Orvar: > As I understand it, JDS is Gnome.
Note quite true. JDS is the "desktop". This includes GNOME, but also includes other desktop applications and interfaces which are not a part of the GNOME umbrella. For example: - Firefox, Thunderbird - RealPlayer - SourceForge applications like gtkam, gphoto, gthumb - FreeDesktop interfaces such as D-Bus, GStreamer, cairo, etc. - Other dependencies which are used by the desktop, but are not a part of GNOME, such as Xiph.org codecs. - JDS also contains quite a bit of branding changes (themes, and code changes to enable branding). - Other things I'm sure I am not thinking of. So, it isn't completely accurate to equate JDS with GNOME. > And as I understand it, OpenSolaris will be using newer versions of Gnome > whenever it will be available. Hence the beta status of Open Solaris. There is paperwork associated with getting new versions of GNOME into OpenSolaris. At times, this does slightly delay getting new versions of GNOME into OpenSolaris. The delays have been quite small the past few GNOME updates, but I wouldn't say that this will always be the case. For example, when GNOME interfaces change significantly in a way that causes things to break on Solaris/OpenSolaris, this can cause delays. This happened, for example, when HAL and D-Bus were added as a hard dependency to GNOME. I think it took us a few months to get all the related issues sorted. > The reason Solaris is not using KDE is because KDE is changing the > API and stuff, making it hard to support KDE. Gnome is better in > that aspect. This is what I heard. The original reasons why Sun chose GNOME over KDE are: - At the time Sun made the decision GNOME was free software, and Qt was not. Now Qt and KDE is also free, but this change happened after Sun already invested quite some time integrating GNOME into Solaris. - KDE uses C++, which is not binary compatible across compilers. This causes more problems for Sun than other GNOME distros since Sun ships its own Sun Studio compiler. So, going with KDE adds complication in that you either support just one compiler or you provide a set of libraries built with all compilers you want to support (probably gcc and Sun Studio are the most popular). - Sun has invested a lot of effort in making GNOME accessible, support Solaris interfaces, and meet Solaris distribution requirements (such as documentaiton, translation, etc.). KDE would probably require a good bit of work to meet these requirements as well. There is a community working to make KDE available for Solaris/OpenSolaris. I would imagine that Sun would consider accepting KDE into OpenSolaris if people were interested in going through the processes. Based on our experience with GNOME, I'd imagine that getting KDE through ARC, and making sure it meets all OpenSolaris distribution requirements would be a fair bit of work, though. http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/desktop/communities/kde/ http://solaris.kde.org/ Brian
