Red Hat Desktop Integration

[Voltage Spike]

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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--

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