Vulnerabilities and alerts in 2002

Vulnerabilities and alerts in 2002

Being pretty new to modern linux systems (most of my experience dates back to 1.2.13. Hey, stop laughing!)

Not laughing - I'm in more or less the same boat, but not back as far. Tried the whole GNOME thing a couple years ago, thought Enlightenment was buggy and confusing, went back to fvwm. Now I have a GNOME toolbar under fvwm, but I don't use it much.

But for developer support, I have to say GTK+ and the GNOME library set are not bad. I just finished my first major GUI effort, using Perl-GTK and Glade. Not without snags - Perl-GTK is somewhat poorly documented and there are certain bugs in it that will probably cause me to rewrite a certain minor module in C, and the Perl/Glade interface had one glaring bug I had to fix (with a kludge) before I continued - but I gotta say, that Glade business is slick; I got off the ground in no time flat. This is with GTK 1.2 - I hear there is a new Perl module for GTK 2.0 that's under heavy development. Haven't investigated it yet.

KDE I haven't even looked at from a developer standpoint, because it is based on Qt which is C++-specific. I understand there are KDE bindings to other languages, but I also understand these other languages are second-class citizens. If you use C++ or a close relative, chances are KDE and Qt will be good to you. If you want complete freedom in language choice, GNOME and GTK seem to be where it's at.

ok..

Your question is about security alerts for KDE vs GNOME. I'm not sure why there should be this disparity, but I think it's an issue of packaging. Both KDE and GNOME come with core libraries, auxilliary libraries, core applications, and auxilliary applications. A specific GNOME or KDE release comprises the core libraries and apps, and "everything else" just tries to stay more or less up-to-date with core library API usage, UI recommendations and other trends. I think the difference is that the core of the GNOME libs and apps is smaller (relative to the whole thing) than that of the KDE libs and apps - KDE tends to encompass more applications in each release, while GNOME tends to let most projects release their own apps on their own time scale. Thus, with security alerts, something affecting a KDE app is more likely to be filed under "KDE" whereas something affecting GNOME will be filed under "scrollkeeper" or "gaim" or "ethereal" or "evolution".

That's just a guess, though.