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Looking Ahead at GNOME 2
Able writes "This is a good article that will teach you how to use the new and improved libraries available with GNOME 2 so that you can write your own Nautilus view, and panel applets. It also provides you with the understanding to compile a few sample GTK+ 2 programs that will give you a good understanding of GTK+ 2's many improvements over GTK+ 1."
This is the difference between Linux and Windows.
/KNOW/ about them.
:)
Microsoft makes their cleartype technology enablable with a big large red button shouting "PUSH ME DARN YOU PUSH ME!".
Linux puts it in a text file.
While having the text file option is nice and all, it would be better if the friendlier installation packages said at install time "heya, we noticed that you have an LCD screen, any chance you want to enable LCD font antialiasing? It'll make your text alot easier to read!"
For the boxed distros, shove it on the back of the box in a yellow jaggy oval. Bright yellow.
Also include it in a settings->display style applet. Make it obvious. Make it easy. Make it so that people KNOW its there.
Linux has alot of unused features, unused because few people
Hell, it could be able to cure cancer and theres a chance the lot of us wouldn't know what string to put on what line to enable it.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Well it sounds to me like you're creating your own worries. I have trouble understanding why you'd be a "worried gnome user" because something else might become or is better. Why not just switch then instead of worrying?
With that said, I don't think you should worry about Ximian, much of their work gets added into the vanilla gnome.
My personal opinion of GNOME is that a lot of work is going into two sections right now: great applications (evolution, gnumeric, galeon, abiword), and whole new libraries for gnome 2.0. I think once gnome 2.0 stabilizes many people will be eager to take advantage of the new features and you'll see the desktop itself get many cool new features.
This point is brought up constantly but people seem to prefer to ignore it. When KDE 2 was being worked on many critics were saying KDE must be dying because they weren't seeing the work. You need to understand that such big code changes happen a lot more smoothly without non-programmers trying to use it and complaining about this and that or sending questions on how to get it working. You're just going to have to be patient, or you could just use KDE2 for a while.
FiGZ.COM - A waste of perfectly good web space
What's the problem, exactly? Gnome will get better, KDE will get better, you can use as much of either or both as fits your needs and at worst, you can go on using the current versions.
It's not clear to me where there's a problem. What's the worst that'll happen -- you might be tempted to change desktops to something that works better for you? You can even keep using your GTK themes.
By the way, VFVTHUNTER, you can turn off the launch feedback indicator on the cursor. I'm on a Mac right now, but it's in a pretty obvious place in KControl.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Yeah, I am putting a Honda Civic backend into my F50. Oh wait, the backends for both cars are so different that trying to use the same backend for both cars is just silly. You ever wonder why the auto industry doesn't put the same backend into every car?
Yes it could be done, two wrappers around the same backend resulting in QT and GTK. However, such a task would require so much additional coding that it would negate any benefits that it was supposed to have.
I hate to say this, but what will happen, is one of the desktop environments will die out. Its the nature of Open Source Software. Things can't stay splintered forever. Eventually natural forces (user's needs, technical needs, development needs, market needs, etc) will cause the gap between both desktop environments to widen. However, the initial competition that exists when there is still more than one option helps the end user get a better desktop environment sooner.
Now this has nothing to do with other ultra-feather weight desktop environments, which will compete amongst eachother for the bare bones performance niche.
Back to the dying out of one of Gnome or KDE... well, you can give any prediction you want, but the productive thing would be to contribute to the development of the desktop you like the best. Contribute by using the desktop and reporting bugs. Contribute by writing code. Contribute by making art (icons, themes, sounds, wallpaper, etc). Contribute by educating others about the desktop of your choice.
Finally, my point is that the dream of unifying Gnome and KDE is silly. One of them will kill the other, and thats a good thing because it won't happen until one is orders of magnitude better than the other meaning that natural community and technical forces will choose the best desktop for us.
The problem is, GNOME is designed to maximize sharing of code. Take libxslt, for instance. You can use it on it's own on Unix or Windows. You can use it in a pure GTK+ application. You can use it in a GNOME application. You can also use it in KDE (as a matter of fact, KDE 3.0 includes it precisely because it's not tied to GNOME).
You wouldn't have that flexibility if libxslt were packaged into libgnome. Even if GTK+ programmers and KDE 3.0 programmers agreed to depending on libgnome, you'd still lose the Windows port since libgnome would be much more difficult to port to Windows than libxslt.
While I can't speak for kernel development, which is easily beyond any programming skill I've ever had, I can say a few comments about other things you cite examples of.
Apache was written in C, either because the programmers were UNIX programmers who are hardcore into C and refuse to use C++, because they had C source to work from, because there were no good C++ compilers out there, or any combination or lack of the above. Same with X-window implementations.
These both would be nice if implemented properly in C++, because the object-orientation features of C++ make a lot of things clearer and easier, and in a lot of cases, mind-numbingly less complex.
The GNU tools (I assume you're referring to things like wget, fileutils, binutils, and so on) are, 99% of the time, pointless to write in C++, because you wouldn't use object-orientation on such a small/limited scale (wget deals with one file at a time, why bother objectifying?).
I do, however, point you to other large projects that DO use C++ - KDE, Mozilla, AtheOS, just to name a few.
Large projects that deal with objects - buttons, windows, controls, lists, etc. - are great when implemented in C++ (if done properly), because it makes the code easier to deal with, less complex, more reusable, and on and on.
C++ isn't for everything, but for something like a graphical user interface, it would sure be nice.
--Dan