Common Interfaces for Gnome and KDE Released

An anonymous reader writes "Today OSDL and freedesktop.org announced the release of Portland 1.0, a set of common interfaces for GNOME and KDE. From the article: 'Specifically, these tools make installing and uninstalling menus, icons, and icon-resources easier for developers. They also can obtain the system's settings on how to handle different file types, and program access to email, the root account, preferred applications, and the screensaver. There's nothing new in this kind of functionality. What is new is that developers can use these regardless of which desktop environment -- KDE or GNOME -- they're targeting.'"

Comments

But there's still two toolkits, right?

[Reality Master 201]

I know I'm gonna get modded down for saying this, but the Gnome and KDE people could do the Linux world a favor by standardizing on a single GUI toolkit.

Diversity is great in a lot of places, but not here. The two major desktop platform in the commerical world both have a single UI toolkit. That allows them to have similar look and feel, and functionality across applications, and relieves developers from having to decide what particular subset of users they want to support.

And, yes, I know, I can install both sets of libraries and run apps from either. The point is, why? Pick one thing, make it work well, and move on to more important stuff, like writing good apps. Duplication of effort is pointless here. It's time to standardize.