“A letter was received by one member of the KDE development team asking the KDE Project to use Red Hat Linux on machines at LWCE and to display RedHat’s shadow man logo on those machines. In exchange, the letter from RedHat explained, KDE would “benefit from many valuable marketing benefits in our booth, on our website, and in our newsletter.” […] At press time, Open for Business was unaware of any response by Mann or others at RedHat concerning this PR disaster. It does, however, raise an interesting question of what the software vendor hopes to accomplish with its continuing near boycotting of KDE. […] As Red Hat’s might is considerably weaker in the desktop segment, with its preferred desktop (GNOME) taking only about 20% of the desktop market versus KDE’s over 50%, they would be wise to change course. […] While being at 70% market share 2-3 years ago, Red Hat hardly enjoys more than 25% [of the Linux] market share nowdays.” Read the whole story about the PR fiasko at OfB.
Red Hat to KDE: “Do as I say, not as I do”
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Red Hat had initially invested in GNOME with developers and labs and so on. Why? KDE wasn’t Free Software. So, when KDE became Free Software, all Red Hat did was bundle it. Why not do more like other companies? Because Red Hat has investments in GNOME, why blow it away?
A couple of hyenas fighting over scraps while a lion, having already eaten his share, sits over in the brush and watches with quiet amusement. Meanwhile, another hyena munches on a smaller but tastier corpse. All around are other various small animals going about thier business. I’ll leave you to draw the analogies to this particularly pathetic aspect of the OS world.
“Much like a telemarketer, Mann continued by essentially repeating his original message, noting that if KDE would use RedHat it would have its name listed on a sign at RedHat’s booth. The KDE logo, however, would not be displayed on the RedHat sign unless KDE completely switched to RedHat systems. ”
Why does this sound like something Microsoft would do? I keep telling you guys that you might as well let the ‘lion’ have its share, or else another lion will be right behind it to take it place.
“While the leading Linux distributor has warmed up to KDE somewhat, finally including the desktop in the 6.x releases a few years ago, its support continues to be poor. Many RedHat specific KDE bugs have been ignored by the company for multiple releases, and KDE’s minor bug-fix releases almost never receive official upgrade packages for RedHat Linux. ”
That’s too bad. As I have said before, I’ve been waiting for a distro (iso) that includes both KDE 3 and Gnome 2. It seemed like it was going to be a choice between Redhat 7.4 and Mandrake 9, but if what the article says is true Redhat’s poor support for KDE, think I’ll go for Mandrake’s offering.
Try Gentoo
It seemed like it was going to be a choice between Redhat 7.4 and Mandrake 9, but if what the article says is true Redhat’s poor support for KDE, think I’ll go for Mandrake’s offering.
Yes, that’s what caused me to switch several years ago. Since Mandrake is pretty much RedHat under the hood, I figure I accrue all of the benefits of RedHat, plus the additional advantage of a decent desktop environment. I usually install KDE out of the box, and then install Ximian Gnome. So I don’t see the advantage of using RedHat, unless you’re using it in a business environment and want their support services.
I don’t really get RedHat’s attitude. While I recognize desktop is not their emphasis, it would seem to be a marginal investment of resources to put a decent implementation of KDE on their distro. Mandrake appears to have done quite nicely for themselves doing exactly that. Those are all customers that could have been RedHat’s.
Considering RH’s past attitude toward KDE, their proposition comes off as a bit arrogant. Asking KDE to provide an endorsement when they have failed to provide any such endorsement to KDE is showing a bit of a crust. But then, the proposition looked like it was some kind of a form letter, possibly sent out to all the exhibitors. So maybe it was just a generic marketing pitch that came off looking badly in this particular context. Details will emerge, I’m sure.
Red Hat doesn’t have to do shit for KDE if they don’t want to. This is like saying “Lycoris ought to include Gnome in their desktop because all they have is KDE”. Red Hat has always been a Gnome-ish distro. In fact, I just installed the Limbo beta and I think they shouldn’t include KDE at all. Not because I dislike KDE, I actually use it all the time, but because it creates confusion to have two different desktops on one distro. They do a good job of integrating their own system management tools into Gnome, I see no reason why they should switch. Their whole infrastructure, including their installer, is bound with Gtk/Gnome. Why take developers away from their current effort into integrating more tightly with KDE?
