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KDE 2.0 in Action
Stormie writes "KDE hacker Mosfet has just put up on his web page a section entitled KDE2.0 in action with a rundown of what is coming in version 2, along with a bunch of great screenshots. Exciting stuff!"
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I hope some cleaner themes come out by the time KDE 2.0 comes out. I mean, it doesn't look very bad, but the designers need some professionals with graphics design to make some really snazzy looking themes so that desktop looks more professional.
Eh, but what do I know.
The thing I have always like about KDE is it's simplicity of use.
I am not a linux hacker and have never claimed to be, I am used to windows98 and NT4 and while I dislike it's bugs, security issues and lack of source they are still useful operating systems.
Until KDE came along I have to admit I was scared of linux... the WMs that were around were very basic and I was addicted to the Ms way of doing things.
Now this is all changing,I have been using KDE for quite a while now and anticipate the release of v2 with baited breath, it takes something like KDE to convert all us MS users who like the idea of linux but are scared of it.
You can run it quite happily after install, or you can hack it to bits. It's themeable and it has all the software bits and LAF of windows, while at the same time being quite different.
What more could a windows user want?
What's more, here in the office we are considering putting all the admin monkeys on a locked down version of linux with StarOffice and KDE too!
The future is bright.
Shameless plug: Here's brief, fun article on how nice it is to program with KDE these days.
However, I have to conceded that 2.0 is shaping up to look very nice indeed. Konq is something that, as a web designer, particuarly catches my attention. If they get it doing CSS and HTML4 properly then they'll be my friend for life :)
Also, I reckon I'd be far happier letting a new user out on KDE2.0 than gnome in its current state... Though whether KDE lives up to expectations remains to be seen... I for one am looking forward to it :)
-- I reserve the right to be completely wrong --
That site seems to be slashdotted already, but there are some more screenshots here: http://www.inficad.com/~nytehorse/
For those who want to try it themselves rather than just looking at screenshots, I've put up RPMs of a recent snapshot on http://people.redhat.com/bero/experimen tal/.
/opt/kde2, so they won't overwrite a KDE 1.x installation.
There will be a new snapshot today.
The packages install to
They're made for Red Hat Linux 6.1, but should run without problems on similar distributions.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
This is not even pre-alpha stuff! Do not use this for everyday work!
Sounds almost as "flamebaity", but worth a reply ;-)
> I use Star Office, Netscape, and Window Maker.
Star Office, Netscape, and AFAIK Window Maker are *not* "lean and mean" packages - why then complain about KDE ? Anyway, if you used the KDE equivalents of these packages, then they would share libraries and consume less memory [I'm not trying to claim KDE doesn't use a lot of resources BTW]
> I'm only interested in app's, not ugly, messy desktop simulations
KDE is more than just a desktop, there's lots of apps that work with it too, including
* KOffice [potential replacement for StarOffice/Office]
* Konqueror [potential Netscape challenger]
> Why would I want a Windows-clone (KDE or Gnome)?
KDE has a lot of options built in - you don't have to make it look like Windows. It can provide a Mac interface, or you can even remove the MS-like "Start Panel" altogether if you wish.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
WMPrefs comes with the default Windowmaker installation and is setup the moment you run it for the first time.
wmakerconf is a GTK+ app that does much the same thing, but with a bit of a nicer (IMHO) interface.
Try them out..i think you'll find that you like them both.
Werd.
However, on the off chance that you're serious, try looking at Linux.com's Page of Window Manager Choices.
Werd.
Good news for you : KDE 1.x already does. Edit krootwmrc, go to (or create) group [MouseButtons] and add Left=Menu I know, I know, there should have been a dialog box for this. But that's the way you like, no ? ;-) And I need to port that to kdesktop. Will do in a second :-)
Actually, if you have a working version right now there are no major stability or performance problems. If you refresh from CVS than it may happen that at some hour of the night some applications are out of sync.
Of course some applications are incomplete, etc. But I am using it for daily work from July and I had weeks of uptime.
