That GNOME only thing? I was just kidding

. . . keeping an eye on the penguin

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Nov. 11, 2005

Well, that was fast.

When Novell gave up supporting KDE, I expected something to happen.

But what I didn't expect Novell to do, as one KDE supporter put it to me, "was to cave in so fast."

What did we know?

In a handful of days, Novell did a 180 degree turn and began supporting KDE again.

I'm not surprised that Novell has decided to support KDE again in its enterprise Linuxes. I had a sneaking feeling with so many KDE supporters in the SUSE division, it would be more or less formally supported sooner or later.

I also would not have been surprised -- in fact I was expecting -- to see some SUSE alumni launch a SUSE-based distribution with a KDE interface. I mean, OpenSUSE would continue to do the heavy lifting of integrating KDE and SUSE anyway, so making one would be trivial.

Heck, even I could do that!

Still, that said, I think Novell made the right move.

Besides just liking KDE better myself, I don't see Novell as "caving in." I see Novell realizing that it was making a mistake.

After all, at this point, it's not like Novell was spending that much more on resources to support both interfaces. At the same time, there's no question that Novell was alienating a lot of their biggest desktop fans.

So, for once, a big company essentially admitted it had made a mistake, and it was going to make good on it.

Can you see any other company doing this? McDonalds, super size me indeed! Ford, only after the governemnt asked about all those Pintos blowing up. Microsoft? Puh-lease!!

Still, in a larger sense, there's a lesson to be learned here.

Both KDE and GNOME have large, passionate communities, which appear to have about equal mind share.

Isn't it time that instead of the eternal posturing of "my interface is better than yours" that they sit down and start talking about what they could do to make things easier for each other?

Would it kill anyone to, say, agree on standardized APIs (application program interfaces)? How about coming to a resolution on a common font manager?

You know, all those things that would make it easier for a would-be Linux desktop application developer to write an application that would work well with either interface?

It would be good for both desktop interface communities, and great for the Linux desktop movement as a whole.

--Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

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