Re: Hrm. Now I know why this list is dead

[Mosfet <mosfet jorsm com>]

On Thu, 20 May 1999, Jonas Luster wrote:
> [Quoting smooge@redhat.com (Steve Smoogen)]:
> 
> (excuse bad english)
> 
> > Ok I can see where you are coming from.  The biggest problem with
> > competition is Not Invented Here Syndrome. The only way to get past that
> > is through some level of co-operation.
> 
> Cooperation is always a good thing. But looking at KDE "vs." Gnome,
> there's an even worse thing than just some flames from Miguel (whose
> speeches I've enjoyed and loved, Miguel is certainly one of the more
> interesting persons in OSS-movement) - it's the placement of Gnome/KDE 
> that is done by not only Media but Distributions and Persons.
> 
> Looking at almost every german computer magazine, reading comments
> from the SuSE-Team or using SuSE as his distribution, one may get the
> impression, there's only _one_ "Linux Desktop" (they even negate the
> fact that both products run on a variety of platforms): KDE.
> 

The opposite is true in the US. Gnome hype is overwhelming here, not just in
the media but also on forums like SlashDot where only Gnome stories are posted
even when equivalent stories about KDE have been submitted.

And in most Gnome stories where Miguel is involved, there is always a quote
about how either Linux had no previous GUI or that Gnome was designed to replace
"legacy" GUI's like KDE.

> Me, personally, I don't like KDE much - not because of some particular 
> missing feature or of some existing ones but because it did not "look" 
> okay to me. I'm using Gnome, doing my GUIs in GTK+ and am trying to
> contribute to the community somewhat in doing speeches on Gnome and
> writing articles on it.

Personally, I think KDE has a much better API, is much more mature, more
stable, has a larger user base, and is being developed much faster.
Qt2.0/KDE2.0/KOffice is a much more powerful combination than anything else
out there IMHO, and is coming along quite nicely. But we will see. 

As far as choosing "look" over functionality and ease of use and development, I
won't even comment on that. As someone who is currently involved in doing look
and feel related coding, I will tell you that stuff is trivial compared to
something like designing a full and working object model.


>

 But - it's hard to break thru' this mist of "Hype" and
it's placement > as the one-true-desktop that surrounds KDE. Looking at the
audiences > of my speeches, I somewhat can understand Miguel - full of hype and
> euphoria for KDE most of them don't even take me serious if I do start 
> to explain Gnome and it's mechanisms to them.
> 
> I'm pretty new to Gnome and GTK, my first version was 0.20, but one
> thing I've ben experiencing with the Gnome/GTK folks is their
> friendliness (yes, timj, I still owe you 50 bucks :), their help and
> their readyness to contribute to the desktop they are using. One might 
> call Miguel a fanatic, I think it's more than that, it's in some way
> the same proudness a father must feel about his child growing up well, 
> beingon its way to perfection one more step every day (regardless
> he'll never reach this point fully :).
> 

That does not excuse his behavior in any way. If he is truly proud of his
project and confident in it's quality he would not see it as necessary to bash
other free software projects during every media interview.

> Just a look on the KDE Pages - they do remind me of commercial pages a 
> bit - full of hoorays and whistles and a look on the Gnome Pages,
> being somewhat more "friendly and cooperative".
> 

Whatever. Gnome has more paid developers than KDE does so I would consider it
more "commercial".  Almost all work, including the website, is done by
volunteers working on a free software project.

> To reverse the question: What in the last months has the
KDE TEam done  > towards cooperation? Have they thought on a way to unify
> session-management, drag'n'drop, everything else? Is there a list on
> the KDE side, called kde-gnome?
> 

Uhm, considering we had perfectly working session management, drag 'n drop, and
"everything else" including a document model long before Gnome was even
started. and that Gnome developers designed implementations from scratch with
no thought of compatibility to KDE, this is not a statement I can take very
seriously.


> jonas
> 
> 
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--
Daniel M. Duley - Unix developer & sys admin.
mosfet@kde.org
mosfet@jorsm.com