Red Hat"s Owen Taylor has been explaining why the distro has decided to erase the differences between the look and feel of its desktop offerings from KDE and Gnome. It should give even the most avid fans of competition between the two camps some pause for thought, and makes a nice counterpoint to Sun"s desktop Linux announcements later this week.
Taylor doesn"t beat about the bush. Providing two desktops with different brands and behavior is confusing and costs Red Hat an unnecessary amount of money, he writes. In the latest beta of RedHat Linux, the distro has replaced the KDE and Gnome branding with its own in-house look and feel. Of course, the underlying applications still use different toolkits and style guides - they"re every part "two Universes", as Taylor puts it. But he says that unifying the warring camps is a task beyond even Red Hat.