Brian Cameron wrote: > 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 > _______________________________________________ > desktop-discuss mailing list > desktop-discuss at opensolaris.org > Agreed minus the KDE part, Sun hasn't done jack with KDE in years. Their latest companion release is just fail.. older than the earth itself.
James
