Comments on: Upgrade timing demotes KDE variant of Ubuntu Linux

Only GNOME-based Ubuntu will get Canonical's long-term support, because KDE 3.5 is too old, and 4.0 is not mature enough yet to use in Kubuntu.

[Penguinisto]

Good read.

IMHO, I do agree that one or the other should be focused on.

That said, I like using GNOME, but love programming in Qt. The good news is, I'm not stuck in an either-or proposition - I can do both.

From the outside, I can see where the need and desire for one overall desktop manager would exist.

OTOH, I had used fluxbox for years (Fluxbox is/was a stripped down built-for-speed Windows Manager that was simple, looked nice, and worked very well with what I wanted it to do).

That said, most of the grunt-work in coding for two (or more) WM's is mostly in the UI look-n-feel, and even then it's not a deal-breaker. One WM can pretty much run everything built primarily for the other. The only real diff you see is the look/feel aspects.

Overall, the market will out. SuSE is big into KDE, RedHat is big into GNOME, Ubuntu splits the diff, and eventually one of four things will happen:

* GNOME dies.
* KDE dies.
* something else comes along and kills both of 'em.
* someone gets an idea and combines the best elements of both.

I'm betting on the last bit. These days, the majority of the Linux user base couldn't care less about which one is better/worse/whatever (a far cry from as recently as, say, 2001).

I figure in about five years, the whole KDE vs. GNOME thing become about as quaint and pointless, as us old *nix-heads are in asking each other "emacs or vi?" when we greet a fellow *nix geek for the first time (e.g. it's mostly just an in-joke nowadays).

/P

[Shankland]

I'm guessing option 5

Your four possible outcomes are certainly possibilities, but my guess is that option 5 will win out: both GNOME and KDE will muddle along independently. Both have significant adoption and loyal fans, but neither at least now has enough dominance to win out, in my opinion, and the technical barriers (including one of C vs C++) are high enough to make merging very difficult.

I could be wrong. Bash won out as the default Linux shell (and of course I imprinted on tcsh), and Beryl and Compiz mananged to unfork into Compiz Fusion, so there are historical precedents that defy my pessimism.

If I were going to call it one way or the other, I'd predict GNOME will win. It's default in Ubuntu and Red Hat, Sun Microsystems contributes to it, and Novell broke with its KDE-allied Suse Linux history in 2005 by making GNOME the default (http://www.news.com/Suse-co-founder-leaves-Novell/2100-1010_3-5942300.html).

sts

[Seaspray0]

Single interface would be best

A single unified GUI interface would do alot towards promoting linux. Can you imagine what could have been accomplished had efforts not been wasted supporting multiple distributions? I'm sure there are those who would dissagree.
Diversity is one of the trademarks of linux. But still... not having to worry if an application will run on your distribution would be highly benificial. After all, it's the applications that are the bread and butter in the world of computing.

[rapier1]

emacs or vi

I've had people actually ask me that. I told them I just used cat. Then I would leave because I really didn't want to talk to people who asked questions like that.

[Vegaman_Dan]

Internal quibbling isn't helping

With different flavors of *nix and now desktops with their supporters having political battles on who gets support for what- the loser is the end user until this all gets straightended out.

It reminds me of the early days of desktop systems. Will you buy an Apple, Amiga or IBM PC? Perhaps you should choose OS2/Warp. You take a chance on any of them because you don't know who will be the winner in the end. How much time and resources do you want to invest only to find you are on the losing end?

It may make more sense to wait a bit for all this to settle out and become a non-issue.

Or it could just be sabre rattling for the sake of making news/getting free press/attention.

It doesn't help the Linux community's efforts to make inroads over OSX or Windows products though in the public perspective. Indecision and political issues internally only make it seem less stable and viable as an alternative than it really is.

