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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."
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.
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."
...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/
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/
The two desktop environments do basic tasks very differently. One of the main reasons why I no longer use Firefox on Linux is because I hate the GNOME file browser that Firefox uses by default. To me, all it does is make my job harder. For the sake of a more sensible file browsing interface, I am willing to tolerate Konqueror's relative slowness at loading web pages. Who's going to negotiate those differences?
The two desktop environments use very different core libraries with different licensing schemes (Qt is GPL, gtk is LGPL). These licensing schemes may carry big implications for those who use them (for example, you can base wxWindows on gtk without a problem, but can you do the same with wxWindows and Qt?)
There may also be major architectural differences that make a merging nontrivial.
Basically, what you're proposing is a huge project. The Portland Project has a much more limited scope, and I think it's much more achievable.
Finding God in a Dog
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.
This is not a new desktop. This is a layer of separation between developers and the underlying graphics libraries Qt (KDE) and GTK (Gnome).
No it isn't. It is a set of tools that will allow applications (including installers) to do things like add menu items, add icons to the desktop, enable/disable the screensaver, etc. in a desktop-independent way.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
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.
His comment actually makes perfect sense. He speaks of the Firefox "File -> Save Page As..." and "File -> Open File..." dialogs, which are _really_ ugly and nonfunctional. Especially the Save Page As dialog. There is no way, for example, to see a list of files which includes sizes. The GIMP has the same ugly and nonfunctional save/open interfaces.
If I didn't like Firefox so much more than Konqueror, I'd switch myself. I hate the dialogs. The KDE versions are _much_ better, and I say this as a Fluxbox user who has spent a lot of time in both gnome and KDE.
--Tyler
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
Actually, they're not; at least in Windows you can change the view from "List" to "Details" and see file attributes. Windows may have its bad points, but there are some things Microsoft really got right.
This brings me back to another post of mine in this thread and I'll say it again: In their quest to simplify the user experience, the Gnome developers have rendered the environment useless.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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"
> In KDE, there is still no real drawing program like The Gimp written in Qt. If you have to load gtk in KDE than you'll slow down, and if you have to load Qt in Gnome you'll have a slowdown.
I use Krita.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.