[GLLUG] Redhat 8.0 + holy crap.

[Basher584]

On Wed, Oct 02, 2002 at 10:35:51AM -0400, Jo wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 02, 2002 at 10:09:47AM -0400, Melson, Paul wrote:
> > What?!  How broken is KDE in RH8?  I'm burning the ISOs right now, but
> > if KDE doesn't work, I'll wait until they're fixed and available via
> > RHN.
> 
>   Err, nono, intentionally broken by RedHat. I'll look up the exact
> details later, but they've broken the directory structure (to fit
> in better with Gnome) which means 3rd-party KDE apps won't install properly.
> They've also made the KDE panel start up non-KDE applications by default
> (so if you click on the web browser icon you get Mozilla, and if you click
> on the mail icon you get Evolution). This is bad because you've already
> got all those KDE libraries loaded but don't have the Gnome ones loaded,
> so KDE feels 'slower' than Gnome.
>   They also forked KDE without talking to the KDE core team, without
> consulting with them in any way, and without any KDE core members in
> the company (they had one, Bero, but they pissed him off enough that
> he left the company recently). Most of the hacking was done by the Gnome
> people RedHat employs, resulting in what the KDE people see as some pretty
> ugly code.  Oh, and to add insult to injury they removed the About KDE
> box from KDE applications.

Of coarse the code is ugly, they are C developers! :)  I am sure it will get better over time.

>   RedHat has of course a perfect right to do all of this, and there is
> some argument for a unified desktop, but hostile forks are generally
> considered a Bad Thing in the free software world and RedHat's made
> absolutely no effort to 'play nice' with the KDE people over unification.
> It doesn't help that RedHat refused to ship KDE until fairly recently,
> did a lot of the early Gnome funding, still employs several prominent Gnome
> hackers, and is generally perceived by KDE folks as being pretty anti-KDE...

Um.. they have there "forked" kernel too, and that has seemed to work out well.
There are always positive and negatives to these things.  Not sure if there is such a thing as a "hostile" fork.

They did a lot of early Gnome funding because of licensing issues with QT.

In general I don't see redhat as anti-kde, they are pro-gnome, but they aren't trying to hinder KDE directly.  The only thing that is sad about the whole situation is it will take time to find another kde person to replace Bero.

What I want to know is why anybody (kde,redhat,independents,etc) haven't made a script to change back to standard KDE? Hmm. SRPMS (ftp://ftp.uni-kl.de/pub/linux/kde/stable/3.0.3/RedHat/limbo/SRPMS/), shouldn't be to hard.


-Ben