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Fedora 19 released

Fedora 19 released

Posted Jul 2, 2013 18:35 UTC (Tue) by hadrons123 (guest, #72126)
Parent article: Fedora 19 released

Tested TC6 mate LiveCD last week. killing xorg in the live CD and logging back in produced multiple caja windows stalling the whole system. With a week away from release, this is something that should have been fixed.

I don't understand how the QA doesn't think it as critical. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=886029.

depressingly Poor QA for the all the RH money spent on the quality.

Later that day I tried Gentoo stable and I am happy with Gnome2.


to post comments

Fedora 19 released

Posted Jul 2, 2013 18:42 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (57 responses)

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F19_bugs#Several_x-...

"Sometimes (the bug is due to a race condition and hence unpredictable), on boot of the Fedora 19 MATE live image or first login with a user account to the MATE desktop, several useless windows labelled x-caja-desktop will open up on the desktop.

The bug has no further consequences and it is quite safe to simply close the windows and continue using the system. The MATE maintainer is currently working to resolve this issue with updated packages."

Fedora 19 released

Posted Jul 2, 2013 19:02 UTC (Tue) by hadrons123 (guest, #72126) [Link] (56 responses)

Thanks for the info. I know someone is always working on the buggy package. Dan Mashal has been great. He has been awesome when it comes to mate based bugs. Very good. But Why the QA release the spin based CD before you fix an issue?

Its giving poor rapport about the Mate-spin considering its the first time we are seeing a Fedora mate spin.

Ideally if you have cared about the users, QA should have waited until someone fixed the issue and released the CD when its ready.

Its not like an app from peanut gallery which is not critical. Its the **file manager** taking down the system and it should have been a blocker.

I am 100% sure Dan would fix this in short while. At least when this is fixed Fedora should release a new LiveCD for the benefit of the users.

Fedora 19 released

Posted Jul 2, 2013 19:16 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (4 responses)

You seem to be overestimating the role of the QA team here. Fedora release criteria is well documented and focuses primarily on installer bugs since these cannot be fixed after the release easily. There are obvious issues which hold up the release as well but a unpredictable race condition in one of the spins won't block the release especially if there is no simple fix readily available to pull in and there is an easy workaround. When an update gets released, you can do your own updated image fairly easily or ask Dan if he will do one for you.

Fedora 19 released

Posted Jul 3, 2013 1:10 UTC (Wed) by hadrons123 (guest, #72126) [Link] (3 responses)

> When an update gets released, you can do your own updated image fairly easily or ask Dan if he will do one for you.

I can do it, dan can do it. Remaining 95% of the world can't do it. Why doesn't fedora update the official images for the rest of the world?

Fedora 19 released

Posted Jul 3, 2013 2:05 UTC (Wed) by brunowolff (guest, #71160) [Link] (2 responses)

Because we have limited resources. See the thread https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2013-June... for some discussion about this.

Fedora 19 released

Posted Jul 3, 2013 2:27 UTC (Wed) by hadrons123 (guest, #72126) [Link] (1 responses)

I already went through the thread last week, its a lot of bureaucracy involved in the process of releasing an updated image rather than functionality to the end-users. Even Debian released an 7.1 update for the sake of the users considering its enormous size of the project.

Fedora 19 released

Posted Jul 3, 2013 2:40 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

QA team says it doesn't have the resources to run the tests against updates images as part of an official release. If you don't care about the QA process, providing an updated image by itself is easy and there are people already doing that.

Fedora 19 released

Posted Jul 2, 2013 20:21 UTC (Tue) by brunowolff (guest, #71160) [Link]

The release criteria are documented at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_19_Final_Release_Cr... . Note that only the Gnome and KDE desktops are currently considered release blocking. You can rebuild spin ISOs on your own using livecd-creator.

Fedora 19 released

Posted Jul 3, 2013 5:12 UTC (Wed) by AdamW (subscriber, #48457) [Link] (49 responses)

"But Why the QA release the spin based CD before you fix an issue?"

Very simply, because we have to draw a line somewhere. You cannot release a bug-free operating system, it is an impossible task.