Furthermore, KDE may now be ahead of Gnome, but their days are numbered. With Sun soon to be including Gnome as part of Solaris, and with Gnome2’s recent release, it’s obvious that Gnome has a great deal going for it. It will be the standard in Unix desktops, like it or not. If the Mono project can create the Windows Forms API to run reliably on Gnome, the fate of KDE will be sealed. It will probably become a hobbyist’s desktop environment. Business will run on Gnome.
No offense but wether Red Hat likes it or not it looks like KDE is going to be the dominate desktop in the Linux world. People like the look and feel of QT and KDE. Borlands Kylix uses a derivative of the QT library. On and on….
They should treat the KDE project with a little respect.
I don’t critisize RedHat much for this even though I think they should support KDE better–it’s what I use. On the other hand I can download RedHat ISO’s, Mandrake ISO’s, or whatever. That’s what counts, doesn’t it? Can you download WinXP or Mac OS X for free AND LEGAL?
— LadyJessica
One thing i don’t realise is why people make such a big deal about KDE and GNOME, like with FUD and RJW. Dont any of you two realise that non of the two are going to dominate the linux or *nix enviroment? maybe one of them might become larger than the other but no complete dominance.
there’s many reasons why i believe that there wont be enviroment dominance. the first is because it would possibly force use of the product, destroying a sense of freedom of choice. competition between the two would be less than it used to be, competition which drives people to create bigger, better, more efficient production, so a slump in competition could result in a slump of production. the best reason i’ve come up with is the fact that everyone has different taste of style. i and my friends tend to use gnome while there’s possibly a bunch of people in berlin which use kde.
on two final notes
-FUD and RJW are both wrong in their own sense in the decloration of gnome or kde being or become the complete dominant in the *nix enviroment. and that they shouldn’t judge the anything based on millions of people and what they use.
– and if anyone thinks or says that windows is enough reason to have competition in the sense of developing a user interface then i would have to say that windows isn’t enough and not even osx, their well beyond it, both gnome and kde.
my 2 cents.
trakz
trakz, I feel small now next to your reasoning. I should have stopped after the first paragraph, which I still hold to.
This about the way RedHat bundles KDE. Unstable, untested, without updates and security fixes. Their KDE packages are created by an employee in his spare time, so don’t blame him.
The only story here I can see is ineptitude on the part of RedHat’s marketing division and a willingness on the part of kde to exploit that for all it’s worth as a publicity stunt.
Of course RedHat could not accept Kde’s counter-offer. What Kde should have done was to ignore RedHat’s offer. Instead the same parties at kde who are always looking for a excuse to display righteous indignation found yet another opportunity to show their asses in public.
Kde may be a fine desktop for those who want to use core components and a gui toolkit tightly controlled by a company which only has an interest in selling proprietary licenses in competition with free software and commercial software which is not bound by similar licensing restrictions. Qt is much more than a gui toolkit. It’s quite nice, but that is beside the point.
Many other people have a very different approach to software development on linux and free unix platforms, in which they are not beholden to a proprietary vendor and can explore a number of possibilities with a greater sense of freedom.
Because Kde is beholden to a proprietary software company, many people involved with kde are always looking for external targets to vent their feelings of frustration and rage against. Instead those people need to understand that this aggressivenes stems from dissatisfaction with their own willing involvement in the situation described above.
There is a story here. RedHat know what their own position is re: KDE vs GNOME. They know that they make KDE a second class citizen to GNOME in their distribution. So it’s a bit rich to expect the KDE project to endorse RedHat, isn’t it?
I wish all you anti-KDE trolls would just go sleep. QT is Free Software. KDE is not “beholden” to TrollTech at all. KDE is based on the GPL version of QT.
If you don’t like the way Trolltech is taking QT it’s in your full right to fork the GPL’ed version of it and do as you please with, within the limits of the GPL of course. Thus, no Trolltech to wory about. They can’t revoke the version they already GPL’ed. Even if they went bankrupt, QT would still live on. please check out KDE Free QT Foundation http://www.kde.org/kdeqtfoundation.html
Maybe KDE isn’t “beholden” to TrollTech; Qt is GPLed, and if TrollTech ever cut off the development of the GPL version, the KDE team could pick up where they left off.
But why haven’t they yet? I use GNOME, and specifically Debian’s packaged GNOME (not Ximian), for the same reason I use Debian; it’s completely corporate-free. The release plans for Debian are decided by the community. The programming for Debian is done by the community. The packaging for Debian is done by the community. Corporations took minimal part in developing the applications in Debian.
