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KDE's Official Position on the GNOME Foundation 93

Posted by CmdrTaco from the can-we-lay-this-to-rest-already? dept.
infodragon was among the many folks to submit the fact that KDE has an Official Position with regards to the recently announced Gnome Foundation and all the ruckus that followed. As usual, the opinions of the folks most directly involved are much more rational and realistic then the crazed fan hordes (and the following reactionary pieces in the mainstream media) that think there is some sort of war going on instead of healthy competition. Quote: "Q: "How much does creation of GNOME Foundation affect KDE development?" A: "As much as the birth of the last baby polar bear at the Quebec City Zoo" (i.e., not at all) "
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KDEs Official Position on the GNOME Foundation More

KDEs Official Position on the GNOME Foundation

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  • Also read "Diversity is strength of free software" (Score:4)

    by joestar ( 225875 ) on Friday September 01, 2000 @07:10AM (#810969) Homepage
    It's on http://osopinion.com/Opinio ns/GaelDuval/GaelDuval1.html [osopinion.com]

    (...)We will never want KDE to extinguish GNOME, or the opposite to happen. We want all the advantages of BOTH of those wonderful environments, and to keep alive the potential for even more. And we want this for all free major components. With this spirit, let's all take Free Software even further and higher without being distracted by yesterday's money makers who don't understand what freedom is about.

    Would be worth a post on Slashdot by the way!

  • Jeez, is it really so difficult?

    Is this KDE/GNOME debate really that much different from the Linux/Windows debate in maturity? No!

    If you don't like one, don't bitch about it - just use another one. It's not that hard.

    Personally, I'm a GNOME/Sawfish person - but I certainly don't hold sides. KDE rocks - it's just not my style.

    Kudos to BOTH teams on an awesome job!

  • Competition and Cooperation (Score:5)

    by sandler ( 9145 ) on Friday September 01, 2000 @07:19AM (#810971) Homepage
    I think it's great that there's all this competition. I used to not, because I wanted all the development focus to be on one. But now that I'm beta-testing KDE2, it's nice to be able to log into a stable release of gnome, and switch back and forth. prefdm allows this. kdm seems to have the capability to allow you to log into either, but it doesn't seem to work. Could be a bug.

    When people say that Linux is so great because of user choice, they are right. But choice should not cause the Linux world to splinter into two. I see no reason why everyone (and every distro) shouldn't have both installed by default, with a pull-down menu on the login screen. Let's move towards sharing desktops, themes, menus, etc. between the two, so when I switch from KDE to Gnome on a whim, I can still access all my menus and desktop icons. Some work is being done towards this already.

    Choice is good, but it has to be easy. The main reason I don't like GNOME is because of the "choice" of window managers. If I log in cold to gnome, I have no window manager, and if I pick one, configurations and look-and-feel aren't coordinated. You can't expect users to figure out that desktop images are controlled by the window manager but screensavers are controlled by the desktop environment, or whatever. Let them default to E or whatever, and, just like KDE, I can change if it I am so inclined.

    Let's show folks who are new to Linux that when they start using Linux, they'll have a choice of what their desktop looks like. Let's not tell them that, before they start using Linux, they have to pick KDE or GNOME and make a life-long commitment to be on one "side" or the other.

  • I supose it's emminent, but I seem not to find any estimate for a release date on the kde web site.

    sorry for the offtopic...
  • Posted by CmdrTaco on Friday September 01, @11:55AM
    from the can-we-lay-this-to-rest-already? dept

    Rob, you said it yourself. Enough with this! Let the KDE developers finish 2.0 and let the Gnomes do their work on Star Office and we can check back at the end of the year to see how things stand. Meanwhile, whatever political issues exist, mediating them through Slashdot is completely counterproductive.

    ---------

  • As usual, the opinions of the folks most directly involved are much more rational and realistic then the crazed fan hoardes

    In an article from a Brazilian netmag, Mathias Ettrich had a pretty unrealistic and irrational rant [olinux.com.br] about GNOME (as well as Mozilla). Seems more like the core KDFE guys are trying a little face saving maneouvre after the initial misinterpretation of the GNOME foundation's purpose. For a good indication of waht the GNOME foundation will do and how, see this interview [lwn.net] with Eazel's Bud Tribble.
    Chris
  • I think that they were responding to quotes in the GNOME foundation press release, and not just casting aspirtions.
  • I agree, just what is the point of slagging off two perfetly good pieces of software, especially when they are both of such high quality. It basically boils down to preference, but cos you don't like it doesn't mean you _have_ to slag it off.

    I use a mixture of Gnome and KDE and enlightenment, it works for me :)

    Well done to all developers out there, it's only with people doing different stuff we get really cool software !
  • NOw, i have used both KDE and GNOME, and really, to me it makes very little difference. They are both by now fairly stable, and the only real difference that i bump into is that their menus are in a different order, which i could configure if i gave a rat's ass and a half, but i don't. As for development, i like Kdevelop alright, but really, most of what i do is either console mode only, or SDL based, so i have little need for most of the features of these development environments.

    So as far as i can tell, either one is fine, they are both doing good work, and whatever rivalrly, one-upmanship, etc... will just benefit the users, so hey, don't bitch =:-)
  • I wouldn't mind seeing some more cross-pollination in the GNOME/KDE world. I know it happens already, somewhat, but it seems wasteful to have so many of the same apps re-coded from the ground up.

    Ask yourselves: could a Qt compatibility layer be implemented on top of GTK? Could a common library be used for all these widget sets? I know the Harmony project died horribly, and I don't code X stuff yet, but still...

    After that, how different would all these apps *really* be? Could they settle on a common component model? With a common component model and a common look-and-feel (customizable, of course!), the two projects would overlap, and if not double, then at least increase in size by, say, sqrt(2), and therefore grow much faster.

    I don't want a homogenous Linux desktop, I want a customizable one, but if we could merge these projects one day, everyone could have all their apps for Linux looking the same and playing nice with each other, AND they wouldn't have to worry that GBar is only GNOME and KFoo is only KDE, and the two don't look the same, and this toolkit isn't Free yet, and blah blah blah...
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • "We program for the sheer joy and fun that comes out of putting out such an awesome product. " That is why I program for open source. I just choose to use C / Gtk+ and GNOME libs. Granted that some may argue that C++ is better than C because of this or that reason. But you know what! I like C. I guess this may be only cause I have not done much C++. But that is not even the issue. The GNOME foundation may actually help KDE in the long run. With all these corporate backers, there will be more people in the pot. This could lead to splintering of GNOME. Someone may decide that sawmill is not what they are 'going' for and create a new window manager. While this is fine. We all know what happened when corporations first got there hands on UNIX. How many version were released? How many version of UNIX do we have today, including Linux and BSD? LOTS Look what Corel did to KDE when they included it in there distro. Rumor has it that they modified some of the code so bad that other KDE apps wouldn't compile with it. While I am not sure that is true or not, I can see it. So maybe what could happen is that all these corporations will disagree adn add there own mods in and suddenly that little CVS tree has all sorts of branckes and becomes a big monsterous bush. Okay this is negitive, but someone has to think about these possibilities. The result could be a decision board on GNOME that could hurt GNOME. SO how does htis help KDE? KDE could end up becoming hte best window manager / desktop around and everyone could stop using GNOME and start using KDE.
    First, the decision to use GNOME on Sun and HP desktops doesn't change much in itself. Sun may be well known for its servers, but it doesn't seem to be doing that great as a desktop.
    This statement is also true. Sun is for servers as Microsoft is to desktops. In reality you wouldn't use Microsoft as a web server on a really busy web site. Hell M$ doesn't use it on there own web sites. They still use BSD and Solaris on there Hotmail system. So why would you use Solaris on your desktop at home?

