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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
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."
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