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Shuttleworth Sees Possibility For a QT-based GNOME
An anonymous reader writes "derStandard.at has an extensive interview with Ubuntu-founder Mark Shuttleworth, in which he seems to be pushing for a switch to QT in the GNOME-project: 'I think it would be perfectly possible to deliver the values of GNOME on top of QT.' He goes on to talk about Apple as an 'innovation leader' and problems with Hardy Heron."
Shuttleworth sees possibility in cats and dogs living together.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
He says in this article that GNOME was chosen for how easy to use it is. He's saying that the widget set doesn't dictate that, so the same thing could be done with QT, not that GNOME should be rewritten with QT.
http://mediagoblin.org/
I thought it was called KDE 4.0.
Wouldn't that get rid of the original point of GNOME? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME#History
Seriously. This is going to be one of the biggest misquoted articles of the year because some Slashdot nobody editor decided to take Shuttleworth's words out of question's context.
He quite clearly says that it is possible to deliver GNOME's qualities on Qt. He didn't say that he wants to do it. He didn't say he was going to do it. He even pointed out a problem in doing it (GPL vs LGPL).
Of course, it would also be possible to deliver GNOME's qualities on Enlightenment or Tcl/Tk if you could find enough hackers to do it. There's nothing unique about GNOME's qualities that only GNOME could do it. They simply picked a different path, and it happens to be one that works incredibly well for Ubuntu. So well that they can share schedules with GNOME, that they can build a base for ISVs on GNOME, and on and on.
So please, PLEASE read the fine article before jumping to conclusions from the terrible Slashdot header.
I'm sure both are very capable libraries. All I want to see is wxWidgets being used for all GUI frontends so that they have a native feel whether you're in Gnome, KDE, Elightenment, XFCE, OS X, Windows, etc. That is, as soon as wxWidgets has KDE support.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
I thought it was interesting how he says that for some of the technical things, like Pulse Audio, Firefox, etc., it would be better to use the newest stuff, even if it wasn't *quite* ready, and fix it all in a service pack, so that the latest software would be there for the long haul.
But when it came to artwork, they considered changing it, but he though an LTS was the wrong time to mess with it, because then they'd be stuck with new artwork for a long time.
Does that seem backwards to anyone? I mean, the people who are using an LTS want stability and software that's proven and that will get the job done, even if it is a little older. They know they're not on the bleeding-edge. Whereas with the artwork, I would think that an LTS is a great time to start off in a new direction so that a new theme can really come to be associated with the distro. Especially given how many people complain about the brown and orange they use now (although I actually prefer the brown and orange).
GNOME and KDE have very different philosophies. KDE is (well, was and will be soon) based on the idea that people should configure their desktop; GNOME is based on the idea that people should only be given those configuration options that are absolutely necessary. KDE makes big leaps in its releases; GNOME makes incremental changes.
Personally, I like the idea of a Qt port of GNOME, since I feel that Qt is somewhat superior to GTK, both in terms of development and in terms of use. Others will undoubtedly disagree with that.
Palm trees and 8
being innovation leader for restriction maybe?
you cant (normally) install a custom program or use an ipod for data storage out of the box.
maybe design leader but not innovation leader oh no!
This is just not true.
The first thing I do with any macs I lay hands on is drop mplayer SVN builds onto them, and the first thing I do after plugging in an ipod is to "enable disk use". I've had ipods since the second generation (the 10 gb brick), and still have the latest 2. 60% of both of these are occupied by normal everyday data.
Do I agree with itunes music store? no! Luckily I can go into parental controls in itunes and turn every hint of it off.
Do I wish they would remove the horrid bloat from itunes? Yes. Do I think they're moving in the wrong direction? Yes.
They're not quite where you are asserting they are yet though.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I don't mean to sound like a troll. It just I am one of those odd people that prefers to use KDE (over GNOME), and likes to write GUI apps using GTK.
So while I dislike using GNOME, mainly for its lack of configurability and the how it makes me feel, I do really like KDE. Similarly I'm not keen on QT, but I do like GTK.
So why not have KDE on GTK? As a bonus KDE apps would obey the LANG var, instead of QT out-of-band language selection. (which makes running more then one language, simultaneously, difficult)
For those that don't know: It's Qt, not QT. It's not an acronym, it's pronounced "cute."
One of the guys from trolltech once told me that when they created the library(-ies) they needed a prefix for all the functions. The letter 'Q' was chosen as it was the most appealing / best looking letter in emacs at the time (which was the head developers favourite editor).
Thus Qt became the name.
Life is Reality
Actually, one of GTK's biggest strength's lies in the fact that it is programmed in plain old C. Because
of this it is much easier to integrate with other languages that cannot handle C++ name munging. I cannot
see any significant value of doing such a conversion or fork.
Got Code?
Does that seem backwards to anyone? I mean, the people who are using an LTS want stability and software that's proven and that will get the job done, even if it is a little older.
I don't think that's an accurate characterization of the reason to use an LTS release. You use LTS because you want a platform that doesn't change (except for security fixes and bug fixes) for a long time. That means that towards the end of the LTS release's lifecycle you accept that you're using pretty outdated stuff, it doesn't mean that you necessarily want that at the beginning.
