Desktop Environment for Proprietary Applications?

nushoin writes "Gnome and KDE are the two major desktop environments used on Linux today. However, Gnome is growing more and more affiliated with Microsoft's proprietary technologies (Mono, OOXML). Targeting the Gnome desktop environment could prove dangerous in the long run, assuming that one would like its applications to run on distributions other than SuSE. On the other hand, TrollTech is being bought by Nokia, whose commitment to the desktop world remains to be proven. Assuming that one would like to develop a desktop application (either free or closed source), which desktop environment would you target, and what widget tool kit would you use?"

Comments

FUD

[QuantumG]

Jesus, GNOME != Suse.. GNOME != Miguel.

Re:FUD

[kripkenstein]

Jesus, GNOME != Suse.. GNOME != Miguel.

Agreed, this is a ridiculous claim.

Yes, Novell is working on Mono and partnering with Microsoft, while at the same time investing in GNOME. But that doesn't 'taint' GNOME in any way. The core GNOME technologies - GLib, GTK, and so forth - are not written in C# and have nothing to do with Mono. The licensing of those core GNOME technologies is the LGPL, in fact, precisely to ensure that there is no risk in developing for that platform. No one 'owns' it, and no one can 'taint' it. You will be able to run GTK and GNOME anywhere you compile it to run, be it SUSE, other Linux distros, Solaris, or whatever; again, as LGPL, you can do whatever you want with it, if you abide by that license. In particular, you can run any app you want on such a platform, which is the question here. The claim that "Targeting the Gnome desktop environment could prove dangerous in the long run" simply shows a lack of understanding of what GNOME is and how FOSS licensing works.

Regarding Qt, Qt is dual licensed as GPL and proprietary. If you want to run FOSS apps on KDE, you have no problem (at least if your FOSS license agrees with what Nokia will accept, and that includes most of those existing today). But if you want to run proprietary applications on a desktop, Qt is a poor choice. For starters it costs money. Furthermore, Nokia can charge whatever they want for proprietary licenses, and this might change at any point; there are no guarantees. However, if you are willing to take that risk, then Qt/KDE is a nice platform (although the portability, one of its main advantages, seems lost in this particular context, since it appears a single desktop is going to be chosen).

So, if you want to develop a FOSS application, both GNOME and KDE are fine (just make sure with KDE that you agree to the licensing). If, on the other hand, you want to develop a proprietary application for a particular desktop, I would say GNOME is the way to go.

Re:FUD

[kripkenstein]

But if you want to run proprietary applications on a desktop, Qt is a poor choice. For starters it costs money. Furthermore, Nokia can charge whatever they want for proprietary licenses, and this might change at any point; there are no guarantees.

This is quite trollish. Qt is no different in those respects from the other innumerable commercial libraries that are routinely used in proprietary software development. Singling out Qt as a "risk" suggests an axe to grind, and recommending GNOME for proprietary applications confirms it.

Yes, you are right, Qt is no different from other toolkits that cost money for proprietary apps: I would make the same argument against Microsoft tools. If you get hooked on Visual Studio/.Net/etc., then you run the risk of Microsoft raising prices in the future. Exactly the same as proprietary apps on Qt, that is the risk of developing for a platform owned by a corporation.

This risk does not exist if you develop for a platform that is LGPL, you can write apps for it (FOSS or proprietary) without such concerns.

Re:FUD

[dpilot]

Come back in 10 years and let's see how "open" Mono/C#/OOXML really are/were.

Most of us are betting that the landscape will be littered with corpses, and the MS Lawyers will be wiping their swords.

Beyond that, where have you been with OOXML? It's not complete! Since when does a *standard* read crap like "Do this the way Word95 does"? If you want a real standard, and if that real standard must accept Word95 has what has been de-Facto, then you need to adequately describe exactly what it is Word95 does. Then instead of "the way Word95 does" insert the real description. (And even with that shorthand, it's over 6000 pages?)

