'Interface nazis' in Torvalds' line of fire

Sam Varghese
Sunday, 18 February 2007 21:46

Opinion and Analysis

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In the process of sending the patches, he also pointed out that it was difficult to find an email address to which he could send his work; one mailing list in question was members-only and in other cases, there were no contact addresses listed in the README file that normally accompanies every single free or open source package on a GNU/Linux system.

Geeks like to tweak things. So do power users. So do ordinary users as they get more and more familiar with the systems they use. It is this aspect of GNOME which apparently irritates Torvalds.

To be true, both desktop environments, GNOME and KDE, have their drawbacks. Both are memory hogs. Both have an unnecessary dependency list - in many cases, you cannot get rid of software, it is a question of having all of it or nothing. But Torvalds has a point. He may express it rather forcefully but he has never been one to be anything other than forthright.

GNOME has emerged as the desktop of choice for the more visible distributions; when SUSE Linux was an European company, KDE was the preferred option. Once it was bought by Novell and became American-owned, GNOME took precedence. Red Hat and Debian have generally used GNOME.

The emergence of Ubuntu as a popular distributution has given GNOME that much greater visibility as it is the default desktop environment. KDE has receded into the background; though there is a Kubuntu distribution (Ubuntu minus GNOME plus KDE), it is slow and painful to use compared to Ubuntu.

The relative importance attached to GNOME and KDE by the Ubuntu project can be seen in this quote from a report about the Ubuntu developer summit in Paris last year: "Canonical employs one developer to do full-time work on KDE packages - roughly the same as its GNOME packages. However, the number of core Ubuntu developers that use GNOME and assume its presence during testing and feature development remains vastly skewed in favor of GNOME. It is unclear if Canonical will be able to change feelings about Kubuntu's role in the community in the next development cycle or has committed or marshaled funding, or encouraged the necessary community resources, to make any meaningful change."

It will be interesting to see if the GNOME developers incorporate Torvalds' patches - about which, he claims, "the code is actually _cleaner_ after my patches, and the end result is more capable."