If what you want is something that's well-proven, you don't adopt any new release, LTS or not. You might pick up a year-old LTS release, after all the bugs have been worked out, but I think Debian stable would be a better choice; it's much more thoroughly stabilized after having passed through the long Debian testing phase.
Given that a new LTS release is going to be somewhat buggy, I don't think it's at all unreasonable to go with slightly unready software, expecting that it will stabilize over the first six months or so after release.
I don't know enough about the issues around desktop artwork to know what makes sense there.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The widget toolkits (QT & GTK+) aren't the only toolkits/libraries involved in creating KDE and Gnome applications. There are libraries used for accessing files across a network (SMB shares, NFS shares, HTTP, FTP, etc.), handling sound (ARTS and eventually Phonon for KDE, GStreamer/PulseAudio on Gnome)*, etc. While completely unifying Gnome and KDE would be stupid, and IMO, counterproductive, seeing a merge between the underlying technologies would be great. It would save third-party developers the time of having to re-implement the functionality contained in those libraries, without having to commit their application to a specific desktop environment. Meanwhile, the DE developers could still maintain their philosophy and have their desktop-specific applications keep their look and feel.
*Yeah, I know those aren't completely comparable.
I think you're right but this is quite a problem. I recently made the switch from Windows to Ubuntu on my laptop. I still run Windows inside a VM but that's just for my management tools which are Windows only.
In these days you don't know which distro is right for you, they all provide much the same functionality and all have little differences. I tried the major distros, KDE, Gnome, and landed on Ubuntu with Gnome because everyone was ranting and raving about it and I thought it was worth a closer look.
In the end I've found that SUSE is easier for the desktop user while Ubuntu and Fedora are easier to hack out difficult functionality like fingerprint authentication using PAM which is still quite problematic, so much so I had to turn it off but that's largely due to a compatibility problem between VMWare and Ubuntu which results in me losing the ability to use my keyboard. Not all apps will work using fingerprint authentication so you still need to be able to type your elevation password.
Of course for me, I get around the issue by adding a widget to the panel which calls setxkbmap which fixes the issue so that I can type my elevation password after the failure has occurred.
Back to the original issue, it's impossible to tell which audience the major distros are targeting. They all try to cater to pretty much everyone and the result is that some distros are better at some things than others which means you have to try them all before you can pick the best one for you. That's a lot of work as you really need to use your machine to know and any machine you use on a regular basis you don't want to be installing a new distro every week on.
Shuttleworth says: "And you can't run an old Windows application on a recent Windows version."
There are some applications, particularly ones that are pushing the limits of what you can do on a PC, that can't run on the most recent versions of Windows, but in general that's not true. I've got programs that I've carried around for decades that still work as far as I've been willing to take Windows.
Mind you, Vista might be an exception, but Microsoft has... up to Vista... bent over backwards to ludicrous levels to maintain backwards compatibility. The phrase "the exception that proves the rule" is a cliche, but this is a perfect example of an exception that DOES prove the rule... there's an enormous push-back against Vista simply because it's perceived as being incompatible. It's NOT a model to follow.
You want to solve the linux fragmentation problem? Well, uniting the two dominant desktops is a great place to start. I've been around a long time so I understand that historic reasons for there being two toolkits. Quite simply, "in the beginning," there *was* no clear winner between Qt and Gtk. They were both immature and unproven.
:)
But, as Bobby sez, things have changed.
Gnome moving to Qt is one of the best ideas I've heard in YEARS! Qt is commercial, better documented, and was DESIGNED to work everywhere from embedded devices to Macs. I've personally worked with both toolkits and as a Cocoa developer, well, Qt is just better.
A quick search for "Gtk Embedded" reveals that my suspicions are correct. The first result is some obscure article in Linuxjournal from 2002! The same search for Qt takes you to Qt's embedded systems portal, full of documentation articles and so on.
http://www.google.com/search?&q=Gtk+embedded
http://www.google.com/search?&q=Qt+embedded
But this isn't just with the embedded side of Qt/Gtk---it's with everything. Go on, pick a topic and do an honest comparison. Want to install your Gtk application on Windows? Get ready to install Cygwin! Want to install A Qt application on Windows, or perhaps a Windows CE phone? No problem: http://trolltech.com/products/qt/features/platforms/embedded/windowsce
I see a lot of comments doing a lot of whining about "Qt Applications are Unstable!!" Qt is easier to deploy consistently and for this developer works more like every other standard GUI toolkit. Gtk is and has always been an absolute nightmare. This anti-Qt argument is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard, something akin to how Java is evil because it is allegedly slow. Here's a tip: next time someone tells you about Java being slow, ask them if they've ever heard of SwingWorker. If they have, ask them to explain how/why it exists.
In a politics section you'll have people decrying your outright and blatent bias no matter what you do or how little bias you actually have. That's the way politics sections work, you decry their obvious bias in an effort to bias them.
As for which articles the Slashdot editors choose, it seems to be the ones designed to generate the most comment traffic. They may not be completely factual, but if they say something outrageous (Gnome is going to Qt!) then they're in. This is the same principle that most 24 hour news sites operate on, if it will draw viewers, put it on the air.
I read the internet for the articles.