There is an audio interview with Caleb Tennis author of the new book Rapid GUI Development with QtRuby. *** amaroK started their fundraising drive. *** Newsforge reports on Create @ Freedesktop the new project to bring together graphics projects including Scribus and Krita, meanwhile Open Clip Art Library 0.18 was released. *** Ging released 0.1.0 of their Debian GNU/kFreeBSD Live CD based on KDE.
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You know what? Me too, and that's what makes me so upset about this whole thing :(
Indeed, so much for the whole "Qt is *more* free than GNOME because it uses the GPL"... where's your freedom now, Windows-boy?
You know... I don't just mouth the word "freedom". Given a choice between Windows and KDE, I'd choose KDE... but then I'm not a crazed bubbled-headed zealot who has lost all sense of proportion.
Pretty aggressive tone isn't it?
Maybe you should try differentiating people for what they are - persons, not trying to group all and everything together. It's not "Darg against the KDE-zealots" here, who in your mind obviously all say the same.
For the record. I (that's me, the person) never ever said Qt would be more free than anything else because it's GPL. Honestly I think KDE would be better of with a less strictly licensed Qt - but I know and accept the opinion of those opposing this for various reasons.
My personal choice to use KDE is based on the first class software it is - it always served me well. If KDE fails for whatever reason, I would first go to Windows which is a platform I know rather well even though I don't like working with it much. Yet people have to do their work, right? KDE makes this pretty easy for me - almost a pleasure. Windows allows me to do things in different, more indirect ways, but in the end you get there. With GNOME I miss various features I have in KDE easily and via some thrid party app in windows.
Actually GNOME get's in my way too often due to beeing over-simplified. Things are missing and you have to go hunting to get them back.
So, why would I even consider using GNOME? Just because it's free (beer or freedom, whatever) ? No. Thanks.
Who the fuck are you, lamer? This whole thread is full of your bullshit. Fuck off.
* Who the fuck are you, lamer? This whole thread is full of your bullshit. Fuck off.
Oooh... temper temper little boy. I realise that this is a difficult moment for you KDE hotheads, but you must see the truth here. KDE is now, at best, a second division desktop with an extremely limited future. You aren't going to take over the world... your desktop is destined to be the plaything of the few zealots who can be bothered to install it.
If you want someone to blame, then blame the fools who took the initial decision to based KDE on the closed-source Qt (read that very carefully before replying. Qt *was* closed-source when KDE started... and even now suffers from licensing problems being a library using the full GPL). It set the course for the entire fiasco that's followed... KDE developers have wasted hundreds of man-years writing code for a desktop that's going nowhere, and all because you didn't pay attention to licensing at the beginning. It's tragic really, but also strangely hilarious.
If nothing else, KDE's pitiful downfall should serve as an important lesson for other projects. DON'T DO WHAT THESE HALFWITS DID. MAKE SURE YOU LISTEN TO THE LICENSING EXPERTS.
It would also be nice if all the little KDE attack squad goons who have thrown so much abuse around over the years would publicly apologise to Richard Stallman, Bruce Perens, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems... who they you have repeatedly abused, slandered and lied about for pointing out the obvious definiencies in the arrangement between KDE and its puppeteer TrollTech.
...on the closed-source Qt (read that very carefully before replying. Qt *was* closed-source when KDE started..
And if nothing else labels you as a clueless moron, that statement did. Qt was never closed-source. Don't matter how many times or carefully you read it, it's plain fact. Those earlier versions are still obtainable so you can download and compile them yourself, no closed source there. The earlier Qt was on the other hand licensed under a license not compatible with the GPL, but that in no way makes it closed source. But that is clearly to hard for your small brain to comprehend.
You are wrong... do some reading you bloody fool. The original Qt *WAS CLOSED SOURCE* and KDE was in direct and blatant violation of the GPL by using it. The fact that the code for early versions was retroactively released (and can now be downloaded) does not change that -- you cannot airbrush history so easily. The later versions were released under an Open Source license that was not GPL compatible... and then finally, dual-licensed under the GPL to solve the incompatibility problem... but still leaving the "must pay Trolltech" problem.
