On Thu, 2006-11-02 at 00:32 -0500, Claude Jones wrote: > On Thu November 2 2006 12:09 am, Arthur Pemberton wrote: > > I just have to ask. I was reading through an article on slashdot.org, > > and I found a suprising number of comments which amounted to "KDE on > > RedHat is bad". As somone who has never tried anything but Fedora, but > > love KDE, I need to know...am I getting a raw deal without knowing it? > > My experience was the following. I began with FC1 which lasted all of about 5 > days before FC2 was released. In those days, I was quickly put off by the > philosophy of Gnome and turned to KDE, which I instantly liked. I've followed > the battles, but I never get involved in the desktop wars - I don't > personally care what someone else uses - I recognize that people are > different, and focus on different aspects of things. Early on, I heard > discussions of discontent with the KDE then offered by Fedora. It was not > released in the same timely fashion, and with the same commitment to cutting > edge that other software in the project was. Then I heard that Gnome was the > preferred desktop in the enterprise behind the Fedora project. Then, I heard > about Rex Dieter and the KDE-Redhat project. Without fanfare, and with a lot > of hard work, that project began releasing the latest KDE versions in a much > more timely fashion, and as I understand it, conformed their KDE more with > the upstream version than with the modifications done by Redhat. Cut forward > a couple of years - KDE-Redhat has come of age, and is in process of being > absorbed into Extras. If you don't want to wait, grab KDE-Redhat now. > Otherwise, as I understand it, you'll soon have it as an option within the > distro. I presume some things will change along the way, but, that's the way > I read it. Rex Dieter is part of the Fedora Project Board now, and he's > stated that he will continue to participate in some fashion with the KDE > aspects of Fedora after the coming changes. I may have some details wrong, > but, that's how I understand it. If I'm way off base, perhaps Rex, or someone > closer to the board's thinking on this will pipe up. > > Bottom line - I wouldn't say you ever got a 'raw deal', but, the one that's > coming will certainly be a substantial improvement. ---- seems pretty accurate to me - if I recall correctly, much of the fuss began with the release of RHL 9 which preceded Fedora where KOffice packages were not part of the base KDE install (replaced by oO.o) and the Blue Curve theme was implemented across GNOME & KDE which tended to blur the distinctions between the two desktop manager systems. I think that there was a lot of discontentment with RH for removing the KOffice stuff since much effort was made to provide across the board UI consistency on all K packages. I think that there used to be a lot of concern over the Qt licensing which has been assuaged over time. Rex has done a bang up job with KDE and not just in Fedora packaging but also replacement packages for RHEL too (and I love having the option). Craig
