A KDE developer tipped me off to a recent thread discussed in the kde-core-devel mailing list regarding interoperability between KDE and Gnome. OSNews featured an interview with the usability experts from Gnome and KDE a few days ago and we expected that the spirit of co-operation would continue to get stronger every day. Luckily this is true regarding most of these developers, but not for all of them are sharing it. Here is a commentary on the issue followed by a summary of the long thread.
It is well known to the readers of this site that I am for interoperability when it comes to the two main X11 desktop environments, KDE and Gnome. In my opinion, this is the only way forward for the Linux desktop’s massive adoption. Most Linux graphical apps are written in either Qt or GTK+. And every new platform needs as many quality apps as it can get (BeOS taught me as much at least…) to stay viable. Therefore, it is important for any Linux-based operating system company to be able to support both. Red Hat was the first distro to make the big step on trying to unify the look of the two toolkits with the use of the BlueCurve theme. Freedesktop.org goes a step closer to a more real integration that would bring an end to the problems we get today between the two environments (major app behavior differences, no full DnD support for all apps, different dialogs, UI HIGs, menu system, notification area etc etc).
All these differences are a huge pain for the average user. Expert users, or users with a ‘religious’ background (against the one or the other DE) will assert loudly that they don’t mind having a different breed of apps running under the same desktop while others will assert that they either run GTK+ apps or only Qt apps and that they don’t bother with the “competitor’s” offerings… Sorry, but the big Linux companies I know ALL want to have full interoperability and same app behavior and looks for both their Gnome and KDE and the same goes for the average user. Why? Because it makes sense! The userbase these companies are trying to capture are Windows users who are used to seeing apps that work and look the same, no matter the toolkit or language they were written on or compiled with.
The Linux platform today is not necessarily the 1996-era 2-hour afternoon hacking project by Joe Developer from his bedroom somewhere on the planet. There are still some elements of this, and Linux is still a great OS for hacker projects, but all in all it has become more corporate. Not acknowledging that fact would be a mistake. The largest pieces of code for the main OSS projects today are written by companies who have adopted OSS as their business, not Joe Developer. Joe is still there, but more and more code is coming from these companies.
These companies do not necessarily have the same needs as the hobby hacker team might have. Joe might not care about Gnome, and Joanne might not care about KDE, but Red Hat, Mandrake and SuSE care for both of them, because the Linux applications their users want to load happen to run on both of them. So interoperability is a must for them. They either do whatever is necessary to build the user experience in a way that will please their users or, both themselves and the Linux platform in general are going nowhere in the desktop. Plain and simple.
Take Apple as the example. They have support for 3 different toolkits, Carbon, Cocoa and Java. And applications written in each will look and behave pretty much the same way when they’re run. And that alone is a reason for someone to switch to MacOSX. Same goes for Windows’ three supported main APIs. All look and feel the same. Even Qt and Tcl/Tk and wxWindows are careful to offer support for the Windows look and feel for their Windows versions, simply because it is important to do so.
And this is what Red Hat, Mandrake (with their new Galaxy theme), Freedesktop.org and even SuSE want to have. There is nothing weird about it. It is business as usual and in fact, it is business that would help the whole Linux platform in the long run, not just the individual distro in question.
I believe that the real problem in co-operation between Gnome and KDE (as I see it in the mailing list discussion) are the people who don’t work for these companies. These people (thankfully not all of them 🙂 don’t view the world with the eyes of someone who wants to make a better (commercial) product. They view the OSS world with their own political agendas, which sometimes go back to 1996 for issues that are completely resolved now. They view the “competitor’s” project with skepticism and distrust and they are the ones who separate this OSS project from the other OSS project. These hackers are doing a lot of work for free, and the community is grateful for it, and I am too. But what I don’t like is allowing these independent hackers get in the way of evolution because of their own political/religious agendas. That would be a major mistake for the further adoption of the Linux platform as a viable desktop alternative. In fact, some think that KDE (or Gnome) is already an almost perfect alternative to Windows or Mac — while this is just not true. And very thankfully, most usability engineers that happen to work on Mandrake/SuSE/Red Hat (the big three), agree with me. There is a lot to be done yet, and this road goes through the unification of the specs and sharing of code between apps that are depending on Qt and GTK+.
Some said that trying to do all this “sharing” work could put a break on the two DE’s effort on adding more features. However, do you rather have Linux never get adopted by the desktop market just because our hackers were enthusiastic to add more features (and more pref panels 😉 instead of doing the tedious work of modifying things under the hood (that the users can’t see with a “naked eye”) but which will enable them to go forward as a whole? Point is, there is work to be done and by postponing this work at this critical point that the Linux platform stands today, would be a mistake. Both camps will need to make sacrifices and might even change libraries or code that a dev really likes a lot but for the good of the interoperability, it is something that has to be done.
Back in the ’80s Unix lost its unity and the leading Unix companies could not agree on specs, standards or on fair competition between each other. That was one of the reasons why Unix became weak in the early ’90s and Windows started to take off. Don’t let the same happen today, as the Unix philosophy has a second chance with they sustained hype around Linux. Unity will make the whole platform strong, fragmentation will destroy both of you. Let history give you a lesson and don’t redo the same mistakes over and over again over religious matters…
And make no mistake: “the common standards that were defined up to now didn’t make KDE nor Gnome lose their individuality”. Choice is good and choice will remain. Nobody is saying to make Gnome and KDE the same project! What is needed are just some common standards that will make the life easier for the user and the application developer. Each project will retain its individuality, but instead of having, for example, a Gnome item working via the notification area in the gnome taskbar just fine and then you run the same app under KDE and you get the notification little app as a real window and not on KDE’s notification area, that is very bothersome for the user. Or when DnD doesn’t work. Or when copy/paste doesn’t work correctly for some apps still (despite the X standard). All of these issues need to go away. It is the only way for users to stop criticizing how “clunky” XFree is, while XFree has nothing to do with this whole issue…
The second biggest problem in the cooperation of the two projects is poor communication. I would advocate that the core developers and usability engineers of BOTH projects should join a kde-gnome mailing list, or simply subscribe to freedesktop.org’s mailing list, and start writing the code required.
However, it is not all “hacker’s fault.” Don’t get the wrong idea please. Companies need to communicate better with the hacker community as to what they have in mind on doing next. And also communicate with both projects! Red Hat should be more active in the KDE list and SuSE/Mandrake should be more active in the Gnome list. They include these projects in their products so it only makes sense to be the driving forces on both camps regarding peaceful co-existence and co-operation. And they should give equal chance and support and respect to both projects. They should be the bright example. (However that doesn’t mean that the KDE ‘About Box’ should be present on each and every Qt app. That’s duplication of information and as KDE is free software, modifications are allowed as long they don’t violate their license. This is to say that companies will modify things sometimes that might be disturbing to the project’s line, but might make absolute sense in the company’s line. I am personally ok with this because I understand the needs and HIGs involved – as long they are legal.)
However, if no middle ground is to be found between Gnome and KDE (I pray that this won’t happen though) we might see forks from the really big distros. And that won’t be good for anyone. If a company is forced to take such actions (simply because their customers are asking for it) that can only be a bad thing for the forked project. And if that company which might do a fork has become in the meantime a 800pound gorilla, then after a few years the original project would be forced to comply with that company’s modifications/standards anyway, as it will be seeing its userbase fleeing and they will be the ones who will suddenly become “non standard” funnily enough. What I described here is a long shot, but it could happen. Just pray that it won’t.
I can only suggest that Gnome and KDE developers keep open minds, think outside of the box and most importantly: think about the long run, not just the “today.” The Linux platform today has different needs that it had 5-6 years ago. People expect a lot from it, expect it to live up the the years of hype. The big three are trying to deliver the goods with the help of many “enlightened” individual hackers, but others are just stuck in their own agendas and “traditional/romantic” way of seeing things. These “backwards” people can become the culprits for holding back wider adoption of the Linux desktop. People overall will have to think more broadly, trust, work together and communicate better.
At the end of the day, there is no Linux distribution company which would like to see its Linux-based products get hurt (except SCO maybe ;), so by helping out the “bigger, more important plan” can only help everyone, not just those few that you might like or dislike.
The whole thread started when a KDE developer asked the rest of the developers in the list what they would think adding Glib as an (optional or not) library by the kdesupport’s dependencies.
“I think that the adoption of glib for certain tasks within KDE will make it easier to achieve such consistency. — Waldo Bastian
Naturally, others didn’t have the same opinion on the matter though…
“We can’t very well gain consistency by disobeying our own standards, so GNOME adoption of KDE standards is the only way to get more consistency. — Neil Stevens
Waldo replied back:
“As the discussion became more heated, the C/C++ issue came about: Your reasoning is solely based on gross generalisation. In most cases C++/Qt is superior to C/glib, however that doesn’t rule out that in _some_ cases C/glib is a better choice. In those cases KDE should use it.
[…] Especially in areas where the KDE standards are more de facto standards rather than documented standards, this can be very helpful to improve consistency. I am not so much thinking in terms of visual appearance here, but more in terms of behaviour, e.g. the opening of a browser to open a URL, the sound-server to use to play a sound.glib can be helpful there by providing commonly needed functionality without repeatedly duplicating that functionality (which you would need to do if you didn’t use glib or Qt) and without introducing rather large dependencies (C++/Qt is a much larger dependency than C/glib). As such I think that glib can offer the right balance in those situations. — Waldo Bastian
The thread continued about component interchange strategies:
“So as some components of these might be inferior compared to other components, I think its unlikely that at any point in time, a user will get the optimal set of all applications and services from only KDE or only GNOME ; thus, it would be better if code sharing could be improved And yes, adopting glib for KDE is only the first step. [optional] — Stefan Westerfeld
Which of course is not an easy thing to do:
“It is relatively easy to use common icons or a common system for installing .desktop files. But unifying things like KPart/Bonobo, DCOP/CORBA and the underlying APIs is almost impossible without a re-design of a lot of things. And unifying common dialogs, like the file dialog, would require 100% code duplication and huge coordination problems (because they must be synced all the time – if you change the Qt dialog you must change the Gtk/Gnome dialog at the same time).
If your goal is to unify Gnome and KDE, you would better spent your time on improving Gtk++/Gnome++ and port your applications to it. But maintaining two complex system and keeping them inter-operable at every level is crazy. — Tim Jansen
Then, it was Havoc Pennington’s turn to explain why this interoperability between DEs is very important for the platform and that by interoperating KDE and Gnome, will NOT mean that KDE and Gnome will be the one and the same (which is something that some people think, sadly enough):
“The applications should be orthogonal to the user environment (choice is good, platform fragmentation is bad).
To me whether GNOME and KDE should “merge” hinges on the question of UI unification. Say you merge the human interface guidelines and general approach/goals. Then at that point you may as well start merging implementation (say porting GTK+ to Qt or vice-versa).
