> I know this topic can easily lead to a flame war, but > I don't think my message has the potential to start > one. You see, I also told what I like on Gnome, that > KDE isn't perfect, and that I prefer KDE. > But I accept people who don't like it (flavours are > different). > I am really serious about this, and I hope the > OpenSolaris community is able to give their opinions > about this topic without flaming. (btw, take a look > at the Topic Solaris vs. Linux, some threads ago, > this is a flame topic, too).
I'm sure we can all agree that there is plenty of room for both GNOME and KDE on OpenSolaris. To answer the question of why Sun chose GNOME over KDE as the basis for JDS, one good place to start is the answer to that question in Sun's GNOME 2.0 FAQ (oddly, this is not in the JDS FAQ): http://www.sun.com/software/star/gnome/faq/generalfaq.xml#q23 Q: Why did Sun choose to support GNOME instead of KDE? A: GNOME and KDE are both powerful desktop environments. Sun has completed a comprehensive technical review of both environments and concluded that GNOME's architecture is a better match for Sun's software strategy, which promotes the creation and use of highly distributed, network-savvy software, as well as easy access to data wherever it might be located. One example is GNOME's innovative use of CORBA for network-aware interprocess communication between disparate systems. Others are the Bonobo component architecture, which enables easier creation of compound documents and system-wide scripting while promoting code reuse, and GConf, the network- and component-aware configuration management system. I would add that GNOME fits the UNIX model of "a whole bunch of little pieces, each doing one thing well" better than KDE's more pragmatic, but also more monolithic, division into kdebase, kdelibs, etc. The downside is that you have to deal with a whole bunch of little pieces of GNOME all being developed independently of each other (and it is a huge pain to compile it yourself, esp. since garnome doesn't work on Solaris!), but the upside is that you can generally update an individual component without having to rebuild the rest of GNOME. It also made sense for Sun to avoid having to deal with providing two different versions of every C++ shared library, one for Sun C++ and the other for GCC (plus, when they started, I believe GCC's C++ ABI had not even been frozen yet). Both KDE and GNOME have made great strides in the past few years, and both have always had the goals of consistency and ease-of-use necessary in order to put UNIX on the "average person's" desktop. Sun decided to go with GNOME several years ago, as did Red Hat and SuSE. The interesting thing about KDE is that it succeeded as a completely self-contained project, regardless of the official "sanction" of any Linux/UNIX vendor (besides Linspire). I'm not sure that GNOME would have reached the same level of success without the contributions of Red Hat and Sun, and so it's understandable that they would be committed to staying with that platform in order to protect their investments in bringing it to where it is today. -- Jake This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
