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KDE Strikes Back
Nerds writes: "The fourth beta release of KDE has been announced. Also, you might want to check out this editorial at LinuxPlanet. It is a bit biased, but the author makes good points." Its an enjoyable piece that everyone ought to read: it takes some pot shots, and points out some very real truths (and does both with a reasonable sense of humor).
I think that the debate over the linux desktop is the same as the debate over religeon. Which one is the correct/best one? Protestant, Roman Catholic, Jewish Orthodox, KDE, Gnome, or for that matter, Mac OS, M$ Windows of Linux? It all comes down to a matter of personal preference, and there is no real way for a clear "Best" one to be found, they are all good in different ways.
I personally use KDE, I like it, It works for me, etc... That's not to say that Gnome is bad (M$ Windows is bad) Pick the window manager you like and get over it!
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He who laughs last... Thinks slowest
I thought the article was quite good, but it's a shame he included sly attacks on Gnome along with mainly factual comments. I was unimpressed with the quotes from anonymous 'Gnome experts who also know KDE', and the rumours about tensions within the Gnome camp, but the points about the languages and API are worth considering.
If only Qt was LGPLed...
As someone who has worked with Microsoft's products almost exclusively over the last ten years but has recently come to appreciate the benefits of open source the sort of ideological arguments that occur in the open source community truly amaze me. I mean, there seems to be little difference between "free software" and "open source" and yet each concept has rabid followers which decry the opposition at every step.
Thanks to my handy Corel Linux distro I'm well on my way to becoming a Linux "guru". After installing it I tried each desktop and came to the conclusion that KDE is a lot smoother and efficient than Gnome was, and have since been using that. But I constantly hear people bewailing the fact that it's somehow "tainted" by the fact that a couple of words in the license don't match their Beloved Leader's psuedo-communistic writings. And then they go and try and create an entirely new product! So much for the idea of having the source encouraging "code reuse"!
As a consultant I can tell you that these issues seem rediculous and petty to outsiders. And they certainly add nothing to either the image or the quality of Linux, but instead cause resources to be squandered in duplicate efforts. As long as it works, why should the license matter so much? It's only software, it's not a matter of life and death.
To be perfectly honest, some of the rabid fanaticism that I see here just strikes me as childish. There's a real need to grow up in some people and get on with improving the code rather than slating the "opposition".
I'm getting pretty sick of the GNOME vs KDE flamewars. But before you mod me up as +47 Insightful because I'm spouting the party line of "we should all just get along" read what I have to say: Both GNOME and KDE have got it wrong.
From a economic perspective: You can't win in the marketplace by being "just as good as" the existing Goliath. What features specific to GNOME or KDE are offered that surpass what you can do in Windows?
From a usability perspective: Why is there all this harping about a "consistent UI"? Check my sig for a soundbite on this, but then come back for an explanation. Sure, it makes sense for a word processor and a spreadsheet to have "File" menus with "Save, Save As, New, Close, etc" all in the same place. But does it make sense for all apps? Think about it this way: My car has a certain UI. My telephone also has a UI. They have absolutely nothing in common but I can use them both very effectively. What if LifeKDE sprang into being and created a phone with a steering wheel? Would I be better off?
How does this apply to computers? Because a computer isn't just one tool. It is a generalized tool simulator. Every "application" is a tool. If two applications serve radically different purposes, I would expect them to have radically different UIs. For instance, people often mention that Blender has a difficult to learn UI--irrelevant! The purpose of a UI is not to be easy to learn. The purpose of a UI is to afford access to a tool. (if the UI is difficult to remember that is a different issue--internal consistency is a valid goal) To go back to the Blender example, people often go on to say that once they learned the UI quirks it turned out to be very powerful. Exactly!
What does this have to do with KDE/GNOME? I think each of these projects has a certain amount of validity. For instance a lot of apps need to have file selection dialog boxes. That should probably be a system service. But "standardization" beyond that level is, IMHO, a very big mistake.
So what do I recommend? I recommend two projects:
1) The Common GUI Services Project for things like file selection dialog boxes.
2) The Advanced UI Research Project to do research on what kinds of UI elements work best with what kind of tool and then making that research available to the tool makers.
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Did I say FUD? He complains about Miguel trying to blast KDE, then he goes on blasting gnome for 5 pages, Nice! I find this whole article so childish! I think he's trying to start wars on just about every subject:
- license wars (QPL/GPL mess)
- language wars (C vs/ C++)
- toolkit wars (QT vs GTK)
- "commercial wars" (which compagny is good (QT), which is not (Helix)
At last, when has anybody (relatively important) working on gnome said "Gnome's goal is to kill KDE". This is the worse piece of FUD I've seen in the OSS community.
(Note: For those who want to know, I use mostly gnome, but use KDE and KDE apps regularly and enjoy them)
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Thi article is totally biased. I mean to say Miguel did it all for the money and the whole point of GNOME was to kill KDE. C'mon! Get real. Kill off KDE. It was setup as an alternative and sure any software would like to have a user based particilarly from a competing product but GNOME was made as an alternative to KDE because at the time with the QT licenses. This guy seems to be a KDE enthusist in the way he downplays GNOME. What does he consider a nasty comment from Miguel. That he says GNOME is better than KDE? What is he supposed say "Well GNOME isn't as good as KDE but I would like you to use it". Of course not...I mean if he wants users...KDE is very good product and is getting better but lets not downplay GNOME. A bit of irony of the GNOME ethusiast though. the who Free Unices (BSD, Linux) is supposed to be about choice but *some* GNOME developers/users seem to want it to be the only one. This is where they make GNOME look bad. Gnome 1.2 is a very good product from helix gnome and I use it and have the KDE 1.9.2 Libraries for some of the superior KDE programmed applications. Lets keep the competition friendly between the two desktops.
Anyone paying attention to XFCE Lately
-The good humor man can be pushed only so far
Under X, it's different. KDE and Gnome -- let alone other wms and apps -- are very compatable, and running programs from one on the other is usually a no brainer. Sure, there are incompatable pieces, but none that prevent you from switching between different desktops/wms.
The only thing people are griping about are the last few inches of compatability; libs used, file formats, and the main language used to create the reusable parts (C vs. C++) -- *not* that you can't use any of your favorite tools if you switch between them.
With the exception of licencing, it's a bad idea to even acknowledge this as a any kind of squabble...and I'm not even convinced the licence issues that get dragged up are reasonable after Trol Tech's changes.
I'm sure there will be plenty of people who think I'm just not getting it. That the issues raised are important in a practical, moral, and cosmic sense.
Well, I don't see smoke, I see a description of smoke. There's definately no fire. You can't even warm a marshmellow with this.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
...does it seem to anyone else that Taco is stoking the fires in the KDE/Gnome battle?
;-)
I say this because, well, typically KDE beta announcements are posted by HeUnique. They are typically short and sweet: "KDE Beta x is out. Go have fun."
