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Does anyone have insights into the possible motivation behind this? I'm an industry outsider, but I've been a bit baffled by the way that Canonical, Purism, and

• deleted 8y ago
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• superflyguy 8y ago
  Who cares? Let's just pick one - any - and standardise on that one so we can maybe move towards a consistent look and feel. They're all sort of the same; just different enough to be annoying and frighten any occasional/non-technical is away. Gnome is good enough? That'll do, let's use that then.
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  • growse 8y ago
    > They're all sort of the same I think the poster's point is that they're not. One has apparently been well designed to be able to scale to new features, and the other one appears not to have been.
    • Barrin92 8y ago
      There seems to be a lot of quasi-religious elements in the debate. Everybody thinks that one is well designed but can't strongly articulate why, and someone else believes the opposite to be true. Linus has often pointed out the huge pain that the fragmentation of the ecosystem causes that is often uncritically identified as a choice. Yes, converging towards standards is almost always a pain point for someone, but the ecosystem overall benefits from having much less ground to cover. And honestly, objectively almost any of the large mature DE's seems to be feature rich enough to use as a starting point.
      • deleted 8y ago
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      • emn13 8y ago
        I don't use linux at all anymore as a DE, but in a few jobs I did, using both (and for a while canonicals ill-fated WM), and the idea that gnome appears less flexible, slower, and just generally worse in almost all ways was usually (though not always) appeared to be the case. Maybe KDE was a little too flexible for my tastes, but it sure worked better (most of the time - not always). I also remember thinking - why the heck is gnome the default? Haven't used linux as a DE for a few years now though, so no idea what the current status is...
      • andrey_utkin 8y ago
        Diversity has a value in stability of the ecosystem. Converge to a monoculture which brings highest short-term gains, and later it all can stagnate or even collapse for some single reason. See "banana monoculture".
        • superflyguy 8y ago
          Sorry, what's going to collapse if all Linux users have the same visual interface? Stagnate? Like a shell, you mean?
          • andrey_utkin 8y ago
  • mbowcutt 8y ago
    People like options, especially the Linux/FOSS people. You could come to a consensus about something but it'll only go so far until some developer decides to fork it and make their own project :)
    • Skunkleton 8y ago
      Tech people like options. It seems like everyone else wants it to just work well enough, and work out of the box.
      • simion314 8y ago
        If Windows were open source I bet you would have people forking Win7 or WinXP and many non tech people use the familiar thing then be forced to use the new shiny thing some designer thinks is best.
      • sanbor 8y ago
        Even developers likes to focus on their work and not why their computer doesn't start again after being suspended. How many developers uses Macs? I have meet sysadmins that uses Time Machine instead of a more customizable back up system. Even Miguel De Icaza, the co-author of Gnome, switched to Mac because "it just works".
      • superflyguy 8y ago
        I'm a "tech person".
    • azurezyq 8y ago
      Community likes options, but enterprises not. Yet another DE means extra set of conformance tests, bugs to fix, look-and-feels, supporting pages. These all mean money but your customers may not even care about this feature. So let's say GNU/Linux can use whatever DE and it will always be. But RHEL is just a business product derived from it, with a selected "blessed" packages. There're no conflicts.
  • asknthrow 8y ago
    640K ought to be enough for anyone.
    • tomhoward 8y ago
      Debunked: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/operating-systems/the--640k--quote-won-t-go-away----but-did-gates-really-say-it-.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/operating-syst...
  • toyg 8y ago
    If you go one step further, who cares about kernels and shells? Let's just standardise on one (NT) so we can maybe move towards actually getting work done. Windows is good enough? That'll do, let's use that then. /s
• chomp 8y ago
  I don't know, it's always sort of been like this for KDE. Even going back to some of the earlier releases, it was always "That one DE with the funny library license". Qt was eventually moved to LGPL, but when stuff (desktop Linux) was starting to take off, KDE 4 came out and it was awful at first release. I vaguely remember Linus dumping on how bad it was which sure didn't help things. Then Ubuntu came out (well, before KDE 4, but during the funny licensing thing), which used Gnome because Debian used Gnome. Debian used Gnome because Qt had the QPL licensing: https://wiki.debian.org/DFSGLicenses#Q_Public_License_.28QPL.29.2C_Version_1.0 https://wiki.debian.org/DFSGLicenses#Q_Public_License_.28QPL... Ubuntu got popular super quick, which got the DE popular, and the entire community just sort of got behind it. If you're creating productivity tools for your customers, you probably don't want to channel money into multiple projects that compete with each other. So, it's not too surprising that RH wants to focus on just Gnome.
