Ubuntu Mobile Looks At Qt As GNOME Alternative

Derwent sends along a Computerworld piece which begins: "The Ubuntu Mobile operating system is undergoing its most radical change with a port to the ARM processor for Internet devices and netbooks, and may use Nokia's LGPL Qt development environment as an alternative to GNOME. During a presentation at this year's linux.conf.au conference, Canonical's David Mandala said Ubuntu Mobile has changed a lot over the past year... 'I worked on ARM devices for many years so a full Linux distribution on ARM is exciting,' Mandala said, adding one of the biggest challenges is reminding developers to write applications for 800 by 600 screen resolutions found in smaller devices. 'The standard [resolution] for GNOME [apps] is 800 by 600, but not all apps are. For this reason Ubuntu Mobile uses the GNOME Mobile (Hildon framework) instead of a full GNOME desktop, but since Nokia open sourced Qt under the LGPL it may consider this as an alternative.'"

Comments

Full 'nix for arm?

[serviscope_minor]

There's already a full 'nix for ARM complete with working packaging and so on, in the form of OpenBSD, just in case anyone has forgotten it. Also, the developers need to be reminded that screens are 640x480 on small devices, not 800x600. It would start if they got out of the habit of using excessively lavish button bars with enourmous, heavily padded buttons.

Anyway, it would be nice to see a proper "full" linux distribution. I'm not much of a fan of the special PDA ones since they're cut down. Then again, I'm not much of a fan of ubuntu either, but I appreciate that (say) Arch isn't to everyone's taste.

Re:Full 'nix for arm?

[Mprx]

Padding makes clicking on the buttons faster, as explained by Fitts's law. I don't want my usability compromised because some people are using impractically small screens.

Re:Full 'nix for arm?

[Mprx]

If you really wanted to do things fast you'd use the mouse (preferably with gestures or pie menus).
http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html :

We've done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:

• Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
• The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

Try timing yourself on some web browsing/text editing/file managing tasks. Keyboarding may be faster occasionally, but you'll be surprised how often mousing wins.

Re:Full 'nix for arm?

[chromatic]

Keyboarding may be faster occasionally, but you'll be surprised how often mousing wins.

I use Vim all day, almost every day. Using a mouse and a word processor is very much not faster for me.

Re:Full 'nix for arm?

[Mprx]

Keyboard shortcuts are not amenable to muscle memory, as the muscle movement differs depending on the previous shortcut. Returning to the home position between each keypresses allows muscle memory, but I'd be very surprised if it were enough to compensate for the movement inefficiency. Consecutive strings of keyboard shortcuts can be memorized by muscle memory (as with typing whole words), but if you use a string of shortcuts frequently enough to memorize in this way it would be better consolidated to a single shortcut.

On the other hand, mouse gestures or pie menus require the exact same movement each time, so are highly amenable to muscle memory.

Re:Full 'nix for arm?

[Arker]

Keyboard shortcuts are not amenable to muscle memory, as the muscle movement differs depending on the previous shortcut. Returning to the home position between each keypresses allows muscle memory, but I'd be very surprised if it were enough to compensate for the movement inefficiency.

You're obviously not a touch typist. That's absurd. A practiced touch typist on a decent keyboard can select a paragraph for manipulation in about the time it takes you to get your hand from the keyboard to the mouse, let alone actually using the mouse to select the paragraph and THEN move the hand back into home position.

Re:Full 'nix for arm?

[alexborges]

It depends SO much in what people are trying to accomplish that the discussion is NOT worth it.

I mean, if im a designer, the mouse is better. If im a programmer, the keyboard shortcuts will be the best way to not loose the rythm (yeah, there is rythm in this bussiness).

If Im a bussiness exec, I dont know why I have a computer.

Re:Full 'nix for arm?

[gknoy]

My reflexive control-X control-S (when I'm /not/ in Emacs) would beg to differ. It's gotten so ingrained that I'll use those shortcuts in other things as well; similarly, shift-delete will delete a whole line in my Other Editor, which annoys the heck out of me, as i'm expecting to cut what I have highlighted. ;) So, I'm pretty sure muscle memory works quite well with keystrokes ... whereas when mousing, I am always looking at where it's going. Perhaps with a tablet it'd be easier.... but even then I had trouble and needed to look.

Why just netbooks?

[DeHackEd]

Sure the big blocky feel of pretty much every window manager out there sucks on my Eee, but this is one reason I stick with GTK+ 1.x. I don't have a 1280x1024 monitor just so I can see the same material I could see on an 800x600 10 years ago but with cleaner rounded edges.

And I have the bigger Eee. 1024x600 resolution, and some dialogs don't even fit on the screen.

Yah for the LGPL

[QuantumG]

For too many years the GPL has been killing adoption of Qt. That's a fact. Maybe it shouldn't have. Maybe people should be willing to be dictated to on what license they can use for their product because they dare to use the Qt framework. Maybe that's your opinion.

Of course, now that so many people are piling on-board to use Qt thanks to the license change, I wonder how many of them have actually bothered to read the LGPL. My favourite part is section 4.

