Novell will (continue to) support KDE after all

[Evan Leibovitch]

Christopher Browne wrote:

>>I love it if they tried to bring the two together.
>>    
>>
>
>I hate to say this, but that's the classic clueless response.
>  
>
Maybe clueless (in some contexts), but nonetheless valid.

The 99.99% of the public that neither knows nor cares about the
difference between C, C++, C# and whatever else is relevant, has a
legitimate beef. To the non-technical end user, it's a legitimate wonder
of how much effort has needlessly gone into duplicating effort.

How much better might the open source desktop be if all the programming,
human design and documentation skills of the community been funnelled
into one program rather than split between two (or more) desktop systems?

This is not like the diversity of Linux distributions, because the
differences in them is usually more than internal design or personal
taste. Many distros serve different and specialized purposes. OTOH, KDE
and GNOME serve very much the identical purpose.

This long ago stopped being a contest of innovation, since neither GNOME
nor KDE really is doing anything groundbreaking (from the users'
perspective). Elegance of internal design is a fine issue for insiders,
but there are many people who can't tell Riesling from Shiraz and there
are many who can't (and don't want to be bothered to) pick a winner
between KDE and GNOME.

>They are implemented in different languages, with very different
>designs, and even attempting to "fold them together" is certain to be
>fruitless.
>  
>
Moreover, most of the ideas that one does first get re-implemented in
the other.
Korganizer, Evolution
Kopete, Gaim
etc. etc. Almost every KDE function has a GNOME equivalent and vice
versa, and in many cases neither is fully cooked or anywhere as easy to
use as either the Mac or Windows counterparts. We're playing catch-up,
while having our progress seriously impeded by religious arguments over
languages and other issues that in the grand scheme of things are just
geek minutiae. This isn't so much technical Darwinism as it is (in this
case) a needless fragmentation.

I interpret (and support) Ted's plea as wanting the FOSS desktop to be a
collaboration of diverse input rather than a bunch of gratuitous and
generally redundant wheel re-inventions.

FOSS proponents dismiss such POVs at their risk.

- Evan

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml