Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Tue 9th Dec 2003 22:48 UTC
A few weeks ago we published an article titled "The Great Mac OS X 10.4 Wish List", detailing a few personal wishes for the next version of OSX. Later I learned that quite a few Apple engineers read the article and so it felt good that the time spent writing the article was not just a voice in the void. A reader emailed me a few days ago asking me to do the same for other OSes and DEs. So here is my personal wish-list for a future version of Gnome. Please tell us about your own Gnome wish list in the comment section provided.
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The "reinvent the wheel" argument is a bit lame, given that GNOME was started as a project to reinvent the wheel. Still, its a good thing that the KDE developers reinvent user-visible components:
1) The KDE versions are often better in many ways. How many HTML renderers does GNOME have? KDE has one, because KHTML was designed from the beginning to be lightweight and easily pluggable. How stable is gstreamer right now? KDE has had a stable media framework (aRts) for awhile know, and the heavily componentized architecture meant that video support was added easily through aRts. How many GNOME apps use components? Almost all KDE apps are componentized, because the KDE component architecture is so easy and lightweight. Why did KDE roll their own configuration (KConfig) and integrated menubar/toolbar (KAction) system? Because gconf didn't exist, and GNOME still has nothing comparable to KDE's fully-configurable toolbars. Why did KDE roll its own MDI mechanism? So all the major KDE development apps (Quanta, KDevelop, Kate) could use it. Why did the roll their own I/O mechanism? So all KDE apps could transparently access remote resources over a huge range of protocols. How come Abiword, which is part of GNOME Office, doesn't appear to use GNOME-VFS? And I still think Qt is a better toolkit in most respects (except maybe for internationalization and accessibility) than GTK+.
2) The KDE versions integrate better with KDE. Why would a KDE user want to use an app that doesn't respond to DCOP calls? Or embed itself in Konqueror? Or transparently support centralized configuration mechanisms (hotkeys, etc). Why would a KDE user want to use an app that didn't automatically use the system-wide wallet manager? Or the integrated KDE spellchecker? Or the advanced features of the Klipboard?
3) The KDE versions have a nice, integrated, KDE-style API. For developers, KDE is a complete application framework, like .NET or Java.
Its a cost/benefit thing. If the benefits are greater than the costs, a KDE version will get built. If they are not, then it won't. That's why programs like Konqueror, Kontact, JuK, etc, were built from the ground up; why non-user-visible libraries like libxml are used as-is; and why specialized programs like the Gimp don't get KDE versions at all.
Look, I'm not trying to begrudge GNOME. GNOME has its own development style, its own developer community, and its own user community. I'm just saying that you shouldn't begrudge KDE's right to have the same.