Interview with theKompany.com's Shawn Gordon

arb writes "The Age has an interview with Shawn Gordon, president of theKompany.com where he discusses such issues as RedHat's focus on Gnome and the relegation of KDE 'to second best', other Gnome vs KDE issues, distributions including proprietary bits and so on."

Comments

Embedded/Zaurus software

[aldjiblah]

Your software for Zaurus/Qtopia has made my Zaurus infinitely more usable, especially tkcAddressbook, tkcCalendar and most of all tkcJabber (nice!). How is the business side of the Zaurus application development - how are sales?

"Race KDE cannot win"

[ultrabot]

I think there might be a grain of truth in the fact that KDE has very hard time winning the desktop. Gnome has the huge advantage of licensing (LGPL vs. GPL). It doesn't matter how much smoother or better the technology underlying KDE or KDE applications is.

KDE people also have the weird habit of producing their own versions of various pieces of software. Surely a conservative decisionmaker will choose a desktop-agnostic Mozilla or OpenOffice over the KDE-specific versions. KDE applications might do better by just dropping the K from their names, thus competing on their own terms (snappines and other virtues associated with Qt).

Note that I have been KDE user in the past (alternating with less popular lightweight wm's), but Gnome seems to finally have gotten their stuff together with gnome2.

Re:"Race KDE cannot win"

[scorp1us]

As s developer, I dispise GNOME. It's a PITA to program in, where as under Qt/KDE it is very easy. Lets face it, C is not well suited for window environments. Sure it can be done, but it's not a Good Thing. Don't beleive me? Look at Windows. MFC is just C++ classes aound C stuff. It is horrid and I hate using it. Having complex the functions organized in self-managing classes is a dream.

I love KDE, but loath the license. I think all GNOME people are fans of KDE, they just won't come out of the closet because they are scared of the license.

What that the License gets you though, is the ability to ship the same high-grade apps on Windows as on Linux, Mac OS X, and whatever other platform you want. This could singlehandedly be the missing element to bring Linux to the masses. If they use cross-platform apps (Kapital for windows), then switching out the OS is small potatoes (Kapital for Linux) because there are no file-format lock-in issues.

I blame several people. KDE, and GNOME are all to blame. If GNOME people worked on Harmony, they'd be set Free, and there'd be no lisensing issues. KDE was foolish for choosing a toolkit with such a license (but it is a GREAT product, regardless).

Qt are the big winners, yet they have an excellent product and deserve to be commended.

BRING BACK HARMONY. Ironically, that will bring harmony to the Linux world. (Harmony is a GPL replacement toolkit that as started then stopped when the Qt license got more OSS friendly)

Re:"Race KDE cannot win"

[uradu]

> Lets face it, C is not well suited for window environments

That's very true, but a straight C API is much easier to wrap in an OO framework. OTOH, a C++ API like KDE is a PITA to bind to other languages, both OO and other. Just look at the gyrations Kylix has to go through to bind one OO framework (CLX) to another (Qt). Unless there is one universal OO mechanism (such as .NET is trying to push through), it's better to have the OS and windowing system implemented in a simple non-OO procedural language. It's just a lot easier to invoke a library entry point and pass in state than to invoke an object method with its implied state.

This is not to say that I don't like KDE and Qt. I think Qt is a great example of the benefits of a well designed OO framework. I'm merely pointing out the hassle if you happen to not be a C++ fan.

Re:"Race KDE cannot win"

[IamTheRealMike]

Partly this is architectural - there's FAR more code sharing and reuse in KOffice/KDE/Qt than in AbiWord/GTK, partly because the balance of talking about it/doing it is further towards the doing it end with KWord than with AbiWord. I guess this also explains why Slashdot appears to have a tendency towards GNOME whilst the Linux community as a whole seems to prefer KDE.

Nope, can't agree with that. Firstly, I don't think Slashdot has a tendancy either way, I see just as many stupid trolls for and against both.

Secondly, for quite some time (dunno if this is still the case) KOffice had David Faure being paid to work on it. AbiWord hasn't had paid employees on it for a loooong time, so they're doing pretty well. Whenever I hear about people word processing on Linux, they're using OpenOffice or AbiWord. For spreadsheets, it's OpenOffice or Gnumeric. Maybe there is an utterly silent majority which actually uses KOffice, but I'd be pretty surprised. Mindshare does in fact matter, and I've found gnome/gtk based projects tend to have much better communication with the outside world than KDE based ones. AbiWord stable is getting pretty old now, but it's the one I'm interested in because I can see it developing and it's getting very cool very fast. KOffice on the other hand.... what is it doing? I do read dot.kde.org sometimes, but haven't seen a KOffice story for ages. The koffice development mailing list has about 200-300 emails so far this year, the same number as abiword development, which focuses only on a word processor, not a whole office suite.