With KDE, on the other hand, the entire graphics toolkit is being developed by a corporation. The direction of the development is being determined by a corporation. If TrollTech moved in some new direction with Qt that the KDE guys didn’t like, they’d either have to accept the change, or fork.
From a practical point, KDE isn’t much good either. If KDE is the Windows of the GUI world, Gnome is the UNIX. Gnome, in 2.0 especially, follows the KISS philosophy, while KDE is more bloated than MS Office. In Gnome, there used to be a whole mess of panel options, that no one ever used; now, they got rid of them all, and only have 3 options. I like that. Also, Gnome accepts diversity; some of the most popular Gnome applications, like galeon, gabber, and everybuddy, aren’t actually part of the distribution, whereas in KDE, if you’re not part of the distro, you might as well not exist. Finally, Gnome has gconf, which is a huge improvement on flat configuration files; I’d love to see a gconf server built-in to the kernel, and the use of flat files obsoleted.
If any innovation is happening in the GUI world, and I’m not sure that there is, it’s not with KDE. Enlightenment’s new efm is innovative. Many features of Gnome are innovative. Fresco is very innovative, and I can’t wait to see it hit 1.0, so that hopefully both Gnome and KDE can be ported to it, and users can finally mix and match parts to make their own desktop environments without having everything look funny. But KDE is just a Windows clone, and I’m surprised any serious developer would want to give it another look.
KDE used to be less bloated than Gnome, but ironically, it seemed to switch at about the time Qt was GPLed. Hmm.
Who cares if they’re the biggest Linux distributor. Or as is possibly the case, was the biggest distributor.
If they’re going to play these baiting games, then show them how they truly look in the eyes of the informed: Don’t buy their products, and be vocal about the reasons why.
Mandrake, SUSE, Gentoo, Sorcerer, and many others, all of which are arguably better setups than Redhat anyway, are better candidates for the Linux desktop, at the least.
Redhat’s constantly focuses on the server market, and therefore has more or less ignored any of us who want to use Linux for more. Now that they’re seeing this as a losing strategy, they’re trying to bully the little guys into doing what they want -Much like a certain bully named Microsoft. (Hopefully I won’t be modded down for pointing this out… You in a good mood today Eugenia?)
Linux isn’t going away if Redhat does… They’re not synonomous(SP?).
Show Redhat what you think of such tactics: Hit them in their wallet by putting your money and efforts with a more consumer oriented distribution.
Not only is Qt free & gpl, but the kde developers have a fair say in its development. KDE developers use a locally modified qt for development (qt-copy) and they send patches back to trolltech. It’s the best of both worlds — Trolltech develops Qt full time, and the KDE folks make real-world demands of it and give back patches & design suggestions.
So, why can’t the anti-qt trolls just open their eyes???
Why do the trolls (for both sides) always yell and scream that there must be One True Desktop?
Come one now, grow up everybody.
Red Hat doesn’t have to do shit for KDE if they don’t want to. This is like saying “Lycoris ought to include Gnome in their desktop because all they have is KDE”.
I would agree that Lycoris should bundle GNOME and at least provide some level of integration if they email a GNOME developer to use a Lycoris machine with Lycoris logos and icons.
Furthermore, KDE may now be ahead of Gnome, but their days are numbered. With Sun soon to be including Gnome as part of Solaris, and with Gnome2’s recent release, it’s obvious that Gnome has a great deal going for it.
All Sun is good for is money. Their influence on the UNIX workstation is gradually declining, if they have any influence at all. GNOME 2.0 is nothing more than an API change. In fact, if you advertise the API, I would accept GNOME 2.0 much more better, GNOME 2.0 doesn’t have the degree of polish KDE 3.0 has, nor do they have desktop users features (for example, can you create a link in Nautlius?). GNOME 2.0 has a long way to go.
Can you download WinXP or Mac OS X for free AND LEGAL?
But then, is Red Hat and Mandrake making money from its desktop OS?
Dont any of you two realise that non of the two are going to dominate the linux or *nix enviroment? maybe one of them might become larger than the other but no complete dominance.
Exactly. Red Hat should respect KDE more instead of just dissing them off. After all, KDE would die off, neither would GNOME. I’m not asking for them to support KDE in the same way as GNOME, but respect it. But what they are doing is trying to use them as advertisements.
This about the way RedHat bundles KDE. Unstable, untested, without updates and security fixes. Their KDE packages are created by an employee in his spare time, so don’t blame him.