However, if you don’t, there is still value in ensuring that the apps interoperate – same help system, font system, MIME system, etc. i.e. even if we offer *choice* of user interface, we should avoid *fragmentation* of platform.” — Havoc Pennington
One of the most active KDE developers, George Staikos joined the discussion soon thereafter:
“I fully agree that choice and interoperability are far preferable to fragmentation. Believe it or not, I do agree that pkg-config is in general a good thing. What I don’t agree with, however, are the approaches and implementations we see presently.
1) Communication, here in The Internet Age, gets an F. Most KDE developers have never even heard about DBUS, at least not until this past week.
[…]Compiling C code with a C++ compiler just gives us the inefficiencies of the C++ compiler of the day, with the loss of power that was available. Are the other desktops prepared to accept C++ as a core requirement, and use C wrappers to the C++ code? Or is KDE to be the one to bear the burden of wrapping C code with C++ to fit the development model? Will we even have to use C# backend code at some
point?
Standardization and sharing technology are noble goals indeed. I do in fact support this. I do not support the means to this end right now. I need answers, procedure and compromise, and I think the rest of the desktop developers need this as well; KDE, Gnome, XPDE, and more.
I sincerely hope that we can discuss these issues more at OLS and perhaps even come to some agreements.” — George Staikos
Havoc continued by explaining that what needs to be done at this first stage leave the vast majority of existing GNOME/KDE code unchanged. No reason to think about interchanging C++ APIs to C or the other way around. Basic (but important parts) interoperability can be a reality between the two projects without major architectural changes.
“Note that my list is mostly the hardest stuff; the easy things are already in-progress or done and just need maintenance over time.” — Havoc Pennington
He later explained the difference between choice and fragmentation.
“Keep in mind though – the problem with duplication is choice vs. fragmentation, not the mere existence of duplication. As I said before, people *like* choosing from multiple email clients. What they don’t like is say not being able to choose the best email client, because of their choice of web browser. Or losing possible users due to choice of devel platform. Or having to set up MIME handlers 6 times.
I think the open source community is inherently going to have 30 efforts in every category, just because there are lots of programmers in the world and they all have their thing they want to try. And in fact users have different needs. That’s not necessarily a problem in itself. It gives users choice, and it gives us “failover” (if one project fails we have others to pick up the slack). The problem is when the stuff is not orthogonal/interoperable. If the Linux desktop slows down due to duplication, it will be because of fragmentation (because we had to provide feature completeness in one fragment or the other rather than in some combination of the two halves), not due to choice (if extra apps exist as an option, that doesn’t matter).
[…]It is simply not that hard to get good interoperability; the list of to do items is very finite and very limited in size compared to the full size of GNOME/KDE. In fact we’ve already solved more problems than remain unsolved. I’m optimistic about our chances for that reason.
There’s no progress or plan to be communicated. All I’m listing here is my personal opinion on what’s a good idea or how it could be done, that’s it.” — Havoc Pennington
Knee Jerk reactions where part of the show too but thankfully they were kept to minimal.
Replies regarding the Red Hat choices followed:
“Ultimately open source software is driven by lots of independent hackers doing what they think is right.
[…]I don’t think this is a productive conversation. I can say “well we care about features XYZ and business concern ABC” and some of those things will be very debatable; there are plenty of judgment calls involved. So those people who are inclined to think we’re evil will
not believe any of it anyway, and in the meantime we’ll have a huge list thread on unresolvable religious issues.” — Havoc Pennington
Scott Wheeler continued the discussion (which now has turned into whether DBUS is a good choice instead of using DCOP):
“I don’t think it’s fair to expect the KDE community to link to the core libraries of the Gnome project while saying that the Gnome project is not willing to link to the core libraries of the KDE project. I know, I know, “tainted by the GPL” or whatever, but that just doesn’t seem like the way that things are supposed to work.” — Scott Wheeler
And two more must reads, one from Havoc and one from George Staikos.
Look at XParts in KDE CVS.
You link and modify GPL code for in house development. You only cannot sell or distribute without the source code and limit further distribution.
Example: a bank develop a in house backoffice using GPL QT. Do they have to pay Trolltech? NO! Only if they want support! They can even distribute it to subsidiaries in other countries, etc… because you only have to make available the source code to whom you distribute the program.
This is basic GPL stuff. _Stop the FUD_. KDE will not “lose” because of that. Try another reason.
Once KDE was not free enough. Now they say is too free.
Well people could be wright about not free enought, but they are wrong about “too free”. GPL is freedom for the user. Total freedom. Including in house development. It’s a smart licence.
“Sure you can. Just write a wrapper around it using KDE the platform.”
Uh, but then I’m still using the KDE platform. Which means linking with Qt, which I don’t want to do.
And you’re ignoring the vast bulk of code, that does not use KDE, nor could be adapted to use wrappers. They use their own platforms. Those apps aren’t going to go away – standards are the *only* solution here.
Again, I think platforms and APIs are being confused. Platforms are systems. APIs are interfaces onto those systems.
[“Sure you can. Just write a wrapper around it using KDE the platform.”
Uh, but then I’m still using the KDE platform. Which means linking with Qt, which I don’t want to do.]
Could you please explain how on earth you are going to embed something into KOffice without linking to Qt? How will your ‘Star Trek’ API/Platform, whatever you are talking about, will achieve this? Give a concrete example of what you would propose, please?
It has no functionality…
Your comment seems to indicate that you failed to see the following comment I made in my post:
“I use KDE all day, every day…”
Even though I use KDE all day, every day, does that mean that I don’t think it doesn’t neet to improve, or that there exists some philosophies in other systems that it could benefit from greatly? No.
As a user, I only care about operations, not underpinnings: I want to be able to send the document I’m working in my word processor in mail with one menu command or by dragging and dropping the file icon to the mail message composition window, I want to be able to cut and paste between all applications, and so on. This is not rocket science. The only thing necessary is a standard high-level message API shared by applications. That’s it. The under-the-hood implementation of this API doesn’t matter. Say it with me: the implementation details do not matter. Qt? GTK? Roll-your-own? Who gives a damn?
If the KDE and GNOME libraries give all KDE and GNOME applications this functionality, that’s great. More power to ’em. If it means, as a user, I need whatever libraries my applications want on my system, I will have those libraries on my system. Again, this is not rocket science. In a perfect world, would that be unnecessary? Sure. In a perfect world you wouldn’t have 78 copies of four versions of Microsoft’s Visual C runtime libraries scattered around your Windows partition, either. Cruft happens.
I have never seen such a profound case of missing the forest for the trees as is visible in these comments. If this is the true state of KDE/GNOME “cooperation,” though, I’m only being partially facetious when I wonder if the next big Linux “desktop distribution” will be built around GNUStep, XFce4, Rox or something else sufficiently removed from this nonsense to think clearly.
I want more people to have those views, and I think that’s a way to increase Linux’s adoption. Eugenia, online there are people who take more meaning from “commercial” and “product” than was ever intended. I think that by “commercial” you mean software for most people. I think that by “product” you mean software. I agree with everything you say, everything, but when you say it that way people don’t listen.
You’re always talking about usability – and how to adapt to what people need – well I’ve observed that people argue with you on your terms and waste time arguing semantics. I’ve seen this for the last year (I’m a long time reader). Eugenia, you need to use different terms or the people with their own prejudices will find it too easy to disregard what you have to say.
You may say that they’re your words, and you’re right. You don’t have to change. But just look at the crap that happens when people get the wrong idea in their head.
Thanks,
Similarly, when you talk about “Corporation” people have their own prejudices about this. Also, that they’re a corporation is beside the point – it’s about software that people can use. The corporation wants to give it to the most people, and that’s something that everyone can agree with (unlike the “Corporation”).
“Could you please explain how on earth you are going to embed something into KOffice without linking to Qt? How will your ‘Star Trek’ API/Platform, whatever you are talking about, will achieve this? Give a concrete example of what you would propose, please?”
I’ll be quick ‘cos I want to go to bed
See how Microsoft have been doing it for years with COM. Basically a set of language neutral rules on how to structure VTables and get pointers to them. Pretty low level. Anyway, it’s a good way to bridge platforms together, without the need to merge them. Delphi users can use the VCL, Visual Basic users can use…. uh, whatever VB users use
In C++ you have MFC and ATL. It can be used from raw C as well.
It’s not just about multiple languages though… for instance you could bridge standard C++ and Qt C++ together….
COM is ok, rather ugly. CORBA is a more standards based version of the same thing, but rather complex and has a focus on outproc rather than inproc objects. Also of course KDE would never accept it.
There are possibilities for other object models that’d let you do the mythical embed into KWord using any language/environment/API/runtime thing … but they haven’t been coded yet
They don’t mean merging platforms though, just standardising some interfaces. The way things should be done.
Night night.
This is what it seems the GNOME/KDE war is about.
Motion: – Let us make our Linux desktops interoperate better.
GNOME: – Yes, yes, that is a brilliant idea.
KDE: – No, out desktop interroperates with itself, no need to interoperate with anyone else.
My question, who sounds more like Microsoft in this case.
I think KDE needs to come out of its shell and realise that the same things that are being asked of them are the same things people asked Microsoft and they refused. Now look who you are trying to replace.
Interoperability starts at the lowest level. We are supposed to level the playing field between all developers, and the GPL, while it is good for programmers who want their work which they put in for free to not be taken advantage of by anyone, especially a big corporation, it is not suitable for the most important parts of the platform and is being used restrictively in this case.
If you want to develop using Qt on Windows, you have to make a decision at the outset whether you are going to license your product as GPL or closed source. Trolltech controls Qt, and that is not too attractive for companies. Its not attractive for OSS developers too. Don’t give me the you can modify it and make it suit yourself if Trolltech tries to screw you over. Once there are some good closed source commercial apps based on the Qt, trying to fork Qt is out of the question. Qt is getting more powerful. The LGPL does not allow that. No one can control how people develop using the LGPL. If commercial closed source alternatives are too expensive, the barrier of entry for free version is lowered.
I really don’t like that the KDE project seems to be running away from the spirit of open source software. De facto standards are not standards as some KDE developer was trying to imply. That is how Microsoft got to where it is right now. Standards need to be agreed on and documented.
And to all those GNOME bashers, I swear you have not looked at GNOME.
While I agre that apps should look and probably feel the same way on both dekstops, and some funddamental things should be established such as copy/paste, notification area, theme compatiblity etc. I THINK WE SHOULD NTO GO TOO FAR! From waht ir ead Eugenia wants far more.
I want both projects to keep their identiy intact!
>From what i read Eugenia wants far more.
REALLY? Re-read the article then before write that trash over here.
>I want both projects to keep their identiy intact!
Me too! Nobody said anything against that!
Mike: Interesting. Good Night 🙂
Maynard:
No, really you are over simplifying. Some in the KDE community are all for what Havoc is proposing (not me). Others are virulently against all forms of interopability (not me). Most are decidedly cautious about it, but in general believe that interoperability is a good thing (me). I think this is true of the GNOME community too.