You'd think a dump like this, full of brazen swaggering advocates, would know the basics... but obviously not.
As if something delivered with sources can be closed source. As if developers can violate their own code.
Don't forget to also quote: "The entire KDE graphical interface and product family will continue to be supported and delivered on OpenSuSE". The OpenSUSE project creates SUSE Linux which is the base for the business products above so the KDE packages will work also on SLES and NLD.
True, but like somebody said KDE is now a foreign citizen on SUSE. Why would anyone go through the hassle of trying to get their KDE packages together on SUSE when (if) there's something that comes with KDE default?
opensuse is (and i guess will be) KDE based. so Gnome is still foreign there... but the corporate editions include gnome as default. sounds like not really efficient from a novell point of view, but hey, the community prefers KDE, the company's gnome...
and i wonder if KDE 4 will change their attitude... i don't really understand why the choose gnome, as it doesn't really have any advantages (except maybe that its slightly more usable, but this is offset by the fact most buisiness users are used to windows, and KDE is more windows-user-friendly) and KDE has a way better framework to build applications upon. it might be licensing, but then again, i still considder Qt an advantage. guess its just gnome trolls that convinced them. the most imporant reason gnome is used at all is they make lots of noize, while knowing KDE kicks their ass on most parts of the desktop.
well, IF kde 4 will be so much faster and better as i expect it to be, the difference between the archaic gnome and the much more advanced Mac OS X, Windows Longhorn and KDE 4(which may very well be the best of these 3) will be staggering...
> opensuse is (and i guess will be) KDE based
Not really. Enterprise editions show the way.
IMHO the only sane way SUSE users can have a vote on this is to vote with their
wallets and feet. Step away from SUSE until the issue has been resolved.
Agreed.
The idea that KDE is still around on SUSE and could be used by anyone who likes it more would not help in showing Novell that customers want KDE in any way.
This is a sad day and a big step backwards for the linux desktop - officially spoken. GNOME as desktop is nowhere close to where KDE is these days. It's no secred and we all know that GNOME is basicly nothing else than a huge mess, architectual wise as well as usability wise. Stuffed full with different languages GNOME matures into an unmaintainable big mess without any future scalability. GNOME - since the 2.x transition kept stuck in stagnation and people keept patching around in it in various areas but there is still no real progress. People came up with different other alternative solutions and programminglanguages in hope to improve softwaredevelopment. Unfortunately GNOME is now stuck and relies on many developmentlanguages and they all run in the background in case you run a ruby, python, java, mono GNOME application. Not just that, but also the majority of GNOME applications are nothing more than halfbacked slammed together crashing tools that - in no ways - could stand competition software as found on Windows or OSX (with just a handful applications as exception). And yes as the other readers and commenters noted. I think the move to GNOME was long seen before and of course pushed by the GNOME zealots who cried loud. I think we keep hearing corporates continue to cry that "Linux is not ready for the Desktop" no wonder if they get GNOME as default installed. A corporate Desktop where the corporates cry out "It's not ready" - yet to hear for the upcoming 10 years. GNOME doesn't work, trivial simple tasks can't be acomplished. Printing doesn't work reliable, viewing documents doesn't work reliable, evolution and other programs permanently crashes or trash important data, no productive tools to get any work done in the science area or the computer science area. The entire Desktop feels like slammed together in a hurry and as repeat again, not even trivial tasks can be done reliable enough. I do feel sorry for the entire Open Source world.
"Unfortunately GNOME is now stuck and relies on many developmentlanguages and they all run in the background in case you run a ruby, python, java, mono GNOME application."