Red Hat bundles KDE reluctantly. In fact, I believe they shouldn’t bundle KDE. So since they have a lot of GNOME developers, why should they have a lot of KDE developers? Your reasoning probably won’t make senseto you if I say this: This about the way Lycoris bundles GNOME (okay, they don’t bundle it). Unstable, untested, without updates and security fixes. Their GNOME packages are created by an employee in his spare time, so don’t blame him. (Okay, they don’t have any GNOME-related employees)
Kde may be a fine desktop for those who want to use core components and a gui toolkit tightly controlled by a company which only has an interest in selling proprietary licenses in competition with free software and commercial software which is not bound by similar licensing restrictions. Qt is much more than a gui toolkit. It’s quite nice, but that is beside the point.
You forgot to mention that QT also comes in GPL. And if ever they stop making QT that is usable by KDE (eg force them to pay in order to use QT), QT would be free under the BSD license. Troll Tech needs to feed their family, GTK+ isn’t a flagship product of any company.
So in other words, you would never use propeitary KDE and QT without have a BSD version lying around somewhere. Maybe in a GPL-incompatible license (QPL). Besides, did you notice the most pushed database app by FSF also does the same thing as Troll Tech?
Besides, if you want KDE to be free from Troll Tech, make something better than KDE, and convince KDE developers to move :p
But why haven’t they yet? I use GNOME, and specifically Debian’s packaged GNOME (not Ximian), for the same reason I use Debian; it’s completely corporate-free.
You didn’t happen to check out the GNOME Foundation have you? GNOME is mostly controled by Red Hat, Ximian, HP and Sun, so much for corporate free. Plus, in Debian, more and more HP influence is coming in. Besides, if Stallman is okay with Free Software corporations, why aren’t you? Like you said, if they change direction, or go under, it can be forked. Take Nautilus for example.
From a practical point, KDE isn’t much good either. If KDE is the Windows of the GUI world, Gnome is the UNIX. Gnome, in 2.0 especially, follows the KISS philosophy, while KDE is more bloated than MS Office.
As a (new) Window Maker user, I would think GNOME is either too bloated, or underfeatured. KISS works to a certain degree. A user would only use a small percentage of the features, but contrary to popular belief, different people uses different features, so you must provide for most of them if you want them to use your product.
Besides, GNOME 2.0 isn’t bloated because most, if not all, of the work went behind the API. Expect GNOME to get bloated reall soon (as early as GNOME 2.2). And anyway, if you really a believer of that KISS thingy, why use GNOME anyway?
In Gnome, there used to be a whole mess of panel options, that no one ever used; now, they got rid of them all, and only have 3 options.
I like the idea of cleaning up, but just notice the controls there – it is just as confusing as before. On Windows, if you have Windows Blinds, when you change a theme, you only change it in one place and everything would change (the icons, window deco etc.). Or the very least, do like KDE, group them together. Okay, just say this thing is good for newbies so they won’t be overwhelmed by the options, for the advance users, is there a graphical way to change things? At least an Advance tab where the rest of the controls are hidden? Nooooo.
If any innovation is happening in the GUI world, and I’m not sure that there is, it’s not with KDE. Enlightenment’s new efm is innovative. Many features of Gnome are innovative.
I can say many features in KDE are innovative. And if GNOME is so much more innovative than KDE, why does many people want GNOME to use aRTs. Also, why everytime KDE is mentioned on #gnome, someone asks if Konqi is gonna be ported.
Fresco is very innovative, and I can’t wait to see it hit 1.0, so that hopefully both Gnome and KDE can be ported to it
GNOME would be easier to port than KDE. Mainly because GNOME uses Bonobo (which is CORBA based), unlike KDE. But still a port would take years, at least 4. Besides, Fresco plans to eliminate the need of KDE and GNOME by having a single API. Perhaps difference themes would be programed, one looking like KDE, another maybe like Next, who knows?
KDE used to be less bloated than Gnome, but ironically, it seemed to switch at about the time Qt was GPLed. Hmm.
Funny, I liked all the features availabled after the license swithc, as oppose to prior the license switch. I’m now using Window Maker because it is nice and simple (as in the looks, when you look at it, it is simple), and very configuratable.
“(for example, can you create a link in Nautlius?)”
Yes.
