Novell, RedHat and Sun Commit to a Linux Desktop 542
DeckerEgo writes "InfoWorld reports on the Linux desktop and how Novell, Sun and RedHat (wha?) are working on making 2004 the year corporations start adopting open desktops. But which desktop? Most interesting to note is how Novell is planning to beef up the number of Ximian, Gnome, Mozilla and OpenOffice developers after its SuSE aquisition is complete. Does this mean that SuSE will stop being one of the best KDE distros out there and follow the way of the Gnome?"
good news (Score:5, Insightful)
Some top players committing to bolster the options available to those looking for an alternative to the stuff from Redmond. VERY good news.
Re:good news (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:good news (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure about 2004 being the "Year of the Linux Desktop", but the battle for the desktop is definately on again. With a vengance.
Me, I'm smiling. This is almost certainly going to be fun to watch. For the first time in quite a while, I'm really interested in desktop technology again.
Soko
Re:good news (Score:5, Interesting)
C'mon, you've been here for ages. Remember all those Eazel/Ximian [Helix Code]/Red Hat press releases we used to get? Ximian is partnering with Compaq! Eazel is partnering with Compaq! What struck me was precisely seeing the same list of companies making the same proclamation for the first time in a while.
Not that I wouldn't welcome it, but it's clear by now that the HP guys aren't rushing back to Palo Alto to start cranking out consumer Linux preloads.
Battle trailer (Score:5, Funny)
The Enemy will never let the penguin come to the thorwn of the desktop.
The war is set, the pieces are moving. We come to it at last.
"I see it in you eye's, the fear of spending too much on software. A day may come when our servers may fail, y. When we forsake our code and break the GPL, but it is not this day. This day we fight!.
[echoing voice]All you have to decide is what to do with the hardware that is given to you[/echoing voice]
"We shall see the commandline again"
You gave away your root password, I can no longer protect you anymore.
"We cannot win this by source code alone."
Not for ourselves, but we can give GNU a chance...
*Followed by several quickly flashing scense of battle slowing as the string section in the back ground retards*
"NOOOOO!!!!!"
*black with titles: Lord of the Desktop: return of the command line.
Oh, wait, I thought this was the review of RotK...my bad...
Re:Battle trailer (Score:5, Funny)
Darth McBride: "Linux, I am your author"
Linux: "No. It can't be. That's not true. That's impossible!"
Darth McBride: "Search your CVS, you know it to be true"
Re:[OT] Americanisms (Score:4, Interesting)
We don't respond to foreign inquiries.
Seriously, though, why do languages take on any nuances? Spit is just as acceptable as spat, although there's a future perfect implied, as in, "I would have spit" versus the standard perfect "I almost spat".
Americans typically like to talk present tense so it would sound odd to use a present tense form of a verb in the past tense, completed sense.
As for petting vs. patting, petting connotes a caring, loving manner (http://m-w.com) while patting connotes merely showing approval. Again, cultural interpretations put a broader sense on these nuances, however slight.
Do return the favor and tell me why you use the form 'USians'. US is not a geographical area, nor is it a regional declaration. It is a political delineation, however, its principle stands on the unification of distinct and disparate elements. (Remember, the US was and is conceived of nations forgoing sovereignty to better guarantee their liberties.)
Personally, I find the term a show of ignorance and derision, but I'm sure you have better reasoning you could provide.
Thanks.
Re:[OT] Americanisms (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:good news (Score:5, Insightful)
However, in my opinion, if these coporporations want to really start working on making 2004 the year corporations start adopting open desktops, they need to consider heavily sponsoring and help develop the freedesktop.org projects.
After all, KDE and Gnome need a base. That base is an X server. Improvements have to be made there as well.
Again, this is only my opinion
SUSE to GNOME? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:SUSE to GNOME? (Score:2)
this promise may mean very little (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:SUSE to GNOME? (Score:5, Informative)
Has anyone followed his link ? SuSE is not abandoning KDE to favor GNOME. And this comes from SuSE's CEO:
It's all about giving their costumers what they ask for, and some customers prefer GNOME. This is it. He is actually stating that most of the European deployment of desktop Linux is due to KDE. He uses KDE and he will keep using it.
