“Recently Dennis E. Powell wrote a commentary entitled “The future belongs to GNOME; inertia, to KDE” that has generated much feedback, and a lot of flames in the KDE community. From my perspective as a software company that was/is doing KDE specific applications I think I see where the fundamental disconnect is between the two, and in my discussions with a number of the core developers, they have substantiated my opinion on this.” Read the editorial at LinuxAndMain.Our Take: It will be with sadness to see that the Gnome and KDE core developers do not collaborate in some matters. In order X11 and Unix to be called “ready for the desktop”, one of the fundamental requirements will be that Qt and GTK+ applications have the same look and behaviour.
The fact that almost half of the main modern Unix/Linux applications are based on GTK+ and half on QT, is an indication that most people are running these applications under a common desktop. However, it is unacceptable for a desktop environment to load the other API’s applications when copy/paste does not work between them (and I am not talking about the ‘middle click’ mouse here) or when shortcuts are different or when they look completely different theme-wise.
These are issues that both the core teams should get together, discuss and solve, for the common good of the Unix desktop’s future.
Just one thought…KDE relies on Qt, which is available either under the GPL/QPL or as a $$ non-GPL version for commercial use. So, when writing KDE applications, am I not linking directly or indirectly against the Qt libraries? That would force me to either distribute my code under the GPL or pay royalties to TrollTech? If so, this would be an advantage for Gnome, where the essential libraries including GTK are LGPL’d.
@stew
well, you need to pay 2500$ if you want to distribute your application closed source, but since the userbase on kde is 10 times higher than on gnome it may be worth it. i’d better go with QT which is clean coded and perfectly written than GTK+ which is full of raceconditions and unstable like shit.
GTK+ which is full of raceconditions and unstable like shit
Well said, sir!
but since the userbase on kde is 10 times higher than on gnome it may be worth it.
Where Gnome apps run perfectly fine in a KDE environment and vice versa.
According to latest stats by some web site polls, KDE has more than 55% and Gnome just a bit less than 25%.
But this is irrelevant.
The point is that A LOT of important applications for Unix are written in GTK+. I do not believe that “Gnome apps run perfectly fine in a KDE environment and vice versa”. I explain why in the article. It is something that needs to be addressed by both parties.
Licensing:
I agree that the licensing is somewhat expensive, but I don’t think it is that big of a deal. If you are experimenting with Qt, just release some GPL apps and then when you make that one killer app that is going to make you thousands of dollars, just plop out $2500 of it for a license.
I usually do a custom development project for some company and then build the cost of the license into the project.
Since the Linux version of QT is GPL’ed, wouldn’t it be possible to port that to MacOSX so that we can also have a free GPL version of QT on the Mac? I know that there’s a commercial license for QT on MacOS but since OSX is based on BSD, it shouldn’t be too hard to port the Linux version to OSX?
Well sure KDE/Gnome interoperation could be better, but unless there are decent KDE equivalents for Gimp and Evolution or a Gnome-Office as good as KOffice or a “GDevelop”, you’ll have to run mixed environments anyway.
If you are experimenting with Qt, just release some GPL apps and then when you make that one killer app that is going to make you thousands of dollars, just plop out $2500 of it for a license.
It’s not that easy. You can run into licencing troubles with non-profit projects as well, since not everything under the sun is GPL compatible. E.g. Mozilla was not compatible for quite a while.
On Qt on MacOS X:
There should be a GPl’d version available in Fink, as there is KDE. However, that one’s based on X11 and not anywhere near the OS X version from TrollTech.
The GPL version of QT *I think* that does not include the whole QT environment. So, even if you port it, you will only port a fraction of it.
http://www.trolltech.com/purchase/comparison.html
(but I am not sure about the GPL version)
Also, the fact that OSX is based on BSD does not help a Qt port at the least. OSX does not run on X11, it has its own GUI engine, which is what matters on a port and what Qt emulates.
Of course, I am talking about a native port of Qt on OSX. Not through an X server.
Qt has been ported to the Mac OS X, both the expensive commercial version (from TrollTech) and the full open source version, via the fink project.
Yes, but the difference is that the GPL/free version is only running through X11, and that sucks goats on the MacOSX environment.