@aleksandr:
Gnome is corporate-free? I thought large parts of Gnome (and Gtk) were written by Ximian, Red Hat and Sun? What happens when they develop “their” parts of Gnome into a directions the independent hackers dont like? They have exactly the same choice as the KDE developers.
“Why does this sound like something Microsoft would do?”
I’ve always said from the beginning that Redhat was the Microsoft of the Linux world. Seems I was right for a change
Parts of GNOME were certainly developed by corporations. The most notable two are nautilus and evolution. It’s no coincidence, in my opinion, that those two pieces of software are the biggest pieces of shit ever written for Gnome, and their inclusion should immediately be discontinued.
Originally, gmc was going to be replaced by a “gfm”, which, AFAIK, would not have had a web browser built-in. Instead, Eazel came along, made Nautilus, and got it included as part of the distro.
Then, Ximian came along, made an Outlook clone, and got it included as the distro’s standard mailclient, replacing balsa.
My mail client now is mutt. If I needed to use a graphical mail client, it would be between kmail and balsa; kmail is a better program, but balsa is based on Gnome2. Kmail is good because it’s nothing like most of KDE; it follows KISS, and therefore I’ve never seen a simpler or faster GUI mail app.
Every time KDE does a new release, I give it a shot and see if it’s gotten any better. It never has. I still open up kcontrol, and have no idea where to start; there’s so many damn applets! Gnome actually reduced the number of preference panels it had, and additionally merged most of them into gconf. I can now load up gconf-editor and change a ton of options, in fact there’s little in Gnome you can’t change, but the preference panels only cover the 5% of things that 95% of users will care about changing.
And KDE still has that damn system-tray workalike! I didn’t switch to Linux just so I could have more problems with system trays.
Now, maybe the development of core parts of Gnome, outside of nautilus and evolution, was assisted by corporations. Still, the vast majority of the development was not done by corporations, the corporations have no official control over where Gnome goes (it being part of the GNU project), and if that ever changed, I just start using blackbox again.
Does RMS support free-software corporations? Good for him. Personally, though, I still think that the best software is the software developed outside of the coporate environment. Debian is the best distro, because it doesn’t have to follow a corporate release schedule, or worry about marketing; they just make a good distro when they’re nice and ready. Everything should be like that.
Ever since my first install of Linux I have favored Gnome over KDE. I use RH 7.3, and I DO install KDE 3.0 as the ONLY desktop; that continues until I install Ximian Gnome which I promptly update to Gnome 2.0 via red carpet…. I am in no way a developer but I think that KDE looks like cr-p and is the elephant of *nix Desktops, whereas Gnome is the Panther….
PS. I only install KDE because I like some of the Kapps…not many though.
rajan:
If you want to change advanced options in GNOME 2: gconf-tool
There is no need to provide a massive control panel for advanced users either. I hated the GNOME 1.4 and KDE (current and 2.2’s) control panel. If you want to change something, head to gconf and change it there. Less waste, less muss.
… at least, not beyond a clueless marketer and some immature KDE developers.
1) The original e-mail was most likely sent out to a large number of organizations who are going to have booths at the show.
2) It was a simple logo swap – if you happen to be running RedHat on your booth system, put our logo on your PC and we’ll mention you in our booth. If you want to run RedHat, but don’t have a copy, we’ll give you one.
3) The marketing guy apparently has no clue of the bad feelings held by KDE devs towards RedHat.
4) KDE devs go into conspiracy mode.
5) KDE sends a two-line response with what is apparently interpreted by the marketing guy as a request for a “presence” in RedHat’s booth (i.e., KDE people in the booth) and with a request for a system to run RedHat on in KDE’s booth.
6) Marketing responds that their own booth setup is already full. Offers instead to give KDE’s logo a prominent spot if KDE puts RedHat on all their systems, in addition to whatever other “marketing benefits” are part of the original logo swap program. Also, RedHat are unable to provide systems to other exhibitors as part of this marketing program because a) everyone else wants one, too, and b) their people already have enough booth sh*t to haul around.
7) People get their panties in a twist. “Mommy, they won’t give us special treatment. They’re just like M$!” Oh, grow up.
That was _exactly_ what I thought when reading the mail conversation (the one with “Redhat: Linux for idiots” in the page title….).
I just didn’t feel like writing it down because we will take a lot of bashing now for sure. Whatever. I guess smart people won’t listen to the mob anyway and draw their own conclusions.