Maynard, you lost me completely though when you started FUDing about Qt licensing though.
>> “Good reason. KHTML uses QT which is a GPL app which means KHTML must be GPL. Gnome as a matter of philosophy does not bundle libraries under the GPL because they want to leave the floor open to commercial development (something KDE is opposed to). If you think the HTML library in kdelibs is better than the one in Mozilla then you are KDE user.”
Oh, please.. if you really want to show how ‘destructive’ the unity push is you’d better do some more research first.
KHTML could be perfectly forked into a general purpose HTML library for Linux because it’s LGPL, not GPL.
Have a look at the following page for some backup: http://developer.kde.org/documentation/licensing/licensing.html
And yes, KHTML is better in some areas, one of them is with widgets.
Personally I prefer native widgets (Gtk2 on Gnome and Qt on KDE), not those ugly XUL widgets that only take over the look of the current theme (it looks nearly the same, but it does not _feel_ the same).
The nonsense that I would be a KDE user because I like KHTML better is bull shit.
>> “Many of the data structures for KDE are provided by their standard widget set, QT. Gnome was designed to not use QT; Gnome has no permission to take Trolltech’s code and relicense it under the LGPL.”
Who said I was talking about stuff from KDE?
So you’re probably assuming, once again, that I’m a KDE user.
Wrong bet.
I was rather talking about glib, or even a complete new library (yeah I know, that takes time.. a lot of it).
>> “Because you didn’t know why they wouldn’t happen. You probably thought it was people being stubborn not that it would be essentially illegal.”
Don’t just act like you know your stuff, know it.
ps. I haven’t read all posts so if someone else came up with that link: too bad.
mysterious and spooky
theyre all together ooky
the unification family
If you want their identitiy intact, and you want applciations to look/behave the same way, why do so many disagree.
I think the above is top priority as long as it can be done elegantly without greately affecting the advancement of oth desktops or sloiwing their speed. I especially care for look, I don’t mind the different behavior to be honest.
I do also want notification area compatibilities, copy paste compatibility like I mentione, but waht else is really needed.
NOW TO TROLLTECH!
You people are bashing their license for no reason. They are very fair, they work hard to make their flagship product Qt and have it released under the GPL as long as you do not develop applications and make money off them. This sounds totally fair, if your not making money from Trolltech’s products, why should trolltech make money from you? I don’t see the problem!
whoever “unknown” is, I am pretty sure its not Ali
Too KDE centric and Ali’s back using gnome now (if still not happy)
Also for all his faults Ali normally signs somewhere in a thread and has a recognisable style, which differs totally
Just thought I’d stick up for him as hes not flaming at the moment
This is what it seems the GNOME/KDE war is about.
Motion: – Let us make our Linux desktops interoperate better.
GNOME: – Yes, yes, that is a brilliant idea.
KDE: – No, out desktop interroperates with itself, no need to interoperate with anyone else.
My question, who sounds more like Microsoft in this case.
Well lets get a real history then:
KDE – Lets build a GUI for Linux that is more than a window manager. There is already a widget set called QT
Gnome – We don’t like QT. Lets create an entirely different widget set. Oh and we will design it in C not C++ so that combining the two will be almost impossible.
—- several years pass —–
Gnome – Now that QT is licensed OK and our project is stalling lets create a common set of widgets.
KDE – OK no problem just link QT into GTK. QT is designed to support links like that
Gnome – Well that mean that GTK would be GPL and we only distribute LGPL libs. The only support we have left is on the commercial side so we can’t do this.
KDE – Why should we want to link in GTK? Our users don’t have any real desire to run GTK apps and if/when they do they understand enough to be able to handle it. Its your vendors who want their users who want to run QT apps without needing to know about KDE/QT.
___________
The spirit of open source is that cooperation is voluntery. KDE is willing to make minor sacrifices to work better with Gnome (for example they got their window manager to be gnome compliant). They aren’t willing to make major sacrifices and double their development time to work well with Gnome. Gnome want this primarily so that commercial developers don’t have to pay a trolltech a few grand when they sell software. I don’t think that’s unreasonable position for KDE.
What does Gnome have to offer KDE that makes it worth their while? How are KDE based distributions suffering from the split? How are open source developers hurt?
I can understand why RedHat and Sun (and hence the Gnome governing board) want this since their users want KDE apps and they want to be able to rebrand them. But how does that help KDE?
I am amazed at the attacks and defenses/counterattacks that took place on this thread. It is amazing at how many people “wake up” as soon as someone expresses how they think linux should/shouldnt be.
Colin
I’ve read the first page of comments and I can’t be bothered to read any further.
I agreed with the article: The fact is that Linux is business. IBM, SusE, RedHat Mandrake etc are primarily responsible for the current widespread adoption of Linux.
The point the article is making is that there needs to be better interoperabiliy to for the benefit of people using the desktop environments.
So far as i could gather, H Pennington and some others have already implemented or talked about what needs to be implemented to that behind the scences, KDE and GNOME and their related apps interoperate more seamlessly than they do right now. This isn’t about merging the desktops and it’s not about making applications look the same. It’s about achiveing better usability and consistency when using GNOME or KDE apps.
The point is, that if some developers don’t want this, then so be it. The distributors and resellers are pumping out to the masses. Those same masses are demanding better usability and consistency. If said idelistic developers won’t provide it, someone else will. Simple.
The whole thing boils down to the lonely developer. She’s out there right now working on the next killer app. Of course instead of working on the app, she’s trying to choose a license that will fit her program. If you go QT you have to sell it to get back the money you spent for the license or you can GPL it. If you GPL it, no one will ever pay you for it but it will be free. Worse yet is to LGPL it then another CO can change stuff and you have to buy it back from them.
She has an idea for a cool widget that will integrate with desktop publishing and improve everyone’s life. But who does she write it for? If it’s for KDE and uses QT it’s pay or free, If its for other platforms it just won’t work.
Hence, the widget never gets developed! Realize that for all the “diversity” in the Linux world, people’s mindshare can only handle 3-5 options. If there are 3 big desktop platforms that don’t cooperate, each with their own way of doing things and their own apps, that only leave 2 remaining mindshare options! You can never build a best system in that environment. If the best Browser sits in one platform and the best website tool sits in the other, your at an empasse–the programs can never take advantage of each other! The current practice is to just run them all at once. That leads to horrible system bloat. As both systems develop now the space grows twice as fast as if they would get along!
Users just want to buy/download something! They want it to work! They don’t want to worry about why GPL is better than Commercial and why they can’t work together. Maybe there’s a third option–data formats. If there were common GPL’d data formats [just the format, not the implementation] that would be a start for apps working together. Example: Why there isn’t a OpenOffice.org import filter for Koffice & AbiWord. That’s a simple thing that doesn’t hurt anyone. But developers will violently oppose it. Why? If I email a document .rtf & .doc are the only common formats even between Linux apps! They’re both Microsoft![html & txt don’t count–maybe html/xml should though]
For Linux to take off basic interoperability needs to be dealt with! It’s the network effect–it’s only valuable if you can easily share it. Computers are about to be a lot smaller and cheaper–running everything at once won’t be an option in the embedded space! Our programmer has to be able to pick one platform for her workstation and know she can share her work [documents and programs] with grandma, the kids, and people in europe. If they all have Linux that has to be enough. Or we can just give up and buy MS devices, at least they all work together. [they don’t work well, but they do work together]
Sun’s original vision for Java was exactly what you all are asking for! It was supposed to have a JVM written for each platform. The platform would then add as many hook as possible from Java directly into their platform providing a consistant feel in their platform. If you moved the program to a different platform it would then feel just like that platform’s programs do.
You saw how that turned out: MS wanted to add it’s own functions not just hooks. Then, no one else wanted to do anything with it. Sun took it upon themselves to rewrite all the features just for java to use because no one would get along. Now java is huge, bloated, and slow–all because developers wouldn’t come down from their ivory towers and work together!
Warning: That’s where linux is headed if people don’t work things out!
For what it’s worth I like GTK+, which seem’s like it must come as a suprise to alot of people here that seem to think that it’s some kind of upstart that began as an afront to the Qt people. For that matter, I quite like GTK– too, I looked at Qt a few years ago, the whole moc thing didn’t appeal to *my* personal tastes so then I went with gtk, gtk– does C++ more along the way I like it, so I use that. I even LIKE corba, shock horror, I’m sure DCOP might be lovely but it’s not going to make too much headway in the banking sector.
I could’nt really give a crap about HIG’s I wont write an app that I find too hard to use and if people want to suggest changes and I dont specifically dislike stuff then cool. Im not going to sit down and read a doc telling me how many pixels away from the north pole my dialogue boxes should be. I’m sorry, but it’s just not that important to me.
Frankly the vast majority of free software is, and always will be, written by, as Eric Raymond put it, people scratching an itch, and frankly attempting to tell someone where they itch is just plain rude. The majority of glorious hordes of hackers out there are not trying to create a ‘desktop environmen’, they are trying to have a little fun writing something they geta kick out of, so to hell with your great visions of a unified desktop, frankly I dont think the majority of the people that you seem to be wanting to tell what to do give a damn what you think.
Traditional unix/geek/hacker.
For the part of Linux and programming that it is about “geekness”, I agree 100% with what you say. Programming is just a hobby for many people, so reading HIGs just to create an emulator front end is pissy boring.
However, there is another part of Linux, the one that came out of its cave around 1999, and that is the corporate Linux platform. And in THAT world, different rules are used. The customers have different needs than the geek/hobby programmer has. And the Linux companies need to follow up on their user’ needs.
Therefore, we have a clash today. People like yourself (geek programmers), and people like RH/SuSE (corporate/product needs). We have a schism of a sort.
And this schism is what it needs to be sort out. Pretending that the problem is not there or taking the attitude “I don’t care what you want to do with my source code” is not right either. The Linux platform today has a hype. People expect a lot from it. Linux has changed. Most of the geek programmers haven’t though. And this is good. And bad. Depends how you see the whole Linux thing.
well from personal experience in linux advocacy in SME environments, and NOT as a ‘geek’ of any kind, my finding have been that the issue against adoption of linux on the desktop have had nothing to do with dialogue bozes, fonts, or “a more unified desktop feel”, they are entirely due to standard business thinking around support, (pretense of) liability, and changing from the norm (apple/windows).
From a unix admin perspective I can promise you that linux is here to stay, and has all but won the war, and that comes down to pure pragmatism.
I’ve given up on linux desktp advocacy amongth friends, partly because it’s is frankly impossible (the moving target of jsut what isnt quite right this week), and the realisation that frankly there is no point in most people usng a unix based desktop if they are not going to use it in a unix oriented way, Thats not arrogance it’s just fact, you get nothing out of it except a whole lot of “its not the same”.
> adoption of linux on the desktop have had nothing to do with dialogue bozes, fonts, or “a more unified desktop feel
I disagree. Look, feel, behavior is *a* factor. But it is NOT the only factor! I would say that the issue we discuss here today has only about 30-50% to do with “why linux is not big on the dekstop”. The rest percentage is because of other things as you stated, plus application support.