In fact, Mandrake has been offering both KDE and GNOME almost at the same level of support (though KDE is the default, but then of course you have to pick a default).
Re:SUSE to GNOME? (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, Mandrake's configuration tools are all GTK+, not Qt.
RH (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:RH (Score:4, Funny)
Well if you bothered to log in, you might get to meta-moderate it.
Novell, Red Hat and Sun to Open Source Community (Score:4, Insightful)
Mandrake (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Mandrake (Score:4, Informative)
SuSE + Gnome (Score:5, Interesting)
Regardless of that fact, having some big companies work together to create a unified front, a unified showing for Linux on the desktop, whether they use KDE, Gnome, or whatever, is good news as well.
Looks like some fun and interesting things are coming.
Re:S(lackware)uSE + Gnome (Score:3, Interesting)
Why the will pick Gnome. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why the will pick Gnome. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why the will pick Gnome. (Score:3, Informative)
Hmm, there's no GTK+ [dropline.net] for Windows [gimp.org]? Or for Macintosh [sourceforge.net]? I guess these pages are just jokes then.
Qt may indeed be a more mature development environment than Gnome, but now that there are native GTK+ ports to both Windows and MacOS, it should be relatively trivial to get any gnome app working on either - More so MacOSX than Windows, which is already known to run all that stuff; the only new piece is the native GTK+.
Re:Why the will pick Gnome. (Score:4, Informative)
--
Evan
Re:Why the will pick Gnome. (Score:5, Informative)
It's the principle that worries most outfits. Sure, $2000 for a widget toolkit perhaps isn't much on its own, but now assume you're paying for the OS, the compiler, the IDE ... it all adds up. Just imagine if there was not one but many libraries that followed this policy - quickly the cost of support code and tools would cause serious problems.
Furthermore, Qt is such an easy-to-use, high quality toolkit compared with anything GNOME has to offer that you are bound to be ahead on the development costs in time savings alone.
This is a fairly common troll, yet it's never been adequately backed up as far as I know. In fact I know a few developers who have used both GTK and Qt enough to know the differences, and don't think Qt is all it's hyped up to be (for instance, the qpe-gaim developer). The Qt API contains its fair share of wierdness, for instance, why does QVBox inherit from QHBox? Where is the equivalent to gdk-pixbuf?
Qt also works on the Mac and Windows - GNOME toolkits don't - this is very important for most commercial developers.
Qt works on Mac and Windows if you pay the fees, which are hefty. The problem is, so does GTK+ - there is a port which tracks the native XP theme in use, and as MacOS X has X11 support built in, they work there too. In most commercial developments cross platform portability is sadly not a concern anyway.
Re:Why the will pick Gnome. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why the will pick Gnome. (Score:2)
Re:Why the will pick Gnome. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why the will pick Gnome. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why the will pick Gnome. (Score:5, Informative)
I wrote an app in PHP-GTK. I found it stable, cross-platform, and most of all, usable. But there sure were alot of weirds.
For example, Clist rows aren't "widgets" in the full sense of the word. Thus, you can't use tooltips (descriptive little popup boxes) on them, even though they act in every other way like a widget.
The combo (dropdown list) widget won't let you set data specific to a particular entry. Instead, you have to store the entry-specific data in an array and load via a special call to set_data().
The entry (write stuff in a box) widget is clearly broken, especially on Windows, (it draws little boxes whenever you have a line break) and I can't get scintilla, (which replaces entry) to scroll the text up to follow you when you type.
The documentation is weak. Many functions are not well documented, and there is no mention of others. Sometimes I had to use the function "Get_Class_Methods()" just so I knew what my options were!
Nothing was insurmountable, and I was able to produce a functional application that's had positive acclaim in its marketplace, so I'm not too horribly upset. But it could be *alot* better.
Re:Why the will pick Gnome. (Score:3, Informative)
The combo box has been rewritten for GTK 2.4, which should be coming out in a few minutes.
I can't comment on the entry box.
The documentation is still weak in places, I agree. It is however a lot better than it once was, and no new APIs are added without proper documentation to back them up.