Taco, otoh, seems to be posting material that's pretty inflamatory towards Gnome...trying to make KDE look bad. I know people can say stupid things sometimes, but I don't think its _just_ the KDE camp doing it
Am I crazy? Ok, well, I know I am, but am I just reading into this too much?
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It's more than a bit biased. It's utterly, completely and unfairly biased. It has numerous digs at GNOME, all conveniently attributed to anonymous sources. It's low on facts, and its only purpose can be flamebait. And at that, I'm sure it will succeed. I have never before criticised /. for posting a story,
but there has to be a first tiem for everything. This story crossed the line.
Flame wars don't achieve anything, other than lots of page view. Maybe the conspirancy theorists are right about /. trying to get more ad revenue...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Because
a) Qt existed before a majority of compilers even supported templates, let alone the std::-library.
b) QString uses UniCode, std::string doesn't. QString also provides reference counting and copy-on-write (yeah, I know that this can be bad in certain situations in multi-threaded environments etc., but it's also much more efficient in the normal case)
-- KDE programmer and computer science student in Klagenfurt, Austria.
There's a small Gnome waiting in the middle of the ring. He's getting really cocky because his opponenet hasn't shown up yet.
The bell rings.
A gigantic gear falls on and squishes the small gnome.
Idunno, it seems even shorter than Bigfoot vs. the Loch Ness Monster to me. :)
Is this post not nifty? Sluggy Freelance. Worshi
"There's a real need to...get on with improving the code..."
If it weren't for people like RMS and his "psuedo-communistic" ideas there would be no code to improve. It's licenses like the GPL that ensure that code freed remains free.
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A QString is unicode capable, a STL string isn't.
Besides, Qt was started before many OSes had a
useful STL implementation.
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Poverty does not a saint make.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
What he means:
It's been a while since the last gnome/KDE flamewar, so I need to start one. Gnomers are always gratuitously nasty about KDE and that's why Gnome sucks. It's also bad because it's controlled by big nasty companies like Helix and RedHat. Fortunatly TrollTech are nice guys and don't count as a big bad company.
...no need to continue.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Dennis E. Powell has written numerous .comments about Linux desktops, KDE most notably. He's always worth a read, and he makes no effort to hide his bias toward KDE.
You should read with a critical eye though. It's *always* suspicious to base major points you have on a source who just happens to be anonymous and untracable. For all we know, this may be a cheap trick Dennis pulls to hide his incompetance when it comes to technical aspects like APIs.
I also question his saying that Gnome was founded with the one goal of killing off KDE. He uses cheap semantics such as "Gnome is written to the venerable and venerated GTK+, while KDE is written to the technically excellent but politically reviled QT."
He goes on to say "I've tried for years to find out who the king of KDE is, and have concluded that there isn't one." Of course, KDE has a founder and über-developer. Mathias Ettrich is for KDE what Miguel de Icaza is for Gnome, and I've heard him bashing Gnome in interviews lately so I don't see the fairness of that not being mentioned is Denis' article.
I hate to see all this FUD within the Linux camp, when we despise the traditional FUD. I guess with big things like Evolution, Nautilus and the Gnome Foundation going on in the Gnome camp and the long-anticipated release of KDE 2.0 along with KOffice in the KDE camp, this is bound to happen as a result of natural human pride. I hope we can all see through the FUDding and the bashing and just look forward to getting some great software RSN!
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"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Powell has one point that has often bugged me about open source software. Far too much of it is written in portable assembly language (a.k.a. "C"). I appreciate the advantages of this as much as the next guy -- it's good to have a lingua franca, C is widely portable, and a lot of tools for programming it are already there. Nevertheless, C is really primitive, and it's difficult to write reusable bits of code for it. Up until 1997, I had a job where we wrote code in object-oriented languages (C++ and Objective C). Since 1997, I've worked at a place where everything must be ANSI C. That has paid dividends in portability, but we've expended tremendous effort doing things like
;-} ).
* writing array structures, and functions to operate on them (pseudo-objects)
* writing standardized error handling
* synchronizing related structures
* fixing memory bugs
* avoiding that oh-so-tempting copy/paste by generalizing function arguments
all of which would have been alleviated by using some flavor of object-oriented language (or even C++!
If you look at the code for open-source projects, you can see them inventing the wheel, over and over. I suppose you could argue that things are going slowly in the Java direction, which is fine. But that just means that Gnome is in retrograde motion.
- Brian K Boonstra (who can't wait to start using Mac OS X)
If I'm not mistaked (I may be, though), You can have a unicode string in C++. Since string is just
typedef basic_strig string;
You can define
typedef basic_strig unicode_string;
or something similar.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Oops, I lost my "greater than" signs... it should be basic_string< char> and basic_string< short>
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
As far as Red Hat is concerned:
Because we didn't finish building the packages in time.
We're currently building the packages, and they'll appear on ftp either later today or early tomorrow.
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There are some things the open source movement could do with learning from the Cathedral...
I wish to hell both bloody groups would stop their bickering and get on with producing a viable, desktop alternative to MS...
As a person who uses both desktops (And MS - due to the fact that I cannot use KDE or Gnome for all my tasks) - I'd really like to have one proper environment.
More to the point, as a Systems designer (In my daytime incarnation), I really, really wish I didn't have to recommend NT 4 on the desktop (With Linux/UNIX in the back room)
So, if any of the Gnome or KDE developers are listening:
GET YOUR F***ING ACTS TOGETHER
Bloody stupid idiots take all the credit and kudos that goes with the JOB of being an open source programmer, but can't actually buckle down to produce what the users want.
If the Kudos was money, they'd be fired.
Gav
"There's no such thing as data that can't be manipulated"
Heres my interpretation:
KDE
Is about stucture and order you have one way to do something and only one way. Everything looks the same, feels the same, works the same. You get on with it.
Gnome
It is about having lots of diferent bits and peices that don't quiet seem to fit toegther, you use GTK,Gnome,Bonobo, perl,scheme,tcl,python... You wonder why your Gnome desktop doesn't work like your friends Gnome desktop. You scream at it when something fails to work that should well damn work.
Only one is an advantage
If you don't believe me, why is Helix Gnome so popular? It couldn't be that it introduces some standards to Gnome could it?
This isn't intended as flamebait, just my opinion.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
from the article: Gnome's stated purpose, its whole reason for existence,is to kill KDE. Nice, huh?
Which just proves the cluelessness of the articles' author. GNOME was started to offer a totally free (in the FSF sense) alternative to KDE. It was also an attempt to coalesce various projects based around the Gimp Toolkit.
Chris
KDE fans, this isn't a flame. It's a free world, you have choices, and whatever you choose is fine with me.
But *I* choose not to use KDE, specifically because the underlying toolkit is not Free. Period. Be as "technically superior" as you want, but I am not going to rely on any software built on a proprietary foundation. Been there, done that, got seriously burnt.