One of the lines we draw is that only issues in KDE and GNOME are release-blocking. We can't practically speaking guarantee that every desktop we ship a live image for - KDE, GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, Sugar, MATE - will be perfect: our timeframes are too short and resources too scarce.

Not to throw Dan under any buses, I love the guy, but please note he and upstream have been trying to fix this issue for something like three months now. It is clearly not an easy fix. What do you want us to do? Delay the entire Fedora 19 release indefinitely (since we clearly have no reliable timeframe for a fix) due to a superficial bug in a single fairly new desktop spin?

We cannot, practically speaking, release one image significantly later than all the others with a new change; it throws the whole release process out of whack, since the release repositories are meant to be *frozen*.

The issue can be fixed for installed systems with an update, in any case.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 3, 2013 7:05 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (44 responses)

> We can't practically speaking guarantee that every desktop we ship a live image for - KDE, GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, Sugar, MATE

Imagine a poor third part developer that wants to create a "Linux" desktop app. Which desktop to target? Which distro to target?

We really did shoot ourselves in the foot in the Linux desktop world, didn't we?

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 3, 2013 7:24 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (36 responses)

We can't even say "we" fucked up, because the guy who caused the fragmentation, dear Miguel d'Icaza, has jumped ship because he couldn't handle the fragmentation!

For me as an app developer, life really is getting worse and worse. Unity on Ubuntu is bringing me a host of bug reports about missing menubars and things like that. Cinnamon on Mint crashes Krita with X11 errors, for some people. Gnome3 does something weird that causes Krita to become too big for the screen, so I had to hardcode fixes for that.

Not that Windows is any better, with weird bugs happening on XP, other weird bugs on Win8. Win7 seems fine, fortunately Vista seems not to be used anymore.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 3, 2013 8:38 UTC (Wed) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (34 responses)

So Miguel created all the desktops? Trend to attack people on LWN and poor comments is sad.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 3, 2013 11:08 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (33 responses)

I do blame Miguel, yes, personally, for being a leading cause of fragmentation on the Linux desktop. And I find it sad that after running away he hits back and blames the "failure" of Linux on the desktop on a fragmentation that he is responsible for.

You find that a poor comment and an attack on people? If it's my opinion that people are responsible for something, I won't hesitate to say so, just because you think that's a personal attack. I also think that my examples of desktop fragmentation giving problems for application developers are pretty darn illuminating -- you find that a poor comment, too?

I find the trend to put down people with trendily-worded little nothings like "Trend to attack people on LWN and poor comments is sad" pretty sad myself.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 3, 2013 13:11 UTC (Wed) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (2 responses)

Leading cause of fragmentation my ass, this clear enough for you?

You complain that I object to your meaningless comment about Miguel, while you started this behaviour. If you want a good discussion, I can have it. But by just stating Miguel is the leading cause of fragmentation, that's just meaningless bullshit.

Also first claiming something then using that claim to back up that he's responsible: what kind of way of argument are you making? Don't you see that your logic is MIA?

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 3, 2013 13:58 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Shrug. You are entitled to your opinion of course, even where that involves your posterior.

Apparently my opinion is making you so angry that feel you have to resort to being rude, twice in a row, but all the same, that doesn't change anything. You lack the authority to make me accept your opinion merely because you shout at me.

Miguel was the guy who left KDE to start Gnome, which means he is the guy who started the fragment the Linux Desktop. He is also the guy who claimed the Linux desktop was a failure because it's so fragmented.

You're free to disagree, but, frankly, I am not interested in another insult.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 3, 2013 15:00 UTC (Wed) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link]

Do you know a list moderator called Olav Vitters (GNOME)?

Ref: https://lwn.net/Articles/453076/

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 4, 2013 4:10 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (29 responses)

Miguel started GNOME and GTK back when Qt required a pact with a devil to use it. And a firstborn son to use it in commercial products.

Sorry, but blame is squarely on the choice of Qt for KDE.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 4, 2013 15:06 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (28 responses)

By the time the first official release of GNOME came out, Qt was already under a licensing scheme that ensured that it would continue to be available even if Troll Tech folded, was acquired, …. Licensing issues with Qt probably played a part in the decision to start GNOME – especially if one listens to the »official story« –, but NIH and »C++ hate« were also important contributing factors at the time.