    Personally I think this is just stirring up all that GNOME is better than KDE or KDE is better than GNOME stuff that really is a matter of opinion and not true. They are both AWESOME projects that depend on a persons personal preferences as to what they like.

    Do you like your coffee black or with cream? Sugar??


    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    I don't want a lot, I just want it all ;-)
    Flame away, I have a hose!
  • Q: "How much does creation of GNOME Foundation affect the use of Motif and CDE in the real world?" A: "As much as the birth of the last baby polar bear at the Quebec City Zoo" (i.e., not at all) It's time for the community to wake up to the startling fact that the vast majority of UNIX applications today are Motif applications -- and that is not about to change now or for years. Work it out: critical applications are in use, so nobody is going to undertake needless ports to a new look and feel at great expense with the sole result of confusing the user community. It gets worse: GNOME/GTK+ and Motif applications will hardly co-exist. Motif is Xt-based, GTK+ is not. So drag 'n' drop, for example, won't work between Motif and GTK+ apps on the same desktop. Just what the poor end-loser wanted. Anybody who thinks that the shift to GNOME on Sun's customer base will happen quickly or even at all is on the wrong planet.
  • I see no reason why everyone (and every distro) shouldn't have both installed by default, with a pull-down menu on the login screen.

    They're both huge in comparison to a minimal X usage eith blackbox maybe? After all, a lot of the feautres are kind of like cup holders on cars, they don't make the engine any smoother or the brakes any better.

    I think a default X should go very minimal to allow for slower machines, smaller machines, more dedicated machines to still have X. Then there may be a further distro's X install process (post actually putting in the base X stuff) that explains what window managers are, what KDE, gnuStep, and gnome are, how you could do without both, and what options you have in each... all with some screen shots and a bt of explanation of the programming internals and some of the popular apps that you'd get with one or the other.

    -Daniel

  • Whn it's done (though they hint probably sometime this month if all goes well).
  • When people say that Linux is so great because of user choice, they are right. But choice should not cause the Linux world to splinter into two. I see no reason why everyone (and every distro) shouldn't have both installed by default, with a pull-down menu on the login screen. Let's move towards sharing desktops, themes, menus, etc. between the two, so when I switch from KDE to Gnome on a whim, I can still access all my menus and desktop icons. Some work is being done towards this already.

    They ought to go beyond just sharing superficial details to actually creating transparent operability. The two teams ought to work on making some kind of API translation layer, if not a unified onject model, so people don't have to worry about choosing a desktop environment based on what apps they want to use. It'd be great if I could just drag and drop an icon from the Gnome file manager into a KDE-based application and vice versa...

  • Gtk+'s drag-n-drop implementation is compatible with Motif and XDnD (i.e, you write your code for "gtk DnD", and it works for both Motif and XDnD apps)
  • Huh? That article doesn't mention GNOME at all, except by implication in, "KDE was so successful that the FSF not only started to bash it, but also to clone it." There is an assertion that Qt is more pleasurable to code in than Gtk, which is debatable but hardly an "unrealistic and irrational rant". I don't know -- the link is above and people can decide for themselves.

    The only potential flamebait I can see is, " If Netscape used Qt, they would have release a modern cross-platform browser two years ago. Now we are still waiting for a final release of Mozilla and what we will get ships with its own middleware, a new component system and yet another widget set. Compare Mozilla with Konqueror, compare the sizes of the development teams, the time they used and the results. Then judge for yourself."

    Honestly, I think he has a point there.

    ---------

  • I don't think it's marketspeak. I think it's all part of healthy competition. Frankly, I think saying that Gnome needs to "catch up" would encourage the gnome folks to push forward more than if KDE had just said, "both are nice."
  • Their response sounds like little more than a lame attempt to put an early end to yet another round of the Great and Holy Gnome/KDE Jihad (Flame War.) Just listen to the way they say that the GNOME foundation will have no affect on KDE! I can't believe that the KDE developers did not take this as an opportunity to surround GNOME's fortresses and lay siege to their walls with great catipults of "my desktop environment is better than yours." Seriously though, it is nice to see some level heads out there trying to put an end to the constant bickering that seems to never die between these two camps. Personally, I use GNOME on my desktop workstation and KDE on my laptop. I am very happy with both.
  • People WILL always choose to see the dancing bear. :-)
  • It is good to see that the official response is level headed and calm. I use KDE and GNOME(Helix). I like them both. My distro (SuSE) comes with KDE by default but I use both with no problem. I like the option of more than 1 UI. I hope that the KDE team never gets discouraged by any of its "competitors", be it GNOME, Window Maker, XFCE, XXXXXX, XXXX, etc, etc.
  • "Could they settle on a common component model?"

    I believe (with my zero-under-the-covers involvement that I have) there should be a possibility of compatibility between the two desktops in practice; in particular, being able to use a CORBA "gateway" to go between both things without necessarily starting a whole KDE session as well as Gnome bits would be rather good. The underlying APIs don't have to have said compatibility in mind, but I think it helps if the data can be blitted back and forth.

    What those who want to stir the "mythical unified desktop" rumour will make of that is, of course, their own problem :)
    ~Tim
    --
    .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
  • Here is the statement from Matthias...

    Mathias Ettrich: KDE is a true open source project that consists mainly of voluntary work.
    You can't compare this to commercial open source projects like Mozilla or the Eazel file manager. KDE gets written because its authors want to write it, while those commercial open source projects get written because somebody senses business and pays programmers to do the job. Don't get me wrong, that's a perfectly sane thing to do, but it also has an influence on the choice of tools. While you can easily make programmers work with inferior technologies and let them reinvent everything from scratch by giving them enough money, you cannot do that in a free project like KDE. Free programmers work for fun. Better tools promise more fun. Programming with Qt is extreme fun, as it lets you concentrate on what you really wanted to do: writing an application, not fighting a toolkit or a programming language. If Netscape used Qt, they would have release a modern cross-platform browser two years ago. Now we are still waiting for a final release of Mozilla and what we will get ships with its own middleware, a new component system and yet another widget set. Compare Mozilla with Konqueror, compare the sizes of the development teams, the time they used and the results. Then judge for yourself.


    What do you think is unrealistic or irrational about these comments ?

    Shaughran

  • OK what they said in that article (for the lazy) (Score:3)

    by linuxci ( 3530 ) on Friday September 01, 2000 @07:44AM (#810992)
    No the GNOME foundation doesn't affect us. We're better so people will use us. GNOME has a lot of catching up to do.

    OK whether or not KDE is better is a matter of opinion what they've said just sounds like something a big corporation would write about its rival rather than what you'd expect from an open source project.

    Can't they word the statement along the lines of:
    The GNOME foundation will have no effect on KDE development. Out aim is to provide a desktop environment which is the best on offer but we wish the GNOME foundation all the success for the future and it's great to be able to have a choice.

    It's not like KDE's in it for the money so why make their official statement sound like a marketing press release?

  • I think the 'official' response is shortsighted (Score:4)

    by brokeninside ( 34168 ) on Friday September 01, 2000 @07:49AM (#810993)

    To start off, the KDE response is that the Gnome foundation doesn't matter to KDE. What a crock! Aything that helps free software gain in popularity will help KDE.

    Think about this, people hear the Gnome announcement and want to check out Gnome. The (arguably) easiest way to check out Gnome is to install Linux. If the person wanting to experience Gnom chooses Caldera, Storm, Corel, Mandrake or any other of the dozens of Linux distributions that make KDE the default desktop environment, more users will be introduced to KDE.

    Also, provided that Gnome and KDE get component compatibility going between Kparts and Bonobo, then every Gnome component that can be embedded or hosted becomes a tool in the KDE toolkit. More tools, more power....

    I also think that there is a bit of misunderstanding on the part of the KDE folks on just what the Gnome foundation is.

