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Posts tagged as “GNOME”

GNOME Is Old Enough To Vote

GNOME logoOn Saturday the popular desktop environment GNOME turned eighteen. Always looking for an excuse for chocolate cake and ice cream, this is a birthday I celebrated, even though I’m not a user.

It’s hard to believe that GNOME is only eighteen, since it seems as if it’s been around forever.

KDE Tops Poll

It didn’t take nearly as long to count the votes for our desktop poll as it did for last week’s distro poll, mainly due to the fact that not as many of you voted, but also because there aren’t nearly as many desktop environments and window managers as their are Linux distros. Also, unlike the distro poll, there was a clear cut winner instead of a virtual tie.

KDEActually, of course, it’s not about winners and losers. It’s about what you like. It’s about preferences. After all, unless you’re a diehard command line person, the desktop is how you interact with your computer.

Again this year, KDE tops the list with a commanding lead, piling up over a quarter of the 617 votes cast. This is a huge drop from the 70 percent showing it made the last time we conducted a desktop poll, back in January and February of last year. In that poll, however, users were only given three desktop choices — KDE, GNOME 3 and Cinnamon. This year, voters were served up a menu that included eight popular desktops from which to choose. As in last year’s poll, voters could also opt to place write-in votes.

Why KDE? According to your comments, there were two major reasons: stability and configurability, with many of you saying, “It just works.” But there seemed to be some disagreement over whether KDE’s legendary configurability is as great as it once was.

Groupon & GNOME: Doing the Right Thing

First things first: I’m not heavily invested in GNOME. In fact, once GNOME 3 came out and — gasp! — no icons on the desktop, I said “vaya con dios” and made skid marks racing to Xfce, KDE and Openbox (on the CrunchBang box) on various machines in the lab. The reason is a matter of personal taste. For the most part, I like icons on my desktop, not in a tray on the side, and I like what they do when I click on them — like, you know, open programs.

But this is not to say I haven’t used GNOME lately. In a test drive on Sunday of Fedora 21 Workstation (that’s GNOME, for those of you keeping score at home), I was reminded why GNOME was not my personal favorite. Exhibit A: I have a tendency to amass large numbers of different copied material to which I often return from time to time — not a huge deal with Klipper in KDE or Clipman in Xfce. But in the current GNOME 3-point-whatever, the clipboard is being managed way behind the scenes, and that doesn’t work for me.

gnome-logoLet me be clear, for those GNOMEistas who might just have their proverbial knickers in a bunch: GNOME has been a remarkable FOSS citizen providing a better-than-adequate desktop environment for many FOSS users, perhaps even a majority of FOSS users. I just don’t happen to be one of them. Further, I will say this for GNOME: Unity should be more like GNOME. Compliment? You decide.

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

Questions on Ubuntu Touch, GNOME and Oracle

FOSS Week in Review

Other than the continuous scrambling to fix Shellshocked — if nothing else we in the FOSS world are both quick to respond to fixes and quick to come up with great names for epic bugs — this has been a relatively quiet week on our side of the digital street. Yeah, we can laugh at Apple for releasing an update that wasn’t really an update and at Microsoft for losing the ability to count, jumping from Window 8 to Windows 10, now with the improvement of having — wait for it — a command line.

But here are a couple of morsels in the FOSS realm this week, answering a few questions, like:

Hold the phone? Remember the Ubuntu Edge, the smartphone for which Mark Shuttleworth went, hat in hand, begging for $32 million so the wider digital community could fund his pet project?

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

Fedora 21 Alpha Gets Off on the Right Foot

I say this often – a little too often – and I’ve hammered home the point in various blogs, to say nothing of calling out people who “review” alpha or beta versions of distro releases: Reviewing an alpha or a beta version is akin to sticking your finger in a bowl of cake batter and writing about how a baked cake is going to turn out.

That said, this is not a review of the Fedora 21 Alpha, released yesterday, but rather a test drive of a version that is destined to be improved upon when it is released in December.

So now you can have your cake batter and eat it, too.

First, a moment of silence for the untimely demise of the Fedora Release Name, as Fedora 21 doesn’t have one. Fedora had the best process for release names, causing spirited debate and possibly fisticuffs along the way: $CURRENT_RELEASE_NAME is a ________ and so is $NEXT_RELEASE_NAME, with the blank being filled in with whatever the current name was. Fedora 20 Heisenbug was the last of the named Fedora releases.

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

KDE Tops Desktop Poll

KDEAccording to the results of our FOSS Force Desktop Poll, our readers prefer KDE over any other desktop environment by a wide margin. In fact, all other desktops were practically left at the gate.

The poll accompanied Ken Starks’ article Those Krazy Kids & KDE, which talked about the preference his Reglue kids express for the KDE desktop. Because Starks’ article focused on KDE, GNOME 3 and Cinnamon, we focused our poll on those same three desktops. However, we included an “Other” category, under which another desktop could be entered. The poll asked the question, “Which desktop environment do you prefer?”

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

GNOME 3, Windows 95 Disconnected

About a week and a half ago, I was nearly taken-in when an item appeared on The Register that tied recent Linux desktop woes to behind the scenes moves by Microsoft to enforce patents against GNOME. Supposedly, GNOME was violating Redmond’s patented designs of the Windows 95 desktop, most specifically the Start Menu and the Start button. According to the story painted by reporter Liam Proven, KDE was also guilty of violating the same patents, but got a pass as they benefited from the famous Novel/Microsoft patent swap deal, being they were the default desktop in SUSE.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

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