If Qt licensing had really been the only problem with KDE, it would probably have been a lot easier to come up with a free reimplementation of Qt than to develop a complete desktop environment (including a toolkit – Gtk was nowhere near adequate at the time and needed major work) from scratch. On the other hand it would have been much less fun, and we know that, at the end of the day, fun for developers is what desktop environment development is all about.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 4, 2013 17:27 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (27 responses)

At that time QT required multiple thousands of dollars _per_ _developer_ to start developing commercial products. That was no-go for the most of ISVs from the start.

GTK, on the other hand, was provided under a nice friendly LGPL license.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 4, 2013 19:17 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (26 responses)

According to the TrollTech web site (courtesy of the Wayback Machine), in 2000 a commercial Qt license was something like $1500 per year for a single developer, with discounts for multiple licenses (e.g., 30% for 7-9 developers). This included support and upgrades.

Considering what the cost of actually paying the developer would be for a year, that doesn't sound prohibitively expensive.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 4, 2013 20:06 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (25 responses)

It certainly is if you broaden your perspectives to include places outside U.S and some of Europe

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 4, 2013 20:33 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (24 responses)

Which is obviously the reason why so many ISVs from »outside the US and some of Europe« have opted to base their proprietary applications on GNOME and Gtk instead. After all, the market is completely flooded with those …

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 4, 2013 23:19 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (20 responses)

Counting ISVs and excluding custom in-house applications which is the much larger market shows limited perspective again but even if you only include ISV's several major asian accounting software uses GTK for example.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 4, 2013 23:51 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (19 responses)

It was Cyberax who claimed that ISVs found the commercial Qt license too expensive, and I was replying to that. I have no opinion regarding custom in-house applications, which are obviously under different constraints than software for external commercial distribution.

Anyway, my main point was that GNOME was started not exclusively because of KDE's licensing issues with Qt but also because of NIH and dislike of C++ on the part of the early GNOME developers. If Qt's licensing had been the only problem, it would clearly have been less work at the time to come up with a freely-licensed Qt clone to support KDE than to write most of a new X11 toolkit and a complete new desktop environment from scratch, and that would not have led to the same degree of fragmentation that we see now.

The fact that GNOME co-founder Miguel de Icaza later went on to develop Mono tells us that he doesn't seem to have a problem in principle with trying to clone huge pieces of very proprietary software such as .NET. Compared to the Microsoft stuff, Qt in the late 1990s was positively liberally licensed. Also, once a hypothetical free Qt clone had been finished to the degree that KDE ran on it, the KDE community could simply have abandoned the original Qt, thereby removing the necessity to track Qt forever the way Miguel de Icaza gets to track .NET.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 5, 2013 1:16 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (18 responses)

>The fact that GNOME co-founder Miguel de Icaza later went on to develop Mono tells us that he doesn't seem to have a problem in principle with trying to clone huge pieces of very proprietary software such as .NET. Compared to the Microsoft stuff, Qt in the late 1990s was positively liberally licensed.
Sure, and the Boston bomber is simply an angel, compared to Hitler. Why people want to keep him imprisoned?

>Also, once a hypothetical free Qt clone had been finished to the degree that KDE ran on it, the KDE community could simply have abandoned the original Qt, thereby removing the necessity to track Qt forever the way Miguel de Icaza gets to track .NET.
Nope. Cloning was never a solution, from the legal standpoint.

Also, you might note that Mono right now is actually used on more machines than the total amount of classic Linux desktops. Mostly because it is THE ONLY real language and framework that can be used to create software for ALL of the major mobile devices.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 5, 2013 6:57 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (17 responses)

Cloning was never a solution, from the legal standpoint.

So you say. I suppose that if one has no legal qualms about cloning .NET, what would keep one from cloning Qt? After all, Microsoft probably has more lawyers in the East Podunk, North Dakota, branch office than Trolltech ever had employees in the whole company.

Also, you might note that Mono right now is actually used on more machines than the total amount of classic Linux desktops.