Re:Why the will pick Gnome. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think anyone said that nobody should be able to make money from classy software. Red Hat makes money and yet you can download ISOs, so there's something going on there.
Frankly, I think TrollTech should have (back in the day) made Qt, handed it out under the LGPL, and then sold a good set of Qt development tools, and tried to get adoped by folks porting commercial software to Linux. There would never have *been* a GNOME, since the license wouldn't have been an issue. It'd be a little harder to make money, yes, though I think they could have made it. They wanted to go for a bigger gamle, though -- commercial control of a major Linux library. There is *tremendous* resistance in the Linux developer community to becoming beholden to any one company. They really didn't want Qt to become another Motif. You don't want the OS that you work on, that is built almost entirely of volunteer-built software, to have as a fundamental component, a non-free set of libraries that all "standard" GUI apps use. And so, I think that the GNOME movement was reasonable, well-founded, and justified. They were not stopping folks from using Qt -- people just said that they wanted to donate time and effort to providing an alternative.
TrollTech held out for a long time -- perhaps long enough to kill their opportunity. Their licensing system is *still* not as free as GTK's, and I think that they will have a tough battle if they attempt to regain their position -- there is currently a significantly larger developer mass behind GNOME, even aside from Linux distributors tending towards GNOME. The only major advantage that they had was early maturity and stability -- and GTK can pretty much go toe to toe with KDE these days.
I can't figure out what you dislike about GTK, frankly. You may prefer C++ to C. That's particularly legitimate if you're an experienced Windows high-level programmer, where C++ and MFC has long been standard. However, GTK is a *very nicely* (IMHO, of course) built example of how to do OOP well in C. It is faster and more modular than Qt, and provides a number of significant features (such as built-in runtime user-level key rebinding) that Qt has not kept pace with.
A number of Qt design decisions were quite reasonable at the time of its production, but are now rather unfortunate in the presence of more solid C++ compilers. Qt contains its own string class, and reimplementation of a good deal of STL functionality. If Qt were being built today, it's doubtable whether these decisions would go the same way.
That being said, choice is nice, and in the end, it's probably a good thing to have two desktops -- if the maintainers of one project don't like your idea, get it tried out on the other desktop. If it works well, the other folks should accept it, and everyone wins.
Re:Why the will pick Gnome. (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, it's not native Python (does have some native widgets though) but if you've never looked at it, try wxPython. On *NIX it uses GTK(1 or 2)/wxGTK, on Windows it uses mostly native win widgets. Easy to learn, less kludgy than py-gtk. Quite well documented API. Should also be able to run on OSX I think. There's also wxPerl and wxRuby BTW. WxWindows itself is C++.
The Fox toolkit also has pyth
Re:Why the will pick Gnome. (Score:3, Informative)
Oh yes, the almighty HIG. "Should "cancel" be on the right or on the left? No, I think it should be two pixels up". KDE does conform to a set of guidelines. Maybe they haven't gone as overboard with this as GNOME has, but they have their guidelines.
Bullshit! Kmail, Korganizer, Kaddressbook, Knotes etc. etc. integrate with each other really well. Kdevelop uses Kate as it's editor (or any other KDE-compliant editor) etc. etc. Cle
Re:Why the will pick Gnome. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why the will pick Gnome. (Score:4, Informative)
Use the Qt Commercial License to:
Build commercial software.
Build software that is not sold, but that advances the business goals of a commercial enterprise.
Re:Why the will pick Gnome. (Score:2)
Re:Why the will pick Gnome. (Score:5, Informative)
Doesn't matter. The Mac and and X11 versions are released under the GPL, so commercial/non-commercial is irrelevant. The Windows version is not released under the GPL, so free software on Windows can't use QT.
The problem is that Trolltech is being sloppy in their FAQ mixing up "commercial" with "non-free". As long as they distribute QT under the GPL (and not a modified GPL-like license) then you can make QT software for any use whatsoever as long as you comply with the GPL. Their FAQ just assumes that if you want to make a commercial product, you won't make it free software (which is probably a reasonable assumption in general).
Re:Why the will pick Gnome. (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Most users, by the very definition of the term, do not develop software.