Our Take: It will be with sadness to see that the Gnome and KDE core developers do not collaborate in some matters. In order X11 and Unix to be called “ready for the desktop”, one of the fundamental requirements will be that Qt and GTK+ applications have the same look and behaviour.
There has been some work as of late on <a href=”http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/projects/metatheme/“>metatheme&… in the GNOME world. It has a simple plugin for changing all sorts of differnet themes. And makes it to set themes for nautilus, xmms, icons, gtk, sawfish, and metacity all in one simple set. If one of the KDE developers were to write plugins for QT, KWin, and KDE icons this tool would truely be a one stop shop for system themes.
Why hasn’t this been done allready? NIHS is not an excuse. This would fix %95 of the whining between gnome and kde. They would all look the same. If you look at kde-look.org and sunshineinabag.co.uk you will see that artists are porting themes from one side to the other with ease.
So eugenia will you use your soapbox to push for KDE support for metatheme?
GnCuster
The GPL/X11 version of Qt contains everything the enterprise edition contains, which is pretty much everything
@eugenia
not true, most of the imporant programs are written using the QT/KDE environment. i am missing a lot of applications for gtk/gnome a lot of stuff for gtk/gnome are simply playtoys. the meaning of an environment is to embedd the applications into the environment but nearly all gtk/gnome applications still yet work on their own. you still can’t share data across the applications.
now let’s have a normal scenario where you are an IT expert and want to sell GNOME/KDE to a well paying customer, well i am not talking about the userbase arund 16-20 here i am talking about companies that deal with big money.
customer: ‘hello, our company heard so much about linux and we want to switch from windows to linux but we need an easy to use desktop environment like windows. could you please help us?’
IT: ‘yes we can offer you KDE and GNOME’
customer: ‘could you describe these two desktops please’
IT: ‘sure, well kde is written in OOP offers a perfect integration into the environment and comes with a bunch of usable business programms like mailer, browser, filemanager, pim, schedule, pda support, office suite that includes word, spreadsheed, presenter, visio like application, multimedia capabilities and much much more in an intuitive simple looking windows conform interface, which is perfectly integrated into the environment. we can guarantee you a unified look across the applications and we can guarantee you that every app communicates with the other application. we can also guarantee you that in the future releases of this environment that all the important programs are beeing portet too.’
customer: ‘neat, now explain GNOME’
IT: ‘well gnome is a new tech environment that was started one year after kde (blah blah) it’s written mostly in C is faster than kde but has still it’s rough edges because GNOME 2 has been released as DEVELOPMENT plattform. i am not quite sure if i should sell you this desktop since i think you need something that simply works and protect your work. i can’t guarantee you a crashfree environment. if you speak of the applications then there are a lot of stuff missing for gnome 2, we can’t deal with a native easy to use webbrowser as in kde, there is an alternative called galeon, but it’s more hackish and can only be maintained by experts etc. it’s based on mozilla and it’s still really tricky to get it working, we also can’t guarantee if whenever something changes with mozilla that galeon will be portet. e.g. if gtk changes API sometimes then we can’t guarantee a running browser. there is also a nice outlook express like application for gnome called evolution but it’s not yet been ported to gnome 2 we can’t exactly tell when it’s planned to be portet. it could really take 1 year before it’s done because it’s a large project written in C for gnome 1 and porting it to the new API of gnome 2 can take really really long. as for the office we have different standalone applications like gnumeric and abiword. please note that these applications are also maintained by different groups or companies, we can’t exactly tell if the future of it is save. gnome 2 is really rought right now. as said above we are not sure if we can recommend you this. since getting all the right applications for your business is hard. interaction between the environment and certain applications can’t be guaranteed now. also the whole approach of gnome 2 is a different one, we can offer you a nice looking desktop with gnome 2.0 but that’s almost all and yet another mp3 player.’
customer: ‘i see, what do you think, is gnome better than kde ?’
