That much? [LWN.net]

That much?

Posted Oct 30, 2004 11:57 UTC (Sat) by hingo (guest, #14792)
Parent article: KDE and the Linux Journal 2004 Readers' Choice Awards (KDE.News)

No comments yet, and maybe that was a good thing. I'm aware of the possible consequenses here, so my apologies in advance if I'm opening up a can of worms here...

I'm surprised to see that the difference is so clear, I consider Linux Journal to be a somewhat credible and neutral authority here and expect it's readers to be rather representative of the hacker elite (that is, Lindows customers et al not included). I've always tought that the KDE vs GNOME camps are about 50/50 in size, with the Gnomes clearly being the more vocal one and also having Red Hat, Debian, RMS and Bruce on their side. (With Linus never taking sides on anything and Erics opinion not available to me, that's about 100% of the votes from traditional authorities. Guess hackers are not that interested in the opinion of authorities.)

Gtk seems to be somewhat more popular with developers, many of the recent good GUI programs are for Gnome, which is a pity if most of us prefer KDE as the surrounding environment. Also things like OpenOffice, Mozilla and Eclipse are always first ported towards Gtk, but one reason might be that KDE already has good (although some would say not equal) counterparts for those projects. Also Mandrake, which (apparently wisely) listening to it's customers has KDE as the default desktop, develops it's own programs in Gtk.

Is Gtk easier for a programmer to approach? Maybe Gtk is becoming the Visual Basic of Linux, an easy way to make programs that are not good? (Please please, let the "not good" refer more to some VB programs and not Gtk before you come and shoot me. Although I could say a few things about some of the things Mandrake Control Center has done to me over the years as an otherwise happy Linux user.)

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That much?

Posted Oct 30, 2004 15:41 UTC (Sat) by Algol (guest, #2681) [Link]

Not trying to troll or anything, this is a very generalised picture.

I have no idea what the user ratio between the two desktops are, but generally GTK is the efficient and the slim way of programming (that's why mandrake uses gtk for frontend in their controlcenter, even though I think most of the work that *screwed* you was done in perl or some other scripting language) while QT is a little bit more bloated.

QT on the other hand is easier to program in, you get a lot "for free", and it's in semi c++ instead of c, so it gives some further possibilities.

I think that "elitistic" programmers will chose gnome in front of KDE, given that it's more efficient, while newbie programmers (or people who likes OOP more than hardcore C) will chose KDE. I suppose that is why KDE is more eyecandy and gnome is cleaner. I also think this is why more new utils are done by home-users in KDE, filling out gaps for other home-users (check kde-apps.org), while larger commercial projects tend to chose GTK (mozilla and evolution). IBM and redhat backing GTK is probably another big factor.

Shrug

That much?

Posted Oct 30, 2004 19:15 UTC (Sat) by leonscape (guest, #12261) [Link]

I agree partly with the above poster, mainly that KDE is easier too write
for. Other things I see differently.

I believe it simply comes down to the C too C++ bias, for some "elitist"
programmers, and the license as to why so many of what you call
"authorities" prefer GNOME. Gtk is LGPL, and Qt is GPL, QPL or a
commercial license(which you pay for). IBM by the way use Qt ( a big
customer for trolltech ), and have tutorials on their website on how to
program in KDE. So I don't know what Algol meant by IBM backing Gtk.

As for the number of users, every poll tends to be similar, I think GNOME
users tend to make a bit more noise, but KDE users have always out
numbered GNOME users.

What I believe tends to be your favourite is what you use most the first
time with Linux. So you tend to get comfortable with it, Then don't like
other approaches. Its the same with programming what you use first tends
to be what you prefer. I think I'm slightly unusual having switched from
one to the other. It is an effort making a switch, I switched from
Windows first, so switching again, and having to learn things again is
always a pain.

IBM backing GTK

Posted Oct 30, 2004 22:48 UTC (Sat) by Algol (guest, #2681) [Link]

Well, all I meant was that IBM is in the board of directors of the gnome foundation, that oversees the gnome/GTK development (and sponsor some). I also tend to see them more actively involved in gnome/GTK business. Anyhow I'm glad to hear that trolltech is making money. :)

(And btw IBM has tutorials for GTK-programming too :)

IBM (and others) 'backing' GTK

Posted Oct 31, 2004 17:16 UTC (Sun) by louie (subscriber, #3285) [Link]

IBM is indeed on the GNOME Foundation Advisory Board and a contributor to the foundation. But their main developmental focus at the moment is really the eclipse platform- which uses GTK, but isn't particularly gnome-integrated, unfortunately.

The record suggests that gtk is the linux target for the most important third-party linux ISVs (IBM with eclipse, Open Office with their Q Document, Real with Helix, Mozilla Foundation, others I'm not yet at liberty to speak about) but none of these partners (except maybe Real) have really gone the distance yet to integrate actively. By which I mean they've used gtk as their platform, but have not attempted to integrate with the GNOME HIG, use gconf, or other such steps. So... it is premature to say that GTK/GNOME have definitely won in the critical third-party developer wars, but we can see some trends in that direction that GNOME needs to take advantage of in order to reach its goals.

targeted users

Posted Oct 30, 2004 19:43 UTC (Sat) by louie (subscriber, #3285) [Link]

GNOME, by and large, is not targeting people who read linuxjournal- for some years now, the goal of GNOME has been to grow beyond that very small market, which means doing things differently. So... if KDE wants to continue to focus on existing Linux users and hackers, that's great, more power to them. GNOME is aiming at different users- frankly, users who don't read linuxjournal, and who mostly don't even know what the difference between GNOME and Linux is. (Try to explain to a windows user some time the difference between X, a kernel, and KDE/GNOME...) So if KDE wants to continue to win these types of polls, great for them- GNOME will continue to focus on the much larger world of people who want software that Just Works. There is space, I believe, for both projects, especially as they increasingly focus on different goals.

targeted users

Posted Oct 31, 2004 8:26 UTC (Sun) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link]

But this is exactly what surprised me, because I've always seen KDE as the desktop that is more "newbie-friendly" and GNOME's design decisions to me seem to be based on a philosophy of doing things the way they have always been done in the Unix world (an example is GIMP opening n number of different windows, instead of one window with many dialogs). The problem is, there is a reason why 99% of people use Windows and nobody has been using Unix for desktop purposes (except universities). That's why "user-friendly" distributions like Corel, Xandros, Linspire always use KDE.

But it's true that the talk in the GNOME camp has recently been the way you said, it will be interesting to see where it leads. Personally I'm glad that KDE doesn't do this spatial-filemanager thing, but if that turns out to be the next big thing, it's good to know that it is available for Linux.

That much?

Posted Nov 1, 2004 12:15 UTC (Mon) by arafel (subscriber, #18557) [Link]

> being the more vocal one and also having Red Hat, Debian, RMS and Bruce on

Not commenting on the rest, but just to bring this bit up... Debian has excellent KDE support these days - the new releases are usually available in unstable extremely quickly.

With the change in Qt licensing, I'm not sure RMS actually cares that much about the two any more. I'm not even sure he uses a GUI. You could always ask him.

That much?

Posted Nov 1, 2004 15:25 UTC (Mon) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]

Actually, I think RMS is on record as prefering Qt to Gtk.

The Qt licence forces people to go 100% Free or 100% proprietary. The Gtk licence allows them to dodge the issue.

Cheers,
Wol