Until such time as the QT toolkit is properly released under a true Free Software licence, then any software that depends on QT will not be installed on my system.
Yes, it's THAT important.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
GNOME vs. KDE: Battle of the Desktops runs on a computer called NES. NES emulators are available for GNU/Linux, BSD, DOS, and Windows.
Have fun!<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
It proves open-source nay-sayers correct. Those people who say that open-source projects only lead toward fragmentation and dissent: they are absolutely right.
Open source means that people have the freedom of choice. If they want to work together on the same thing, fine and well. If they don't for any reason (personalities, technical, ideology, etc,) they are free to try on their own and the world judges them on their results. I believe that's the entire idea of capitalism too, right?
Now what would happen if everyone were forced to work on the same project? Sooner or later, egos and personalities would clash. I'd bet good money that before too long, the infighting among them would destroy the project. The current system gives people elbow room to move if problems show up.
Besides, next time the nay-sayers come around, point out the Linux/BSD fragmentation. Did it produce two crappy OSes? No, it produced two very good OSes which have their own niches. Did the MySQL/Postgres competition produce two crappy databases? Nope, once again, we've got two great products which are excellent in their respective domains.
It's about what you can do with it.
Currently, you can use Qt to write open source applications for X11 only and write bugfixes.
You can not port it (according to readme that comes with sources) to another platform, be it win32, beos, mac, or future systems like berlin. You have to rely that Trolltech will allow you to port your (GPLed) application to these systems.
Yes, I understand that Trolls want to make money. I don't object. But I want to run my applications on any platform in my sight. Qt may be technically superior (or may not, we will not discuss it here), but it does not allow run my programs on platforms other that *nix/X11 that I routinely use (e.g. at work).
Although most responses have been positive, some articles and comments about our recent GNOME Foundation announcement have been disappointingly inaccurate.
In particular, two mistakes are common. The first is referring to the Foundation as "consortium"; the Foundation is not a consortium, but an organization of individual contributors to the GNOME Project. The companies joining the Foundation join an advisory board which has no decision-making function; decisions are made by a board of GNOME contributors elected by the membership. At this time, around two-thirds of the members of the Foundation are independent volunteers not employed by one of the advisory board companies. The Foundation is simply a legal entity that can act on behalf of the preexisting GNOME Project. The GNOME Foundation is comparable to the SPI/Debian and the Apache Software Foundation. For more details, see the press release: http://www.gnome.org/pr-foundation.html
The second mistake is that this represents some kind of flareup or resurgence of a "war" with KDE. At our press conference, we took pains to discourage this interpretation of the announcement when members of the press asked about it. We are interested in healthy and friendly cooperation with the KDE project and other free software projects. Interoperability efforts such as http://www.freedesktop.org continue and will not be affected by the GNOME Foundation.
Both GNOME and KDE have valuable contributions to make. We're creating a foundation to help us run GNOME well, and we're excited about the recent commercial acceptance of GNOME, but these things are advances for GNOME, not attacks on anyone else. Our primary focus is to expand the userbase of free software; competing with other free software is not the point.
Are you at all familiar with GNOME programming? Many of the deficiencies you mention not a problem with Gnome, because they're available through GLib.
Helix was going to do this for one project, and they decided not to do it. It is not a requirement for any project at this time.
Not every application is an editor. Including editor commands in every application is ridiculous, and can be misleading.
And for the Blender example, what does File- Save save? The entire scene? The current object? A texture?
You simply can't have a consistent interface for any and all programs. Even something like "Exit" can have different meanings. Sometimes it means "close this window", sometimes it means "shutdown the app and close a whole slew of windows". It may have a consistent meaning for the programmer, but it can have many for the user.
As for scripting, I personally believe that engine and interface should always be completely seperated for tools (for toys it doesn't matter so much). I'm going to try very hard not to launch into my usual tirade against XML.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Also, the reason was not to fork proprietary versions, that would probably be forbidden by the assignment papers just as it is for the FSF assignment papers. It was just to change license between LGPL/GPL/etc. and be able to defend copyrights in court.
Is that not the case? That's why Gnome was started! Because KDE was not open source because of QT.
Read on Gnome's web page: "The GNOME project was born as an effort to create an entirely free desktop environment for free systems."
He uses cheap semantics such as "Gnome is written to the venerable and venerated GTK+, while KDE is written to the technically excellent but politically reviled QT."
What's wrong with that? My understanding is that C is excellent for operating system but that GUI are best done with OO languages... No?
As good as the C API can be, it will still take longer to develop a GUI with a C interface than a C++ one (and I know what I am talking about!).
Ok, I am biased toward KDE but so are you about Gnome!
Black holes occur when God divides by zero.
That important code is available under the GPL is not proof that it would not be available without the GPL.
How many programmers who would have written public domain code decided to use the GPL just because "that's what all free software is written in"? RMS didn't invent free software, he distorted the name Free Software for his own purposes ("it's not really free unless you place restrictions on how you can use it" - good logic, Mr. Stallman).
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
You know, I've said many, many times in the past here on slashdot and elsewhere. When you command 90% of the market, YOU are the standard, regardless of what the other 10% agree should be standard. It does not matter that everyone except MS agrees that some format should be common, they are the minority, and the "true standard" is what the majority uses, thus windows.
I have had my arguments with Windows for years, and probably will always have some problems with it, but I have used MacOS, linux, solaris and windows in various combinations for years, and for day to day work, I must honestly say that I am most productive under windows 2000 (which is the first MS release I will call a true operating system, since it actually operates my computer without crashing it ;-) Regardless of what you may think of windows, or regardless of which superiority it may indeed have, it is not the "standard" for desktop computing, it is a fringe operating system for the desktop, and as such, to make it work on the desktop, and therefor to truly SET the standard, it needs to be the dominant player, not just the technically superior product. To do this, it needs to adhere to the standards that people care about, the standards of ease of use and productivitythat they need, and for that, linux is not there. Gnome gets it close, IMHO, KDE gets it even closer, but its still not there yet, the only
company to get UNIX of any flavor "ready for prime-time" as we used to say, is APPLE, with OSX. When the power user can pull up a CLI and get down to serious work, and the average user can do anything they need to on their system and NEVER pull up a CLI, then linux/unix will be ready for the desktop and may become a large enough player to start setting standards.
Once again, I must let out the old battle cry. "If you want linux to dominate the world, you have to make a linux the world can use"
I think....therefore I am
I reject your reality
But it's a moot point, anyway. Everybody is welcome to make money while making free software.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
There is a difference between creating completely free desktop and development environment and trying to actively kill off another project. Gnome was not started to kill KDE. A completely free system (beer and speech) was and is necessary given their (Miguel and the other original Gnome hackers) and my worldview.
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
Bonobo is way to fat for a DE. The statement on the KDE technology page sums it up pretty well. You can find it here.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Search for kde2. Redistribute.
