Qt/Mac KDE Call for Help

aqsalter writes "Benjamin Reed of Fink fame is calling for help porting KDE to Mac using Qt/Mac. Interested parties should swarm the KDE-Darwin mailing list. KWrite for Mac here we come!"

Comments

Disturbing

[veldmon]

The one thing I've never understood is the relationship between OpenDarwin and the distribution concerns. Although GNU-Darwin maintains its own fork of Darwin, it mostly functions as a distribution the way Fink does. Meaning, it is a solid addition to OS X and not its replacement. However, only Fink seems to be traveling in the same direction as OpenDarwin, as far as strategic interests are concerned.

GNU-Darwin almost seems to be hindering the entire Mac OSS unix community. It's only logical that the community should be centered around the PPC. Especially now that the G5 is on its way. This is where OpenDarwin and Fink are pouring all of their porting energy into. GNU-Darwin on the other hand has strangely abandoned the PPC in favor of x86 compatible chips. I believe the spokesman "proclus" said that they had to refuse to work with Apple over some free software issues.

This almost surreal splintering can do nothing but harm the overall effort of ported OSS software for the Mac. If we can't agree that the PPC is the heart of the Mac, than what can we agree on?

But....why?

[Prien715]

I know I'm sacrificing karma on this but I'll ask the question anyway...why? Though I love linux as much as the next guy, OSX is probably the best GUI around. Why not concentrate efforts on making KDE the best GUI possible...better than OSX...before trying to port it? It'd be like Microsoft porting IIs to Linux. Who'd honestly use it?

Re:But....why?

[gdarklighter]

If I understand correctly, the effort is not to port the GUI itself, but applications that use the kdelibs and arts libraries (i.e. koffice, konqueror, etc).

Re:But....why?

[Dave114]

If I could get KMail running with MacOS X (X11 doesn't count), I'd drop Apple's Mail app in the blink of an eye.

Re:But....why?

[Trurl's Machine]

Spoken by someone who obviously hasn't used OS X or a Mac very much or at all. The whole reason the Mac interface is so good is subtle features and deep use of use (some of which was lost in the move to X, but will return at some point, no doubt).

I disagree (myself being a person who uses OS X a lot; I type these very words on an iBook 800). Indeed, the guy does not capitalize Mac correctly, but his point remains valid. Power users usually require extensive customization of their working environment. They just know what the want and they don't need any wisecrack from Redmond or Cupertino telling them what they can or cannot do. Customization options of a vanilla MacOS X installation are next to nonexistant. Yes, there are some third party hacks like Tinker Tool, but even with them, MacOS X is still less flexible than MS Windows. It's not important for Joe Shmoe, but I can understand the frustration of a power user, who can't even customize a bloody desktop theme. KDE for MacOS X could be a Holy Grail for these people - OS of their choice running on a machine of their choice WITH A DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT OF THEIR CHOICE.

Re:But....why?

[Matthias Wiesmann]

Didn't Apple do much of the work already, when they ported the Konquerer renderer into Safari?

Not really, what they did for Safari was basically a small library that emulates the few QT controls used in the Konqueror rendering framework - I think this library is called Quack.

Porting KDE is another beast altogether, we are not talking about a few controls and widgets. We are talking about application design frameworks. This means:

• Handle inter-application data transfers: clipboard, drag-drop, services. Both framework use different internal formats (rich text, images, sounds, urls) so you have to convert things on the fly.
• Link KDE application on OS X services for printing, file-management, filename mapping, icons, etc...
• Link KDE application settings like internationalisation, appearances, user preferences to the OS X system.
• Handle application level events and scripting - i.e make it possible for KDE application to understand apple-events like quit, open, print, but also OSAX scripting.

All those things require a tremendous amount of work.

Re:But....why?

[iMacGuy]

The library is actually called "KWQ", and it's a bridge between things like QString and the Cocoa stuff that does the same thing. WebKit handles the UI, I think.

