Slashdot Mirror
Interview: KDE League Chairman Andreas Pour
Frank writes "Here's a good interview with KDE League chairman Andreas Pour. He talks about the K desktop environment (KDE) 2.1, that will be Hitting the streets on Monday, February 26. He reveals info about some significant advantages over the old 1.0 platform, including a full-fledged browser and the upcoming KOffice suite of business applications."
I love the new shell plugin idea. Konqueror has been top-notch stuff, and adding the ability to conveniently execute shell programs and capture them to a terminal just rocks.
I've been using the embedded terminal feature to do this in KDE 2, and having a way to do it without needing to pop open a shell in advance is just nifty. I bit of configuration lets me set up development directories that are extremely convenient to use.
I've been hearing this fiction that KDE is not for serious Unix users, but this is just bull IMHO. Konqueror is easily the most productive programming environment I've ever worked with.
It isn't going to happen - not for a long time anyway. Both KDE and GNOME are still developing their infrastructures and investing massive resources into their own respective projects. The thought that one project would abandon their work and merge with the other is extremely unlikely, especially considering the past animosity and considerable egos that some nameless core developers have (I won't say which project - I'm no troll).
.NET working with the Linux desktop.
I wouldn't expect to see anything significant until KDE 4.0 / GNOME 3.0. Then we should see two mature component models, a large number of applications that make use of it's respective desktops features and things will have probably settled down a bit. At that point, it might be possible to see some sort of bridge developed between the environments at the object level.
One day we might have a desktop that integrates Mozilla XPCOM, KDE Kparts, GNOME Bonobo, OpenOffice UNO (yeah, I know about the port to Bonobo) and possibly even COM/ActiveX via WINE. Who knows, maybe some people will get
There is obviously a lot of talk here about merging KDE and GNOME. That is not a good idea. There is also a lot of talk to keeping things like it is. Also, not a good idea. The only real way to solve this issue is create a standard desktop API that KDE or GNOME backends can plug in to. I've already espoused the idea dozens of times, and if you want details, look at my back-posts, especially the recent Art of UNIX Programming Thread. If there was an ABI that apps had to follow, then we could open the desktop environment to competition in quality, stability, etc, while still having a consistant desktop, and without fragmenting the application base.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The same argument as you're using has been used over the last few years to justify the Windows monopoly. Windows, it's argued, brings much needed compatability, and therefore forcing people to buy computers with Windows is a good thing. After all, all that having multiple operating systems would do would be to generate incompatable platforms all trying to do the "same thing".
I can't agree with that argument. Ten years ago I remember a software industry that was vibrant with innovation, where multiple software houses produced outstanding software on a range of different platforms. We had choice, and even those who selected obscurer computer platforms had a range of tools available to them of decent quality. I remember the days when the adverts in most computer magazines were 70-80% software.
That seemed to stop when people stopped caring about choices. When Windows 95 became dominant, and PC choices from OS/2 to the various Digital Research OS's were dropped from the market. It became rare to find any PC with anything other than Windows, Office, and the occasional shareware utility like WinZip installed on it. Games were perhaps the only honorable exception. And that was the PC industry. Amiga (still my favourate platform) disappeared, Atari faded, first by becoming a games console only company, then by fucking it up. NeXT, well, NeXT screwed up from the start, but it was at least another direction.
You may feel that we're better off having the entire might of the programmers of the world focussing on two or three platforms today, but I kind of feel like I can't find anything I want to use these days. I don't like the way Windows 9X feels, or its design. NT might be better but is overly bloated. Unix has some wonderful ideas, and right now my home is a Linux/OpenBSD only shop, but I'd hesitate to suggest the OS family is close to how I want to work. And while technically there are other PC OS's out there, like QNX, BeOS, and OS/2, none appear to have any momentum. Right now they may as well not exist, thanks to the industry consensus that competition is a bad thing.
*ix, be it BSD, Linux, or whatever, is the closest thing we have at the moment to a platform on which to build new environments to provide choice for users. GNOME and KDE deserve to both exist, both succeed, and both remain independent, for the sake of their users and for the sake of continuing that policy of choice. It would be really nice to see that attitude at some other levels of the OS as well, such as creating a credible alternative to X, but it's great that we have that choice. I don't want to see people reducing them.
Even if shortterm, merging may bring benefits to the quality and completeness of KDE and GNOME might improve more quickly, a single desktop standard will be the death of choice in user environments. We've seen how difficult it is to get a "new" operating system accepted in an environment in which the industry has settled on one standard. If we lose choices at other levels of the system, we may never get them back.
--
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Windows (95 and 98) require less resources than Konqueror. Period. Windows 95 and 98 also came out 6 and 3 years ago respectively, so this can be taken with a grain of salt.
I have 256 MB of RAM for my Win2000/Linux "box" (actually, it's a laptop) because I'm preparing for the future. RAM is cheap right now. Not everyone has this option though.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Consider your history. Why are there now two desktop environments for Linux? Well, we have reached this state because of liscensing issues. The Gnome project formed purely because people were unhappy with the KDE qt liscense.