2. $2000 USD is practically nothing in terms of software development costs.
Re:Why the will pick Gnome. (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, the Qt licensing completely kills the potential for shareware apps for KDE. It's not really an issue now, but it would be if Linux were more mainstream.
Re:Why the will pick Gnome. (Score:3, Informative)
My company used to by five figures each year to Cygnus/Redhat for GNUPro support. Five years later we dumped it when we realized we hadn't used it once.
Having used Qt extensively, I can tell you that it doesn't NEED pay-for support. It's that good.
Re:Why the will pick Gnome. (Score:3, Insightful)
But in the home-OpenSource-contributor/hobbyist world, $2000 is a buttload of money. And if the goal is to provide software under the GPL, it might as well be an infinite amount of money.
Commercial adoption of Linux is a great thing - and a welcome evolution.
But one must not forget the roots of the platform, and how Linux got to where it is today.
Re:Why the will pick Gnome. (Score:3, Informative)
But in the home-OpenSource-contributor/hobbyist world, $2000 is a buttload of money. And if the goal is to provide software under the GPL, it might as well be an infinite amount of money.
Qt for X and Qt-embedded are licensed under the GPL, meaning it's free for GPL app developers.
Only Qt for Windows is unavailable under the GPL, but that doesn't have much direct impact on desktop Linux. Personally, I think Trolltech would be wise to release Qt for Windows under GPL as well, but it's their code and the
Re:Why the will pick Gnome. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why the will pick Gnome. (Score:3, Informative)
Because there is no obstacle. All KDE libs* are LGPL, you have no obligation to GPL a KDE application. Of course it'd be nice if you did. Anyway I though theKompany developed GPL software and they then sold it.
*bar some libs for inessential applications like amaroK, but that's because I only just realised we probably blanket licensed that GPLv2. Ooops.
Re:Why the will pick Gnome. (Score:3, Interesting)
How is this possible? The QT libraries are GPL. The KDE libraries link against them. Therefore if they aren't GPL'd also (they are indeed LGPL), they are in violation of the GPL. Is this not so?
Re:Why the will pick Gnome. (Score:5, Insightful)
The price of a similar set up (OS + Development Studio + ToolKit + Database Server + groupware APIs + web server +
And, if you decide to use QT to develop GPL software, your cost goes down to zero. On the other platorm, the cost remains the same... and probably you cannot GPL the whole code.
Of course, you can opt to build GTK-based applications.
So, in short:
- it is cheaper
- you have choice of toolkits
- you have choice of license for your code
I say developing for Linux is better.
Peace
Everyone Wanted Consolidation (Score:3, Insightful)
Everyone that has ever commented on the state of the Linux desktop has begged for consolidation. And now with Novell/SuSE, RedHat, Sun, HP, and IBM all backing Gnome it would appear that said consolidation is finally going to happen.
Re:Everyone Wanted Consolidation (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Everyone Wanted Consolidation (Score:4, Insightful)
The question becomes a little murkier when you realize that a sizable percentage of the KDE hackers will soon work for Novell, and that Nat Friedman is heading up Novell's desktop Linux division.
Don't get me wrong, I don't expect KDE to disappear overnight, but the Gnome crowd now has the majority of the professional KDE hackers by their paycheck. At the very least you can expect their to be a lot more talk in the KDE world about "integration" (and it will be the Gnome crowd calling the shots).
Re:Everyone Wanted Consolidation (Score:3, Informative)
Most KDE hackers are, funnily enough, keen on KDE. Most OSS developers devote themselves to their chosen projects. Of course a good paycheck is something to covet in these trying times, but I have faith in the near-religious devotion us hackers have to our tasks.
Still I feel all uncertain.
Re:Everyone Wanted Consolidation (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, when we're talking on Slashdot, it's easy to be evenhanded. That may sound absurd, what with Slashdot trolls and flamebait everywhere you look, but the point is, it usually doesn't have an impact (much to the disappointment of the more political among us). So I can love KDE but say I see merit to Gnome, and it's no skin off my back.
