Novell is dumping KDE, so I'll be dumping SuSE
 

It looks like Novell execs are still out of touch with their userbase (Hell, look at how long before they realized Netware was dead. It took them almost 10 years until they realize Netware had no future).

I came across this thread ( http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl...id=223&tid=106 ) on Slashdot and read the article. I immediately sent Novell an email indicating my disappointment in their current KDE policy. I strongly suspect that it is Qt/KDE licensing which is causing this move, but Novell has the resources to either "encourage" Trolltech to improve their licensing and make commercial app development more affordable ($1,900 / seat is FAR more expensive than it costs to develop Microsoft-centric apps!) so I suggested they do that in an email.

See, it was SuSE 9.1 that caused me to finally switch back to Linux, with the core reason being that SuSE is the one distribution I've seen which is both KDE-centric and Just Works™. I wouldn't dream of pushing the Gnome Desktop (which I used to love but now abhor) and I certainly would not force my developers to code for Gtk, which is outright hostile to developers relative to Qt/KDE.

Here is the text of my email to Novell:

I am of the (strong) opinion that KDE/kwin is far more friendly for end users who are coming from Windows, and for experienced Linux users who just want to get work done rather than tinker. I still occasionally run the Gnome Desktop Environment just to tinker in the rare occasion that I have some free time to do such things, but for an every day environment, I absolutely hate it. I really abhor it. If KDE hadn't matured so much recently I'd probably be running Gnome Desktop again, like I used to (that is, IF I had switched back to Linux last year) but when I sit down at a customer's Fedora box, I just cringe at the lack of integration, the fugly controls, and cringe at everything else about Gtk. I am by no means a KDE zealot - if something better comes along I'll happily dump KDE/kwin in favor of that, but for now at least I think KDE is the Linux desktop's best chance to compete with the Microsoft Windows monopoly. On every machine I configure the Gtk/Qt libraries so that Gtk apps take on the KDE environment's look and feel.

I really believe the issue at hand is Trolltech's obscene licensing - last week (Thursday I think, by sheer coincidence) I was looking into Qt licensing costs because I have a couple of products in mind I'd love to produce and make cross-platform, and the licensing cost shocked me. Then I came across this new Novell policy and I thought that it has GOT to be Trolltech's greedy licensing fees which are hindering widespread KDE application development. The solution Novell should take is not to dump KDE, which really is the reason for SuSE's success and rapid growth, but to encourage, force, or simply buy out Trolltech to make their licensing structure more attractive to commercial developers' adopting Qt/KDE.

Qt, thanks to KDevelop and countless volunteers who contributed to KDE, is much more developer-friendly and results in much more rapid application development, not to mention easier debugging. It's a better choice for development, especially when their is room for both open-source and commercial applications in the Linux world.

If you care at all about Novell's policy, please take the time to drop them an email asking them to keep KDE in SuSE, as the primary environment.

heh, odd coincidence... http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=380557

i'd say my take on why novell dumped it is more that they're just doing what redhat already does... their more likely to take some of their enterprise share from being very similar but 5% better than not being that close aesthetically. Obviously any long term admin isn't gonna touch X, but it's getting more capable and acceptable to use i'd say.

I've personally found gtk a great toolkit to code with, but i'll freely admit i've never even wanted to look at Qt's api's, so that's my loss, not theirs.

But at the end of the day, i think many people would resent you using them as part of the userbase you state you are highly representative of.

novell just did a 180 on kde. will continue to offer both.

But regardless, this is LINUX. So what if a distro doesn't offer the desktop you want? Just download and install it - we don't need to be spoonfed.

I bet NONE of you guys are running the version of SuSE that would have even been affected.

Ok, so now I must ask, raise your hands if you are running Novell Linux Desktop. Ok, no one, sounds good.

openSuSE was never going to drop KDE, ONLY THE NOVELL DESKTOP.

So with that put aside, I am glad they listened to their userbase, because IMO KDE > GNOME :)

zipidachimp>

Yeah that was mentioned in other threads - it's excellent use er, news.

acid_kewpie>
Most administration tasks are best done via CLI but the big money really is in the desktop and licensing, not on a handful of servers. Any site where they need a massive server farm (e.g., Akamai, Google, etc.) is going to roll their own distribution either by stripping down slackware or building it up totally from scratch - everyone else is going to just pick distribution foo and elect not to install X, or at most install it but make runlevel 3 the default init script.

Aside from groupware licensing and support, there isn't much money to be made on Server OS sales. Add-ons like Oracle, slick MySQL or PostgreSQL front ends, and other server apps, sure, those can bring in some big money (last job I had before self employment the server app sold for anywhere from $250K to $2.7mil) but for the most part the OS itself is going to offer slim to no profits. Support will net some, but really, the desktop is where it's at, even if the cost per seat is lower - thanks to the economy of scale. Microsoft didn't get rich off of Windows server editions - they got where they are before NT even existed, thanks to the desktop and bundling deals. They only got into server products when they realized that while there are only a handful of servers at most companies, by offering a complete solution (desktop AND server) they can capture even more of the market and end up with customers being locked into the vendor (Microsoft) thanks to legacy data amd infrastructure. I'm having a heck of a time dumping Microsoft Exchange due to exactly that reason - How can I migrate all of our data from the Microsoft Information Store into an open source (or proprietary) Linux solution?

Now to get away from the tangent: I'm all for dumping KDE from server editions of Novell Linux - but where SuSE Enterprise Linux is marketed for both servers and workstations, dumping KDE would have been a huge, huge mistake. It's been my experience that sitting users down in front of KDE will have them working right away with NO training, but sitting them down in front of Gnome will have them grinding and gnashing their teeth because it is too different from the MacDows(tm) :D experience they're used to.

For another look at this exact same subject, and more articles with more up to date info, including the fact they aren't "dumping" anything, just changing the default and only on SLES versions of SuSE...see this thread.

They're only changing default to GNOME for NLD and SLES, NOT SuSE or OpenSuSE.

Happy days.

xbennyboy>

Thanks for the "me too" on the updates others already posted. ;)

Yessss..someone gets it right. Most people tend to skip over or not follow what they actually read. Opensuse will not be affected by this...and kde will still be the primary desktop.