| I'm not dead yet! KDE vs. GNOME |
Nov. 09, 2005
You would have thought someone had just run over a KDE user's dog last week.
No sooner had the story started to break that Novell was making GNOME the official interface for its business Linuxes -- SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) and NLD (Novell Linux Desktop) -- than the screaming began.
Thanks to an opinion piece in LinuxToday, which implied that Novell was killing off its desktop line, people were already in a tizzy. Even after I pointed out that Novell wasn't axing its desktops, it was just committing to GNOME, the howls continued.
These included the ever popular, "Why not continue to support both!"
OK, here's why.
If all you have in your wallet is a fiver and you want to buy a fast meal and your only choices are Wendy's and McDonalds, why don't you buy your meal from both?
Well, duh, because you can only afford to buy it from one of them.
Welcome to Novell's situation.
Novell is in trouble with its stockholders for not making efficient use of its resources. Things have fallen apart to the point that the company, even though it's cash rich, finally did lay off employees and change top management.
There was simply no way in a Harvard Business School world that Novell was going to get away with fully supporting two different interfaces that do essentially the same thing.
OK, so "Why GNOME, Why?"
Well, that one's pretty easy to answer. Novell bought Ximian, GNOME's parent company, back in 2003. And, while there are a lot of KDE supporters within SUSE, KDE has never been the heart and soul of SUSE the way GNOME was for Ximian.
So, when push finally came to shove, GNOME's supporters were in a better position than KDE's within Novell to make the final call.
“Is this the end of KDE!?”
Where do these questions come from! Of course, not!
It's not even the end of KDE at Novell. The community-supported SUSE Desktop is going to continue to support both. KDE's libraries, at the least, will still be in SLES and NLD.
What is true, however, is that GNOME is becoming the choice of desktop interfaces for the big name Linux/Unix companies: Novell, Red Hat, and Sun.
Now, honestly, I'm not sure why that is, because I really think KDE is the better interface. I've used it for years, and I don't see it leaving my desktop anytime soon. Every time I give GNOME a try, which is pretty much every time there's a new significant version, I find myself heading right back to KDE.
There are also lots of smaller desktop Linuxes -- like Xandros and SimplyMEPIS, two of my favorites -- that are sticking with KDE. If you prefer a bigger name distribution, Mandriva is still sticking with KDE.
Finally, if you want to try a Ubuntu-based distribution, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has announced that he wants Kubuntu to move to a first class distribution status within the Ubuntu community.
So, while I, for one, would have preferred to see KDE become Novell's one and only official interface, I understand why they had to make the move they did, and I can live with it.
Just don't expect to see GNOME on any of my work desktops anytime soon, because it's not going to happen.
--Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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