Re: [SLUG] Red Hat 8.0

From: Paul M Foster (paulf@quillandmouse.com)
Date: Thu Oct 17 2002 - 02:32:58 EDT


On Wed, Oct 16, 2002 at 06:44:07PM -0400, David R. Meyer wrote:

> Something else of interest...I notice in my RHCE courses that GNOME is
> mentioned MUCH more than KDE. When I asked someone about that I was
> told that industry wide, companies are standardizing on GNOME. I don't
> know if that is totally accurate or not, but it would explain some of
> what we are seeing. However, while you still have the option for KDE on
> the desktop, I'd not worry about Red Hat becoming like another software
> company out there.

"industry wide" means Red Hat, Sun and maybe SGI. IBM installs either
Red Hat or SuSE, depending on the machine, and SuSE prefers KDE. From a
corporate viewpoint, KDE has a little more baggage than Gnome, because
it relies on the QT libraries which, while they are now Open Source, are
still controlled by a company. The Gnome libraries, on the other hand,
are controlled by the community.

Another point is that, last time I checked, Gnome was using a CORBA
model that caused every mouseclick, movement of the mouse, etc. etc. to
generate a CORBA event. Nice in theory, but sluggish on the desktop and
really overkill. KDE's implementation seems to be a little more of a
reasonable tradeoff. Moreover, it seems I recall that Gnome needs a
pre-compile step before you can actually do a compile. I could be wrong
about that-- it might be KDE instead. Gnome was designed to look like...
Gnome, whereas KDE was designed to look more like Windows, to help the
transition from Windows newbies. And KDE may have an edge in stability.
I've used both, and that was my impression. Personally, I use Blackbox,
but I tend to prefer KDE programs running on top. Can't really explain
why. Maybe just that the KDE programs seem to fill my needs better than
those from Gnome.

In any case, I think "industry wide" is a bit of an exaggeration. And
Red Hat may be a 300 lb gorilla at this point, but they're not in the
800 lb gorilla category yet. Besides, Linux people are dang stubborn and
independent.

Paul



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