gnome vs. kde

[weatherman]

just read Carsten's blog (the author of Kalzium) about the edubuntu people creating gallium without contacting him once.

http://cniehaus.livejournal.com/27154.html

If that's indeed the case, I think that's really really disappointing.
What do you think?

[GeneralZod]

I find it odd that they didn't even bother to contact him, but as long as people write code that is tied to DE/ Toolkit X, the exact same wheel will always be re-invented by folks who prefer DE/ Toolkit Y. It's simply a fact of life.

Edit:

Ok, I've just seen (http://www.edubuntu.org/Screenshots) that Edubuntu currently includes the entire KDE Edutainment suite, so I'm wondering whether they intend to re-write this entire suite to make it GNOME-based or, if not, why on Earth they've chosen to pick on Kalzium as a target for replacement :confused:

[Kateikyoushi]

Wasted energy which could be used for better purposes not the first nor the last time in OS history.

[Bloodfen Razormaw]

There is nothing wrong with writing a version of software for a specific DE. The real problem is when GNOME's extreme NIH syndrome affects non-desktop software, too (e.g. Avahi, to replace a superior, free reference implementation of zeroconf). That and the hypocrites who whine about, say, Krita competing with The GIMP (when they don't even focus on the same job), yet have a laundry list of software "Linux" is missing that KDE has had for 8 years, software which is superior to any competition out there. A quick browse of these forums finds thousands of requests for GTK+ competitors for big names like Amarok or K3B all the way down to KSnapshot.

If these people want to do something useful, they should improve GNOME's impoverished developer environment. The reason all these attempts to port KDE software use twice the development time and only produce something a tenth as useful, and which is full of bugs, is that GNOME doesn't have the developer tools to write good software. How about some GNOME libraries that actually make writing software easier? They CANNOT make a Kalzium replacement. Kalzium is simply too excellent because the developers had the fantastic libraries and development programs of KDE, and GNOME's development environment does not allow for software like that to come about in a manageable way. Two years from now Gallium will be where Kalzium was in a month.

Frankly, GNOME is an extremely poor choice for Edubuntu anyway. All the good free educational software is KDE-based, and KDE has a far superior system for administration and security.

[ComplexNumber]

There is nothing wrong with writing a version of software for a specific DE. The real problem is when GNOME's extreme NIH syndrome affects non-desktop software, too (e.g. Avahi, to replace a superior, free reference implementation of zeroconf). That and the hypocrites who whine about, say, Krita competing with The GIMP (when they don't even focus on the same job), yet have a laundry list of software "Linux" is missing that KDE has had for 8 years, software which is superior to any competition out there. A quick browse of these forums finds thousands of requests for GTK+ competitors for big names like Amarok or K3B all the way down to KSnapshot.

If these people want to do something useful, they should improve GNOME's impoverished developer environment. The reason all these attempts to port KDE software use twice the development time and only produce something a tenth as useful, and which is full of bugs, is that GNOME doesn't have the developer tools to write good software. How about some GNOME libraries that actually make writing software easier? They CANNOT make a Kalzium replacement. Kalzium is simply too excellent because the developers had the fantastic libraries and development programs of KDE, and GNOME's development environment does not allow for software like that to come about in a manageable way. Two years from now Gallium will be where Kalzium was in a month.

Frankly, GNOME is an extremely poor choice for Edubuntu anyway. All the good free educational software is KDE-based, and KDE has a far superior system for administration and security.
ever so slightly biased :lol:. and total rubbish too.

[darkhatter]

There is nothing wrong with writing a version of software for a specific DE. The real problem is when GNOME's extreme NIH syndrome affects non-desktop software, too (e.g. Avahi, to replace a superior, free reference implementation of zeroconf). That and the hypocrites who whine about, say, Krita competing with The GIMP (when they don't even focus on the same job), yet have a laundry list of software "Linux" is missing that KDE has had for 8 years, software which is superior to any competition out there. A quick browse of these forums finds thousands of requests for GTK+ competitors for big names like Amarok or K3B all the way down to KSnapshot.

