Novell clarifies position on KDE and Gnome

There has been a lot of talk about Novell Inc’s plans for the graphical user interfaces it will support for its future SUSE Linux desktop and server implementations. For some bizarre reason, some people have got it into their heads that SUSE will not be supporting the KDE graphical environment, and they seem to think this might be related to the recent layoffs at Novell.

Given the fact that Novell bought Ximian, the company behind the open source Gnome interface for Linux, before it even bought SUSE, it might seem like a reasonable conclusion to jump to that Novell would somehow focus its efforts on Gnome and stop worrying about KDE.

Sources at Novell say this is a tempest in a teapot, and it will, in fact, support both interfaces for all future SUSE Linuxes. What has changed is that future Linuxes will ship with Gnome–an interface Novell knows better since it is the key developer for it–as the default interface, with KDE being the fully supported option. SUSE 8 and SUSE 9 were the other way around–KDE was the default with Gnome as the fully supported option.