The big letter warnings are more of a legalese kind of stuff, and what day really say is "please do not put it as default in the distribution (yet)".
L.
DCOP IPC !
IPC done whithout a standard corba is a nightmare yes you can do it and yes you can make programing easyer wich is why they are doing it I surpose
BUT its incompatable nightmare and the only thing that would save it would be Koffice and the fact its open source (easy to change the whole thing write bridges and such)
IPC is for people who are speed freaks (im talking Cray people money to burn on development)
WHY NO CORBA ??
this is what Corba was designed to do and very well to it makes runing services easy and abstract ie you may run it where you like a server in hong kong or on your laptop and you dont have to worry because it was a standard thats why they where useing Mico
there where lots of flames and I read them and they seemed to say DCOP would be complemtry and you need an ORB DCOP would help speed things up relieing on the X way of doing things
am I wrong ?
regards
john
a poor student @ bournemouth uni in the UK (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
Well, the reason you'd want a desktop environment is to provide standard, user controllable forms of IPC. To make an analogy, why do I need a system of printer drivers? Why don't applications simply send native commands to printers, which would certainly be faster? Because you're stuck with the choices of printers the developer makes. The desktop environment provides standards which, if adhered to by the developer, allow the user to assemble his how suite of applications. In a word processor, a user should be able to insert a graph or table from his choice of spreadsheet. Furthermore, a user should be able to insert objects of types that the developer has never considered, for example results from a simulation engine or maps from a Geographic Informatin System. The most important thing is not the "simulation" of a desktop environment, which after all is a very weak metaphor. Most users would be surprised to learn that Windows or the Macintosh use a "dektop" metaphor. The important factor is the provision of standard abstractions for developers which allows them to participate in a community of applications, from which the user can pick and choose, and expect certain reasonable default behaviors.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Frankly, -ALL- the window managers (yes, even including twm) have their strengths and weaknesses. Most of them, I've not used in a while, but I have the knowledge that if I need to do something for which some old, half-forgotten window manager is absolutely ideal and everything else is just blah, it's there.
People can complain about (insert name of WM or desktop environment hee) being too slow, too bloated or too cheesy, but I think they're missing the point. The point, to me, is that X allows choice, in a useful sense, in a way that almost no other windowing system ever created does.
Actually, even the complaints are good, IMHO, in that they show that people -expect- choice, and are picky about what works for them, not letting someone else tell them what they -should- want, and why they're wrong if they don't agree.
Summary: Long Live REAL Freedom Of Choice!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
However, I also question where the GUI areas of Linux have been heading. When I started using Linux, it was touted as being an entire OS that could live in 40 megs of HD space and 16 megs of RAM on a 286 , and yet be fully functional. I'm using right now a 486, running X-Windows and a generic window manager with xterms and Netscape, along with a rather high load web server among other things. I tried KDE 1.x and GNOME and both slowed my system to a crawl; sure, they're nice and convinent, but speed is much more important than looks.
(And yes, I know I can get a faster system for dirt cheap nowadays but that's not the point :-)
Basically, while I strongly believe both KDE and Gnome need to move forward to make Linux a viable desktop system, we still need to consider the true power users that don't need the intergration of all GUI parts and can deal with the simple window manager and inconsistancies across apps. And while KDE and GNOME apps can be run without having the main core package loaded (that is, you need the core library files), they still tend to be slower than those that access the original X libs directly.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
You completely missed the point.
Don't confuse HTML widget and web browser.
The point here is that you can very easily use an HTML widget in your application, be it a mail reader, a text file (help files, man pages,....) viewer, or whatever else.
A stupid example : want to add a 'credits' page to your app written in HTML ? Use KHTMLWidget.
How can you do that with netscape ?
> Screw system performance. What most people are
:)
>interested in is "eye candy". The jump from DOS
>to Macintosh in 1984 was proof of that.
Nope. They were competeing with 4.7 (?)mhz 8088s (though you could get 8mhz 8086's at the time, which were about twice as fast).
The mac was *significantly* faster than the dos machines, even after spending most of its power on the graphical system.