    Now we have been asked "Will KDE ever create a KDE Foundation in the same sense as the GNOME Foundation?" The answer to this is no, absolutely not. KDE has always been and always will be controlled by the developers that work on it and are willing to do the code. We will resist any and all attempts to change this.

    This is no different than the Gnome foundation. The only difference is one of scale, Sun's 'fifty developers' will have a unified voice on the board of the Gnome foundation in the Sun person on the board. The same is true for Eazel, Helix-Code, or any of the independant developers that have joined the Gnome foundation

    Looking at the issue from another standpoint, the KDE Project is possibly the only large Open Source project that has neither a "benevolent dictator" nor an elected governing board (or any voting at all). In a sense, we are the only large "pure" Bazaar-style project out there... and it works. We have no intention of changing an obviously winning formula.

    This train of reasoning implies to me the opposite of what the KDE folks intend it to mean.

    1. There are many succssful free software projects.
    2. With the exception of KDE, all of these successful free software projects have a 'benevolent dictator' or a 'board' of some type.
      therefore
    3. The 'pure bizzare' KDE model is the best

    I don't get it.

    There are also some poorly supported assertions of fact.

    First, the decision to use GNOME on Sun and HP desktops doesn't change much in itself. Sun may be well known for its servers, but it doesn't seem to be doing that great as a desktop. There are likely many many more BSD and Linux computers running KDE than there are new Solaris workstations running CDE. We don't anticipate that this will change very much in the future.

    This quote shows an incomplete understanding of market dynamics. There are several overlapping categories of workstations to consider.

    1. Workstations running Gnome
    2. Workstations running KDE
    3. Workstations running other desktop environments

    Given that there is a good deal of overlap between one and two, the real questions to ask are

    1. What percentage of Sun workstations already run Gnome or KDE?
    2. In the pool of Workstations that run X, how many are Sun workstaions that don't run Gnome or KDE?
    3. Given that Sun, HP and other Unix vendors will begin shipping workstations with Gnome as the default desktop environment, will the number of new workstations with KDE as the default desktop keep pace with the number of new workstations with Gnome as the default desktop (which are not restricted to only Sun and HP machines)?
    4. What effect, if any, will marketshare have on the Gnome and KDE projects?

    I'm not a Gnome only kind of guy. I think that both KDE and Gnome are very good environments. However, I do think that the official KDE position is a bit short-sighted. The Gnome foundation could very well benefit KDE. To say that the foundation is totally irrelevant is to misunderstand the way things work in the real world. For KDE to ignore the Gnome foundation would be to repeat the mistake of Unix vendors ignoring Windows NT in the early nineties.

  • Think about this, people hear the Gnome announcement and want to check out Gnome. The (arguably) easiest way to check out Gnome is to install Linux. If the person wanting to experience Gnom chooses Caldera, Storm, Corel, Mandrake or any other of the dozens of Linux distributions that make KDE the default desktop environment, more users will be introduced to KDE.

    This is exactly how I discovered KDE. Up until I first installed Linux, I had only ever heard of Gnome. But, in the options for what to install, there was this KDE thing listed. So I investigated, and found out that it's an operating environment like Gnome is. So I tried it. I'm now hooked.

    Okay, so this is a boring "me too" post, but it lends credence to your argument. In the long run, the Gnome Foundation will help KDE.

  • All quotes are from the quotation of Mathias Ettrich by shaughran. I have not checked for accurary.

    First there is a bit of inconsistancy...

    KDE is a true open source project that consists mainly of voluntary work.
    ...
    Programming with Qt is extreme fun ...

    How many volunteers work on the QT project?

    There are also some stabs at Gnome

    While you can easily make programmers work with inferior technologies and let them reinvent everything from scratch

    Better tools promise more fun

    f Netscape used Qt, they would have release a modern cross-platform browser two years ago. Now we are still waiting for a final release of Mozilla

    While neither Gnome, nor GTK is specifically mentioned, it seems to me that the context implies that Gnome and GTK are the 'inferior tools' being refered too. Attacking Gnome and GTK as being inferior technology and implying that working with them is not fun is not a rational point of argumentation.

    Also in the unrational realm is the constant intermixing of the idea of programming in QT with the idea of programming in KDE. KDE developers can not insist both that KDE is not affiliated with any corporation and that KDE is superior because it is built on QT.

    I would also say that Mathias is cherry-picking his examples.

    Compare Mozilla with Konqueror

    Or compare Galeon to Konqueror ....

    And there is also what seems to me to be a rather spurious correlation

    If Netscape used Qt, they would have release a modern cross-platform browser two years ago.

    There may very well be something to the the point that underlies this assertion. It may be quicker to develop apps with QT than with GTK. OTOH, I hardly think it appropriate to blame a problem that appears to have at its source, the incompetence of management at Netscape/AOL, on using a non-QT toolset.

  • Maybe, but you miss my point: the code we're talking about is not *going* to be written for gtk DnD -- it's already been written for Motif and is not about to get changed any day soon. There are millions of lines of Motif code in thousands of apps in banks, defense, NASA, teelcoms, cellular management, that nobody is going to change. It's simply not cost-effective.
  • OK, I didn't say they did, and I definitely didn't say they shouldn't. Put the point I'm getting at is that this sounded like a very commercial press release when they're just an open source project. I think both projects should try and get along, there's no such thing as 'the best' desktop environment so it's all a matter of user opinion. We need both to succeed so that we can have a choice and competition is good. As KDE isn't going to gain anything from people using GNOME it shouldn't try to place into peoples minds that GNOME is inferior (let them disover for themselves what they think).
  • I heard it estimated 'early September'
  • Or compare Galeon to Konqueror ....

    Galeon IS Mozilla so the original comparison
    between Konqueror and Mozilla is a valid one.
    The KDE project did write its own HTML widget,
    Galeon uses Mozilla's Gecko.
  • Sun has only recently (in Solaris 7) made CDE their default desktop (announcement of CDE default desktop made in 1993). So that only took about 5 years -- when do think GNOME will actually become the Sun default desktop? 2001? 2002? 2003? Ever? Do you think that HP are actually going to rush to discard CDE (a.k.a. HP VUE)? I don't think so. And IBM haven't committed to making GNOME their default at all (nor much else, for that matter). But Sun got an amazing amount of attention from the press and others by hijacking Linuxworld to make the announcement. And Sun (in the person of Ed Zander, no less) have also stated publically that they will never support Linux. All the wood behind the Solaris arrowhead. Seems to me that all is not what it seems.

  • The only potential flamebait I can see is, " If Netscape used Qt, they would have release a modern cross-platform browser two years ago.

    Actually, I seem to remember that some people at Trolltech ported the Mozilla codebase to QT in a couple of days, not long after the code was released. When you realise that there was already a stable, cross-platform toolkit available, you do start to wonder why all the xp stuff was written especially for Mozilla. It would definitely have cut down on the bugs and speeded things up if they had just gone with an establihed toolkit.

  • Here is the offical release schedule for KDE2.

    http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/re lease-schedule.html

    The schedule says September 4th, which is Monday. Beta3 was two days late. RC1 (Beta 4) was 4 days late, so don't expect it on Monday, but I haven't heard of any showstoppers since RC1.

  • Technology versus politics (Score:5)

    by mfterman ( 2719 ) on Friday September 01, 2000 @08:46AM (#811003)
    KDE has some pretty valid claims to technical superiority. However KDE has serious political flaws that doom it. The first is the dependence on a proprietary toolkit, Qt. That is the most serious one in my opinion. That is what scared most of the corporations off. They didn't want a repeat of the CDE scenario where they tried to make a common standard off of prioprietary licenced products. The fact is that the GNOME Foundation isn't a rehash of the CDE fiasco no matter how much some KDE people try to make it out to be as one.

    A lesser one is the use of KParts rather than CORBA. Perhaps the consortium might have overlooked that but the fact is that everyone has a lot invested in CORBA these days. GNOME is more buzzword complaint than KDE and that's another political mark in its favor.

