Why KDE?

Fri Jun 14 08:01:42 BST 2002

personally, i prefer KDE more than GNOME though i am still considered new to
the linux world. the applications running under KDE are much more
"standardized" from the look and feel, as well as the way the applications
behave. this contributes a lot of user-friendliness and integrity of the
whole system. GNOME, though sometimes the interface might seem much more
attractive, the inter-operatability between the applications is not there.
there is also no standardized user interface such as the menu items,
shortcut keys and so on. the advantage of KDE over this might be owing to
the presence of a single powerful development environment, the KDevelop. i
believe that further enhancement to the KDevelop will further popularize the
operating system over those commercialized O$.

regards,
YK (Yong Khun, Loh)
<ykloh at lkta.com.my>
-------------------

-----Original Message-----
From: kde-admin at mail.kde.org [mailto:kde-admin at mail.kde.org]On Behalf Of
CiAsA S'Nuey Boark
Sent: Friday, 14 June, 2002 10:11 AM
To: kde at mail.kde.org
Subject: Re: [kde] Why KDE?

On Friday 14 June 2002 07:38 am, Jannik Lindquist wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am new to Linux and puzzled by the fact that there are no less than
> two different ambitious desktops available. If I have understood
> correctly, GNOME is the oldest of the two projects. Why was KDE created
> when GNOME was already there? After all one of KDE's core tenets is:
>
> * Use available tools rather than reinventing existing ones!

your pretty misinformed there.  KDE was the first of the two desktop
environments. As a short (probably misinformed also) explanation:

	Before either project was formed, there was no comprehensive desktop
environment for linux.  So some guys from Europe decided to develop one.
The
toolkit they chose was the Q toolkit.  It was chosen because of its
stability
and maturity (if not for other reasons)
	The only problem was that QT was not licensed under an opensource license
and
a good number of people didn't like that (RMS in particular).  RMS and his
hoodlums decided to create their own desktop environment to compete with
KDE.
They chose the Gimp Toolkit (which was licensed under the LGPL I believe) as
a basis.
	The kind folks at Trolltech decided at some point to relicense QT under a
different license for their X11 version, the license was the QPL.  The QPL
is
somewhat like the GPl, but not quite (both the GPL and QPL should be
included
with the QT source if your interested in reading/comparing them).  Pretty
much everybody that already used KDE liked this, while RMS and the general
gnome crowd didn't.
	(skip a good bit of time and come to the QT2 versions...)
	QT-X11 is relicensed under a dual license.  At compile time the user can
select whether to abide by the QPL or the GPL

	Anyway, thats about enough.  The change to the dual license pleased as many
people as can possibly be pleased, but by that time Gnome was too far along
in development to just dump it (I believe it was at 1.2 by that time, but
I'm
not too sure).  To make a long story short, KDE was there first, and Gnome
was founded because of the fear of both the possible closing of QT as well
as
the (supposedly) murky legal waters surrounding including KDE (GPL) apps
compiled against a non-GPL license.

	keep in mind that this is all comming straight from memory here.  It would
be
better to do a google search and see what you get.

a little more info on the legalities at:
http://www.debian.org/News/1998/19981008
--
Many pages make a thick book.

Jonathan Nelson [icq=56665957] [aim=ciasaboark]

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