Leave the arguments and grab the funtions.
I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
I notice that Caldera OpenLinux and their Technology (Kernel 2.4) preview as well as Suse have precompiled binaries already available, but this is not so for Redhat-6.x and Debian-2.2. One thing I've noticed about GNOME is that the team makes every effort to support most any platform (including other architectures). I recognize that there was once a tiff between Redhat and the KDE teams, but since there are so many Redhat (and to a smaller extent Debian) users here in the States, that if the KDE team wants significant penetration in the US market they're going to have to provide good support for it's most popular distributions.
I am not biased. I will support KDE if my users request so. But I won't manually compile the tree just to show it off. I think the KDE folks ought to re-think their attitude toward Redhat users and support RH6/7 as a top-teir platform -- one with the potential to attract huge numbers of users down the road. That is the goal, right???
No. If they were corporate, they would release a product to make the marketing folk happy even if it wasn't ready. KDE won't release until they're ready with a polished product.
However, FreeBSD and Linux are more or less source compatible. GNOME and KDE are not. If several OSs are source compatible, then they survive because software written for one is quickly ported to the other. However, if they are not source compatible, one or the other dies. Think about it. Would anybody use FreeBSD if it wasn't UNIX compatible? Not that many people develop for FreeBSD in particular. If it didn't have UNIX compatiblity, it wouldn't get any apps. Sure it would still have it's own merits, but the total lack of software would kill it. That's the way it is with GNOME and KDE. You can't write an application that works on both (unless you don't take any advantage of the DEs and write a straight X application.) Thus, developers will undoubtedly choose one, and one will undoubtedly win. Due to the nature of Open Source, the other won't die, but will become very marginalized. Take GNUStep. Sure it's not dead, but is it really ALIVE? Also, I find your concept of "freedom of choice" increadibly self-serving. Two incompatible APIs are only freedom of choice for the developer, not the user. Back when there were only window managers, there WAS freedom of choice. Developers generally had to program to the X API (either directly or through toolkits) and all applications worked on all window managers. A person could choose any window manager they wanted, and still be guarenteed that they could run all the applications. Now, you've got to choose one. Either GNOME or KDE. (Or you could use both, but considering their sheer size, that's a bad proposition as well.) Now, it's the developers who choose what environment YOU run. Now, if you want to run KDevelop, your stuck with KDE. (Even if it is inside GNOME, it is still a KDE application. It looks and acts like one, and integrates best with other KDE apps.) If you want GNapster, your going to have to have GNOME. That's not freedom for the masses, that's freedom for developers. Whether it is Microsoft, KDE, GNOME, there is somebody deciding what your going to use.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Maybe I have it all wrong. When Helix really started coming around I remember reading on Redhat Labs that with Helix working on GNOME usability and how it looked they were going to focus their energy on improving the base toolkits like the GTK. Eazel is making the filemanager thingy(for lack of a better word) to add to the GNOME desktop. This doesn't sound like a battle to me. It sounds like each is working on their own part. Well I don't have anything to add other than that.
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
Read my other post. On UNIX, there are a lot of ways to get things done, but they're all compatible. All window managers (generally) are compatible with each other. You can pipe information from yacc to any type of awk you choose. You can use any compiler you want on ANSI C code. That's not true with GNOME and KDE. It's not you who is doing the choosing, it's the application developer.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
However many modifications and improvement to it made by the proprietary Unix vendors have not. On the other hand, if it were GPL's they may never have made these improvements. God, aren't license wars dull ?
Simon
Why does everyone always neglect Slackware packages? As of yesterday, there STILL aren't any Slackware packages for 1.92, much less 1.93.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
How's the speed of this release? On my 300MHz machine, KDE 1.92 is pretty poky. Especially Konqueror which takes a second or two to start up. It's shouldn't be because it is a debug build because I compiled the sources myself, and stripped everything. In fact, all the KDE apps seem to have a built in delay. Everything from Kontrol Center (several seconds) to simple applets (a second or so) take a long time to start up.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
OO concepts can be used also when programming in C if appropriate programming practice are followed. In fact this is how gtk+ works.
True, coding GUIs in an object-oriented language such as c++ can feel more "natural" to those accustomed to it, but in the end it all boils down to use whatever language and toolkit you feel most comfortable and productive with, it's as simple as that.
> "If gnome-hackers [a mailing list] was archived, you could have a whole debate
> about a very classical problem of C programming : when a function returns a
> char*, who owns the char*? Does the caller have to free it? This is just about
> the most basic problem you can find with C programming. And they're thinking
> about it just now, after 3 years of development. KDE doesn't have such a
> problem, it has QString.
>
> "This is only an example of a more general trend: their C base puts them in
> front of a lot of problems which KDE doesn't even face. Of course, KDE has
> C++-specific problems, but nothing as fundamental as this."
Well this problem is not solved in c++ as well. This problem stems from a really big architectural problem of general c programming and operating systems. There is no provision for garbage collection and strong typing. I am pretty sure that c++ has - maybe - more refined and precise disposal guidelines for caller/callee then plain-c. Unfortunately, guidelines aren't worth a cent in this case. In a component-oriented, object-oriented environment no-one can keep track of the uses and references to the objects. I mean, no one except the memory manager that could deploy automatic memory reclamation. Of course, reliable memory management (heap-memory, I mean) can be obtained through strong typing: no pointer arithmetic is allowed and each pointer is bound to an object (usually called reference). A language-system can be considered safe with respect to memory, if it support strong typing *and* it doesn't allow for manual disposal of dynamic memory.
All this, in order to say that it is very childish to argue between c and c++, since both aren't safe languages (a.k.a. they suck, excuse my French), thus both sharing the same pitfalls. This is for example one of the problems that require hardware memory protection to be solved (separate address spaces). Actually, it could have been solved earlier with a better language and system design, without the (at this point) avoidable overhead of heavy-weight processes.
It's surprising the way he sweeps the whole license issue under the carpet. Can even the free non-profit license be withdrawn like he says?
This is way worse than I had realized.
The other amazing thing is in the same breath he notes that the KDE GUI is free for NON profit uses then says these commercial companies backed the wrong horse. Why the heck should any commercial entity back a proprietary standard as the desktop for Linux? Does he really expect they are lining up to pay royalties, or to force their customers to pay royalties? They can do that now with Motif et.al. You can get the whole of Windows for less than just the library license fees for the darned Motif GUI on a Unix workstation, in the mean time unix custs are asking why their workstations cost more than wintel systems. The consortium wants to change this and get a standard adopted, not recreate this attrocious situation.
When are these KDE folks going to get it? The license is CRITICAL. It's THE major obstacle for KDE, it's not enough to dismiss these concerns or say "trust us". KDE-Qt is doomed to be marginalized in the long term unless it ditches the QPL.
