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OSDL to Bridge GNOME and KDE
Trax88 writes "Open Source Development Labs is previewing work that will attempt to make life easier for software companies by bridging GNOME and KDE. The effort, called Portland Project, began showing its first software tools on in conjunction with this week's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo. Using them, a software company can write a single software package that works using either of the prevailing graphical interfaces. Working with Freedesktop.org on unifying interface issues, they plan to release a beta version of the software in May and version 1.0 in June. Ultimately, advocates hope that it will be part of a larger but separate effort called Linux Standard Base, which is designed to make the operating system easier for software companies to use."
Dammit, bridge for FVWM2 too!
If it's no better than what Redhat did with their Frankenstein mix of Gnome and KDE, then I want nothing to do it.
I'd rather one or the other. But, really the other: KDE.
...that the hybrid desktop will be gnown as Knome :)
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
Slashdot ought to ask its visitors what their favorite features between the two that are not shared so this OSDL project can get more guidelines from the right demographic. Ask Slashdot is a powerful resource to collect knowledge, perhaps more than any other system in the galaxy.
Why not just merge KDE and Gnome ?
I understand that my statement looks like a troll's dream but it would not be such a bad situation.
After all, Firefox is now the main F/OSS web browser with a large dominance among the F/OSS community. And it's not that bad. Why would it be so bad with desktop managers ?
Please enlighten me. Thank you.
Nice idea... of course like many I suspect I'm skeptical.
Look at the Windows side... Direct3D is pretty useful and was intended to remove the need for developers to write for specific graphics cards.
What happened? For a time everything was fine until the two major players, in an effort to differentiate themselves from the other went off in slightly different directions ultimately resulting in vanilla DirectX and Direct3D being a lowest common denominator between the two sides, and still forcing developers on both sides to write specific code for major devices so as to be able to offer the best experience.
I foresee a similar issue here. A common platform that enables an app written for it to work fine under KDE or Gnome will work great, at first, but then developers will find a feature of one or the other which they need, or at least want to have optional, so will design in parallel paths of UI rendering and functionality, ultimately resulting in a common framework that is insufficient for many apps.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
The benevolent dictator said:
"I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE.
This "users are idiots, and are confused by functionality" mentality of
Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will
use it. I don't use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long
since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do.
Please, just tell people to use KDE."
Will this help users of non-linux systems, like myself running KDE on solaris/sparc whom are upset that all of Sun's bundled tools are gnome-specific and load up a billion gigs of dependant libraries when I try and launch them?
This is not a new desktop. This is a layer of separation between developers and the underlying graphics libraries Qt (KDE) and GTK (Gnome). This is so I can code an app using this new API and it will run and look good on both KDE and GTK systems.
...It's cement. (That's "See mehnt" for you Red staters) Geddit? Portland? Cement? Hahaha. Laugh. It's funny. Or something.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
From the article:
Portland Project is working on two ways to gloss over the differences
I hope this doesn't mean it's doomed from the start.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
It's hard to tell exactly what this project is going to deliver, but it looks to me like an abstraction layer that will run on top of whatever GUI toolkit is available, rendering with native widgets.
This has been attempted before, and it usually doesn't catch on. There are plusses and minuses to both toolkits (as there are in any GUI toolkit). The problem that arises when you try to combine them is you end up with a superset of the negatives and none of the plusses that would lead you to choose one over the other. Essentially, it's the "lowest common denominator" problem. If a certain feature is present in one toolkit but not the other, then guess what? It's not going to make it into DAPI. If similar tasks are accomplished differently in the two toolkits, the Portland project is going to have to choose one, and shoehorn the other to fit. Either that, or introduce a third way of doing the same thing.
People view the existence of two competing desktop standards a "problem." I disagree with that. As a developer, if I see a certain application already exists on my platform of choice, I'm not going to make another one, even if mine would have been better. On the other hand, if I were a KDE man, and there was an existing app for Gnome, but one that I didn't really like, then there's a little more incentive to make a native KDE version, in the mold of what I really want. In the end, it's the users who win, because they can pick and choose between both apps.
So for now, pick one and go with it. Don't fall into the trap of trying to conquer both worlds at once.
My guitar chord generator.
Hi all,
0 6-March/msg00002.html
Please consider this email a formal request from the GNOME Foundation.
We, being the GNOME Foundation, as well as many GNOME Foundation members and
contributors to the project, have contacted you numerous times over the last
four years regarding the use of the old GNOME logo on Slashdot. We've posted
comments on Slashdot stories covering GNOME. We've been very nice about it.