We put my 128k mac next to an 8088, running the same number crunching operation (numerical integrations, iirc) in microsoft basic. The mac was graphing the solutions it calculated faster than the 8088 could do the calculations--and aside from the plotting, the code was identical (we typed my code into tony's machine. He was shocked; he had been convincedhis machine was much faster).
Hmm, I think i just dated myself
I was under the impression that free software was about choice, not belittling others for the choices they have made -- and about doing the best with what one has, rather than "solving" a problem by throwing money at it.
Fuck Slashdot
Just make sure you're not theming as root, I'm not sure if the themes will enter the global shared folder or not...
Here's how you remove the offensive theme. Just rm everything from ~/.kde/share/apps/kwm, and restart kde / kwm.
If you backup your kwm folder, you can freely experiment with themes without fear of losing your original settings.
I've come to the conclusion that all desktop environments are memory hogs, whether they're KDE, GNOME, or Windows 98 :-(. If you have a low-memory machine, you're much better off sticking with something like fvwm or blackbox that doesn't use much RAM.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Ongoing royalties are what kills me as a software developer. I don't want to have to send 2% of my revenue stream to every #%%@ vendor library that's linked into my code. All those percents adds up too quickly, and they're all volume-oriented so I have to tell them "I'm going to sell 50,000 copies so you charge me the 1.5% instead of the 2% rate for 20,000 copies". The problem there of course is how the hell do I know how many copies I'm going to sell?! This is the computer business, folks! Great programs fail to sell all the time because the projected market for it dried up and moved on to other things, or because the market isn't there yet... per-copy volume based royalties are the utter PITS.
Remember, if you're an independent developer writing programs with QT, you can still develop the program with the QPL version. It's just when you actually sell it (get some money for it!) that you must send your $2k to the Trolls. If you can't make $2k off of a piece of software, you shouldn't be trying to release it as "shareware" anyhow, you should just GPL it and toss it onto the pile of Open Source code that already exists!
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I have been keeping tabs on Berlin development and they most defintely will not keep an X compatible API. Berlin is ahead of its time and the whole point of the project is to go beyond what we have now with X. They have a very nice architechture and I don't think X should ruin it.
***Beginning*of*Signiture***
Linux? That's GNU/Linux to you mister!
> Report KDE bugs to http://bugs.kde.org, not to slashdot.
... die of loneliness I guess?)
Where you can list open bugs that haven't been closed in over a year (maybe fixed, but the ticket is left to
And where you find that you cannot submit bugs from any kind of web form, but have to send some kind of specially-formatted email.
Windows, meanwhile, now comes with a bug submit program -- they just bury it real deep.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I managed to get 2.x up on my Linux box once, when I got the base to compile. Since then, I've had a few difficulties compiling a few parts, which caused the whole makefile to bomb. The ODBC library, for instance, did not compile, which would be okay, hunky-dory, it's unstable, but I couldn't even get make -k to get over it. Had to manually edit the makefile.
... rough. Almost like they were hand-drawn (though a true "hand-drawn" theme that introduced little variances in each widget would be COOL, if a little slow)
Recently, I've had to edit the makefile for kdelibs again because it compiles them out of order and several dependencies don't work. It would seem not one of the developers ever recompiles this system from scratch, because there is no dependency checking.
Anyhow, when I got it working, I was impressed by the speed and looks (a bit crashy, but this was EARLY stuff and I didn't have everything installed either). The wizard was incomplete, but the art was good, but "My name is Kandalf"??? OH PLEASE. The wizard doesn't need a name, much less such a god-AWFUL corny (Korny?) one. Just a nitpick, but I just about gagged. Really.
Anyhow, slightly less trivial notes: I certainly hope it's not the default QT 2.0 look that I saw there. There *is* too much of a thing as "too much 3d". The buttons had these ultra-rounded edges, and the radio buttons looked not only way too bumpy, but
Kicker wasn't terribly impressive. I do not like having my taskbar crunched into a little, or even large applet space. I like to smack my mouse to the top of the screen (yeah i keep it at the top) and have the whole edge to select my app. yes, the idea of the "K" menu is also awful, I guess it's a necessary concession to people used to the equally awful "start" button. This is a gripe I had with gnome, and now KDE replicates it.