If these people want to do something useful, they should improve GNOME's impoverished developer environment. The reason all these attempts to port KDE software use twice the development time and only produce something a tenth as useful, and which is full of bugs, is that GNOME doesn't have the developer tools to write good software. How about some GNOME libraries that actually make writing software easier? They CANNOT make a Kalzium replacement. Kalzium is simply too excellent because the developers had the fantastic libraries and development programs of KDE, and GNOME's development environment does not allow for software like that to come about in a manageable way. Two years from now Gallium will be where Kalzium was in a month.

Frankly, GNOME is an extremely poor choice for Edubuntu anyway. All the good free educational software is KDE-based, and KDE has a far superior system for administration and security.

kde is crap and buggy and unuseable, and to think I've been a happy kde user for the past 5 years.

[plb]

ever so slightly biased :lol:. and total rubbish too.

Sounds biased but in reality it's somewhat true. All the "good" educational packages are qt based...go poke around on freshmeat if you don't believe me. From a technical standpoint qt is superior to gtk+...that is not bias, that is a fact. Both gtk+ and qt have there great apps....

qt- k3b, amarok etc etc
gtk - firefox, gimp etc etc....

It's all a matter of choice really.

[ComplexNumber]

All the "good" educational packages are qt based.aye, thats true. but i wasn't disputing that. i was referring to the rest of his rant.
besides, theres not much advantage in having good educational packages if they're on a buggy and crash-prone desktop environment.

[plb]

aye, thats true. but i wasn't disputing that. i was referring to the rest of his rant.
besides, theres not much point in having good educational packages if they're just going to sit on a buggy and crash-prone desktop environment.

I don't understand why they just don't make edubuntu kde based? All the edu packages are qt...it makes sense. I mean to me it seems like a waste of time trying to port something over to gtk+ when the qt based version is right there and will more then likely be better in the end anyway. That effort can be put to use elsewhere.

[ComplexNumber]

I mean to me it seems like a waste of time trying to port something over to gtk+ when the qt based version is right there and will more then likely be better in the end anyway.maybe there's a hidden agenda, because there's lots of packages that are being ported to gtk from qt. maybe now that qt has gone public, a lot of people are getting worried. i don't know. take that and many other shifts from qt/kde to gnome/gtk, its looking like the future is gtk/gnome based.

[maniacmusician]

maybe there's a hidden agenda, because there's lots of packages that are being ported to gtk from qt. maybe now that qt has gone public, a lot of people are getting worried. i don't know. take that and many other shifts from qt/kde to gnome/gtk, its looking like the future is gtk/gnome based.
god I hope not. I love my KDE. Gnome is good too (and xfce) but i really really love my KDE.

[plb]

god I hope not. I love my KDE. Gnome is good too (and xfce) but i really really love my KDE.

I wouldn't worry about KDE disappearing, I'm more of a gtk+ person myself but I will admit KDE is the more popular DE. Also, kde will be crossplatform soon with the 4.0 release...there are already screenshots of kde apps on windows surfacing...that will only lead to more developers similiar to how firefox took off when it became available on windwos. 4.0 sounds excellent. I also don't see how the poster said it looks like a gtk future....I mean cmon even google uses qt on its linux apps.

[ComplexNumber]

I wouldn't worry about KDE disappearing
i don't think there's any chance of kde disappearing. well, not in the immediate future anyway.
also, gnome has quite an advantage when it comes to developing in languages other than C++. mono has a great future, and there is nothing to rival it in qt/kde.

[plb]

i don't think there's any chance of kde disappearing. well, not in the immediate future anyway.
also, gnome has quite an advantage when it comes to developing in languages other than C++. mono has a great future, and there is nothing to rival it in qt/kde.

gtk+ is c not c++..........qt is c++

[ComplexNumber]

gtk+ is c not c++..........qt is c++
yes i know. but gtkmm is kept constantly up to date and C++ is the natural language of qt/kde. i doubt there are any C apps in kde, so that can't be the common base.