And what does that have to do with anything? Presumably if Miguel de Icaza had devoted the same amount of energy to cloning Qt that he later put into cloning .NET all those machines might now be running his free Qt clone.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 5, 2013 7:03 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

It turns out that it's far easier to re-implement an existing API when you have a large workforce funded by the sale of a business than it is when you're a college student.

Based on personal experience: it's less difficult to write something with equivalent functionality than it is to write a re-implementation of something with a specified API.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 5, 2013 9:17 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

It turns out that it's far easier to re-implement an existing API when you have a large workforce funded by the sale of a business than it is when you're a college student.

Probably. After all, everyone knows that a college student would never be able to come up with something really big and complicated – like, say, an industry-strength Unix-like operating system kernel.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 5, 2013 7:04 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (14 responses)

> So you say. I suppose that if one has no legal qualms about cloning .NET, what would keep one from cloning Qt? After all, Microsoft probably has more lawyers in the East Podunk, North Dakota, branch office than Trolltech ever had employees in the whole company.
Microsoft explicitly allowed cloning, by standardizing .NET. They've also granted a royalty-free license for their patents on core .NET technologies.

Any realistic API-compatible clone of QT would be deemed a derived work because of the overwhelming number of literal copying that'll be required.

> And what does that have to do with anything? Presumably if Miguel de Icaza had devoted the same amount of energy to cloning Qt that he later put into cloning .NET all those machines might now be running his free Qt clone.
See above.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 5, 2013 7:31 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (13 responses)

Any realistic API-compatible clone of QT would be deemed a derived work because of the overwhelming number of literal copying that'll be required.

If there is stuff that you need to copy literally because it is the only way to do something then that stuff is probably not eligible for copyright in the first place. Given that copyright is supposed to protect the output of the creative process, generally a work needs to be creative in order to be copyrightable, and if there is only one possible way of writing something down then coming up with that way is not especially creative.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 5, 2013 7:53 UTC (Fri) by dark (guest, #8483) [Link] (12 responses)

But Qt is C++, which means a lot of the implementation can be in the interface. For example qlist.h contains the entire QList implementation (mostly as templates). On the one hand, it would take an expert to figure out what you can change without breaking compatibility. On the other hand, it's 900 lines of complicated code and it seems unlikely that a court will decide there's no creative expression in there.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 5, 2013 9:13 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (11 responses)

This is what clean-room techniques are for. You have someone write a spec and/or tests and have somebody else, who hasn't seen the original (Qt or whatever) source, write the actual implementation to suit the spec and tests.

You obviously can't copy something that you have never seen, and anyway your own implementation will probably differ enough in detail to no longer look like an outright copy of the original to begin with.

It is probably worth noting that at the time we're talking about (late 1990s), Qt used to be considerably smaller and simpler than it is now.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 5, 2013 18:14 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (10 responses)

That simply won't work for complicated C++ stuff. Too much logic in the interface.

And anyway, you have now moved on from stuff that a small company or a collection of individuals can do to the stuff that requires a large company with a legal department.

Now think about it, suppose that I spent $100^500 to clone QT - what do I achieve?

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 5, 2013 21:03 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (9 responses)

Now think about it, suppose that I spent $100^500 to clone QT - what do I achieve?

Nobody needs to clone Qt now. For one, Qt is now available under a reasonable selection of licences, and secondly, Qt is by now uncomfortably large and complicated.

Cloning Qt instead of implementing GNOME and most of Gtk from scratch would have been a more reasonable proposition 15 years ago when Qt was a much smaller piece of software. We might have avoided the desktop environment fragmentation that plagues us now if we could have standardised on KDE at a fairly early stage instead of coming up with a competing desktop environment.

On the other hand, chances are that even if Qt had been available under the LGPL from the beginning, the GNOME people would still have started GNOME just to be contrary. GNOME was initially as much about NIH and not wanting to use C++ as it was about Qt licensing.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 5, 2013 21:09 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (8 responses)

Ok. Imagine yourself in 1998 and you want to start building a free desktop, which can be used for commercial products as well.

What do you do? Spend millions to clone a crappy UI toolkit with a guaranteed lawsuit afterwards? And what for, just to appease a bunch of developers of a marginal desktop environment (KDE)?

Nope, GTK creation was an entirely logical step at that time. Dislike of C++ might have played a role, but it wasn't decisive.