But here today we just tuckle one of these issues, not all of them.
>I can promise you that linux is here to stay
Of course it is! Especially on the server space! It is a strong server platform!
What we clearly said is that Linux will have slower adoption in the desktop market if these 4-5 issues are not fixed.
Traditional unix/geek/hacker.
You probably didn’t mean that as a compliment. Nice.
Pretending that the problem is not there or taking the attitude “I don’t care what you want to do with my source code” is not right either.
I don’t think anyone would pretend the problem isn’t there. It’s an issue that time, technical merit, and willpower will sort out. Nobody will be hurt in the meantime. But what you want to do with other peoples source code is irrelevant. It’s GPL, you can do what you want with it. What you _can’t_ do is tell _me_ what to do with it or my free time. I just don’t care. I won’t compromise my enjoyment of my preferred development platform to make it more in tune with your subjective HIG preferences.
The Linux platform today has a hype.
Who cares about hype besides newbie freeloaders and giant corporations looking for free code? If you want to shape what gets done in a free project, you’ll have to pull your own weight and contribute.
People expect a lot from it.
And there would be NOTHING there for people to expect anything from except for the “traditional unix/geek/hacker” you dismiss as cavemen in need of your various forms of wisdom.
Im a little late in the conversation but… wouldnt this kill Gnome? I mean if KDE can do everything KDE can PLUS everything Gnome can… why have Gnome??
I must have missed the point
I think you have lost the plot a bit here..
It is not about Gnome and KDE (no matter what some people might want to turn the issue in that direction). It is about Gnome libs and KDE libs and Qt and GTK+.
The point is that there are applications (the very reason why an OS can be useful or not) that are written either for GTK+ or for Qt. And they don’t interoperate well together. And people want to. So freedesktop.org and most of the big companies want to make these apps work better together. But they find resistance or misunderstandings from the “KDE Vs Gnome” people.
But my point is still somewhat valid
If all gtk application behaves as well in KDE than they do in Gnome, what’s left of Gnome? If the core GTK+/glib is present in KDE, why have Gnome?
Of course this sounds like I believe KDE is superior to Gnome but the same could be said if Gnome could run every Qt/KDE apps perfectly. But it seems they can’t because of licenses, so we’re left with KDE that can do everything…
I know this article is only about “interpoerability”, but in the end, when everything “interoperates” so well together, you lose all incentives to have 2 different platforms, right?
Yes, my english is very suck.
>you lose all incentives to have 2 different platforms, right?
No. Their desktops will still look different, have different options on their menus/context menus, have different layouts etc. There is still choice.
//Another notable difference between you and I … I use a Free Desktop every day and you are still stuck using your closed system.//
Stuck how? Stuck with a solid OS that runs nearly every program you could ever want, and is “out-of-the-box” compatible with *THOUSANDS* of different pieces of hardware?
Yah, that would suck.
Ass.
Ultimately it seems to me that…
1. telling the little guy (whose kind have produced this wonderful thing that is here for all to whien about) that he should be looking at the bigger picture is pretty offensive, his picture looks just fine, you would’nt tell Turner to paint adverts.
2. The majority of sme/corporate decisions will be made without even glancing at thee aesthetic elements that get so much attention, RedHat have gotten, and will continue to get, major corporate accounts because they represent a viable alternative, not neccesraily an aetheticly suprerior one. You might be right about speed of adoption, but IMHO improving aethetics and integration are not the only, andindeed not the quickest, methodof achieveing acceptance. Many of the concerns out there will be met as people seek to meet the next of the technical challenges, by promoting your point of view you can guide what challenges people look at, but this shouldn’t be done by trying to point things out as absolutes when they are subjective and emotive issues.
3. I think alot of the grass roots developers are becoming rather concerned tha the notion and promotion of variety and choice is being put down by those out there who want to seek corporate acceptance. And for many of us its not a price we are willing to pay.
4. It will all sort itself out in the end. Those with the means and motive may well devleope the grand unified system that they want, and may people may take it up and use it. My personal suspicion is that other market forces are going to decide how successful these efforts are in the end. Those of us withother goals will keep plodding on, after all, we’ve not done so bad over the last 25 years.
One thing is for sure though, successive releases of the main commerical linux distro’s are acting as a wedge, each release is driving that wedge deeper and deviding the community, regardless of the “desktop devide”. The devision is between the unix users and hobbyist that know what they like, and the desktop users who seem to be told what they like.I can guarantee that one of those groups is going to survive, and we shall see about the other.
The adult tolerance that has been demonstrated towards some of the childishness on both GNOME and KDE lists has been nothing short of amazing. A few people have had reasonable, mature, disagreements but the sheer volume of the petty snipes that have been maturely allowed to pass unremarked is quite encouraging, regardless of whether interoperability is achieved or whether the best technical design is arrived at. After all, it can always be redesigned later, but if we fall to infighting and acrimony, we are lost. Havoc in particular has been very mature on the KDE list, as have a few of the KDE people on the Gnome list.
wxWindows provides a standard cross-platform GUI API with multiple language bindings.
If (??) wxWindows can be warapped around QT and GTK+, app developers would have an API to code with regardless of the underlying DE or OS.
The API used to create the apps is *not* the problem. The rest is.
> No. Their desktops will still look different, have different options on their menus/context menus, have different layouts etc. There is still choice.
I realize what they are trying to do here with laying down the framework, but like Mat seems to suggest, at some level it would seem like reducing either DE to a theme, and that is probably what really scares some of the people in both camps.
There is no need to get personal just because you get out of arguments. GNOME has fallen back, GNOME destroyed it’s own community, GNOME is in-efficient, GNOME is worthless as plattform. Mike, there are many votes on all places that can prove this and your reply really sounds more ignorant and hardheaded to me than openminded.
http://www.desktoplinux.com/cgi-bin/survey/survey.cgi?view=results&…
http://www.linux.com/pollBooth.pl?qid=1386&aid=-1
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?threadid=398…
Here are some examples Mr. Mike, now show me one poll on one unbiassed page that shows GNOME on first place.
Again, I don’t see the necessarity for KDE to trash their concepts and road just because some GNOME’rs wants so. And now after the KDE team has rejected you people are becoming unfair and bash about KDE being uncooperative and whatelse. First of all SHOW the world that you can keep up with KDE then we can talk about cooperation again but right now you only managed to create a big disappointment.
Hey guys, I am a college student and I have been using mandrake 9.0 for about a month. I currently use kDE because it is most familiar to what I am used to xp, and I can work faster. Things that I use my computer for: writing papers, email, internet, AIM, FTP, IRC, P2P, mp3/divx/xvid player. I dont really understand the argurment that people want all their apps to look the same. I actually did not like the fact that KDE installed with all its own stuff as default, seemed a little to forceful to me. I like that a distribution comes with most programs that one needs, but I dont think they have to be KDE apps. I like that basic functionality exist with the file browser and config tools. However, I like that programs look different… they are after all. I use mozilla/mail cus it doesnt have all the extra stuff that evolution has which I dont need. But as long as it is close enough to what I am used to using (forward, backward etc), it does not have to look like the file manager, web browser, writer etc. This didnt even occur to me untill I read these posts. What did occur to me is that OOo looks very dated and wastes space with a drop down url browser making presentation combersome. I think the ability to use a program on different platforms is more important then making them look the same. One should be able to cut paste, and use programs seamlessly. The fight between KDE and GNOME does not really matter to me, I just want stuff to work. I think KDE will be popular with first time switchers like me becaues it is more intuitive after windows. That being said I do enjoy the ability to choose my environment and configure things as I see fit. I have tried gnome, KDE, windows maker etc. Just a word about what we are up against, I intalled mozilla for a friend of mine getting sick of popups. She got mad at me and demanded that I reinsall netscape 4.7 because she couldnt figure out how to get the mail client to display her total messages number. Suffice it to say I am in the vast minority and most people are not very competent with, and do not care about their computers. If you want wide spread acceptance of linux it has to be *very* easy. So interoperability is good, and for me anyway so if flexibility. There was an article in the main campus paper the other day about palladium and the IT people were not happy and neither were students (piracy is rampant in this setting w/ mega bw as I am sure you all know). College users my be fertille for new linux users if M$ keeps pushing. I would actually suggest making these “important” college apps available on a “evaluation” cd or something because it was a pain to figure out how to install all the stuff that I use. I dont care because it took me a good 2-3 years to get to that point in windows so few weeks to make the switch is more then fair. However it would just grease the wheels of progress. Anyway just my 2 cents, maybe you will be interested in the opinion of a college student, maybe not. M$ is the bad guy here guys.
..is all I need to say. Eugeina. nice to see that someone gets it.
Beeing a developer, it’s just way to frustrating making GUI apps for linux. Nothing is consistent, everything can be done in several ways(good), but they are not compatible or doesnt interoperate(bad).
How is this related to this technical conversation the others and I’m having here ? We are trying to argue about advantages and disadvantages about two totally different Desktops and their fundamental layers. We are talking about if it’s good merging them or not. And obviously there is no reason for one to drop their fundamental layers in favour of another Desktop and vice versa. The point is, that KDE exists long before GNOME, we today wouldn’t have this split community or we wouldn’t have this sorts of conversation or war if there wasn’t another Desktop. GNOME is a fragmentation, now they realized that KDE is growing faster than GNOME, now they come to KDE and beg for cooperation and beg KDE to drop 50% of their fundamental layers. For what ? I bet if KDE would have been in this really really sad position that GNOME is today then I bet none of them would care for KDE either. Even better I think a lot of wine bottles would be opened if KDE would simply disappear. So argued, I don’t see the relevance for an cooperation with KDE. GNOME made the fragmentation 6 years ago, they can’t keep up anymore and they fear to loose the Desktop race. I also like to add that there is a lot of fragmentation inside the GNOME libraries itself, like multiple Toolbar code and various other wrapped code. If there wasn’t this fragmentation that GNOME is responsible for then we would have The GIMP, Evolution, Mozilla with QT or KDE support these days and would happily look into a nice future with one dominating Desktop Environment, no war, no fragmentation, no fight between standards, no such conversations like this and many more.
This integration in KDE is not necessarily forced, it’s because the framework is that way. E.G.
– one Clock Object embeddable in other apps,
– one Addressbook Objekt embeddable in other apps,
– one Thumbnail Object embeddable in other apps,
– one Bookmark Object embeddable in other apps,
and so on, this is nothing bad and nothing wrong. It of course causes fragmentation with applications using their own standard Widgettools such as OpenOffice or XUL but this is not our fault, this we can not change. Now look on GNOME,
– Nautilus has own Bookmark support,
– Galeon with own Bookmark code and editor,
– GThumb with own Bookmark code,
– Evolution with own Addressbook format,
– Evolution with own Clock and Calendar,
– Gnome Desktop with own Clock and Calendar.