You may convey a Combined Work under terms of your choice that, taken together, effectively do not restrict modification of the portions of the Library contained in the Combined Work and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications,

Yeah, didn't see that did ya? Almost every boiler plate EULA includes a clause prohibiting reverse engineering and I wonder how many have not been updated to comply with the LGPL (thankfully a lot of us can just ignore these restrictions as the government in our part of the world recognizes reverse engineering as a right that cannot be contracted out of).

I'll be looking for violations.. just for shits and giggles.

Re:Yah for the LGPL

[QuantumG]

Note the words "reverse engineering". If you forbid reverse engineering, as typical EULAs do, for any purpose, then that is forbidding reverse engineering for debugging modifications to the library. So they at least need to modify their EULA to permit reverse engineering for this purpose. And it also means they can't put any anti-debugging tricks in the application, because it will interfere with that reverse engineering.

Re:Yah for the LGPL

[QuantumG]

No. You fail. To understand what the LGPL means you need to actually read the LGPL. I know it's scary, but there ya go. The provisions actually say that you have to permit reverse engineering of the application, and take no action to permit said reverse engineering, so that one can debug changes to the LGPL library. The purpose of these provisions is to allow someone to fix problems in the LGPL library and have your application work with those changes.

Re:Too big

[Arker]

I saw a MIPS based netbook for about US $150 a week or two ago. Trying to remember where.

It strikes me that the best way to improve usability of X apps might be to send these little babies off to as many developers as you can find - and then preferably putting a gun to their heads and forcing them to try and use their apps on them.

The gun to the head part, of course, is tongue in cheek - but wow! seldom is such a bad idea so tempting.

Debian Has Supported ARM For Years

[John Hasler]

I worked on ARM devices for many years so a full Linux distribution on ARM is exciting

You mean. for example, Debian GNU/Linux on ARM ?

Re:Whiney complaints (send to /dev/null)

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to build from source you should be competent enough to figure out how to download it; it's really not hard. Otherwise, let your vendor do the packaging for you. Most Linux distributions make it so you don't have to care about building anything; and the BSDs make building easy anyhow.

Granted, if you are building from source, Qt's build method is mildly stupid compared to the (end-user) ease of autotools or CMake. But really, if you're just wanting to run programs, let your vendor take care of it all for you.

Re:Whiney complaints (send to /dev/null)

[tftp]

WTF? What is that all about to someone who just wants to run an application that uses Qt?

If you want only to run a Qt-based app then you do not need to do anything except to install the application. It should install the Qt runtime libraries for you.

Why the hell am I even looking at this when I just want to run an application?

A good question indeed :-)

If you want Qt widely used you need to make it easy to get and install.

If you are a developer then installation of Qt is the least of your worries. If you are an end user then, as I said, you should not install Qt at all.

AT LAST

[NekoXP]

Hoo-fucking-ray!

At last some common sense..

Qt outstrips GTK/GNOME just as a GUI toolkit and a bunch of middleware, even before you start thinking about stuff like KDE.

The only thing stopping it's use - at least in the strange mix of preinstalled Linux distributions on standard hardware - was that weird problem of having to have every one of your developers buy a license just to run their app - on a Dell for example - if their license was even slightly incompatible. That was a real turn-off if you were a hardware company wanting to take advantage of open source and build communities around open source software.

I'm glad that so soon after Nokia announced the LGPL relicensing, people are taking notice of what is quite obviously a far superior middleware solution than the GTK/GNOME nightmare, and considering developing solutions that work because of code quality and wealth of features, and not *just* because it's GPL.

Re:Whiney complaints (send to /dev/null)

[Draek]

I know my comment will be burried for saying this, but this kind of crap is what we all know is wrong with open source software. The front end delivery is done by geeks and bean counters who don't actually use the products as end users.

You may notice the fact that QT was originally developed by a commercial company, Trolltech. You may also notice the fact that since, until lately, they sold commercial licenses for the same software they licensed as GPL, practically all contributions to the 'main' branch of QT were done by Trolltech (and now Nokia) employees. Therefore, if anything, this proves the failings of cathedral-style development, of which closed-source is the biggest exponent.

Ohh and also, being a person unwilling to use pre-compiled packages to be able to use a library you do *not* plan to use as a developer puts you amongst the minority of a minority of a minority of users, therefore do not be surprised if Trolltech/Nokia doesn't care about you at all.

Re:"" may "" "" consider ""

[morgan_greywolf]

Ok, I'll bite.

Top 10 Reasons GNOME isn't going anywhere:

10. Firefox and Thunderbird are GTK+
9. Konqueror and KHTML, without WebKit, is hobbled by severe rendering and JavaScript bugs
8. GIMP is GTK+
7. The OOo KDE integration, last I checked anyway, was nowhere near as good as the GNOME integration.
6. Pidgin is GTK+ and Kopete is still very immature compared to it.
5. Inkscape is a GTK+/GNOME app.
4. Audacity is GTK+
3. Most of the popular major distros have GNOME as the default desktop (Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, Debian, etc.)
2. GNOME is easier to use than KDE

and the number one reason GNOME isn't going anywhere:

1. Germans just love David Hasselhoff!

Re:Whiney complaints (send to /dev/null)

[AeneaTech]

If you want Qt widely used you need to make it easy to get and install.

