Pair of KDE Stories

An anonymous reader sent in a pair of articles about KDE. The first is over at VAR Business (which has a nice quote from Chris) and the second is over at ZD Net's Smart Reseller. Both articles are about KDE 1.1.1 and neither says anything that will surprise us, but its interesting to note that a bug fix release is capable of generating that real press.

Comments

Re:Stability

[Daniel]

There are only three things that I can think of in Gnome that need work (in decreasing order of importance):

* gmc. The more I work with it, the more I get the feeling that we *have* to replace it entirely. The only thing I really like about the current version is the libvfs stuff (and the pretty icons). Currently it has (at least) the following architectural problems: singlethreaded (so one long operation bogs down the UI), poor handling of multiple selections (especially MIME type actions on them), inconsistent menus (the desktop icons behave differently from the rest of the program), and a general feeling of non-modularity and inextensibility. (see continual postings about "how do you add items to gmc right-click menus" on gnome-list..which brings me to my next topic..)

* Not modular enough. It's already pretty modular but it seems like CORBA isn't used in places where it would be useful or clever--for example, a CORBA interface for menu generators would be useful.

* Icky menu system (not that they're alone here..) A hierarchically configurable menu system was proposed on gnome-list a few months back (see "My Little Wish List for Gnome") but no-one has had time to finish it.

Once gmc gets its act together (or possibly gets rewritten) I think I'd feel fine about recommending Gnome to newer users; the rest of the core works perfectly well. It's kind of embarassing for something so central as the filemanager to feel as klunky as gmc does, though..

Daniel

Re:End User Apps

[Pascal Q. Porcupine]

Even moreso, it doesn't even matter if people use the same suite (KDE or Gnome) as long as they use open file formats and can be made compatible with one another. Cooperation, and not competition, is VERY important to both KDE and Gnome. Myself, I don't care much for either, and I don't want to have to run KOffice under KDE to read someone's document any more than anyone wants to have to run MS Office under Win'98.

UNIX is great in that file formats have always been *open* and relatively easy to deal with. I mean, there's several dozen commonly-used mail programs out there, and practically all of them use the Sendmail /var/spool/mail fileformat to store everything. PINE, ELM, Mutt, mail, etc. can all read and write to my various mail folders without a problem, and so switching programs isn't a daunting task. (Wish the same could be said for Netscape Communicator, but I've not used Netscape for reading mail ever since Netscape 3.0 consistently corrupted all my messages and did other unpleasant things.)

I mean, okay, I don't need to run KDE or Gnome to use KDE or Gnome applications, but that's not the point. The point I'm trying to make is that just because a program is available now and is free doesn't mean one should be locked into that single program. It'd suck if I were stuck using PINE forever and ever, for example. (I want to try Mutt someday.)

That said, perhaps some work should be done in deciding/drafting formal document format specs. We already have a perfectly good word processing format (namely TeX) and many word processors which can use it (such as LyX/KLyX, and even some lesser-known Windows word processors such as Scientific Workplace)... but what about spreadsheets? Are the formats of GNUmeric and (whatever KOffice's spreadsheet program is) compatible? What about StarOffice? Whatever happened to 'sc'?

What about groupware programs? It's hard enough to deal with KDE/Gnome flamewars on Slashdot. What about in the workplace where the manager wants everyone to use a KDE-based groupware app but all the Gnome zealots want to use a Gnome-based one, and then all the desktop-agnostics (which I currently am) want to just use one which works under fvwm2?

(Yes, I know there's better WMs than fvwm2. But I have it setup to work nicely with my Datahand and I don't feel like learning how to configure another WM right now.)

Many things to think about.

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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.