IT: ‘actually, NO, gnome is lacking a lot of polish, stability, usability, consistence and UI related stuff. not to mention it lacks a lot of applications for a serious company like yours. we are not willing to sell you a good looking but useless environment like gnome 2 and why should you and your company wait if you can get something that you know from windows, that will save you a lot of money for you and your employees to learn yet another environment’
customer: ‘you are right, let’s decide for kde’
ok time to install KDE3
emerge kde
getting every kde app on
echo “exec startkde” > .xinitrc
startx
hmm
crash on start… instant recover…
after that see some app lose their settings or the mount toy lose the icons…
let’s try the qtbuilder and the new kdevelop
they work fine but… hmm overall is… SLOW!
installing gnome2
emerge -u gnome
stuff merged
echo “exec gnome-session” > .xinitrc
startx
gnome2 correctly start
“hmm the xmms icon isn’t what I like let’s change”
hmm damn it disappear!!
hmm gnumeric2 has funny huge toolbar (ok I can set them back to normal size)
hmm let’s try glade2.. wow is working fine
anjuta2 is on cvs as galeon2 and mozilla on gtk2 isn’t really stable…
ok time to go back using enlightenment .16 with the old useful and well working gtk 1.2.x and qt3 programs
i expected such a reply. for companies a new FAST computer is cheaper than:
a) teaching their employees to use gnome (different usability)
b) installing gnome and all the kidtoys (timeconsuming)
c) developing in ‘C’ on gnome (timeconsuming)
i would like to get a serious reason to offer GNOME to a company, i am not speaking of personal taste here or some kidtoy shitty micky twicky shit. be real if you are an IT expert that make money for your family and children then you don’t sell gnome to your customer, you would choose kde (if the customer wants to switch to linux) otherwise i would sell them windows.
@martin
I find it laughable that you claim that few important applications are coded in GTK (think Gimp, Evolution, Dia, Abiword, Gnumeric etc…). They not only surpass KDE apps in quality, but also in their attitudes and drive. Why do you think that KDE cannot create a semi-decent competitor to the GIMP? While the, I’ll admit, well designed component architecture does lead to very quick application development, the stability issues you claim plague Gnome2 are much more prevalent in your obviously favorite desktop. KPresenter (now cited by KDE itself as part of the KDE distribution) for instance often crashed upon the creation of a blank slide (this was on an official stable release on many different platforms). There is a similar fragility in main KDE components such as the session manager. Other ‘Quirks’ from the interesting clipboard implementation to the mass of configuration items and increasing feature bloat mean that biased views like yourself and the large proportion of osnews readers are becoming quite redundant. Why is there such a need for pointless bashing? We all need to look at things in perspective. Gnome has a lot to learn from KDE in terms of integration and meeting deadlines. KDE has a lot to learn from Gnome in terms of feature curbing and (important) licensing issues. These aren’t commerical applications that come and go with the market, they are real life community projects that people devote their precious unpaid time to. Why waste yours being a troll.
@ioc2k
bullshit, the gimp, dia, abiword are NOT GNOME applications. oki i know you never claimed it. but now tell me what remains for GNOME ? if i count the QT only applications then the KDE section (to name it that way) has more to offer than GNOME. speaking of the gimp, it’s neither a GNOME nor a KDE app. but i assume you know this already.
speaking for good paying customers, for companies that deal with a shitload of money every year. i doub’t you gonna offer them GNOME to do their daily business stuff. for the crashes, GNOME recently crashes as much as KDE does nothing is free from crashing not even WINDOWS. all this left outside will make KDE powerfull on the desktop.
what does GNOME offer ? what ?
@martin
What does Gnome offer???
What the hell do you want it to offer that it doesn’t already. It provides a highly complex component architecture, and uses a versatile GUI library that has bindings to many different and varied languages. It provides the ability for applications to be consistant, but gives the programmer the freedom to deviate from this if required. It also provides a platform for the devlopment of commercial close source applications that do not rely on the support of a single third party such as Trolltech. While perhaps not as mature as found in KDE, Gnome2’s architecure seems to be heading in a much more technologically advanced direction. GConf, Bonobo and Corba are fascinating technolgies, but so are KParts and DCOP. None of them should be buried into the ground through ignorance, or trolling, on either sides of the fence. As many have said before, the competition between the two desktops is healthy as they have much they can teach each other. And stop talking about Gnome like its the creation of a money grabbing organisation. I’m fed up of you and many other people treating open source projects as if you paid hard cash for them. Everything needs investment, and open source needs people. You are a person right?
P.S. yes, I know Abiword, Dia and the Gimp are not Gnome projects. They are, however, GTK and therefore integrate a lot better with Gnome than with KDE. Given this initial integration and the increasing integrity of the Gnome2 platform, how long do you think before they start using more and more of Gnome?