Re:FUD

[nushoin]

First I'd like to clarify, my intention was not to create a flame-war.

My concern with Gnome is not the license (that is, copyrights) but rather patents. I know that Mono is GPL, but that does not protect me from Microsoft's litigations in the future over grounds of patent infringements. Currently only a few distributions (SuSE, Xandros etc.) are 'protected' from such litigations. I know that Gnome is not Mono etc, but they do seem to adopt several 'problematic' technologies.

About Qt, I happen to trust Nokia to continue supporting that platform. This is of course a personal opinion, I'm not affiliated with Nokia in any way. The company does have a history of supporting open source initiatives.

My concern is real, at least for me, and I guess that others are worried as well. The comments below suggested using Java, which is an option for me. I'll also look into wxPython as I develop in Python. However a C/C++ widget toolkit is also necessary.

About myself, I'm using Linux, both Ubuntu and Fedora. I happen to like the Gnome desktop. Currently I develop applications for in-house use in the course of my studies toward a master degree. These applications will probably be released under some open-source license in the future.

Re:FUD

[Cyberax]

However, today Microsoft tools cost almost nothing. You can get Visual Studio Express for free and professional version for something like $150. I don't think that this price is going to change in foreseeable future. And you don't need to upgrade it often - I still use VisualStudio 2003 for my C++ development, and a lot of people still use ten years old VS6!

On the other hand, QT costs a lot (I'm not going to pay that much money for a desktop toolkit) and its price IS going up with each release.

GTK produces revolting UIs on Windows and Mac, so it's not good either.

The only other somewhat good cross-platform UI toolkit I know is wxWidgets. It doesn't look like shit on Mac, at least.

Re:FUD

[kripkenstein]

I'm glad to hear that your intention was honest and not just trying to start a flame-war.

The concern with patents is a valid one, because of the sad situation with the (US) patent system. This is an issue with all desktops, and we all need to be aware of it. I do agree with you that Mono is more vulnerable to this issue than other random technologies, simply because we know of Microsoft patents relevant to it. So I can understand if someone is wary of Mono (but I, myself, am not too concerned about this). Yet, as you say, GNOME isn't Mono and certainly does not depend on it, so this is a non-issue. Especially if all you use is GTK - that certainly has no connection whatsoever to Mono. Hence, given that GTK is LGPL, which is a big benefit if your app is proprietary - it doesn't cost money - this seems the best idea for you.

(Btw, not sure what you mean by 'other problematic technologies' aside from Mono. Like what? OOXML? That is also not related to GTK in any way... it might appear in Gnumeric and OpenOffice, neither of which is directly GTK-related.)

I wouldn't be enthusiastic about wxWidgets - it's a nice concept, but doesn't seem to have enough momentum behind it. In particular there are few applications using it compared to the other platforms, GTK and Qt, and for good reason.

Why not just use Ubuntu?

[MMC Monster]

That's what nushoin uses, after all. Yeah, it's flamebait. The whole freaking summary is flamebait as well. Just because someone that writes code likes some stuff that MSFT makes doesn't mean that we should abandon ship. If proprietary code is found in the codebase, it should be easy to remove. So far it hasn't shown up, which is pretty amazing since it's all opensource.

Re:Why not just use Ubuntu?

[aminorex]

The issue is not the copyright on the code. The issue is the Microsoft patents which cover the techniques implemented by the code. Only Suse has a license for those patents. If Gnome depends on patented Microsoft technologies, all other distributions are illegal. Contrast this with QT and KDE. To my knowledge, no one claims any patent rights on any technologies implemented in QT or KDE.

Anyhow, to respond to the original question, I would use wxWidgets or SWT for any new GUIs, due to the native l&f with excellent cross-platform portability. I see no reason to tie myself to Gnome, for example, when I can use wxGTK and wxCL or wxPython, and get satisfactory platform compatibility, while remaining portable to Windows and OSX etc.

