Ubuntu and KDE

[Christoph Bier]

George Farris schrieb:

[...]

> As a side note, I'm very happy with Ubuntu and GNOME and think it was a
> wise choice, it works extremely well.  Perhaps you could suggest what
> doesn't work for you rather than saying it doesn't meet your needs.

Hi George,

you didn't ask me, but I take the liberty of answering your posting.
For years I was a assured GNOME user as you could read in many
usenet postings if you understand german. But this changed with
version 2.x of GNOME. It has lost its flexibility. I even downgraded
Sarge to GNOME1.4, which I really like. Mainly the loss of
flexibility cost me lot of time to adjust the desktop of a my
girl-friend to meet her needs. She can't abandon edge-flipping of
sawfish (me neither!). So I tried to acitvate sawfish for this
feature. It was horrible. gconf-editor just ignored choosing sawfish
and went on starting metacity.

$ sudo update-alternatives --config x-window-manager

didn't work, too. So, I did the following dirty hack, which helped:

$ sudo chmod -x /usr/bin/metacity
$ sudo killall metacity && sleep 1 && sawfish &

But this is far from comfortable! And it was not enough. To make
edge-flipping available, I had to create a .sawfishrc with the line
(require 'sawfish.wm.ext.edge-flip). Sure, I found the solution via
Google and I'm not an unexperienced Linux user. But if you are
familiar with GNOME1.4 where choosing sawfish with edge-flipping was
just a piece of cake, it's not easy to fall in love with GNOME2.x.

Furthermore in GNOME2.x I miss the possibility of path completion in
dialog boxes. Maybe it can be activated /somewhere/ ... I also miss
some of the nice applets. So GNOME loses its advantages over KDE for me.

I don't know whether KDE would meet my needs, I even guess it will
not! But there's one special thing I miss in GNOME since I saw it on
a KDE desktop: a comfortable tool to access mobile phones via
bluetooth. gnome-bluetooth* is far away from, what I've seen there.
I think I would still use GNOME, but I'd like to have the liberty to
access KDE programs, too, with a comfortable package manager.
(Actually I'd like to use XFce ... but I'd still like to use GNOME
and KDE programs.)

Some LaTeX users like Kile very much for editing their LaTeX files.
But it's a KDE program. There's nothing similar for GNOME! (*I*
don't need Kile or something similar for GNOME, I found my editor.
But some of my friends ...)

I always read, that there were soo many KDE centric distributions
and that's why Ubuntu should be GNOME centric. This is a conclusion
I really don't understand. I don't want to choose my linux
distribution because of the DE it supports. I'd appreciate a
distribution, that lets the user decide which DE to use. Or is it a
question of faith? Sure, I could install everything from source. But
one of the main advantages of debian based distributions is dpkg.

If the Ubuntu maintainers decide to stay only GNOME centric, it's
ok. Then I will never ask again or answer postings like yours,
George. But the FAQ states: "We are working with the KDE team to
collaborate on that, so that Ubuntu will be an excellent platform
for KDE users too... more on that in due course." I just want to
know. It's ok for me to search for other debian based distributions
to install on friend's PCs. If there's not enough manpower to
develop Ubuntu packages of KDE, I understand it. But at the moment I
receive the impression, that it is a religious war.---I remember a
discussion after the release of Warty on one of the mailing lists,
where one was carpeted for writing "M$", because this was sensed as
some kind of flame. I was surprised to read this on a linux
mailinglist, but received the impression of a mature distribution,
not beeing ideological but pragmatic. And I felt, that this is a
good idea! So I started spreading Ubuntu on many PCs of my friends
and most of them asked for KDE. Yes, I know, there are many other
distributions supporting KDE ... but I like free and Debian based
distributions as I use Debian for about seven years now. And as
mentioned above: if Ubuntu will definitely not integrate KDE
officially, I won't ask for it anymore.

Best regards,
	Christoph
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