Turning the question around is fair, right? In my experiences with KDE, I found myself using non-KDE apps more often than the “K” counterparts. I didn’t particularly like KWord (I’ve actually found the underrated RTF editor Ted to be a great lightweight word processor for Unix). No “K” programmers’ editor convinced me to switch from GVim. Konqueror’s a good enough browser but it’s not really as good in my experiences as Mozilla 1.
When push comes to shove, what GNOME might offer, paradoxically, is what you’re looking at as a liability. People write GTK apps, not GNOME apps, for the most part; but also for the most part, people don’t write QT apps, they write KDE apps. KDE is nearly an all-or-nothing proposition. (Yes, I know you can use KDE apps in other window managers, but you pretty much have to have all of KDE installed to do it.)
I’ve gotten the impression that the better ideas and better architecture concepts are in GNOME rather than KDE. But Eazel was really the development house pushing to get GNOME in order, not Ximian. (According to an interview I remember hearing with Andy Hertzfeld, a lot of what they wanted to do was on the back end, and they didn’t expect to get where they wanted to be until GNOME 3 or so. Unfortunately, all they got out the door was a very pretty and very slow file manager.) I think it’s still too early to declare either one a definitive winner.
Meanwhile, I’ll keep using XFce, which has been the definitive winner on my FreeBSD desktop for a year now.
> bullshit, the gimp, dia, abiword are NOT GNOME applications.
No, but they are GTK+ applications, and GNOME is the biggest “customer” of GTK+. So, if they are using the gnome-libs or not, it is the same thing for the user.
*Bottomline* is that the QT/KDE and the GTK+/Gnome people, should get together and disccuss the problems.
End of story.
yeah who want’s to belive this ? the last 3 comments are worth shit. look at the poll above to see who is leading, who has the better acceptance around.
nice to say that gnome has a nice framework, has nice updated code, has keybindings etc.
.. but who cares about all that ?
IT: ‘hey customer, please choose gnome it has a cool codebase’
CUSTOMER: ‘uhm, i don’t programm i want a working desktop’
IT: ‘yes use gnome it has a nice gui, looks like a charm and you get that incredible MP3 player’
CUSTOMER: ‘??’
IT: ‘yeah cool mp3 player and another bunch of cool applications where none of them operates with another gnome application also grab the new gimp which was gnomified with crappy shitty icons’
CUSTOMER: ‘??’
IT: ‘hey we also offer windows registry on gnome, thats what you are familar with aren’t you ?’
CUSTOMER: ‘errrr!’
IT: ‘hey to make you get totally mad we also reverted the buttons, i know your employees are known to find the buttons like OK then CANCEL… we now reverted them to CANCEL OK only to make you suckers mad’
CUSTOMER: ‘??’
IT: ‘yeah gnome is the damn future, it makes no progress, but has new code… hey we don’t offer any serious tools but the code is clean, has a cool framework.. sorry we can’t deal with a nice emailer or webbrowser but the code is still clean and has a cool framework… yeah gnome does it all right but still no fucking apps but hey don’t worry grab that new MP3 player written by a fuckin’ kid hey the code is clean and new… do you know bonobo.. it’s the ape inside the code
…’
CUSTOMER: ‘sorry, i heard enough, grow up kid, we are dealing with billions of US-Dollars each year. we need a sercure working full integrated environment, where our employees can work savely on, since you can’t offer us this we gonna go back to KDE or WINDOWS. we don’t give a fuck how cool your framework is as long as there are no apps we can work with. sorry we deal with money we need a serious conterpart’
For my money, Gnome and KDE both leave a bit to be desired, although I seem to have settled on KDE for the time being. The shame of it is, both of them have some really good ideas, but they never seem to get refined enough to bring them to fruition. But I do give them both credit – whatever failings they have, they’re both light years ahead of the primitive OpenLook and the miserable CDE, at least they give me hope that eventually *NIX will have a desktop that’s usable by someone besides developers and sysadmins. Until the first time I used KDE, I didn’t think it was possible. Linux itself, I’d trust with my life. You get something to run on it, and it’ll run forever. Unfortunately, the desktop environments that run on it aren’t so reliable. Bizarre and unexplainable things seem to randomly occur in every X-based desktop I’ve ever used. And I’ve been a UNIX sysadmin for over a decade, so I’ve used plenty of them.