I have one pc running windows and one running linux. I use the linux machine as a router and fileserver. Also I like to fool around with it a bit. I installed helix gnome, to check it out. It installs easy, but somewhere it fucked up because the gnome setup lists settings for both sawmill and sawfish. Both report that sawmill/sawfish is not running when I try to change anything. This became true when I finally decided to install enlightenment. I also have Icewm but I didn't like it very much. Enlightenment looks very cool and sort of gets the job done. The only thing is that it fucked up my menu structure (never asked for that) and duplicates a lot of functionality (didn't ask for that either).
I tried KDE as well (hell it comes installed with mandrake). However upgrading seems to painfull to me (you have to download 20 or so packages) so I won't give 2.0 a try.
Jilles
I'm sick to the back teeth of watching all these fevered egos in the KDE and GNOME camps whacking off in public like two troops of rabid spider monkeys. Snipe followed by counter-snipe followed by smug insinuation followed by all-out shit-slinging rarely seen outside the monkey house at the Zoo. Where they get the time to code is beyond me.
Point is, I've tried both and they both suck. Why? Because they are shamelessly ripping off a UI paradigm popularised by Microsoft, a paradigm they ripped off in turn from Apple, who designed for a 128K monochrome machine with a 400K floppy drive. If I wanted my machine to work like Windows, why would I have bothered installing Linux in the first place? Both GNOME and KDE actually boast about the extent to which they follow Windows-- "no retraining-- it works just like Windows!" they crow.
This is cowardly bullshit. Any real user you talk to will tell you how much Windows and the MacOS suck. KDE and GNOME are appealing to the same middle-tier IS management types who mandate the use of Windows throughout their organisation; empty-headed MBA jackals with one hand turning the pages of some gushing ZD publication loaded with "handy" product feature matrices and the other hand tugging at their atrophied genitals. These, all you GNOME and KDE advocates, these are the assholes that put Microsoft on the map, and you are lining up, learning to talk their talk and walk their walk so you can kiss their asses. "No retraining-- it works just like Windows!" You fucking whores!
Why does the Open Source community have such an inferiority complex when it comes to original UI design? Is it because we don't really "get" GUIs? Is it because deep down we'd just be happy with a command line if it wasn't for those pesky users wanting their icons and their flat toolbars? So instead of sitting down and thinking through this whole UI thing, we just clone Windows? Are you so desperate for mindshare and flattering media coverage that you'd take over screwing your users where Bill Gates left off? A reaming from the Free Software community is going to feel much the same as a reaming from Microsoft come morning. "Microsoft spend millions on usability! We don't have the resources!" scream the apologists. You idiots. That's a PR exercise if ever I saw one. Microsoft spend that money to impress the middle managers who are their real customers; the rest can go hang. Do you really think Microsoft ever ditched a single line of interface code because it raised a usability issue? The whole thing is a snow-job; it gives Microsoft plausible denial: "What? You say our products are unusable? Well, we spent squillions on usability last year-- you must be a retard or something."
The 15-year old Mac GUI metaphor is creaking badly; it doesn't scale. I have a 6GB hard disk at home (tiny by today's standards); how am I meant to navigate it, to manage? With a GTK+ tree control? Think again, Mr. GNOME Man. Furthermore, we're stuck with Mac UI dogma that made sense on a 128K box but not on a machine with 32MB or more of RAM. A one-shot Clipboard in this day and age? Puh-lease! You want me to click File, Save every five minutes? Give me a break; I could record every damn keystroke in my word processor including ^H and never run short on hard disk space. File Open dialog boxes? They were a hack because the first MacOS was single tasking and you couldn't get at the shell!
Think, you freaks, think! All this sniping about code reuse and re-inventing the wheel. Both camps started re-inventing the wheel before the first line of GNOME or KDE code was written, and you didn't even notice.
Read this and this and then come back to me.
IBM and all the other big boys probably want GNOME for Commercial use. Thus they would probably have to pay to QT or Trolltech.
Why pay for milk when you can get the cow for free? GNOME is just that the cow, and you get the whole thing free. NO annoying popup ads no shareware reminders free. No license fee, etc. And they have the source to GNOME, Gtk+ and all the apps as well so they can tweak them as they need. They can't do that with KDE and QT. KDE yes QT NO. KDE is the milk that companies like IBM and et al pay for. Not KDE in and of itself, but QT. Think about it. ;-)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I don't want a lot, I just want it all
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
The whole language issue is similarly silly. You can pretty much program in what you like, which is how Linux has worked all along. And ORBit bindings are either already in place or being worked on for all the big languages (including C++.)
He does have a very good point about documentation though. Thus far I'm not aware of any resource that will tell you everything you need to know about Bonobo programming, for instance. Gtk/Gdk have reasonable resources available, but gtk-- is barely documented. Hanging out on the developer's list will provide insights into various things, but not everyone can afford the time to read the developer's lists every day.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I think that should do it. He makes it sound like C is sooo bad. If C++ was so great why is just about every version of UNIX written in C? Obvoiusly if you have C programmer s to write the OS it should not be difficult to find C programmers to work on GNOME either. C++ is not that great, it has its problems too. This author is just bias and this article is really just here to get the KDE vs GNOME war going. Gee maybe KDE developers should help write the C++ interface to gtk+ and then port KDE to that.
On another note has anyone tried gtkmm?? ;-)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I don't want a lot, I just want it all
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
The people over at Open Implementation would probably disagree with your statement that a "black box" is necessary to be object oriented (or even that it is desirable at all).
Delegation based languages like Self don't have inheritance but achieve reuse all the same.
Typeless languages don't need polymorphism.
I don't think multi-dispatch would be called "messaging", as there is no "recipient" like there is in single-dispatched languages like C++.
Maybe it's just me, but your four points seem very C++ biased. If you want a different bias of what is "required" to be object oriented take a look at what Eiffelites might say:
- should have the notion of class as the central concept
- must have assertions to check preconditions, postconditions, and invariants and produce documentation from them as well as check them at runtime
- classes should be the only modules (i.e. no "namespaces" a la C++)
- every type should be based on a class (so long C++ and Java)
- it should be possible to specify which clients can access which features (i.e. finer granularity than "public", "private", and "protected")
- the genericity mechanism should support constrained genericity (i.e. only classes with the method "sort")
This list is no more or less biased than your own.Please, before I continue, let me assure you, that I'm not trying to
:-)
.doc documents
:-)
:-)
flame/convince/icmp attack you.
Ok, now that we got that straight, let me introduce myself:
I've been using linux for 4 years (since slackware 3.1, kernel 2.0.0),
pretty much exclusively for the past 2. So although I'm not really an old
timer, I'm not a newbie either. I'm also a final year undergraduate
computer science student at University College London. I have run various
versions of slackware, tried debian & mandrake, and I've settled down now
with my own tweaked version of redhat. Through my university course, I
have been exposed to various unices, running from IRIX to sunos (from
openlook to CDE).
