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BBC on Gnome & Interview Miguel
Evil Greeb writes "The BBC have written a fairly pro-Linux article, citing Gnome as "the operating system which could loosen Microsoft's stranglehold on the market". I thought it was a desktop environment myself, but that's not the issue: Linux promotion is! The page includes an audio snippet of Miguel de Icaza on Gnome. " Excellent-now if my Gnome-session would just run properly.
There are two big pieces to a desktop environment, that distinguish it from a window manager.
It has a set of UI guidelines that conformant programs follow as closely as possible.
For example, on Win95, hitting Alt-F4 will kill just about any Windows applictation, and every menu bar has to have a File option -- these are the sorts of things that Windows applications are (theoretically) required to follow.
It has a set of guidlines for exposing component interfaces that conformant programs follow as closely as possible.
The advantage of having a component architecture is that it makes it *much* easier to script programs (because the scripting language bindings become simple to implement), and because it makes it easier for programmers to allow different programs to interact. For example, a programmer writing a word-processor could let users put charts into a document whose appearance is dynamically calculated from the spreadsheet, without knowing how the spreadsheet is implemented -- all he needs are the component interfaces. Think of it as Unix pipes on steroids and growth hormones, and you'll have some idea of why component models are so cool.
Also, a DE usually contains a set of libraries and applications to make adhering to the first two much easier.
For example, KDE uses the QT widget library to expose a set of UI elements to make it easier for programs to look and behave like KDE apps. Gnome uses GTK. Likewise, KOM/OpenParts (for KDE) and Baboon (for GNOME) are the component APIs that programs have to honor to be well-behaved KDE or GNOME apps.
That's all there is to it, really. A window manager doesn't do these two things; all it does is manage the decorations on the windows. (Well, there's ICCCM, but it is at once hideously overengineered and utterly inadequate for specifying UI behaviors....)
However, note that the big interoperability problem between GNOME and KDE isn't the UI; Unix users have been dealing with wildly different-looking GUI programs for years.
Instead, the problem is that the component specs are different, which means it will be a lot harder to write programs that mix components from the two environments. For example, it will be unneccesarily messy to (say) write a script that uses KIllustrator to draw a chart from data in a Gnumeric spreadsheet unless the KDE and GNOME teams figure out a clean way of bridging their two component models.
Fortunately, both of these are free software, so if they don't want, someone else will be able to. (It would have *legendary* hack value, if that someone is reading and needs encouragement. :)
>"I don't think KDE has a future at this point,
/., the GNOME/KDE flamewars finally cool off and then Miguel has to go and say stupid something like this! :(
>it's not completely free yet and it's bound to a
>single programming language in Unix. Gnome from
>the very beginning has been accessible through >any language. We are providing the GUI for
>all the languages and programmers can choose
>the language they like the most," says Miguel.
At least on
KDE and GNOME are both very nice( I use pieces
from both ) and there is no need for either team
to make inflammatory statements like this. Let
the kiddies fight this psuedo-debate out in the
middle school lunch room. GNOME rocks! KDE rocks!
But having a choice rocks even more!