With all these uncalled for GNOME-bashing, why aren’t there GNOME developers and so on coming here and start bashing us causing the thread to grown to 200 in two days?
@Martin
I’m sorry, but you can’t even speak english properly, never mind construct a decent argument. Shitty icons??? Do me a favour – have you compared them to the KDE stock. If you had you’d retract that statement, as the gnome2 icons are clear, concise and very clean. Repeating the same incorrect statements over and over again does not make them right.
Tsk, it seems that osnews just attracts the linux/gnome bashers (the KDE/beos are/were great, everything else is ‘a pile of shit’ camp) who have no grounds for their arguments and nothing better to do with their time.
In the longterm, your opinion is worthwhile (like everyones), but in an intelligent conversation your previous comments are worth shit.
@ioc2k
sorry engrish
is not my native language. anyways my engrish not that bad after all. you seem not to read carefully enough refering to the icons, i was speaking of the gimp, which rechently got uglyfied by gnome icons.
and yes i am operating with gnome 2 every day and gnome 2 sucks.
People have mentioned several times the GPL licensing issues involving with the Qt/Free Version (from the Harmony project, yada yada … basically the GPL/QPL XFree86 version). However, isn’t Qt/Free dual licensed with both the GPL and the QPL (the QPL being an OSI-approved license, so it can be included in Debian now), so when you compile your app, you can chose which licensing scheme you want to use? I’m not a lawyer, and all of these OSS licenses make it a rather mucky issue, so I was wondering if someone could clear this up.
As far as cross-platform programming goes, Qt is the way to go. It runs beautifully on Windows, Mac OS X, and X Windows (*nix). Granted, the commercial version of Qt (required to release commercial apps on any platform) runs $2500 USD per seat (and platform, IIRC), many of the apps that are being developed in this way are high-end specialized in-house applications that really benefit from this type of cross-platform ability.
Personally, I have been following GNOME and KDE both from their inception, and have found greater consistency within the KDE groups as a whole, and tighter integration between all apps. GNOME lacks many GNOME-specific apps, however there are many GTK+ apps out there. (And please remember that GTK+ is the GIMP ToolKit, which was created for the GIMP. GTK+ is not tied to GNOME, but rather the other way around. This is the same as if GIMP was written using Qt, and none of the KDE-specific libraries. Granted, there are very few non-KDE Qt apps availalbe on Linux — and other Unices — this does not make it impossible.) (And if I recall correctly, CORBA is rather chatty and doesn’t behave well, as DCOP is a much better and cleaner system for sharing info between apps … much like OLE on Windows.)
I fully agree with Eugenia on this one. As far as ioc2k is concerned, I don’t feel that he fully understands Eugenia’s position on all of this. Sure, she was a great contributor to the BeOS community (I’ve enjoyed many of her ported SDL games), but I feel that she writes and reviews with an even hand. Perhaps we just operate on the same wavelength, but I can’t recall in recent memory any stand she’s taken on a software project that I haven’t agreed with (not that I’m just following her words).
And remember, her comments regarding better desktop environment interoperabilty was prefaced with “our take” meaning the views of OSNews.com, not every other person on this earth.
Keep up the good work Eugenia!
— Rob
GTK+ which is full of raceconditions and unstable like shit.
Maybe you should be more factual, otherwise such sentences really sound like a troll.
Cheers,
Olivier.
Eugenia,
I do not believe that “Gnome apps run perfectly fine in a KDE environment and vice versa”. I explain why in the article. It is something that needs to be addressed by both parties.
As far as I know, both parties are aware of that and work is being done to address it. The freedesktop.org plays an important role in it (look at http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/ for the currently covered areas)
You should note that the scope of interoperability standardization is wider than just GNOME/KDE but includes ROX, Xfce and plenty of others.
Cheers,
Olivier.
gconf looks something far advanced and completely different from the mswindows registry:
1 the configuration file is xml and is readable
2 all the changes come active once done (no need to reboot…)
3 can be used or not
@Rob
I do understand Eugenia’s position, and while I may not agree with all she says I am willing to listen. My more ‘verbal’ outbursts were directed at the mindless trolling that Martin seemed to be spurting.