The story is the one everyone is discussing; RedHat disrespects KDE in their distro but expects the KDE team to endorse RedHat by using RedHat Linux and flying the RedHat flag. The story is this;
1) RedHat shouldn’t ship with KDE.
2) RedHat shouldn’t be asking projects they make a point of not supporting to support RedHat.
3) All the anti-KDE trolls need to go to sleep – if this story was about Lindows and Gnome there’d be a storm of self-righteous outrage and indignation.
off topic, but I always thought their logo was of a woman. Learn something new everyday
Red Hat has had their collective heads up thier rectums for a couple of years now, and this behavior is nothing new. This past year alone RH’s distro’s have felt increasingly closed to modification and technologically backwards. Ez pointed out exactly how I interpreted the story, in that they are effectively attempting to A> Bully the KDE team, B> Trying to make themselves sound more important to the community than they really are, and C> Pull the same type of @#$% M$ did back during the Browser wars on the Windows side of things. (Sorry folks, but IE won that fight. Mozilla may be hot $#!T under Linux, but it blows under Win32. Redraw and refresh errors, misdisplayed pages. HTML isn’t that complex, for pete’s sake Arachne displays most pages better than the Win32 Mozilla!)
Oh, and on the logo, I thought it was Carmen Santiago. Where in the world is Red Hat Linux??? I suppose it’s better than M$’ “This is where you will go today”
They didn’t expect KDE to do anything, it was just a simple logo-exchange offer. The only reason why the KDE developers are probably pissed about this is, that KDE aren’t treating them with more respect then other exhibitors. Calling them “Linux for idiots” because of this is somewhat harsh, don’t you think so.
And what anti-KDE trolls are you talking about please? There is only one (Alex) and maybe the comment from RJW but he more or less apologized and his comment was countered by a pro-KDE troll anyway.
I didn’t see any GNOME supporters bitching because of it’s lack of existance in Linudows or Lycoris so far.
In fact many people are asking for distributors to concentrate on one desktop to reduce user-confusion so there is no real point in bitching about distributors to do exactly this.
BTW, are you aware that Redhat did actually change the panel layout of GNOME in Limbo to be more consistent with the KDE panel layout? I’m not very happy with this decision but it should show that they care a little bit (no, I don’t use Redhat and probably never will).
Every time KDE does a new release, I give it a shot and see if it’s gotten any better.
Then probably KDE is not made for you. That’s the main reason why there are so many DEs and WMs. No shoe fits two people. Personally, I like KDE, but right now, I’m using Window Maker because I wad downgraded to 64mb of RAM. I do miss KDE a lot.
still open up kcontrol, and have no idea where to start; there’s so many damn applets!
Before you are overwhelm, ask yourself, what do you want to do. Click on the on the category closest to what you want to do. Then select the thing you wanted to do. Like, if you want to change the Sounds, select Sounds :p. Sounds easy enough? Remember, I was a almost brand new computer user when I started using KDE. It wasn’t configured for me, that idiot cousin of mine chosed GNOME, but it didn’t fit me, but luckily, I found KDE. I manage to configure it to my taste, and later on, because of my curiosity, I became a geek :p.
Anyway, the KDE developers are open to having a KControl replacement, but the problem is nobody wants to do it. There are those you are making HTML XP look-a-like (Lycoris isn’t the only one, search kdelook.org).
I’m planing to do so during my holidays in November, December. I plan to write an front end to KHTML (most likely Python, or probably I would fork Konqi), and use XSLT and XML for the control panels. Then I would use Python to make the applets. I’m doing it this way so that it would be themable (e.g. if someone wants it to look like System Preference in Mac OS X, like Mosfet, he/she could. If someone likes Windows XP, they could use that).
Gnome actually reduced the number of preference panels it had
But it didn’t clean it up. As in making it easy for the user to change stuff. For example, how would a brand new user know what is Nautilus? Just asking :p. Personally, for me, GNOME 2.0 is a developers release. It isn’t easy to use (I manage to move from KDE to WM, to Windows XP. Also manage to use Mac OS X. Believe me when i say GNOME 2.0 is confusing for the new user). I’m waiting for GNOME 2.2 to evaluate whether to continue using KDE or to jump over.
And KDE still has that damn system-tray workalike! I didn’t switch to Linux just so I could have more problems with system trays.
