Is Redhat/Fedora Losing Interest in KDE?

[Andy Green]

David Cary Hart wrote:

I don't think RH is losing interest in KDE, but I do have a rant about it.

>>My LinuxPPC FC5 iMac runs KDE much better than Gnome (gnome crashes
>>eash time I try to use it.)

I did not in recent memory have a KDE or Gnome crash, it is all very
solid nowadays.

> I don't want to (re)ignite the Gnome-Kde food fight but I much prefer
> KDE. 

To be fair before the partisan stuff , Gnome and Nautilus has improved a
lot since the last time I really tried it in RH9 days.

After the SuSE announcement that KDE was to be backburnered (I since
read it was something of a lesser commitment) I tried Gnome for a couple
of weeks.  When I realized that I was staring at a Gnome desktop covered
in KDE apps (kate, kwrite, konsole, in the end even konqueror for
filesystem navigation) superior enough to the Gnome equivalents (I did
not find a Gnome equivalent to the excellent kate) to be chosen over
them, I had a bit of an epiphany that I was in fact a KDE person.  I
went back to KDE 3.4 and await FC5 for KDE 3.5.  Afterwards I read
Linus' rant and the responses and I knew where that was coming from.

Then today a recent update broke Alsa in xmms for me, so I tried
rhythmbox.  There was no way I could find, even after I googled to find
out about gstreamer-properties, to select a non-default Alsa sound
channel, eg, 0.2.  What an insult that is, to "protect the user" by not
presenting even gstreamer-properties capability in the enduser app, no
way to discover it from the app either.  This "present simplicity to the
user" boils down to "make the user google (and feel inadequate when they
deviate from the usability script)".  It's like the undiscoverable
Ctrl-L in the Gnome File Open dialog all over again: Ctrl-L, the
"obvious solution" to typing filepaths.

In the end the reductionism in vogue in Gnome leads to the lightswitch.
 There is one user bimodal interface element and there is one pixel.
It's perfect and it's useful but it's not what you need in a desktop
environment.

-Andy
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