Gnome/KDE......

[Karl Gutenberg <GlueSoft gmx de>]

Please adjust the subject line if you change the subject.......

> just wondering..........this gnome thing.......I'm gonna try again and hope
> for better............in past
> my system slowed down horribly during execution of normalthings
> etc.......file manager would take forever tostart....
> anyway it might have beensomething I did as semi-newbie tosome admin
> things.......

I used Gnome in a virtual machine with 48MB and maybe processor like power of 
a 300Mhz Celeron. The result was compelling enough to make me switch to 
native Linux. And it's lightning fast on my 600Mhz, 128MB, as fast or faster 
than Win2k was. You just ought to avoid Netscape and other bloatware.... then 
you will be fine.

The KDE which I tried first, showed some performance deficits on the same 
setup, but that is a matter of taste. Some elements of KDE seem to be 
slightly bloated and after all, I tried to multitask KOffice, Konqueror with 
little memory. It got better when I chose low-res themes, no background, 
etc...

I'd personally say that Gnome should be happy with a machine that Win NT is 
happy with and same goes for KDE.

But I would also say, that KDE2 is for now better at performing tasks. Gnome 
has still to catch up. Konqueror is there and works better than Galeon, the 
Gnome frontend of Mozilla engine, and Mozilla with standard UI makes things 
slower again.... but I expect Galeon to catch up quickly.

Right now, both need more work.... 

> anyway just wondering......this gnome/kde issue..
> is gnome somehow MORE inclined to be a "free development" environemnt
> whereas kde
> programmes pers must pay some licensing fee or something???........i've
> been to kde site and I
> do not recall seeing that it states free software..

Actually, the issue is a bit strange. From how far I see it, KDE started out 
using a toolkit to visualize that was not free software at that time. You 
were e.g. not allowed to modify the toolkit and distribute it. Then it made a 
step to become free software, with a special licence that held back some 
rights to the company owning it and last week, it became GPLed, meaning that 
KDE is now completely GPL like Gnome is.

Gnome was started because KDE was regarded not to be free software, requiring 
you to use un-free software. It was based on a GUI toolkit of a software, 
called GIMP, used for image processing. (You can see that still in that Gnome 
deems a lot more pretty than KDE.)

Now the odds begin. Gnome has attracted Helix-Gnome and Eazel and many more 
companies that do the core work on Gnome, with a *commercial* interest. Helix 
Gnome e.g. focusses on delivering an Outlook-like application to Gnome and 
becoming the brandmark and a distribution like Redhat for Linux, making money 
from Services.

Recently big companies formed with them the Gnome foundation. You will find 
e.g. Sun in it, planing to "contribute" StarOffice which they recently chose 
to released und GPL. The plan of Sun is to make StarOffice components the 
standard office components and offer extra-services to it. They got a concept 
of it being used as an application server e.g. for which they keep the source 
closed. Netscape chose to change it's license for Mozilla from MPL which was 
free to be also GPL. Naturally also with a plan in mind, to become the 
standard browsing component for the future.

And there's lots of others companies, seeing the GPL as a standard license 
for there alliances nowadays.

Now isn't GPL, free software? Yes, indeed. But seemingly free software is 
regarded to be the way to make money through services in the future. The big 
ones want to get their share in the standard software of the future....

Now KDE has been different. The only commercial effort I know of for it is 
Klyx or whatever the Delphi clone of Borland for Linux will be called. It was 
started a longer time ago, and I bet, some people at Borland get a tad bit 
nervous about Gnome....

So while KDE was based on a commercial software, exactly THIS kept the big 
companies from using it as their platform. Strange, isn't it? And guess what, 
the base is now GPL to attract commercial software.....

The truth is that GPL is no longer a warranty to keep big business out. It 
scares me to read of 50 developers of Sun working on Gnome. It's most likely 
a lie anyway. But you know, he who writes the code determines the direction 
and you better have concurrency of KDE and Gnome.

Because if you had not, Gnome would become a standard like Windows is/will 
have been, and take directions in the interest of the companies controlling 
it. With a concurrent project, with the option to choose, they can't get you 
into using things that you don't want to.

They can't make you tolerate some things, because you want others, with each 
upgrade. They will have to keep you convinced, that Gnome is what you want to 
use.

> is there a difference between the open-source project between gnome and
> kde?

Actually there are many, but they only affect programmers. Gnome is more 
friendly to non-C++ programmers.

Gnome is written in C and KDE in C++. This changes the ways you address the 
interfaces in a program. A C interface will require little of you, choosing 
your own abstraction, and choosing your language of preference. C talks well 
to all other languages. The C++ does not. To use certain features, you will 
be forced to use objects which makes simple things, elegant, but not easier 
and complicated things impossible unless you code in C++ yourself.

I expect Gnome to take a quicker performance, whereas KDE will soon suffer 
from what all C++ apps sooner or later do. It will become a maintainance 
nightmare. 

Being coded in C and highly modular, Gnome has a bigger potential to have a 
paceful development and long time maintainace of a stable interface. You will 
see KDE getting incompatible to older versions more often or stagnating....

Well Ok, enough on that :-)

But certainly, the answer is, KDE is closer to a non-commercial effort. KDE 
was less free software. Future takes both to keep both free of company 
interests....

Karl