I actually use the system tray. I use it for KPPP and Klipper. You could disable it you know, and you could enable it on GNOME 2.0 you know.
the corporations have no official control over where Gnome goes (it being part of the GNU project)
The GNOME Foundation does control the roadmap of GNOME (anything in the GNOME CVS). And GNOME Foundation is controled mostly by Ximian and Red Hat, partly by Sun and HP. Maybe you should move to Blackbox, or maybe WM, or Fluxbox….
Besides, GNOME would be nowhere without these corporations.
Personally, though, I still think that the best software is the software developed outside of the coporate environment.
And the best software in developed inside the corporate enviroment. There are incentives to work, called pay. Besides, if I was you, I would start planing to move away from Debian as it is getting more and more HP influence, and also an increasing amount of Libranet, Xandros and Lindows.com influence.
I am in no way a developer but I think that KDE looks like cr-p and is the elephant of *nix Desktops, whereas Gnome is the Panther….
GNOME is not the panther, it is not the fastest out there. Also, KDE could be made to be faster than GNOME if you don’t stick with the defaults and switch off what you don’t need (there are much more to switch off in KDE than in GNOME). Plus, the speed increase when compiled with GCC 3.1 for KDE the speed increase is very apparent, while GNOME 2.0 is quite a little.
If you want to change advanced options in GNOME 2: gconf-tool
Forgive my ignorance.
1) RedHat shouldn’t ship with KDE.
Personally, as a KDE zealot, I don’t think they should unless they are ready to support it. They should just keep GNOME and throw away KDE. Unless if they have official security and bug fix RPMs and support KDE.
off topic, but I always thought their logo was of a woman. Learn something new everyday
Oddly enough, I thought the same.
Every time I hear a statistic for gnome usage on osnews it gets lower by 5%. Could someone please provide same damn proof!
rajan, are you aware that your comments are _always_ annoyingly long?
Take it slow…
“For example, how would a brand new user know what is Nautilus?”
WTF should he have to know that? The term “Nautilus” appears nowhere in the GUI (besides of it’s about box and help of course).
“Believe me when i say GNOME 2.0 is confusing for the new user”
No I don’t. Your comment about not beeing able to create links in Nautilus was wrong and your comment about users not knowing what Nautilus is is weird.
Please provide actual examples of what you couldn’t do or what was too complicated in your opinion. If those make sense and can be reproduced, I will be more than happy to post them to the GNOME usability list. I review the GNOME 2 ui all the time since I switched from KDE 2.2 and Windows 2000 to GNOME 2 but I couldn’t find any (unknown) problems with it so far. Just a few very minor ones which usually get fixed soon after reporting. Well ok, I think Nautilus is still pretty much on crack but it’s getting there.
Again, please provide details don’t just do generalising statements like this. Otherwise you will unintentionally spread a lot of FUD.
“I’m waiting for GNOME 2.2 to evaluate whether to continue using KDE or to jump over.”
Noone is asking you to do that… If KDE makes you perfectly happy, please continue to support them. The main point of GNOME (and KDE) is to draw away users from Windows, Mac OS, CDE, etc, _not_ from each other.
That’s why all this shittalk about GNOME (often unjustified)
doesn’t really help. Well it helps KDE, but it hurts free software in general.
“GNOME is not the panther, it is not the fastest out there. Also, KDE could be made to be faster than GNOME if you don’t stick with the defaults and switch off what you don’t need (there are much more to switch off in KDE than in GNOME). Plus, the speed increase when compiled with GCC 3.1 for KDE the speed increase is very apparent, while GNOME 2.0 is quite a little.”
Performance talk is mood. Both KDE 3 and GNOME 2 behave pretty good. Startup time is exactly the same (I measured that), application startup time is probably similar with GCC 3.1 (couldn’t test it yet) and as for speed of the desktop, both Metacity/KWin and Gnome-Panel/Kicker are lightning fast. As for filemanagers, Nautilus is still a bit on the slow side compared to Konqueror but it has improved enormously and since 2.0.2 the difference is really marginal. Both could still need some improvements of course as filemanagment should be as snappy as possible.
“Personally, as a KDE zealot, I don’t think they should unless they are ready to support it. They should just keep GNOME and throw away KDE. Unless if they have official security and bug fix RPMs and support KDE.”
Redhat packages a few thousand packages without supporting all them explicitely. But of course security patches should be provided… Unless they are a few hundred megs in size.
Those of you unhappy with kdes control center should be happy to know that it is being worked on. It is being reorganized at the moment, and i expect many more changes after 3.1 is released. (in feature freeze right now)