[Fwd: Re: So Long, SuSE, We Hardly Knew Ye!]

[Robin Laing]

Ric Moore wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-11-04 at 12:06 +1030, Tim wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, 2006-11-03 at 19:54 -0500, Ric Moore wrote:
>> 
>>> 1.) Dump Gnome, get with the KDE crowd with both feet. Make
>>> friends there while they still feel alienated and betrayed.
>> 
>> I've been biting my tongue over this thread, until now.  It all
>> seems to be about the KDE zealots, mostly those in love with it,
>> but a few against it.  Personally, I've never liked KDE, I've found
>> it a right pain.  I don't think Gnome is super brilliant, but I
>> prefer over KDE by a long chalk.  KDE isn't even installed on any
>> of my systems, anymore.
>> 
>> However...  The OS distributor ought to be making window manager 
>> agnostic systems.  It shouldn't be concentrating on one system to
>> the detriment of the other.  Nor flailing about trying to be all
>> things to everything, but nothing much good on any of them.
> 
> Couldn't that be achieved if BOTH camps, Gnome and KDE come to some
> sort of compromise to "circle the wagons" and defend the camp against
> the invaders?? Let's face it, the time has done arrived. M$ isn't
> going to watch their market share erode to anyone, not even by a few
> percentage points, as it's has never been in their corporate
> pathology to do so. Would you agree, Tim?
> 
> I believe it would be a major coup for the entire Linux community if
> all cylinders were firing in order, by both camps, to find a way to
> merge into one strike force. THAT would be a major kick in the M$
> pants. Front page news. The crowd would go wild. If you have opinions
> on how this could be done, I'd love to hear 'em. I have to admit,
> that recently KDE kicker has gone CPU usage nuts. The one thing I
> have to say, regarding KDE is that if you go to their site, there is
> a lot of software there that we don't see here, yet. Maybe that stuff
> doesn't work well, or is complete crap, but they do have many
> multimedia suites there to choose from. To win the hearts and minds
> of the high school / college / university crowd, setting up a webcam/
> quick cam/ telephony / DvD mastering / midi / Java / flash / ought
> not be a major production. If Gnome and KDE could share resources and
> pool their talent into one desktop, these issues would soon cease to
> be issues, I think. Ric
> 

There is a start on the common front.

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/11/206221
> "Today OSDL and freedesktop.org announced the release of Portland
> 1.0, a set of common interfaces for GNOME and KDE. From the article:
> 'Specifically, these tools make installing and uninstalling menus,
> icons, and icon-resources easier for developers. They also can obtain
> the system's settings on how to handle different file types, and
> program access to email, the root account, preferred applications,
> and the screensaver. There's nothing new in this kind of
> functionality. What is new is that developers can use these
> regardless of which desktop environment -- KDE or GNOME -- they're
> targeting.'"

I like gnome and kde apps.  I find things about both that I dislike.  I 
prefer the option of using either.
-- 
Robin Laing