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Linux Magazine: The Desktop Decides The Future

“As I brace myself for the outcry of the millennium, I put forth
the following suggestions:

  • Support the efforts of the Linux Standards Base (LSB). This
    group is working to develop standards that, if followed by the
    Linux distributions, will result in binary compatibility across all
    flavors of Linux.
  • All Linux distributions should standardize on only one
    windowing environment, and Linux developers need to decide
    (quickly) on a single environment that will be developed.
  • The resulting windowing environment should be based on a single
    toolkit, and all other toolkits should be abolished from the
    standard Linux distribution package.”

    “The Linux community is constantly bragging about how many
    development resources we are able to garner, but we then turn
    around and fracture those resources into hundreds of competing
    projects. Instead of all of us competing against a common enemy, we
    are battling against one another for dominance in various
    areas.”

    “The KDE people have a beautiful, stable, solid, and intuitive
    interface, and they are deeply loyal to the Troll Tech-controlled
    Qt toolkit. GTK is foreign to them, and they will be hard-pressed
    to move over to GNOME. The GNOME people are nowhere near KDE in
    terms of beauty, stability, and intuitiveness, yet they are based
    on the free (GPLed) GTK toolkit.”

    “We can’t go on with these competing desktop platforms. Who
    drops their project to join the other? That’s a decision that
    should be made between the principals of the two projects, but it
    should definitely happen, and should happen soon (like,
    yesterday).”

Complete
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