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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
byIdiomatick ( 976696 ) writes:
Well it was a few years ago. Hope ubuntu has enough weight it can set standards.
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bymonoqlith ( 610041 ) writes:
I think Ubuntu implicitly has set the standard. Ubuntu comes standard with GNOME, GNOME uses GTK, GTK is therefore the de facto standard.
The more relevant complaint seems to be that GTK isn't good enough. I agree that Ubuntu and GNOME could do a lot to improve it.
bySantana ( 103744 ) writes:
Let's not forget about Kubuntu. I have just tried it and looks impressive. I already have around 100 Ubuntu PCs deployed at work. I'm seriously thinking of Kubuntu as a replacement.
byFishWithAHammer ( 957772 ) writes:
Kubuntu is the forgotten stepchild. I'd recommend avoiding it, just because half the damned time it doesn't work.
byFilterMapReduce ( 1296509 ) writes:
Or hedge your bets with sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop, so you can have GNOME and KDE on the same Ubuntu system. It's convenient enough, as you can switch between desktop environments by clicking a menu option at login. It has a few flaws though, such as dumping some menu items into both environments that only work in one.
bySantana ( 103744 ) writes:
Have you tried Kubuntu 9.04?, I have, for some hours of serious work, and everything was fine.
I'm honestly interested on any (preferrably reproducible) problems you have found in Kubuntu 9.04.
byCeleste R ( 1002377 ) writes:
Seconded, I use Kubuntu Jaunty, which I moved to from Ubuntu Jaunty (Gnome).
The single problem I have with it is the lack of a wide selection of good widgets for the toolbars. It is a limiting factor, because least Gnome has that down pat. I do like to know when my (limited) laptop is running out of memory.
That being said, I'm happy with it, and I have no intentions of going back to Gnome, even for my old, heavily customized UI.
bySantana ( 103744 ) writes:
I was using Ubuntu Jaunty too, with a Windows XP theme, for most of my users.
The only thing that refrains me from using Kubuntu for my users right now, besides many days of previous testing, is that it seems to require a lot of RAM (which I'm verifying again on Monday). X only was using around 380 MB. Most of my users' PCs have at most 512 MB of RAM.
We're working on alternatives anyways: buy more RAM, buy new PCs and/or XDMCP.
byCeleste R ( 1002377 ) writes:
Gnome is a bit leaner, that's true
If you're looking for something ultra-light, go with XFCE with gtk+ applications. Perhaps it'll squeeze a few more months or years out of those computers.
byKjella ( 173770 ) writes:
I'm honestly interested on any (preferrably reproducible) problems you have found in Kubuntu 9.04.
My clearly biggest complaint, though I don't know how to specificly trigger it but it happens very quickly, is that notification windows refuse to disappear completely and instead become a black border with transparent background. Happens to me both with and without desktop effects enabled.
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byfyoder ( 857358 ) writes:
Yep. I use kde-desktop, but don't really consider myself a kubuntu user. That's because I install ubuntu, then kde-desktop. When I tried a straight kubuntu install, it was a disaster. No big deal, since I want both kde and gnome anyway. They're largely compatible and it gives you access to apps for both families. It seems kind of stupid to limit yourself to one or the other when you can have both.
byfluffman86 ( 1006119 ) writes:
Depending on who's using the computer, don't bother, unless you're programming in Qt or your users are very tech savvy.
I first started using Linux full time around Kubuntu 7.04 alpha 5-ish. I looked at Gnome and KDE and thought KDE looked nicer. I couldn't even boot the standard Ubuntu on my PC at the time, so it wasn't really an option anyway. KDE was great, but I found it was pretty difficult for my fiancee and parents to use. It has a LOT of menu options, and it was overall pretty difficult to do com
byEnderandrew ( 866215 ) writes:
Except GTK is so poor that you have Gnome devs calling for a major restructuring, and Mark Shuttleworth of Cannonical/Ubuntu fame calling for Gnome to be built on top of KDE. Ubuntu hitched their wagon to Gnome very early on, and ships broken KDE packages to this day, but I have to wonder if Shuttleworth regrets that decision today.
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byEnderandrew ( 866215 ) writes:
He did call for it to be built on top of Qt, not KDE. I know better, and honestly can't tell you why I typed KDE instead of Qt.
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byjshackney ( 99735 ) writes:
We knew what you meant. Only the crackpots actually give enough of a damn to correct you.
On a somewhat tangential note, I've always felt Qt would provide a significantly more polished window-to-the-world for end users of Ubuntu.
byKjella ( 173770 ) writes:
I thought you actually meant KDE. Well, of course not the actual desktop but things like the compositing window manager (KWin), hardware detection (Solid) and possibly also the UI framework (Plasma) - they should be flexible enough to write Gnome-style menus, panels, effects etc. too. Phonon, the multimedia framework, is of course adopted by Qt and would be shared anyway. If they actually got started they might find more common ground on the backend and simply have two UIs for Gnome and KDE too, but I would
byEnderandrew ( 866215 ) writes:
Qt ships with a Clearlooks engine that can mimic Gnome/GTK widgets pretty well out of the box. Kwin is a fantastic window manager as you pointed out, and there are some solid technologies they could build upon like Solid, Phonon, Sonnet, Akondi, Nepomuk/Strigi, etc.