  • spiritcat 8y ago
    Make MATE default!!1!
    • Jach 8y ago
      I survived the Gnome 3 transition in Gentoo by masking it and staying on 2.4 until Mate was ready. Throughout it all I've been able to keep my wobbly windows and window decoration with compiz and emerald, too. Mate doesn't need to be the default, but it does need to be easily installable. I never understood the "Kubuntu", "Xubuntu" etc. line of distros when the alternate DEs were easily available in stock Ubuntu. Similarly RHEL ought to make sure KDE is easily installable no matter what is their default... (Though is it common to even run a DE on Redhat?)
      • spiritcat 8y ago
        i ran xfce on centos for a while. we were running centos on the server, so figured i'd use it for my dev vm as well.
      • calgoo 8y ago
        I have to run a wm for our LDAP servers but apart from that, we don't install it on any of out Servers.
• pmoriarty 8y ago
  You might as well ask why RedHat decided on adopting the widely-reviled systemd.
  • beatgammit 8y ago
    I think you mean "created". Lennart Poettering works at RedHat and presumably created SystemD to solve problems RedHat has.
    • ILMostro7 8y ago
      I thought Lennart created systemd before he joined RedHat ...
      • the_why_of_y 8y ago
        He claims he wrote it in his spare time, after being told not to work on it by Red Hat management because Upstart is the future. https://www.linuxvoice.com/interview-lennart-poettering/ https://www.linuxvoice.com/interview-lennart-poettering/
    • johnny22 8y ago
      he created systemd on his own. It was argued about on Fedora's list before being accepted. The discussion wasn't as vitriolic as with debian, but it wasn't automatically accepted.
• esotericn 8y ago
  I'd flip it around and ask how Gnome and KDE have existed as full-blown DE's for as long as they have considering the amount of work required. I'd expect to see one DE for mainstream users, one DE for business, and a plethora of less well maintained options for power users (I don't use a DE at all). The 'user' and 'business' DE I'd expect to coalesce into the same thing because they have fairly similar use cases. The existence of multiple DE's strikes me as an anomaly, if anything.
  • paulryanrogers 8y ago
    > I don't use a DE at all Just curious, what do you use?
    • esotericn 8y ago
      I use i3. Just a window manager. I rarely use GUI applications with the exception of a web browser and terminal and I have enough arcane knowledge by now that applets for network configuration etc just get in the way.
  • Redoubts 8y ago
    > I'd expect to see one DE for mainstream users, one DE for business, and a plethora of less well maintained options for power users. Well, I’ve got good news for you...
• axaxs 8y ago
  I've always found it interesting that, in my opinion, Gnome has always felt better to use as a user, but KDE had consistently and vastly better user applications than the Gnome counterparts. That said, I've come to love the layout of Gnome 3 (with many extensions, by default it's nearly unusable). However, its performance is awful. While it's better than it used to be, it's still a leaky mess. I for one hope KDE continues to exist and be supported for no reason other than having a viable alternative when I finally become tired of performance. As a developer who looked into the two a few years back, I chose QT as it was much easier to work with than GTK. This was before QML, however, so I don't know if it still holds true.
  • simion314 8y ago
    QML is not a replacement for the QWidget system, so the classic widgets are still there. I do not understand how GNOME feels different since you can setup KDE to behave like you want,
    • axaxs 8y ago
      I understand that, but it doesn't seem to be a -default-. I used to be very involved in open source, tinkering, performance tuning, etc. Now I just want something that's usable out of the box. The default KDEs I've seen look more like Windows did, and I'm just not a fan of menu driven navigation...
      • simion314 8y ago
        I do not understand what do you mean that QWidgets are not the default, KDE apps do not use QML, the Plasma widgets use those(toolbar,start menu,clock etc) You prefer Andoid/iOS like interfaces on your desktop ? I did not check all apps in KDE but Konsole and Dolphin let you hide the menus(if you need those pixels) also KDE apps let you hide or customize your toolbar so if you nver use the back/forward buttons you can hide them
        • axaxs 8y ago
• grumpydba 8y ago
  I beg to differ. Gnome is simple and gets shit done. I don't care about all the tweaks and config options as much as I used to 15 years ago when I started using linux. To each his own.
