A recent study prepared by Evans Data concluded that KDE is the preferred desktop environment amongst Linux developers. 65% of the 600 surveyed said that they currently use KDE, against 56% for GNOME. Nicholas Petreley, Evans Data's Linux analyst, said "It is also interesting to note that KDE has taken a statistically significant lead in use and deployment after running neck and neck with GNOME for the past three years."
Dot Categories:
Comments
Lycoris is a distro maker, Ximian is an application house. how many core KDE devels does Lycoris employ? how many LOC in KDE's CVS are due to Lycoris employees or their sponsorship? how many CVS modules are maintained by Lycoris people? not saying that Lycoris is bad, just that they aren't a Ximian-alike. heck, SuSE does a TON more than Lycoris for KDE, and even SuSE isn't a Ximian-alike.
Novell purchasing Ximian is different than what we've seen before. IBM, Sun, HP, and others are hardware companies that sell software/hardware solutions. FOSS is a natural for them, commoditize software, value-add their hardware. Novell is a software company. They sell shrinkwrap.
Should be interesting to see how it works out. I suspect we'll see more like the Exchange connector that Ximian brought out; closed proprietary based on lgpl libraries.
I'm not sure if that is good. Brings in market share and all that, but is it free as in speech?
Derek
Why guess? There was an interview with Sun programmers involved with GNOME a while back where they said it was because GTK/GNOME are written in C. Old-time C/Motif hands are going to be much more comfortable with that style of API than with OOP and Qt.
I doubt if nationality or even licenses had much to do with it.
People at Sun now believe they should have bought TrollTech and then made Qt LGPL. It is much more elegant and cross-platform compatible than Gtk. Unfortunately, Sun only had Unix on its mind when it initially got involved.
Sigh...
What is your source for this?
His ass.
I wish I could moderate this "+1, funny as hell".
LOL Im still smiling.
Cheers,
Ryan
There are a few other more important reasons :-
1] Binary compatibility:
Sun has a commitment to BC (look at Solaris/SPARC).
C++ makes this harder, especially due to the everchanging ABI. Binary
incompatibility is an utter nightmare for ISVs.
Ref: http://developers.sun.com/tools/cc/articles/CC_abi/CC_abi_content.html
2] Licencing:
No need to explain here... they obviously want to develop commercial
applications without licencing fees.
I doubt whether the quality of kde versus gnome at the time of their
decision had any impact, or that the ammericanness of gnome is related
to this either.
There are wide reports that internal developers at Sun regret the decision. If you think OOP is very pretty in C/GTK compared to C++/Qt then you must not be very well informed. :-)
The wide-spread reports come primarily frm a single developer, who would like to re-write the kernel in Java; and doesn't live in the real world IMHO.
No it comes from actually talking to Sun developers at conferences.
That's not what Sun developers said at Linuxtag this year :)
(although American and European Sun developers may beleive differently.. rh-Europe has always been more pro-KDE than their American counterparts)
So? Your never going to get a multitude of developers to agree on a choice like that.
If your source is real, hes not very well informed. Certainly at the time there was no GPL QT, let alone an LGPL QT. Also, while GTK+ manages to support OO in C, something that C was never designed to do, in a reasonably sane manner, there is also the well maintained GTKmm C++ bindings which that disgruntled developer could use.
If you could supply the name of the developer that you personally spoke to, Id be interested to get his further opinions.
Cheers,
Ryan
Basically my point is, aside from license issues there is no real difference between the two libraries.
Dont worry! Trolltech works for us! ;)
BTW, it's really strange that now the GPL is becoming the major concern.
Hey GPL's supposed to be A Good Thing (TM). Of course it can't be hijacked
by commercial interests as easily as other licenses. But wasn't that what it's been
invented to do?
>Hey GPL's supposed to be A Good Thing (TM)
There is nothing that is "A Good Thing (TM)", that's why there are other licenses: LGPL, BSD,etc...
I personnaly prefer the LGPL for libraries, toolkits, and the like and the GPL for applications, YMMV of course.
Hijacked by commercial interests?
People need to realize that on a given OS there needs to be a FREE GUI toolkit to develop your applications with (e.g. Win32 + DirectX on windows). While I _love_ KDE, I can't be surprised if Gnome gets more supported because it's LGPL. The only stumbling block in KDE's mass adoption in the licensing issue really.
Just my 2 penneis
>People need to realize that on a given OS there needs to be a FREE GUI toolkit to develop
>your applications with
While I partially agree with that, be careful with the word 'free' :). According to the FSF Qt is free, more that GTK+.
It's indeed somewhat unfortunate that KDE's success is connected with with the willingness of vendors to produce software that is also free, or to pay a non-trivial amount of money to TT.
Don't let FSF define free for you. It seems free to them means "The freedom we like, and if you don't like it, go kill yourself" Seriously, how can something that gourges you more be freer. LGPL says, if you modify my program, then make you modifications freely available, but if you want to link to this LGPL'd one, it ok. To me that is freer than GPL. But GPL is also very useful in other contexts, when you want to limit these freedoms. Like in the kernel. Now, we don't want people running away with out kernel a la Apple/OS X/ Darwin do we. Nothing against Apple, the day I get enough money, I buy an Apple.
LGPL is less restrictive. The GPL is about keeping freedom, not having temporary freedom. If you don't want it you could also buy the source code and a site license of a proprietary app.
It's indeed somewhat unfortunate that KDE's success is connected with with the willingness of vendors to produce software that is also free, or to pay a non-trivial amount of money to TT.