Oh, come on, drop the language supremacy FUD! Whilst it makes sense to keep dependencies moderately sane (and to avoid certain redistribution issues with things like Java), running Python programs (for example) just entails having slightly more libraries on the system, and they don't all "run in the background in case you run [such an application]". In fact, given the shower of odd libraries stated as dependencies for various C/C++ programs, I'd argue that by choosing something like Python (or even Java) you often get a more sane dependency foundation because the application developers just used the standard library for most of the functionality rather than using libarbitraryrandomlib234, last touched for maintenance in 1997, because they haven't learned something better.
Given the continued segfaulting of applications in the otherwise excellent Kubuntu distribution, I'd argue that more applications need to be done in Python, not fewer.
The continous segfaulting on Kubuntu is Kubuntu specific, I hava KDE here on SUSE 10 and it's quite excellent
I'm terribly sorry to hear about Novell perverting SUSE, but then, it was already obvious that they know squat about SUSE and what to do with it.
Unfortunately, this leaves me/others with no good KDE distro at all.
As I recall, Microsoft prospered in part due to the flow of undergraduates trained on MS Visual Studio and familar with the Windows API who influenced technologies used in developing systems. As a college professor, I've encouraged students to develop KDE applications given KDE's architecture, OO foundation and development tools, but could not imagine supporting GNOME development as strongly. That a diminishment in the importance of KDE potentially lessens the pool of students trained in Linux technologies (if others think as I have) raises the loss for Linux and Open Source as well. I'd suggest the KDE community find some way to make a BIG push into college curricula, perhaps through developing sound academic teaching materials and tools, or finding more ways to collaborate with faculty. I think there's a window of opportunity now... Java's suitability is being questioned more often among professors as a teaching language. Swing is unpopular due to its complexity. CS departments need to become more attractive and more responsive to real-world needs in order to succeed- languages, software engineering, etc.
As a purchaser/user since 6.1 I'll wait and see whether SUSE stop supporting KDE on the ground. They've always updated the RPMs and added stuff. IMHO, quicker than when SUSE was independent, (they RPM WINE quickly too). When that stops, well I'll just have to:
a) agree with the foregoing
b) learn how to compile the bl...y stuff myself
c) donate directly to KDE.
At the moment it seems that Novell are still supporting KDE developers, OpenSUSE has put out and SUPER looks interesting (I'm trying to work out if I'm skilled enough to get on with that one). Let's just watch for a while.
Even though they've taken a business decision to support GNOME, it's hardly up there with supporting the BSOD, lock-in, forced upgrades, spyware, anti-spyware. They've decided this is how they get their bread on their tables. And if we get Linux or the other *nixes on the corporate desktop then all our lives get easier anyway.
> At the moment it seems that Novell are still supporting KDE developers,
> OpenSUSE has put out and SUPER looks interesting (I'm trying to work out if
> I'm skilled enough to get on with that one). Let's just watch for a while.
Hey, Andreas Jäger already confirmed the move. This time it's for real. Time
to unsubscribe from the lists, clear the bugs and install something different.
Sad, sad day for OSS. I, too, had bought SUSE for 7 years now..
Looks like a battle of the SuSE employees then, Marcus Meissner denied it.
And Jeremy Allison say yes and no (while being unspecific about what to refer to).
AFAIK Marcus didn't really deny it, he was just a tad more vague with he's comments. Like politician, really.
Hm, looks like those who say the fears are "unfounded" keep indirectly referring to OpenSUSE, knowingly omitting that apparently Novell doesn't plan to ship any more boxed customer Linux versions with KDE. So you may be right. This would really be a hard blow for all the distribution tradition SuSE stands for up to now.
The problem seems to be: Does Novell know its customers? Who runs this company?
Let's face it: SuSE is a KDE desktop and customers will not accept Gnome.
Maybe ximian's fud machine is able to use novell as its plattform but certainly business shall follow a market/demand driven approach.
> Let's face it: SuSE is a KDE desktop and customers will not accept Gnome.
Agreed, I just don't get it. Since when has it been a good business practice to kick your own customers in the nuts? Or have these folks lost a last bit of their sanity?
I don't know if this is true or not, but I already had a bad feeling about the future of SUSE when Richard Seibt, the former Suse president left Novell and when they announced OpenSUSE. I guess by now Novell's Linux strategy is pretty much controlled by former Ximian people.
