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Gnome happened because KDE, older, was based on Qt which was non free so the GNU project pushed for an actually free desktop. Actually, the GNU project followed
by jraph 3y ago
Gnome happened because KDE, older, was based on Qt which was non free so the GNU project pushed for an actually free desktop. Actually, the GNU project followed two strategies at the same time: it pushed Gnome given Qt was not free, and pushed for Qt to be free [edit: initially by initiating a free replacement for Qt, Harmony] [1]. It succeeded in both. If Qt had been free from the start, maybe we wouldn't have Gnome at all.
I think why GNOME eventually became more widespread than KDE with most major distros adopting it instead of KDE in recent years (at some point RHEL was KDE-based, SUSE always was, we had Mandrake too) is another question.
[1] https://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/stallman-on-qt-the-gpl-kde-and-gnome/ https://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/stallman-on-qt-the-gpl-...
- lupusreal 3y agoKDE was probably continually stymied by "it's nonfree" FUD, but part of the problem must be them blowing their foot off by releasing an alpha quality release as "4.0". (And why did distro packagers switch to it? Because users would see the version number and demand the new thing... It wasn't fair to expect packagers to hold back.) Before then it seemed like KDE and Gnome were on roughly equal footing, but maybe that was just my perception.
- gtirloni 3y agoOh, the memories. I was always excited about new releases at that time and KDE 4 really had me rethinking that. It was so bad.
- wkat4242 3y agoYes but they really made up for it with Plasma, to be fair. They learned from their mistakes.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y agoI really loved KDE 4, but then again, I'd just come from Vista.
- jraph 3y agoFirst versions of KDE4 were unstable (notably, there were memory leaks I think, and frequent crashes - maybe related to the memory leaks - in plasmoids), but last versions were rock solid (starting from version 4.4 maybe), and it was a very nice desktop environment back then. (Now, we have Plasma 5, and Plasma 6 in a few days, which are even better :-))
- deaddodo 3y agoYeah, KDE 4.0 wasn't bad because of its design philosophies or functionality. Everytime people hear that phrase, they instantly jump to that conclusion for some reason. No, it was resource hungry and crashed a lot (mostly due to aforementioned resource needs). The later versions of KDE4 didn't change much, they just pared down resource requirements, stabilized things and let the average computer specs catch up to them. Now KDE is considered the more "conservative" DE.
- wkat4242 3y agoI wouldn't call it conservative. Compared to Gnome probably. Compared to XFCE not as much. But it's totally with the resources <3
- wkat4242 3y agoTotally worth i meant. Oops
- coldtea 3y ago>No, it was resource hungry Was it really, or was that just a rumor from non-technical "C++ is bloated" Linux crowd? I used to run KDE in the early 00's, and it run just fine, in very primitive CPUs of the time.
- deaddodo 3y agoI was a KDE mainliner and switched to GNOME2 because KDE4 was too resource intensive for my machine. So our anecdotes are contrary to each other's.
- sho_hn 3y agoMore recently, there's a trend of devices or newer device-centric distros tending to ship Plasma by default (e.g. Steam Deck/SteamOS, Asahi Linux for Apple Silicon Macs, a bit earlier the PineBook).
- deaddodo 3y agoKDE is easier to pare down/minimize due to it's classical componentized structure ("KFrameworks"). It's really hard to do the same with gnome-shell, without either forking it or writing a replacement. Not that the latter is a bad thing, necessarily, gnome wants to provide a cohesive experience. That just doesn't fit in as much for environments trying to go against that vision (Pop_OS!, SteamOS, etc).
- jraph 3y agoThere's a timeline mismatch. I'm speaking about the time when Gnome was created. KDE 4 happened long after these issues of Qt being non-free (and it's not FUD, Qt was not free, it's a fact). Qt was released under the GPL in 2000, 8 years before KDE 4. At the time of KDE 4, nobody was (even) mentioning the non free Qt issue anymore. It was already old history. The instability of the first releases of KDE 4 might have played a role in Gnome success, but Gnome was already the dominant desktop. It was Ubuntu's default desktop, and Ubuntu was the major desktop linux distro. I think it was still Gnome 2, with Unity about to be released. KDE 4 was a big shiny promise and took some time to be released (because it was a huge revamp), that's why we wanted to have it.
- thriftwy 3y ago> Qt which was non free It was GPL licenced. If you call that "non-free" that's downright Orwellian.
- jorams 3y agoThat's not true. It was first released under the Qt Free Edition License, which was nonfree. Harmony was started in that time. In 1999 version 2 was released under the Q Public License, which was a free software license but not GPL-compatible. Then in 2000 version 2.2 was released under the GPL, and the Harmony endeavor ended.
- thriftwy 3y agoIt's so not relevant. All the Linux desktop wars happened when Qt was already GPL, including Gnome, Gnome 3, KDE 4 and Unity. It was already GPL for almost a decade when the described events happened.
- jraph 3y agoAgain, I was speaking about Gnome's creation, which was first released in 1999, before Qt was freed, and started in 1997, 3 years before this and a few months after KDE's first release.
- vidarh 3y agoIt's relevant to the reasons for the creation Gnome. Gnome was very specifically created before that and the whole ruckus over that was if anything one of the big drivers behind the GPL release of Qt. The flamewars over this at the time were epic. Had Qt already been GPL'd, the chances of Gnome taking off would have been far smaller - though there were other differences as well, the GPL issue was by far the most prominent.
- coldtea 3y agoGnome 3 and KDE 4 are "modern history" compared to the events we describe. Back then (way before those release) KDE was less free than Gnome.
- guenthert 3y agoYeah, all that, but I also remember that many would-be developers were at that time not convinced that C++ was the way to go. Gnome hence was decidedly not using C++ (for the better or worse, i.e. C++ is today a nicer, much more acceptable and accepted language than it was in the mid-nineties, but basing the object system on C makes it easier for other languages to interface with).
- jraph 3y agoDo you have something I could read about this? I didn't know about this aspect and I'm interested / curious.
- jwells89 3y agoAnd a big reason for GTK’s continued proliferation (even beyond GNOME) is that GTK is easy to write/generate language bindings for, enabling it to be practically used with many different languages. Qt being restricted to just C++ and/or JS dampens its appeal.
- sho_hn 3y agoQt has fully supported Python bindings as well, and there's increasingly capable Rust bindings from the community, too.
- jwells89 3y agoWhich is great, but GTK still has it solidly bested for language choice.
- jraph 3y agoWhich of these languages really mattered though? C? (which I'm inclined to believe)
- jwells89 3y agoIt’s less about languages “mattering” and more about meeting devs where they are. Projects, especially those of a FOSS nature which are often hobbies, are more likely to happen when a dev can write in their preferred language.