Having said that, I can't be so balanced here. If the Gnome crowd is calling the shots, then in my opinion, this is an unmitigated travesty. I want to be courteous, but seriously, if my desktop is at risk, I need to speak plainly: I think the goals of Gnome, the look & feel of Gnome, even some of the people behind Gnome, are completely at odds with everything I like. I dislike Miguel's MS cheerleading, and I love at least one of the KDE developers for saying bluntly in a Slashdot comment 2 years ago that he/she wants KDE to stay the hell away from that kind of thinking. I think Gnome's widgets are still terribly legacy-driven, and the ideas they have behind uber-simplified preferences flies in the face of everything I ever wanted.
In summary, I've always wanted to be a diplomat with the Gnome/KDE issue, because you catch more flies with honey and all that. But if KDE is going to get quietly redirected, my only response can be "do not go gently." I'm showing my cards. I don't think Gnome has any merit beyond their choice of licensing. KDE is superior in my opinion, and if KDE developers will not be leading Gnome, then at the very least I hope they retain autonomy.
Re:Everyone Wanted Consolidation (Score:3, Informative)
- You may not like the lack of preferences, but corporations (and inexperienced users) do. MSN is the default home page on millions of systems because users are too lazy to change it. You may like a control center with 40 pages (and multiple tabs per page), but such a thing flies in the face of usability. Users are so overwhelmed by options that they don't find the ones that really matter.
- GNOME has a decent HIG, and devel
Re:Everyone Wanted Consolidation (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay, I agree that KDE beats GNOME on:
* Making toolbars always hideable (though this isn't exactly "advanced")
* Tearable panes
However, GNOME beats KDE on:
* Tearable menus
* User rebindable accelerators for menus (KDE has a systemwide version of this, but it's far less powerful).
Both of them lack a couple of advancements that I'd like to see, like trying out pie menus, having a DOCUMENT_UNSAVED window manager hint a la Mac OS and NeXTStep, having
Re:Everyone Wanted Consolidation (Score:3, Informative)
(KDE has so much cool stuff that it's hard to keep track of.
Ah! One other
Re:Everyone Wanted Consolidation (Score:5, Insightful)
The rest of us wanted healthy competition. I'd hate for corporate America to standardise Linux distributions like Microsoft have standardised the intel personal computer.
Maybe I'm just nervous because I hack on KDE.
Re:Everyone Wanted Consolidation (Score:5, Insightful)
The rest of us wanted healthy competition. I'd hate for corporate America to standardise Linux distributions like Microsoft have standardised the intel personal computer.
Regardless, everyone wants or should want interoperability. That means the object models must have a way to pass data and pointers back and forth. It means lots of fit and polish thing like the applications not looking or acting jarringly different from one another. When all is said and done, applications are king. Neither of the desktops possesses all of the best apps. Most of us run a mixture and we want them to work together.
It fine if you don't want consolidation but things like unified theme sets and standardized ways to cut and paste more than just text are not evil.
To what effect? (Score:5, Insightful)
The only thing that really bothers me is that Random Corperate Giant is making the decision, not the users. When it comes down to it KDE and Gnome are both on top because they are both Really Good, and that fuels competition, etc. They've stayed "euqally" as popular because their respective user bases like them so much. So the most well known, in my opinion, Linux, Network OS, and Unix providers get to pick what they like and back it... Frightening.
Not to rant.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
LInux Desktop vs Longhorn (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:LInux Desktop vs Longhorn (Score:2)
Thank you in advance.
Hmmmm (Score:5, Funny)
Knome Desktop Environment.
funny thought (Score:4, Funny)
LOL
Re:funny thought (Score:2)
Bad for both KDE and GNOME (Score:5, Insightful)
Just look what happened with CDE and OpenLook in the previous UNIX desktop war. After people standardized on CDE, it started stagnating until KDE was founded and eventually GNOME killed it off.
I've been a GNOME user since GNOME 1.0, and I would hate to see Suse switch to GNOME, since they've been a driving force behind KDE, and thus a driving force behind GNOME.
Some bad, some good (Score:5, Insightful)
The fight for the open desktop is a tiny battle compared to the fight for all desktops. Perhaps KDE and GNOME have reached a maturity where greater focus on the large battle might be beneficial.
