Re: KDE Interop

[Mike Hearn <mike theoretic com>]

<unlurk>
(strange quoting is due to being copied from archives)

Miguel wrote:
"Reading today's Slashdot comments, you can see that our desktop is
falling behind stability-wise and feature wise to KDE.  It is of course
your time that is being spent on D-Bus, and maybe you do not have a lot
of choice on what you get to spend your working time on, but end-users
which do not care about the royalty issue do feel that KDE is a better
desktop."


Wow. Fear the power of Slashdot brainwashing ;)

I don't really know where you got that idea from.... I mean really 
here are quite a few people like me who now use GNOME, and who before
liked KDE. I know many such people, just friends I chat to on IRC and so on.

I guess we should go around flaming KDE or more or something, maybe then
we'd get noticed. Perhaps we should spam this list with praise for how great
GNOME2 is.

Anyway, my point is that basically in my experience you're wrong,
I don't care about the licensing issue at all, and yet I still prefer what
you guys have made.

If you're going to listen to Slashdot, you might as well go hack on Fresco 
because everybody knows X is slow and bloated. Actually screw that, why not
just use MacOS X? It's a completely open source UNIX desktop right? *cough*

Miguel also wrote:
"I probably mentioned this before, but when I went to Mexico in December
to the facility where we launched gnome, they had all switched to KDE3."

Harsh. Remember however that at this stage, Linux/UNIX desktop installations
will basically be using the personal preference of the administrator. In the
absence of any one desktop being significantly ahead of the other, esp in terms
of mass deployment, if the admin decides he likes KDE, then that's what his users
will use. If they like GNOME2 more, then that's what they'll use.

Really you can't draw any conclusions from stuff like that until the mega-corps
start deploying stuff, the kind of people who can't afford to have personal biases
and who can easily spend months evaluating all the options. In much the same
way that Linux on the server gets cut no slack when measured up against Windows or 
UNIX, KDE/GNOME/E17 whatever will be the same. But not today.

As for the points:

* Compiling Gnome is too difficult.
???? The reason I'm posting here today is because garnome and its ilk made
compiling it so easy that I let my curiousity get the better of me. In fact,
I've even submitted a patch to metacity, simply because the code was sitting
there beckoning me. Maybe compiling it was too difficult before or something,
I dunno, but not today.

* Gnome is slower than KDE.
This is the kind of thing that's fairly pointless to argue about, because it's so
subjective. Most people I know think GNOME is pretty fast. I know that's one of
the things that struck me when I first used gnome2.0.2 after kde3 (on suse), and
again with 2.2 - but hey, Slashdot is full of people who think a G4 running OS X
isn't slow, so what do I know?

* KDE's file manager acts like Windows: its a browser and a  file manager.
Yes, and why does Explorer morph between file manager and web browser? I think
Netscape had something to do with that design decision, didn't it. I don't
see any other OS doing that.... 

Miguel wrote:
"At this point we are not fatally loosing a race for adoption, and a race
to see our baby and our work be used by millions, but we are lagging
behind."

Not sure how you're measuring that... the closest thing I've seen to statistics
were the Gentoo emerge stats, which showed KDE being slightly ahead of GNOME, but
obviously:

* They weren't released at the same time, and it was measuring total downloads iirc
* Gentoo is a distro that's only used by people who have lots of time and massive
enthusiasm for tweakability, ie *not* most people (not even most linux users).

So, I think in the medium-long term I can't see Gnome lagging behind.

Finally:
"Getting Gnome on every desktop possible is a pretty good goal that
people can identify with (I do)."

Whoa. Maybe I misinterpreted you, but I think you should
be VERY careful with that - that kind of attitude makes it very much easier to say,
"well, maybe interop isn't so important here, we've got to differeniate ourselves somehow".

Then users end up choosing GNOME (or whatever) not because of their merits
as a desktop, but because their apps work better with it, or one integrates better with the
underlying OS etc. At that point, why is this better than people choosing Windows or
MacOS because that's what their applications need, because the interop isn't there?

I don't want to see that happen, I don't think anybody does....

</lurk>

thanks -mike