --

  • What I'm looking forward to is seeing how Mozilla will be intergrated into Gnome.

    You mean how IE was "integrated" into Lose98? No thanks.
  • I thought Britain was on the winning side. Unlike the US in Vietnam, who were up against a small Asian country, not an extremely large military machine with most of the resources of mainland Europe available. Without America, I doubt that the UK would have won, but to suggest we did nothing the whole time while the Americans did all the work, is quite simply stupid. Even Hitler wanted a truce at first, rather than take us on. Now can we stop this stupid bickering and get back to the topic (yes I know a Brit started it all - thanks mate).
  • You sick, sick man.........
  • Most of the USA by the looks of things.
  • I'd like to see the rendering engine of mozilla modularized to where you could build your own interface. How cool would it be to have a skinable/themable browser that supports all the latest standards?

    NH
  • I'm thinking sawmill [sourceforge.net] as it has a plethora of themes that change based on the GTK theme, it has converted a significant number of former E users, and John Harper is a coding God.

    Is there another WM that someone else finds viable?

  • Well I think the big difference would be that it would be a component, not running all the time and doing stupid things like IE does in windoze. Rather than using the web browser to do things that don't require a web browser, it could be used when it was needed, and wouldn't be adding unwanted bloat. Micro$oft may have had some good ideas about some things, they just didn't care to implement them right.
  • Hmm, then again, we could bring up a war between England and a certain small group of ragtag guerillas occupying a few colonies on the eastern mainland of the US, circa 1776 or so. :>

    - Jeff A. Campbell
    - VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])
  • For a great desktop with even greater promise. With applets, multiple pager windows and the ability to put in a good windows maneger I find it even better than the winXX one allready, which isn't bad at all.
    I can't wait to get my hands on the next version, so keep up the good work!

    Now someone please moderate those trolls down and lets have a civilized discussion
  • Your wish has already been answered. Mozilla is about as modular as it gets. The rendering engine can be made completely seperate from the interface, making it usable in other programs. As it is now everthing in the interface IS skinable. All the buttons, scrollbars, etc., can be changed by their skinning language based on XML, called XUL. So expect to see lots of mozilla skins in the future. The next step after that will probably be alternative interfaces to mozilla, such as a GTK interface, or maybe a more advanced skinable interface, giving you the ability to make skins like those on some of the cooler mp3 players, or maybe something even crazier.
  • Vietnam, or have you forgotten. Hitler signed a treaty, because he didn't want to go up against the whole British Empire. It was Britain who declared war on Germany due to the invasion of Poland, that Hitler had promised not to do. I don't see what the USSR or China have to do with anything, as far as I know you haven't fought a war with either of them.
  • Actually.... KDE is GPL. It's QT that isn't GPL.
    treke
  • Fair point, I'm just annoyed by clueless statements like Britain did badly in WWII, when they were the only country in Europe to successfully hold off the Germans.

  • Sawmill isn't there yet. (Score:3)

    by slothbait ( 2922 ) on Saturday February 26, 2000 @03:06PM (#1243757)
    I've played with Sawmill some lately. There are some things about it that I rather like. Its nicely themeable without feeling Over The Top like Enlightenment does. Plus, the flexibility of using LISP to define commands seems promising.

    But Sawmill is still young, and not as stable as one would like a default to be. Further, it is *slow*. On my box, Window Maker beats it into the ground, and I've never thought of WM as "light weight". Perhaps this is a direct result of the above mentioned LISP scripting. I'm not sure. I hope that the John Harper can speed up the code some in later versions. If it ran faster on modest hardware (another requirement of a default WM, IMHO), I'd play with it a lot more.

    I'll definately be keeping an eye on Sawmill, though...

    --Lenny
  • You could try to become a prison guard :-)

  • GNOME Flaming (Score:4)

    by BLarg! ( 129425 ) on Saturday February 26, 2000 @03:16PM (#1243769)
    I feel for some reason compelled to address this issue, although I don't know why because it won't change anything, but oh well.

    I don't understand why it is that everytime there is a post on Gnome or a post on Kde that the opposite group of zealots decides to reply to the post with their trolling and flames and whatever. What doesn't make sense is that, the reason why most of us switched to Linux (either permanently, or for use in conjunction with Windows) is because Linux gave us a lot more freedom with what we can do with our software. As of now, there exists two very good desktop environments, Gnome and Kde. Each has its pros and cons, its advantages and its problems. But since the choice is up to the user as which to use (especially since every distribution I know of distributes both Gnome and Kde), why argue over it? Personal preference isn't that big of a deal. Just because user X uses Gnome doesn't mean that you can't use Kde. And no amount of flaming will somehow stop development on one of the environments, and increase development on the other. I think it is good thing that we are presented with a choice as to which desktop to run (or none at all). This is the best competition we can get in the free software world, which is a good thing.

    Of course, the other issue is that, if there is so much flaming on Gnome and Kde, why is it that people never argue over Enlightenment or Sawmill, or AfterStep and Window Maker? I'm not encouraging this, but I think that these flame sessions are getting quite childish.

    To get on topic, I'm very excited with the future of Gnome and I think that with the pending 1.2, 1.4, and 2.0 releases we shall see something that will compete very nicely with Kde 2.0.

    -- BLarg!
  • Hmm.. you find Sawmill SLOW? I use sawmill because it was the fastest pixmap themeable wm I've used. I even thought it was faster than the non-pixmap-theme blackbox. Blackbox looks nice even w/o them though... I think sawmill would a perfect match with gnome. I've only ONCE had sawmill crash on me, and that was a good while ago with an older version.

    Ian Zink
  • I have a general question, and then some personal observations.

    First, isn't the religious reason for Gnome the fact that QT is not GPL, and KDE needs QT? Maybe I fundamentally misunderstand the situation, but couldn't the effort that created Gnome have created a GPL work-alike to QT? In fact, as I recall, the KDE developers could not even VIEW the QT source when KDE was originally written, so mimicking the documented interface and functionality of QT should have been trivial (from a design standpoint. I am not trying to minimize the amount of work involved.)

    This is not a troll. I intend this as a serious question. I am sure that there is a perfectly valid answer, that is why I am asking.

