Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 11th Jun 2008 08:14 UTC
The KDE project saw the writing on the wall. They saw that they had reached a certain limit when it came to what could be done with the KDE 3.x series - they named it the "big friggin' wall", and decided that in order to get over that wall, incremental updates wouldn't do - they needed massive changes, a big jump, and they went for it. It's been a rough road, but it seems as if KDE 4.1 is showing signs of the vision becoming a reality. And it now seems as if several people within the GNOME community are seeing the writing on the wall too: GNOME 2.x has reached its goal - now what?
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Member since:2005-07-06
I firmly believe that Vala is their best bet.
I'm not so sure: it's a language that only Gnome dev will use, so there is a risk that there would be less developers because they wouldn't care about learning a language specifically for Gnome.
GNUstep has been in the limelight for a very long time without much traction, it's possible that this is because they're using Objective-C..
Maybe D would be a better choice, but it is very immature having not one but two standard libraries (which are not compatible AFAIK) or Scala which has a better syntax but it's running on the JVM..
Member since:2008-06-13
I'm not so sure it's not about KDE tbh. I think there are a bunch of GNOME devs that are getting a "grass is greener" feeling when looking at the new toys the KDE4 people are playing with.
Personally I am against re-writing things just for the sake of making them shinier. I agree wholeheartedly with Michael Meeks on the subject tbh
http://www.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2008-06-12.html
it really does just seem like another example of the CADT development model and that sucks.
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Member since:
2006-01-02
KDE has nothing to do with this, this is purely a GNOME story, so why mention it at all in the story... My fear is that mentioning KDE in the story will encourage trolls -- this topic has a *massive* trolling potential! So please people let's focus on GNOME while commenting here
That said my background is from the KDE/Qt ecosystem.
Here are my 2 cents:
- it's great that part of the GNOME devs are realizing that they need to develop a desktop primarily for themselves, as that's more motivating, and nothing prevents it to be flexible enough to adapt then to other categories of users. I think this realization can do a lot of good to GNOME. See the "audience" paragraph here: http://wingolog.org/archives/2008/06/10/regarding-decadence
- regarding the base language/platform debate (C, Mono, Vala, XUL...) I firmly believe that Vala is their best bet. It is a smooth upgrade path from C. It retains the performance and no-overhead of C. It is object-oriented with special attention paid to GObject. They have full control over it. The idea of a preprocessor sounds scary at first, until one realizes that it has been doing a lot of good to Qt, so why not to GTK. Of course Vala does more since it also seems to replace the role played by the C++ compiler front-end in the Qt stack.
I hope the GNOME community can organize efficiently towards the goal of renovating GNOME and GTK, sure it's exciting times ahead.