Please update the icon used for GNOME stories on Slashdot. We have used this
logo since 2002, when GNOME 2.0 was released. It has been a *very long* time
since the marble foot logo represented our project. We're now at GNOME 2.14,
so we've shipped seven releases since the new logo was adopted. In that time
you have posted over 120 articles in the GNOME category on Slashdot.
We'd really appreciate it if you updated the icon. It may not be a big deal
to you guys, but our logo is a mark of pride for our project. We'd like to
see it used.
Thanks,
- Jeff
From: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/20
http://blogs.gnome.org/view/jamesh/2006/03/20/0
http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/random/logo/
Just what I needed. ANOTHER computing standard to learn. Which standard is next to join the act? Maybe the next one will be more standard than all the other standards.
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what's right. --Isaac Asimov
vi and emacs?
There's a difference between looks like kde and works like kde. Will the menus/config/keybindings be in the right place/format? Will the application handle dcop messages properly? Cross-platform toolkits usually abstract away the differences between platforms. It might translate the function calls and provide the right look, but that's only half of getting the proper look-and-feel.
The ubuntu openoffice-kde package does a nice job, but it's obviously not a kde application. I hope this toolkit gets it right because I would kill for a KDE version of firefox (damn these infernal gnome save dialogs!).
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
I am waiting for kde4 myself. I used to be a kde fanatic but switched to gnome.
The UI and speed is horrendous and gnome is improving with every release. Kde4 is going to have a much cleaner and better interface with huge architectural changes. I look forward to it so I can try kde again.
http://saveie6.com/
So instead of a bunch of apps with names that start with "k" and a bunch of apps that start with the letter "g" we'll have a bunch of similar apps that start with the letter "p!"
It's crazy but it might just work!
The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.
I'll tell you why I saw the light.. I was using Ubuntu with it's Gnome desktop.
Gnome was doing me well until I wanted to change something and couldn't. (Window manager metacity blows) So i switched to KDE's window manager, kwin.
Then one day I realized I liked Amarok and digiKam so I installed Kubuntu Desktop via apt-get while using Ubuntu. Figured I'd give KDE a try.
Within an hour I had KDE configured to look exactly like my gnome desktop, to every last button and taskbar. Then I realized, I didn't have to make it like gnome at all!
So in summary. KDE Is better than GNOME because KDE can look like GNOME but GNOME cannot look like KDE. Same as all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. Gnome is a square.
Also, i had a preconcieved notion that KDE was a Windows desktop clone, which it might be at first glance, but you can quickly and easily make it your own.
Gnome is just inferior in comparison, but I still run it on my laptop.
KDE4 will (possibly, not 100% final yet) use an abstraction layer instead of directly using a sound system. This way the end user can decide which to use, and there are plans for gstreamer, xine, nmm, and arts so far I believe.
why not use WxWidgets?
I've been running KDE apps on GNOME and vice-versa for years, largely thanks to the work of Freedesktop.org at getting them to use common drag-n-drop, system menus, and notification area. So based on the incredible lack of information in the article, I had to wonder... WTF does this do that isn't already possible?
The Portland project page isn't particularly informative either -- the description is too low-level: "we're going to create two interfaces." OK, two interfaces to do what?
The Integration Tasks page actually provides information about what kinds of things they want to do: make sure apps built for both desktops will talk to the screen saver in the same way, deal with power management, share preferences like default apps, etc.
Sounds like a logical continuation of FreeDesktop.org's efforts so far, and something that will improve matters for people like me who like some apps from one desktop and some from the other.
I think GTK is admirable, but GNOME has regressed over the last 2-3 years to the point that it's no longer usable for me. The dumbing down of the GNOME widget set cornered me into a Fisher-Price user experience that I disliked greatly. Let's face it, I'm sure only a tiny tiny slice of Linux users are technophobes. Catering to such a tiny user base is a death wish for any but the most specialized of projects. If GNOME doesn't make an about face, it will eventually become nothing more than a fringe player with KDE owning 95%+ of the desktop pie. I have faith that GNOME can turn about and drop this "simplicity" crap, the question is will it?
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Let me know when it also works with ncurses.
Because the real problem is not so much the used framework but to use a single set of guidelines. The main obstacle of the Linux desktop is the usability, the look&feel of the applications. If one just uses 2 different applications on Linux, one most likely has to learn 2 different ways how to work with. If one uses 10 different application one doesn't have to learn 10 different ways but quite possible 5 to 7.
. html) and follow the links to the sources. Or go and read the guidelines themselves at http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/guidelines/content .html.
t s/2005-December/000349.html), they seems to already have forgotten. I've also informed Novell and posted it to LinuxQuestions, almost no reaction. So what else can I do?