    With the above aside:

    In my personal experience KDE is slow on a slow system, and fast on a fast system. On the other hand, Gnome is S-L-O-W on a slow system, and slow on a fast system. As a matter of taste, I prefer KDE's less "frilly" appearance, and find it nice to use. Gnome is not bad, but I don't see what the performance penalty is buying me.

    The general response to this question is "Gnome is not slow for me." If this is true for you, perhaps you have some configuration hints you can share. I don't have any benchmarks to back up my impression that Gnome is (considerably) slower than KDE on the same hardware, but a lot of people agree that it is a dog, and I don't think that it is just a conspiracy to get people on a slippery slope of using non-free (lebre) software (in this case QT.)

    The short version: Why should I run Gnome instead of KDE, assuming that I don't care about QT licensing quibbles? What do I gain for the (possibly only perceived) poor performance of Gnome.

    (To disclaim again, I am posting these questions in good faith.)

    -Peter
  • Or, if you're in South Park, Colorado (US, of course) there are two seasons, Winter and July...

    Hey! I'm havin a god damned honerable distinction over here.

  • I've never had a problem w/ Sawmill being slow: the only time I would call it that is middle-button responsiveness can SOMETIMES be noticeably painful (ie, Click - one - two - three - oh, there it is). There is also a slight delay in alt-tabbing through windows. However, the places to me that it counts - moving, resizing, flipping between virtual desktops - its never been slow for me at all.

  • Gnome Office (Score:3)

    by Skeezix ( 14602 ) <jamin@pubcrawler.org> on Saturday February 26, 2000 @03:50PM (#1243783) Homepage
    Does anyone have any insight into how Gnome Office [gnome.org] fits into the picture? Will this be released along with the 2.0 release of Gnome? I realize that the various components of the office suite are available now, but they currently do not integrate very well. Bonobo [gnome.org] and Gnome Print [levien.com] are both key technologies to the office suite, but neither have yet been released as part of the 1.X development platform. Aside from Gnumeric [gnome.org], which nicely demonstrates these technologies, have the other elements of the Office suite made strides to integrate?

    I'd also like to encourage the Gnome hackers to seriously consider working on an IDE similar to KDevlop [kdevelop.org]. That is simply an amazing piece of work. You have all the documentation and tools necessary to rapidly create KDE applications...and it's very easy to use and intuitive. I know that Gnome has Glade [pn.org] and gIDE [pn.org] and there has been talk of integrating the two, but somehow that doesn't seem like the answer. I think Glade should be integrated into an IDE, but gIDE is no KDevelop, no offense to the author(s). A very functional IDE that even new hackers could use, would go a long way to getting further involvment int the gnome project.
    ----

  • Is there anything odd with your configuration? Was there something in particular you found slow?

    Because I personally haven't found a pixmap themeable window manager that has come close to sawmill in terms of speed and definitely not one that has come close in terms of configurability. This is also what I hear from most people who have used or do use it.

    You might want to send an email to the mailing list if you find one thing or another particularly slow or if you have a problem with the implementation of somehting in particular.

  • The people that worked on Harmony (some left when Qt2's QPL was blessed to work on KDE) couldn't look at the Qt1 source since they were mimicking it. As for KDE, there isn't any contamination issue looking at Qt's source. Many bugs are found in Qt by the core KDE developers. Their heavy pounding on it has made it better.

    But more importantly, KDE is hated for (1) it's use of Qt and that whole license stuff, (2) it's use of C++, seen as the most evil language you can write in, and most importantly (3) it's target of new users who were moving from Windows, aka newbies.

    (1) has become moot with the free license now, but many people haven't gotten the message and will just hate Qt/Troll Tech forever. As for (2), C is a horrible language to mock objects like Gtk+ does. Some complain about the use of moc, preparsing the headers. I would complain just as much at Gtk's use of mock-inheritance and all. C++ works and it's a heck of a lot easier to program in for something like this. ;) Finally, for (3), well there's little you can do to change the mind of those that just want Linux to remain for the brightest among us.
  • Come now, at least the AC before you was intelligent enough to give examples for his argument (take any news piece from Miguel in the early days). You, are much more the troll in this thread.
  • The reason the middle-button menu takes so long is that it is a seperate executable. There was a message on the mailing list (archived at http://inanna.starseed.com/sawmill/ [starseed.com]) yesterday or today. I believe there is a setting where you can make it so you only experience this once per session.

  • Don't forget about the Korean War. In Vietnam, the N. Vietnamese were certainly being supplied by China and the USSR. In Korea, China was fighting with the North Koreas against the US and its allies.

    Hitler signed a treaty to get Britain off his back. His main goal was to grab Central & Eastern Europe and the USSR. Don't forget, the Nazis were extremely anti-Communist and Russia suffered the most casualties of any nation involved in WWII. The Russian body count makes the Jewish Holocost look like a picnic. This was a factor for them to create the eastern bloc as a buffer between it and the West.

    Also, just because Britain was an island, didn't mean that their land forces weren't involved. Does North Africa and Indonesia ring a bell to anyone? The Brits were fighting Germany, Italy, and Japan in those areas in addition to naval warfare in the Atlantic & Pacific and air combat over Britain itself.

    Other than Singapore, I would say they did very well. The RAF defense of Britain and the British crypto work kept them alive. Georing's and Hitler's screw ups didn't hurt either (the Luftwaffe chief didn't think radar was important and his switch from attacking RAF bases to bombing London at night actually helped the RAF and solidified morale. Hitler's insistence of making the Me-262 a fighter bomber delayed its entry into service by about a year. Having a jet fighter would have certainly helped them in defending against the Allied bomber raids.).

  • The one thing I would love to see come out (either as part of a Gnome Office release or on its own) is AbiWord. I like the 0.x releases of it, but it isn't just up to par yet with the other available choices. I agree that Gnome does need a solid Gtk+ based IDE, something that I've been looking for a while and (well other then gIDE) doesn't exist. We still have to keep in mind yet that Gnome isn't completely done yet (in terms of Gnome itself and outside Gnome applications). The first stable release was almost a year ago (correct me if I'm wrong), and since then only two apps do I know of really seem stable, Gimp and Gnumeric. Of course, Gimp predates Gnome and it is why Gtk+ was spawned. Hopefully with the release of Gnome 2.0 later this year, we will a slew of nice applications to accompany it.