    And so because GNOME was more politically acceptable and technically good enough for these companies to choose to endorse GNOME. The KDE people can harp on technical superiority, but the computer industry is littered with technically superior products that ended up niche players. Linux has for a very long time been technically inferior to every other form of Unix but the fact that it is politically superior has enabled it to last and have its technical failings addresed. Microsoft won because it was politically more adept than technically. The fact is in the long run you have to look at the political angles.

    And there is the fact that if GNOME becomes too corporate, developers can vote with their keyboards and fork GNOME. Or can go back to KDE (or more likely start over with something new). Personally, I don't see the GNOME Foundation as being too far off from the Apache Foundation, and I have yet to see a single KDE developer use IBM's ruining of Apache as an example of why GNOME is doomed (hint, there's a reason for that). GNOME is GPL'd all the way down to the toolkits it depends on and that gives it a certain freedom KDE ultimately lacks.

    [begin flame]
    The fact is that the complaints about corporate control and how the KDE people are more pure and dedicated to the ideals of open source reek a little of hypocracy and a convenient ignoring of certain facts in KDE's history. The history of KDE is linked to the history of Qt because of the dependency and who remembers the Harmony project, the one time people tried to break KDE completely free of depending on TrollTech. The fact is that TrollTech has a few KDE developers working from it and while they've been mucking with the QPL, the fact is that they did their best to break a GPL'd version of Qt would would have lost their control over KDE entirely.

    If Harmony had succeeded, KDE might well have been picked. But the fact is that people let themselves be seduced by TrollTech and compromised their open source principles instead of taking the hard path to being independent of them by getting Harmony to work and now the GNOME Foundation has showed them that politically they went down a proprietary dead end. To say that KDE is free and independent is to ignore it is rooted in something controlled by a single company.
    [end flame]

    My personal prediction is that in the long run KDE is going to be a niche player. TrollTech's greed and desire for control has doomed Qt and KDE in the long run, much as the other Unixes are doomed in the long run compared to Linux. Whatever lead KDE has now in support will slowly start to erode under official endorsement of GNOME for more major *nix variants than KDE does. Whatever technical superiorities KDE has currently will be eroded as more developers are piled on to GNOME, or they will become irrelevent as GNOME is good enough for most people. And it will get the lion's share of the development from various companies and develop a broader range of applications than KDE.

  • Slickness (from the crusty old unix standpoint) (Score:4)

    by Threed ( 886 ) <nowhere.atall@com> on Friday September 01, 2000 @08:51AM (#811004)
    The quality of "slickness", call it ease-of-use, integration, homogenization, themability, or whatever, used to be the responsibility of the distro.

    RedHat started whomping on other distros because of the value-add in the form of slickness. Mandrake started trumping RedHat when they went beyond just repackaging RedHat's stuff and did even more value adding, in the form of added slickness (Drak tools). Slickness now touches every aspect of the OS; installation, configuration, and the general look and feel.

    Now, the slickness of Helix Gnome and KDE are going to be available to each distro. The problem with this is, no one will want to come up with their own slickness. We're losing choices and getting slickness that may not be appropriate shoved down our throats by the competition of distros! Whereas before, the choice was "RPM, DEB, or TAR.GZ", now it's "Who's slickness are we going to use?" Lord knows, they gotta have some slickness, 'cause every other distro has it. And they soon won't be able to give the user a choice because each slickness package has its own tools, its own way of doing things with the rest of the system, and they soon won't cooperate well.

    Gnome & KDE used to be simple (compared to current) ways to get apps to cooperate (cut-n-paste, drag-n-drop, file management). Now they're controlling the whole system, to the point where getting anything done from the command line is harder because the tools do things in toolish ways (pun intended!). The configuration files are getting less text-editable. More and more apps depend on the presence of a slickness package.

    And you know what, none of it makes my life any easier. I just have to learn new ways to perform the same tasks because now they're all graphical and the configuration files are getting more machine-edit-only as time goes on.

    I may not know what to do about it, but I KNOW something's got to be done. Microsoftism is creeping in, along with corporate bucks and media hype. It's not quite time for a down-with-slickness campaign, but it's time to start thinking about where all this slickness is leading us.

    (This post probably belongs under the Helix story more than it belongs under the KDE story, but it applys to both. Does /. need crossposting now? Anyways, don't mod me down for flamebait. Helix is walking a bad path but KDE's got Mandrake pumping new tools into it on every release. Just as guilty.)

    The real Threed's /. ID is lower than the real Bruce Perens'.

    --Threed
  • So the KDE party line seems to be: "Let GNOME do what it wants with those nasty corporations. We're going to continue coding for the pure love of coding, and make the best darn desktop we can."

    In layman's terms, this means approximately:

    "Oh, yeah - give it to me! It makes me feel bad and dirty, but I like it! Harder! Harder!"

    KDE seems determined to sit back and watch as they are pushed out of the market, going the way of the Amiga and the dodo bird. Too bad; they have a good desktop.
  • Absolutely true, which is why both KDE and GNOME specs are completely bogus.

    I mean, both specs offer *complete* solutions, based on toolkits, rather than creating open standards. Sure, the standards *are* open, but are made less so by being tied to specific toolkits.

    I don't code in KDE at all, and haven't messed around enough with GNOME to be able to write a spec. If anyone cares to do so, hey, more power to ya. :^)
  • I thought I understood it, but the more I look at this stuff the more I get confused.

    Xwindows show up in both KDE and GNOME but the API to program under each is different?

    At work we have some applications (Oracle java installer, some perl Tk programs) that don't run over the XVision software our windows clients use. They work fine on the console with a window manager.

    If on an Xterm on a windows machine I can type KDE and it sort of pastes some of the KDE icons on the windows desktop. Thats a real mess.

    enlighten me!

  • I'd like to know what you're smoking - can i have some?

    First of all, Qt 2.0 is *not* proprietary. Qt is licensed under a certified Open Source License. Repeat after me. *Qt* *is* *not* *proprietary*. I'm surprised how many people get this wrong. Qt before the days of Free Qt Foundation and 2.0 was proprietary, but it isn't today. period.

    What do you mean by "Troll tech's greed and control desire"? To me, it seems that they've been bending over backwards to please the OSS crowds. (but that's just my subjective opinion - feel free to disagree :)

    Please don't go around spreading FUD like that.

    No, i don't have anything to do with Troll tech or KDE, other than that i like coding with 'em.

    -henrik

  • Whistling past the graveyard (Score:4)

    by nrc ( 112633 ) on Friday September 01, 2000 @09:13AM (#811009) Homepage
    Q: "How much does creation of GNOME Foundation affect KDE development?" A: "As much as the birth of the last baby polar bear at the Quebec City Zoo" (i.e., not at all) "

    If they really believed that the wouldn't have to bother with an "official response" to the GNOME Foundation, now would they? In general this response makes some very good points, but the false bravado in the intro is a little silly.

    Mindshare does matter. They obviously know that because they talk a lot about their own mindshare in their response. So basically we're supposed to believe that their mindshare will influence the GNOME Foundation, ("Any attempt to proclaim 'we are THE standard' without our involvement is just silly") but GNOME's won't have any affect on them.

    To me the bottom line is that the Sun and HP's decision to adopt GNOME have proven the whole premise behind GNOME development - the need for a truely free desktop. Because of the licensing issues it's very unlikely that Sun and HP would have ever adopted KDE as their default desktop.

  • If it's half as cute as this one [bearden.org], then Konqi [kde.org] has a real run for his money. How long until the media pick up on this inter-mascot war?
  • Galeon IS Mozilla so the original comparison between Konqueror and Mozilla is a valid one.

    Galeon IS NOT Mozilla. Saying that Galeon is Mozilla because they share an html widget is like saying that my friend's old Dodge Aspen sedan is an old Dodge pickup truck because they share the same engine.