This is FRAGMENTATION because their philosophy changed from an unified and integrated Desktop to single standalone applications. KDE is a Desktop Environment and was that since day one. Desktop (Windowmanager capabilities and Libraries) and Environment (Other stuff around it that feels and work the same). GNOME used to be a Desktop Environment as well but with 2.0 they dropped the idea of Environment.
Look at Dan Duley’s cool Pixie Plus
http://www.mosfet.org/pixieembedding.html
7 Lines of code changed in his Program (because of OO and it’s seamless integration) and now his Pictureviewer is able to show PDF, PS, HTML documents as well. GNOME developers would probably need half a year only to support half of this within their applications. You need to understand that KDE has a working framework already with all sorts of Objects, these Objects can be used to create NEW applications in a really short time. You don’t need a diploma or much computer experience just to understand this. GNOME is lacking all this.
Well, who should take you seriously ? With your last reply you shot and disqualified you so much that it obviously need no further comment. Is this a normal behaviour from GNOME people like you are to heavily attack people you obviously don’t know about just because you have no other arguments to show up ?
Now the world seriously sees what the main problems in this community are regardless the fact of GNOME or KDE, the true facts are people like minkwe who have no further or true arguments to bring up becoming personal by attacking people on the worst and most evil way they could find.
– You have NOT replied to any of my replies and to it’s real contents,
– All you and Mike Hearn was up to is slandering people on it’s worst without even going into contents of what’s being said or written.
– You are the REAL trolls of this community while others at least made constructive and technical comments about things.
This is nothing about GNOME or KDE anymore, this is about personal attacks of individual people. In no time within all the ~140 we talked disrespectively about Havoc Pennington for example, we only expressed our opinion about him for not being right in the direction he likes to see things but in no time we called him a Troll, an asshole, a liar or whatever. We just argued about his opinion and his short sighted consequences that may happen for either KDE or GNOME.
What you and Mike Hearn and the other bunch of morons are trying all the time is the lowest possible piece of shit people can do. No argumentations and then trying to hit on the lowest possible way people can do, below the belt.
You and the other minions are trying to show the world how much of an asshole this person is (whoever he is) but you only showed how much of an asshole you are on your own. Maybe even worse than that.
pot calling the kettle black 8^)))
Not wanted on dot.kde.org, not wanted at gnomedesktop.org, not wanted at osnews, not wanted at slashdot.org
Must say something about this person (who ever he is
)
Get a shrink!
Now we have 145 Messages written here, where 10 are from the Unknwon person.
So are you saying that you are unknown or not?
Now, you are experiencing what happens when you pretend to be several different characters (which is not strictly the same as being anonymous): It becomes hard to keep your stories straight.
It’s all ok to have GNOME/KDE/XFCE/E17/whatever.
What a user wants is to have some work done.
What a developer wants is to implement some means to fullfill the work that the user (maybe himself) needs to do.
What is blocking to the user in the current state is that applications doesn’t interoperate well (e.g. cut-n-paste, drag’n’drop, file-formats, etc).
What is blocking to the developer is an “easy choice” to keep the user happy.
Leave the DE as they are, but make them inrteroperable in the user’s perspective (just support a standard DND/Cutnpaste/fileformat… thay’re just protocols, have nothing to do with the UI).
Since you’ve made it your duty to spread FUD about GNOME, I’ve made it mine to inform others that may be tempted to listen to you.
“He that lives by the sword, dies by the sword!” he he he
> So are you saying that you are unknown or not?
I thought you found out that obviously 10 writings made by Unknown are oGALAXYo ? Why do you still ask if you where sure in first case ? But the question isn’t WHO wrote the comments, the question is WHATS written in these comments. Now that you found out that I’m the author of these comments, are you now willing to prove me wrong or do you still fear to reply to me just because I know so much about and around GNOME ? By the way you simply could hasve asked normally who I am and would have get a normal answer to it. No need to get to such an low dirty level.
> Since you’ve made it your duty to spread FUD about GNOME.
You haven’t proven on this one yet. Will you ? Show the FUD I wrote. Prove the world wrong.
> “He that lives by the sword, dies by the sword!” he he he
Exactly, the sword as to sharp sides and you have cut yourself with it.
We have a free room here in our house, I like to invite you to come over here with your furniture and be part of my persoal life, including sexual life. Maybe we find an agreement and start loving each others.
No thanks!
I finished my psychology degree already, I don’t need another ‘subject’ to work on.
10 Print “You are dumb.”
20 Print “No, you are dumber.”
30 Print “No, you are dumbest.”
40 Print “No, you are dumbest in the whole world +1.”
50 Print “No, you are dumbest in the universe + 100.”
60 Print “Whaaaa. My daddy can beat up your daddy.”
70 Goto 10
Run
🙂
> GNOME destroyed it’s own community
Guess why ? Maybe because of people like you ? Slander, Libel, piss other people off because of their opinion ? Getting lower level of conversation because of no arguments ?
You still haven’t valued and proved the world that my comments here are wrong …
No you see the problem here is you, You said in a previous comment that you’ve committed patches to a variety of projects including gnome, so I took the liberty to grep the gnome cvs tree and guess what, nothing there from you, and this atlantis browser of yours, hasn’t even been produced , and yet the other day on irc you asked a question, a question only a beginner would ask in the irc channel.
So no I cant really take your “skills” for ..granted.
Whilst I probably will get called a ranter or troll now, I’ve seen posts from you and Seriously I can’t take them for what you want them to be, please do enlighten us with some proof the next time..
and btw, Settle on one nickname if your going to comment…
gnome is what it is
kde is what it is
e17 is what raster wants it to be 😉
xfce is what it is and so forth
in the end of the day your concerns are being adressed already, you just reiterate to divide.. nothing else..
c’est la vie
Uhm, what are you people up to now ?
Look in the Authors list of Balsa, Look in the Changelog of GALEON, GDM2, MC (Midnight Commander) and various other things. Look in GNOME 1.4 cvs as well. CVSGnome my own project and even Atlantis got offered as binary on my webpage some months ago. While I am writing this, I gonna sent you the binary tarball.
okay, grepped my local mirror of the cvs tree once more, nope nothing about you and i tried atlantis.. promising project.. hope it gets released.. other than that..c’est la vie
learn to grep using my real name and not my nick. i’m asking a friend to set up a little mirror with all the shit i made only to keep you people shut up.
The onus is on you to prove your evil allegations, and accusations.
you even said in an earlier thread a few weeks ago:
> GNOME 2 was an extremely needed change
> of path; the powershift inside the project, the new
> libraries and the emergence of the UI designers inside the
> project gave a new life.
@oGALAXYo: definately i fully agree to this. it’s not that gnome is not nice or full of overall mistakes. no that’s definately not the case and i would be wrong saying this in any case.
You are not exactly accurate about your facts either:
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=2747&offset=30&rows=45#71…
Ok my appologizes – Maybe I should be more precise next time when replying.
But since you appologized for that you are forgiven.
Why don’t you spend you time to write a CVSkde build script and release it under a closed license?
There’s no point discussing your posts an longer because you are internally inconsistent.
Listen Minkwe, what you are up to the readers and I seriously don’t understand. But be it that way continue your doings, no one will ever contribute to GNOME anymore because of people like you. Sad that the big failure of GNOME is at the end nailed on the head of one person who only expressed his opinion. You are laughable.
How about a FileSelector ? To trivial to embed into GNOME eh ?
Let me collect some points I’d like to call “facts”. Not being a developer myself I try to make the developer’s view, as I see it, understandable for normal users. Feel free to prove me wrong if possible and necessary.
It’s obvious that Gnome and KDE won’t merge. Mergers, especially in the Free Software community, need a high level of cooperation among all developers. This is not going to happen.
Red Hat is very late in the desktop race. The only country I know where they actually do have a majority of market shares today is the US, they fall second, third or even lower in all other countries. And this doesn’t even exclude the server market, the only market Red Hat is really particularly strong.
Commercial software support doesn’t depend on the desktop, it depends on the compatibility between distributions. As long as distributions can’t ensure basic low level compatibility accross their own versions as well as competitors the market is already way too fragmented by that. Each fragmentation need separate support while all of them together barely reach the level of market share by Apple. No Gnome/KDE merger would change that, and the licensing issue between GTK+ and QT is in this situation highly laughable at best for commercial deverloper.
According to some outdated market figures in the US at http://lwn.net/2001/0524/dists.php3 about 68% of all Linux boxes run KDE as default, Red Hat being the only distro which has Gnome as default. Today it might even look worse for Gnome considering that there are still only Red Hat and Ximian actively promoting Gnome (Sun doesn’t have much effect since their systems are barely something you’ll run as your desktop) while many new Linux distributions which actually promote their desktop use from the very beginning are also using KDE as default.
Considering this whether interoperability will be increased doesn’t depend on KDE developers, it depends solely on Red Hat willing to pay enough good developers to create good enough code which KDE developers then are willing to use regularly.
Red Hat has only a chance by doing this move since Linux so far lacks a real platform/framework structure, that is except the one created by KDE developers. While other developers still worked on single libraries KDE developers agreed on a platform/framework structure early on and are working on it since then. In the platform/framework realized within KDE most features and behaviors are standardized, there are single places for commonly used features like bookmarks etc. which then can be shared. Communication and integration between programs is realized as well. KDE is an allrounder desktop solution which offers satisfying standardized solutions to most questions programmers have.
Now I mentioned programmers. But shouldn’t we care about users? Yes, we should, but still the equation “more users=more programs” and vice versa is wrong here. It’s really is “more programmers=more programs”. And while Gnome was a project started for political reasons with a following in the eye candy lover groups which now turned into a simplicity lover group, KDE, with QT, was from the very beginning a (C++) programmer’s darling which allowed programmers to simplify and streamlining their own development environment in an already working platform/framework structure.
Distributions using KDE can now benefit from all these which increases development on many different levels which not only results in satisfaction for programmers but also a lot of specialized programs which are more and more closing all remaining gaps on which KDE within itself suffered in user Joe situations. Gnome on the other hand stagnates. It has GIMP with which everything started, a couple of GNU office programs, a file browser and a outlook clone contributed by commercial developers, a bloated former commercial office suite still to be integrated, a bloated former commercial browser which is still far from being integrated perfectly, a couple of semi-core libraries which still need to be combined, and it’s still missing a working platform/framework structure since Cobra is mostly only used as integrating point for different languages.
KDE became self-sufficient for it’s core users, the developers. Gnome on the other hand still relies on programs which know nothing about each other and suffers on the non-existence of a platform/framework structure vision to finally solve this. And here’s where Red Hat jumps in and want to ensure full interoperability.
This is a noble goal, but the only way I see them achieving this is either creating programs and libraries within Gnome which are fully compatible to the existing solutions in KDE, or, which is more likely to happen and already worked on, propose an API independent solution for the whole platform. But the latter is no longer necessary for KDE itself so only Red Hat can come up with a solution. For KDE to be able to accept and actually include their solution Red Hat must ensure that firstly the new solution allows for full backward compatibility without cruft, and that secondly the new solution offers enhancements truely usefull even within a pure KDE system.
