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The Desktop Wars

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the stuff-to-read dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Sam Williams at Upside.Com on the Gnome vs KDE wars with real quotes from real people." It's interesting that this debate has faded so much. This article is a nice summary of the situation right now too- lots of interesting bits (although the server seems laggy).

2 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Integration science by raph · · Score: 4

    The Gnome/KDE "war" gives us the opportunity to think about competing systems in a totally new way. A lot of people think about it in essentially the same terms as Win vs Mac, but I think this is a narrow view.

    There are basically two ways of getting a unified system. You can start with a design for how things Should Be Done, and reject anything that doesn't meet the design. It's a good approach - the Mac has done this with great success. We laugh at newbies who try to put a Mac disk in a PC and expect to run the software. Should we?

    The other way to do it is to work to make the pieces integrate well. And this, my friends, is more the Linux Way, if you ask me. We don't talk about NFS vs. Samba vs. Netatalk. You've got a heterogenous network? Run 'em all!

    Now, to get KDE and Gnome to seamlessly integrate is quite a challenge, both technically and politically. But I have some hope that the two teams are willing and able to work on it, in a way that Microsoft and Apple never could.

    Here's a specific example of what I have in mind. Both Gnome and KDE have some mechanism for "themes", ie the ability to configure the graphical look. What if there were a theme setting application that set the themes of both desktop environments, and so that they're consistent? Ultimately, a person might not need to know or care whether an app is KDE or Gnome - it will be a matter of developer preference.

    Of course, this vision takes quite a bit of work. A bi-theme application is quite a bit harder than one for a single desktop. Work will no doubt be required to bring the theme systems in harmony. But I think all of this can and will happen.

    Raph, a Gnome developer who supports KDE

    --

    LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs

  2. The teams themselves by aheitner · · Score: 4

    have been on good terms for some time now, according to Ian Peters, the GNOME Games maintainer. Apparently they're working towards interoperability of object models, which will allow components of one desktop to be used with components of the other, giving end users even more free choice.

    I'll also note that the moderation system on /. has greatly increase S/N aroud here and reduced pointless flamewars. And increased prevalence of what Ian calls "score whores" -- people who always write long detailed comments (guilty as charged). It's an improvement, by any measure.

    Now for a hard jab: I'm not at all impressed with Gtk--. You shouldn't have to do signal handling that way in C++, dammit. I know Gtk+ does things that way, but it's C, it has an excuse. I want nice civilised event handling via virtual functions. Someday I'll write it m'self, I guess.