[Bloodfen Razormaw]

I wouldn't worry about KDE disappearing, I'm more of a gtk+ person myself but I will admit KDE is the more popular DEbased.
Not just more popular, but growing in popularity at an incredible rate. GNOME, meanwhile, has stagnated. The GNOME userbase is now highly confined to Red Hat and Ubuntu. Large numbers of GNOME users have abandoned it for XFCE. KDE, meanwhile, now dominates corporate and government desktops in Europe, and GNOME is practically non-existant in Asia. Red Flag alone probably gives KDE more users than GNOME has worldwide. Add in the rest of the Asianux family and you have quite a party.


mono has a great future, and there is nothing to rival it in qt/kde.
Mono doesn't come within a mile of Korundum.

[ComplexNumber]

Not just more popular, but growing in popularity at an incredible rate. GNOME, meanwhile, has stagnated. The GNOME userbase is now highly confined to Red Hat and Ubuntu. Large numbers of GNOME users have abandoned it for XFCE. KDE, meanwhile, now dominates corporate and government desktops in Europe, and GNOME is practically non-existant in Asia. Red Flag alone probably gives KDE more users than GNOME has worldwide. Add in the rest of the Asianux family and you have quite a party.


Mono doesn't come within a mile of Korundum.
yeah, if you say so.

[mips]

yeah, if you say so. *checks temperature of Bloodfen Razormaw*


Here we go again :rolleyes:

[Wolki]

Not just more popular, but growing in popularity at an incredible rate. GNOME, meanwhile, has stagnated.

You sure? GNOME seems to reclaim quite some space. At least, activity is picking up.


The GNOME userbase is now highly confined to Red Hat and Ubuntu.

And Fedora. And SuSE Enterpise Desktop. And a cuple of smaller distributions. And more of the default KDE distributions start paying more attention into GNOME - Mandriva used to only have KDE live, now they also do GNOME.


Large numbers of GNOME users have abandoned it for XFCE.

Source?


KDE, meanwhile, now dominates corporate and government desktops in Europe

The large rollouts in Spain tend to be GNOME. The Rollouts in german-language countries are very often KDE though.

Surely, KDE is doing quite well, and it has for some time.
GNOME is picking up though, and interest both from users and developers continues to grow. Reports of its death are an exaggeration. :)

[GeneralZod]

Surely, KDE is doing quite well, and it has for some time.
GNOME is picking up though, and interest both from users and developers continues to grow. Reports of its death are an exaggeration. :)

I agree with your analysis; the future does seem to be more GNOME/ Gtk than KDE/ Qt. There is a yearly poll conducted by some Linux site (LinuxQuestions, maybe ... ?) and one of the polls is about the preferred desktop environment. To my knowledge, the site in question has no particular GNOME/ KDE bias (unlike on these forums, where GNOME always wins similar polls by a landslide :))

A couple of years ago, KDE absolutely slaughtered GNOME - the percentages were something like 35% GNOME and 65% KDE. This year, with the same poll, the results were practically neck and neck - something like 35% GNOME and 37% KDE (XFCE's share improved markedly, if I recall). I'd be surprised if this trend didn't continue.

Still, as a devout KDE user, I can't say I really mind - as long as both DE's continue to gain additional developers and more of the global marketshare and continue to feed off each other with the exchange of ideas and friendly competition, I don't much care if KDE has only 1% :)

What many people don't seem to realise is that GNOME and KDE do not need to be enemies - they are, after all, Free Desktop Environments, and so the only DE that it makes sense to brand an enemy is a non-Free one - and I'm sure you all know which one I'm referring to, here ;)

[ComplexNumber]

A couple of years ago, KDE absolutely slaughtered GNOME - the percentages were something like 35% GNOME and 65% KDE. This year, with the same poll, the results were practically neck and neck - something like 35% GNOME and 37% KDE (XFCE's share improved markedly, if I recall). I'd be surprised if this trend didn't continue.you are correct, GeneralZod :).

here (http://www.desktoplinux.com/cgi-bin/survey/survey.cgi?view=archive&id=0215200495458)'s a link to the 2004 one. gnome stood at 21.1% and kde stood at 61.1%

and here (http://www.desktoplinux.com/cgi-bin/survey/survey.cgi?view=archive&id=0821200617613)'s a link to the 2006 one. gnome stands at 35.1% wheras kde stands at 37.7%


so much for Bloodfen Razormaw's claims of "Not just more popular, but growing in popularity at an incredible rate. GNOME, meanwhile, has stagnated."