    -- BLarg!

  • One of my favorite channels on Dish Network is the BBC. I love it. Much better than the us networks

  • I haven't used KDE, and I'm not interested in getting you to switch at the moment. However, I am curious why Gnome is so slow for you, just because it doesn't seem that bad to me :-) There are two big things that can make Gnome look slow:

    -> Pixmap themes. Pixmap themes suck. In particular, they suck memory. Big-time. Evidently imlib or the GTK+ pixmap engine (one or the other) leaks like a sieve, and it's even worse than a memory leak, because what it leaked is X pixmaps. This means that your X server memory usage has a tendency to grow without bound if you use pixmap themes heavily. Also, pixmap themes get redrawn way too many times (this is really a problem for GTK+ in general I think, but particularly painful when using a pixmap theme), and are very very slow in general.

    -> gmc. This is probably the most useful thing about Gnome, especially for newbies. It would be nice, therefore, if it wasn't a horrible hack of porting a serial, text-based interface into a graphical, asynchronous environment. This is a large part (IMO) of why everyone wants Nautilus. gmc is not only unstable, buggy, and prone to randomly grabbing the X server and not letting go (last I checked), but it `feels' very slow. This is due to the fact that it's designed on a one-operation-at-a-time basis, so even the UI (redrawing windows, responding to clicks, etc) gets short shrift while it's running.

    I use the ThinIce GTK+ theme and get decent performance (I also don't use gmc, and mainly stick the panel on the side of the screen for the CD player, pager, clock, and ICQ client)

    Daniel
  • I am not a Gnome user (yet), but I have to admit that the website rocks. It's an impressive one-stop source for all kinds of Gnome related projects, including a Slashdot-like discussion area and an awesome web interface to the 'live' CVS tree that provides hyperlinked cross references inside the source files!

    It's a good model to follow, and other open source projects should definitely take note.

  • Re:Let's have the KDE v. Gnome debate one more tim (Score:3)

    by drew ( 2081 ) on Saturday February 26, 2000 @04:25PM (#1243802) Homepage
    having used both to varying degrees, you should use gnome(kde) if you have an aesthetic or functional preference of gnome(kde) over kde(gnome).

    no other reason. (assuming, as you said, that you don't get into the whole license issue) both of them do more or less the same thing, although each has little strengths that the other lacks. for example, i prefer the gnoe panel to the kde panel, but i refuse to use the gnome filemanager. kfm on the otherhand make a good basic file/web browser when i don't need javascript or https. so i use the gnome panel with kfm. or sometimes i get sick of one or both of them and go back to using a plain vanilla windowmanager (if you can call enlightenment plain) until the next version comes out. so if youve tried both, and decide that one works better for you, stick to that one. but if you have the time, you should still check out new releases form "the other side" every now and then. i gave up on the gnome panel a long time ago for example, but now with their "tasty yellow banana" release, i decided to tried it out again and was very impressed.
  • USSR or China [...], as far as I know you haven't fought a war with either of them

    Except for the fifty years of cold war, including the space race. In the end, USSR was done in by a movie actor and a pope, go figure.

  • Fair point, I'm just annoyed by clueless statements like Britain did badly in WWII, when they were the only country in Europe to successfully hold off the Germans.

    You forget that a huge portion of Germany's resources were going into its war with Russia during most of the war. Russia suffered more casaulties than any other nation in WWII. Germany was too busy fighting the Communists to commit to an invasion of Great Britain.

  • Rasterman defumigation? (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 26, 2000 @04:36PM (#1243806)
    Has anyone else noticed that Gnome(Red Hat) has defumigated themselves of everything that Rasterman had touched?

    • Imlib replaced by gdk-pixbuf
    • esound no longer a requirement
    • enlightenment replaced with Sawmill
    • anything else I missed?

    Coincidence?
    Raster might create beautiful innovative eye candy but I've looked at his code and it exactly matches what others have said, "what a mess". Well Raster is a rock star of the Linux world, but are Open Source rockstars a good thing? Hmmm, what is VA going to do when Enlightenment is not included on the next release of RedHat? That will be a sticky situation.
  • Thanks for clarifying the licence thing. I had heard that the QT toolkit had it's own restrictive licence, assumed that KDE had that licence also. Anyways, i did not intend to spread the flame war, i should have posted that comment as a question rather than assuming.

  • Re:Gnome Office (Score:3)

    by Romen ( 10819 ) on Saturday February 26, 2000 @05:04PM (#1243816) Homepage
    As one of the many AbiWord developers, I feel called upon to discuss the apparent misconception that AbiWord is part of the Gnome Office. Currently, the Gnome Office consists of Gnumeric, which has been developed by the Gnome team, and additional applictions developed by outsiders, such as AbiWord. AbiWord is NOT just a Gnome, or even just a Linux, application. We run on Win32, BeOS, QNX and soon Macintosh. These are not addon ports, the are integral parts of what AbiWord is. If you have specific concerns with AbiWord, we would appreciate hearing from you. We realize that all is not yet perfect, but we think that we do what we do well.
    Sam TH
  • Yes, there is a way to keep this to once per login:

    (setq menu-program-stays-running) in ~/.sawmillrc

    You should also be able to add (menu-start-process) to .sawmillrc to make the menu process start in the background as soon as Sawmill starts. Viva la memory waste! :)

    Daniel
  • >The short version: Why should I run Gnome instead of KDE...?

    OTOH, why should I run either? I, for one, love WindowMaker, with the Dock and it's right-click menu, plus xterm. for the record, i have tried Gnome, and found it annoying that i had to run Enlightenment, which i found even more annoying. i also tried KDE, but found it much too windows - like.

  • I have a general question, and then some personal observations.

    I'll try to help.

    First, isn't the religious reason for Gnome the fact that QT is not GPL, and KDE needs QT?

    Yes. But most Gnome developers won't even discus that these days.