QT is fair, but is limited to C++ and ECMAscript (QSA). GTK is better than QT, in my opinion, for portability and language interoperability. But wxWidgets is the ne plus ultra of GUI portability heaven.

Epic FUD

[splortnik2003]

And not because it's inconsequential that QT was bought by Nokia or that Miguel *hearts* MS. It's just not news, not shocking and at the moment not a problem.

Re:Epic FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

That doesn't make it any less FUDulous. Asking stupidly, overzealous loaded questions is just ASKING for a flamewar to break out, and the fact that it was accepted and posted here should just make everyone here sick.. the editors have devolved to Digg's stupidity.

First of all, Qt is GPL (even v3 now); Nokia can't undo that. Future developments might change things, but people can always fork it and continue as if Trolltech never existed.

Secondly, GNOME is *NOT* adopting Microsoft technologies. Miguel != SuSE != GNOME. OOXML, Mono are not essential technologies, and can be removed quite simply (with very little deficit to usability; the only significant Mono applications in the GNOME stack are a photo manager (GThumb already exists), Tomboy (retardedly complex code for sticky notes; already several replacement projects AND E-D-S can already do everything Tomboy does, AND Conduit can sync E-D-S across machines) and Beagle, and Tracker's not only faster, but it uses less memory and has been accepted as default across most of the prominent GNOME-based desktops). Futhermore, effort is underway to give C# users a better way to integrate into GNOME: Vala is modeled after C# and compiles directly to plain-ol' generic GObject C. On top of that, the most new code going into GNOME is Python, by a rather wide margin.

Re:Epic FUD

[kripkenstein]

Vala is modeled after C# and compiles directly to plain-ol' generic GObject C. On top of that, the most new code going into GNOME is Python, by a rather wide margin. +1 for pointing out this neat stuff. Vala is a pretty brilliant tool, really I have to give the developers a lot of credit. I expect to see more and more GNOME development being done in Vala. Likewise, Python / pygtk is a great setting and a lot of fun, and well worth developing in.

I am pleasantly surprised that most new code is in Python, interesting, how was this measured?

Use Qt4 for GUI toolkit

[Anonymous Coward]

Nokia poses absolutely no threat to Qt and it's the best GUI toolkit available for Linux by far. It also works wonderfully on Windows, OS X, *BSD and Solaris.

GNUStep / Étoilé by far the most common

[Colin Smith]

You get free portability to the Apple Macintosh built in.

Re:wxWidgets

[Otter]

Yeah, but I heard some of the wxWidgets developers own iPods and XBoxes, so they're clearly untrustworthy also. It seems to me that the submitter has no choice but to develop his own toolkit and not allow anyone else to use it.

Re:The answer is simple, very simple

[SanityInAnarchy]

Or you could follow the examples of Opera and Skype and go Qt.

Same rules apply, though. Don't be afraid to pull in libraries, but no matter how closely you tie it to a particular desktop environment, unless you do something incredibly stupid, it will work on others -- it will just be that much more bloated on them.

Re:Motif

[FudRucker]

elvis is like vi only with sideburns and drives a pink Cadillac...

Methinks the community doth protest too much...

[soren42]

Honestly, I'm a little surprised. The very first reply opens with GNOME != SUSE... but, let's look at this seriously - GNOME may not be SUSE, but it certainly is Novell. You're talking about a company that employs many key GNOME developers. To futher quote the replies to this post, GNOME != Miguel deIcaza - true - but a LOT closer to the mark is GNOME == Nat Friedman. More importantly, look at the list of GNOME project thought-leaders under Nat's leadership at Novell... people like Larry Ewing (F-Spot), Michael Meeks, Dave Camp, Joe Shaw, Robert Love, and (yes) Miguel de Icaza.

Even more concerning is influence that Novell simultaneously exerts over the KDE project. In this case, Novell certainly doesn't have the impact on KDE that TrollTech does - however, they do have the legacy SUSE team, who were (are?) huge KDE advocates, users, and comprise many of the developers.