They (Qt Software) make it easy to use and install for their intended user-base. Namely: developers
As an end-user you have no business going there.

The applications you are trying to install should be installed using apt-get which will install the needed Qt libs.
If there's no .deb for the requested app, apt-get ubuntu's libqt4-dev, download the source, go to the source directory where the .pro (project) file is located. run qmake-qt4 in that directory and then run a normal make.

It's not that hard, even from sources. Sure, some problems might arise if the app is using features of a newer Qt version than the 1 bundled with your distro. Even that is easy to solve if you are a developer and if you're not, go complain to the author of the app...

Nokia open sourced Qt under the LGPL

[John Hasler]

Qt was already Open Source, of course, under the GPL.

Re:what the fuck are you on about?

[slimjim8094]

Folks, I propose we take this good fellow as the perfect example of a non-biased and uncharged commentator.

Kudos to you on your stellar objectivity!

GTK2.x theming to the rescue

[bornagainpenguin]

Martin Ankerl has a potential solution for you then, he made a HOWTO and has released a compact version of Human and Clearlooks which really make a difference! I even use them when I'm on my desktop these days to cut down on screen bloat. Find the HOWTO and linsk to the themes here: http://martin.ankerl.com/2008/10/10/how-to-make-a-compact-gnome-theme/

--bornagainpenguin

Re:"" may "" "" consider ""

[Kennon]

Pidgin is GTK+ and Kopete is still very immature compared to it.

I was totally onboard with your post until you said Kopete was immature compared to Pidgin...As far as I am concerned the complete opposite is true. I am regularly a Gnome user but I switched to KDE for a few weeks (for reasons beyond my control) and I completely fell in love with Kopete. It matches GAIM/Pidgin feature for feature then adds 100 more on top of that. Just the appearance and skinning options alone dwarf Pidgin's. All the best Pidgin plugins are represented in Kopete too. Plus Kopete has great video device support, a feature the GAIM/Pidgin team has been promising for years but never has managed to deliver. The integrated camera on my Lenovo Thinkpad W500 was supported out of the box. I really wish we could get a gtk version of Kopete over to gnome to give Pidgin a run for it's money....for years now, like ever since the main dev went to work for Google it is as if Pidgin has gone into feature freeze/bug fix only mode...

Qt is *NOT* Gnome alternative itself

[hubert.lepicki]

OK, Qt isn't even close to Gnome in terms of being a desktop environment. In fact, it isn't a desktop environment at all - so it can't be alternative to Gnome. It can be alternative to GTK, which is underlying library for Gnome. What I guess is the case - Ubuntu might look for KDE as an alternative to Gnome desktop, or create something new based on QT that'll fit more on small screens.

Re:Qt is *NOT* Gnome alternative itself

[CrashandDie]

The summary is a bit stupid.

Hildon is GTK for Mobile Devices. It was developped by Nokia. One distribution that uses this the most is Maemo. Considering Maemo is a Nokia-motivated (read coded/funded) project, and that Nokia bought Trolltech and told them to GPL Qt, they now have an extra incentive to boost Qt adoption. One of the tactics used to boost Qt adoption is that from their next version of Maemo (code named Fremantle), the UI is going to be moving from Hildon to Qt. Fremantle will still be using the Hildon libraries, but the version after Fremantle (Harmattan?) will include the Qt libraries by default, and will be officially supported.

Considering that Hildon is very closely entied to Maemo, if Maemo drops its use (read: if Nokia drops it), keeping it up to date is going to be a hard task, which is probably why UbuntuM is switching to Qt as well, as they don't want to have to maintain the UI library on their own; quite the smart move.

We've seen full Linux distributions running on ARM platforms for quite a while. Yes, Debian works, Maemo does as well, and some people might even be intersted in projects such as Mer (Mer is project that forked from Maemo and that is basically the Maemo community yelling at Nokia that they'd better not drop support for the n800/n810 in Fremantle, as they're proving they could very well take care of themselves --software wise-- and that they won't buy new devices just because Nokia wants them to). We've even seen fully fledged KDE desktops run on the n8x0, or Android for that matter.

The main problem on these devices is the lack of support for languages like C++. Yes, we have libhildonmm (C++ bindings for Hildon), but this is all pretty limited. They don't add the flexibility and power that Qt has; and they most probably won't ever do so. At this point, the devices are too slow to even think about compiling C++ on it, so most people default to shit languages like Python.

But I digress, let me summarise:

- Nokia created Hildon, and Maemo.
- Maemo uses Hildon.
- Ubuntu Mobile came along, liked Hildon and said "Hey, let's use that!".
- Nokia bought Trolltech, that develop Qt.
- Nokia is switching Maemo to use Qt instead of Hildon.
- Ubuntu Mobile doesn't want to hold on to the losing end, and switches to Qt before Hildon dies.