    Maybe I fundamentally misunderstand the situation, but couldn't the effort that created Gnome have created a GPL work-alike to QT?

    Yeah. That's what team KDE said. In fact there was an attempt to do just that in a project called "Harmony". As soon as Troll Tech announced that QT-2.0 would be under an OSS / Free Software license called QPL [troll.no] the developers on that project quit and went to work on KDE.

    In fact, as I recall, the KDE developers could not even VIEW the QT source when KDE was originally written,

    This is incorrect. They could view the QT source all they wanted but they couldn't distribute modifications.

    Gnome is not bad, but I don't see what the performance penalty is buying me.

    A desktop interface is very much a matter of preference. There are people out there who prefer FVWM2 for reasons other than performance. Try them all and use whatever you like. There is no need to worry about benefits that don't affect you.

    The general response to this question is "Gnome is not slow for me." If this is true for you, perhaps you have some configuration hints you can share.

    Get a faster machine. After you get a really fast box there really isn't any need to worry about the performance of the desktop.

    The short version: Why should I run Gnome instead of KDE, assuming that I don't care about QT licensing quibbles?

    Why not just use whatever works for you ? If Gnome doesn't like your machine or the way you configure it so just use KDE and stop fretting. It's not like the KDE desktop will stop you from using the Gnome apps or vise versa.

    What do I gain for the (possibly only perceived) poor performance of Gnome.

    At the very least Gnome has a far better FreeCell program. Better even than the Windows 9x version.

    (To disclaim again, I am posting these questions in good faith.)

    That won't stop them from moderating us both into oblivion. :)

  • This hardly induces thoughts of rockage... any script kiddie could write something to do this in a matter of minutes. Maybe when I was 12 I would have thought this was cool. Then again when I was 12 I thought I was a l331 h@x0r d00d. Now I realize I am just a nominal linux user whose only code is pretty much replicating already well documented numerical recipes.


    Tell a man that there are 400 Billion stars and he'll believe you

  • The future of *nix Desktops (Score:3)

    by nitehorse ( 58425 ) <clee@c133.org> on Saturday February 26, 2000 @05:36PM (#1243824)
    This is good. TINAFB (this is not a flame but) does it seem like GNOME is playing "catchup" with KDE in more than one way? They've been left behind with the release versions, they've had to come up with their own implementation of a COM-like mechanism, and they don't have an integrated office suite or a web browser. (Clarification: GNOME Office is not *yet* integrated, from what I can tell.) What exactly will they offer that you can't get with the other desktop?

    I'm actually curious about this- Gnumeric is awesome, and I could probably never convince anybody who uses windows/excel currently to even *try* linux without it- but what do they offer that you can't get with KDE? What's the added value? How would you sell GNOME to your manager, especially if he's read some article waxing poetic about KDE?

  • &gt (setq menu-program-stays-running) in~/.sawmillrc

    That should be

    (setq menu-program-stays-running t)

  • I knew that AbiWord wasn't being developed by the Gnome team, but I assume that it is being included in Gnome Office. It did, however, slip me for a moment that it has multiple ports too. I have yet to try out the win32 version, but when it turns 1.0 and runs real nice, I'll probably run it on any NT machine I use. With what I've seen of it so far, it is looking really good so keep up the good work!

    -- BLarg!

  • Performance of GNOME (Score:3)

    by Oestergaard ( 3005 ) on Saturday February 26, 2000 @06:00PM (#1243836) Homepage
    I felt that KDE was too ``german'' in it's looks and feels (no offence meant to germans, but I'm sure some of you know what I mean). So I preferred GNOME over KDE. However, GNOME was slow. Especially when switching desktops, I would have to wait for -too long- to get a netscape away and six terminals where I wanted them.

    So I decided to just skip the desktop race, and go with enlightenment, straight, mean and lean. Much to my surprise, this didn't change the situation... After a little wondering, I started out on a new track.

    Now, with GNOME and icewm as my window-manager, I have a lean and fairly mean desktop system going, and it's *MUCH* faster at desktop switching than enlightenment ever was.

    Clue: If GNOME is too slow for you, try replacing the default window manager. Try icewm (has an *ugly* default theme, but has others which are nice and readily available from T.O.). Or try sawmill (haven't done that myself - yet).

    For historical reasons, enlightenment is the default window manger in the GNOME releases done by redhat and others. This is changing. Enlightenment is - hands down - the most artistical window manager I've ever seen and used. But there's just (IMO) too much of artistical sophistication instead of lean code in that one, to perform well on ``old'' systems (my dual PPro with a Matrox I for example).

    GNOME with icewm rocks. It seems faster on FreeBSD 3.4 than on Linux 2.2 though, but on the other hand, Linux wins when it gets to disk I/O etc. on the day-to-day workloads. GNOME is not slow in a sane configuration, it's just slow in it's default configuration.
  • gmc IIRC is going to be re-written from scratch (or a written from scratch file manager substituted for it)
  • Esound isn't a requirement, as far as I know, because as more pci sound cards come out with drivers that allow multiple '/dev/dsp's to be used, there really isn't a reason for it.

    Enlightenment is being replaced with Sawmill because Sawmill is simpler in terms of features (many of Enlightenment's are included in Gnome) and seems to have a much simpler but powerful configuration system. Although my understanding is Enlightenment was never a part of Gnome. I just thought that Linux distributions always included it as the default gnome window manager.

    The only thing is why replace Imlib with gdk-pixbuf? I thought that Imlib did its job well. Does anyone know why they decided to do this?

    -- BLarg!
  • Of course, the other issue is that, if there is so much flaming on Gnome and Kde, why is it that people never argue over Enlightenment or Sawmill, or AfterStep and Window Maker? I'm not encouraging this, but I think that these flame sessions are getting quite childish.

    My guess is that KDE and GNOME both aspire to be more than just window managers. They want to be your desktop environment. GNOME and KDE position themselves as free replacements to CDE and such. KDE and GNOME have also been hyped more than projects like Windowmaker (as far as I can tell). Supposedly, these two projects are what are going to bring people over from Windows. Sure.

    Mankind has always dreamed of destroying the sun.