I used to be running KDE, being very enthousiastic about it, since the
first stable version (1.0.0) came out. I was (still am really) very
impressed about it (didn't really care about the licensing issues), as I
was with all the updates as they happened. It was pretty much the best
unix desktop I had ever seen (although too windows-like//let's not kid
ourselves (this is not a bad thing per se)). When I switched over to
redhat (version 6.0), I tried gnome for the first time (version
1.0.something) and found it appauling (didn't really try too hard to learn
it). It was much too slow, enlightenment and gnome didn't really cooperate
to such an extent, seemed bloated, and was far less stable than KDE.
However 2 things I did take notice: DragNDrop worked both with xmms (or
was it x11amp then?) and with Netscape. I wondered: Netscape was out for
SO long (much older than KDE). Why the hell didn't motif dnd work with
kde? (let alone xmms). But I switched to KDE anyway, and kept recommending
it to anyone who wanted to use linux. However, after upgrading to redhat
6.1, I tried gnome again, played with it some more and updated all the
packages through redhat rawhide. I also installed sawmill (now sawfish) as
a window manager, which cooperated to a much better degree. I was stunned!
Although a bit slower than KDE (and less stable, but certainly more stable
than the shell of an OS of a certain large Redmond-Based company), it
totally blew KDE away at my opinion. DnD worked! Mouse-wheel worked. It
looked far better than KDE and was certainly more customisable. Or so I
found it. And I've been using Gnome since (I've also installled some kde2
betas). (I've on to your article. (btw I seriously recommend (out of
open-mindness at least to try the latest version of helix-gnome))
Everyone deserves an opinion, so please do hear mine:
"Every six months or so, hostilities once again erupt between the KDE and
Gnome communities. These battles are usually sparkedwhen the king of the Gnomes, Miguel de Icaza, grants an
interview and just can't seem to resist saying something gratuitously
nasty about KDE."
True, but you must admit that KDE is pretty arrogant too! At every
occasion it keeps boasting that it is the "Leading desktop for Unix" or
Linux, at every occasion. If you want to be exact, CDE or TWM is the
leading desktop for Unix and it is debatable if KDE is for Linux. Redhat
and Debian have a huge linux market share. Plus, the Gnome Foundation
really (whether we want it or not) makes gnome the "leading Unix
desktop" simply because Solaris is the most popular Unix OS. Please note
also how TrollTech a company bashed gnome in the recent QT-Designer app.
"(The argument is that because the QT toolkit used by
KDE is proprietary, KDE is tainted. But QT has a
foundation, too, and it has pledged to keep QT free for noncommercial
use. And as a practical matter, withdrawal of free use of QT would
make as much sense as Adobe withdrawing Acrobat Reader.) Gnome's stated
purpose, its whole reason for existence, is to kill KDE. Nice, huh? "
The argument is that it's illegal to tie GPL (under which KDE is released)
with the QPL. This might not make much sense to the users, but it is
important to the free software movement in general. The GPL has not ever
been legally enforced. What if some large unknown corporation, took out
say the best parts of the linux kernel and incoporated them into their os,
without giving any source back. How will the GPL be legally enforced, if
projects as popular as KDE also violate it? Plus Gnome sole perpose isn't
destroying KDE. Not at all. Even collaboration efforts have been made This
is simply the third attempt of the GNU project to create a GNU desktop
enviroment.
"(Does anyone else see the irony of a project headed by a guy who's in it
for the money, backed by companies who are in it for the money, getting
the official Glorious October Revolution seal of approval, while a
volunteer effort driven by sheer love of the project does not? Yes, there
are people from distributions who work on KDE, but they have not set up
little companies for themselves to capitalize on it.)"
I really doubt that Icazza and the rest of the gnome team is only in it
for the money. Two years ago, when gnome started and KDE was light years
ahead, you cannot argue that people were in it for the money! You should
also note that many people have set up companies to capitalise on another
free software project: the GNU/Linux OS. They're called Linux
Distributions, and they have offered a great deal to the Linux movement
and operating system, just as Helix-Code have done to gnome (if you were
using gnome, you would have seen the great progress that gnome has had
since the introduction of helix-code).
"Gnome is written, mostly, in C. KDE is written in C++."[...]"Goodbye,
easy portability to other platforms. KDE, on the other hand, has reuse of
code as a goal, which is why KDE2, though far more powerful, often has
less memory footprint than does earlier versions."
If you want to code an application for KDE you can only do it in C++. Even
if additional code has to be loaded (but certainly gnome-apps are not as
slow/inefficient as statically linked apps), it is still a great advantage
for gnome that you can code gnome apps even in pascal, or Lisp or python
(or C++ of cource). (though I think there is a PyQT module which allows
apps to be written using Python). Gnome is also Very much portable. Look
at all the binary distro's that helix is offering (not only Linux). Plus,
you cannot argue that Gnome has not reuse of code as a goal! Look at
gnome-print as an example. And also, if KDE/QT has reuse of code as paramount, why do KDE1 apps need to be PORTED to KDE2?
"But even sticking to C, I'm told by programmers fluent in both, Gnome
faces a world of technical issues to overcome before it is on par with a
project, just starting out, in C++."
That is VERY debatable. GTK which is very much OO is written in C.
""If gnome-hackers [a mailing list] was archived, you could a whole debate
about a very classical problem of C programming : when a function returns
a char*, who owns the char*? Does the caller have to free it? This is just
about the most basic problem you can find with C programming. And they're
thinking about it just now, after 3 years of development. KDE doesn't have
such a problem, it has QString."
I don't see any USERS having a problem with either gnome's or KDE's
interpretation of character strings
"Gnome is written to the venerable and venerated GTK +, while KDE is
written to the technically excellent but politically reviled
QT. (Technically excellent? Youbetcha. I still have here a copy of QT
Mozilla, in which Netscape Navigator was ported to QT in one man
month.) Compare the documentation of the two. Look at the new QT Designer
integrated development environment. Look at the documentation and tools in
GTK+. Which would you rather write to? Likewise, the specific
documentation for the developer heavily favors KDE."
If I am not mistaken, QT is older than GTK+. Technically excellent is
again debatable. Even if you do not like gtk+, it has grown much faster
than QT has, introducing more widgets and supporting features like
mouse-wheel faster than QT. QT is also very nice and easy to program
with. GTK+ has also been ported to win32 like QT. You also fail to note
that QT Mozilla, has, well failed. Mozilla uses GTK instead. QT
documentation is indeed very nice. But so is GTK+ / Gnome! Have you
checked out the gtk.org gtk intro? Or the "Gnome/Gtk+ Application
Development" book (http://developer.gnome.org/doc/GGAD) (also in
bookstores). ? They are both very well written. Plus there exist gtk+
/gnome C++ wrappers like gtk-- which making coding much easier for the C++
crowd.
