Top Linux exec departs from Novell (News.com)

Nice conspiracy story. In the world (for ones without a clue - not it's not our world) where MySQL (with Sweden company as "sole owner of source code") is shunned by "big boys" from U.S. and PostgreSQL (without clear owner of development team at all just like GNOME) is exalted by the same "big boys" this story will even look plausible.

It's not a secret GNOME was started back then when KDE status was "in the air" and we only had "free Qt" which was not free at all. Later Qt adopted GPL, but... dies were cast: it was "too little, too late" type of deal. Hate of U.S. corporations has nothing to do with it. Qt is actually has more users then GTK - only KDE is having problems.

By the way, I've used RedHat 8 and 9. Neither was a disaster, although 9 was much better than 8. I've always been more of a gnome user though. KDE has seemed pretty nice in the Fedora releases.

Suse has always been the premier distro for the kde experience. Those who have used only the watered-down redhat kde and don't understand why we call it crippled would get an eye opener if they spent some time with kde in the suse environment.

The fact is, a top redhat kde developer resigned because he could not bear to participate in the "crippling" of kde to make it fit into the redhat scheme.

I find it quite telling that kde was voted the most popular desktop environment again this year in the linux journal poll, garnering twice as many votes as gnome!

I think the Novell management have recently realized just how good kde is, and have reconsidered the whole idea of throwing away such a gem. There may well have been some words exchanged over the company direction, what with the purchase of ximian and the whole gnome trend. They also backtracked on the idea of a single unified desktop, and for now are supporting both gnome and kde. It will be interesting to watch, but I for one love what I see in sles 9 and suse pro 9.2

SUSE Founding
http://lwn.net/1998/0205/suse.html
Look its an actual email of someone that worked at SUSE explaining the start of S.u.S.E. As you will note in that post S.u.S.E. started as a repackage of Slackware (a distro based in the Evil USA) When they decided to go their own and start a distro they didn't pull a LFS roll, they grabbed another distro and worked from that point. The other distro was jurix
http://www.softaplic.com.br/pub/jurix/docs/history.html for the history of that.

So right off the bat we can see your facts arent totally inline with reality.

KDE/QT and Gnome/GTK
Original KDE Announcement http://www.kde.org/announcements/announcement.php
But please make note of the fact that QT by TrollTech wasn't about Linux, it was about a cross platfrom widget set.

And heres a quick run down on the reason Gnome was started
http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/gnome-history.html

If you bother to check the links you will find that Miguel actually looked at getting behind KDE/QT, but at THAT time licensing was an issue. You might not see it but the developers did. Those issues have now been resolved but by the time they were Gnome DE was already off and running.

Linux distro's can and are sold without support for both DE's. This was especially true of the early versions of said products. Currently there are a lot of distro's our there, and most of them support one or the other DE as their default. As you yourself point out, SuSE stuck with KDE. And more to the point Mandrake got its start as a RedHat with KDE instead of Gnome.

I leave the rest of the rant to those that want to do the research with the amazingly difficult process of using Google.

The reality of using a Linux distro on the desktop is that you the user get to make a choice. YOU get to decide which Desktop you want to use. But if you want to use Distro X, and they don't support that Desktop then either look for another one that does, or live with the problems that come with using unsupported software. If you live in Windows you can change your graphic shell, but its unsupported and mileage may vary. This is the same thing as installing KDE or Gnome on a Distro that doesnt support that DE.

Your attack on Gnome users is pretty much something that can be said about KDE users also. Just look at your whole pro KDE anti Gnome rant right here, who threw the first stone? You didn't talk about technical merits or drawbacks, or licensing history and changes, instead you start looking for conspiracy.

The reality is that most Gnome users don't like KDE. I'm a Gnome user and I can't stand the look and feel of KDE. Thats why I don't use it. I like the way that Gnome FEELS. No amount of screaming by zealots on either side is going to make that change. The real fact is that most of the zealot screaming on either side seems to be from fanboys that think everyone needs to see the world the same way they do.

Welcome to Linux. Get over it, we all get to chose how we use our systems. Nitice that the developers aren't in screaming wars or yelling about conspiracy. They are working together through groups such as fd.o to make Desktop Linux happen, regardless the the desktop enviroment the user decides fits their use.

Microsoft is not even close to a dead end with their tech, but if it makes you feel better to think that then feel free. But again reality is that MS actually has think tanks of very smart people whose job it is to come up with new stuff. As long as MS has money they arent out of the game. Last look is they had more money than most so its going to be a long wait if you think they are going to just disappear anytime soon.

Novell,SUSE and Ximian will be what they will be. In the past Novell has dropped the ball. I hope they do better this time and hope them all the best, even though I personally will not use their distro. In the long run we don't need Novell to survive. Linux and OSS will live on with or without them, Novell bought 2 companies. that doesn't mean they own Linux or any OSS.

And if you look at the current DE default offering on most versions of Linux, you will notice its a Sea of KDE with Islands of Gnome. Really sit down and write down a list of distro's that come default with a Gnome DE installed and then do the same for KDE. KDE is currently has alot more distro's that ship with it as default. So please stop your ranting, take off the tin foil hat and go outside and breath some fresh air.

KDE was not created by Trolltech. The QT libraries were and then a group of open source coders based KDE on these libraries.

It was the pressure created by the formation of Gnome that eventually lead Trolltech to dual license the QT libraries so they could properly be used in Free software. The fact that there are two competing desktops is down to Trolltech taking so long to do this.

Frankly I think having the two dominant desktops competing with each other is better than having just the one.

Thanks.