  • these GTK+ Pixmap theme / flickering / sluggishness issues are likely to be fixed with gdk-pixbuf and gtk 1.3 (which is only in CVS at the moment).

    These are not GNOME issues per se, but because of what it relies on.

    About gmc, I think most everyone agrees with you, Nautilus is GNOME's messiah.
  • > gmc IIRC is going to be re-written from scratch (or a written from scratch file manager substituted for it)

    This is Nautilus [eazel.com] -- the eazel-written GNOME 2.0 Filemanager/Desktop.

  • Just as a side note: KDE and Gnome are slower than MICROS~1 Windows on the same computer, but that is not necessarily the fault of either of these two libraries. The XWindows protocol is incredibly powerful but has a huge amount of overhead.

    When the next version of XFree86 comes out later the year, I believe the performance difference will be night and day. Much of the XWindows overhead is supposed to vanish for localhost displays.

    But if I am wrong, I have found that some of the crazy Gnome skins did trash my system resources beyond usability. But that is avoidable.

    Ozwald
  • I completely agree, the desktop issue isn't an either-or dillema. GNOME and KDE (especially with a window manager that supports both -> Enlightenment) work well together. GNOME has a much nicer panel (and applets) than KDE, but KDE has more well-developed applications. So, use both. It can be a very simple, very inclusive desktop.

  • Re:Rasterman defumigation? (Score:5)

    by AT ( 21754 ) on Saturday February 26, 2000 @06:11PM (#1243847)
    Enlightenment is still the default window manager in the Redhat 6.2 beta. I'm sure that if it is retired as the default, it will still be part of the distribution for a long time to come.

    Despite the fact it has grotty code, it pretty much revived the whole window manager scene and showed people X could look nice. Widget set themes either directly or indirectly owe their existance to E and Raster. I remember 1995 when fvwm and Xaw were king, and I thank Raster for getting us past that.

    That said, imlib was fundamentally flawed something had to be done. It probably could have been fixed, but the GNOME developers chose to reimplement the functionality. Reimplementation is not always bad -- lessons learned the first time can be fixed. From what I've heard, esound has (or had) some pretty serious problems; perhaps they are being worked on, or replaced.

    Remember VA Linux makes its money selling hardware for Linux. Anything that makes Linux better is good for VA; whether it is Raster's code or someone elses doesn't matter. They probably pay Raster to do what he has done: trailblaze some interesting ideas that make Linux more appealing, visually or otherwise.
  • Gnome isn't the slow one, E is. E just tries to do stuff that it doesn't need to do. It's a filemanager for god's sake, why does it need a file manager? Anyway, sawmill is lean without sacrificing extensibility.
  • You may run WindowMaker with GNOME, it works almost perfectly, except WindowMaker doesn't have session management (or at least doesn't work with GNOME'S), therefore it gets screwy. If you plan to try GNOME again, try sawmill [sourceforge.net] with it.

  • Re:Let's have the KDE v. Gnome debate one more tim (Score:3)

    by adraken ( 8869 ) on Saturday February 26, 2000 @06:20PM (#1243855)
    *insert Daniel's comments here as to why GNOME seems slow* In addition to this is the fact that Enlightenment is currently the default Window Manager for GNOME. This will change to sawmill [sourceforge.net] soon because it is so fast and it integrates so well with GNOME (it stays out of the way when it should). (Sawmill author is even going to GUADEC -- GNOME Conference in Paris)
  • Reasons: Using seasons instead of months increases the grace period for releases and thus relieves any user-inflicted pressure upon the development team to shoot for a specific month. (you get a 3 month period to shoot for instead of 1). Using seasons instead of Q1 2000, Q2 2000, etc. makes you/the project look like less of a suit-ish person/project. People can perceive things off of the tiniest off hand remark or quirk like using business-like quarters instead of seasons or something. Plus, remember October GNOME? Yes, they did use a month to denote a release date in that case.
  • > The next step after that will probably be alternative interfaces to mozilla, such as a GTK interface

    In fact, when you compile mozilla, it builds a GtkMozilla widget, so that you can link to this library and use the mozilla rendering engine as a widget, very cool. (somewhat like how Internet Explorer can be used as an ActiveX control in Windows (case in point: Winamp's minibrowser))

  • > The only thing is why replace Imlib with gdk-pixbuf? I thought that Imlib did its job well. Does anyone know why they decided to do this?

    (forgive me if this is a repeat, something bad happened and I'm not sure if it was posted)

    imlib was not designed for the purposes which gnome delegated it for, it provided suboptimal performance and had some memory leak problems... (which are now fixed, but nevertheless, injured the reputation of GNOME). gdk-pixbuf is being designed by GNOME people for taks which are important to running gnome (quick and light loading/displaying of small pixmaps with antialiasing and alpha transparency).

  • Any idea when 1.4 (stable version, 1.3 is unstable) will be out? I tried the CVS code recently and it seemed a long way from releasable -- unstable, test program segfaulting like mad, etc..

    Daniel
  • why replace Imlib with gdk-pixbuf?

    There were problems with imlib's memory management, it could only render to a X Pixmap and not a Drawable, the API for transformations on an image was limited and not extensible. I believe imlib also had problems with alpha blending.

  • flaming overestimated (Score:5)

    by mattdm ( 1931 ) on Saturday February 26, 2000 @06:52PM (#1243865) Homepage
    There was a post like this last time this discussion came up, and I noticed the same thing: lots of comments on "oh no, look at the flamewar that always explodes when this comes up", and very few actual flames. (And, thanks to the moderation system, any that do happen are relegated to the bottom of the heap.)

    So, I'd like to propose that next time there's a Gnome or KDE article, people just skip commenting on the theoretical but largely imaginary flamewar.

    --

  • Oops. Correct.

    Daniel
  • Wow, I can't believe the activity on this thread!

    Lots of interesting info. I have run E without Gnome, and I must admit it is quite pretty, but it is not shy about consuming resources.