    The KDE project did write its own HTML widget, Galeon uses Mozilla's Gecko.

    For the sake of this comparisson, it doesn't matter who wrote which widget. The comparisson is about how easy it is to write an application of a specific sort with the available tools. Why reinvent the wheel? Isn't that what using QT/KDE or GTK/Gnome is all about, re-use?

  • First of all, I agree that these remarks were petty and unnecessary. They hardly constitute an "unrealistic and irrational rant about GNOME", though.

    How many volunteers work on the QT project?
    .
    .
    Also in the unrational realm is the constant intermixing of the idea of programming in QT with the idea of programming in KDE. KDE developers can not insist both that KDE is not affiliated with any corporation and that KDE is superior because it is built on QT.

    You're missing the distinction between programming with and programming for. Qt is an open-source/free toolkit from Troll Tech. The KDE project uses Qt, along with automake, gcc, the C++ libraries and all the other standard tools. That doesn't make KDE affiliated with Troll Tech, the FSF, Bell Labs, Red Hat or any of the other companies and organizations that make those tools.

    Now, several Troll Tech employees contribute to to KDE and a fair amount of code flows into Qt from KDE work. But fundamentally, Troll Tech makes Qt -- the KDE project makes KDE, using Qt.

    OT: I needed to make a new dialog last night, and decided to try doing it in Qt Designer [trolltech.com]. That thing is unreal! A perfectly laid out dialog and clean, readable C++ source with all the signals and slots tied together, in about 10 minutes! 8 of which were spent reading the manual!

    ---------

  • Your use of the word "cooperation" bears too much likeness to our intellectual property here at The Corporation(c). Cease and desist forthwith, or you shall suffer the same fate as Sesame Street's.
  • This is just a bit of FUD designed to create good publicity.

    The reason GNOME got started is that Miguel, in his typical lack of diplomacy :^) essentially told the KDE team that they should use another toolkit. When they took a rather less-than-enthusiastic stance to this, he started the GNOME project, and based it mostly on GNU software.

    When you get right down to it, KDE has been getting bad publicity lately. It's true; Qt is a *commercial* toolkit. It was also AFAIK the best choice at the time. Debian, being comprised mostly of people with no legal knowledge (not that I have any) have taken an ambiguity in the GPL and ran with it, stating that distributing KDE is illegal.

    The KDE team, of course, believes in what they're doing and would like to continue the project, and they need some decent publicity for it to be "worth it." So what do they do?

    Write some FUD.

    It's kind of like stating "The workers of the Soviet Union will rise against you." Workers? Please. KDE is to some extent controlled by Troll Tech now, since some of the core KDE people work for Troll Tech. They're not as free as they imply. I'm sure they're still doing it because it's fun, but it's a lie to state that they're more free than GNOME.

    More open than GNOME? Try subscribing to a mailing list and suggest that Konqueror should use Gecko as its HTML renderer and just see what happens. You'll wish you hadn't.

    I like both projects and I'm glad to see that the KDE team can still say, after 3 years, that they have fun doing it. But, guys, there's no need to lie to stay ahead. Just let the market decide.
  • I think a default X should go very minimal to allow for slower machines, smaller machines, more dedicated machines to still have X.

    OK, so make twm a third option on the pulldown menu. No one who installs Linux has to do a full install anyway. The point is, I should be able to decide on a distro based on technical merits, not which desktop environment they decided to bundle.

  • "...the fact is that people let themselves be seduced by TrollTech and compromised their open source principles..."

    Open Source Cult...? Open Source is about freedom, not politics. KDE developers have the freedom to choose what toolkit to code for. Why do people get their underware twisted into knots for such bushwa? Let KDE use whatever it wants to. If someone loves KDE so much but just can't for the life of them get over the fact that Qt is open source, but a company and not random hackers made it (and made it well), then go forth and carry on with a Qt compatible alternative. Oh yea... you mention one that bombed. Why was that anyways? I think it was because no matter what TrollTech does to Qt... it's free [trolltech.com]. BSD license anyone? I guess there wasn't any point for Harmony anymore.

    "Seduced" by TrollTech? It was the KDE developer's decision to use Qt not TrollTech's. Perhaps the developers were "seduced" by something that was technically superior than what was available. Don't think GTK was always there when Qt was do ya?

    "TrollTech's greed and desire for control has doomed Qt and KDE in the long run, much as the other Unixes are doomed in the long run compared to Linux."

    No one likes companies. :( That's so sad that people don't feel a company has a right to make money of its software. Are you just jealous you'll never have as much money as Billy G? If TrollTech was so greedy over their code... why are they giving it up for free use? So they want to make money by charging for people to develop commercial closed source software. Let 'em make the money. Sun is a partner of the GNOME foundation. They have their source code opened under a non-GPL license (barring StarOffice at this point). I'm sick of this crap.

    "Whatever technical superiorities KDE has currently will be eroded as more developers are piled on to GNOME, or they will become irrelevent as GNOME is good enough for most people."

    Heh heh... by reading all of KDE's responses to GNOME... they certainly feel that GNOME will be irrelevant as KDE "is good enough for most people." Most people aren't developers. Most people aren't interested in pissing matches such as this. Most people use what they like because they like it. As long as they like it they'll use it. Same with me.

    ---
    James Crawford
  • KDE seems determined to sit back and watch as they are pushed out of the market

    You are using obsolete metaphors here. A free software hacker doesn't need a market. He likes to hack, and he likes attention from his peers, that's it. The end user market is utterly irrelevant. Linux was already alive and well when the end user market was still exactly at zero.

    --

  • I was referring to *everything* about both projets, from a usability sense.

    The desktop, the embedding of data in documents, etc. *should* be defined as Xdnd is defined; that is, not toolkit-centric. Yes, I realize what a mess this area was before KDE & GNOME came along, but you must admit it makes sense, to a point.

    Miguel made a good point recently that UNIX/X software "does it all wrong" when a projet supplies its own print services, file services, etc (which in a sense GNOME did this too.) If Miguel & Crew had been so concerned about not reinventing the wheel, they should have concentrated on Lesstif and Display Ghostscript instead of making GTK into The New Motif(TM). God bless 'em, they've done a great job, but it's a bit ridiculous that much of the work done on both projects is simply duplication & reimplementation of existing services on other toolkits.
  • That letter does seem a bit defensive. I also detect a sense of desperation in there as well. I use Gnome, but I think KDE is no second ran. However, the Gnome Foundation is a powerful statement from big business who will, unfortunately, shape a lot of what will happen with Linux in general. It isn't uncommon for even the best projects to fall by the side of road. KDE is no exception.
    I use Gnome by choice, just as I use Linux by choice. But this development can do a lot to seriously affect our choices. I still use Windows for games. That is what most game companies develop for. I just hope that this Foundation doesn't wind up doing the same thing in favor of KDE.
  • There are twolevels: 1. Xlib - most basic code that handles simple operations like line drawing etc .. Every X app has to use this ( it might be hidden by level 2 code but it is still there .) 2. Various toolkits build on top of Xlib (KDe, GNOME.) Most apps use some sort of toolkit. Window Managers use portion of Xlib that was specifically designed to handle managing windows etc...
  • Well, yeah, that's only half the problem, you'd still have to make a unified graphical interface for it all, somehow. They'll probably both support themes, though, so you could just make GNOME look like KDE, and get one wm to have hooks for both...

    I could care less about the unified desktop; I run fvwm2 and bash; but I know a lot of people want that, especially (a) for linux newbies and (b) to get the Mac Zealots to shut up. :)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • ...I have read the official response from the boys at KDE and I find several of their points well put. I think that the formation of the GNOME Foundation has no relevant affect on KDE development. The main affect is the way that the general public views the market.

