Red Hat Desktop Integration

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Author: Voltage Spike
Date:  
Subject: Red Hat Desktop Integration
On Thursday, September 26, 2002, at 01:49 PM, Craig White wrote:

> Perhaps I am a bit too unknowledgable about all of this but it would
> seem that each distro is essentially making these types of decisions
> all
> of the time and that is exactly why one would choose one distro over
> another.


While I don't really care one way or another, let me see if I can shine
some light on this:

* Red Hat "hacked" Qt to enable Xft support. This generally seems to
be a good move (cleaner fonts), but the rumor is that is has broken
some of KDE's functionality. To me, this sounds more like a bug report
than a real complaint.

* Red Hat changed the default theme for KDE to like GNOME. While some
people seem snubbed by this, it doesn't seem to be an issue. It was a
look change, and that is all.

* Under the "Help" menu of KDE applications, the "About KDE..." was
removed. Credit is still given to developers in the separate "About
Application..." option, but people perceive this as obscuring the
project from whence the application came.

* Red Hat simplified the default menu items based on what they felt
were the "best" applications. This appears to be the big one. In an
ideal world, this would make sense since not every user is going to
evaluate multiple software units for the same functionality. However,
the cards landed such that very few / no KDE programs made it onto that
menu. KDE prides itself on the fact that its applications are a
"suite" and everything works together, but the new user may never learn
this even though they are using the "KDE Desktop". Essentially, Red
Hat claims to include KDE but when you choose KDE as your environment
the user is presented with the KDE task bar and little else.

Note that all of the applications are still included and can be run
from a terminal or Alt-F2, but, like the command line tools, the new
user may not discover them without prompting.

Note that the above opinions are not my own, and, in fact, may not be
expressed by anyone. Thank you, and have a pleasant evening.

- -- 
                                                            Voltage Spike
       ,,,
      (. .)
- --ooO-(_)-Ooo--