Regarding D-BUS this seem to be the way Havoc likes to go (ie. being backward compatible with DCOP while offering network transparecy and security/right management). But this will be a lot of work for Red Hat, and whether Gnome developers really like to see their environment “infected” by solutions already included within KDE for quite some time remains to be seen.
I think the level that this discussion has degraded to has proven Eugenia’s point.
KDE and Gnome are no longer hobbyist projects. They are both huge, with corportations behind their development. Once a project grows to a certain size, leadership and the ability of developers to work together is more important than any individual’s coding abilities. The sad truth is that many “individualist” developers (hackers) will find themselves feeling disenfranchised by the projects they once loved.
I want to apologize to the readers for jumping on that horse of that minkwe troll and bringing this once nice thread down to a low level. But I hope that by reading from message 144-* that you will understand my reactions. Said this I would like to thank Datschge for his nice reply which hopefully bring this conversation up again. I fully agree with him.
Sorry if that disappoints you but KDE has no particular leadership nor a corporation behind them. So yes, the ability of developers to work together (resulting in rather excessive but effective code sharing) has been more important than any individual’s coding abilities alone there for quite some time now.
Such immaturity and name calling I have not seen since junior high. I sincerely hope you aren’t all this intransigent and stubborn in other facets of your lives.
Linux is in deep shit if this is what legitimate technical discussion issues turn into. As a user, I could care less about any of the political issues.
Just give me a distro I can use!
Hi all.
Most postings are about merging KDE and GNOME or that GNOME is far behind or about licenses or I don’t know what (crap).
But, hey! Hello?
I think most of you lost the point.
We all here talk/write in a particular protocol (English, most probably). But some people think (as an example) Spanish woul be a better approach to talk/write to each other.
But why don’t they?
Why the hell am I (trying to, actually) writing in English now?
Because I WANT TO INTERCHANGE INFORMATION!
There are lots of object component models out there.
There are lots of programming languages and paradigms out there.
There are … (to be continuied).
And I actually don’t care.
It’s not about crippling KDE. It’s about developing a common way to interchage information.
Why not a network protocol, as X11 is one? (I don’t know wether this is clever though).
Eugenia’s ideas are only POSSIBLE solutions to find such a “protocol”, not THE solution.
And as it seems, you don’t like this solutions, try to find one that pleases all!
Cheers, Georg
SUSE and Mandrake are both corporations that need to make money. I was always under the impression that their developers contributed to KDE, though I may be wrong. I’m not a KDE (or Gnome) developer, so I don’t really know how the projects are managed, but I find it difficult to imagine that KDE doesn’t have people steering their projects. It may be informal and not done by a corporation, but KDE does have some form of leadership, right? Anyway, it sounds like you got the basic point of my post.
The whining and name calling that I’m seeing here doesn’t work in a professional environment. I’m amazed that these people can’t even accept that other people have differing opinions. If this is how OSS developers behave, I want no part of it. Luckily, from the interview I saw a couple days ago, the top people in both KDE and Gnome seem level headed.
The problem is that one side is not willing to make compromises to enable interoperability. Why should people writing GTK apps have to link GTK to Qt to enable interoperability. Interoperability means eliminating dependence on toolkits, not masking it. Think of the internet. You fire up a browser which has very little in common with the next, and you still get your information. That is what protocols do. You develop a protocol, and let people implement it as they see fit. Defining a protocol and saying you must use certain toolkit is not making it interoperable with other environments.
This is a lot of excitement over very little. No need to “merge” or “unify” anything. KDE or GNOME will win naturally in the marketplace, no need to bend one to the other. Linux will survive without merging KDE & GNOME. GNOME fell behind, and now they want to “unify” – BFD, somehow we didn’t see them come to KDE before KDE pulled ahead, but now that Red Hat needs a desktop, and GNOME is utterly lame, they’re desperate to “unify” with the leader KDE. But GNOME gives KDE NOTHING. Sure, there are apps where GNOME is ahead (honestly, most important apps GNOME is better), but it is only a matter of time – and not much time – before KDE pulls ahead in apps as well. Then, GNOME can just shrivel up and die. This is not about a “war” between KDE and GNOME – it is natural evolution, the better adapted survives and pulls ahead. I don’t understand why you care if KDE and GNOME are unified? Of what advantage is it? WHY NOT LET GNOME (or KDE) DIE??? Jesus weeps, people, Windows doesn’t feel a need to “unify” with Apple, why should KDE and GNOME do so? This is some kind of insane agenda driven by Red Hat, and you are falling for it. THERE’S NOTING TO IT!
The problem is that one side is not willing to make compromises to enable interoperability. Why should people writing GTK apps have to link GTK to Qt to enable interoperability. Interoperability means eliminating dependence on toolkits, not masking it. Think of the internet. You fire up a browser which has very little in common with the next, and you still get your information. That is what protocols do. You develop a protocol, and let people implement it as they see fit. Defining a protocol and saying you must use certain toolkit is not making it interoperable with other environments.
But here we get to a major difference between the two. The lowest level “components” for KDE are QT objects. Gnome on the other hand controls GTK. If they want an implementation depending on a bridge between libraries then that really is a discussion Gnome should be having with Trolltech not with KDE.
SCENARIO:
Originally we wanted to draw something on a graphics card.
Some implementations did this by actually drawing on the graphics card. Other Implementations provided some API (a library or toolkit or whatever you want to call it) to indirectly and hardware independently access graphics cards.
Another implementation was to invent a network protocol whereas the server was meant to be the “drawer” (X).
This provided another level of abstraction from the original problem (and API or toolkit or library).
There are more than one Xserver implementaions.
There are at least two toolkits.
YOU STILL THINK OF GTK AND QT as solutions!
GTK and QT are toolkits!
Again:
Is it possible to solve this problem of interoperability with a protocol?
I am not necessarily talking about X11 Extentions.
SOAP perhaps?
Think about it.
Would it be a good idea?
What do you think?
There are more than one Xserver implementations available… Thus more than just one toolkit (both, QT and GTK, and even others or all) could implement this protocol.
SUSE and Mandrake are both corporations that need to make money. I was always under the impression that their developers contributed to KDE, though I may be wrong.
Mandrake used to employ David Faure, and SuSE employs Waldo Bastian and Lubos Lunak. Those are some of the very few developers who get paid for working more or less full time on KDE. They already worked on KDE before getting employed by those companies. Mr Faure mostly does random bug fixes and kis current focus is KOffice. Mr Bastian and Mr Lunak are the guardians of the holy grail so to put, the KDE libraries. They ensure that all changes to the libs are fully debated and consistence and actually work while ensuring backward compatibility, fixing bugs etc.
I’m not a KDE (or Gnome) developer, so I don’t really know how the projects are managed, but I find it difficult to imagine that KDE doesn’t have people steering their projects. It may be informal and not done by a corporation, but KDE does have some form of leadership, right?
It does indeed have some form of leadership, the leader is the release coordinator who is elected by the developers in the kde-core-devel mailing list for coordinating the next major release and all its subsequent buxfixes. Those release coordinators are often veterans contributing to KDE for a long time already. For KDE 3.0.x and 3.1.x the coordinator has been Dirk Mueller, for coordinating KDE 3.2.x Stephan Kulow has been elected. Similar to that every single program or package has its own project maintainer. But that’s all you get as formal informations, everything else is done practically voluntarly. For more transparency of the release procedure Mr Mueller introduced the KDE release schedule guide ( http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/release.html ) gives a basic overview over what’s planned and what’s being worked on. PR stuff like press releases are usually something the release coordinator cares about (if at all). Since the introduction of KDE League, which has been etablished for financing the promotion of KDE by financing appearances at exhibitions and printing advertising material, its unsalaried elected head Andreas Pour keeps posting stuff like the KDE Feature Guide ( http://promo.kde.org/3.1/feature_guide.php ).
The whining and name calling that I’m seeing here doesn’t work in a professional environment. I’m amazed that these people can’t even accept that other people have differing opinions. If this is how OSS developers behave, I want no part of it. Luckily, from the interview I saw a couple days ago, the top people in both KDE and Gnome seem level headed.
I think these kind of flame wars are pretty much limited to outside forums. KDE has an abundance of specific mailing lists ( http://lists.kde.org/ ), most of which are led by some dedicated programmers, where everyone can find one that suits him/her. Mailing lists are usually accessible for everyone, while CVS access is limited to the “core” developers. According to the most recent KDE-CVS-Digest ( http://members.shaw.ca/dkite/mar72003.html ) there has been 2500 individual developers contributing code and around 2000 CVS commits every week ( http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-cvs ). There’s roughly 2.6 million lines of code in KDE’s CVS now, catching up to the Linux kernel in size which code amounts to 3.1 million lines at the moment.
This all is not without problems like you can see at the following example. Often people debate for some time, come to a conclusion, and exactly in that moment someone has to join the debate who is questioning everything again, and this can repeat again or suddenly die off if there are more important stuff to care about. This way it took well over 4 months from the initial re-design of kde.org by root who started the discussion until last sunday when a final design (which can be customized like every KDE thingy =P) finally went online, satisfying every W3C rule and nearly everyone envolved. Now the different CSS style sheets are being further improved, and at some point we plan to have a poll to choose the most popular one of them as default style.
Overall I have to say that the community sense within KDE is great while participating, it just takes time to really get into this huge project and realize all the connections.
I thought Eugena’s summary was good but it deserved a reply from the other side.
I disagree that the average Linux user wants to make the sacrifice of various libraries in exchange for applications looking and acting the same. Outside of OSNews I almost never hear this issue raised. Linux users are used to apps that have wildly different interfaces. The support standards but their support is tempered by a belief that innovation is more important than standardization. The Gnome (and remember GNOME stands for Gnu Network Object Model Environment) governing committee itself agreed with this when they broke the GNU standard for documentation (texinfo) and went with docbook instead. This is the typical UNIX attitude:
–standards are good
–backwards compatablility is good
–programmer freedom is the greatest virtue
I do most certainly do agree that many non Linux users consider this lack of corporate driven standards a major barrier to Linux adoption. I certainly do agree that one of Apple’s strongest features has been how similar their apps feel and look. All other things being equal applications looking and acting the same is good. All other things being equal the greater the degree of cooperation between these desktops the better.