FWIW I am European, and I think the characterisation by Gordon of the KDE developers as "get on and do it" and of others as "make lots of noise" is stupid - which desktop project was it that threw a hissy fit when Redhat altered some themes and changed some branding (something gnome also went through)? I know Europeans and Americans, and haven't noticed a great deal of difference between them in the way described.

I take it you've not used KDE 3.1 yet then? There's some good improvements in there. And let's face it, GNOME usability still has a long long way to go *cough*GTK+ file dialog*cough*

I take it you've not used GNOME2.1? I monitor what KDE and GNOME do, and so far GNOME has KDE beat by miles in the usability stakes. The GNOME/GTK world has a strong set of UI guidelines in the form of the HIG that even non-gnome apps are complying with (like xchat, gaim etc) because despite its lack of perfection, it gives a clear direction and it makes sense to follow it.

Last time I checked, I couldn't even find the KDE equivalents on usability.kde.org (though I have seen at least one before) and I've been told there are two such guides, both unfinished. The kde usability list seems to flap around without clear direction whereas you can visibly see and feel GTK apps get more usable.

And don't diss Noatun: you might not like it but from my point of view it's far nicer than anything else available.

You're certainly entitled to your view, but you're the first I've met who actually prefers it to XMMS. To be fair, the version in KDE3 is much improved over the one in 2.2 but it's still a hellhole usability wise. What made me laugh was the default plugin was called "Excellent" with the tagline, "A very simple, and therefore usable interface". First mistake, simple != usable. In fact, Excellent tripped me up several times, for instance it took me quite a while to figure out how to click on a part of the time slider to make it jump to a part of the song. Left clicking moves it in increments. Right clicking? No. Double clicking? No. Ohhh, that's right, middling clicking lets you move the slider to the part under the mouse. Obvious. Three types of playlist, none of which are compatible with each other and the only halfway decent one does NOT read .m3u files????!?

The only interface I found I could actually stand was the WinAmp one. Noatun does have some saving graces like the keygrabber plugin, and the notification tray icon is nice (though it doesn't actually notify you of anything). Nonetheless, I feel I'm justified in slamming it.

And let's face it, GNOME usability still has a long long way to go *cough*GTK+ file dialog*cough*

The file dialog is the exception that proves the rule, and a new one is definately going in for GTK2.4, that's guaranteed. It's harder for GTK because unlike KDE/Qt GTK is actually widely used outside of the desktop project. You can't just introduce random dependancies on Nautilus for instance. I'd also like to point out that the KDE file picker is simply a direct lift of the Windows one with all the UI faults it comes with, I won't write an UI review of it here because they exist elsewhere.

Really, GNOME has had to make some tough choices, ones that a small but vocal minority was opposed to every step of the way. Simplifying the UI was needed, GNOME 1.4 had an even more bloated UI than KDE in this respect, but KDE hasn't yet picked up the gauntlet. I don't think it is, but if Shawns theory holds true then it's simply because the KDE team don't like making controversial decisions, which is maybe why it looks and works so much like Windows.

Can't we all just get along

[HealYourChurchWebSit]

Here's the real problem:

"... focus on Gnome and the relegation of KDE 'to second best', other Gnome vs KDE issues ..."

With Mandrake focusing its attention on finances -- it is time for a leader such as RedHat to do what my father used to say to my brothers and I when we'd be squabbling over this-n-that "I don't care who's fault it is, I'll knock both your heads together -- now play nice!"

So long as we have these pissing battles between Gnome and KDE -- Windows will continue to enjoy its top of the heap status.

Competition is what we need

[Max Romantschuk]

As I see it, both KDE and Gnome are good, and no matter which is better neither is revolutionary.

But the most important thing is that the competitive enviroment is maintained. If one get's to dominate too much, there's no real need to really invent stuff. Just look at what happened to Windows I haven't really noticed much of a difference since NT 4...

Re:Second best?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Today the desktops are basically equal, although they are
> stronger in different areas. So, GNOME has better usability
> IMHO, but KDE has more features.

This is a shortsighted opinion of yours and doesn't reflect the reality and obviously show that you never tried KDE for longer than 5 minutes. I know both Desktops on it's best using GNOME CVS HEAD and KDE CVS HEAD here. In my opinion GNOME hangs behind KDE in many ways. I don't want to make GNOME look bad now but I want to give you a fair objective view of the facts.