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  • scottlegrand2 8y ago
    Meanwhile over on Ubuntu MATE, I'm enjoying gnome 2 and sticking with it. 100% disinterest in the cognitive load of learning any sort of new UI for the rest of my life.
    • SEJeff 8y ago
      Meanwhile over on Microsoft Disk Operating System, I'm enjoying DOS 4 and sticking with it. 100% disinterest in the cognitive load of learning any sort of new UI for the rest of my life. dosshell.exe or gtfo!
      • yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
        If it isn't broke, don't fix it. Consider that one author who legitimately uses Wordstar on DOS.
        • MrLeap 8y ago
          There is wisdom in this.
        • suby 8y ago
          That person being George R.R. Martin, the author of Game of Thrones.
          • avar 8y ago
            His editor setup may be arcane, but just look at his raw productivity!
• JoshTriplett 8y ago
  > all the Linux experts I read and listen to (many of whom actually work at Canonical or Red Hat) are talking about how great KDE Plasma is, and how troubled Gnome Shell is People who are happy about the current primary/default environment don't often go out of their way to talk about it. People who are happy about a non-default environment, or who are not happy with the default environment, talk about it more. It's a form of selection bias.
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  • simion314 8y ago
    Just go on the GNOME subreddit and you will see there actual GNOME users complaining, you will see mostly this: - how I get tray icons working (tray icons were removed) - GNOME won't start (an extension incompatibility can make the DE crash) - lag when some animation happens - how can I make the theme to use less padding (some devs are considering removing theming support completely ) This are complaints for actual GNOME users that update to latest version and have unpleasantness surprises.
    • dman 8y ago
      I just upgraded to Fedora 29. Text scaling slider is gone, now you can only pick between 100% and 200% scaling. Cant understand what would drive this "simplification"
      • wlesieutre 8y ago
        It works on iOS where Apple picks which screen resolutions exist, so it should work fine on Linux too! More seriously, I dealt with this trying to run a Linux VM on a Surface Pro a couple of years ago. I don't remember which distro, but 100% and 200% were the only UI scale options. Surface Pro's native scale in Windows is 150%, and the solution to match that in Linux ended up being to scale it to 200% and then set up xrandr to scale it back down to 75% of that. Not exactly a clean way to handle it. I'm pretty sad to hear that's still the state of things.
• bad_user 8y ago
  Before switching to MacOS I used Linux on my desktop for a decade. KDE has always been the one with the better foundation, except that ... it never worked ok. Every time I tried it, it had a ton of issues that would make me go into this rabbit hole, trying to fix it via endless configuration options and it never worked. And the migration from KDE 3 to KDE 4 was a complete clusterfuck. Whereas Gnome always lacked configuration options, people always complained about its state, but it kept compatibility and it worked well out of the box. The Linux desktop never took off due to immaturity. Microsoft did not abandon Windows, they didn’t rewrite from scratch, every release is basically an iteration of the previous one and Windows 10 for example is simply an iteration of Windows 7, which was XP with some lipstick on it. Same can be said of MacOS. In open source however people just want to work on the new shiny all the time. As soon as something with more sex appeal comes along, people move to it. The desktop Linux is freaking horrible and obviously what people have been doing in the last two decades doesn’t work. So yes, let’s corporatize it, let’s make it boring and reliable. Because people want a working desktop, not freaking widgets. Speaking of desktop widgets, this is yet another example of immaturity. Do you know how many times per week I see my MacOS desktop? Never. My apps are always on and I restart my laptop like once per month, otherwise it’s in standby all the time. Such reliably is unheard of with the Linux desktop.
  • Latty 8y ago
    That's completely counter to my experience. I run my KDE desktop 24/7 in very much the way you are describing and it works very reliably.
    • dreix 8y ago
      Same with my GNOME 3. All I ever see is the gdm login screen.