At the beginning, I think the idea is just to get the apps running on QT/Mac effectively.
(KDE already links into OSX's printing, since that uses the open-source CUPS, although it still uses its own GUI.)

GNU-Darwin is irrelevant.

[Xenex]

"The one thing I've never understood is the relationship between OpenDarwin and the distribution concerns."

OpenDarwin distrubute software. They call it DarwinPorts.

OpenDarwin is a project launched in April 2001 which works towards porting BSD-style software to Darwin, and features a crown jewel of DarwinPorts. OpenDarwin was founded by Apple, although they now have no control over the project's operation. Jordan Hubbard is one of many Apple employees closely associated with the project.

"GNU-Darwin almost seems to be hindering the entire Mac OSS unix community."

Virtually no-one in the Macintosh community cares about GNU-Darwin.

GNU-Darwin is a project founded by a person that goes by the name proclus. This proclus character spends a fair majority of his time replying to valid criticism of his project on sites such as Slashdot and MacSlash. Unfortunately, this time would be much better spent working on the actual GNU-Darwin project; GNU-Darwin has nothing to offer that hasn't already been done better by either OpenDarwin or Fink.

"This almost surreal splintering can do nothing but harm the overall effort of ported OSS software for the Mac."

What splintering? GNU-Darwin is totally irrelvant.

GNU-Darwin are not even involved with Metapgk, an alliance formed between DarwinPorts, Fink, and Gentoo. All the major packaging groups in the Macintosh community are part of this alliance.

"If we can't agree that the PPC is the heart of the Mac, than what can we agree on?"

That GNU-Darwin isn't going to exist much longer.

DarwinPorts is going to be a part of Panther, and OpenDarwin is assured of a bright future. Fink and Gentoo are part of Metapkg, so all porting work that OpenDarwin does will help those projects as well.

GNU-Darwin is totally insignificant, has virtually no support in the Macintosh community, and is let by someone with a warped view of reality. When it inevitably disappears, no one will care.

Power users with a lot of time on their hands...

[The Herbaliser]

KDE is great if you want to spend about half your time configuring it. You can really customise KDE. It's got more options than the next California election. What's the point, though? In the end, you're still getting the same stuff done. I really don't think someone with a fanatical need to configure their desktop is really a power user. I'd call them more of a nerd with a god complex. The real power users are the people who know how to get stuff done... have a solid understanding of unix, know how to script well, and actually use that knowledge. The real power users would rather customise their shell than their GUI. Apple actually gives the user a lot of control over how the OS works, just very little over its appearance. In my opinion, that gives you a lot more power. I used to run KDE on my iBook. It was neat to watch the OSX dock pop up over the KDE dock when I scrolled down, and it was fun to play around with it, but it never actually made it easier for me to do anything or gave me any more realy power, just nerd empowerment, which is a very different thing. What I would find useful however, is the ability to run more GNOME and KDE apps independently. I was thinking about the differences between various the various *NIXes and Windows. It seems to me that Windows tries to obfuscate the user experience - they hide things from you so that if you want to do anything more than a few basic tasks, you've got to go get Microsoft Training. The names of system files are meaningless, every directory is deep within some bizarre structure, and the only way to find anything is through the copious use of shortcuts. Unix (and Linux) makes it much easier to get at the power of your computer - I mean, it's easier to more fully understand a Solaris install than Windows - but they throw it at you all at once, which makes it difficult and intimidating to get started. Using KDE (I haven't used GNOME) I find that you have the benefits of Unix that I mentioned, and you've got this GUI on top, but that the GUI, like Windows, hides things from you. It's better than Windows, but it still doesn't really expose you to how your computer works. My experience with OSX, although others' may be different, is that it draws you into Unix. You find yourself understanding the underlying system intuitively, and being drawn into it. It seems to sort of trick you into learning Unix. You don't need the terminal - but inevitably you're drawn to it. The thing about Macs is that non-technical Mac users often turn into power users without thinking about it.