As for the big Linux companies considering interoperability a priority that’s not surprising. On the other hand Linux is fundamentally anti-corporatists in nature. The fact that conflicts of this nature are inevitable is the reason big companies don’t govern any important part of Linux. The kernel group is still governed by the people who were part of the kernel from the early days. KDE and Gnome are both governed by developers. Apache, Samba, etc… again by developers. Corporate friends of Linux deserve to be heard, they deserve to be given respect, and they deserve to have considerable influence. The developer community deserves the final say. There are tons of operating systems for people who want suits in charge
As for the charge of going back to 1996, I’ll go further it goes back to the early 1980s when an academic anti-corporate operating system that been developed primarily by academics and programmers in the spare time was taken over by corporations. I absolutely agree we should avoid the mistakes of Unix. If the original X libraries had had a GPL license and not the MIT license the Unix desktop would be 10 years ahead of where it is today. Instead the corporations did very little to improve X and spent most of their effort guaranteeing that no implementation of X was actually free in practice and an entire project needed to be started to rebuild X and recreate all the work that went into the Unix desktops from scratch. An entire decade was lost because of trusting corporations. Similarly with the kernels or any other component that wasn’t developed by Berkley during the 1980s. That’s why in the 1980s the notion of “free software”, the GNU project was developed so that this would never happen again.
So I agree completely we should avoid the mistakes of Unix the debate then is what was the mistake. Was it to:
— do everything the corporations asked so as to assist “commercial adobtion”
or was it to
— not take sufficient care that what is free today remains free?
Most people who believe in free software understand that liberating territory is a long process. If 10 years from now Windows is still 85% of all desktops, and these windows desktops are still running 3/4ers commercial software; but the other 15% is 100% free software that would be a huge victory and 10 years well spent. If 10 years from now the Linux kernel is running on 85% of all desktops and 3/4s of the software running on Linux is commercial that would be a massive defeat. Replacing Louis the XIV with Louis the XV was not a meaningful change compared to replaceing Louis the XVI with Marat.
Finally, as for RedHat forking KDE I doubt that is what would happen. The cost of maintaining a forked version of a heavily worked on GPLed program is immense. To maintain a competitive forked version RedHat would need to be willing to spend some percentage of the resources that KDE spends to develop their own programs. Currently KDE has several thousand developers (though not full time) and with the likelihood that KDE might become the German governments standard desktop, this number could get kicked up another order of magnitude. It’s the same reason that IBM will not fork the Linux kernel even when Linus rejects a patch they desperately want. IBM does not want to have to endure that expense, the virtue of Linux is the ability for most corporations to only pay a small percentage of what the full operating system would cost; fork and you that number can skyrocket. What I see as more likely is that RedHat:
— stays with Gnome
— provides all alternative desktops include KDE in fairly “raw” form. That is they don’t treat KDE any different than BlackBox, Windowmaker, Sawfish.. KDE would be an expert option for people who can reasonable self support and for some reason prefer KDE to the RedHat/Gnome desktop.
This BTW is exactly what KDE wants from RedHat. RedHat’s current policy annoys the very KDE customers that a KDE desktop as an alternate desktop is supposed to appeal to.
Even if I were wrong about expense I see another reason that RedHat would never do this. They do not want to be Caldera. They know the fact Caldera was hated by the hacker community did enormous damage to their product. Caldera had far and away the best installer, the best implementation of X, the best enterprise features… in the mid 1990s, But they consistently got horrible press and couldn’t get the cooperation from other projects they needed to be successful. RedHat has interests that: the Samba team, the kernel team, the apache team, the mozilla team, the gcc team, etc… not become uncooperative with them when the need something. RedHat has a very good reputation with both the hacker community and the business community. They are not going to screw that up over providing a forked KDE desktop.
There will be cooperation between Gnome, KDE and other desktops. A great number of these standards may even become features of X and supported by all desktops. But its not going to be corporate driven. The hackers are still (thankfully) running the show. Corporations are welcome to contribute but not to control.
>Outside of OSNews I almost never hear this issue raised.
It was the right time to bring this issue up, and I am proud that osnews was the first place to mention all that.
>Linux users are used to apps that have wildly different interfaces.
Thing is, these companies need more customers, and these customers will be windows users, hence the need for fixing the UI and usability of Unix. It is about time for this to be taken care of.
It took me a looong time to read the posts (arf tired) and I have a few questions that keep on bugging me :
First no offence to anyone please I am just trying to understand :
Why would someone that uses mostly Xp and MacOs try to give lessons to Linux Developers ?
I do not feel like it is anybody’s mission to bring Linux as the major player in the OS playground, so why do people that mostly don’t use it want that to happen ?
What is the value that RedHat brings to the Linux community ? For I what I know they collect free software mostly developed by hackers, package it and sell it for $$$$$$ (In the case of RedHat the package can even piss off the original developers) I want to see the cvs contribution of their developers weighted against the rest of the word.
Why do other distros like Debian and Slackware don’t complain about this ?
I have heard about people asking for interoperasomething, is it just because the word is cool ? I would rather find a per application request most sensible (like : I want this feature to work) and I am actually curious to see examples.
RedHat making x $$$$ x being pretty high, why don’t they just pay more people to implement the work they need to catch up, instead of asking the free labor that the Linux Developpers are for them to carry their greedy needs ?
I don’t think RedHat is doing anything for the love of Linux, so just give me one good reason for the hackers to incorporate their vision if it doesn’t bring them any immediate value.
Bottom line it seems to me that if you want something to happen for a system you don’t use, when you have the unique chance to be able to contribute but you prefer to sit on a chair writing articles that you know will mostly just bring quarrels, I think you ought to ask gently and not just try to give lessons (which is how it look to me, and by reading the threads I don’t think I am the only one).
No I am not oGALAXYo, but I agree with him.
And about some of the other dudes I hear them checking other people’s cvs commit, why don’t they never talk about theirs ?
Cheers, George W.
If one looks at the statistics, it is easy to see that the growth rate of KDE is far outpacing that of GNOME. KDE is more popular than GNOME in almost every country, possibly even all countries.
In the United States, we find a relatively small number of technical people and the GNOME-funding companies constantly whipping up media hype on GNOME and making a big fuss about interoperability, compatibility, etc. Is this interop such a big deal in the real world? Of course not. It is a media creature, not a natural creature.
In a year, maybe two years, it will be obvious that KDE is by far the worldwide market leader and no one will really get worked up about GNOME anymore.
Redhat’s blatant anti-KDE attitude will last for a while, but they are going to run into more and more problems in the worldwide Linux community. I think someone before me called it the “Caldera effect” and I would agree with this assessment. I think Redhat will be smart and rework their desktop plans to be KDE-centric within the next 1-2 years. Redhat showed some intelligence recently by offering workstation and entry-level server versions of their OS distribution. So they will not stick to their wicked Frankenstein GNOME in the face of market pressure to get rid of it.
There is a strange analogy between GNOME and Apple. They both try to be something for the “rest of us” not quite realizing that the “most of us” went with something that worked well enough and are busy doing what we want to do. Apple sacrificed enormous market and mind share because of their arrogant elitist culture and it looks like GNOME is doing the same thing.
It is no wonder that this GNOME vs. KDE media hype issue was whipped up on this website as it is run by an editor with a clear pro-Apple/pro-Microsoft/pro-big-corporation bias who seemingly out of cultural sympathies for GNOME keeps bringing up all sorts of strange conflicts and issues that simply do not exist in the real world. Linux is not monoculture. Apple and Microsoft are monoculture, much more Apple than Microsoft. Linux _works different_ than the life-stilling monotony of the monoculture platforms.
What I can heartfully say for Linux is viva le difference!
I think you are wrong. The KDE vs GNOME war is only heating up now because both desktops have succeeded. Check this thread from from 1997/11/06:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&frame=r…
Some of the stuff is not relevant anymore but is a good historical recap of the real situation.
i prefer twm ..
GNOME and KDE may have each become “successful” but KDE has got major velocity compared to GNOME and seems to be accelerating as well.
If the media didn’t hype the KDE/GNOME incompatibilities, it would not be a big issue. This is really my point. Time will take care of the evolution of the Linux platform. Monoculture media people really are not a good influence on any computing platform, especially one as broad as Linux.
Unfortunately, the de facto model for “news” is usually “manufacture conflict” and “dirty laundry”. Not very conducive to constructive problem solving.
It will only be a matter of moments before Linux users are branded terrorists for instance. Microsoft and USDOJ already came out and basically said that P2P users are supporting terrorism. There has been next to nothing from the media when it comes to objective people-centric reporting of these issues.
And as the wireless is sucking my battery dry… i think i’ll call it a post.
Nice reading on google groups. We shouldn’t forget the fact that these points are valid if we view them at this time 1997. During that time both Desktops where similar, same way of brokeness, same looking control-center, a lot of functionality, good way of storing preferences and so on. Today we have 2003 and in the middle of 2002 GNOME 2.0 reached the light, we need to compare both Desktops today again and not of what’s written 6 years ago. Today the opinions of the same people would be different I guess. The GNOME developers are making one big mistake, the mistake to belive that everything is turning around them and they ignore the fact that KDE is not sleeping during that time. Today they offer a complete round Desktop environment, maybe not perfect at all but really usable. We should compare again when GNOME 2.4 comes out and KDE 3.2.
For this war issue, I sometimes have the feeling that the GNOME corner is far more agressive defending GNOME e.g. on Slashdot and other places without even bringing up facts why they think their Desktop is better. Years ago it was the stupid excuse that QT was not GPL’ed and today the excuse is more stupid than the old one by saying you can’t write Propritary software with QT because of the lincense. There is not much brain needed to understand that this kind of argumentation is laughable because the person saying such statements think the company can’t afford such a license of 1250 USD (while they could ask for personal condition at TT) but on the otherhand like to make money on their own with their Propritary software. This is really an ashamed argumentation.
Then people start arguing about the cool software they use and we always hear stuff like, XMMS, AbiWord, Galeon, GAIM, XChat and so on. Now look at these named applications and what do you see ? None of these applications are relevant for business.
I want to hear:
– UML creator (Umbrello for KDE),
– KPovModeller (for 2D/3D technical stuff),
– Kivio (for other layout stuff).
– Kpresenter (for PowerPoint presentations)
– Kdevelop (a really working IDE, the best so far i’ve seen, not that I use it but to mention it)
where are the fullworking counterparts for GNOME ?
– Dia (not usable and bascially not GNOME related),
– Anjuta2 (development stagnated not usable).
That’s it. Where are the programs that may be worth for a business to use it on their System ? Sure GNOME has Evolution but don’t expect a business to write emails 8 hours per day (their workhours).
Has anyone at least thought about these issues when writing arguments ?
Call me wrong again, call me whatever you like but these things are important.
galaxy-galaxy,
If you read through the thread you will realize that even then, interoperability was being discussed, Havoc was not a RH employee, KDE was not stable, GNOME was not stable, QT was not GPL!
From this thread, interoperability was already being discussed as you can see here, that was in 1997:
9. Gnome and KDE people actually work _together_ on how
to make programs written for either desktop system
work on each others systems (ie. retain integration).
Notes: if a free Qt clone appears, there will be little incentive
to use the original Trolltech version, hence making the original
Qt basically useless under X11 – Trolltech might as well release
X11 Qt under LGPL now.
Conclusions:
Future prediction if nothing changes: option 1, eventually followed
by option 7.
The easiest option to take would be 9 (if egos can be put aside).