I am a long time Debian User, but I downloaded and installed Suse10 last week and I have to say it is a pretty nice distro. Some people once started Yast4Debian. Did this project proceed? Kubuntu with Yast would probably make a very nice desktop distribution.
No, it's not. The comments in that article were made by an ex-Ximian Marketing guy, and he was never actually quoted as saying they were moving in that direction. He allowed the author to imply it. It's a well worked tactic employed by these people in the past, most around the time of the Suse acquisition.
This thread scared me, but I sure hope you're right.
After all, the Ximian people have already tried to play this kind of cheap tricks in the past, and maybe now they think that thay might influence a slightly modified management by launching rumours.
We all know this: "Yes, Your Majesty. You already said so." :)
There's an article around the time of the Suse acquisition exactly like this one that said Ximian Desktop would be tightly stitched with Suse. Where is Ximian Desktop now?
In a way it's the default desktop for SLES and NLD in the future.
The product "Ximian Desktop" was merely a customized GNOME desktop. When Ximian got acquired by Novell there was no point in having Ximian Desktop AND GNOME, so basically all the sensible changes from Ximian would have flowed into the default GNOME desktop of Novell.
The easy answer of course is: Ximian Desktop now IS SuSE*....
*misspelled intentionally to remind of the good old days
"In a way it's the default desktop for SLES and NLD in the future."
ROTFL. No it isn't. It certainly isn't for SLES, and it isn't even for the NLD.
"The product "Ximian Desktop" was merely a customized GNOME desktop. When Ximian got acquired by Novell there was no point in having Ximian Desktop AND GNOME, so basically all the sensible changes from Ximian would have flowed into the default GNOME desktop of Novell."
You're dodging the issue. There's no real Novell build of Gnome as there was with Ximian Desktop.
He is not dodging any issue. NLD is exactly what Ximian Desktop was before, only that it now comes bundled with an operating system. It is and always was a polished distribution of GNOME with a few enhancements.
"NLD is exactly what Ximian Desktop was before, only that it now comes bundled with an operating system. It is and always was a polished distribution of GNOME with a few enhancements."
The NLD is not a Gnome distribution, although it is one of two desktops available to you in it.
GNOME distribution as in "a distribution of the GNOME desktop software" not as in "a Linux distribution centered on GNOME". Their Ximian stuff was simply merged into NLD (alongside the entire SuSE OS with KDE), and that's exactly what they had planned.
I won't defend too strongly this opinion but could the fact that KDE doesn't look like an entreprise desktop be detrimental?
COLORFUL
I tried a while ago to make my KDE desktop less colorful and lo, it was a real pain in the ass (one point is i couln't find a fairly decent, complete, tone neutral icon set). Don't get me wrong I love color but it might be hurtful for the eyes of the normal management person. Point me to screenshots if i'm wrong. If you look at the gnome desktop, it look much more subdued, more neutral wich might a good thing if you want your people to work. After all you *as a manager* want your people to work, not to look in awe at the art on their screen (I know I do).
Make a comparison:
http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Colors
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/design.html#Palette
SIMPLICITY
For entreprise simple, less gizmo is better. A personnal experience is the less i can touch at the settings of my desktop, the more i am productive. (Yes kiosk is a good thing and I haven't tried it). It might be a nice addition to have *profiles*. Think about demoing to your boss gnome and kde. Wich desktop environnement would take more work to make it acceptable?
This whole set of thinking was based
1) on the comment my friend made on the fact that IBM laptops look ugly (ie: black). It could be suggested that people equals "ugliness" with reliability (it's doesn't look attrative so it's surely reliable).
2) The other one is that simple is better *sometimes* depending on your goals. Users want beautiful so kde is beautiful. Entreprise wants simplicity, not too many options that you can lose your time on, (how much putting your taskbar at a x pixels height improve your productivity really?) professionnaly looking (yes boring).