There are a lot of issues within GNOME such as integration, usability, consitency over the dialogs etc.

GNOME is not as integrated as KDE is. Have you ever dealt with KDE and seen how all the apps are playing together ?

Usability, have you seen what happened recently to GNOME's interface it toally alienate GNOME from the rest of available applications that work and require X with any toolkit.

Consistency. We all know that with the ongoing versions of GNOME the developers are trying to get consistency into the applications but yet all dialogs are still looking differently. There is no real pixel exact layout of the dialogs, menus and windows because many GNOME applications are written either with the GUI hardcoded, or Glade or Bonobo therefore all UI's are looking differently and makes it hard for the UI reviewer to get a structure inside.

On the otherhand KDE's ui are mostly external in separate *.ui files which makes it easier for the UI reviewers to concentrate on the UI and pixel exact layouts.

That's only a minor point of the whole mountain. KParts for example, every new written app follows a strict rule of KDE and embedds itself seamingless into the whole desktop. It has a Webbrowser embedded in a Filemanager and both of them are really usable and and and..

I could write half a day and name more and more features and pros which makes imo KDE far superior. KDE as is right now are milies if not lightyears ahead of GNOME but it's understandable that GNOME people don't want to have their desktop look bad but face it as is GNOME has a hard and long way to go to at least keep up with a little bit of KDE's features. Keeping up with KDE itself is a lost battle.

Where have you been for the last two years?

[PeterClark]

What's wrong with KDE's (and QT's) GPL license? Or are we going to get into that silly "LGPL is better than GPL" argument? It's possible (because of QT's dual license) to produce closed-source software, which is what theKompany has done. Or have I been trolled?

:Peter

Re:Where have you been for the last two years?

[patter]

Look at wxWindows [wxwindows.org]

Hmm, well I may be somewhat redundant, but I've been looking for and evaluating several cross platform GUI toolkits.

I started with QT, because a few years ago, did some work in it. Doesn't look like it's changed much, but to write apps that run on Windows/*nix, I've gotta cough up $3000 USD per seat.

Then I grabbed GTK+, wrote a simple app, used glade to make the GUI, and compiled on Linux and Windows -- great says I. Then I wondered why the Windows version looked like the Linux version. Strange, windows programs should look like Windows programs IMHO ;).

Then I found wxWindows -- this is to me the one that's had 10 years of development, yet next to no press. They do what NO ONE in the GUI toolkit business has thought of -- the apps look like native apps, yet the same source code compiles and runs on multiple platforms ! That and it's LGPL'd so I can make OSS stuff, closed source stuff, etc.

Another plus I find is that unlike most OSS stuff that's made for Windows developers this thing supports (very well) Visual C++, and Borland C++ builder.

One thing that's a complete pain in the neck to me is building stuff with cygwin. If I'm programming on Windows, I'm going to have a decent development tool for the environment, and sorry gcc isn't it (it's great on *nix, but that's because the OS has a good shell already).

From looking at the documentation and investigating a little, it looks like I can take my MFC programs and port them (the parallels are amazing -- and the API is probably a lot better than MFC from what I've read).

I think this is the ultimate solution for me, I can write apps that run on Windows, *nix (wrapping either GTK+ or Motif/Lesstif), and MacOS 9 and 10.

If the native OS doesn't have a widget, wxWindows emulates it (such as MDI on GTK+).

Re:Where have you been for the last two years?

[SideshowBob]

"so they actually had to produce Qt wrappers and de-Qt parts to prevent it becoming GPL software."

That almost certainly is not why Apple developed KWQ (the abstraction layer that lets them tie Safari into Cocoa). They did that because Apple's own browser needs to have a good, thorough implementation of the Aqua user experience. Apple cares a lot more about the user experience (and thus is willing to go to the extra work to have it) than the typical /.'er seems to realize.

Keep them both

[bgfay]

This is the beauty of using an open system. I've used KDE, I'm using Gnome. Switching between them is pretty much painless (as is switching between KDE/Gnome and Windows). That there are two systems for window management likely means that both will get better faster. Gnome sees a great innovation in KDE and implements it. KDE sees that Gnome is running faster and works to make KDE run faster. And back and forth.

The problem with Windows has been that there was no real competition. That problem is being solved. I know that there are folks out there who are devoted to Debian and hate what Red Hat has done with 8.0, but regardless, I could hand the Red Hat discs to any of my family members and they could install it on their computer without wiping out the Windows install. This is one thing the Linux community has been shooting for. Are there problems with RH 8.0 and BlueCurve? Sure, but it's something that compares well with XP.

