Aaron Seigo talks life, free software and reinventing the Desktop [LWN.net]

Aaron Seigo talks life, free software and reinventing the Desktop

Posted Feb 3, 2008 9:10 UTC (Sun) by frazier (subscriber, #3060)
Parent article: Aaron Seigo talks life, free software and reinventing the Desktop (ComputerWorld)

from the article:

People choose KDE - look at the Asus Eee PC

It's the form factor and price point getting those sales. It would sell about the same if it had gnome on there. (almost) no one is looking for Xandros. If Ubuntu specifically was pre-installed I bet the sales would increase, by maybe 10%. "Ubuntu! Cool!". There's not a lot of "Xandros! Cool!" people to be found.

People aren't looking for Xandros.

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Aaron Seigo talks life, free software and reinventing the Desktop

Posted Feb 3, 2008 13:19 UTC (Sun) by alonso (subscriber, #2828) [Link]

You have to ask yourself: "Why asus chose Kde and not Gnome?". Kde is better than gnome. kde
has a licence problem, is gpl and not lgpl this is why red hat has choose gnome. Mandrake(now
mandriva) was born because kde was better but wasn't supported in red hat. If Nokia will make
lgpl qt things will change dramatically.

Aaron Seigo talks life, free software and reinventing the Desktop

Posted Feb 3, 2008 17:34 UTC (Sun) by frazier (subscriber, #3060) [Link]

You have to ask yourself: "Why asus chose Kde and not Gnome?".
Not really. There's more to a distro than just the Desktop environment. I think the real question is "Why Xandros?".

Ubuntu will run on the eee (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRP8fPcaSzI), after all. Dell ships it. Ubuntu has a lot going for it (name recognition, cost). I'm curious why ASUS chose Xandros.

Better?

Posted Feb 3, 2008 19:07 UTC (Sun) by tony (guest, #3654) [Link]

"KDE is better than gnome."

This is not a matter of fact, it's a matter of preference.

I dislike KDE. I don't mind GNOME. It's not great, but it's not bad. KDE seems to work
differently from the way I work; it gets in my way more than not. And, I think it's ugly.

It's a matter of preference between the two.

I haven't tried KDE 4. There've been some big changes, so I might give it another shot.

However, as a developer, I *really* dislike KDE. The choice of C++ as a base language was a
bad one, IMNSHO. It tends to make it harder to develop in straight C, or Objective-C (which I
prefer *infinitely* over C++).

So, as both a user and a developer, I rather prefer GNOME. I believe it is better *for me*
than KDE.