[msimoens]

Take examples

Pick one and go with it. I'm dedicated to KDE not knowing what
advantages it has over GNOME (and vice-versa). Apple has Unix
under the hood and built a WM over it right? (I am just a novice so
don't slam me if I'm wrong) So pick one and flourish.

Vegaman_Dan is right, this "quibbling" is only gonna take energy
away from a common goal.

[The_Decider]

Only to you

Which isn't surprising.

It is not an either or situation.

[Penguinisto]

Three letters: LSB.

Linux Standards Base. Go look it up.

Also, read this: http://www.news.com/5208-13580_3-0.html?
forumID=1&threadID=33994&messageID=361365&start=0

[slickuser]

engineered crap...

Both KDE and GNOME are over engineered crap!

[kdskinner]

Re: engineered crap...: reader comment from slickuser

And you suggest?

Maybe the command line huh?

[Seaspray0]

I'm so confused

That sounds much better than an under-engineered piece of crap! Perhaps you can explain to me how over engineered is detrimental. The Germans are famous for highly engineered automobiles, so your comment could be considered a compliment of linux.

[Imalittleteapot]

What?

This article is a bit confusing. The author spends half the article convincing people that two different desktop managers is a problem. For a support company that might be a problem, but then at the end of the article they suggest XFCE. If two different managers were really a problem how would offering a third solution make things any simpler?

I only think it's a problem for support companies, or software developers. For the end user it just provides more choice. It might be harder for some, but support and development are supposed to be hard for the sake of the end user right?

It might be cool if they stripped KDE, and Gnome or some other and combined their best assets into something new and streamlined. But it wont' solve this problem. That would just create one more choice, which is fine by me.

A lot of people make the same mistake with Linux distributions. If they just made one good one then we wouldn't need all these distributions. But in reality creating another distribution just leads one more LiveCD sitting on the desk.

If they dropped support for Gnome and started working exclusively on KDE, then in a few months some programmers would notice that Gnome is falling behind and say well if no one else is working on it, I might as well. Then they?d take the Gnome source and start adding to it. We?d be right back where we started.

Linux doesn?t have a company like Apple or Microsoft to control its every move. Which is good because that means Linux users don?t have a big company like Apple or Microsoft controlling their every mouse click.

[Goodbye Helicopter]

pointless article

The article reads like some of the drivel in those Linux-oriented
magazines.
Pointless, meandering...
Most likely scenario: this article is intended to be a slash-dot
flamebait article.

GNOME and KDE are not going to be conjoined. they're both too
different internally. So you can forget that happening ever.
KDE is more stable. GNOME looks more like windows so it is an
easier "sell" to suit and tie types.
XFCE is better in a lot of respects, because it accomplishes
mostly the same things without the wasted system resources.

All Canonical is saying is that KDE 3.5 is nearing end of life, so
it's not going to sell new long-term support contracts. KDE 4 is
not yet ready, so they can't sell anything on that yet.

[calande]

The author is right

I don't see THAT many differences between Gnome and KDE. If you ask me which one I prefer, I'll say "whatever, each one works great". So, more competition, ok, but...If both products are already excellent and very similar, what's the point? Shouldn't developers use their man power to develop other applications? For instance, Linux lacks GOOD applications for: WYSIWYG web authoring, video authoring, Flash authoring, image authoring (or improve GIMP).

Regarding duplication of graphical libraries, I can feel it on my old computer. On my KDE partition, I only use Qt applications; on mt Gnome partition, I only use Gtk applications. Moreover, mixing applications with different graphical libraries gives an inconsistent experience and look & feel. I just wish Qt were licensed with a 100% free license right from the beginning, there wouldn't have a need for an alternative DE.

[MaxToTheMax]

KDE and GNOME should not merge. Nuh-uh. I could be convinced that rewriting KDE to use GTK+ is a good idea, but then there'd be a bunch of orphand Qt applications. Until there's some kind of merged toolkit (QtK+, maybe?) that is completely compatible with each, I'm not buying it.