[Bloodfen Razormaw]

And Fedora. And SuSE Enterpise Desktop. And a cuple of smaller distributions. And more of the default KDE distributions start paying more attention into GNOME - Mandriva used to only have KDE live, now they also do GNOME.
Fedora would be a Red Hat distro. SuSE's userbase has very few GNOME users. One recalls how under pressure from its Ximian employees Novell tried to change the default to GNOME, a plan which lasted only a week under protests from users. If you were to look at what distribution every GNOME installation used, I would bet you would find almost all use RHEL/Fedora or Ubuntu (and RHEL/Fedora are not even made for the desktop). Meanwhile, Linspire, the only distro to get sold in American retail outlets, is KDE-based. So is SuSE, which dominates much of Europe. Asianux has a stranglehold on Asia and is KDE-based.


GNOME is picking up though, and interest both from users and developers continues to grow. Reports of its death are an exaggeration.
A few years ago KDE and GNOME were in opposite positions. KDE 3.x looked insanely slow, and this after KDE 2 which was unusably buggy. That has been reversed now. In the last three years GNOME development has been sluggish at best. It took them a year just to switch to fd.o menus and add a menu editor for it. Most new features in each release are just them finding a program they like and telling distributions to include it with GNOME. To this day GNOME doesn't have an official instant messenger, nor an office suite (no, telling people to install abiword and gnumeric doesn't count). Development simply doesn't seem to happen.

GNOME won't die. As someone mentioned above, it has revived in some surveys (in the one mentioned above, GNOME had about 35% two years ago IIRC, dropped drastically last year with KDE getting almost all those users, and recovered this year), but polls like that target a very small audience (American/European home users who love Linux enough to do polls on it). The lack of GNOME in Asia is especially bad news. KDE doesn't just dominate Linux in China. Linux is growing incredibly fast at the expense of Windows. Red Flag basically has a market of a billion people who are switching quickly to KDE. A more accurate survey would get much more different results than a Linux magazine's poll. If you were to do a survey that covered every UNIX installation worldwide (every home user in every location, corporate desktops, government machines, etc.) you would find KDE dominates by a huge margin, with GNOME getting probably around 10-15%. CDE would probably have a fair chunk, and XFCE wouldn't show up in any mathematically significant way.
Edit: It should be noted what really makes GNOME look bad for being MIA in Asia is how much Qt sucks at East Asian input. Even with GTK's much better localized input, GNOME is avoided like the plague.

[darkhatter]

I thought the whole gnome push was from Red Hat, and that everyone else was just following Red Hat.

[plb]

The one thing I've noticed about gnome over the years that I've been using Linux which is nearly 7 in case your wondering is that development moves at a snails pace. Sure there are releases every 6 months which is a good thing but changes are always minimal. Another thing I've noticed is that as quick as they add something they will take it out for no reason...like the menu editor they once had they soon took out and now there is another one back in there a few releases later. There are many great gtk+ apps out there but how many good Gnome apps are there, that is, apps that actually ship with Gnome.

[Bloodfen Razormaw]

Well put plb. The menu editor had a real reason for being removed, but it is still an excellent example of how bad GNOME coding is, and how slow development occurs because of that. GNOME took 6 months of coding to switch to the fd.o format, wasn't able to reuse their original menu editing system since it was so poorly designed, and still didn't have time to create a new one to replace the old. And they decided to ship a broken system rather than wait to finish it. They just can't develop it anymore with its total lack of a development platform and shoddy code quality. It's amazing how little GNOME has changed since 1.4 was released five years ago (except Nautilus, which is far less powerful now).

