OSNews is Exploring the Future of Computing

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 2nd Apr 2009 16:12 UTC, submitted by Rahul

Only a few days ago, we ran an article on the future of KDE and GNOME, and which of the two had the brighter future based on their developmental processes. Barely has that discussion ended, or the GNOME engineering team comes with a pretty daunting plan to introduce a fairly massive reworking of the GNOME interface for GNOME 3.0 (2.30). Read on for the details.

15 · Read More · 127 Comment(s)

http://osne.ws/ge2

Permalink for comment 356451
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.

RE: you know what sucks?

by Richard Dale on Thu 2nd Apr 2009 18:14 UTC in reply to "you know what sucks?"

Member since:
2005-07-22

You know what is sad? Reading the page http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Features you can only conclude there is some great potential there. Then moving on, you see they created some gross hacks and are building it all from scratch. While there is a fully free, LGPL framework out there, which has been in development for over 2 years now, and is build to do specifically this: recreate the desktop experience in a new way. Sure, it's KDE technology, but who cares? They can work with it in javascript, python, ruby, C# or a mix of those - so it can't be the C++ they hate.

The Plasma scripting api used for writing javascript, python, ruby and c# plasmoids is not the same as the C++ api that is used to develop the heavyweight plasmoids such as the task manager. There are quite a few things that you can do in C++ that you can't do in those languages, and conversely you can't download and run C++ plasmoids from the internet like you can with the scripting ones.

That is a deliberate design decision, but I think the Gnome shell approach of using a GObject-Introspection based JavaScript binding as the primary implementation language is interestingly different to the Plasma's approach of using C++ as a foundation.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 1