"While we're making comparisons on a developer level, it might be a good
idea to look at kdelibs v. gnome-libs. The KDE libraries are well
understood to the extent that a bug is often fixed almost instantly. Gnome
(and GTK+) are another story, according to a very highly respected Gnome
and GTK+ expert who knows KDE and QT as well."
kdelibs vs gnome-libs is an interesting point. kdelibs have been frozen at
version 1.1.2 for several months (close to a year maby). gnome-libs are
constantly updated and Helix-Update can automatically update
them. End-users do not care if bugs are instantly fixed in CVS or source
pathes. Gnome clearly wins in this one. Plus you cannot quote a "very
highly respected Gnome and GTK+ expert who knows KDE and QT as well.",
without giving his name!
"The KDE project was designed to produce a great desktop for Linux and
related operating systems, while Gnome was given the task of killing KDE
and, on the way, producing a desktop."
That is simply not true. You are unfairly bashing gnome now.
"KDE has an office suite weeks away from release; Gnome has played with
one (and an element of it, the Gnumeric spreadsheet, is by all accounts
quite good)"
You are wrong: Gnome Office has the following elements, out NOW (unlike
KOFFICE, which although VERY good (I use it) is still unstable and in
beta)
Abiword: Good, lightweight worprocessor which can import
(much faster than KWord btw, but has less features).
The Gimp: No intro needed
GnuCash: Quicken like money managing program, very nice
Gnumeric
Gphoto: digital camera manager
DIA: a diagram creation program (supports UML
Also, helix-gnome has written evolution, which by all accounts, is the
greatest linux mail program (maybe in all platforms!)
" but now seems to be counting on the largesse of Sun to cough up a port
of StarOffice (well, speed and memory efficiency weren't a consideration
to begin with, were they?) for a pre-packaged office suite, those who have
worked within the Gnome project be damned, about which more in a
little. There is likely to be a StarOffice for Gnome available for
download within the next year or two."
Competition is never bad. After all, I too wish KDE 2 to succeed, so that Gnome will also advance.Everyone applauded Sun for releasing staroffice. Granted, it is bloated, but it is the best productivity suite out for linux at the moment (sure beats Corel WPO for stability and
speed). Plus OpenOffice (as it is now called) will remove stardesktop, and
will have only single individual apps. Plus you do not KNOW that
Gnome/Staroffice will be available in the "next year or two". For all you
know, it could be available this December.
"Which is another issue with Gnome. No one knows anything about release
schedules. Gnome developers grumble privately about it, and publicly when
events such as the release of Gnome 1.2 surprised developers and led to
some very hard feelings within the project. It's generally thought that
Gnome 1.4 will be released sometime around Halloween, and Gnome 2.0
sometime around -- well, let's be satisfied with sometime. KDE, meanwhile,
publishes a schedule. Yes, it slips, sometimes more than anyone is happy
about, but everyone is kept informed."
True, KDE does keep a more tight schedule. But: KDE-stable is still at
version 1.1.2 for nearly a year now (maybe more than a
year?). Gnome-stable on the other hand, has really advanced on the same
timespan. It has many more features, it is faster etc. Gnome has advanced
MUCH faster than KDE. Also you should note that the Gnome release schedule
is much more like the Linux kernel release schedule. It will be released
"when it is ready". Believe me, you do not use gnome, but if you had used
it, you would have really known what all this time has done to Gnome. The
improvements are countless.
I do agree that gnome should abandon the war, and start pursuing
excellence. But KDE should do that to, staring by stopping calling itself
the leading desktop for Unix. I do not know of any unix cluster that uses
KDE!
Well I undestand that you will not agree with some of my points. Linux is
about choice after all. But I really think that articles such as yours,
can fuel the fire. Do give gnome a shot. Helix-code has created a
wonderful installer for anyone to use. Plus gnome can be customised to
match any personal preference. I really cannot describe the number of
features that the latest helix-gnome has. Do give it a try.
I hope that you will read my letter,
Stefanos
- the article had some points, however, it was a little overboard in it's 'gnome sucks, kde rocks' attitude. It's fine to feel that way, but when every sentance is a slam, you (or at least I) get a sick feeling reading it.
- some of the points, like making money from gnome, are kina irrelevant. In the interview posted on
/. the other day (link) the way they were going to make money was by keeping the software free and open (beer+speech) but offer a *service* to aid people using it. This is how people can survive economically in an open source world.. this is also a service that I would use.
- KDE vs GNOME is personal preferance. Both have good and bad points, but in the end, you use what you like or are comfortable with. I use gnome becuase I like the way it looks and feels. [random other person] uses kde for the same reasons. Who cares beyond that.
- At the end user level I don't care at all if one is written in C and the other C++. I care if the applications and environment *feel* comfortable to me and the apps do what I need.
- It appears everyone is missing the "use the right tools for the right job" philosophy that comes as the result of most "us vs. them" arguments. Macs have their place, as do windows machines, as do linux machines, as does kde/gnome/fvwm/xfmail/mutt/pine/elm/gimp/photosho
p ....
- having read some articles on UI design I know that both kde and gnome break a huge number of rules... or at least ideas of how a "well designed" GUI should work.
- I really don't think that GNOME is out to kill KDE. It is there as an alternative, though it was started because of the politics of KDE.
- Alternatives are good.
- Choice is good.
- Competition is good. One thing about the gnome/kde debates that people seem to miss is that a huge number of STANDARDS compliant (or at least semi-standards compliant) apps have been written since this whole war started. While the kde coders are trying to outdo the gnome coders they are all creating decent apps and making them better over time. The end result of this is that in the end we have more choice, more apps, and better apps.
Now folks lets come to our senses, realize that we're all on the same team with the same objective... to make linux better.but not for closed source projects.
It's funny how all the advocates of Gnome claim that QT can not be used for commercial projects... Use an Open source license for your comercial project like StarOffice and you are fine with the QPL....
Moritz
So beyond garbage collection, I don't think that any languages do anything beyond a simple setjmp()/longjmp() to deal with exceptions. The problem with doing this in C is that you end up with an obsession to make things more and more generic until you have to start coding in an OO approach, so you implement objects and message passing.
And then after a while you realise that you've just reimplemented Objective C.
Oh well.
If you haven't tried the version of sawfish (ie. sawmill) that comes with HelixGnome you really should take a look at it. I used to be a fan of IceWM, but the GNU (oops I mean new) HelixGnome combination of Gnome + Sawfish is really quite impressive.
Gnome really has come a long way in the last little bit.
I haven't seen many GNOME users talking this way, but if they do, ignore them, dismiss them, don't even acknowledge their statements. I, along with hundreds of other GNOME developers and users that I'm in contact with, are still saying that Gnome brings freedom to the desktop and that KDE and GNOME can coexist. And yes, I'm very excited about the GNOME Foundation!
