Kaiwai:
> As for what I think; CDE is dead, but going for GNOME was stupid, Sun
> should have bought out trolltech, made the Qt kit BSD/X11 or even CDDL -
> then made KDE the default desktop. Atleast we would have a decent
> collection of applications that didn't royally suck when it came to
> integration between the desktop environment, the application and the
> services the desktop environment provides.
There were many factors that affected why Sun chose GNOME over KDE.
These included:
1) When Sun started working on GNOME for Solaris 8 and 9 (around
2000-2001), GNOME had free licensing while Qt did not.
2) Sun wants to support multiple compilers (Sun Studio and GCC).
This gets more complicated with C++, where ABI compatibility
issues means you can't easily support more than one compiler.
3) Whether GNOME or KDE is better is something people seem to feel
religious about. However, GNOME's "simpler is better" approach
towards usability is probably a better match for most Sun
customers, who typically need to inter-operate in heterogeneous
computing environments.
4) Sun is hardly alone in preferring GNOME. The most popular Linux
distros ship GNOME as default. Red Hat, Ubuntu, and Novell are
some examples.
I am currently involved with the project to get KDE through the
ARC review process. Choice is good, so it will be exciting when we
are also able to provide and support KDE on Solaris. It is just a
matter of time, I think.
If you have specific examples of how GNOME integration should be
improved on Solaris, please lets discuss further. Talking about
issues in general doesn't help us understand the specific problems.
> It seemed like, to me, GNOME was a dart board decision coupled with a
> 'we don't want to invest any real money into this project' - as if
> actually providing a decent desktop environment was something Sun was
> reluctant to actually do.
Considering the investments Sun has made to make Java, GNOME, and KDE
support accessibility (just for one example), I think it is unfair to
suggest that Sun has not been investing a reasonable amount of money to
help the free software community take productive steps forward.
Brian
