[K12OSN] Support for a KDE-centric branch?

[Mike Ely]

Paul,

These are all valid points, and allow me to clarify things a bit:

First off, the problem with just changing DefaultSession has everything
to do with distro: Red Hat, for various reasons, has elected to put
their primary focus into developing for Gnome.  That means that where
any desktop integration exists at all in FC4/RHEL/CentOS/etc, it's going
to work better in Gnome.  Red Hat has in fact been sharply criticized
for the changes it makes to KDE when it distributes it, and I agree with
many of these criticisms.

As far as the "eye candy" argument, that's not really factual.  In the
one instance I had where I was thrashing an LTSP server, I simply
selected a much simpler but still very attractive window decoration
theme (called "Web" if you're interested), and performance jumped back
to expected values.  Eye candy in KDE is completely controllable, and
equivalent effects in both desktops require equivalent resources.
Current iterations of Gnome are just as heavy as KDE - so if you're
going to run a server that can handle either, might as well work with
the one you like more on its own merits.  If you aren't able to put the
hardware in place to make this happen, then I agree wholeheartedly that
IceWM or similar is the way to go.

Setting up Edubuntu and installing KDE on it isn't a bad option,
although my personal take on it is that it may suffer from some of the
same problems here as doing KDE on FC4 - Ubuntu was Gnome to begin with,
and although Kubuntu has come a long way, it's not as "finished" in the
small details as other KDE distros.

Ultimately, I think we're stuck with a distribution problem: the distros
have thrown their weight behind either KDE or Gnome, with very few of
them being truly agnostic.  This makes sense, as it's a lot of work to
tie together the pieces of a window manager into a sensible theory of
operation, no matter which one you choose.  My belief is that a lot of
the distros go with Gnome because it provides a lower barrier to entry -
you can find a lot more c programmers than c++ programmers, etc.  This
does not mean Gnome is better or worse than KDE (although Linus Torvalds
would disagree on that point, vehemently), just that Gnome is easier to
learn to write to.  The result is unsurprising: a user interface that
was written to scratch the itch of newly-minted coders.

Either way, I think KDE has a lot to offer here: kiosktool is mature and
has a lot more to it than sabayon, which is fairly new (kiosktool works
over the top of an underlying API that is very feature-complete,
providing even more control).  kdeedu has a rich set of teaching and
edutainment tools.  The KDE control center is very powerful and provides
granular control over the entire desktop environment in a very intuitive
and accessible way - set it up side-by-side next to gconf, and see what
I mean.  And speaking of accessibility, KDE has a very well-developed
and mature accessibility toolset integrated right in.

I think what I may need to do here is just build an alpha version, and
put it out there.  People who already prefer KDE aren't going to care
about any of the above, as they already agree with me that KDE is
better.  People who prefer Gnome aren't going to care, either, as they
will most likely just think I'm wrong.  It's the people who are
constantly on this list thrashing about looking for the hidden tool or
dialog in Gnome because that's all that is available to them when the
fix would be easy and obvious in KDE that I'm trying to help here.

Mike

Paul VanGundy wrote:
> Mike,
> 
> I personally like Gnome. I started out with KDE but now prefer Gnome. To
> each his or her own as they say. However, instead of trying to make a
> KDE centric LTSP distro, after you install K12LTSP just set the
> DefaultSession to KDE... Second, KDE has a larger footprint then Gnome
> traditionally because of the extra eye candy so it will require more
> from a sysadmin's server. Users that are limited might not want to go to
> KDE. If you're really stretched thin server wise use IceWM (least
> favorite for me, but again to each his or her own). 
> 
> I guess I am saying this, I don't personally see the point in creating
> K12LTSP (or a distro like it) that just has KDE on it when after you
> install K12LTSP you can just change the DefaultSession to KDE...You know
> what I mean? By no means is this meant to discourage you, it's just my
> look on the idea. On your side, there is Edubuntu which is just like
> K12LTSP but on the Ubuntu distro with the Gnome desktop manager. So why
> not a Kedubuntu (example name) that would hold the KDE desktop manager
> and serve up LTSP?
> 
> -Paul
> 
> 
> 
> On Sun, 2006-03-19 at 10:49 -0800, Mike Ely wrote:
>> Hello list,
>>
>> A lot of the questions I see in here have to do with issues of
>> customizing or locking down various aspects of the desktop, login
>> manager, etc.  The sad fact is that Gnome is *terrible* where this is
>> concerned - the basic Gnome philosophy seems to be  that reduction of
>> complexity is always a positive outcome.  While this may or may not be
>> true for Grandma, it is far from what an LTSP administrator is going to
>> need - one of the great benefits of an LTSP system is that you can make
>> very specific changes on one server and have that change propagate to N
>> number of desktops.
>>
>> My experience over the years is that KDE is a much better fit for
>> deploying LTSP systems in almost any environment, but particularly in
>> K12 labs.  With KDE, you get the advantages that the desktop environment
>> provides, while still being able to access GTK based applications, and
>> you'll also have a better file browser and browse dialog and more mature
>> desktop lockdown tools.
>>
>> I'm sure that there are other people in here who feel this way.  I'm
>> willing to put in work to create a base distribution for K12 people
>> wishing to deploy LTSP in an easy fashion, a K12LTSP (KDE Edition) if
>> you will, with all the educational software and ease-of-setup gained
>> through the very hard work put in by K12LTSP, and all the advantages of
>> the KDE environment.
>>
>> My idea right now is to use OpenSuSE as the base distribution, as it's
>> currently my hands-down favorite where KDE distros are concerned,
>> although I'd be very willing to do this on Kubuntu, provided a timeline
>> exists to work out some of the quirks in the Ubuntu method of doing
>> LTSP.  I'd also want to see what sort of management tools are coming
>> forward - YaST is in the end a very effective and easy tool to learn to
>> use, and so far I haven't seen anything like it out there.
>>
>> The point here is not to copy K12LTSP feature-for-feature, but rather to
>> create a fully-integrated KDE-centric learning environment for LTSP
>> systems that is easy to install, maintain, and use.  Where intersections
>> exist in the versions, so much the better, but that's not necessarily
>> the goal of this project.
>>
>> Anyway, how about it?  Anyone willing to pitch in with me to help out
>> with packaging and installer?  If the distro is to be OpenSuSE, I'm
>> pretty sure the autoinstaller feature in YaST can be used to build
>> ourselves a distro in short order.  The tricky bits would be integration
>> of LTSP into the base install, which would involve creation of a YaST
>> module and making sure that gets launched during the install process.
>> Neither of those tasks are terribly difficult.  Other important
>> discussion would involve selection of packages, defaults, etc.
>>
>> If this discussion gains any traction, I'll create some web space and
>> various tools (svn, etc) for us to get started on.  Let me know.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Mike Ely
>>
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