3) The last is a personnal experience. I *want* to be in control of every aspect of my desktop. Entreprise doesn't want that.
I think despite my preferences that gnome has answered the needs of the entreprise better on those aspects (look, simplicity) that kde has. It stands to reason that it can be fixed. KDE4 will be great of course but it might useful to integrate a way of toning down (a really complete theme and kiosk profile) the KDE desktop. That is if we want KDE to please entreprises.
PS: As for the political aspects, as a SuSE user, I am sorry to see their active support for KDE go (will it change something for KDE developper wise?)
Yes, "business" want boring colour schemes...
We will have crosstheming soon.
The default colour theme can be changed anytime and will get changed.
What a load of absolute fucking shite.
It is perfectly doable to give KDE a corporate/boring face and to lock it down. This is considerably less expensive than investing in other technologies. So no, this is not the explanation.
The fact that Trolltech is not for sale might be an explanation, though. As a matter of fact, I keep thinking, how can you create SuSE and sell it to strangers? Not that I'm at all against business, but how can you sell your business? This seams mean.
Sure, too colorful is not "business like".
Because if you look at Windows XP and Vista, all you see is brown, right? Like in Gnome.
Making a fugly desktop will not bring success in business.
What makes me wonder is why a bunch of loosers keep flooding the SUSE forums with "KDE's non-GPL licencing model' stuff. Also nobody is correcting them.
I always suspected that the SUSE userbase is infested with ignorant people, by where are the rest of the people?
I just installed OpenSuSE 10 and found that the button order was swapped around "Gnome style" on a few YaST screens (mistake? sign of things to come?). The fact that YaST looked "native" on my desktop was one of the joys of SuSE. The fact that SuSE will keep KDE as an option is pretty much "too little, too late" if they screw up YaST.
Any suggestions for new distros?
You can switch to Mandriva (formerly Mandrake) Linux.
Mandriva Control Center is GTK, and it definitely has the buttons in the wrong order, so no, the guy cannot switch to Mandriva.
As for Yast, I think it has some strange buttons placings because it's a wizzard style gui, so 'Next' is supposed to be on the right.
No, I could have sworn it was a "Cancel/OK" abomination in YaST.
I'll double-check to make sure it wasn't my imagination, but admin tools that don't look alien on your desktop are a big plus in my book. All suggestions welcome--sorry to hear about Mandriva.
1. Kubuntu (Aka - Your first dive into linux)
pro: Debian-based, yet all bells and you know. Free, so you loose nothing if you make a mistake.
con: seems to move in the "separate but equal" to Gnome status.(Used to be in "foster child" category)
2. Mandriva (Aka - RedHat generation is welcome here)
pro: KDE is da thing. Long history. Lots of own content. (Crystal Icon theme was initially theirs)
con: Too much glue on the system level. It's (at least was) heavily customized on system level. Some generic stuff doesn't compile ocasionally.
There is a review of it on osnews.com
3. Slackware (Aka - Why Gentoo when you have Slackware?)
pro: Everything is stock. Everything compiles on this thing. > as soon as KDE comes out, chances are there are Slackware binaries already on KDE ftp. It is often more stable/faster than a comparable Suse version.
con: Lots of rough edges, like: laptop unfriendliness, lack of Hal, BSD style init.
I personally use Slackware. It feels exactly right for KDE spirit. It is extendable and tweakable to extreme. Package management is available, yet dependancy checking absence is a big releif as opposed to continuous rpm hell.
" 3. Slackware (Aka - Why Gentoo when you have Slackware?)
pro: Everything is stock. Everything compiles on this thing. > as soon as KDE comes out, chances are there are Slackware binaries already on KDE ftp. It is often more stable/faster than a comparable Suse version.
con: Lots of rough edges, like: laptop unfriendliness, lack of Hal, BSD style init."
BSD style init is a big plus. It's not mess like SysV.
To be frank, this type of move just made loath Novell to the extreme. Heck, even many parts of the 'OSS community' are really rotten to the core..