Deep Inside the K Desktop Environment

Lemmingue writes "Ars Technica published a very good article about the KDE architecture. It's a essential read for anyone wondering how Konqueror can open documents in the same window or just understand the license issues regarding the Qt use. The article describes most of the technologies behind the KDE (Qt, KParts) and how the project is organized. The article is full of links, screenshots and diagrams."

Comments

Re:Why does KDE always reinvent the wheel

[yokem_55]

The idea is to have software the integrates and takes advantage of everything the kde environment has to offer. There are two ways of doing this. 1. Pull your hair out trying to cajole existing applications originally created off of an entirely different framework, to take some, limited advantage of what kde has to offer. 2. Start from scratch with an environment that makes fast development very easy and very quick, without massive quantities of hair left in your hands.

Not only that, it's a dupe.

[bonch]

Slashdot posted it when it came out.

I'm convinced--the editors absolutely do not read Slashdot. The last straw was last week when Michael duped a story from three hours earlier that was still on the front page.

Re:Why does KDE always reinvent the wheel

[Seli]

Actually Konqueror/KHTML and Kontact are not really reinventing the wheel.

The work on KDE's filemanager and HTML engine dates back to the days when the only usable *cough* browser was Netscape4.x and Mozilla seemed only like a great failure.

Kontact is basically an aggregation of long time existing KDE applications like KMail, KNode, KNotes etc., pre-dating e.g. Evolution.

That said, this question about reinventing the wheel is stupid anyway. First, there are many things about KDE that KDE has had first (like, the first usable Linux GUI ;) ), and second, everybody is reinventing the wheel all the time anyway, so what?

Re:License Issues with Qt

[Seli]

"Qt is GPLed, and as such, prevents FOSS developers from using any OSS licenses that are not compatible with the GPL. Ironically enough, XFree86's license is not compatible with the GPL, and hence XFree86 could not include a Qt configuration utility."

Your first statement is wrong. Should I bother reading the rest?

http://www.trolltech.com/developer/faqs/license_gp l.html#q19

http://www.trolltech.com/developer/faqs/license_gp l.html#q114

Re:Rockin! Maybe in a few months...

[Hannibal_Ars]

Believe it or not, our article web pages are statically served. It may be low-tech, but it's cheap, scalable (for our volume of output), and the server can take a licking and keep on ticking. So the server doesn't even bat an eye at the Slashdot crowd. Now when a major Mac article comes out and the entire online Mac community is trying to load the page at the same time... well, that's the one time when we're maybe thankful for Apple's small market share :0)

The news on the front page, on the other hand, is served dynamically by a CMS.

Re:my first experience with KDE

[nusuth]

You can use the personalizer (kpersonalizer) to quickly turn off eye candy. Or you can fire up the kde control center (kcontrol) and go over all appearance & themes stuff one by one. Don't worry, you can't break your install from kcontrol unless you try to do just that.

IMHO, the best theme for KDE is plastic but almost all themes are "low-impact". Only a few used to use fancy ways to render their widgets, I don't know if any survive.