Of course, NOW we have QT under a reasonable license and it's much better than GTK. But we're talking about ancient history.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 5, 2013 21:25 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (7 responses)

Nope, GTK creation was an entirely logical step at that time. Dislike of C++ might have played a role, but it wasn't decisive.

If it had been up to me personally, I would have put the same effort that the GNOME people put into making Gtk usable (it was really bad at the time) into Tk instead (which was freely available and a lot farther along than Gtk). But of course the GNOME people didn't like that idea, either – NIH, remember –, so they basically had to roll their own no matter what. A bit like what the Canonical folks are doing today.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 5, 2013 21:39 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (6 responses)

Tk is... well... Tk.

It had its own problems and idiosyncrasies: it was not themeable, it had poor cross-platform support, no support for TrueType fonts and so on. Oh, and it also was butt-ugly.

"Approaching user interface design with a programmer's mindset can only end in pain, tragedy, and Tk." (c) David Vallner.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 5, 2013 23:27 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (5 responses)

Tk has been themable for a number of years now; there is no reason to believe that with appropriate effort that could have been built in earlier. As far as cross-platform support goes, you are misinformed; in the late 1990s Tk ran on Windows and the Mac as well as on X11 (including unusual X11 platforms like VMS), with native-looking widgets. In the late 1990s, TrueType font support was basically up to the X server, so if your X server supported them then Tk would too. (Now that we have XRENDER Tk of course supports that.) »Ugly« is in the eye of the beholder; Tk was originally built to look like Motif, which in the early 1990s was the obvious thing to emulate. In the meantime tastes have changed, and with Tk's theme support there is no reason why a Tk GUI should look any different than a Qt or Gtk GUI.

Tk also had some good things going for it in the late 1990s, such as very flexible geometry management, reasonable UTF-8 support (which at the time no other popular toolkit bothered with), or the canvas and text widgets which were really quite useful. It always seemed silly to me that somebody would spend vast amounts of effort to make Gtk into something that anyone except the GIMP developers would actually want to use; the same amount of work put into Tk would easily have taken care of all the things that people like bashing Tk for and then some. But then of course there is no accounting for taste, and »NIH« is a very powerful motivator.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 6, 2013 1:03 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (4 responses)

So why hasn't KDE chosen Tk instead of proprietary QT?

Sorry, you can't have it both ways. Either GTK was a logical step to create a free UI toolkit, or KDE caused huge fragmentation by choosing a proprietary UI toolkit instead of working with free UI toolkit developers.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 6, 2013 12:27 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (3 responses)

When KDE started out there were no other free desktop environments (there were lots of free applications but nothing that tried to present a unified »look and feel« similar in scope to, say, that of the Mac). KDE took its inspiration from CDE, which at the time wasn't free at all. You can't really cause fragmentation if you're the first on the scene.

Personally I would of course have preferred to see a free desktop environment based on something like Tk rather than Qt. However, the KDE developers did not see fit to consult me before they got started ;^) You would have to ask them (more specifically, Matthias Ettrich) to find out exactly why they picked Qt. There is some information about their reasoning available on the KDE web site, but that very likely includes some hindsight.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 6, 2013 19:20 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

The reason why Qt was picked is actually quite simple - Tk was (and still is) butt-ugly and hard to extend. And there was nothing else really available at that time.

GTK developers faced the same exact situation, except that they were against proprietary Qt.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 6, 2013 19:33 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

Your comment only tells us that you apparently haven't done much with Tk.

The GNOME people took an atrocious toolkit (Gtk) that had very little traction at the time and was barely good enough to support one single application (The GIMP) and spent massive effort to make it into something they could use for their written-from-scratch desktop environment. They could have put the same sort of effort into Tk and made it into something vastly better with less work. Tk, for its flaws, is really quite well-engineered and well-documented and it would have been absolutely feasible at the time to build a desktop environment based on it (at least as much so as building one based on what was then Gtk). I'd personally be inclined to think the main reason the GNOME people didn't do that is NIH and/or ignorance and/or not wanting to work with the Tk community.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 6, 2013 20:59 UTC (Sat) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

Maybe they perceived Tk as strongly coupled to Tcl, and didn't like Tcl.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 5, 2013 1:11 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

Most ISVs simply looked at Linux and decided it's not worth it to fork over tons of dollars just for a crappy UI toolkit (and QT _was_ a crappy UI toolkit back then). The company I worked back then in Russia simply decided to use Java and SWING instead.

