On 10/22/18 1:08 AM, Gerald wrote:
On Monday, 22 October 2018 at 04:41:08 UTC, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa)
wrote:
On 10/21/18 1:13 PM, Russel Winder wrote:
[...]
First of all, minor nitpick: Unless some bombshell news occurred that
I managed to miss, Ubuntu pushes their own Unity, NOT Gnome. Yes,
that's still GTK, but still...accuracy...FWIW.
To be accurate, Ubuntu announced the dropping of Unity back in April
2017. Current versions of Ubuntu use Gnome.
https://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-Dropping-Unity
Wow! I really am out of the loop then. That is SERIOUSLY *MEGATON*-level
announcement. I'm shocked that I missed it. I would never have even
guessed. Thanks for the input!
Chalk me up as one who prefers Gnome over KDE. I like the clean UI that
gnome provides and the adherence to a common HIG. KDE is way too fussy
and busy for my taste. I also don't agree this is a minority viewpoint.
Like Russell though I'm glad there is choice and people can use what
they prefer be it Gnome, KDE, Mate, Cinnamon, XFCE, i3 or whatever.
I would also be white happy to see D support Qt as well just to have
more options.
Fair enough. For me, I find GTK/Gnome to be chunky (ex: problematic
overuse of margins/padding) and Apple-level "zee must conform!" (ie:
under-use of configuration). That, and an outright bad file-chooser ;)
But, it's possible I might agree with you if we were talking KDE's
defaults - I don't actually use KDE's defaults. But that's kinda my
point though: KDE is based around the philosophy of configurability,
whereas Gnome (while admittedly does have a certain level of
configurability) it very intentionally designed around a philosophy of
conformity being superior to configurability.
But more importantly than anything else, it seems we all clearly agree:
The key (and beauty) of Linux is "user's choice", not "GTK vs Qt".
Most distro maintainers want their distro to be as popular as possible.
If KDE was a slam dunk like you imply they should be jumping over
themselves to make it the default yet they do not. When Ubuntu dropped
Unity they had a perfect opportunity to make KDE (or something else) the
default yet they did not.
Personally, I think you're underestimating the group-think factor in
modern software management. From a managerial perspective, there are a
LOT of VERY STRONG motivations for promoting conformity over
configurability. Not the least of which is "That's the way of
Apple/Facebook/etc, and Apple/Facebook/etc are extremely
popular/successful".
That, combined with both modern tech's current focus on "buzz" and
"popularity", AND the practical software-dev-management benefits gained
from disregarding the user as anything but collective commodity, creates
a VERY potent motivator to prioritize similarly-minded projects over a
purely population-driven decision.
