On Wednesday 24 January 2007 16:04, Mihamina Rakotomandimby (R12y) wrote: > Hi, > I would like to know who's using KDE in here, in the place of GNOME? > As well as the distribution has decide to "switch" to GNOME, who stayed > faithfull to KDE? > > Optionnal question: is there a big team yet that maintains KDE and > K*/Qt* apps in OpenSuSe? In other words, as _open_Suse is an almost > community driven distro, has "community" blindly followed Novell's > choice or is there competent people that decided to stay KDE based?
SuSE is primarily a KDE base distro and has always been so. Furthermore, SuSE was/is one of the oldest supporters of KDE development and many on the KDE team are (or were) SuSE developers. Back in the day, GNOME in SuSE was often an after thought. And not until Novell bought Ximian and then acquired that GNOME development began to see any substantive gains (though many long time SuSE users are skilled developers and helped to offer GNOME packages specific to SuSE for the user base outside of the "official" SuSE channels). At one point Novell strongly hinted (or many read it that way) that they would be dropping support for KDE in favor of GNOME (by way have a quasi-mandate to default to GNOME during installation). This did not go over well at all with the tried and true user base. In fact quite a few voices were raised in opposition to what they (and many) saw as Novell dumping KDE. On one hand Novell did spend a few dollars to acquire Ximian and to some degree they would like to see their investment flourish. But due to the discontent the situation wrought Novell felt compelled to release a statement to dispell the discontent - and to continue to make available KDE and the option to choose which desktop environment the user wanted - KDE or GNOME. On the question of KDE/QT there's always been a more robust development team for KDE than GNOME. This is not to say that GNOME is built by a group of college comp sci grads in a basement somewhere - far from it! But comparing the two by nothing more than the bulk of people on the respective development teams - KDE has more developers. On the other side of the coin - Redhat has been a staunch supporter of GNOME and almost the converse of SuSE wherein KDE was often a quasi-after thought - at least from the perspective of the specifics related to the distro's desktop focus. The main reason many in the business world tend to lean toward GNOME over KDE is usually due to license issue related to QT/Trolltech vs GTK. But then the suits often carry a gaggles of hyper paranoid lawyers in the hip pockets - so their fear of licenses is usually driven from this perspective. But the same can be said about the GPL and similar. If it's got a license, patient, or IP issues the only ones that seem to benefit in most cases from these are... The lawyers, since they get paid regardless. Let me put it this way. Go to the open SUSE repositories and see what the KDE and GNOME directories hold. Furthermore, track how much they change or get updated. This is especially true in the case of the open SUSE "Factory" (beta development repos). I think you'll find that in this case KDE development is far more robust on it's face. HTH, Curits. -- Spammers Beware: Trespassers will be shot, survivors will be shot again! I don't want a politician I can believe in. I simply want a politician I can believe! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