    I would also like to mention that there was a lot of "you should do this or that." I have used several window managers, and I am not a sycophant who can't remember life before "desktops" (i.e. KDE and Gnome, as differentiated from WMs like AfterStep or Xfce (I kind of dig Xfce, even though I am not a big fan of Slowlaris, but I digress.)) My intent was to start a bit of a dialogue, and get a clearer idea of what other people think of these two projects.

    -Peter
  • GNOME seems like it is playing catchup because the teams did not work in the same track. KDE quickly finished their panel to look like CDE, finished. GNOME refined and tweaked it so (by now) it 1) looks beautiful 2) acts like a next-generation Dock.

    With the extra time, KDE developers developed their KOffice suite. GNOME's core developers (actually, mostly Miguel) developed Gnumeric (very Excel-like) as a sample application for others to mimic and integrate other Office apps.

    Gnumeric is very Excel-like for a good reason: like-it-or-not, businesses nowadays rely on Excel/Word/Powerpoint. If you provide a good and similar alternative on Linux/*BSD, it is more likely that they will switch.

    This sample app -> mimic approach didn't work quite how it was expected. Gnumeric is hailed, but there are no other major apps (word processor, presentation creator, personal information manager) that mimic its level of functionality and integration with GNOME. (AbiWord for GNOME is pretty GNOME-like, but it doesn't integrate like Gnumeric does.) This is why Miguel and Nat created Helix Code [helixcode.com]. While they will still pretty much control the core libraries and such, they will focus on developing these other applications. They are currently working on Evolution (couldn't find an URL at the moment), an extensive personal information manager which will combine the functions of Balsa, GnomeCard, GnomePilot and others into one Outlook-like functional product. Their main goal is to develop desktop apps for GNOME.

    To finally answer your question, I'm not even sure that GNOME is ready for the business environment yet, but don't dismiss it as a "wannabe" or "johnny-come-lately". GNOME's core architecture seems to have many advantages over KDE, so we'll see what comes down the pipe.

  • Oh yeah, there isn't enough closed applications out there already. We need more, lots more. I think you've changed me. Anything that promotes this damned "Free Software" idea is bunk! We need the freedom to not share with the community, to build upon all these years of source code without giving a damned thing back! This is the only true way now. Damn the QPL! Damn the GPL! Long live the new General Private License, "You have no right to do anything with this software. Do not touch it. Do not do nothing to it. If you are found to violate any terms of this license, you will be required to not release any source code. Good day, sir."
  • Get a faster machine. After you get a really fast box there really isn't any need to worry about the performance of the desktop. Bzzt, unacceptable. Try again. I know the last person who said this got moderated down to zero, but I totally agree: if one (x) is slower on your machine than another (x), then it's the (x)'s fault, not your machine's fault. Think third world, think poor college student. Not everyone can just wait until they have enough money to buy another computer. Most people have to deal with what they have right now for at least a few years. If you're gonna take the attitude "well if your machine can't handle our desktop, then we don't want you," then you're just driving that user into Microsoft's welcoming arms.
  • ...had some memory leak problems... (which are now fixed, but nevertheless, injured the reputation of GNOME)...

    Still has, actually. There are serious flaws in imlib's image caching, but you can't turn that off without making the pixmap theme even slower...

    --
    Ian Peters

  • If only this were flamebait (Score:3)

    by rambone ( 135825 ) on Saturday February 26, 2000 @08:51PM (#1243894)
    Linux interfaces so far have yet to demonstrate much in the way of innovation.

    The developers of Eazel claim their product will be "revolutionary". Currently it looks like Midnight Commander++ - certainly nothing to get worked up over.

    Expect to see Aqua ripoffs on linux by 2003.

  • Speeding up GNOME: Tips (Score:5)

    by ajs ( 35943 ) <[ajs] [at] [ajs.com]> on Saturday February 26, 2000 @10:00PM (#1243903) Homepage Journal
    GNOME has several pieces, and each can be approached seperately. First, the window manager. GNOME is window manager independant, so if you don't have a kick-ass system with at least 128 MB of RAM, I suggest ditching enlightenment. Go with sawmill or icewm or one of the other WMs.

    Next comes widget themes for Gtk+. Keep in mind that themes that have pixmaps for every widget take up a LOT of memory. The flat-colored themes are the least expensive, but least visually apealing. Try looking at the various theme entries on themes.org and note the sizes. Pick a list of your favorite themes and use the one with the smallest size (the size of the theme is not a perfect guage, but it's a good start).

    If GNOME still seems slow try these tips:
    • Don't use transparent windows, and if you must, don't use shaded transparency
    • Exit netscape if you're not using it. It's a pig.
    • Don't run GNOME and KDE apps at the same time. They both have huge libraries.
    • Grab the source for glib, gtk+ and gnome-libs and re-compile with "-O2 -finline-functions -mxyz" where xyz is your platform (e.g. "pentiumpro"). The GNOME coding standards require lots of little functions, so the "-finline-functions" parameter will really help.
    Hope this helps!
  • Removing the esound requirement is definitely a good thing - removes the requirement to install esound (and everything it depends on, such as libaudiofile) on computers that don't have soundcards.

    Window managers are still the user's choice. Anyone who prefers enlightenment can use it.

  • But the biggest reason we prevailed in the cold-war is that the inexorable dialectic of corruption undid the ideological trappings of Leninism from around their regimes and revelaed them as modern day Pharoahs.And nobody really likes slaving and dying for Pharoah.

    No, people enjoy slaving and dying for President, Congress and Coca Cola-Microsoft-Ford-Monsanto-Walmart. Please, cut on the propaganda language, and talk about the facts.

  • Both have their good sides.
    IMO it isn't important which you run - there's no
    problem with running GNOME applications inside KDE
    and vice versa, so you can just pick the best of
    both worlds.
    With Qt 2.*, the licensing is no longer much of an
    issue (and even with Qt 1, you could have a look at its source, just not re-use it or add your own
    modifications).
    My personal preference is KDE simply because GTK's API is (IMO) painful for programmers (I'm sure many of the GNOME developers will disagree with me here though) because of its attempt to simulate an
    OO-style API in a language that simply wasn't
    designed for this sort of stuff - causing, among other things, oddities like stupid bugs (such as an attempt to add a listbox item to a pushbutton) to compile without problems.