  • lph 8y ago
    I'd always had the same kind of buggy KDE experience whenever I experimented with it, so I used Gnome for years. And then I tried KDE Plasma... it works fantastically, at least for me, on the latest stable Ubuntu. So it's sad to see RH moving away. Gnome is such a dumpster fire right now (and has been since the inception of Gnome 3)
• leppr 8y ago
  In my experience using both for years, Gnome has always been more stable. Multi-monitor, Hi-Dpi support, in particular, is properly broken in KDE (while it's only half broken on Gnome). As for features, the titlebar integration used by a few applications (ala MacOS) is a nice touch. Otherwise it's true that the KDE experience, especially around customization, seems more thought out. Gnome's UX is nonsensical in more than a few places. The problem with KDE has always been stability and reliability. Having to reboot your machine due to crashes even once a week is enough to justify putting up with Gnome's overall worst UX.
  • Symbiote 8y ago
    Does multi-monitor mixed-DPI work in Gnome? Because that's the only thing that I couldn't get working in KDE about 2 years ago. (The problem was most easily solved with a new monitor.) I restart perhaps every six months due to some problem that could be KDE; I find it very reliable both at home and at work. Granted, both machines are desktops, I use a laptop so rarely that I usually shut it down after use. > titlebar integration This is personal preference, but that's a showstopper for me ever using Gnome (or Mac OS) for anything beyond web browsing. I use focus-follows-mouse, which is incompatible with a titlebar outside the relevant window.
    • davidp 8y ago
      Nothing built on X does mixed DPI well, because X itself (in most configurations) treats multiple monitors as simple viewports onto a single screen. A single screen with multiple DPIs doesn't make sense virtually any more than it does physically. Wayland is supposed to help with this, since it has a more modern take on screen virtualization (a la Windows or Mac). Getting all the user software to work on Wayland (via XWayland) is a nontrivial ongoing task. I'm not sure what Gnome Shell's state of affairs is w.r.t. Wayland, but I do know the ecosystem missed the boat with Ubuntu 18.04, which elected not to make Wayland the default due to stability and usability issues. So it might be a while before a major stable distro makes the move.
    • leppr 8y ago
      > Does multi-monitor mixed-DPI work in Gnome? Not by default. I had to hack a script by mixing xrandr scaling and Gnome scaling settings, which works, with some caveats I haven't figured out yet[1]. The reason I stick to Gnome is that plug-and-play works like a charm, remembering my settings with various monitors. > I restart perhaps every six months due to some problem that could be KDE; I find it very reliable both at home and at work. Granted, both machines are desktops, I use a laptop so rarely that I usually shut it down after use. Most crashes came from laptop-related actions: monitor hot plugging, closing the lid while being awake, waking up with another monitor plugged in, etc. > I use focus-follows-mouse, which is incompatible with a titlebar outside the relevant window. What I meant by "titlebar integration" was when the applications themselves draw UI on the titlebar like in Nautilus or Tilix for instance[2]. The "menu in top bar" feature can be deactivated, so I think you could use Gnome. [1]: 1. The Gnome UI (dock and topbar) are huge, which isn't much of a problem for me since they are on a smaller monitor. 2. Some applications don't scale properly and are either too zoomed in or out. [2]: https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/src/images/gallery/tilix-screenshot-3.png https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/src/images/gallery/tilix-..., https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Files?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=general.png https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Files?action=AttachFile&do=get&t...
• toyg 8y ago
  Last I checked, most of the top Qt/KDE developers were not based in the US. That might be a factor - historically speaking it certainly was.
• phkahler 8y ago
  >> What gives? Is this just part of the growing "corporatization" of Linux -- i.e. an investment of resources into a more corporate-controlled project I always felt KDE was more of a corporate project. It's also been my impression that KDE comes with a lot more dependencies. IMHO GTK is a decent toolkit with lower complexity - it's GNOME shell that I really don't like but I live with it.
  • toyg 8y ago
    KDE was hardly ever "corporate", but it was always somewhat controlled / guided by the company behind Qt (Trolltech, originally); for the simple reason that most of the top KDE hackers were top Qt hackers and hence, in most cases, employees of Qt's owners. In many ways, getting involved with KDE was a good way to audition for a job at Trolltech/Nokia/Digia/whatever-it-is-now. Add to it that KDE saw some significant early deployments in the European public sector, which resulted in some particular attention given to collaboration features (imap, calendaring etc). That might have looked corporate to some, but it was just a necessity for bootstrapped QT-centric businesses trying to take on the office giants like Microsoft and IBM.
