<quote who="Jock_louise Nicholson">
> Hi I got this address from Redhat home, and just wanted to ask one
> question. How degraded is kde in RH 8.0? Is it possible to restore
> original visual settings and themes of KDE, or does redhat over ride
> these? I'm a massive fan of KDE and always want the original creation of
> KDE.org Thanks for the time in this matter
There are upstream-style KDE RPMs available for Red Hat 8.0 if you want
exactly what the KDE project releases.
However, I personally don't see what the fuss is all about. Red Hat also
made a stack of changes to the version of GNOME 2.0 they shipped, but there
hasn't been a lot of complaints about that. :-) The major changes include:
- Red Hat integrated menus (same entries on both desktops, Red Hat 'bless'
particular applications as the best in their class and list others as
'extras')
- Both environments default to the 'Big Three' desktop apps -> mozilla as
web browser, Evolution as mailer/groupware, OpenOffice as office suite.
They are (perhaps arguably) the best apps in their class, and Red Hat
chooses to support them over other applications. This is a positive
thing for their users.
- A number of changes to Qt and GTK+ so the entire system uses fontconfig,
the next-generation font handling software written by Keith Packard. Now
both toolkits (Qt and GTK+) support fontconfig without patches (and with
GNOME 2.2, you *must* have GTK+ built with fontconfig support), but they
didn't when RH released 8.0.
Ultimately, Red Hat build and productise their distribution for their
customers, who value these kinds of changes - and integration of the desktop
environments is a big support win for those customers. If you don't like Red
Hat's changes, use a distro that keeps things fairly close to upstream's
design (I'd recommend Debian, but for more important reasons than this one).
I think Red Hat has done an incredble job with their build of KDE,
especially when you consider that it is not their primary interest in the
desktop space. Compare Red Hat's KDE to SuSE's GNOME some time. ;-) [ Funny
though, SuSE have announced that they will provide better support for GNOME
in future versions, which is probably a response to RH8. :-) ]
Thanks,
- Jeff
--
"'Cause remember, smug is beautiful." - Zachary Beane
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/
More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