  • Re:Fall = Autumn = Spring (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well pardon me but I guess I don't do much in the financial sector or business but when do the various quarters occur?

    Not sure what doing much in finance has to do with anything, but just to help you out..

    Right, we normally divide the year into 12 months, these are January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December. The number of days in each varies a little from month to month which may make things a little complicated for you, I'm really sorry about that, just check a calendar if you're unsure. Okay, so as there are 12 months in a year and we want to get quarters (danger, math approaching) we divide them up into 4 groups each of 3 months. The first quarter (pay attention here, this is the bit you wanted to get to) runs from January to March, the second quarter runs from April to June, the third quarter runs from July to September and the fourth quarter runs from October to December.

    Now, what may be confusing you is that if someone is talking about a project running from or reporting to certain dates, or a company with a certain year end, or for example a rent agreement with quarters running to particular dates then they're likely to refer to quarters in terms of those dates (I know this is SO confusing) so if your rent is paid quarterly and your first payment date is in September, they may call that the first quarter's rent even though it isn't the January to March bit! When talked about in isolation though, e.g. a press release saying "we plan to ship this product in first quarter 2001" go with the January-March, April-June, July-September, October-December thing.

    You may want to print this out for future reference, I tried to avoid long words but a few may have crept in :(

    HTH
  • Duh, that's what he just said more or less.

    KDE is a whole desktop environment INCLUDING a window manager. Thus, it's more than just a Window manager.

    GNOME is also a desktop environment and currently lacks a window manager (people generally use Enlightment or Window Maker I think) but it will soon have one of it's own. Either way, you can say it's more than just a window manager.

    Anyway, the issue as to which platform is best is completely moot - both environments are only as cool as the applications written for them. I don't have much experience with GNOME apps, but I feel justified in saying that many of the applications written for KDE are total crap and seem to have been written by kids without any sense of the importance of finishing anything. The offending apps are mainly GUI with fairly little functionality behind them, and come with poor or no documentation at all.

    Maybe QT makes things too easy. Judging by the above characteristics, we seem to be looking at the OSS equivalent of a generation of self-taught VB programmers here (shudder).

    Don't try to use KDE in a business environment or you'll probably get burned. I cite as particular hazards: Netscape's extra propensity to crash under KDE, Kmail's lack of IMAP support and KOrganizer's general bugginess and half-hearted implementation of a "to-do" list.


    Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
    Thought exists only as an abstraction
  • Yes, I might. Let me look at it again. They say Gnome 2.0 will be based on GTK+ 1.4. Fine. They also say Gnome 2.0 will release 'around fall 2000'. Ok. So you *could* infer that GTK+ 1.4 will be released around fall 2000

    However, the Gnome folks don't speak for the GTK+ folks, and the GTK+ 1.4 release could be scheduled for any time prior to or after the Gnome 2.0 release, which is already pointed at a rather vague target. I'd like to hear from someone who knows something about GTK+ developement when I can start using the new version :)

    Daniel

  • It is ridiculous to say there is no difference between USSR and USA. Even if the commoner is slave in both, at least the USA has `bread and circuses.'

    As a person, who (as opposed to most of Anonymous Cowards here) lived in both countries, I can testify that in "bread and circuses" both countries were approximately worth each other, yet in both propaganda shown the other side as something between Roman Empire, Hell (christian version) and Moon surface.

  • Actually, there was a thread on debian-devel the other day that indicated that the memory (actually, X pixmap) leaking may not, in fact, be fixed. People were reporting that their X server was using over a hundred megabytes of memory if left running overnight; the only commonality was that they were running Gnome and using various imlib-based things (pixmap themes, transparent Eterms, etc)

    This is actually worse than your average memory leak, as the only way to recover the memory is to restart X.

    Daniel
  • If I could I'd clean up every piece of messy code I could get my hands on. Heck, I'd rewrite the entire system from scratch.

    The fact is, though, that I do not have an infinite amount of time in which to work, and that therefore, I rely on other people to fix things I don't have time to get to. Does this make sense? I'm not sure it makes sense to me :)

    In any event, E is way too broken on a fundamental level to be fixed. I switched to Sawmill and never looked back; I predict that E will either eventually become an entire operating system (possibly even incorporating a kernel :) ) -- the logical extension of its current development path -- or collapse under its own weight. Or possibly both.

    Daniel
  • I tend to disagree on both points.
    1. is related to a C vs C++ issue, yes. One of the main problems I have with gtk (and I've programmed in both) is that it pretty much tries to do C++ stuff in C, and has to use some relatively ugly kludges to get it done.
    Yes, I know gtk-- exists, and I have tried it, and it gets nowhere near Qt/kdelibs as far as usability for the programmer is concerned (at least IMO), partially because it has to use what gtk does.

    As for 2., I know there's some redundancy and you don't get the same look and feel unless you configure it twice, but unless you're on a really slow machine, it's not that big an issue.
    Interoperability between KDE and GNOME is going to improve, not to get worse (with KDE 2.0, you can use drag and drop from a KDE application to a GNOME application and vice versa).
    KDE will use DCOP for a number of things GNOME will do with CORBA - given enough time, the other problem you mention will be solved with a DCOPCORBA bridge.
  • And when Debian defines their spec for licenses requiring that it be free for both personal and commercial use.. that sorta screws KDE over (provisions in the QPL

    Why is requiring a commercial QT license worse than the provisions in the GPL which make it illegal to use GPL software in commercial products under ANY circumstance? You would be having a fit if somebody was putting GNOME code into a commecial product. QT realizes that despite the zealots, commercial software isn't going to go away any time soon, so they might as well make money from businesses using their code.

    You have to expect a little zealotry from Debian, the call it "GNU/Linux", which seems like needless RMS ass-kissing to the non-zealot linux user community. (GNU/Debian GNU/Linux 8.2 GNU/CD 4, the entire GNU/source-tree of GNU/Emacs)

    Seriously, the fact that KDE is less buggy, compiles on the first try every time, and adheres to most of the existing X standards that GTK ignores more than makes up for the crufty QT license. Speaking of which, I have read the QPL, and it seems fine to me. The continued availability of QT is assured, despite the FUD thrown out by the GNOME crowd. If TrollTech folds or is bought out, QT reverts to the BSD license.
  • > My personal preference is KDE simply because GTK's API is (IMO) painful for programmers

    Try Gtk--, the C++ binding to gtk+. Looks very Qt-ish, except it uses template functions for signal/slot connections instead of a gross macro hack to the language.

