Red Hat: Always againt the desktop preferred by the majority. [LWN.net]

Red Hat: Always againt the desktop preferred by the majority.

Posted Apr 18, 2008 13:51 UTC (Fri) by morhippo (subscriber, #334)
Parent article: Red Hat: no desktop products coming

I still recall when Red Hat boycotted the KDE project due to alleged licencing problems,
heavily funded Gnome. This basically doomed their desktop efforts. Despite heavy corporate
(Eazel, Sun, Redhat, Simian, Novell...) funding and much money being put into Gnome, it still
has not reached the level of functionality present in the community effort KDE-3. There is a
lot of polish, but the foundations are shaky and furure progress slow.

Remember Mandrake? They started as Redhat plus KDE.

I think Redhat's experience and difficulties with marketing Gnome forever spoiled any Redhat
desktop efforts, as no one wanted to admit that they put their money on the wrong horse from
the very beginning. Even when any licensing issues Qt may have ever have had fell away, they
were too proud to admit their misunderstanding of user preferences.

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Red Hat: Always againt the desktop preferred by the majority.

Posted Apr 18, 2008 21:00 UTC (Fri) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]

Enough with the war-mongering, please.  We have two different major DE's which serve rather
different needs.  I'm glad I don't have to use KDE.  And I'm glad that people who prefer KDE
are not clogging Gnome mailing lists with requests to make it like KDE.  And I am pretty sure
that my counterparts in KDE-land feel conversely.  I'm going to assume that you are one of
those counterparts.  Do you really want me and my friends on your mailing lists every day
complaining about the (perceived) sucky interface?  If we did not have the choices that we
have, that's where we would be:  All on one set of mailing lists bickering over the one true
way to design a user interface.

Red Hat: Always againt the desktop preferred by the majority.

Posted Apr 21, 2008 19:19 UTC (Mon) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]

"""
I think Redhat's experience and difficulties with marketing Gnome forever spoiled any Redhat
desktop efforts, as no one wanted to admit that they put their money on the wrong horse from
the very beginning.
"""

The #1 home desktop distro is Gnome-based.  The #1 enterprise desktop distro is Gnome-based.
The #2 enterprise desktop distro is Gnome-based.  Hardly the "wrong horse".

Hard as it may be for some people to swallow, there is not enough money in consumer Linux
desktops to make it a reasonable business proposition at this time.  If there were, Canonical
would be profitable, and it's still existing on Shuttleworth's funds.  I'm afraid we have a
continued wait ahead of us.

Red Hat: Always againt the desktop preferred by the majority.

Posted Apr 21, 2008 20:37 UTC (Mon) by morhippo (subscriber, #334) [Link]

Most polls in recent years have constantly shown that KDE is the preferred desktop even though
Redhat has pushed Gnome and even though Novell has started to favour Gnome after the
acquisition of Ximian.

Basically, even though companies have always preferred Gnome, as it makes the development of
unfree applications easier and cheaper due to being Lesser GPL(btw, where are these great
unfree commercial applications for gnome? - never seen anything substantial), the users and
the community have carried on preferring KDE. Several of the consumer focussed desktop
distributions have KDE as default: Kubuntu, Knoppix, PcLinuxOs, Slackware, Mepis, Xandros
(EEEPC), ....)