Slashdot Mirror
The Last GUADEC?
An anonymous reader writes "How can we ensure, together, that this will not be the last GUADEC? Last year, during GUADEC, there was that running joke amongst some participants that this was the last GUADEC. It was, of course, a joke. Everybody was expecting to see each other in Brno, in 2013. One year later, most of those who were joking are not coming to GUADEC. For them, the joke became a reality. People are increasingly leaving the desktop computer to use phones, tablets and services in the cloud. The switch is deeper and quicker than anything we imagined. Projects are also leaving GTK+ for QT. Unity abandoned GTK+, Linus Torvald's Subsurface is switching from GTK+ to Qt. If you spot a GNOME desktop in a conference, chances are that you are dealing with a Red Hat employee. That's it. According to Google Trends, interest in GNOME and GTK+ is soon to be extinct."
Although Qt is going strong, KDE and gnome seem both to be in a downwards trend..
http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=gtk%2Cqt%2Cgnome#q=gtk%2C%20qt%2C%20gnome%2C%20enlightenment%2C%20kde&cmpt=q
Ah well, the higher abstraction level that C++ offers, does make sense for a UI framework.
I just became the maintainer of a small games project in gnome and I have to say, the lack of (wo)manpower really shows. There are other projects that have many hundreds of untriaged bugs (most of them unconfirmed. We're not talking about unfixed here). There are only a handful of people doing really cool stuff and about nobody doing the menial labour of just making builds stable or working with one-off-contributors who sent in patches on their own.
But all in all I don't believe gnome's development cycle is unsustainable in the foreseeable future, even with shrinking interest in the desktop as a whole.
I am sure I am not the only one who doesn't know what GUADEC is, and in fact even the event homepage (https://www.guadec.org/) doesn't spell out what it is. It is the GNOME Users And Developers European Conference.
Or how to name software.
LGPL 2.1 vs LGPL 2.1?
get your helpful gnome back ;)
http://mate-desktop.org/
For almost a decade, Qt has been the superior choice for developers.
I used GTK for several years (probably up to version 2.2). The mindset back then was that the minimum functionality should be provided and the developer should build what he or she needed around it. For even a simple item list you had to use the treeview, which in turn was really complex to use. I wonder how much of that remains today.
When I discovered Qt, I ran constantly into the situation of thinking "This behavior I want to do sounds like a common case, i'm sure there is a helper/shortcut to implement it", and 99% of the time there was. Maybe it was more "bloated", but it definitely did reduce development time by a large factor.
Also, if you are doing a desktop app, you are most likely wanting to go cross platform. GTK is terrible at that.
The main disadvantage back then was the license, but that's ancient history. Qt has aged well and moved to mobile without much of an inconvenience. Besides Desktop, It runs on Android and Blackberry 10, and will soon be running on iOS too.
For starters
Okay, shoot me down in flames - apparently if you don't understand everything in a Slashdot summary some people think you shouldn't be allowed on the internet - but what the hell is a GUADEC*? Wouldn't it be a good idea for a news site that presumably wants to attract and keep as many visitors as possible to at least give a brief definition of the terms used in a headline? You can easily do it subtly enough - you don't even have to spell it out, just give enough context - that those in the know won't notice, and those not in the know will come away better informed, instead of having to open up another tab just to find out whether or not they're interested in the content.
Yes, haha, lgmtfy etc. But you know what, I actually do expect to be spoon-fed my news. That's precisely why I watch TV or read newspapers instead of wandering the streets hoping to catch drama unfolding first-hand.
*of course I've already looked it up.
Everybody was expecting to see each other in Brno
Okay, now I know you're making shit up!
(specifying the country of a not-very-famous city wouldn't hurt, either)
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
What about it? All you need to provide is a static library (.a/.lib) with the objects for the rest of your project. As long as anyone can statically relink the thing with their copy of Qt, you're good.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Great. Then tell me of all the wonderful Qt applications people commonly use. I use GIMP, Inkscape, Gnumeric GTK+ applications quite frequently and have used zero Qt applications so far.
Common people use Skype, VLC, etc. and not Gnumeric.