Re:How about

[dhobbit]

Porting KDE to Win2k/XP is the dumbest idea I have ever heard. It's dumber then a friend of mine who clipped a 9 volt to his balls. If you want to play games buy a Game Cube. If you want to run a stable computer then use a *nix. Or better yet encourage your game maker to write that game in OpenGL so its easier to port to OSX or Linux.

You miss the point by a mile

[AvantLegion]

You talk about KDE's extensive ability to be customized, but you take the flawed approach of thinking that people that enjoy this option use every last capability of it.

This is not true.

The point of KDE customizing is so that people that want one or two things to be a very specific way can make it that way and be happy.

Very few people customize every last thing on the desktop. But many people customize a few things, and for different people, it's different things they want changed.

You don't have to customize everything to appreciate KDE's deep and broad customizing options. All you have to do is customize a couple of GUI features in a way that other DE's don't allow, and you'll see the benefit immediately.

Re:You miss the point by a mile

[The Herbaliser]

Actally, I believe you've missed my point by a mile.

My point was not that extensive customizability is a negative thing, but that it's usually unnecessary, and does very little to make your actual computing experience more powerful.

I know guys who dedicate their lives to perfecting their shell setup files. I'm sure they have lots of fun doing it, but I don't think it really makes that much difference to how much work they can get done.

Re:You miss the point by a mile

[babbage]

You talk about KDE's extensive ability to be customized, but you take the flawed approach of thinking that people that enjoy this option use every last capability of it.

Actually, the last time I spent a significant amount of time using KDE as my default desktop, I did spend a lot of time noodling around in customizing every last aspect of the interface. I did not do this because it was fun. It was not fun. No.

I did this because if I didn't find a way to fix the default settings, I was going to shoot somebody.

For some reason, the default font for many text displays -- such as the source for a web page -- was a big loopy cursive, like what you'd see on a wedding invitation. I don't ever want to use a big loopy cursive as my default font, unless I'm using a program like Illustrator to take a crack at designing my own wedding invitation. It wouldn't bother me to purge such fonts from my hard drive forever (it wouldn't bother me if my wedding invitation were in GillSans instead), but no amount of tinkering could get the setting for cursive fonts to go away. Oh there were times that I thought I had it, but the next time I logged in the cursive would come back with a vengence: "thought you were rid of me, eh? muhahaha!"

My other favorite was printing. I never did get the default print setting to be anythign other than (say) 5pts. To simulate this, take your browser and hit CMD- or CTRL- or ALT- or whatever your browser's "make the text smaller" keychord is, and hit this chord as many times as your browser will allow you to do. Now take that final small setting, divide it in half again in your mind, and imagine it printed out. I could have printed out "War & Peace" as a 20 page pamphlet sure to drive the strongest eyes blind if I had been cruel enough to try it.

Plus, half the time it would be cursive tiny type.

So yeah, I spent a lot of time trying to get my shiny new P4 desktop with gobs of ram and a fast processor to feel like anything other than a Medieval torture device.

Then I found an ancient beige G3 Macintosh in a supply closet, and I begged the tech support guys to let me use it as my desktop. It was old, flaky, and took forever to get OSX installed & running, but once I did I never ever had to think about customizing the system again. That brand new KDE machine ended up being a headless server under my desk as I connected to it via SSH & HTTP from the Mac, and I was happy as a clam.

So, the moral: please don't try to convince people that, as you say,

The point of KDE customizing is so that people that want one or two things to be a very specific way can make it that way and be happy.

The "very specific way" I want my computer to be is non-braindead. I'm willing to accept a wide interpretation of what non-braindead might mean, but I know it when I see it, and I don't want to have to fight to get it.

KDE forced me to fight, like an arrogant Kung Fu master that I really wasn't hoping to confront. OSX got out of my way without making me think. Sometimes, the best way to win a fight is to not fight at all.

Aqua 1, KDE 0.

But would it behave like a Mac app?

[anarkhos]

'cause not a single Qt app does so far