No "Wha?" (Score:2)
The Proven Track (Score:2)
PC-DOS, then MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows first moved into the corperate environment and from that position into the homes.
Adoption at home came from work to allow the user a chance to do work at home and maybe get an edge on the co-worker who was running a 'home computer' rather than a PC.
Red Hat is only marginally wrong in saying Linux isn't ready for the home, but the problem really isn't in Linux, it's in the workplace.
Once the workplace reaches critical adoption the migration to home will be a na
It's the only way to win... (Score:3, Interesting)
Linux is Dangerous (Score:2, Funny)
It's all about KDE (Score:2)
One can only hope!
Re:It's all about KDE (Score:2, Funny)
Understanding the corporate customer (Score:4, Interesting)
For that reason, my money is on Novell making it on the desktop because they have a good understanding of deploying desktop/corporate systems. Sun and RH are more server folks. Maybe they can collaborate in some way?
IMHO.
Noone said 'drop KDE' (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally i prefer KDE for business reasons, but hey, if a better GNOME helps the cause.. why not..
SuSE best KDE distro? What? (Score:2)
Betting pool? (Score:3, Funny)
My guess is we'll see something Friday.
QT bites KDE in the end? (Score:5, Informative)
Since RedHat is already Gnome centered..this target is and will be GTK+, which allows for third party linking without them having to pay licensing fees.. this is where the choice of QT finally comes and bites KDE... sad but true, a little ironic though... that KDE loses out because it is not friendly enough to corporate types vis-a-vis QT* while Gnome will win(at least it looks like it will) because it is.
*For those in need of a li'l background QT is licensed under the GPL while GTK+ is dual licensed under the GPL and LGPL. So, QT free(as in speech & beer) for GPL apps but not as in beer for non-GPL apps and while this is fine and dandy for community projects corporations will never pay a 'gatekeeper' if they want to release applications for the 'standard' desktop(even Mickeysoft doesn't charge that.. let's ignore MSDN for now).
--
Not... just... yet. (Score:5, Insightful)
Congratulations- I think you'll never go back (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't want a teletubby desktop. I don't want arbitrary restrictions driving my costs. I don't want to keep track of licenses. The SPA tried to extort some money from us and the ensuing audit took many, many hours that could have been spent doing cool shit with our network. Figure that in the TCO. Figure end of life forcing an otherwise unecessary upgrade. RH pulling support for 9.0 is a bit of a problem, but I have learned to compile from source! I can even build an rpm. So I don't need Redhat to support my now-legacy servers. I can nurse them along until the pain of that outweighs the pain of switching. My call. Staying on NT 4.0? Not if you connect it to anything. Uh uhhh. Not your call.
It is cool to use stuff made as a labor of love, an act of generosity, or simple itch-scratching. We can go so much farther with the source!
new worlds, new desktops (Score:5, Interesting)
KDE v/s Gnome (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the KDE desktop is more easily configurable, but Gnome (GTK-2) apps are nicer.
Certain KDE components-- like Kate, Konqueror (as file manager and browser), Kasbar and Konsole are more elegant and utilitarian than their Gnome counterparts. That said, many utilities written for Gnome, but not necessarily part of Gnome are nicer than the Equivalent KDE third party apps--by this I mean Things like Gaim, Pan, and (this is a stretch) GTKed Firebird. Gimp's superiority goes without saying.
I was a long time KDE user but the need for speed and elegance caught me. Now I use Fluxbox [sourceforge.net] because all is available from the right mouse button, and any app can be "tabbed" with any other. I find myself using the aforementioned Gnome/GTK2 apps, konqueror and quick show for occasional file browsing/image viewing, and aterm.
I just wish some how Exposity would work with Flux...
Gnome/KDE interoperation barriers (Score:4, Interesting)
This is very, very true. In my case, I am presently using both Gnome and KDE apps - and the XFCE WM. If Gnome & KDE would stabilize on a common underlying data model (be it XML or whatever), then I could keep the same address book in both. I could use whichever calendar I wanted at the moment. And, because these two dominate the Linux desktop now, sooner or later all the other WM and desktop environments would probably migrate there too.