I can see a significant amount of people getting pissed off enough
to take option 5, resulting in option 7.
My recommendation: option 9
What we are seeing now is that egos are getting in the way of interoperability as was predicted.
So all your conspiracy theories about why there is a discussion on interoperability NOW, just evaporate into thin air. It is okay to state as an individual user that you don’t care about interoperability. But to come out and state that GNOME is begging KDE because it has fallen behind, or that Havoc is pursuing the evil agenda of his employer is just not true and simply FUD.
For the last time, this discussion is about the benefits of interoperability for the Linux desktop user, it is not about the differences between KDE and GNOME, or advantages of one over the other. Could you give us a single constructive un-emotional non-religious reason why interoperability between GNOME and KDE is a bad thing for the Linux desktop user? — We didn’t think so.
Remember that we have used both GNOME and KDE and we know the differences, some of us like GNOME better and some of us like KDE better so there is no need to bore us with your opinion of it either. Just stay on topic: Interoperability!!! No more no less.
—
FWIW arguing about which desktop is better is like arguing which color is better. It’s like a color-blind individual arguing that everybody should be dressed in yellow because that is what they like.
Nice try. Who of us started getting personal and totally OT ? You or me ? And now you have the nerve critizising me for being a bit OT with my reply ?
Interoperability is indeed a nice thing, KDE offers it. Why should KDE care for other teams with other visions ? Some dictators already destroyed GNOME and now they are trying to force their dictatorship on KDE. But here it has to stop. You can’t force GNOME’s requirements and visions on KDE. KDE for me is the last bastion of the hope getting a halfway usable and productive Desktop and I (and probably others too) won’t allow any harm and damage to this. Maybe I’m wrong with this, maybe right, regardless of that that’s what I’m beliving in.
You still haven’t answered the question.
Who of us started getting personal and totally OT ? You or me ? And now you have the nerve critizising me for being a bit OT with my reply ?
I’ll leave that to the readers of this forum to check for themselves. Besides I’m very calm, you are the one getting all worked up and paranoid. My intension was not to burst your bubble. Contrary to your contention, I am simply pointing facts regarding the truthfullness of your posts and obvious contradictions and attempts to mislead.
Interoperability is indeed a nice thing, KDE offers it.
That just says you don’t know what interoperability is from webster:
Main Entry: in·ter·op·er·a·bil·i·ty
Function: noun
Date: 1977
: ability of a system to use the parts of another system
You shurely realize we are talking about more than one system here.
What would you say about this:
Why should GNOME care for other teams with other visions ? Some dictators already destroyed KDE and now they are trying to force their dictatorship on GNOME. But here it has to stop. You can’t force KDE’s requirements and visions on GNOME. GNOME for me is the last bastion of the hope getting a halfway usable and productive Desktop and I (and probably others too) won’t allow any harm and damage to this. Maybe I’m wrong with this, maybe right, regardless of that that’s what I’m beliving in.
> You still haven’t answered the question.
You haven’t even bothered to answer mine either so why should I or others care for your ranting and trolling shit ?
…at least in many enough regards. But I don’t think the whole topic will be changing anything, KDE as a whole won’t care, and GNOME shouldn’t care, Red Hat can contribute their code whereever they think it’s needed, and whoever think it’s needed can use it then.
What we are seeing now is that egos are getting in the way of interoperability as was predicted.
No, egos were the problem which led to some people not trusting a commercial product which was promised being freely available for all free software developers for all time (which has been true and can’t be changed now anymore due to the GPL). One parts didn’t care about all the worries (aka FUD) and went ahead building a coherent platform based and extending on the freely available library product which already offered a great framework, the other part meanwhile was debating about whether to make a clone or a competing library resulting in a lack of alternative coherent platform/framework up to today.
For the last time, this discussion is about the benefits of interoperability for the Linux desktop user, it is not about the differences between KDE and GNOME, or advantages of one over the other. Could you give us a single constructive un-emotional non-religious reason why interoperability between GNOME and KDE is a bad thing for the Linux desktop user? — We didn’t think so.
Interoperability is not a bad thing for “the Linux desktop user”, most of them won’t even notice it as such. They’ll just notice when something doesn’t work the same way or even not at all.
KDE has a vision and built the platform to avoid the latter problems, and offers the fitting framework which ensures that everything stays coherent and is easy to take over by any other program within KDE.
GNOME had basically the same vision but concentrated on few specialized applications and libraries instead building a coherent and easy to reuse platform/framework structure, thus they still can’t easily avoid the latter problems. It’s missing many low level systems KDE has realized for quite some time now. Now Red Hat says we should ensure interoperability between GNOME and KDE. I say, sure, please build a coherent platform/framework based on GNOME and the we can easily create wrappers and translators for the communications between both desktops. But while KDE has standardized and widely used systems already GNOME doesn’t, and that’s the problem I see which should imo be resolved first. KDE developers have it already so they’ll only interested in this kind of talk within GNOME when the result will be significatntly better than what KDE already offers to them.
Main Entry: in·ter·op·er·a·bil·i·ty
Function: noun
Date: 1977
: ability of a system to use the parts of another system
You shurely realize we are talking about more than one system here.
I disagree, next to Windows9x/ME, WindowsNT/2000/XP, MacOS, OSX, BeOS and other advanced Desktop systems only KDE is imo worthy being called as system. Achieving interoperabilty is not much of a problem between systems with standardized interfaces. GNOME is a collection of libraries and features which even contradict each other at times, that’s not what I call a system.
Why should GNOME care for other teams with other visions ?
They shouldn’t, they should care only for their own vision, just like KDE.
Some dictators already destroyed KDE and now they are trying to force their dictatorship on GNOME.
I don’t see dictators within KDE.
But here it has to stop. You can’t force KDE’s requirements and visions on GNOME.
Blame Havoc, he seems to think now that GNOME itself can’t build a platform all itself anymore so he now want to create “global standards” like D-BUS, copied its structure from KDE’s DCOP and want it to be interoperable with KDE’s existing system (again DCOP).
Anyway KDE developers are mostly caring about what they are working on, and that’s their KDE programs, platform and framework (which are improved with most new feature since most of them can be shared between all KDE programs with ease using the existing infrastructure). I’d expect GNOME developers to do the same, but I can’t avoid the impression that there are hardly any GNOME developers, there are only developers who make use of GTK/GNOME libraries and are good at making kick ass stand alone programs but do not really care about the non-existence of a decent platform/framework structure.
… well written…. well written…
Look, you’re blowing this way out of proportion, it’s only about interoperability at the message bus level. A system wide message bus would be beneficial for everyone, including people who don’t even use GNOME, KDE or even X itself. DCOP is a great system, but it has it’s limitations, hence DBUS.
Further, I don’t see the need for all the GNOME bashing. What’s your point? Just use KDE, and leave it at that. All the bashing is nothing but bad karma.
Yeah this is right but you are missing some little details here. It’s not about DBUS anymore it’s more. Please go to the Desktop-Devel-List on mail.gnome.org and then on the kde mailinglist from this News Topic link. When you start reading more attentive and with some more background knowledge about the whole situation and not just a peephole out of it then you understand that GNOME wants more changes. There are already writings about KDE need to adopt GStreamer, GLIB, ATK, DBUS, GConf etc. at least all this stuff is spread from the GNOME community and the KDE people have hard times denying that they adopt anything of that. Such argumentations spread in the public leads to many frustrations and false informations. Please see the things as a whole. If KDE adopts all this stuff mentioned above then it definately will require heavy changes in the core layers of KDE. Now Havoc Pennington (for sure a honourable person who has some visions) wants to go a step further and have both projects share the same bottom layers, this requires both teams to find an agreement on what to change and how to change. If it comes to an cooperation for that (which is the point). My worries here are that KDE is in no need of such cooperations, which only leads in frustrations and leads to throwing the Desktop back for another 2 years at minimum. KDE already has a stable framework and does not need a cooperation the way GNOME likes it because their framework is already stable and proved to work flawlessly.
This all has nothing to do with what Desktop I use or I not use, or what other people use. The insight from GNOME comes a bit too late imho. GNOME (because of the fact that moved from 1.x to 2.x recently is fresh enough to adopt new technology (they are only adopting new technology but doesn’t make it usable for the endusers – as sidenote) but KDE is not because they already have what they need. If GNOME really wants this kind of interoperability then they should join the KDE team and work on one really successful Desktop.
To say, interoperability and sharing layers is a nice idea. But the real logical solution is merging both teams and work on KDE to make it a really good Desktop. This is the only logical and correct conclusion and solution to be made. KDE is far ahead eveything else is TRUE fragmentation.
Sorry if my post made it looking like bashing GNOME, that wasn’t my intention.
“How is this related to this technical conversation the others and I’m having here ?”
This is typical of far too many (but thankfully, not all) hackers in the Linux community: the unwillingness to listen to the non-techies who will eventually decide whether or not their products become successful in the marketplace. Newbie was just trying to give input to the conversation from a user’s perspective, and he’s immediately dismissed because he’s not (as you put it) “technical.”
Nice.
When I read about all the technical stuff they are trying to force on KDE it just reinforces that GNOME is a Microsoft-culture company. Yuck.
It would be a very good thing if GNOME was simply disbanded. The group as it is today has less than zero to offer the world and are just a political organization doing the bidding of their corporate masters. It is shameful how they are trying to terrorize KDE.
I follow both desktop-devel and kde-core from time to time, but I don’t agree with your analysis. I don’t see a coordinated GNOME effort to convince KDE to use GNOME technologies. Specifically:
* GLIB: aRts already contains parts of GLIB. The GLIB question was brought up by one of the aRts developers (Stefan Westerfeld) of whether or not it would be alright to rely on official GLIB, in order to reduce code duplication and maintenance. For what it’s worth wv2 (the .doc importer for KWord) also relies on GLIB.
* ATK: KDE has no accessibility framework, so the reuse of (some of) ATK would be a Good Thing, and would ensure a11y compatibility with non-KDE applications.
* GSTREAMER: Gstreamer isn’t even an official part of GNOME yet, so it’s premature to make any assumptions.
* GConf: I did a quick search of the kde-core archive, and gconf has only been mentioned in 19 mails _ever_.
All this is still theoretical as DBUS isn’t even completed yet, and neither GNOME nor KDE has even committed to using it. Both desktop environments recognize that there are larger issues involved and remember that DBUS is a joint venture between GNOME and KDE developers.
Even if DBUS were to be adopted as a standard, KDE will of course keep using DCOP as it’s a good system. There will most likely be DCOP-compatibility layer in DBUS to enable existing KDE applications to function unaffected.
Hey Ali, I can’t find another way to contact you. Care to contact me, please? =)
eMail on the way.
God you are a bunch of sad bastards aren’t you? I am quite positive after reading all these comments to Eugenia’s thoughtful article that if the rest of the Linux community is like you lot, Linux is never going to get *anywhere* on the desktop. Well done. Maybe you should all go fight a war or something, let out that frustration.