    I use plain ol twm myself, there's something zen about having a completely blank desktop when you're not using anything.
  • I've used the GNOME panel - I like it, but in my experience (from versions .66 to 1.0.53) it's never been quite stable and it hasn't always reacted as expected- if I start Sawmill and then the panel, half of the time GNOME-pager complains that I'm not running a GNOME-compliant window manager. I like the panel's functionality- when I use GNOME, I have a vertical bar in the upper right, a horizontal bar in the lower right, and a single button Menu launcher (with the foot icon) in the lower left corner. It's great- but I run KDE2 almost all of the time now, because it offers (to me) everything that I need from a desktop.

    That doesn't mean it's perfect, but it works well enough. The pixmap themes are more stable (and leak one hell of a lot less memory) than the GTK+ equivalents, and it's relatively straightforward to convert a GTK theme to a KDE2 one. I've done so at my web page [inficad.com] and you can see that although it's not *quite* the same, it works and it looks a lot better than the default settings.

    Anyway, back to your post. Everything in Kicker, the new KDE panel for KDE2, is also an applet- and there's a nice structure and backbone provided for building your own custom applets with it. However, I like it relatively simple, so I leave well enough alone. However, I am most impressed by Konqueror [inficad.com], the new KDE file manager/everything browser. Somebody pointed out that you can coax Explorer into doing some of the things Konqi does (automatic embedding of document views, like a Word doc or a KWord doc [in konq's case]) but you can't do the frames! Once you actually see the frame action working, you'll switch back.... ; )

    Or not. But that's why choice is good, no? : )
  • I felt that KDE was too ``german'' in it's looks and feels (no offence meant to germans, but I'm sure some of you know what I mean).

    Um, care to explain it to the rest of us?!
  • My point was exactly that- technically, what are the advantages of using GNOME over using KDE, especially from a programming perspective? I don't know how many other /.'ers use the pre-alpha version of KDE2, but I'm one of the lucky few- and I can tell you, it's impressing the hell out of me.

    To start with, there is the whole idea of KParts and the embedding of parts within eachother. From what I can tell, Bonobo does equal KParts in basic functionality; but IMHO the KParts mechanism is/would be more attractive to prospective developers since it is already working/in use by two MAJOR (albeit pre-alpha) projects: Konqueror and the KOffice suite. The beauty of the KParts mechanism comes into play when you realize that you have the ability to embed a web page into a KWord document which could be embedded into a Kpresenter presentation... which could on the next slide have a Kspreadsheet with an embedded Kchart. It's true desktop office functionality- with source, and for free.

    Also, maybe not as impressive as KParts (or maybe more, depending on how you look at it) is the new KIO library. KIO is what provides the getting/putting of files for applications within KDE- and it's new implementation is over 5 times faster than it used to be. It blazes (by my calculations, Konqueror with KIO is about two or three times faster than Mozilla currently) and it's totally internet transparent. So by including a couple of headers and writing a few small lines of code, one could theoretically have a very nice application which integrated with the entire KOffice suite while also being lightning-quick and providing a nice viewing component for the Konqueror.

    What I'd like to know is- what are the structural advantages of GNOME over KDE's? Especially since GNOME-2.0 has a lot more time left to take (KDE2 is supposed to be released this spring); what will they be offering to developers to convince them that GNOME is where to be?
  • I think he means the widget set looks a bit too rough and technical. Try driving a German vehicle sometime. all kinds of odd buttons, and lotsa squareness in those things. Like mercedes has all kinds of giant rocker switches on the dashboard, and the radio is very wide. It's just a different aesthetic, and something I'd expect from a French or Italian car as well. Different countries, different engineers.

  • Yeah there was a lot of very scary stuff going on and the "Commies" were behind most of it. Vietnam was "clearly" part of that trajectory. Even allowing the possibility that the whole Indo-china problem was not a plot hatched in Moscow, (I know it wasn't) they could hardly be complacent about it. It sure looked like a Commie plot, and certainly if you were an American policy planner, could you possibly doubt that the opposition in Moscow and Peking would make the most out of any opportunity arising from new satellite states in S.E. Asia?

    The problem is, it was not a decision of one politician or group of politicians at that time. "Blame Commies for everything" at that time was "the" direction of american international politics, and at that time it was as "natural" for american politician to think in this direction, as thinking that planets make circles and epicycles around the Earth was "natural" for medieval astronomer despite better explanations being easy to come up with.

    The Leninist strain of Marxism was something that simply had to be fought off actively. It was contagious, as it offered really bad people a way to get everything they always wanted --with the cooperation of people of good will. I cannot say that the necessity of resisting Leninism justified all means used...

    That was Stalinism, not Leninism (and certainly had nothing to do with Marx) -- and it is well known that Communists themselves managed to turn domestic policy away from it as much as the dominant political force was able to soon after Stalin's death, so this was not tied anywhere to their main doctrine. Ideology/philosophy/religion often have very little to do with dictatorship and oppression -- by now ideas of "capitalism" and every major religion (with Islam being most prominent lately) were quite successfully used for the same goals, yet US didn't try to fight all of them at the scale anywhere comparable with communist ideology. It's also very likely that many of those countries would end up more tolerable (similar to USSR in 50's-80's) if US and other western countries didn't demonstrate so much hostility toward them just for the sake of anti-communism.

  • Hmm... While I see that there are some prominent German KDE developers, I seriously doubt that it has a 'German' look. Too many other people involved there... And I really think many things simply look a lot like the Windows GUI (which is basically a good thing IMHO). But that's very subjective. Could it be that KDE resembles whatever QT has to offer?!
  • I'm not a troll, and I've already proved it. Now *you* try to prove it's not. Twit.

    Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
    Thought exists only as an abstraction

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