• erikb 8y ago
  > What gives? Is this just part of the growing "corporatization" of Linux I would argue that this is the case, and if it's not the case then mostly because it's not becoming more corporized but because it always was. I would argue that there are three popular reasons for open source development, that there is a huge difference in user impact between these, that corporate interests have been the main driver behind open source, that having ones own preferred solution allowed to take profit from the competition, and now that the profits are dwindling distinction between competitors becomes less important than saving costs, and therefore everybody focusses on whatever appears to be as the winner in the current topic area. Reason 1 for open source development, and probably the original reason, is art. People wanted to scratch an itch, they themself felt. They don't care much about gaining any additional advantage so they share the whole thing and not just the binaries, maybe by doing so gaining some recognition by other smart people. These artist developers usually hate the normal user and despise the disrespect these bring towards their piece of art. They often don't care about the trivial problems the user has, like the need for a complex yet intuitive UI. So users will often refrain from using these tools. Making them mostly unimportant at large, if not someone else comes along and uses the knowledge gained from it for another category of open source. Reason 2 for open source development is the goal of social and political influence, which drives a person or group to develop tools to fascilitate communication between supporters and fascilitate spread of the culture. One example I see here is the scuttlebut network, which if you analyse closely, is not really good for everybody but mostly used by a group of New Zealend developers to spread their ideas of off-grid lifesstyle and something they call "solar punk". This is by no means criticism. It's a great tool/protocol and the ideas they spread with it also don't seem harmful to me. But without the desire to influence the political landscape they probably wouldn't invest that amount of time and energy to build their social network. This kind of project can gain quite a lot of influence on users at large. For instance all these 2chan,4chan,8chan imageboards might rival professional social networks in size and usability. But usually it's limited to people who support the political goals or at least can accept them. For instance it's unlikely that a group of feminist game developers would choose 8chan as their platform after it became a platform for the anti-feminist gamergaters. Last but not least stand the group of open source project which directly or indirectly are for profit. For instance Linus Torvalds is one of the best earning people on this planet. Multiple companies have formed around linux distributions. And most of the commits nowadays come from people who are paid to do them. As said as it may sound, this is the most influential group. It's simply a fact that user-focussed development can be a daunting task and most people wouldn't do it if nobody paid them for it. So the development is also built around market dynamics. When cool UIs gain user attention most distros will focus their resources on one desktop manager that separates them from the rest, so that users who like these distinctive features will come to them. And when profits shrink they will look for whatever desktop manager is the current winner and jump on that band wagon, so they can reduce their development investments and focus these on other topics. If we can agree on these three categories I think it's clear that the last one is the one that gains the most users, and therefore will also influence open source in general the most. Also it might have never been different from that, and as long as the getting is good it's also not to the users disadvantage.
• bsder 8y ago
  > Or to put it differently: all the Linux experts I read and listen to (many of whom actually work at Canonical or Red Hat) are talking about how great KDE Plasma is, and how troubled Gnome Shell is, yet all the companies are rejecting KDE for Gnome. > What gives? Simple question to answer: why do so many devs work on OS X machines? People value "it works without me thinking about it" over "it has features". However, the people who value "features" are really loud. The only thing most people use computers for is sharing pictures and videos. And what are the things that Linux sucks at making work out of the box: wireless, audio and video. KDE could win the battle simply by making those work--every single time. OS X does it. And look at how many developers use it.
  • toyg 8y ago
    It's a different playing field: OSX has to support a small handful of chipsets, and if it doesn't work then manufacturers will step in. Linux has to support a boatload of crap silicon, and if anything doesn't work, manufacturers will just shrug. Add to it that every Linux distribution has its idiosincratic approach to low-level subsystems, and you have a recipe for problems if you work anywhere higher up the stack. But don't worry, eventually the problem will be solved the other way around: there will be a systemd-DE, and everyone will use that. /s
  • SubiculumCode 8y ago
    Mate just works,
  • marcosdumay 8y ago
    > wireless, audio and video... KDE could win the battle simply by making those work Too bad the 3 are OS problems, and the DE has no way to fix them.