Licencing wise, I think that it remains vital that widely used libraries (such as GTK) are distributed using the LGPL rather than the GPL. Trolltech may have a fully open sourced GUI library in the form of QT, but misusing the GPL does constrict commercial programmers in a very monopolistic way (e.g. what will companies do if Trolltech suddenly doubled the cost of the commercial licence). The lack of community editions for many non-unix platforms highlights the problem with this.
Another dangerous clause prevents starting with the community edition and then licencing the commercial version if the product becomes viable (this means a large up front cost regardless if the product will ever be completed).
No other platform requires a company to pay so much money just to use the API’s. If we all start to rely on QT applications, the Linux community will see all commerical ventures wither and die as companies fail to justify the costs.
@lu_zero
well no matter how advanced gconf is over windows registry. the question here is simple… why do we need it ? in over 30 years we didn’t required a windows registry like system under unix and now ? for many people gconf is the worst nightmare around on this globe. the programmers definately see positive aspects about it like individual setting of preferences or share through other apps etc. but why does it have to be solved with a windows registry like system ?
Where are the Gnome and Gtk developers responding to trolls thrown out by the Kde/Beos/MacOSX/Windows people on this forum? Someone asked that. Maybe they consider it a waste of their time responding to trolls and flamers! However, not speaking as a Gtk/Gnome developer because I am not one, I come to their defense. I have been a Qt/Kde developer who recently has had a change of heart about toolkits and desktops.
After using the most recent stable Ximian Gnome with all the bells and whistles for a few days, I’m very impressed. Some of the features of Gnome 2.0 have been backported. What a change from Kde. Kde is sluggish and crashy. Ximian Gnome, even with Nautilus on the desktop, has crisp, more precise response. (Evidently the most recent version of Nautilus is a big improvement, and it will only get better) And it looks so much better. Mozilla embedding into Nautilus is now offered as an alternative to gtkhtml. (Although gtkhtml is just fine for a help browser).
Kde’s answer, like Microsoft’s, is to keep users on a perpetual hardware upgrade cycle because its bloated system requires ever more fuel to do the same amount of work. Gnome is a desktop for those of us who think a really elegant system is one which uses hardware and resources efficiently, not which has the most precise implementation of OO theory or looks the most like Microsoft Windows or Mac OSX.
I’m much more familiar with Kde’s kparts than with bonobo, but bonobo does work an is used in many Gnome apps already. And these apps don’t crash, at least in my testing so far. All the features of CORBA are not used in many or even any Gnome apps, so arguments about the overhead of CORBA are a moot point for Gnome desktop users. That’s just a red herring thrown out by the kde people.
Gtk may not be as polished as Qt. It has a lot of room for improvement but I consider it a better toolkit in most respects already. Something about Qt eats up processor cycles, I’m not sure what. Probably the way Qt’s signal/slot messaging is complied. There seems to be a lot of polling with any Qt app, whereas a gtk app will be “at rest” until needed. Also, something about the appearane of the Qt doesn’t seem to fit the linux desktop. The proportions are not pleasing. Qt is an excellent cross platfrom toolkit but seems to live in its own universe by its own rules, as does Kde. Gtk on the other hand seems more natural to linux, like it belongs there.
I don’t agree with arguments made about the technical merits of Qt and Kde architecture which are now taken for granted because they have been repeated for so long and so loudly by kde boosters. Many things about Kde’s architecture are very nice and at this time kde is more of an integrated environment than Gnome. But that means little or nothing if the system and the apps are bloated and buggy. I’m not of the opinion that Kde/Qt is easier to work with or develop with. In many ways Qt is like Delphi or Visual Basic, very good for database front end programming and form building. For such uses Qt can save time and perhaps money, but Gtk or PyGtk is probably even easier to work with for in-house prototyping.
I think Kde will remain the most popular desktop in the near term because it looks and feels more “commercial” but nagging licensing issues about Qt make it unattractive for many geek or hobby programmers and for commercial developers. Nobody wants to be tied to a closed, proprietary toolkit, for a number of different reasons. Although GPL and QPL licensing of Qt is used for most linux apps which use Qt, Qt is developed by a closed company with its own agenda which is not necessarily compatible with what the linux desktop needs. So those using Qt will always be chasing a proprietary toolkit. Further, kde boosters imply that free software cannot produce a top-quality gui toolkit. That rubs many if not most of the developers in the Linux community the wrong way.
