Contributors: GNOME equal to KDE

[danielnez1]

only because you see a lot of people complaining does not imply that they are the significant majority. usually people don't post in forums when they are happy with what they have.


considering several statistics i saw (sorry that i cannot come up with a link) seem to talk a different truth than you seem to think. i may be wrong, but your argument is insufficient.

I would be very interested to see such a link. At the end of the day, the students I see represent an a more independent viewpoint of the Linux world then what we do since we are more entrenched with it. Unfortunately that can make you blind to issues that are obvious to an outsider looking in.

After two years on the trot of hearing opinions GNOME 3 from Students' who know little about GNOME or Linux as opposed to fanboys, apologists etc. I'm more inclined to take on board the criticism they give rather than hyperbole.

[Vim_User]

actually it seems that by far more people are happy about the new gnome shell than the old calssic mode (including me as i hate since over 15 years the widespread scheme of a task bar and start-menu-like stuff, widely used but very inefficient, while many better designs got lost due to people ignoring new ideas).

There are tons of WMs with different design paradigms and a bunch of WMs that can be setup the way you want, so why being angry for 15 years instead of actually making a change (unless you are also someone ignoring ideas, which I doubt)?

[timothyja]

Redhat traditionally supports Gnome and GTK+. SUSE generally supports KDE and Qt is supported by it's parent company. Red Hat also acutally does contribute a bit to kde. Thene there is this new Blue Systems company which has hired several KDE devs to work on KDE. Both projects are getting corporate support.

Just to add to this SUSE also contributes to Gnome and GTK+.

[a user]

While I agree that consumers are exposed to UIs these days, I don't believe that is relevant to my point since if the GNOME Shell was truly an advancement in usability etc. it wouldn't received as much criticism as it has.

actually it seems that by far more people are happy about the new gnome shell than the old calssic mode (including me as i hate since over 15 years the widespread scheme of a task bar and start-menu-like stuff, widely used but very inefficient, while many better designs got lost due to people ignoring new ideas).

only because you see a lot of people complaining does not imply that they are the significant majority. usually people don't post in forums when they are happy with what they have.

considering several statistics i saw (sorry that i cannot come up with a link) seem to talk a different truth than you seem to think. i may be wrong, but your argument is insufficient.

[movieman]

So what are you suggesting? Adding the complexity to the Shell because no one cares to do the house keeping?

Uh, no. Just build a sane GUI in the first place.

The other problem with extensions, even if someone does maintain them, is that you have no idea whether they'll be installed on any random computer you use.

The solution to that, also, is to build a sane GUI in the first place.

[n3wu53r]

Four letters followed by one number. RHEL7. You should be happy for a free desktop to get this kind of support. Sure it is not what you prefer. There is no reason to get angry with me. Im no more than a messenger. The contributors did the real work on Gnome.

Redhat traditionally supports Gnome and GTK+. SUSE generally supports KDE and Qt is supported by it's parent company. Red Hat also acutally does contribute a bit to kde. Thene there is this new Blue Systems company which has hired several KDE devs to work on KDE. Both projects are getting corporate support.

Now a lot of people are talking about KDE's code base bloating. This is a little misleading.

http://www.ohloh.net/p/compare?project_0=KDE&project_1=GNOME#

12 month stats kde gnome
Lines Added 7,574,841 lines 3,010,670 lines
Lines Removed 7,663,744 lines 2,358,901 lines

30 day stats kde gnome
Lines Added 363,214 lines 165,033 lines
Lines Removed 1,043,151 lines 148,504 lines
It seems gnome's LOC are going up, while KDE's are going slightly down.
Also, KDE's LOC are super inflated from what they truly are. Look at code locations.
Gnome: http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome/enlistments
KDE: http://www.ohloh.net/p/kde/enlistments

KDE has a lot more applications using it's hosting infrastructure. For example KDE has Calligra Office Suite, which is 1.4 million lines of code! That is included in the KDE count while gnome has no office suite hosted on it's git repos. The same with applications like Digikam (400k lines), kdenlive (100k lines, pitivi not on gnome repos). KDE hosts tons of Software, many different music players (juk, amarok). Video players (Kaffeine, dragon, bangarang). 2 different browser (rekonq, konqueror). KDE repos also have a mirror of the Qt repository. This mirror ALONE ADDS MILLIONS of lines to the count. Taking this in to account the code base is not as big as it seems.

[danielnez1]

Great argument of those who don't have one.

I don't think great arguments are Honton's forte sadly.

Gnome might work up the angry complainers but they also tend to keep alot of silent doers.

Great argument of those who don't have one.

Gnome is a GREAT product and you should be happy about that. No one comes close to this level of corporate support.

If it is great it will be more popular than KDE and Unity, but it seems it's much less popular. What corporate support do you get from gnome or what corporate support does gnome receive? KDE's using the best available toolkit which is really advanced and very well supported unlike Gtk. Gnome 2 was much better and Gnome 3 is unusable for many people, because of its stupid launcher.

[danielnez1]

At that time, there were very few alternative UI excluding OS/2 (Mac OS does not count because Apple ran on different architectures).
Today, consumers are exposed to several different UI flavours than before, you cannot compare to what happened two decades ago.

While I agree that consumers are exposed to UIs these days, I don't believe that is relevant to my point since if the GNOME Shell was truly an advancement in usability etc. it wouldn't received as much criticism as it has.

Gnome Shell isnt that jarring, it sounds like you are very conservative in UI appearance much like enterprise audiences (Microsoft Windows NT series for enterprise still retains the old Win2000 UI interface at the request).
RHEL7 is doing the same thing while still gradually incorporating the new Gnome 3 features.

I demonstrate on a System Administration module at the University I'm at and the Linux machines have had the GNOME Shell for the past 2 years. Every year the students complain about how difficult and frustrating it is to use and by the end of the module a large proportion of them either ssh into the Virtual Machines the use from their own Laptops or use the Fallback mode. It is pretty embarrassing. This year KDE has been installed alongside GNOME so at least students will have a choice.

I wouldn't consider my self a traditionalist, by all means the GNOME developers have every right to try out new things but their execution has been extremely poor with their "all or nothing" approach.