Re: KDE Interop [Was: D-BUS background]

[Vadim Plessky <plessky cnt ru>]

On Sunday 02 March 2003 09:31, Havoc Pennington wrote:
|  On Sat, Mar 01, 2003 at 04:55:27PM -0500, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
[...]
|
|  > Reading today's Slashdot comments, you can see that our desktop is
|  > falling behind stability-wise and feature wise to KDE.
|
|  My view is that we're ahead of KDE in a number of areas, in some cases
|  far ahead. Not all areas of course.

I am curious to know where GNOME is ahead of KDE.
I try every major GNOME release and still can't find it useful (as of 2.2 
version).
On the other hand, KDE became useful since 2.1 version.
So, I am really curious to hear your arguments.

|
|  It's easy to listen to Slashdot too much. But those people do not have
|  the same priorities that an operating system vendor or an "enterprise
|  customer" has. Usability, simplicity, modularity of the packaging,
|  accessibility, licensing, applications, interoperability, standards
|  compliance, development process/visibility, API/ABI supportability,
|  the list of things that really matter that Slashdot doesn't understand
|  or care about is long. Frankly Slashdot wildly overestimates the whole
|  desktop environment thing to begin with; applications and the OS as a
|  whole are at least as important.
|
|  Nick Petreley thought that Caldera would win, IIRC because they had
|  more corporate-looking graphics and didn't buy into the whole open
|  source thing. Doh.  While KDE may "win," it's not going to be due to
|  the rationale that Petreley gives - he ignores numerous relevant
|  issues and overblows some very superficial points.
|
|  I hope your mail won't land on Slashdot or some other web
|  site. Slashdot (= shorthand for all similar sites) is the most evil
|  influence possible if we really want to do what it takes for Linux (or
|  UNIX) to succeed on the desktop.
|
|  The reason "enterprise customers" matter is that "enterprise customer"
|  basically means "customer who deploys lots of seats and pays lots of
|  money." And this is thus where you win significant marketshare and
|  make significant revenue. And that's where you can start having some
|  momentum.

I doubt "enterprise customer" in current economical environment would wish to 
pay lots of money.

|
|  > 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.
|  > I am not sure the reasons they gave me were correct, and they can be
|  > debated (and in fact, people in #gnome pointed out that those reasons
|  > might be wrong), but here they are:
|
[...]
|
|  > 	* Compiling Gnome is too difficult.
|
|  A great example - what is typically called an "enterprise customer"
|  would not compile GNOME. Some of these guys have a heart attack if

This is correct, enterprise customers would expect binaries coming 
pre-compiled.

|  they have to run any binaries that haven't been officially certified
|  for the *specific version and errata set* of Red Hat Linux (or
|  whatever OS) they are running. We put out a security patch, they want
|  to see all their ISVs say "that doesn't break our app." Compiling
|  GNOME themselves would mean they would have no support at all.
|
|  On the other hand, GNOME's modularity is clearly better when it comes
|  to scaling/parallelizing our development process and easing
|  distribution maintenance - i.e. helping us handle a larger development
|  team and manage architecture changes over time.

If you think that GNOME has larger development team - *why* GNOME is (IMHO) 
behind KDE (in terms of usability for *real world* apps, like mail client , 
office suit, etc.)?

|
|  Not to discount the value of promoting garnome/jhbuild.
|
|  > 	* Gnome is slower than KDE.
|
|  Totally depends on your setup (many people on Slashdot today actually
|  said the opposite of this), and assuming basic sanity, is no way going
|  to be the most important factor for anyone who's paying money for the
|  OS vs. trying to use something cheap on old hardware.  I use GNOME 2.2
|  on my 266 Mhz laptop, though.
|
|  That said, we are on track to be *substantially* smaller and faster if
|  we kill the duplication of platform in gtk vs. libbonoboui, speed up
|  pixbuf handling, optimize fontconfig, and some stuff like
|  that. kdelibs is *huge*, as is Qt, and they heavily duplicate each

well, kdelibs+kdebase have the same size as 57 packages required to install 
Gnome desktop, while:
a)  GNOME Desktop (panel+terminal+control_center+Nautilus) lacks Web Browser.