So I created wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/) exactly for this, to finally have a single set of guidelines. And I designed wyoGuide to be cross-platform guidelines since no serious developer codes for a single platform these days. wyoGuide can and should be used on any platform with any framework and any language. Sure I do provide sample code written in C++ with wxWidgets but I'd love to put up others sample code as well. So far nobody familiar with other's framework volunteered.
To stress this point again, the Linux desktop won't become a success unless it can't be agreed on this single set of guidelines. It's possible that everybody sits together and designs yet another set but the outcome won't be much different than wyoGuide. On the other side wyoGuide is still work in progress and I'm open to any suggestion to make it more suitable for anybody.
If somebody doesn't believe me just read the LXer article here (http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/54009/index
What I'm curious about is how the Portland project handles this info, the knew it since December 2005 (http://lists.osdl.org/pipermail/desktop_architec
O. Wyss
See http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html
I just tried it serveral times in Firefox 1.5.0.1 on Ubuntu Dapper, and it works there. Not only do I have tab completion, the text field even pops up a chooser list to help resolve ambiguities.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
G.A.S.
Sorry, I couldn't resist...
But, gnown as Knome is REALLY one HAL of a good one... Imagine attaching Gnome to the HAL exoskeleton.... Oh, now THAT sentence was serendipitous...
Jeez... image word: chipmunk
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Simplicity has great value.
Have you read all 54,000 pages of tax code?
Are you aware of all the laws that apply to your daily life?
I believe simplicity in general, and especially simple laws and simple codes are important - otherwise you get to the point where not even one specialized person can understand a single entity.
I heartily applaud Gnome, Gaim, Firefox, and other open source projects who are making the effort to *simplify* their programs.
Simple is far from stupid; simple is smart!
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Except for panels such as the file browser and print setup, and other popups like error messages and alerts, etc, people probably would never notice if they are running a Gnome or KDE program on either desktop. The differences in GUI between the toolkits are miniscule due to them copying each other and copying Windows (and Windows is only "consistent" because the toolkits there copy each other, there are in fact many *more* different GUI toolkits used on Windows than Linux).
I would like to see a Unix-style solution to this mess, which is to have small programs do each job. In the file chooser case, any program wanting to popup a file chooser would do something like exec("file_chooser", args...) and wait for it to exit. Exit with an error means the user hit cancel. Exit with success and the program will print the chosen filename to stdout. Existing toolkits would be modified to do this, scrapping their filechooser code.
This would allow people to experiment with new designs of file choosers. This would, within a few months, make Linux have the best file chooser in the world, as opposed to being in last place as it is now. Also practically, the file chooser program could lauch and keep a process running, allowing all the read directories and all the icons and thumbnails and user preferences to be already loaded and cached and shared between every file chooser, rather than the obscene overhead that exists now. It would allow all programs to instantly integrate into KDE/Gnome/XFCE because they all call the same file chooser and other popup panels.
Even today there is a lot of precedence. After a long line of crap, it is becoming accepted to display a web resource by running "firefox ", rather than running the toolkit's html preview widget. There is already a program called "dialog" or "kdialog" that does a very limited version, though people seem to think this is only for shell scripts, but nothing keeps programs with no tookit from exec'ing it.
I would like to see some sign that the freedesktop.org guys are considering this, but have not seen anything. Really sad and scary, as they are killing the biggest advantage Linux has or could have over other systems.
Can we just have the "desktops" agree to disagree and have a configuration option for standardized dialogs and button order? It is absolutely retarded to have one app on your system have Ok/Cancel and the other app have Cancel/Ok.
Personally, I prefer the KDE style because I use Windows at work and dual boot at home. Ok/Cancel is what I'm used to, and it makes more sense to me. If Gnome users prefer the Mac way of doing things, hey - that's great. But no matter what *desktop* a Linux user is using, they are going to be using a mix KDE *apps* AND Gnome *apps*. Can we *please* just have a configuration option that switches button order, file browser dialog style, etc. based on what the *user* wants?
Thanks
"Good people drink good beer"
There is no need for mixing KDE and Gnome alltogether.
As I already mentioned in another slashdot discussion some time ago, I run KDE on vt7 amd Gnome on vt8. (And Fluxbox on vt9 just for OpenGL 3D accelerated games but that's another story.)
Just try it: On KDE 3.5.x, click "Switch User:Start New Session" on K menu. You will get your favourite login manager running on a new terminal. Pick another deskop you have installed. Switch back and forth with Alt+Ctrl+F7,F8,F9... And don't forget you still have your framebuffer consoles on Alt+Ctrl+F1..F6.
There you are, staring at me again.