I like having KDE and Gnome to choose from and, at this point, I don't know enough to choose one over the other forever and ever amen. Right now, though, I have the choice and that's what brought me to the party in the first place.

Re:Second best?

[Blimey85]

with Mandrake looking like it's going down the tubes

You really should do a bit of research before spouting off like this. Mandrake is far from going down the tubes if by saying "going down the tubes" you mean going out of business. They had some problems, they have since fixed those problems, but are having some issues with a lack of available cash on hand to cover their debt. Due to that, they needed bankruptcy protection while they raise more cash and continue working on the next release of their OS and other products.

They are far from the point of throwing in the towel and closing their doors. I think a lot of people see this as the end of Mandrake because so many other Linux companies have gone under over the past few years. That does not mean that Mandrake will not be able to make it. They have a very popular distribution that is #1 in some markets and #2 to RedHat in most other markets.

It's a tough time for most companies right now. Not only is the US economy depressed, other economies around the globe are struggling as well. This has an effect on lots of business and to think that a few temporary setbacks are enough to end a great company such as Mandrake... that's nuts. I'm not claiming that Mandrake will be around forever. They may eventually buckle and fold but that won't happen any time soon.

C is for interfaces

[ChaosDiscord]

Lets face it, C is not well suited for window environments.

Fair enough. Window environment programming really does benefit from a language with solid object oriented programming support.

But, C++ is not well suited to interacting with other languages or truly dynamic library use. These are two key elements of anything you're planning on making "core system libraries". Personally I include my GUI libraries in the fuzzy mess I label the core system libraries.

C's interface is the defacto interlanguage interface. Most mature languages develop some way of relatively easily explosing C functions in shared libraries. C's interface is very stable. C++'s varies from vendor to vendor and from compiler version to compiler version (GCC 2.95, 2.96, 3.0, 3.1, and 3.). A library in C plays well with Perl, Java, Python, C++, and many other languages. This is a good thing. (Mind you, this just means that the interface should be in C, but the implementation can be in C++. I certainly agree.)

Second C can be used dynamically. Not automatic dynamic linking, I'm talking about searching the filesystem for a library and using dlopen and dlsym (or LoadLibrary and GetProcAddress under Windows) to find functions you need. This technique is sometimes necessary and it's important that core libraries support it. C++'s interface is just too messy to support this.

Look at Windows. MFC is just C++ classes aound C stuff.

MFC suffers from more fundamental problems than being a C++ wrapper over a C interface. MFC was originally developed fairly early in C++'s life and so had to work around weaknesses in the early language and in Microsoft's early implementation. Those original workarounds remain in place for compatibility, but significantly complicate the code. MFC tries to be all things to all people, and it tried to accomplish this goal from version one. As a result, it's a giant interconnected monstrousity with lots of non-obvious magic. For the longest time any use of MFC required you to use the Document/View framework, and that assumption still runs throughout the code. It's not possible to point to a subset of MFC and say, "this is the GUI interface as distinct from the application framework code." MFC is too bloody big.

Thin Windows API C++ wrappers exist and are much more pleasant to use. You can easily cook up your own in a few days and slowly expand it as you need it. If you want a more heavy duty C++ wrapper over the Windows C API, there are some of those as well. One of them is called Qt. :-)

Re:My favourite..

[bogie]

"n my personal opinion (put on flame suit) GNOME has always been infinately better than KDE. I find KDE ugly, and irritating to use"

What an odd thing to say. Most people who have been using Gnome and KDE since they started would say only now has Gnome about caught up with KDE in quality. After all KDE had a huge head start. Also ugly? In what way? They both look pretty much the same to me. Either desktop can also be made to look like anything from Windows XP to OS X to Next etc etc.

The only people i have ever heard say one is "easier" to use then the other are the completely biased ones. They are both easy to use and have been for quite some time.

Your post reminds me of the early days when all the KDE bashers used to say "but KDE isn't themeable like GNOME!".

"GNOME has hits flaws and quirks, but I just get up and going on GNOME, and can customize it to my needs a hell of a lot faster than I can with KDE."

Again good for you, but customize it? Ever hear of KDE's control panel? It doesn't get any easier than that. It just sounds like you made up your mind a long time ago that Gnome was somehow "better" than KDE and your either unwilling to learn more about KDE or are just hopeless biased.

Today they both about equal and anyone newbie could get their work done easily with either desktop.