GNOME (et al.): rotting in threes
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 8th Nov 2012 20:54 UTC, submitted by Elv13
Gnome "Theme development is a tedious and difficult task, and for the GTK devs to be so careless in breaking their API at every turn disrespects the many hours people put into making themes for it. [...] I was given to believe that this breakage stems from a Microsoft-like climate of preventing users from customizing their systems, and deliberately breaking the work of others so that your 'brand' is the best. Anytime I hear the word 'brand' being used in Linux, I know something valuable is being poisoned." I find the tone of this one a bit too harsh and overly negative at times, but his point still stands.
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RE[5]: Why not use Qt?
by ssokolow on Fri 9th Nov 2012 00:17 UTC in reply to "RE[4]: Why not use Qt?"
ssokolow
Member since:
2010-01-21

The official python API is PySide, not PyQt. That is the one actually developed by digia.


It's been a while. Last time I actively tried writing Qt applications in Python, PySide didn't exist and, last I considered trying again, PySide didn't have a Windows release.

I'll have to give it another try at some point... assuming it's compatible with something like Py2Exe.

Regarding vala, it seems like a really cool idea, but is very immature and has a fair distance to go before it reaches widely useable potential.
I actually wanted to play around with it, until I realised it was basically just for gnome. I've only had bad experiences with gnome, so...


What made you conclude it's just for GNOME?

I've had no problem playing around with GNOME-free GTK+ programming in Vala and, while it means you can't do object-oriented stuff, it does have an experimental mode which kills the Glib dependency so you can compile to more pure C.

Dolphin does less than konqueror and kommander, but it does have a much more clean and pleasing UI, whilst retaining features like pane splitting, kparts and integrated terminal.


That depends on your definition of clean and pleasing.

1. I find the variable icon sizing and blur-inducing animations for showing and hiding disk usage bars in the places pane to be irritating despite preferring KDE's support for application-specific place bookmarks.

2. I never use the icon size slider in the statusbar and much prefer how PCManFM puts a free space counter there.

3. I have no clue what you mean by Dolphin supporting KParts. It still seems to be firmly designed to only use the DolphinPart KPart because the author doesn't want people to realize that he's reinvented Konqueror.

(He's of the belief that a file manager should not also be a browser and, to protect that viewpoint, he refuses to implement "preview using KParts" because Dolphin already uses KIOSlaves and all it takes for a primitive browser is KIOSlaves and KHTMLPart)

but pcmanfm/thunar just don't look that good, and the reason we're using file managers instead of just a terminal is for the GUI, right?


I don't understand. How do you define "look that good"?

http://i.imgur.com/a0AW9.png (comparison)

To me, they look pretty much the same aside from KDE applications using some icons not present in the Elementary theme I've grown fond of.

I do agree that Thunar is undesirable... but that's because the Xfce devs are adamant that Thunar will never have tabs.

It could well be that I have no problems because I'm running a Phenom II 965 quad core, and intending to upgrade to haswell next year, but even on my athlon, the themeing of KDE was something that kept me there, as opposed to the lighter desktops, despite the minor performance regressions. I know you clearly favour performance, but I like my working environment to feel enjoyable, which for me means a consistent and modern appearance.


I think we might have different definitions of "modern". I find Oxygen to be unpleasant and consider quite a few aspects of "modern" theming to be counter-productive glitz.

My (currently Lubuntu-based) LXDE desktop may not follow current trends, but it feels pretty darn modern and consistent to me.

I can't help you with that directory panel, unless it is folder view, or the classic start menu, which are still bundled with default KDE as plasmoids.


No, it's sort of a hybrid of the two. It's like the classic start menu except, instead of a tree of categories and application launchers, the menu allows quick navigation of the filesystem.

(The LXDE one just shows folders for quickly opening a PCManFM instance while the KDE one shows everything for quick launching)

I have one for my home directory and one for my media library.

Edited 2012-11-09 00:19 UTC

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