So, does Novell present a nexus of influence and control on the core of Linux's desktop systems? Can they exert undue influence on these projects and, therefore, bend them to the good of their corporation - as opposed to the projects being driven primarily by unaffilated community developers? (Or at least a community of developers with varied and diverse affilations, effecting the same net result...)

And, then, the question that naturally flows from this discussion is "Is this a good thing?". While I don't think anyone one entity should have paramount influence over two competing projects, in this case there may be some significant advantages. Having a unified driver behind both GNOME and KDE could allow a desktop to take advantage of the best from each. We've seen Novell already attempt to do this in their own distro - SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 has many useful KDE features ported to GNOME and integrated into their standard desktop configuration.

I guess at the end of the day, it comes down to two questions: 1) Do you think really can influence both projects (or even either one)? and 2) Do you trust Novell to drive the desktop in a direction beneficial to all?

wxWindows produces native GUIs.

[Futurepower(R)]

wxWidgets is native to all supported operating systems. GTK was originally designed for Unix-style X Windows. My understanding is that under Windows it still has X Windows quirks and limitations. There is also a difference in grief:

GTK -- Using Microsoft's Compiler:

It is possible to use these packages with Microsoft's compiler. However, these DLLs use the MSVCRT.DLL runtime library. This means that also applications that use these DLLs should use the MSVCRT.DLL runtime. Specifically, this means that you should not use newer versions of the Microsoft compiler than Visual C++ 6 without knowing exactly what you are doing.

wxWidgets Compiler support:

wxWidgets supports more compilers than probably any other framework. All popular Windows C++ compilers are supported with the exception of Symantec C++ (this is being worked on), and on Windows you can use the Cygwin or Mingw32 free compilers. Even the 16-bit versions of Visual C++ and Borland C++ can be used. On Windows, makefiles are provided, with project files for VC++ 5 and above.

Just about all known Unix C++ compilers are supported, for the Motif and GTK platforms. If you have a compiler that isn't supported, with help from the wxWidgets team we should be able to fix the problem quickly.

Re:Tk

[bcrowell]

Hmm...so are you advocating writing GUI apps completely in Tcl, or writing the app in some other language, but doing the GUI parts in Tk? From what I've heard, Tcl itself is a reasonably nice language. But personally I don't want to learn a whole new language just so I can use a particular GUI toolkit, and if I'm going to write my app in a scripting language I'd prefer to use Perl or Python, due to their excellent, comprehensive libraries.

I've done a Perl/Tk GUI app, and my experience was decidedly a mixed bag. On the one hand, I found it very pleasant and efficient to code to the Perl/Tk interface. On the other hand, I ran into some major issues with code quality and the fact that nobody is actively maintaining the code base. If you look through the Perl/Tk source code, you see page after page of C that handles pointers as if it was still 1978. This led to one major snafu that made me decide never to touch Perl/Tk again: there was a null-pointer bug that interacted badly with a GTK release that came out ca. 2005, causing Perl/Tk applications to crash randomly. I submitted a patch, but it took ages for it to be applied, and during that time all Perl/Tk apps were crashing frequently on, e.g., all the recent releases of Ubuntu.

Microsoft wasn't allways cheap

[krischik]

However, today Microsoft tools cost almost nothing. You can get Visual Studio Express for free and professional version for something like $150. I don't think that this price is going to change in foreseeable future. And you don't need to upgrade it often - I still use VisualStudio 2003 for my C++ development, and a lot of people still use ten years old VS6! Prices for MS$ tools have gone up and down depending on how strong the competition was at the time. When Borland was strong in hobby arena (When MS-C/C++ came without "Visual") prices where low. When Borland more or less abandoned Hobbyist/Student use Viusual-C/C++ went up in price until GCC became more mainstream when Express was introduced.

Besides I consider Express is cripple-ware. Quite a bit of interesting stuff is not included (at least last I checked). And it's of course the same for Borland tools.

Martin