Ah, please, name a couple of companies that use GTK+ in closed source applications, preferable crossplatform.
http://wingide.com/
http://www.vistasource.com/
http://www.roebling.de/
The real reason why Gnome has the number of users that it does is down to the popularity of Red Hat, especially with their contracts with big companies. Since Red Hat installs Gnome by default and Red Hat is the most popular distribution its popularity doesn't seem that strange (Yes I know that KDE is an option on Red Hat).
To move a greater number of people to KDE Red Hat need to give greater support to it, this maybe forced onto them if KDE continues to grow into a dominant Linux desktop. Maybe another company like Mandrake (with their financial issues) or SuSE (with their excellent corporate contracts) could replace Red Hat as the no 1. Linux provider? They both use KDE as their default desktops.
Umm... Redhat is the most popular in the _US_, isn't it? Here in NI, everyone I know uses Debian. It's similar everywhere I hang out online, too.
*shrug* It seems that SuSE and Red Hat are both popular in the UK. I know at my work place (former DERA, so lots of scientists/engineers) there was a mix of Red Hat and SuSE.
I think a lot of people choose their distro based on their preferred desktop. I know I switched from SuSE to Red Hat because I decided I preferred Gnome and suses gnome simply wasn't as good.
I'm not sure how this story got posted, considering the numbers add up to more than 100%. But then it's bashing gnome, so I guess that's why it got posted :(
> I'm not sure how this story got posted, considering the numbers add up to more than 100%
The survey did not ask for the preferred DE, but for the DEs that the developers use. Obviously many devs use both.
I guess it depends on the definition of a "case". The tallies for each desktop all added up to 600, so I can't see how they could have voted for more than one. Then the next column is percentage of "cases" which adds up to more than 100, but case isn't defined anywhere.
case == respondant
1 respondant provide >= 1 response
so responses >= cases
ergo >100%
I'm not sure why you post here, considering that you always bash KDE.
Btw, you are wrong on another thing. There are a LOT of Redhat desktops deployed that default to KDE, customized or otherwise. Like the City of Largo for instances.
I don't know any RedHat user who hasn't even at least tried KDE.
Don't forget that Redhat basically crippled KDE to be worse than GNOME. Most users don't know that.
Troll!!!
> Don't forget that Redhat basically crippled KDE to be worse than GNOME
Such as? (I know about the default blue curve theme and the mozilla icon on kicker, but you must be referring to something else)
Actually I was quite impressed by the kde 3.1 desktop on rh9.
This is bunk, that has been discussed and flamed beyond recognition. RH changed KDe in ways that the community didnt like, but there was nothing done that was crippling.
Cheers,
Ryan
by shipping with a crash-prone KWin deco, a buggy style and changes to includes and desktop flie locations that were incompatible with other more stock KDEs, they deffinitely hurt KDE's showing. most if not all of these things were addressed in future releases.
something that wasn't was defaulting to pretty much all non-KDE apps when choosing the KDE desktop as your platform of choice. i understand their reasons for doing so, but many still consider that "ripping the guts out of" KDE.
hope that helps you understand how others have arrived at an opinion so different from yours.
As I said above, I have heard all those arguements to *death*. Bottom line: those who think RH is out to "destroy" KDE need to retire their shiny tin-foil hat and find something more productive to do. You may not have liked they changes, but they were done to satisfy their customers, not KDE (or GNOME, if you think Im being unfairly critical) hardcore users.
In fact, my guess is that RH wont ship the "Ximainized" OpenOffice 1.1 (with font AA, Gnome icons, etc) because it is inconsistent between desktops.
Hope that helps you understand how others see KDE as not so hard done by with regards to RH.
Cheers,
Ryan
Red Hat's Linux version is now using a community development model (http://rhl.redhat.com/), similar to and thus competing against Debian. If it's as open as they imply KDE fans who prefer Red Hat should be able to help improving KDE within Red Hat.
Did you all see the the message on the SuSE site that they have an agreement with Sun? (http://www.suse.de/en/company/press/press_releases/archive03/sun.html) So maybe Sun will start using KDE...
It doesn't look like that.
No, sun have basically fully committed to GNOME. They're active developers of it -- writing docs, adding patches regularly, etc. And they just announced full & ongoing support for GNOME on their systems.
Sun has provided KDE with Solaris for quite a while too.
You dream. That is for Linux, not Solaris, which is where they default to GNOME
I read today that the version of Sun will use GNOME.
It's sad to see that it'll be very uncomfortable. ;-)
1) How can 65% prefer KDE while *more* than 35% prefer GNOME? That doesn't make sense.
2) "As of this survey, however, KDE has jumped ahead of GNOME by a significant margin for the first time." - is it just me or does this sound like "OMG we won! victory! you suck wahahahaha!!!"?
And if I remember correctly, there have been a lot of polls in the past about GNOME vs KDE usage. And for most of them, KDE has the most votes. What the heck is "As of this survey" supposed to mean? To declare a victory to a "war" that never existed in the first place?
> 1) How can 65% prefer KDE while *more* than 35% prefer GNOME? That doesn't make sense.
They asked what they use. Some developers use both KDE and GNOME quite obviously.
On my Redhat 7.3 desktop I use KDE, but I use Gnome almost exclusively for any configuration issues. I find Gnome easier to use when configuring the system. On my Redhat 6.2 (Yes we still use it) & 8.0 Servers it's Gnome all the time.
Hmmm, but what does configuring the system have to do with GNOME or KDE?
stolen from kde-cafe:
---------------------------------------------
from the source article at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1210083,00.asp
"[Jack Brooks, director of technology at Walt Disney Feature Animation,] and
his team also moved all their GUIs to Qt, a multiplatform kit from Trolltech
Inc., and ported more than 4 million lines of code to Linux."
apparently they have 600+ desktops running Red Hat Linux... nice...
- --
Aaron J. Seigo
-----------------------------------------------
and so much for american vs european!