Perhaps these desktop groups could actually meet online or in San Diego, or wherever, and decide to agree on data formats and communications / object protocols!!
Even groups who went their own way could develop a mapping from their way to the common lingua franca.
One of the big advantages of open source software is that proprietary considerations take a back door to improving the breed. And all it takes is agreement at the bottom level.
We almost picked a desktop? great! (Score:3, Interesting)
As a KDE user, I am slightly sad to see these corporations favor Gnome, but I would have to imagine that the features that I really like in KDE would find their way into the standard Gnome desktop (if that ends up being what happens) becuase lets face it -- the FOSS that is developed generally mimics the users of that particular FOSS.
It will be very interesting to see what type of inroads will be made in 2004.
Microsoft has large companies by the balls (Score:5, Informative)
I work for a Fortune 10 company and let me tell you how depressing it is... Their approved standards list has nothing but Microsoft products wherever possible. It would be not be an exageration to say the criteria for building this list was "Does Microsoft have a key product in this area? If so, that's our standard. Otherwise, we'll just choose whatever is most popular."
In many cases the products these IT desicion makers are choosing are unproven and unpopular even, but hey they're from Microsoft so they'll win eventually anyway. This includes...
- Microsoft Sharepoint (instead of industry leading Documentum)
- Microsoft Passport for authentication
- IIS (They catagorize Apache as "contain", meaning no new deployements should be done)
When asked about all this during a meeting at a local site, one of the IT corporate leaders said...
"Anyone here ever deal with Microsoft on corporate licensing"
[Silence]
"Well, let me tell you those guys play hardball. Unless you can convince them your heart and soul is behind them and their vision, they won't give you a good deal on the licenses you need like Windows and Office."
He then went on to describe how Microsoft was unhappy that our company was using certain competing products such as Lotus Notes. And that they told us they wanted us to get rid of those products as switch to Sharepoint etc or they would screw us on the Windows/Office licensing.
So I can't see us switching to Linux/open source desktops anytime soon, regardless of their quality or other compatibility issues.
The only good news is that Microsoft's actions in strong arming some of these big companies is likely polarizing: Either the company will embrace Microsoft or reject them. Let's hope they manage to piss enough big companies off with their actions.
Re:Microsoft has large companies by the balls (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if you are selling your corporate soul to MS, never let them know it. Have an alternative plan sitting on the table featuring stuff like Linux and Open Office.
Now if your bosses are playing games with the MS rep, its a good idea that the salesdrroid thinks this is for real. So, just deploy a few Linux systems for 'evaluation'.
Re:Gnome-KDE thread here! (Score:5, Insightful)
KDE's better. Hell, even Linus uses it. But just because KDE's better doesn't mean Gnome sucks. Gnome's faster, GTK is better than QT and GTK apps look better in Gnome, and Gnome is overall less bloated. But KDE is far more configurable, so I like it better.
-1, trollbiter
Qt vs GTK Comparison (Score:5, Informative)
* Qt has good C++ bindings. Better than GTK, though GTK does have gtkmm.
* I'm not sure whether it's possible to do Qt in C. If so, it would be quite ugly. If you are otherwise entirely neutral as to choice of toolkit and desktop, C fans (traditional UNIX folk) are probably going to prefer GTK, and C++ fans (generally Windows folk) are going to prefer Qt.
* GTK is more widely used and supports more languages outside of C and C++. There are no Qt ocaml bindings, for instance.
* GTK uses less memory and is faster.
* Currently (and according to Qt/KDE developers, due to linker deficiencies), Qt apps launch more slowly than do GTK apps (both toolkits do too damn much init-time processing IMHO).
* There are tearable panes in either KDE or Qt...not sure which. This is a very nice feature that GTK does not do.
* GTK allows (though with GTK 2, a config file option must be enabled) the user to easily rebind key combinations associated with a menu choice. Qt does not do this.
* Qt currently has good support for small framebuffer-based devices. I do not believe that there is as much work on GTK for this (though GTK can go through the framebuffer instead of X).
* Qt is "commercially supported", FWIW.
* GTK is currently more widely used.
