Star From GNOME to KDE and Back: Computing Habits Hard to Break
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 21st Mar 2008 21:49 UTC
Editorial "I used KDE as my primary desktop from 1996 through 2006, when I installed the GNOME version of Ubuntu and found that I liked it better than the KDE desktop I'd faced every morning for so many years. Last January, I got a new Dell Latitude D630 laptop and decided to install Kubuntu on it, but within a few weeks, I went back to GNOME. Does this mean GNOME is now a better desktop than KDE, or just that I have become so accustomed to GNOME that it's hard for me to give it up?"
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RE[19]: From GNOME to KDE and back
by leos on Tue 25th Mar 2008 22:23 UTC in reply to "RE[18]: From GNOME to KDE and back"
leos
Member since:
2005-09-21

Trolltech is a company that's completely dedicated to Qt


Wrong. Qtopia is a huge focus for them as well. More so now that Nokia has bought them out.

and all work that Trolltech does goes directly into improving the Qt platform


Yes, which runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, WinCE, etc.. Only the Linux part of Qt is directly relevant to KDE (and slowly Windows/Mac is becoming more important as KDE is ported to those platforms).

hence 250+ KDE developers right there.


How can you not tell the difference between Qt and KDE? Not all work on Qt is useful for KDE. 10 GTK hackers does not equal 10 Gnome hackers either.

Edited 2008-03-25 22:27 UTC

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2

kelvin Member since:
2005-07-06

Wrong. Qtopia is a huge focus for them as well. More so now that Nokia has bought them out.

And Qtopia Core is the embedded Linux port of Qt 4, so a large part of Qtopia is Qt. All the Qtopia work towards making Qt faster, smaller, and more efficient directly benefits KDE.

Yes, which runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, WinCE, etc.. Only the Linux part of Qt is directly relevant to KDE (and slowly Windows/Mac is becoming more important as KDE is ported to those platforms).

Which is exactly the point: thanks to the efforts of Trolltech, porting KDE to those platforms is actually possible, and all the porting work directly benefits KDE.

How can you not tell the difference between Qt and KDE?

The difference is merely academic. KDE would never be possible without the Qt platform and its continued support and development by Trolltech.

Not all work on Qt is useful for KDE.

Really? What work on Qt isn't useful for KDE? All work on foundation libraries is beneficial to the higher levels. That goes double for KDE which is so tightly integrated with Qt.

10 GTK hackers does not equal 10 Gnome hackers either.

I'd argue that it does. All the work that goes into GTK+ and supporting libraries (glib, gobject, gio, cairo, libxml, etc.) certainly benefits GNOME directly.

Edited 2008-03-25 23:00 UTC

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2

leos Member since:
2005-09-21

And Qtopia Core is the embedded Linux port of Qt 4, so a large part of Qtopia is Qt. All the Qtopia work towards making Qt faster, smaller, and more efficient directly benefits KDE.


Indirectly at best. This is a really tangential benefit. You must realize there are shades of grey here. Aaron Seigo working directly on KDE technology is obviously very beneficial to KDE. Thomas Zander working on Qt printing is also quite directly beneficial. Lorn Potter working on Qtopia on the Neo, not so much. There is some potential for some really indirect benefits in the form of performance tuning, but that's really stretching it. You can't compare all these people like they were directly involved in KDE hacking.

Which is exactly the point: thanks to the efforts of Trolltech, porting KDE to those platforms is actually possible, and all the porting work directly benefits KDE.


Once again, indirectly. Yes it benefits KDE to a certain extent, but it's nowhere near the benefit as if that effort went directly into KDE development.

All work on foundation libraries is beneficial to the higher levels. That goes double for KDE which is so tightly integrated with Qt.


If you loosen the definition of beneficial enough to be meaningless. Porting Qt to WinCE is of very little use to KDE, for example.

Anyway, your 250 hackers working on Qt is completely bogus. Trolltech has 250 employees TOTAL. A whole ton of those are managers, marketing, tech support, janitors, whatever. http://trolltech.com/pdf/TrolltechASAQ42007report.pdf

I don't know how many employees are actually developing on Qt directly, but I counted 20 unique names in the first 5 pages of the trolltech blogs. < 50 is probably a more accurate guess.

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