“10 reasons why GNOME is better than KDE” and other links…
Jack Wallen: “What replaced the ever-popular KDE 3.5 was something unstable, hardly usable, and as configurable as Windows Vista. Gone were the days of configuring KDE to your exact specifications. KDE was (and is) the first-ever “Microsofting” of the Linux desktop. The developers released something that was painfully worthless and refused to listen to the users when the users gave feedback. On the other side of the battlefront, you have GNOME, which is steadfastly moving forward — the same direction it has been moving for years.”
Because KDE has a reputation for being more complex and Linux power-user ‘friendly,’ it’s quite a surprise to find KDE morph into something that can be accused of emulating Microsoft, Vista-era designs.
Alternative to KDE and GNOME
Julian Coccia: “The fact that GNOME is getting heavier and more unreliable is not my main problem. The big issue I have is that it depends on the Linux implementation of .NET (Microsoft's framework) called Mono. THAT'S WRONG, PLAIN, SIMPLY WRONG. Mono used to be optional to GNOME, but now it is a dependency. To make things worst, more and more applications are migrating to Mono, which means that, soon, most of GNOME will be built on Microsoft's .NET. That seems to be very necessary for a lot of people, especially Microsoft. I, for one, don't want to have any Microsoft junk in my computer.”
My other lousy assumption was that GNOME would not get any where near Mono—because Miguel de Icaza can be charged with the “crime” of leaving the GNOME project to lead Mono development. More truth stranger than fiction…?
Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org
Michael Meeks: “the statistics show a picture of slow disengagement by Sun, combined with a spectacular lack of growth in the developer community. In a healthy project we would expect to see a large number of volunteer developers involved, in addition - we would expect to see a large number of peer companies contributing to the common code pool; we do not see this in OpenOffice.org. Indeed, quite the opposite we appear to have the lowest number of active developers on OO.o since records began: 24, this contrasts negatively with Linux's recent low of 160+. Even spun in the most positive way, OO.o is at best stagnating from a development perspective.” This one comes via Jeff Atwood.