The origin of the projects is no longer important. So if MIT suddenly is given the source code for all the printer drivers in use on their campus, should RMS give up the Free Software Foundation? (click here if that didn't make sense to you)
Why continue to divide out labor on two projects which both hope to achieve the same thing?
Because they plan to do this in completely different ways, also once they are mature the differences willbeself evident.
Imagine how much more polished the Linux desktop environment would be if all effort were focused on just one. Twice as much effort would be expended on it every day.
Anyone who has read Frederick Brooke's Mythical Man Month knows that your statements are a big misconception. Doubling the number of developers on a project does not double the amount of time taken to finish the project because new developers have to be brought up to speed and the layers of communication increase which leads to more errorsoccuring due to miscommunication. Basically there is a certain level of complexity where throwing more developers at a product produces little net gain. KDE and GNOME are at that level of complexity.
KDE is mainly C++, GNOME is mainly C (if you do not realize there is a fundamental difference in these languages then go to comp.lang.c or comp.lang.c++ and state this and see the responses you'll get). GNOME uses all sorts of CORBA stuff while KDE does not. GNOME uses OrBit while the few KDE developers who know CORBA used Mico. Both projects are extremely undocumented and very few, if any, have a complete grasp of the entire system in either case.
Quite frankly,if KDE and GNOME merged the efforts involved in adjusting to the merger would slow down development a lot more than any perceived current lack of developers does. In addition, some functionality that was a part of one or the other system would be lost (because stuff always gets trimmed in a merger).
A better suggestion is for KDE and GNOME to start actively pursing interoperability. Unfortunately this is one place were Open Source may fail. It is unlikely that GNOME interoperability is high on the list of any KDE developer's list of itches he/she wants scratched and vice versa. Thus since they are all simply volunteers they can't be made to do it like would happen in a professional development environment, where a manager can just assign a bunch of coders this task.
Finagle's First Law
It seems that their corparate ties with Ximian, Eazel and Sun are causing real trouble. Apparently they have lost nearly all of their voluntary work force after the GNOME Foundation was announced. Couple of quotes I saw in gnome-hackers list. These are core developers, not some random guys:
Alan Cox:
"...there are not enough people working on gnome infrastructure/site admin to keep up with the demands of these because most folks are busy working on their rival Ximian or Eazel projects and so the number of effective actual gnome core contributions has dropped massively rather than risen as might originally have been expected."
link
Matthias Warkus:
"Looking at the CVS logs, no one seems to be really working on the core anymore. Pretty much all of the code commits go into Nautilus, Gnumeric, Evolution and Eazel's and Ximian's supporting and surrounding technology and tools.
I think we're at the point where we should ask ourselves whether the GNOME Project can still be considered a living entity at all. And whether it's a good move to, at this point, tie our next release to Nautilus, which, however cool, is essentially a third-party product with the main purpose of generating revenue for Eazel. If we go on "outsourcing" software that way, we might end up with a "GNOME desktop" which is not much more than lots of commercial free software bundled together haphazardly."
link
Is their situation really this bad?
For instance, take Gnumeric: the best free spreadsheet available, the one with the most confortable user interface, pleasant to use and only surpased in functionality (but not in usability) by OpenOffice. Guess what? Gnumeric is fully written in Gtk+.
Evolution is another good example: it has a great user interface, but some bits of usability are still not there, and we are working actively to do user testing to make sure we provide a better interface, but this has nothing to do with the underlying technologies (as you like to convenientnly present in your interview). It has to do with matching the "User view" with the application, rather than forcing the application model into users.
OpenParts (KDE's CORBA-based component architecture) failed for a number of things, few of which could be traced to CORBA, I will enumerate the ones i remember, for the sake of completeness:
try {
corba_object->method (x);
} catch (...) {
handle corba errors here;
}
Was actually written like this: corba_object->method (x); Of course you get "unreliable" code if you do not handle errors. (btw, notice that most security holes on BugTraq a few years ago were all caused because people did not handle boundary conditions correctly, nor handle errors from Unix system calls correctly.
I've been using KDE 2.01 (XF86 4.0.2) combined with kernel 2.4.1 for about a week now, and the combination far surpasses anything I've experienced on Windows or Mac. Its fast and stable (I compiled everything from source...those of you compiling QT 2.2.4, try
I'm really excited about where this project is headed. In my mind, the Windows 'standard' has already been surpassed.
Click here for a DVD on Linux HOWTO
--------------
Is this rock and roll, or a form of state control?
However, if these two projects were merged it would not work. They have many fundamental differences, differences that would nearly require one project to be completely dumped. We all agree that this would not be a good thing.
I am a KDE user, and I am damn proud of it, but many of my friends use gnome, which is thier preference (its too slow for me).
The competition between the two projects has had an effect on each of them, encouraging adoptation of similar ideas, and generation of new ideas, ideas which might not have made it into the source code otherwise.
The competition between kde and gnome is a good thing, even if both groups didn't care about the existence of each other, it is nice to have more than one option.
Those of you calling for a merging of kde and gnome, think about this, what if we merged the linux kernel and a bsd kernel. It probally wouldn't work for a few years. Think about it.
Spring is here. Don't believe me, look outside!