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
I would suggest you try Gnome 1.2.X. And I'd also suggest using the Helix Gnome distribution. It installs beautifully on top of RedHat 6.1 and is very stable.
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
I base it on praticality. What are the odds that you'll be using a CORBA component on a remote server running HP-UX? Seriously? Read up on KDE's stance on the issue. The think that CORBA is very cool technology, but not suitable for desktop components. (BTW KDE offers CORBA too, it just doesn't use it for desktop components.) 99% of people want to embed a spread sheet into their document, not embed a remote-spread sheet running on a computer 50 miles away. Anyway, those specialized applications that DO need to embed something over CORBA have the freedom to do so. What the KDE developers think is that desktop components will almost never need to be embeeded on a remote OS running a different OS. They don't preclude using CORBA to embed something more specialized, but the acknolodege that there is no need for the two to share the same protocol. From a pragmatic standpoint it makes sense. For local desktop components use DCOP that offers high performance for the user. Still, offer CORBA for those specialized components that need it's power. Chances are that the two won't need to interact, so there is no reason for them to use the same system.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I don't support either side that much. (In fact, I think GNOME Foundation is a good thing.) My point is that in the last two days, I've noticed several comments about how GNOME is going to dominate the Linux desktop and how KDE should be running scared. After the IBM thing, several GNOME people have decided to rub KDE people's noses in it. This is a big change from the past when GNOME was billed as bringing more freedom, and everyone talked about cooexisting and all.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Open with scene of woman struggling to use computer that obviously has Win95 installed. She's throwing her hands in the air, making loud exasperated noises, etc.
Voiceover: Tired of the difficult to use UI of Windows 95?
Jump transition as Windows 95 disappears and KDE appears. Woman begins smiling and becomes obviously productive (much mousing around and so forth).
Voiceover: Discover the power of KDE: Alt-F2! It brings up a little input field which you can use to start an app quicker than using the menus! Finally, a breakthrough in UI technology that will make you 10 times more productive leaving you more time for your family, blah blah blah...
Yes, I understand your point: the difference between a poor UI and good UI is incremental. My point, though, is that the difference between and good UI and a great UI is fundamental. We need to make a jump beyond Windows as far as Windows was beyond DOS.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
I know that, but since most commercial apps are not open source, I said "commercial (not open source)" to clarify that i was talkign about those.
The article linked to on the front page was obnoxious, and I feel personally attacked, not for my code's merits, but just on "general principle", because I happen to code for GNOME. I, as many other developers want to be left alone by such rabble-rousers. I just want to do my thing.
I've never attacked anyone on the basis of doing the KDE project - on the other hand, we're all making good progress, and I believe that one borrows ideas from the other on a regular basis. The "inefficiency" of having two projects with such overlap is blown out of proportions by many comments here. They merely represent two different approaches to a problem, with two different solution sets. No one side has all the best solutions.
Here are links to the publicity/news pages on both sides of the camp, so you can compare the badmouthing-article counts:
KDE news, GNOME news.
They speak for themselves. Thanks for your attention and stuff.
Therefore, distros cannot both ship KDE _and_ QT at the same time.
Hmmm, can Sun distribute GNOME alongside its openwin? In any case, I'll play the devil's advocate and assume that Qt accompanies KDE and is simultaneously a module of KDE. What to do? Just read a few phrases back and distribute the source code for Qt! And reading over section 2, I find that works distinct from the Program do not have to fall under the GPL.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Actually, KParts isn't the object model. It is the embedding system. Think of it has the OLE of the KDE world. KPart's object model is DCOP, which is KDE's COM, and is the component you should be comparing with CORBA. Your mentaility, that desktop application servers will become big so leave the option open, is exactly what leads to UNIX becoming the increasing overweight system it is. Does no-one have any concept of specialized, lightweigth systems anymore? There is no proof that desktop application servers will become big. There isn't even an indication that mainframe computing (which is essentially what an application server is) will become big. Even if they do, shoehorning an existing technology into that paradim would be suboptimal. Do you seriously think that objects that are designed at the core to be run on the local machine are going to fare well when run remotely? (Actually, DCOP can be run remotely as well, it's just that CORBA has more features to do it.)
As for DCOP it is far from a quick-and dirty hack. It is just a wrapper over the standard X11 ICE library, which is quite mature.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
And of course, even within the context of the three main monotheist religions there's a couple questions that set them apart concerning the wishes of the Deity...
You missed the point of what I was saying. Maybe I should have been more specific. I picked one religion, Christianity, as an example to illustrate my point. There either is just one God, or there isn't. You could also pick another religion, as an example and say, there are either many Gods or there are not many Gods. The entire point was to say that religion isn't the same is picking what socks you want to wear on a given morning; it's not just a matter of preference.
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Celebrate the finer things in life
Qt 2.0 *for Unix* has a proper free software license: the QPL, thus this problem will go away if the above poster is correct (which I'm unsure about).
The problem here is that the free software producers are not producing a net benefit to the end user by copying every advance as quickly as they can.
They blatantly copy good ideas as soon as they appear, producing nothing new of value, just spending their own effort to keep people from having to pay the people who had the good ideas. This is mostly what free software developers do, they duplicate effort to get around IP restrictions (yes, of course, there are exceptions, but the high-profile stuff is all duplication).
Knowing that this will happen, people don't bother developing their software ideas, because they know they can't get paid. Instead, they end up making a living doing system administration or some such thing, and creative talent gets wasted on unoriginal work.
There's a way out, though. In mass market busking, the users decide who and how much to pay, and are therefore free to pay whoever has the good idea first, and not bother paying people who just duplicate effort or slap a new interface on public domain code. This actually gives people a profit motive to write innovative free software for the general public. Integrators of all the good ideas can also get paid without usurping the income of the originators of the ideas, because it is in the best interests of the people who are paying to and they have control of their payments.
This also deals with the problem of 800-pound gorillas like MS screwing original people even worse than the free software community does.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I just use languages like perl / tcl and Java mostly so I don't worry about these things. I do do some C, but more properly you should have said I am not a hard core "C" code. ;-)
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I don't want a lot, I just want it all
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
I think perhaps you might need a lesson in basic classical logic. There is a fundamental difference between a choice about sock preference, what to have for dinner, what kind of car you want to drive, et. al, and what you are going to believe is true. The difference is that when you make a decision about what kind of car you are going to drive, for example, you're just deciding what your preference is. There is no wrong answer. When you are deciding what to believe regarding the nature of the universe, the existence of God, if he does exist, what his character is like, etc. there are many wrong answers! You can be completely, utterly, fantastically, desparingly, hopelessly wrong in your views of the nature of the universe. You can't be wrong when you make a decision about what socks to wear.
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Celebrate the finer things in life
fair enough. :)
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Celebrate the finer things in life
I can (In fact, am) develop in GTK-- now. When inti appears whenever it appears, I'll have a look at it.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?