As for language, obviously Qt was designed for C++, but there are language bindings for both Qt and GTK for your language of choice. In fact, a sizable chunk of Gnome development is being done with C++ and Mono these days, isn't it?
I'd assume t
bySubm ( 79417 ) writes:
You figured the information was better than just a +5 Insightful, so you wrote it in two parts to get a +5 Informative too.
Well played.
bykoiransuklaa ( 1502579 ) writes:
Bullshit.
He said "I think it would be perfectly possible to deliver the values of GNOME on top of Qt". You really need new glasses if you read that as "GNOME should move to QT"...
http://derstandard.at/?id=3413801 [derstandard.at]
byEnderandrew ( 866215 ) writes:
I agree that you can deliver a Gnome desktop on top of Qt, and why even suggest it in an interview if he wasn't saying it should be done?
It should be noted that Shuttleworth also pushed for a notification system right out of KDE 4 and OS X in Gnome.
bykoiransuklaa ( 1502579 ) writes:
I agree that you can deliver a Gnome desktop on top of Qt, and why even suggest it in an interview if he wasn't saying it should be done?
Uh, because he was asked a question about it so he had to say something? Please read the interview that you linked to...
It should be noted that Shuttleworth also pushed for a notification system right out of KDE 4 and OS X in Gnome.
So? The different desktops environments have been collaborating for some time now, trying to be as compatible as possible: this means technolog
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bypizzach ( 1011925 ) writes:
Except GTK is so poor that you have Gnome devs calling for a major restructuring, and Mark Shuttleworth of Cannonical/Ubuntu fame calling for Gnome to be built on top of KDE. Ubuntu hitched their wagon to Gnome very early on, and ships broken KDE packages to this day, but I have to wonder if Shuttleworth regrets that decision today.
So this is how the QT people get to feel better about themselves after a horrible major restructuring that made Linus Torvalds of the Linux kernal fame team begrudgingly switch to Gnome even though he hates its approach to UI design. Seriously, your post was asinine. GTK has grown extremely long in the tooth because of the extreme dedication of the group to incrementalism, but that is not a sign of poor design.
●KDE 3.0 and Gnome 2.0 were released in 2002.
●KDE 4.0 was released in 2008 and Gnome 3.0 will be
byiYk6 ( 1425255 ) writes:
KDE and Gnome are desktop environments. Qt and GTK+ are GUI toolkits. KDE is built on top of Qt. Gnome is built on top of GTK+. GTK+ is not responsible for Gnome developer decisions, and Qt is not responsible for KDE developer decisions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(toolkit) [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTK%2B [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME [wikipedia.org]
bypizzach ( 1011925 ) writes:
Appreciate it, but I was simplifying myself by clumping them together to speak in a broader context. You see, you can get picky that I wrote "speak" in my last sentence. I am actually writing. :-p If I am not mistaken, the general development practices between the respective DEs and their toolkits mirror each other no matter which is in the lead.
byiYk6 ( 1425255 ) writes:
When choosing a GUI toolkit, citing the mistakes of another project that uses that toolkit is completely irrelevant. You used them interchangeably, and as such, gave the impression that you don't understand the difference. Anybody reading your post would have a hard time gleaning any meaning from it, and your flow of logic only makes sense if you disregard the fact that Qt, KDE, GTK+, and Gnome are all completely different projects.
bypizzach ( 1011925 ) writes:
The poster above me was talking about toolkits. So I started off my first paragraph talking about toolkits and transitioned to desktop environments since for programs, there are generally a lot of other libs involved (kdelibs, libgnome, etc). Gnome is having changes under the hood for 3.0. Glade and libgnome functionality are generally moving into gtk. But still, glade and libgnome are not gtk. Are you going to tell me they are?
byEnderandrew ( 866215 ) writes:
Linus switched away from KDE 4 because it didn't match KDE 3 feature wise yet, and he felt it removed freedom and choice from him. Freedom and choice was the reason he chose KDE 3 over Gnome 2. Here is the funny thing. Instead of going back to KDE 3, which allowed him to customize his desktop how he wanted, he threw a fit and went to Gnome, which he publicly said he hated time after time, to make a bigger statement.
Linus is brilliant and entertaining. That doesn't mean he can't be an ass from time to ti
bysegedunum ( 883035 ) writes:
So this is how the QT people get to feel better about themselves after a horrible major restructuring that made Linus Torvalds of the Linux kernal fame team begrudgingly switch to Gnome even though he hates its approach to UI design.
I don't know what QuickTime has to do with it but if you mean Qt then I'm afraid all that was a storm in a teacup that was made a big thing of by some fanboys after Linus had made it known that he believed that Gnome had no real functionality. It simply meant that the KDE 4.0 as shipped by Fedora was not usable for him, which isn't surprising since distros were actually told this and they just replaced 3.5.x regardless and then whinged.