I feel that Glib, Gdk and Gtk should be considered a “system” libraries for linux, just as glibc is a system library. In practice, they are. Qt can never be that. Once I was opposed to that idea, because I felt it was unfair to Kde, but I feel that Gtk has now passed the test. Kde developers are very good at what they do, but Gnome is getting input from all kinds of sources that Kde has cut itself off from in being so closely tied to Trolltech.
The best thing is that I’m having so much fun using Gnome. I can actually get some work done in a pleasant environment and can trust the system not to go banannas on me. Kde people often talk about “struggling with a toolkit” to put down Gtk programming, but in using Kde I’ve always felt that I was “struggling with a desktop” as an end user. It’s nice to use a full featured desktop that cooperates with me for a change.
All this has little or nothing to do with market share or notions of “winning” a desktop war. Of course Gnome will ultimately prevail, but even if Kde continues to have the majority of users indefinitely Gnome will be the better desktop. Windows has far more users than Kde, so what does that mean?
Please. No lectures about my attitude. It gets page hits for you, doesn’t it?
@ioc2k
Thanks for the clarification. I actually read the QPL after I posted. It seemed to be quite similar to the GPL, meaning that source must be made available for every app. It also noted that patches must have source made available as well. However, on TrollTech’s website they alluded that if a commercial lisence was purchased, you can convert your existing codebase to a commercial app, and never have to release your source again. (Again, that’s just the impression I received.)
I also wholeheartedly agree with the idea of the LGPL. We need to have something that allows closed source apps to be linked with an open source library. Also, thanks for clearing up the Eugenia issue, I think I got some of your troll-bashing confused and mixed up. Yes, trolls need to go the way of the dinosaur (you reading Eugenia =).
— Rob
> Qt make it unattractive for many geek or hobby programmers
yes exactly. that’s why gnome will never make it as desktop for commercial companies. because it’s made by geeks and hobby programmers. i wasn’t able to describe it better.
Troll galore.
I whish OSNews would be more strict about them (perfect would be post rating like on slashdot so moderators don’t have to delete the postings but can make sure people who don’t care about trolls don’t need to bother with them).
About “your take”: After a few years I realised, that a merging of KDE and Gnome will never happen, they are just different in every aspect and noone is so much interested in changing that, that he would go through the trouble.
A common style engine could be great of course but that is not easy to do. A common pixmap theme engine would be easy (AFAIK Qt can already use Gtk pixmap themes) but most people aren’t using pixmap themes anyway but Gtk-engines or Qt-styles. Those are compiled and part of the toolkit, not just images and XML, so it would be very difficult to write a common style engine. And it would only bring the illusion of equalness. People would still stumble about differences here and there and so I think it’s better to not hide them away.
You stated that half the important apps would be Gtk and the other half would be Qt but that’s wrong. Both Gtk and Qt have an tremendous application base. When I’m using Gnome, I refuse to use any Qt app.
When I was using KDE, I completely switched to Qt applications. For example, people can do their daily work with those Gtk applications:
Browing: Galeon
Multimedia: XMMS, Gstreamer
File managing: Nautilus
IM: Gabber, GnomeICU, Ickle, LICQ with Gnome plugin, etc.
Email: Evolution, Sylpheed, Balsa
Tools for CD burning, ripping, etc are all there.
And of course several text editors and Glade for GUI design.
Gimp for image manipulation.
For KDE that is
Browsing: Konqueror
Multimedia: This KDE multimedia app (forgot the name)
File managing: Konqueror
IM: serveral, LICQ has also a Qt plugin
Email: KMail
CD burning, ripping, etc tools are there as well as text editors and KDevelop.
Gimp is missing but there are many graphic applications for smaller tasks.
You just have to see them both as basically different system (more like Windows and Mac instead of two toolkits on onw system). With the _big_ difference, that you _can_ use applications from the other environment if you want to and they will integrate “quite ok”. DND will work, Copy and Paste, etc.
IMO it’s a good thing that both “worlds” are so different because they can learn from each other, compete, fill different niches, etc. Two is just a great number.
Even if one will be leading the other like Windows leads Mac OS, it will still be nice to have the choice. This will always motivate them to innovate.