I guess the news about Sun cooling down Linux desktop plans means that I can eat the promised cookie now myself. And it seems GNOME realized that some of their deployment claims are short on details.
Talking about Sun, it was nice to see a Sun employee mention both GNOME and KDE as arguments in a discussion about the advantages of Solaris Express over SchilliX.
I also had a closer look at GNOME's Footware page which intends to list distributions that ship the GNOME Desktop. There are not less than seven distributions wrongly listed which according to Distrowatch ship libgnome but not Nautilus. Those should be removed or the table renamed to "ship GNOME Platform" maybe.
Syndicate Blogs
Gnome in China
Now hit the /. too http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/29/1721242&tid=163&tid=190&tid=102&tid=106
Incorrect listings at Footware page
They are using stats compiled from Distrowatch.com & mention that if anything is incorrect that we should contact Distrowatch. It is both DW's fault & the GNOME Footware maintainer's fault because DW tracks GNOME by checking for libgnome-x.y.z & not by checking a virtual package like gnome-x.y.z or kde-x.y.z. So the Footware page assumes that if a distro includes libgnome-x.y that GNOME verion x.y is shipped with that distro. This is simply not true because some of the distros listed that claim to ship GNOME are LiveCDs based on Knoppix and Knoppix has not included GNOME as a DE since (if I recall correctly) Knoppix 3.2 or close to 2 years. Practically all the hot new Knoppix derivatives that appear at DW use KDE as the default and do not ship a real working GNOME desktop. GNOME has only been brought back into Knoppix on the latest release Knoppix 4.0 DVD which is a huge 4GB ISO download.
Verifying my claims are as easy as downloading the LiveCD ISOs & checking it to see if if can load GNOME. If it can't then in my opinion it did not ship GNOME. I feel that the GNOME folks are not guilty of lying or being deceitful, but they are perhaps lazy & have not done enough fact checking to back up their claims.
Really?
I will admit to being fairly ignorant of how Distrowatch does things. I think it's fairly stupid of the Gnome people to pay too much attention to this at all though. It's not like it's Distrowatch's fault that some people want to misinterpret it though. After all, there was a Desktop survey for 2004 out not long ago that put KDE's usage at a very sizeable 60%, albeit with a lower sample than the previous year. Many people complained about the accuracy of that, but it's an awful lot better than basing your usage claims on this. Com to think of it, I don't see any KDE people humming and harring about how many users KDE has at all.
Re: Incorrect listings at Footware page
> It is both DW’s fault & the GNOME Footware maintainer’s fault
You can't blame Distrowatch for others parsing the wrong entry.
> some of the distros listed that claim to ship GNOME are LiveCDs based on Knoppix and Knoppix has not included GNOME
You're wrong assuming that all seven are derived from Knoppix, only one is (Kanotix). The other six are not (PCLinuxOS, ArkLinux, Xandros, Yoper, MEPIS and TurboLinux) ...
> Verifying my claims are as easy as downloading the LiveCD ISOs
... and are also not all Live CDs.
I think we are focusing on different distros
Ok I should haave been more clear. I was focusing on LiveCDs since they are the easiest to use & identify. Download, burn & boot. I spotted the big names (Xandros & MEPIS) decided to skip them. Why? I dunno. I just did.
I have identified up to four other Knoppix derivatives as certainly not shipping GNOME. I am positive that SLYNUX (localized for an Indian dialect & based on Knoppix 3.6 with minimal package changes) and Kurumin do not ship GNOME. I have not downloaded Whoppix or Auditor but based on their ISO file sizes, package listings & descriptions, screenshots & in some cases Flash demos, I conclude that they too do not ship GNOME.
SLYNUX, Kurumin, Whoppix, ...
Those names are so unfamiliar to me (as regular Distrowatch reader and distribution tester) that I didn't bother to look them up. So there seem to be more than seven...