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GNOME/KDE Integration Gets A Few Boosts
Balinares writes "Great bunch of news on the Linux desktop unification front. After the unification of GTK and Qt themes that Slashdot already reported on, it is OpenOffice's turn to get the unified look treatment (screenshot 1, screenshot 2, screenshot 3).
In related news, the recently released QtGTK library allows to merge the Qt event loop with that of GTK. In other words, this means you can now easily use KDE's DCOP, IOslaves, and, last but not least, file dialogs, from inside your GTK apps. (Screenshot of this feature used in XMMS2: 1 2). It comes with a tutorial that explains the basics.
Finally, the new fuse_kio tool now makes it possible to use KDE's IOslaves directly at the filesystem level, from any Linux app. 2004 is really beginning well for all those of us who use Linux as their primary desktop!"
What effect will the QT/GTK event loop intergration tech have on licensing? In other words, does your app have to be GPL to use this tech?
One of the screenshots look like a print dialog box. I wonder what the state of that is. Or is this a moot point, when cups has it all solved?
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
Great job to all those who worked on the integration! I have been worried that Gnome might overtake KDE as the popular desktop and KDE might then be subject to a smaller niche for the desktop. I'm glad that all the work that the KDE teams have done will continue to be used alongside Gnome.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
That KDE people are creating technologies to be able to make Gnome apps compatible with them is a sign of Gnome's success. The same thing do BSD/SCO/etc when they trie to run Linux apps and the same thing did IBM when trying to run Windows apps in OS/2. Is the reaction of a platform to the growth and success of the competition.
Besides..
Someday one of Gnome and KDE will be obsolete. The remaining licence issues around Qt makes Gnome the obvious winner, as one cannot create commercial apps for Qt without paying fees.
Merging event loops so GTK and KDE components can interoperate is great. Now the wide variety of commercial applications for Linux et al can play nice with KDE!.
Oh, wait... doesn't KDE require a license for commercial applications... oh, never mind...they can't play nice together.
For you KDE users who aren't on Konqueror 24/7: don't forget to say thank-you.
When I first installed Linux I flipped a coin to decide between the two :) Yes, I didn't want to make a choice, as Redhat gave no background to base my decision.
that now companys who don't want to fork over a licence fee to trolltech can build apps that integrate with KDE using gtk and no one would have to know or care? Or is there some kind of GPL conflict that I'm not seeing?
Why is it so hot? Where am I going? What am I doing in this handbasket?
Plus the kioslaves are glorious.
.tar.gz which was open in Konqueror straight into an FTP site, also open in Konqueror. A bit later, I was copying Ogg Vorbis files off an audio CD.
The other day, I was copying stuff out of a
There's loads of other kioslaves, like smb:, fish:, lan:, kamera:, floppy: and sftp: - they can make tasks which previously required entirely separate applications utterly seamless instead.
I'd love the opportunity to be able to use them on the command line, and to use them with other, non-KDE software, which it sounds like fuse_kio thing will offer...
Why Gnome/KDE insist in non-fs integrated virtual filesystems? Although their solution is platform independent, it is too 'opaque'. LUFS and similar stuff is the win :-b
Tell you what. Sit one of your relatives in from of a properly configured Linux desktop (either KDE or Gnome will do). Let them click around for awhile and answer any questions they have. People get the hang of Linux on the desktop pretty quickly. The reason your grandma probably doesn't want to deal with Linux on the desktop is because you're making it seem more difficult for her than it really is.
It's up to us to teach people how to use a Linux desktop, not the desktop itself.
as part of a recent initiative to do something about KDE's reputation for only doing their own stuff, seemingly "starting over" (their own office suite, their own browser etc)
KOffice and Konqueror were started long before OpenOffice and Mozilla became open source.
-- Repeat with me: "There is no right to profits".
I think that all the Translate-o-matics should be merged. But KDE isn't hated enough to have one, so behold the Gnome-translate-o-matic 2004!
:Gnome has a new web browser
Gnome is a rival to KDE, the popular collection
of programs for Linux and freinds. Unfortunatley, ever since Gnome 2.4 (and the BETA 2.5) was released, I have found more and more Zealots who MUST advocate it at every possible moment. Here are some of their most common claims and what they REALLY MEAN.
Claim : Unlike KDE, Gnome is free
Translation : GPL is freerer than LGPL. LGPL allows corporations like Novell
and Sun to have propeitry forks and lock away their changes from the user. Now
that Novell has taken over Ximian you can expect Gnome to get put under
corpirate lock. With KDE you have the choice, you either PAY UP or pay with
your source code. Most companies agree, the majority of commerical software for Linux is written in Motif and Qt, and NOT GTK. Apart from Ximian's desktop, there is no major product using GTK.
Claim : Nautilus is much better than konqueror.
Wrong, if your using nautilus for anything more than a simple finder clone you
can forget it. No split screen, no ioslaves (gnome-vfs can't compare, sorry) and forget about being able to
have a decent file dialog, not to forget that it is as unstable as hell and is
STILL slow on >3 Ghz machines. The latest version decided to copy Windows 95, complete with a my computer icon on the desktop.
Claim : Gnome is easier to use than KDE
Yep, nothing like using gconf-editor to edit all except the most trivial of
settings. Want tear off menus? Want a useable file dialog? You won't find it
here. Gnome was a lot more usable back in the 1.4 series, before sun came along with their usabillity "study".
Claim : Gnome has eye candy
Yes, my pirated Win32 fonts with the patent infringing font renderer. Bit
stream vera sans looks like Tahoma put through a shreadder! Of course I still
reboot into windows to print using "Comic Sans MS. Gnome themes don't even let you change the colour scheme. Looking at sites like art.gnome.org you will see that the majority of themes are the same one in different colours!
