[Fsf-friends] KDE vs GNOME war

Harish Narayanan harish at gamebox.net
Mon Oct 10 06:11:11 CEST 2005


Great, I'll bite.

Tinku Sampath wrote:

>What is happening every where?. Are you coming to my point?.
>
No, not really. Just what is your point?

>The fight
>continues and have reached at a stage that must be seriously considered by
>every member of the Free Software community. I have a doubt. If GNOME is not
>great enough ( I am extensive KDE user from the beginning... No doubt in
>it... I tried GNOME at each of its release.. But i am not satisfied a little
>bit about it in considering as my desktop... I can't see any of my friends
>using GNOME as their desktop...
>
And I've been using free OSs for just over 10 years now and I haven't
used KDE. So what is your point? If you are a newbie (as you say you
are), how "extensive" of a KDE user could you be? How many releases of
GNOME could you have tried?

>I can see a few other people who are newbie
>to GNU/Linux using GNOME since most of the beginners start with Fedora and
>go for a personal desktop installation where the Red Hat guys continues to
>deselect KDE from their install section as default... Fact that, most of
>them don't know there is a feature rich polished alternate desktop named KDE
>...), then why it can't be improved?. I don't know whether you know this
>fact. The birth of Mandrakelinux ( now Mandriva Linux) is a result of this
>war which started long ago when Red Hat removed KDE from their distribution
>supporting only GNOME. But after the popularity of Mandrakelinux, Red Hat
>was pressurised to include KDE with their distro but still GNOME as default.
>Even nowadays Red Hat is showing their excessive discrimination towards KDE.
>Most people ( including me ) are away from Fedora due to this attitude. Is
>GNOME is preferred since GTK is purely under GNU GPL?
>  
>
(Firstly, gtk+ is licensed under LGPL and not GPL. But belabouring that
point will be counter the argument I am trying to make, so I will leave
it at that.)

OK, now let me restate your story from the point of view of someone who
has been around since before GNOME, or even usable X on normal hardware.
I am sure older people than me can jump in with their anecdotes, but for
now, bear with me.

Contrary to many people's opinion on this mailing list, RedHat did and
does not release its OSs with non-free software. As you've noted (from
your Tux magazine article, or whatever), QT was once non-free. Which
means your beloved KDE was once entirely dependent on non-free software.
If Trolltech dies, KDE dies. If Trolltech charges for QT, KDE dies. You
get the idea.

Distribution developers who care about this sort of thing (RedHat) did
not ship KDE, and actually actively supported (and still do) GNOME
development once it begun. Others who didn't care about this sort of
thing (Mandrake, which was for a long time just an RH release + KDE)
shipped KDE. Later on, with the POPULARITY OF GNOME, QT (X11, not all
ports) was made GPL, and thus KDE became free and THEN RedHat shipped it.

If it were just "popularity of Mandrake" that had grown, I can assure
you RedHat wouldn't have shipped KDE.

A deeper implication of this is that the KDE developers didn't value
their freedom and decided to base their choice of toolkit purely on
convenience. QT has since then slowly been made more free on different
platforms, but is still non-free on some platforms. But some people, and
I know at least one, who do not forget or forgive these things so
easily. RedHat has also invested a lot in GNOME development over all
these years and spent much time tuning their software to work well with it.

Given these, among other reasons, why wouldn't RedHat relegate KDE to a
sort of second-class status?

And, I have to add. Free software projects, both large and small, are
not just about some product. At some level, they are about community and
friendship and all the other things that happen when you have small and
large teams working on things. Just because you waltz in and feel one
group has to give up what they're doing (just because you feel it would
be better if they spent their efforts elsewhere) and help other projects
doesn't mean it will happen. Is <insert app A> better than <insert app
B>? Probably. But if I put in a lot of time into app A and the other
developers are my friends and I have fun working on it, I won't drop it
for app B. However great it might be.

Oh, and just to let everyone know I can be a trolling child too: I don't
like the way KDE looks. Never did. I find it too.. "plasticy" and too
filled with gradients. That, plus initially, enlightenment was GNOME's
default window manager. Now if you were a sucker for mindless eye-candy,
choosing an ultra-slick looking (but quite buggy and unstable) GNOME
over a ( more polished, perhaps) bland KDE is a decision that involves
little thought.


Harish




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