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from the will-the-coconut-fund-also-donate? dept.
KDE e.V. is announcing today it has received a donation of 200,000 USD from the Pineapple Fund.
With this donation, the Pineapple Fund recognizes that KDE as a community creates software which benefits the general public, advances the use of Free Software on all kinds of platforms, and protects users' privacy by putting first-class and easy to use tools in the hands of the people at zero cost. KDE joins a long list of prestigious charities, organizations and communities that the Pineapple Fund has so generously donated to.
"KDE is immensely grateful for this donation. We would like to express our deeply felt appreciation towards the Pineapple Fund for their generosity" said Lydia Pintscher, President of KDE e.V.. "We will use the funds to further our cause to make Free Software accessible to everyone and on all platforms. The money will help us realize our vision of creating a world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom and privacy".
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday February 21 2018, @04:00PM (2 children)
Don't take this the wrong way. I think that if we're going to see a year of a Linux desktop, Gnome has the right idea.
How so? They have a UI that's stripped-down, yet is not really like the other two dominant proprietary desktops (Win10 and Mac), and like most other UIs these days has a lot of undiscoverable features, so it's not exactly easy to switch to for users who have years of experience with one of the others. So it's limiting, but in ways that "refugees" are not used to, so it's not going to appeal to them much. The Gnome devs seem to think they're somehow the world's premiere experts in UIs however, so they don't seem to understand this, and also the fact that all UIs rely on a certain amount of familiarity.
On the gripping hand, I'd rather live in a world where the desktop everybody uses is built with free software, even if it absolutely has to be systemd-gnomed, instead of being closed-source, user-subjugating, proprietary software.
If living in that world means having no real choice (because I can't exactly maintain a whole DE by myself) and being stuck with a crappy, slow, stripped-down DE run by devs who are arrogant, condescending asshole who tell me "you're holding it wrong", then I'd actually rather use proprietary software where the company at least tries to give me some of what I want, and isn't rude about it. Win10 may suck in many ways, but there are (proprietary) third-party extensions you can get for it, and unlike GNOME3, Microsoft doesn't intentionally break the APIs at every release, causing your extensions to not work.
Finally, your statement really doesn't make that much sense: what good is "free" software if you're forced to use GNOME? That's not freedom. That sounds more like the Soviet definition of "freedom". (Actually, it's worse: from what I've heard, in the Soviet days, if you wanted to buy some tennis shoes for instance, there would be perhaps 5 different styles you could choose from; even they didn't believe in only having 1 choice. But the GNOME devs do.) But what's bad is that, in my view, this isn't even a failure of free software development that much, it's really caused by corporatism: if it weren't for heavy corporate support, mainly from Red Hat, GNOME3 would have much less influence, or perhaps not even exist. Why RH funds these guys is really a mystery too; it's not like they're doing huge business with deploying GNOME3 on corporate desktops across America. It's just a money sink. It makes me wonder what their real motivation is.
(Score: 2) by everdred on Thursday February 22 2018, @01:01AM (1 child)
I'm not OP, but I think I have an idea of what they're getting at with "if we're going to see a year of a Linux desktop." I think that for normal people, wrapping their heads around what this Linux thing "is" and what it looks like is a confusing concept. (Pretend that explaining GNU, BSD and distros shouldn't also be part of the conversation.)
"What does it look like?" is a reasonable first question that a plurality of people might have.
"Well, it varies. There are different window managers and desktop environments to choose from…" is the kind of answer that makes eyes glaze over.
If the conversation continues and the Linux newcomer is interested in hearing more about the pros and cons (and politics) of various GUIs, you have a truly special individual on your hands. Thing is, for "the year of Linux on the desktop," you need great masses of people to make it past step 2, not just folks who only need a nudge to become enthusiasts. And in order to achieve this, you need to be able to actually show it to them.
(Aside: I'm not suggesting that the lack of GUI standardization is *the reason* Linux on the desktop hasn't taken off, but if the circumstances were such that it could take off by some other means, it's the kind of thing that could hold back adoption.)
If standardization is important and you're going to standardize on something, Gnome 3 is… reasonably elegant and modern looking. Pretty much works. Doesn't have a lot of scary options, and less-technical users might not even realize what useful options they're missing. You could do worse than giving people Gnome 3.
When I started using Linux on desktop, Ubuntu was just emerging and I gave that a try. I already had a pretty developed geeky attitudes, and had developed a curiosity about Linux over the course of a couple of years. LiveCD distros like Knoppix and Damn Small Linux helped too — seeing something not-Windows run on my own hardware had been mind-blowing. I took the plunge and installed Ubuntu alongside Windows on my main computer because a lot of people seemed to consider Ubuntu a solid choice for beginners, if not also for themselves. It was a good gateway at the time.
I'm not saying that standardized desktop future, or a default that is difficult and painful to avoid is something I'd be personally welcoming, even if it means more Linux market share. I'm sitting over here with my Xfce desktop customized to look like a weird mix of WindowMaker and BeOS.
Oh, and I gave Gnome 3 a serious try… spent a couple of months with it as my default a few years back. The difficulty customizing and the amount of customization I felt it needed suggested that it just wasn't for me. But it if we hope for "year of Linux on the desktop" it might very well be for people who don't come in with expectations of customizability, specific UI aesthetic tastes and such.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Thursday February 22 2018, @01:54AM
That would be fine if:
1) the Gnome devs weren't so hostile to working with other DE devs to have some common standards, make applications interoperate well between them, etc. Instead, the Gnome devs are outspoken in their disdain for other DEs, and absolutely refuse to lift a finger to work with them in any way.
2) the mainstream distros made it very, very easy to pick a different DE either at install time or later, rather than pushing Gnome as the standard, and also doing some kind of work to make the other DEs look good on their distro and work well with it, rather than just slapping the vanilla packages up there and calling it done. This is especially bad with Red Hat since some people get stuck with RHEL at work, and aren't administrators, so they can't easily switch over to another DE there. So RH/Gnome are really doing exactly the same thing Microsoft does: eliminate choice.