    The news media puts way too much emphasis on the formation of the GNOME foundation, The key to survival is diversity. It's the personal preference market. People like what they like. I personally prefer Gnome but I have used KDE and will probably try the upcoming 2.0 release to see how much it has improved. If I like it I may switch, that is my prerogative. And I'm glad I have that option. This is America "Land of the Free" (or so they say).

    thank you and good night.


  • Someone made a reasonable and rational reply on /.

    Thank you.

    I our biggest quibble is the gray area between the subjective definitions of 'petty and unnecessary' and 'unrealistic and irrational'

    I usually categorize 'petty and unnecessary' cheap shots as being 'irrational.' But that's me.

  • What the fuck are you talking about? Everything he says seems right. Where is the rant about GNOME? Mozilla != GNOME. And he's right, the Mozilla project is a complete failure. Ask JWZ.

    Bud Tribble, on the other hand, doesn't even know if Gnumeric supports Bonobo. What bullshit. He's a pointy-haired if you ask me.

  • LISTEN

    Programs don't care if CORBA/KParts/GnomeFingers/etcParts are used!!!

    Interfaces Count

    I can make any two programs communicate effectively and effeciently if I am given the interface used by each program. Screw CORBA or KORBA (that should've been the name used!) or KParts. Give me the interface declarations!

  • Re:Competition and Cooperation (Score:4)

    by DaKrushr ( 16560 ) on Friday September 01, 2000 @10:06AM (#811026)
    Drag and drop WORKS with KDE2 and GNOME/GTK - I use it all the time.

    Very nice for dragging MP3s from Konqueror into XMMS.

    In addition to a common DND protocol, they also use the same .desktop format for menu entries.
  • and this is wrong in what way? Motif apps will dnd into GTK+ apps and gtk apps can dnd into motif apps. it's completely transparent for the user. Xt or no Xt makes absolutelyno difference here. GTK+ not being based on Xt makes it hard to do a Motif->GTK+ port, but it makes absolutely no difference on how DnD works together. Things can happily continue to use motif. Now dragging of complex data types is another story, but motif doesn't handle that really. So if you made your motif app support bonobo, you could dnd bonobo objects to/from gtk apps. The toolkit makes absolutely no difference here.

  • Re:If another geek says CORBA/KParts I'll scream! (Score:4)

    by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Friday September 01, 2000 @10:16AM (#811028)
    You don't really get it. The magic in CORBA and KParts isn't that they allow apps to communicate, hell, you've add that ever since signals. What's cool is it allows you to build applications in terms of other applications. It allows programmers to create apps that are mainly sets of components lashed together with glue code. UNIX modularity at it's finest.

  • Re:Technology versus politics (Score:3)

    by mfterman ( 2719 ) on Friday September 01, 2000 @10:51AM (#811029)
    >KDE tried CORBA. It was bloated and slow. Kind of like GNOME itself. You really should work in marketing though: "Everyone else (for whom I can name absolutely zero examples) is invested in CORBA, so KDE needs to be using that just for the buzzword too!"

    Go to www.corba.org and start from there to see who is behind it. I assumed the fact that CORBA was an independent standard invented by a coalition and supported elsewhere was rather obvious.

    In an ideal world, technical issues would always win out and people would always choose the technically superior solution. That was the whole bleeding point of my article. The fact is that CORBA is more politically acceptable than KParts. I said that KDE tended to win on technical merits all over the place. But generally people choose the most politically acceptable solution. The history of the computer industry tends to drive that point home over and over. I didn't say it was a good thing that people tend to cling to buzzwords, but it's a fact of life. I've lost my youthful idealism on that point.
  • Galeon IS NOT Mozilla

    Correct, but it takes all the difficult stuff from Mozilla and adds a relatively simple GUI. So for what it's worth Galeon is (a lesser) Mozilla. Don't belittle the effort of Konqueror's developers.

  • KDE releases statement regarding GNOME's Momma (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01, 2000 @11:23AM (#811031)

    The recent announcement regarding GNOME's Momma giving her stuff away all over town has resulted in a deluge of requests to the KDE Core Team asking what our "position" is. Well this is it: right on top of GNOME's Momma.

    But these days, that doesn't seem enough. So read on.

    GNOME's momma so corporate-controlled, she need to ask Sun's permission to type `make'

    GNOME's momma so hard to develop for, it be like writing IA64 machine code on punch cards

    GNOME's momma so hard to use, we had to roll her over and hit it from behind

    GNOME's momma so fat, when she back up she go "beep beep"

    GNOME's momma so stupid, she don't even know that the industry has settled on object oriented languages as a de facto standard for implementation of graphical user interfaces

    Summary

    In summary, GNOME's momma ain't shit, GNOME ain't shit. We can kick GNOME's pussy ass any day of the week. Bring it on GNOME. We ain't scared.

  • Well, I'm a linux newbie and I've found both GNOME and KDE to be a pain in the ass...

    I using Linux partly on a machine with 640 X 480 video... When I need to use X, I use GNOME w/enlightenment because I can use the large virtual desktop to let me control x-apps with widgets that fall outside the area of my screen. There may be a way to get kwm to do the same thing, but I'll never know because the KDE designers used a huge settings dailog box with all the import widgets inaccessible off the bottom of the screen.

    So I mostly use bash and no X at all -- Which is fine becaus I'm spending most of my time in Linux learning C. I use Vim to create my source files and gcc to compile them and that's getting me where I want to go today.

    It would be nice if GNOME was stable and even nicer if KDE wasn't so hostile to users with small displays... Personally, from my limited experiments with GNOME and KDE, I hink KDE looks and "feels" a little more polished, but that's not worth much when it won't deliver basic user functions like window manager configuration.

    For what's it's worth, this Mac user sees no reason why both GNOME and KDE shouldn't surpass MacOS in features, usability and basic goodness.

  • Some words from a KDE Developer... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01, 2000 @11:37AM (#811033)
    Hi everyone, as this discussion is going on long enough I think as well that with the latest comments from the KDE side the thing is over - at least from my side as well as from other KDE developers. The only thing Ive thought when I read about the GNOME foundation was: "What would the public have said if it were KDE having a foundation together with TrollTech, SuSE, Caldera, IBM, Sun, HP ?" The answer is obvious: everybody would have said it was only a matter of time because KDE uses Qt as a base library for its development which is owned by a company(TrollTech) which means RMS says its "bad" software so joining with companies comes natural to them. Now its the other way around but I do hear little about the fact that now companies will show or at least point into a direction - which has never been the case with KDE. I remember a company asking us for cooperation on KDevelop and offering developers as well as payment for the developers already working on the project. Guess what we did: We said, thank you, but we are a free project. Everyone is invited to donate us money, machines, sponsoring - which is what Siemens, SCO and now Lineo are doing. But they are doing it for FREE although they know that other companies will use software they helped to build as well, even their competitors. I think that is the business model free software needs and has proven useful - its the same with KDE in general. Last words about an old topic. I dont care much who "wins". Matter of fact is which OS wins; this question on the desktop war is like whos got the trousers on in a good marriage ;-) Ralf Nolden, KDevelop Project
  • Choice is good, but it has to be easy. The main reason I don't like GNOME is because of the "choice" of window managers. If I log in cold to gnome, I have no window manager, and if I pick one, configurations and look-and-feel aren't coordinated. You can't expect users to figure out that desktop images are controlled by the window manager but screensavers are controlled by the desktop environment, or whatever. Let them default to E or whatever, and, just like KDE, I can change if it I am so inclined.

    You might want to check out Sawmill. Just install helix-gnome and you should be all set up. Sawmill only does the things that it needs to, but it's (almost?) as configurable as E without the redundancies (like have a gnome menu come up on a left click and an enlightenment menu come up with a right click, heh). To tell you the truth I don't know which things are part of gnome and which are part of sawmill, but I don't really want (need?) to know.
  • To the folks at KDE: Jesus, who CARES what you guys think? Just pump out KDE2 and WE'LL tell YOU if you have anything to worry about from the GNome foundation.