GTK has grown extremely long in the tooth because of the extreme dedication of the group to incrementalism, but that is not a sign of poor design.
Oh please, it is exceptionally poorly designed. GTK was chosen as a knee-jerk response to the whole KDE thing in the 90s to build Gnome on. To this day we still have brain damage like libegg and libsexy and where developers even copy and paste GTK code that they need liberally around their codebase if they want things like toolbars. The only reason there is a HIG is that things such as spacings cannot be inherited by applications. Leave a 12-pixel border between the edge of the window and the nearest controls?! The horizontal spacing between the buttons [on an alert] is 6 pixels?! Give me a fucking break. That's why we have component based programming and inheritance. If you give that to a Windows or OS X developer then he'll piss himself.
So Gnome's 2.0 structure was so bad that it is going to last longer than KDE3's?
KDE bit the bullet when they looked at the proprietary competition and what they were doing in Vista, Windows 7 and OS X. It's a rocky road but it was necessary if anyone was even going to fart in the general direction of an open source desktop.
I also doubt it's going to have the rockey ride that was 4.0/4.1 for KDE users either.
Why not? It happened for Gnome 2.x.
The reason for the outward protests at Gnome is that the developers are absolutely against the KDE4 kind of developement unless it is 100% necessary.
No. The protests against doing what KDE 4 has done have come about because it's like the elephant in the room - the developers know in the back of their minds that they need to do something if open source desktops and Gnome are to stay relevant when people look at Windows and OS X, but they don't want to do it because the infrastructure is so rotten that it will take them years to build it, years to build a desktop out of it and years to build any applications.
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byDhalka226 ( 559740 ) writes:
If you put things in bold you sound really smart and clearly prove that you have something extremely important to convey.
Unless, that is, you can't understand the difference between Qt and a desktop environment that uses Qt. Then... not so much.
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byefalk ( 935211 ) writes:
And yet Debian Gtk chose to recently arbitrarily rename the glib package, breaking binary compatibility. Why? Who knows? Will they ever fix it? Who knows?
Why does this Linux community have such a deep and abiding hatred of backwards compatibility? Library versions, device drivers, audio systems, hot-plugging, device naming, anything even remotely related to multimedia. This list goes on and on.
Until the Linux community decides to settle on some standards, it will never be ready for the end-user deskto
byvadim_t ( 324782 ) writes:
There's no "Linux community". There is a lot of communities of different sizes, many of which don't give a damn about each other, plus individual developers doing their own thing.
It's like asking, why does the "programming community" keep inventing new languages? Can't we just all settle on C?
There's a guy somewhere working on some project who got really fed up with say, artsd, and decided that writing a successful sound daemon would look good on his resume. And we end up with yet another sound system. And if you come to him complaining about the lack of unification he'll tell you he's doing it on his own time, has X very happy users and doesn't really care about what you think.
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bymonoqlith ( 610041 ) writes:
I agree, the lack of unification works to create a lot of options, some of which are excellent and which create happy circumstances among a very select and relatively very savvy group of users.
That said, I don't buy this idea there is no Linux community. I think there's a sustained effort by a large number of developers and users to make across a number of distros to make a Linux desktop that is competitive against Windows and OS X. If that's not something of a community I don't know what is. And if compet
byTablizer ( 95088 ) writes:
There is an upside to ignoring backward-compatibility (especially in the binary interfaces changing with your compiler): It's much harder for malware/viruses/etc. to infect an operating system with which they are not compatible with.
I'm sure that's an upside, but obviously a down-side for vendor and driver support.
byTyFoN ( 12980 ) writes:
I'm not sure if I want it to be the end-user desktop, I want it to be the
cutting-edge desktop.
As for backwards compatibility, why would you want that
as long as you can just recompile your app towards the new version.
Do you know how many of the bugs/cruft that is in windows comes from trying to be
backwards compatible? There is a reason they finally had it (same with Apple),
and recommends xp in a virtual machine for windows 7 users if they need to run old apps.
Apple had their OS9 emulation layer going on for
byzerojoker ( 812874 ) writes:
As for backwards compatibility, why would you want that
as long as you can just recompile your app towards the new version.
And that's why it will never be the year of Linux on the desktop. Because for that, commercial applications need to be there, and with this attitude, there will never be widespread commercial applications on Linux.
byTyFoN ( 12980 ) writes:
Or the commercial software vendor can just make the binary static or include every single
library file like they do on windows. Heck, most windows applications even install their
own version of the windows "libc".
Not that this is really necessary, the ABI for most libs don't seem to change between
minor releases. Its been years since i had problems with closed software in linux.
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byThelasko ( 1196535 ) writes:
I think Ubuntu implicitly has set the standard.
My advice to Google is, make it work with Ubuntu, and you won't hear much complaining. Let the community take care of everything else.
bygrantek ( 979387 ) writes:
Ubuntu also comes with Firefox...
bydogeatery ( 1305399 ) writes:
I'll call Ubuntu the standard-setting distro when every app that's not in the repositories includes a .deb package for easy installation
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