And you are also right about the (extremely low) number of GNOME apps. There is plenty of GTK+ software, but even that tends to be either simple or low quality. If you look at the free software available, in field after field the best is a KDE app. It isn't rare for KDE apps to even be superior to the best commercial offerings. Often there are so many GTK+ apps precisely because they are so low quality. There is almost a sick kind of entertainment in watching the endless failed attempts to make a GTK+ Amarok or K3b.

[Kindred]

:mrgreen: :rolleyes:

[plb]

you are correct, GeneralZod :).

here (http://www.desktoplinux.com/cgi-bin/survey/survey.cgi?view=archive&id=0215200495458)'s a link to the 2004 one. gnome stood at 21.1% and kde stood at 61.1%

and here (http://www.desktoplinux.com/cgi-bin/survey/survey.cgi?view=archive&id=0821200617613)'s a link to the 2006 one. gnome stands at 35.1% wheras kde stands at 37.7%


so much for Bloodfen Razormaw's claims of "Not just more popular, but growing in popularity at an incredible rate. GNOME, meanwhile, has stagnated."

Yeah I saw that poll...only 15,000 people in it though and it makes sense when you think about it since Ubuntu was the most popular distro at what 37%? next was debian at 12% Ubuntu is gnome based afterall and with that number no wonder why gnome was so high up. Either way I like both gnome and kde so I don't care :)

[NoTiG]

From what I have read, KDE seems technically superior... because the Qt toolset is better and is based on C++ which is more object oriented and leads to more elegant programming... whereas gnome is plain C and gets messy. At least thats what I have read. The bad part about KDE though is the QT license itself, and how if proprietary programs are ever to use it they will have to pay. That makes it Less free, sort of how the gpl v 3 is less free than 2. I prefer the greater freedom of gnome and gpl v 2 so thats why i use it. But its cool to have a choice... i hope neither of them falter... but i believe the future is brighter for Gnome

edit: oh and also from what ive read the KDE virtual file system is much better (gnomes needs a rewrite) ... and perhaps Amarok is reason alone to use KDE. there are many good things about KDE but the funny thing is i've never even tried it. not to mention that Linus himself endorses KDE over gnome

[Bloodfen Razormaw]

A KDE user has every bit as much of the freedom GNOME has. The LGPL does not guarantee the freedom of its users, while the GPL does. In the same vein the GPL3 guarantees the freedom of users more than 2. It's all about the freedoms the users has, not the freedom of the developer to take them away. It is worth noting that Qt is actually used far more than GTK+ for ISV development anyway, and a lot of the money they pay to keep their software closed is going to KDE in the form of donations and sponsorships from Trolltech. If proprietary software that steals users' freedom is going to made, isn't it preferable that the free software community benefit in some way?

[mips]

At least thats what I have read. The bad part about KDE though is the QT license itself, and how if proprietary programs are ever to use it they will have to pay. That makes it Less free, sort of how the gpl v 3 is less free than 2.

Well then they must pay. As long as it is open source it stays free.

If you were to use a commercial package would you not pay for it ?

[GeneralZod]

just read Carsten's blog (the author of Kalzium) about the edubuntu people creating gallium without contacting him once.


In case anyone is interested, Carsten just mentioned on IRC that the gallium guys have contacted him and now everyone is happy - the gallium project is going ahead, but they will re-use as much of the code and data from Kalzium as they can. Hoorah!

[darkhatter]

happy ending :D

[NoTiG]

A KDE user has every bit as much of the freedom GNOME has. The LGPL does not guarantee the freedom of its users, while the GPL does. In the same vein the GPL3 guarantees the freedom of users more than 2. It's all about the freedoms the users has, not the freedom of the developer to take them away. It is worth noting that Qt is actually used far more than GTK+ for ISV development anyway, and a lot of the money they pay to keep their software closed is going to KDE in the form of donations and sponsorships from Trolltech. If proprietary software that steals users' freedom is going to made, isn't it preferable that the free software community benefit in some way?


Freedom for the users is great but i prefer greater overall freedom. Drm for instance...... while im against it.... if it was made impossible to include on linux because of gpl v 3... it might mean that linux could never become mainstream because of it... so overall it could hurt the end users. if you look at the big picture.