    This is just some article saving face for another article that was saving face for another article that may have trashed Gnome unfairly. At this point, it's all spin doctoring, so who cares?

    Funny, I haven't been hearing all that much from GNome about what their position on KDE is. Maybe it's because they're too busy WORKING?

  • ..for that baby polar bear to escape the zoo and maul all the core KDE developers at a cocktail hosted by the Gnome Foundation...
  • Sun and HP don't want to pay Troll, so they go for GNOME... Despite which many, many Linux users will use KDE. Touting corporate support for competing free (in every sense) projects is a bit silly, isn't it.

    Surely the only mindshare that counts is among Linux users and it's just a bit early to draw conclusions about that.
  • Hmmm,

    First thing is that in IMHO you have selectively quoted from the statement in a way that somewhat distorts it's tone.


    It is widely acknowledged Object-Oriented development using an Object-Oriented langauge such as Smalltalk, Delphi, Java, Python or C++ offers a lot of benefits when developing GUI components or applications that use a GUI. These technologies are widely used in the development of GUI applications across all platforms.


    The KDE developers believe that a C++ toolkit, as opposed to a C based toolkit, is the way to go when developing GUI code. C++ is much more widely used in GUI development across all platforms than C.


    There are many people who post on Slashdot saying that they use C rather than C++ to develop their GUI code. This is fine but it doesn't change the fact that most people who develop GUI applications regard an OO based approach as the way to go for GUI application development.


    It is therefore not irrational to argue that GTK is inferior to Qt for GUI development as GTK is C based whereas Qt is C++ based.


    Your points about the comparison between Mozilla and Konqueror have already been addressed.



    Shaughran

  • Okay, maybe it is just my liking for really good journalism, or maybe I enjoy reading something that is written nice, but the KDE folks writing this article did a good job.

    I use HelixCode GNOME. Have for a while now and will most likely continue to. Does that mean I dislike KDE? Not neccesarily, but I haven't really tried KDE in a year or so. KDE2.0 seems to be getting quite some hype lately and I'm started to get interested in what's going on (so maybe when I get home from work I'll download whats available of 2.0 and give it a whirl).

    Getting back to the article, it looks to be like KDE has a strong foundation (at least they claim). If I were a brand new user with nothing on my desktop and no knowledge of the available software, I would think KDE is leading by miles and GNOME is brand new in development.

    Or at least that's what the article makes it sound like. This technically may be the case, with KDE's easy-to-use interface and user-friendly icons, but I feel when it comes down to the real meat of applications and a strong desktop, GNOME is starting to get it together, even more so with HelixCode making huge waves in the pool.

    So what do I think about KDE's position and their "war" with GNOME? I quite frankly think things will continue to be as they are. GNOME will continue to be a tad more popular (or at least I feel it is right now), and KDE will still be going strong, with it's nice interface and easiness. One day KDE might be used on all desktops, while GNOME is being ignored, but by what's going on today, it looks like the opposite. Stick in there KDE! :)

    --
    Scott Miga
    suprax@linux.com
  • It's about ego more than anything else... Do you think that Mattias will give his 'leader' hat to Miguel, or that Miguel will give his to Mattias? No way! And sharing a throne has always been too difficult...

    The kind of rant we saw here is all too typical. Right now, the spotlight is over GNOME and the KDE team is defending their position. A few months ago it was the exact opposite... I think the projects are too advanced to decide and cooperate with each other.

    As for your question, yes, they are terribly different beasts. GNOME's guts are a highly modular component system called Corba, and Bonobo is (I don't understand exactly how) a framework set on top of it. KDE uses also components, but to a lesser level. The implementations of Corba/Bonobo/GTK and QT are too different to merge them transparently - a re-coding of all the programs would have to happen were we to integrate both projects into one.

  • Polar bears can be mighty (Score:3)

    by Mr T ( 21709 ) on Friday September 01, 2000 @12:44PM (#811041) Homepage
    They underestimate the power of polar bear cubs. We had a pair here in Denver (actually I think the count is up to 4 in the last 6 years) Anyhow, they were called Klondike and Snow and their mom didn't want them and they almost died but zoo keepers stepped in and saved the day. So the zoo keepers and in spirit the whole city got strapped and ended up raising them, if you will. T-shirts, books, videos, stuffed animals/action figure, coloring books, posters, movies, news specials followed; there were regular news updates on the local stations and a couple of papers in the area ran regular columns on them. It was a really positive vibe for the city. Little kids would send them cards and drawings they made, zoo attendance went through the roof. They would take the little tadgers out on walks (yes, like you walk your dog) in the parks around the city and people would just got nuts over the cute little white bears. It sounds stupid but I'm glad it happened, it's the first time I've seen a big city rally around something positive that wasn't a sports team.

    When the evil Sea World Florida won adoption rights for the larger adult versions of Klondike and Snow there was a serious campaign to keep them. They were big but you'd be amazed at the level of interest that was still there. Little kids and adults cried. Petitions were signed. I think the major and some other government people were brought in to make pleas to "save" the bears. (no shit, people called up their congress persons to make them ask the zoo to keep the bears!) Ultimiately Sea World took them way because our zoo already has a lot of polar bears and they have a tank full of cold water there with real salmons swimming around for them to eat and that's kind of cool. On occasion they still show an updates on the news, I guess that they learned how to catch the salmon despite being raised by humans, kind of interesting if you ask me, they had trouble at first and just snapped their teeth at the water missing the salmon..

    When the cubs were born, nobody thought much of it but they turned into a passion for the whole city and probably quite a bit of the state. I suspect that the KDE guys feel that way about GNOME. I don't think it's all anger and debate, but GNOME needs KDE and KDE needs GNOME and GNOME Foundation will affect them. If GNOME foundation is serious and they actually put effort into it then GNOME could easily become the default desktop and the most full featured and funtional; it will take work, KDE is still ahead but there are some major players in the game now. Just dismissing it is foolish. They need to embrace the competition, both groups still need to work towards some interop. and they need to celebrate another victory for free software. Really, this should just be more pressure for TrollTech, it's making less and less sense to not GPL QT and from there start relicensing KDE.

  • Mindshare and Open Source
    Some people involved in this discussion are arguing that KDE will be marginalised because big corporations such as Sun et al are adopting, deploying and supporting GNOME. If the world worked that way Linux would not be as successful as it is. Large corporations came late to the open source movement which was based from the beginning on leadership by developers, technical excellence and a volunteer ethos rather than leadership by CEOs, marketing excellence and a commercial ethos.


    Licensing
    Many comments have been posted stating that large corporations refused to support KDE because they do not want to pay TrollTech for QT. Trolltech have released QT under the QPL free of charge for Free software development under X11. The QPL is an open source license and is compatible with the GPL and LGPL. So you only have to pay for QT for X11 if you are developing closed source software under X11. If GNOME has been selected by the corporations because they do not want to pay Trolltech then the implication is that these corporations are planning to develop closed source applications for X11. So GNOME allows corporations to deploy closed source applications under X11 which undermines to a certain extent the proclaimed aim of the GNOME movement, the development of an Open Source desktop.


    In the light of these points, I think it is fair to say that KDE is now the Open Source Desktop as it conforms more to the Open Source Desktop ethos and promotes the goals of the Open Source movement more than GNOME does at the moment.


    These are all my personal opinions..

    Shaughran

  • Let [GNOME users] default to E or whatever

    The first time a user uses GNOME, it defaults to Sawfish. E is too bloated (it tries to be both a desktop environment and a wm) to be GNOME's default wm.

    (A Sawfish is not a penis fish. And this is not a penis bird.)
    <O
    ( \
    XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]

  • I used KDE1, Switched to Gnome, Now back to KDE2 (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01, 2000 @01:23PM (#811044)
    I just installed the KDE2Beta4 rpms.