BTW, actually try look at commercial Unix software - I think most of it used GTK back then.

Oh, and if we're talking about fragmentation - why hasn't KDE used Motif? After all, it's totally free with JUST a $5000 per developer pricetag! I totally can't imagine why people would decide to write something that doesn't require forking over tons of bucks, with a vendor lock-in.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 5, 2013 7:11 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

Most ISVs simply looked at Linux and decided it's not worth it to fork over tons of dollars just for a crappy UI toolkit (and QT _was_ a crappy UI toolkit back then).

However bad Qt may have been at the time, Gtk was many times worse. Its main raison d'être was supporting The GIMP, and it took a major effort on the part of the early GNOME crowd to get it anywhere near where Qt was. Which, looking back, seems all the more silly given that there were better free alternatives around – and supports the thesis that GNOME was at least as much about NIH than it was about Qt licensing.

BTW, actually try look at commercial Unix software - I think most of it used GTK back then.

That which didn't use Motif or even other things like Tk which were more popular. (Tcl/Tk used to be pretty big in the (commercial) VLSI design scene, for example.) AFAIR, Gtk at the time had a fairly small slice of the cake as far as commercial development went.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 5, 2013 7:16 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> However bad Qt may have been at the time, Gtk was many times worse. Its main raison d'être was supporting The GIMP, and it took a major effort on the part of the early GNOME crowd to get it anywhere near where Qt was.
Duh. So what? It was obvious that some time will be required to reach a level where GTK is better than QT for most applications.

>Which, looking back, seems all the more silly given that there were better free alternatives around – and supports the thesis that GNOME was at least as much about NIH than it was about Qt licensing.
Which alternatives? Lesstif? Or maybe early EFL?

> That which didn't use Motif or even other things like Tk which were more popular. (Tcl/Tk used to be pretty big in the (commercial) VLSI design scene, for example.) AFAIR, Gtk at the time had a fairly small slice of the cake as far as commercial development went.
VMWare used it, several commercial suite also used it. Then lots of software started to use Eclipse which on Linux is based on GTK.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 3, 2013 12:05 UTC (Wed) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link]

In the old days, GNOME has an installer and installs itself nicely to /opt/gnome ( I got such information from books in library, correct me if I'm wrong. )

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 3, 2013 12:27 UTC (Wed) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (1 responses)

> Imagine a poor third part developer that wants to create a "Linux" desktop app. Which desktop to target? Which distro to target?

Why bother do so?

Remember the old quote? "I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately. I'm sorry that this is the case but it wasn't GNOME's fault that Ubuntu has started this fork. And I have no idea what XFCE is or does sorry."

Source: https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685#comment:4

In many cases Web app is a better choice.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 3, 2013 23:33 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

> In many cases Web app is a better choice.

Yeah, if only everything on the desktop could be solved with that approach. Unfortunately, real desktop still needs real applications - which is what actually distinguishes the desktop from the new breed of devices.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 3, 2013 15:37 UTC (Wed) by AdamW (subscriber, #48457) [Link] (4 responses)

Eh. I don't see that most desktop applications have to 'target a desktop' or 'target a distribution' at all. Just pick a toolkit and write your app using the appropriate functions. It's the job of the desktops to ensure it then appears correctly in their paradigm.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 3, 2013 15:41 UTC (Wed) by AdamW (subscriber, #48457) [Link]

...though I *do* wish all the desktops would buy in to Freedesktop.org / XDG standards a little more strongly, like was the case back in the middle of KDE 3 / GNOME 2. We had things working pretty well cross-desktop for a while there. It's a shame that particularly GNOME, Unity and KDE have gone off and sprouted a few mechanisms with no consideration for cross-desktop compatibility since then.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 3, 2013 22:07 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (2 responses)