* Qt provides more *things* than GTK does (Note: this is based on my experiences, which are biased towards GTK 1 instead of 2). I suspect that you could write an app entirely within Qt -- GTK is designed to supplement the existing UNIX APIs.
* If you're into the ideology, the FSF/GNU people have tended towards supporting GNOME rather than KDE.
* Qt has been around for longer than GTK has.
* Qt widget engines support fading menus. I do not believe that this is currently the case for GTK.
* You may prefer using various apps associated with either GTK or Qt. Features aside, I find that Konqueror feels more like a "native" app to its widget set than does Galeon, but on the other hand, GTK has GIMP and a number of other programs that I use.
* No matter which you use, either API is modern, and light years ahead of Win32 or the Macintosh Toolbox. Programmers who have worked with these in the past are in for a big, big treat. It's *much* easier and faster to write code for common cases, and a lot of neat debugging code is present.
* Qt is better documented. The core GTK functionality is well documented, but some more esoteric GTK or GNOME related libraries have very little documentation.
* GTK's license is LGPL -- frankly, this license is much more generous and gives a good deal mroe freedom than Qt's license, which is GPL at best and commercial (and costs $$$) at worst. Since the core widget set for a platform is a pretty crucial element from a licensing perspective, it's awfully rough to try to force every GUI developer to use a particular license or pay a license fee.
* Both have RAD GUI design tools. I'm unfamiliar with Qt's. GTK's is called glade -- it has a rather awkward interface, but works reasonably well, and has plugins to export to a number of the GTK-supported languages.
* (A bit of a digression) GTK uses glib. Glib is really, really, really cool. Any C programmer out there will *drool* at the idea of having glib's functionality available to their programmers, even if they like Qt (as a matter of fact, KDE now uses glib, IIRC). Not a huge deal for C++, but glib provides some functionality that C could really use, when aimed at application development.
I'm going to digress a bit from Qt/GTK to KDE/GNOME, since your choice of widget set also affects your desktop environment.
In general, from a user perspective, I've found that GTK/GNOME apps tend to be a bit more oriented towards the hacker, and Qt/KDE apps tow
Re:Gnome-KDE thread here! (Score:3, Funny)
emacs.
Re:Here come the mercenaries? (Score:3, Informative)
You thought wrong. Matthew Szulik said that while a Linux desktop can exceed expectations for corporate users, it doesn't meet the expectations of home users. In a corporate environment, IT can (and, in most cases, needs to) control what software is loaded on corporate workstations. That allows them to install Linux applications which meet the needs for most desktops, and install Windows systems when there are specialized application
Re:My 2 cents...(that's 2.6 cents US) (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Redhat to work on desktops? Makes sense to me.. (Score:5, Informative)
who wrote Orbit with very significant controbutions to gnome-terminal, gconf, freedesktop.org and maintaining Gtk+. Mike Harris is a huge contributor to X itself.
I know this is slashdot but please don't open your mouth unless you have a clue.
Re:Debian+KDE (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Devide and rule (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Devide and rule (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Linux Desktop does not mean Home Users (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the vendors could care less in the long run about unseating MS. Unseating MS is an idealist's goal not a business one. As long as they make enough money to justify what they're putting into Linux then they'll be happy. Taking a few percent of MS' markets would be serious money to all of these companies and MS could still claim victory. I don't see MS going away anytime soon. I'd love to s
Re:Has anyone seen any commercial QT/Windows apps? (Score:5, Informative)
How would you be able to tell a Qt app from any other Windows app? They both use the same visual elements.
Re:Has anyone seen any commercial QT/Windows apps? (Score:3, Interesting)
Careful. They use the same theme, but so does GTK+ on Win32. The widgets are still different. The Qt widgets are deliberately designed to be close to the Windows native widgets but they are not the same, and there are plenty of subtle differences that you'd only notice if you worked with it day in and day out.
Re:Double speak (Score:3)
I got tired of the upgrade treadmill for my home systems, and finally stopped doing upgrades as often as RH released them. I now upgrade when I need something.
If thinking like an enterprise was a requirement, then it would have been sensible to either deploy AS (or 7.