    • bsder 8y ago
      Then maybe we just need to write Linux off as simply unfixably sucking as a desktop OS. If you don't want to do that, then you need to realize that the DE is THE point of contact between the user and those problems. As such, fixing those problems starts there. Now, the DE developers may need to relentlessly pound Linus until he finally allows them to do something sane to fix things. And they may have to get chipset spec sheets and correct things deep in the kernel. And ... RedHat, for all their faults, DOES THIS. And they catch a lot of flack for it.
• hevi_jos 8y ago
  Well, it is very simple: Linux expert users do not represent the user base that RHEL is interested in. RHEL is interested about that one guy or woman that actually decides(to pay them) and has control of the company. This person wants control overall of what people do with (her company) computers. Desktops like Gnome have a very limited set of options, great for companies. More stable, less problems, people focusing more on work to do at the company. I used to program KDE widgets for things like displaying the tides, the lunar phases, sunset times and so on. It was a cool thing to do and useful if I wanted to go fishing or to the beach. Marginally useful for work. Working you need something that works, with the least amount of work and money possible. KDE is not designed for that.
  • mixmastamyk 8y ago
    > people focusing more on work to do at the company. Instead of configuring things, good point.
• Nelson69 8y ago
  Onlooker since GNOME was being called Teak.. KDE initially used QT which didn't have a satisfying license. Possibly incompatible, I'm not sure it was ever resolved entirely as to what the condition of things was. What was clear is that a corporate entity could close source QT and effectively end KDE. After years, multiple business transactions and such, QT was really open sourced all the way. By then RedHat had gone "all in" with BlueCurve and GNOME. I think as a result of that, and in spite of various standards about open desktop support, the commercial apps tend to be on GTK+; maybe not full GNOME apps, but Firefox and VMware and others have GTK+ in them and they will seamlessly use your distribution's custom skin... Ending support for KDE is just momentum. There could be a bit of a European vs North America thing too; I'm just speculating but take Suse vs RHEL, RHEL is tons more common in the US despite Suse's remarkably quality, there has been some questions about its future at times but it is a remarkably high quality platform with a really nice aesthetic about it but RHEL and Centos tend to dominate. To be honest, I didn't know Redhat still supported KDE. KDE is great, I think it's always been a bit more consistent, a bit more cohesive and it has a great set of well crafted applications. With Redhat being bought by IBM and everything, the possible rumors about Canonical being in play, it sort of seems like it might be time for a new distribution to take hold. KDE is a great place to start, there is an awful lot of good stuff in there.
  • blattimwind 8y ago
    Qt was available under GPL since 2000. For Linux, anyway. It's not like Gnome works on Windows (though much of KDE does).
• mixmastamyk 8y ago
  Both KDE and Gnome are shiny crap these days. Moved to Mate about ten years ago and still happy.
  • majewsky 8y ago
    Mate first appeared in 2011.
    • mixmastamyk 8y ago
      Ok, G2 before that.
• avar 8y ago
  This is RHEL. People buy support contracts for it because they want to run Oracle's database and other enterprise-y stuff on headless computers sitting in a rack somewhere. As someone who uses RHEL (and also CentOS because we do our own support) at work all day long I'm surprised it had a supported desktop environment at all. I've spent tens of thousands of hours on logged into shells on RHEL systems and not once have I seen what the GUI looks like. I'm sure RedHat to their delight has managed to find some clueless customer somewhere who's overpaying for RHEL as some GUI workstation environment, but that customer is going to be happy with GNOME.
• pksadiq 8y ago
  > Does anyone have insights into the possible motivation behind this? I consider the following as possible reasons: 1. GTK+ is completely (GNOME) community owned (QT is a company owned, which companies like to avoid) 2. QT is LGPLv3+/GPLv3+. This, I assume, is to encourage buying commercial license than promoting free software. GTK+ is LGPLv2.1+, a lot of individual/small team developers prefer [L]GPLv2 over [LA]GPLv3. 3. Accessibility is pretty bad in GNU/Linux in general. But if there is one, the only choice is AT-SPI[0]. It's a GNOME project. I think KDE is a bit behind (I'm not sure though). 4. GNOME, GTK+ are GNU projects (Or many people prefer GNOME because it's a GNU project). I have seen many people in our Free Software User Group using GNOME just because of this. > Gnome is approaching a crisis point, stripping away features as the debt comes due for bad design decisions made We have seen a lot of software pieces whose development stalls, just because the code complexity increases way beyond some limit, or the main developer quits. Many (vocal) users prefer well configurable software pieces - but it comes with a high price. Many implement every possible feature to look the application c00l. But eventually as we gain experience, we may eventually abandon the project just because it's bloated (code wise), or even re-write it with less features, so that the code is more maintainable. If we look the code of many abandoned projects, we can see how bloated the code is, with many hacks, and bad designs. I think GNOME is in the path of porting their applications to maintainable pieces, and eventually adding features as the code gets better. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assistive_Technology_Service_Provider_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assistive_Technology_Service_P...