Just like Fedora release folks (yourself included) have trouble doing QA against so many different desktops (which is completely understandable), so would a third party application developer. Just consider the combinatorial explosion of the desktop/distro/version matrix that this poor third party would have to try to ensure the app works against. And all that to target 1% of the market. That is probably one of the reasons they stay away from it.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 4, 2013 4:40 UTC (Thu) by AdamW (subscriber, #48457) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, mostly we're not QAing other things 'against' desktops, we're just checking that *the desktops themselves* work. In general I would expect that a third-party app designed to be 'desktop neutral' would run fine on *all* of them if it ran fine on *any* of them.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Posted Jul 5, 2013 0:32 UTC (Fri) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

> Well, mostly we're not QAing other things 'against' desktops, we're just checking that *the desktops themselves* work.

Yeah, the bar for Fedora QA is even lower and yet this many desktops are clearly not testable.

> In general I would expect that a third-party app designed to be 'desktop neutral' would run fine on *all* of them if it ran fine on *any* of them.

In general - very general.

In practice, if say Adobe wanted PhotoShop to work on Linux (say top 5 distros and all supported desktops they ship), they would have to perform regression testing against all combinations and they would have to make sure the software actually installs on all these different systems. That is a lot of effort for 1% market share with no clear direction "winner".

We can pretend it's something else, but IMHO it's just fragmentation.

Fedora 19 released

Posted Jul 3, 2013 10:43 UTC (Wed) by hadrons123 (guest, #72126) [Link] (3 responses)

>Not to throw Dan under any buses, I love the guy, but please note he and upstream have been trying to fix this issue for something like three months now.
I know. I like Dan too. I have reported my observations on that bug too.
>It is clearly not an easy fix.
I understand.
>What do you want us to do? Delay the entire Fedora 19 release indefinitely (since we clearly have no reliable timeframe for a fix) due to a superficial bug in a single fairly new desktop spin?
I don't expect to delay the entire F19 release. But when you have released the OS already, how about an updated image of MATE-LiveCD alone when the bug is fixed, since the bug is reasonably troublesome when it involves the file manager and bringing the system down for the sake of the users?

An updated image which is not tested as much as the release is better than the "broken caja which brings the system down". Can't the QA guys make this as an exception for the users since its too big to be neglected?

Fedora 19 released

Posted Jul 3, 2013 15:38 UTC (Wed) by AdamW (subscriber, #48457) [Link] (2 responses)

Um. The bunch of windows doesn't 'bring the system down': you can just close them all and the system will work fine. If you're seeing the system not working, it seems likely you're actually seeing *two* bugs. All other reporters so far indicate that the bunch-o-windows problem is entirely superficial.

Fedora 19 released

Posted Jul 3, 2013 16:44 UTC (Wed) by hadrons123 (guest, #72126) [Link] (1 responses)

I am not seeing 2 bugs. The bunch of caja windows actually fills the screen with mate-panel using 99% of the CPU and I have to kill the X server in Terminal. Its not really bunch where you can just close all the open windows. Its about hundreds of caja-windows. AdamW, Thanks for the reply though!

Fedora 19 released

Posted Jul 3, 2013 18:44 UTC (Wed) by AdamW (subscriber, #48457) [Link]

Huh, that's definitely worse than the cases we saw in testing. I've hit the bug myself, several times, and for me it's just ten windows or so and it's fairly easy to just close 'em all and start working. The issue does seem to be a timing bug, so maybe it's not only a case of 'happens or not', but there's a spectrum of how badly it happens, and your system is affected worse than most :( Sorry about that.

We don't really do official respins, but once there's a confirmed fix for the bug, Dan and I may throw up a strictly unofficial respin somewhere.

Fedora 19 released

Posted Jul 3, 2013 14:07 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

> I don't understand how the QA doesn't think it as critical. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=886029.

Looking through the bug report it seems like less of a problem with Fedora and more of a problem with Mate supported a confusing array of semi-obsolete ways of launching applications at user's log in.

This issue, I believe, has mostly been solved on KDE or Gnome.

Too bad that Mate so confusing that even the spin authors can't figure out how to do it right.

> depressingly Poor QA for the all the RH money spent on the quality.

If you want to find out what Redhat spent it's money on then don't use Mate.


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