Claim : Gnome is not ugly like KDE
I am too stupid to realise that the look of KDE can be changed by going to the Appearence and themes section in KDE, not to mention that KDE has more themes wrote for it. Popular themes such as Keramik, Liquid, dotNET, Plastik and Alloy were wrote for KDE first, but somebody wrote a crappy port of it on art.gnome.org, so Gnome must be good.
Claim
Yawb! Along with Galeon, mozilla, thunderbird, konqueror, atlantis, lynx,
netscape and w3m. Yes I need another browser! Not to mention that its got a
religiously offensive name and it dosen't allow bookmark folders. It also
crashes like a crazy! Apple chose khtml for a REASON! its stable and light! Epiphany is also a faliure, it has gone through 6 major bug fixes and none of the major distrobutions use it because they stick with decent browsers.
Claim : Gnome is more popular than KDE
Despite the fact that the only mainstream Gnome based distro has been EOL'd,
and all the newbie distros such as Mangadrake, Lindoze, $u$E, Lycoris,
Xandroze, Gentoo use kde default, bruce perens decided to make a gnome based distro and everybody hated it because KDE wasn't in it.
Klaim : You KDE guys must be sick of the K
Our G's and monkeys are SO MUCH better, gedit, glib, gconf, bobono, ghex,
gless, same-gnome, gstreamer.
Claim : Gnome has multimedia framework
Its a kludge of esd combined with broken xine libraries. No wonder it crashes
all the time and dosen't work on 95% of video files. But we have Rhythmbox, a cheesy Itune clone using it, so it rules!
Zealot : My Gnome work station.....
My 2Ghz G5 box my mum bought for me from PC w
Does anyone know if a closed-software maker is violating the GPL if it has originally linked to an LGPL library (legal), which has an independently created GPL analogue?
If not, then isn't it a matter of a LD_PRELOAD to transfer all or many GTK calls into QT calls, where the preloaded library is fully GPL, and gtk+ software was originally linked to the LGPL original gtk?
I really don't understand that logic. In fact, for system facilities, libraries, etc, I think the LGPL makes more sense. If a programmer wants to write a proprietary GTK or QT app it should be able to access all the system level facilities that the respective GNOME and KDE environments offer. Now it shouldn't be able to pull the code of a competing free software project into it with out having to give back. In short, if you are providing an open service/API or other applications to use, I personally dont' think it's right to discriminate as to what apps can use the service. Them actually rolling your code into their package though is a different matter. Kernel = GPL libraries = LGPL apps = GPL (or proprietary if you really want to) The app writer should be able to make that choice.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
KMail is(er.. was) possibly the worst core KDE application, IMO. I have used it pleny of times, and it always does something unexpected(deleting mail, crashes, etc.).
:) Its included in 3.2
:) The OOo situation is a bit complex. What Ximian is working on is a GTK+ version of OpenOffice's Native Widget Framework (NWF). Contrary to the name, the NWF is not a port of OOo to the native toolkit. Rather, it is a way to use the native toolkit to draw widgets for OOo. Its a cosmetic layer on top of the OOo VCL toolkit. KDE has an NWF implementation that's pretty far along as well. Of course, all of this is completely different from the new toolkit abstraction outlined in the Q Concept, which will have native ports for GTK+, Windows, Qt, and OS X.
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I've been using KMail since the 2.x days, and I've never had it lose email.
I also find the interface to be rather buggy and quirky.
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How so? KMail's interface is pretty straightforward. Folders on left, mail on top right, current message on bottom right. Toolbar buttons to compose, save, and print emails, as well as download new emails, reply and forward emails, iterate through unchecked mail, delete email, and search for emails. A lot of KDE apps are cluttered and have overly complex interfaces, but KMail is not one of them.
But what I think the other guy was getting at is that it lacks the huge number of features of most "modern" email clients.
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Like? Kmail has made enormous strides over the past year, because of the Kolab/Kontact work. By the time Kontact is mature (when the Kolab work gets integrated in a few months time), Kontact will most likely be more feature-complete than Evolution.
Personally, I use mutt these days, with vim as my pager and editor(you just can't beat that).
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Heh. Thanks to KParts, you can use vim in KMail too
False. Both use many GTK widgets now. Look at the buttons, text entry boxes, etc. Still not GTK menus though...
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You're right, I hadn't looked at a recent Firebird release. Although, its really not a GTK app. It still uses XUL as its toolkit. You can get OpenOffice to use Qt to draw its buttons/menus/etc too, but that doesn't really make it a Qt app, does it?
No, he was correct. Ximian has been working with OO.o, and they have implemented GTK for nearly the entire app(using the GUI-independent framework? I don't know... but it is there).
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No, I was correct
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Yes, they did. When you distribute under the BSD license, only your code is under the BSD license. When you combine the two, the GPL supercedes the GPL so the entire distribution (your BSD program + GPL program foo) is distributed under the GPL license.
That means, if I so choose, I could sever the GPL parts from the BSD parts and close your software, but not the GPL parts, because I wasn't given permission to.
Black and grey are both shades of white.
More realistic comparison would be Kontact - Evolution.
I guess you mean Kword - Abiword?
I prefer Konqueror. How well does Epiphany handle filemanagament? Now very well eh? That's what I thought...
I think Kcontrol is superior. It lets me tweak the desktop EXACTLY the way I want to.
Maye GNOME is more gung-ho when it comes to simplicity of use. But they do that at the expense of configurability. Sorry, but I prefer KDE's approach. And I have exactly ZERO problems with KDE and it's ease of use. Just because you can tweak it as much as you want does not mean that it's hard to use.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.