Linux Online - On the GUI Selection in UserLinux

On the GUI Selection in UserLinux


Publication:	Newsforge	Date:	Dec 16 2003

In the original UserLinux white paper, I made it clear that the project would play favorites among the software choices available to it, and that the resulting process would be painful. You can't say that you weren't warned. But it turns out not to be particularly painful, except for one issue: the selection of the GUI used in the system. The selection of GNOME as the GUI of the UserLinux project has raised a good deal of opposition from KDE supporters.

GNOME and KDE are both Free Software. Both are developed by lots of good programmers, with the support of honorable business people. Many people in the Free Software community have a huge emotional (or even financial) investment in KDE or GNOME, because they have put a lot of development into one of those desktops, or they've just spent a lot of time with one of them as a user.