"I had the opportunity to speak with several KDE developers recently. Benjamin Reed, Jaroslaw Staniek and Ralf Habacker are several of the many talented developers working on porting KDE to Mac and Windows respectively. They explain in detail what's involved in making KDE and its myriad of applications boot under Mac and Windows."
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Member since:2006-01-09
KDE Doesn't need to be ported to windows for Qt, GTK, etc. based Open Source applications to be available for the platform, there are loads of them that already are.
Yes, there are lots of Qt and GTK applications for Windows out there, but not KDE applications. KDE uses Qt as a base to build upon and adds lots of features and functionality itself.
The KDE desktop as you know on Linux won´t be ported to Windows. What is going to be ported is mainly large portions of kde-base and kde-libs in order to make the porting of KDE applications (not Qt ones) feasible.
However, while I would love to be able to run Konqueror and Amarok - best apps on their respective categories on any OS IMHO - on Windows, I still am not convinced that porting KDE to Windows/Mac is a good idea at all.
While getting the average Joe and Jane Doe to get acquainted with OSS sounds like a lovely idea, I wonder how long the Windows version will keep feature parity with the mainstream Unix version until a point where it will drive KDE development and then the Unix version will have to adopt Windows-isms in order to keep up to speed due to plain pressure from the, arguably, larger audience on the Windows side of the fence.
I foresee this as something inevitable as Windows has a larger developer base that, getting interested on KDE development, will cater to the Windows version better leaving the Unix version (with its unique IPC mechanism, etc, etc) as an afterthought. The KDE developers may have a saying on this, making the API as broad as possible to try to cover all the possibilities and avoid this but somehow I doubt that such thing might work properly.
I am not saying that I am against it, but I will reserve my judgement until the thing is released and we can measure its effects.
Edit: Typos (probably missed a lot of them 
)
Edited 2007-02-02 12:35
Member since:
2006-04-28
KDE Doesn't need to be ported to windows for Qt, GTK, etc. based Open Source applications to be available for the platform, there are loads of them that already are.