Adding Mozilla results in additional 15MB-20MB of disk space.
Besides, Mozilla is not very well intergrated with GNOME (to say the truth: 
not integrated at all), and adding Galeon results in one more package 
installed, and it is still not 100% integrate dinto GNOME.

b) kdebase has very power programmer's text editor/IDE tool - KATE (KDE 
Advanced Text Editor), plus KWrite, and you don't have such tools in standard 
GNOME Desktop.

c) KDE's Control Center is superior to GNOME's one

|  other. While GNOME has no fundamental or pervasive reason it's larger
|  than XFCE, just a few relatively solveable isolated bloat points.
|  This is a place we could be a lot better than any of the competition
|  with a bit of effort.
|
|  > 	* KDE's file manager acts like Windows: its a browser and a
|  > 	  file manager.
|
|  However Konqueror is incredibly complex UI-wise compared to Windows
|  Explorer, and simply does not handle many web pages that Mozilla does
|  (though sure, it anecdotally works well enough for many people, and
|  having Safari helping may address this over time).

from my experience, Konqueror is superior to Mozilla.
Mozilla is incredibly slow and resource-hungry, and it fails on too many pages 
to be useful.

|
|  I believe the real Windows clone distributions are using forks of KDE
|  2 with their own file manager or control center, plus Mozilla and
|  OpenOffice.  The Chinese government developed distribution is doing
|  the same.

If you speak about Lindows (th emost advanced from those Desktop Windows 
clones) - they have KDE3-based version of Lindows.
Not sure wether it's released or not, but that's the question of time.

|
|  Windows XP moves in the same direction as GNOME in terms of
|  simplifying things rather than adding more complexity; OS X and the
|  screenshots of next-gen Windows move even further that way.  GNOME 2.2
|  is *still* more complex than either Windows or OS X in various ways.

Compare Outlook (I have Outlook XP in office) with KMail.
KMails' UI is much simpler and more intuitive.
Outlook's UI is bloated and incredibly difficult to use.

|
|  > Again, not the same.  Some people want gnome because it makes sense
|  > license-wise (Red Hat and Sun seem to be concerned about *this*
|  > particular issue).
|
|  This is a misconception, at least for Red Hat. There are 5 or 6 major
|  bullet points in the "why we default to GNOME" rationale. People felt
|  we could work around or address the licensing issue, in fact. The
|  technical and organizational points are the main ones.

There is no licensing issue with Qt/KDE already for 2.5 years!..

|
|  (I don't want to list them; it'll just land me on Slashdot and piss
|  people off. Not that there's anything wrong with the reasons, they are
|  just a technical/requirements evaluation type of thing, but people
|  won't take them that way.)
|
|  > This is not intended as a flame.  Hope the tone here is the right one.
|
|  I think it is a good tone, I hope my reply is in the same spirit.
|
|  In short, my opinion is that we have done many of the hardest tasks
|  very well. We've scaled the devel organization and release process to
|  a large number of people. We've sorted out how to manage corporate
|  participation/contribution. We've addressed usability and
|  simplicity. We have nice HIG. We have years of effort completed for
|  Section 508 compliance. We have best depth of application
|  functionality. We are on course to have the devel platform
|  unified/unbloated by GTK+ 2.4, rather than two duplicating layers.  We
|  have the most credible enterprise OS vendors involved.  We have clean

Do you know that Intel+HP were demonstrating recently Itanium2-based Superdome 
server, and it was running (together with HP-UX, on another partition) Linux 
with KDE?

|  and maintainable code with strong maintainers for nearly all the key
|  components. We've properly modularized those components so we can
|  spread out release cycles and maintenance.
|
|  What remains are some relatively isolated and addressable features and
|  issues, rather than big-picture hard stuff. I have no question we'll
|  nail a sizeable number of these in the next 6-12 months; we fixed a
|  ton of them for 2.2, 2.4 and 2.6 should not be different, our process
|  is like a machine these days. The determinant of our success will be
|  whether we get the right features and get them done soon enough.

What version of GNOME would have usable File Selector?
(comparable to KDE 3 or Windows 2000 File Selector in terms of functionality 
and usability)

|
|  Have faith in the direction we've established during 2.0 and 2.2; it's
|  a good path, it is the right path, and if we sustain it and don't have
|  too much bad luck it'll work.
|
|  Havoc

-- 
Best Regards,

Vadim Plessky
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