As far as the qt toolkit.... i don't mind proprietary software... but i prefer buildingblocks to be free. if that makes any sense.

[darkhatter]

is windows and mac osx toolkits free? I don't think OS X's is, but I'm not sure about windows

[NoTiG]

Look at this : http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2006/09/librarian.html

* libdl.so.2
* libpthread.so.0
* libX11.so.6
* libXext.so.6
* libXt.so.6
* libfreetype.so.6
* libfontconfig.so.1
* libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
* libgobject-2.0.so.0
* libglib-2.0.so.0
* libm.so.6
* libc.so.6

so i take it that flash 9 will be dependent on gtk ? since they didnt bother licensing the QT toolset to simply port their flash to linux?

[Sushi]

The bad part about KDE though is the QT license itself, and how if proprietary programs are ever to use it they will have to pay. That makes it Less free, sort of how the gpl v 3 is less free than 2. I prefer the greater freedom of gnome and gpl v 2 so thats why i use it.

Qt is GPL'ed, period. GTK+ is LGPL. GPL is better at securing the freedom of users. That is a fact.

I have never really understood the license-argument. I have heard several people say that GTK+ is superior because it allows companies to make proprietary software with it, without having to contribute anything to the community. Since when did free software turn from creating kick-*** free software, in to satisfying the whims of pushers of proprietary software? Since when did it become a good point when companies can create proprietary software, and not contribute anything back? With Qt they have two choices: Either they contribute code, or they contribute money. Either way, the community benefits. With GTK+, they can do whatever they wish (well, almost) with GTK, and not contribute anything back to the community. And we, the community, are being told that that is actually a good thing?!?

Is this the Bizarro World?

[boban]

and perhaps Amarok is reason alone to use KDE. there are many good things about KDE but the funny thing is i've never even tried it. not to mention that Linus himself endorses KDE over gnome

I like both DE... And the thing I like the most is that I can use KDE apps in Gnome... (and as far as I know vice versa)

[NoTiG]

One more potentially good thing about Gnome... integration with mono. I think alot of people have criticized mono and don't fully understand it. But I think its a framework that will compete with QT in its ease of use, and rapid application development. I think mono will be gnomes saving grace. Just look at all the cool apps already that have quickly synthesized from mono on gnome... beagle, tomboy , deskbar etc.......


As far as the license issue.... I like the idea of the QT license where if a company doesn't want to open source their software... then they have to pay. But this money goes to trolltech. I don't think it really benefits the community. It would be cool if there was a toolset with the QT license, that all profits went to benefit linux and not just trolltech i guess. I still think the gnome license is more free and that makes companies less wary of using it. Look at the above post on flash... i see they are using GTK and gnome rather than qt libraries.

[monktbd]

the best framework for c++ i found for crossplatform developing so far is wxwidgets. much better documentation than gtkmm in my opinion.
and yes gtk+ lacks a lot of developer documentation in my eyes.
not that the one of wxwidgets is much superior but it is better i think.
still behind the one of qt and this is really where i think the success of qt and kde apps lies. so someone who wants to start programming in c++ probably has it much easier with qt.
gtk+ is c, not much fun for me to program with that. qt is not bad but the connection of events to eventhandlers is not that much c++ like i think.

mono is a project that is based on gtk and probably will gain much more popularity soon.

i am a gnome person myself (and always have been and have used mandriva for the last years) but i think both DE have their userbase and rightly so. kde always didnt seem right for me.

complaining about the lack of presented functionality in gnome is not leading anywhere because reduced functionality is what gnome intends to do. if someone needs to tweak every other small detail of the DE with a dialog hidden somewhere then kde is probably better suited.

right now i have no kde libs on my system and i am still alive - although k3b and amarok are great apps, i didnt find the latter especially stable at all.

where i do agree is that ressources need to be bundled and it makes no sense to develop the same thing twice.
helpful here is a strict separation of GUI and functional code whereever possible. that this is not easy when it comes to standard classes like qstring etc.. is clear as well.