desktop printing

[Stuart Jansen]

On Thu, 2004-12-02 at 13:55 +0000, Arturo wrote:
> Sorry for the offtopic question. I like Fedora, and I plan to stick to 
> it, but why does it so often feel that the Fedora devs just simply 
> forget KDE?

What follows is purely opinion formed while observing the development of
Linux for many years. It does not necessarily represent the opinion of
my employer, RH, SUSE, Linus Torvalds, Lee Iacocca, Vladmir Putin, or
any other person, organization, or entity, living, non-living, or
yet-to-live, besides myself.

My guess would be that it's one part strategic, one part historical.
First, the history: RH has generally striven to ship only unencumbered
software. When it ships anything else, it's usually because an
alternative doesn't exist. If you go back many years, Qt used to be
partially encumbered, thereby making KDE less than Free (per. FSF
definition). The issue was resolved, but not before Gnome had gained
momentum. Now we get to the strategic part. It takes time and money to
maintain a polished desktop. RH has invested more into Gnome. SUSE has
invested more in KDE. RH has taken alot of abuse over KDE, but in my
opinion SUSE has historically done even worse with Gnome. (Hopefully
this will change as Novell continues to integrate Novell, Ximian, and
SUSE to form a single company.) Both RH and SUSE are commercial
entities, they have to prioritise and allocate resources. Gentoo and
Debian, both of which are mostly volunteer based, have done a decent job
of packaging both desktops, only occasionally demonstrating a partial
preference for one or the other. And that's the root of the problem.
Companies are best off picking one general direction and sticking to it,
volunteers can afford to explore the whole map.

Now we come to where you fit in. Because RH is welcoming volunteer
support in the development of Fedora, you can help improve the quality
of KDE support in Fedora. The more you do by testing, reporting bugs,
and submitting patches, the more momentum KDE will have within the
Fedora project.

Until then, don't be surprised if Gnome enjoys a favored status simply
because more people developing and testing Fedora are using it. Some
people get upset or make accusations, but resist the temptation. Just
keep providing gentle reminders like you did in your message.

-- 
Stuart Jansen <sjansen at gurulabs.com>
Guru Labs, L.C.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-desktop-list/attachments/20041202/f01ce604/attachment.sig>