    This is one sweet package!

    It just ooozes good engineering and re-usable components throughout. It looks good too.

    Konqueror is one killer application. Except for a few minor bugs it basically makes mozilla obsolete (and that includes the Galleon GTK port).

    • Progressive rendering like mozilla -- as you resize the window only the unobscured part gets redrawn. Very slick.
    • Java and Javascript Support (you can enable or disable Java(script) by domain if you wish)
    • Cookies can be dynamically blocked/unblocked by host/domain etc or completely turned off. If you deny a domain it gets recorded and used from then on.
    • Cryto support of SSL connections (OpenSSL)
    • All browser buttons/lists/sliders etc are rendered with the native KDE look and feel. No more klunky netscape Motif decorations.
    • Correct rendering of every page I can find with the exception of www.msn.com and shoutcast. That is some sort of beta4 font bug. It can be overridden by re-applying your font choice.
    • The whole thing just feels cleaner
    • A complete object oriented interface betweeen traditional dotfiles and the "resource" concept that most gui's need.

    GNOME is cool too, but I think that KDE now has a very powerful edge over them. The Browser is the killer app. If I were the big corps I would re-incarnate the Harmony project and finish it. That would be by far the best thing they could do. Who cares what they do with the servers. OpenSource has given the choice to the users.

    Good luck to all OpenSource projects. I certainly believe KDE2 to be a superior desktop to MickeySloth. Many people on Linux will follow the browser. Konqueror is very aptly named.

  • KDE tried CORBA. It was bloated and slow. Kind of like GNOME itself. You really should work in marketing though: "Everyone else (for whom I can name absolutely zero examples) is invested in CORBA, so KDE needs to be using that just for the buzzword too!"

    I'll agree that we don't need to add more buzzword-technology to our environment for the sake of having our press releases be full of buzzwords. However, your statement about CORBA being bloated and slow is misinformed. ORBit [gnome.org] is an extraordinarily lightweight, speedy implementation. Bud Tribble addressed this in his recent interview [lwn.net] at lwn.net [lwn.net].

    For more information about ORBit, you can also visit the ORBit page [redhat.com] at RHAD [redhat.com].

    In addition, check out the CORBA for Beginners page [omg.org] at OMG [omg.org].
    ----

  • Actually, from what I've seen, Debian and Slackware still have very little of this "slickness." Yes, they both have packaging, but all that does is make software management easier. You can still compile from source if you want to. And I don't think either has many, if any, graphical config tools, unless you count the ones that configure GNOME/KDE.

    I don't want to flame, but too often people talk about all the "Microsoft" stuff creeping into Linux, then when I ask them to elaborate, they're really talking about stuff creeping into RedHat.


    -RickHunter
  • The polar bears of the Quebec city zoological gardens must be the saddest bears, polar or otherwise, in the whole world. They live in a pathetic white-painted concrete hole, and do nothing all day but stand around, neurotically shaking their heads from left to right over and over and over. A most disheartening sight indeed.

    If you saw these wretched things you would probably forget about KDE and Gnome for a few minutes too.

  • If they really believed that the wouldn't have to bother with an "official response" to the GNOME Foundation, now would they?

    They answered this in the first paragraph of the response. Quote: "The recent announcements regarding the formation of a GNOME Foundation coupled with the Sun/Hewlett Packard decision to use GNOME as their standard desktop has resulted in a deluge of requests to the KDE Core Team asking what our "position" is. Well, this is it. We offer this position paper in the hope that we can put this behind us and get back to coding.

  • This is so FRUSTRATING... repeat this with me

    QT IS NOT PROPRIETARY
    QT IS NOT PROPRIETARY

    The QPL is an open source license. QT2 is under the QPL. There, all solved.

  • What do you think is unrealistic or irrational about these comments ?

    What's irrational is that the PAID efforts would "have" to reinvent everything, and the "free" programers would automatically get "better tools".

    This is generally the complete opposite of reality. If a business is willing to pay people to develop software, they are usually quite willing and even happy to pay for tools to make their employees more efficient.

    Whereas "free" programmers are generally stuck with free tools. If the free tools are better, great. if not... they usually just have to make do.

  • I have GTK and QT installed, and use some applications like kfm, written for kde, I also use applications like gnome-napster (not to download anything protected by IP laws though!), so I guess I use both, however my desktop is ice-wm at the moment, although I'm fine with a bunch of bash shell windows, as thats all I realy use to launch applications.

    I dont understand the ruckus, I dont like kde's window manager, I dont know what gnome is TBH. Perhaps I'm missing something big, I dont se these arguments between Afterstep, enlightenment and TWM.

    /me is looking forward to enlightenment (on the subject, not the window manager!)
  • QT IS NOT PROPRIETARY [...] The QPL is an open source license. QT2 is under the QPL.

    Quite right.


    There, all solved.

    Nononono. It's not that simple. The QPL is seriously flawed. Here's an example for you: nick bits of QT and stick them in, say, Zend. You'd now be breaking the law if you distributed that modified app, under clause 3b [trolltech.com], which states that you have to give both "initial developers" the right to create proprietory derivatives of each other's work[*] - a right you don't have the power to grant[**].


    In other words, if the QPL takes off then the free software world will fragment into hundreds of legally incompatible apps and code re-use between these apps will die an ugly death.


    It might be OK to stick Just Another Unimportant QPLed App into a distribution. But making the whole GUI heavily dependent on something with this broken license is a Bad Idea.


    [*]They are required to produce QPLed versions too, incidentally.

    [**]The problem here is that the two apps have different "initial developers" and the QPL grants extra rights to initial developers.

  • See here [slashdot.org].
  • no matter what TrollTech does to Qt... it's free.

    There's a vital freedom missing from the QPL - the freedom to combine two QPLed apps. See here [slashdot.org].
  • Quote: "Q: "How much does creation of GNOME Foundation affect KDE development?" A: "As much as the birth of the last baby polar bear at the Quebec City Zoo" (i.e., not at all)"

    Instead, I would have answered with:

    "We're now searching for corporate sponsors ourselves."

    (Of course, not so directly -- subtlety (ambiguity?) is how you rise to the top.)

    Thing 1

    --

  • LizardKing said: Seems more like the core KDFE guys...

    That reminds me of my freshman english course: GFI (GI101, "Great Ideas").

    Thing 1

    --

  • uhhh? As far as I'm reading your reply it says "Because most people use C++ for GUI programming, using C for such purpose is inferrior". By the same argument Windows must really be waay better at just about everything since more people use it.

    You are giving your personal opinion. There is nothing rational about saying that "language FOO is inferrior to language BAR for doing BLAH". It is a subjective choice. It depends on your coding style, your preferences, the people you work with, etc...

    You also appear to be mixing object oriented programming (which is a programming technique) with language with sugar object oriented syntax. Yes. OO syntax is sugar. That doesn't say it's bad or good, but it does say that it is not mandatory.

    The best programming environment is the one you are the most comfortable with. If I know FOO and am very profficent with FOO, I will probably be much more productive with FOO then with BAR. Not only will I be more productive, but what I produce will be more useful and less buggy.

    So don't take this as an argument either way. I'm not arguing that C is better in GUI then C++ or that C++ is better then C.

  • Actually, the Linux/Windows debate makes more sense. Which is a very sad thing.
    --
  • WTF is with the screwy "Funny" mods? Don't get me wrong, I don't mind being modded up, but why "Funny." If you think I said something incorrect, please answer instead of modding me UP. I got one the other day too for saying "Java can be compiled." What's up?
  • I remind you: many people believe RMS to be [their] god.
    • the egyptian pyramids are of extraordinarily poor design

    You probably didn't get any more out of the above statement than what you had said. Care to expand on your thoughts?


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