I originally saw this on a site called Planet SuSE. Please review my recent comments about GNOME and or the KDE. There are plenty of messages I posted online which can be retrieved. Of particular interest might be the week I spent crashing MonoDevelop. Oh, and do review my recent post describing my conversation with sun's senior manager of new product development. http://primates.ximian.com/~fejj/blog/archives/000035.html November 09, 2005 My Dad's Thoughts With the layoff announcement(s) and the recent FUD article by a KDE developer about Novell dropping support for KDE, my dad called me up this morning (that and we haven't spoken on the phone in a a few weeks) to do his fatherly duty and make sure everything was OK on my end and offer up his comments. After assuring him that I still had a job (wooo!), he commented that he had read (presumably on E-Week since I doubt he reads Slashdot or The DOT) that Novell was dropping KDE in favour of GNOME. He went on to say that he was glad that GNOME was chosen (as if I have anything to do with decision making) because he's gotten to really like the GNOME desktop and that he feels that GNOME is the more professional desktop of the two (he's used KDE extensively as well[1]). I asked my dad for clarification on why he thought GNOME was more professional - partly to pat myself on the back (hey! I'm a GNOME dev!), but also because I was genuinely interested in why he felt that way. What he told me was that from the comments he's seen by "KDE folks" always seemed to be immature and unprofessional - insulting GNOME and the GNOME developers without any technical merit, but purely based on emotional outcry. He's noticed it both in articles announcing GNOME accomplishments and in articles announcing KDE accomplishments. He's also noticed that the "pro-GNOME" commenters rarely stoop to such low levels of flaming KDE and it's developers, but rather stay positive. My dad feels that any accomplishment for KDE or GNOME is a win for Linux and is always happy to see either, but over the past few years that he's been using Linux and pushing Linux at work, he feels less and less desire to go with KDE because of such unprofessionalism from the KDE community. My dad didn't say this, but I can say with reasonable certainty that my dad couldn't care less about GNOME vs KDE, he just wants Linux to get better and become more viable to companies wanting to ditch Windows on the desktop. He also doesn't care about technical arguments about the underlying architectures of either desktop, he simply cares that the desktop is easy to use and works without problems. [1] My dad has been using Linux both at work (USGS) and at home for about 5 years now. His office has a couple Red Hat (using GNOME... wooo!) machines because he pushed hard for Linux (afaik they are Red Hat, I know they're not SuSE/Novell) but I think most of the desktops are currently Windows. I know he'd love to see the day when all of the desktops are Linux (but we gotta hurry, he's gonna retire in another 2 years!). When I first got my dad into Linux, he went with KDE (the first distro he "soloed" was Mandrake which installed KDE by default) and I never pushed him to use GNOME, I let him use whatever he wanted. He now runs Ubuntu. He switched to GNOME about 3 or 4 years ago now, I think right around the time Evolution 1.0 was released. Anyways... the reason I'm posting this is because I just loaded up Slashdot to find, much to my dismay, yet more GNOME/Ximian bashing. I keep hoping that these insults are not coming from the KDE developers themselves but rather just the vocal immature 12 year olds that seem to like flinging mud at GNOME whenever they get the chance. Maybe they're just jealous that we have clue and they bought theirs in isle 9 at K-Mart. I don't know. I wish more KDE followers could look up to and try to emulate great KDE hackers such as Mattias Etrich (spelling?) who are really great people, not only for their maturity but also for their ability to see the Big Picture(tm) and for being able to compliment the "opposition" (the quotes are because KDE and GNOME shouldn't feel they are competitors, they should be more like brothers in arms). Anyways, I mention Mattias because I remember speaking with him at GUADEC 2 in Denmark quite a few years ago now and I recall him praising Evolution and it felt really great to hear a KDE developer with such status as his saying something nice for a change, it restored my belief that KDE developers weren't the bunch of whiney immature idiots running around trolling on Slashdot. I still hope this is the case, I sincerely want to believe that it's not the KDE developers being so immature. I have felt this way for a long time now about the pro-KDE commenters on forums like Slashdot, Linuxtoday, and so on but haven't said anything because it'd be too easy for people to come back and say "yea, but you're a GNOME developer so you are biased". My dad has not chosen GNOME because I work on it (in fact, he didn't even know what I was working on until this morning when I told him over the phone), so his choice of GNOME is completely unbiased. My hope is that the people throwing out insults left and right about GNOME/Ximian and its developers will cease being so immature and irrational. Sadly, it's more likely that the insults will continue. sigh As one last plea to the KDE community (hopefully this need not apply to the developers) to straighten up and act professional... if this is what my dad sees and concludes, isn't it also likely that this is what other people are seeing? And if so, perhaps this is why there is so much more support for GNOME by corporations. They just don't want to deal with people who are so unprofessional. If you want KDE to be taken seriously, then you need to act professional. Note: These comments are my own and my dad's and not Novell's or anyone elses from the "Ximian Division" (hopefully I'm not saying anything that will be disagreeable by Novell). Posted by fejj at 10:20 PM | GNOME Comments Post a comment