  • alxlaz 8y ago
    > 1. GTK+ is completely (GNOME) community owned (QT is a company owned, which companies like to avoid) If avoiding commercial vendors is what you want, do not look at the emails in the GTK commit messages :-). Qt is covered by an agreement with the KDE Free Qt Foundation which ensures that even if the company decides to stop developing it (even in case of bankruptcy or acquisition) or to stop releasing it as open source, the Foundation can release it under an open source license. It's in no worse shape than GTK+ in this regard, except it has more paid developers. > 2. QT is LGPLv3+/GPLv3+. This, I assume, is to encourage buying commercial license than promoting free software. GTK+ is LGPLv2.1+, a lot of individual/small team developers prefer [L]GPLv2 over [LA]GPLv3. This is, legit, the other way 'round. Large companies are the ones preferring GPLv2 over GPLv3 because of the tivoization clause. In the services/consulting industry, ensuring that a BSP is free of (L)GPLv3 components is basically a standard statement in SoWs. Small teams and independent developers sometimes stick with GPLv2 because it has fewer legal pitfalls and they don't mind commercial attention, but it's not in your favour :-). The code complexity of Gnome has been steadily decreasing, not increasing in the last 7-8 years. The impending "crisis" has nothing to do with code complexity and everything to do with how design and implementation decisions were made (and, of course, with many of those decisions).
• awill 8y ago
  I don't know any numbers, but my guess is that the majority of Red Hat's GNU/Linux subscriptions are for the headless server version. I'm sure they have some customers for the Workstation edition, but I've always felt that the Desktop features were done more about of employee desire than top down mandates.
• partycoder 8y ago
  Gnome was built on GTK and GObject, libraries that have always had well defined licensing. KDE was built on Qt, a framework that did not always have the licensing it has today. GTK and GObject are C libraries, and many constructs are easy to reason about. Qt is C++ based and there is a LOT going on and the meta compiler is insane.
• sidkshatriya 8y ago
  This an important and pertinent question. I’ve often wondered the same so I thank you for asking it. I find QT UI applications just a bit more consistent than GNOME ones. It’s a subjective impression...
• scoot_718 8y ago
  Everyone I know who cares about the UI of linux doesn't use either.
• mikekchar 8y ago
  Red Hat (as a company) is a massive contributor to Gnome. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_contributions#GNOME_developers https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_contributions#GNOME_d... (interesting to compare with their KDE developers just below). The whole reason everybody got stuck with systemd is because Gnome wouldn't run without it. Every distribution had a choice of getting rid of Gnome or moving to systemd. I actually gave up Gnome several years ago when they decided to make it so that every window shared an IME. That would mean that I couldn't have a window that had Japanese input and a window that had Roman input at the same time. Red Hat developers were busy making patches to every IME that existed so that it would follow the grand vision of what they had decided for Gnome. The only hold out was FCITX. I think they eventually saw reason but there was a good year or so where Red Hat was bent on breaking my computer just because that's what the Gnome developers had decided was best for everybody. Red Hat doubled down on Gnome a long time ago. They aren't interested in anything else. Edit: Also of note - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_contributions#Desktop_Software https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_contributions#Desktop... Go down the list a bit and notice: "GNOME Shell - Primary development by Owen Taylor and many Red Hat developers and interaction designers" among many other core Gnome infrastructure.
  • _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
    > The whole reason everybody got stuck with systemd is because Gnome wouldn't run without it. Every distribution had a choice of getting rid of Gnome or moving to systemd. They haven't made it easy to run GNOME Shell without systemd, but people have got it working in Gentoo, Void etc., see, for instance: https://dm.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/66ass2/update_void_linux_offers_a_fully_functional/ https://dm.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/66ass2/update_void_li... (That said, I don't run GNOME Shell on any of my machines.)