BTW, what the heck is krootwm called now? It was really crashy when I was using it, and I would have liked to be able to restart it.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Then don't install KDE. Sheesh! It's not like your perfectly-configured-for-your-needs OS will suddenly become less perfect because some newbie somewhere else on the planet installs a GUI over the top of his or her installation.
Free software is about choice. Why do you want to deny other people a choice just because you personally wouldn't choose it?
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
My experience with gnome/E was so bad with the version that shipped with RH6.0 that, even though I loved the way it looked, I probably won't try it again for quite a while.
Yah, even the GNOME people admit that the version that shipped with Red Hat 6.0 had way too many bugs. But I can say that the October GNOME release, which I am currently running, is very stable, and works quite well.
I do think GNOME needs to drop Enlightenment in favor of another window manager. I mean, E! has some great eye candy and is very feature-filled, but it really isn't designed to integrate with GNOME the way kwm integrates with KDE.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Windows, meanwhile, now comes with a bug submit program -- they just bury it real deep.
A bug submit program for Windows? Wow, that's kind of like a windshield wiper on a submarine. Run it all you want, and things still aren't going to get any better.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I also question where the GUI areas of Linux have been heading.
:-)
They are aiming for the sorts of features Microsoft claims's windows has: Integration, easy-to-learn, drag-and-drop, object embedding, that sort of thing. Generally, power users are only minorly interested in these sorts of things, which is why, up until recently, Unix programs often did not have them. This explains why an bare-bones Xlib program is faster: Because it is a bare-bones Xlib program. TANSTAAFL, and you're not going to get all of those new features for free, either. Fortunately, power users are generally quite content to continue to use their bare-bones Xlib programs, while "home users" get their pretty icons and such.
Fotunately, Linux is still about freedom and choice as much as it is about performance and stability.
When I started using Linux, it was touted as being an entire OS that could live in 40 megs of HD space and 16 megs of RAM on a 286.
Minor nit-pick: Linux requires protected, virtual memory, something the i286 cannot do. So an i386 is the minimum processor Linux runs on. (While there are other projects based on Linux that are targeting the 286, they are not Linux.) Additionally, no one ever claimed you could run Enlightenment on a 386.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
This was on Slashdot the other day, but we only got one screenshot of the elusive Konqueror browser. Follow this link for lots more. From what I see, it's pretty amazing - if this really was conceptualized and designed less than two weeks ago, that's very impressive that they already have a functioning browser that displays Slashdot and other sites perfectly, and has built in support for PDF and DVI. Not bad.
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Yes. I think the good idea is to start everything from scratch. All our current toolkits is based on X and Berlin will never need toolkits. The widgets themselves can be replaced and any language can be used that has a CORBA binding.
Berlin is not as far but has the superior design. Once it gets started I think you will see development speed up.
What do you mean by wasted effort? Are you saying we should only have one windowing enviroment forever? If there was a project I was interested in developing I would work on it and I wouldn't give a damn about production value or how well it competes with Microsoft or how much it furthers the movement. I think Berlin is wholly remarkable in design. I am looking forward to a more usable release.
***Beginning*of*Signiture***
Linux? That's GNU/Linux to you mister!
Please see this document on Ompages that describes how to set up a very functional graphical desktop based on Debian and Windowmaker specifically for use with low end hardware. If you are running debian you can 'apt-get install package1 package2 ...' these packages and you will have a nice fast desktop for your 486. I wrote this as part of the the Ompages Project it is my contribution to the project to put together a software selection that people with low end and legacy hardware can participate in modern computer culture. Let me know what you all think.
Needless to say, I'm a huge proponent of retaining feature parity between legacy and modern desktops. It is essential to proliferation of computers throughout the world. It is also quite feasible. You sacrifice no functionality, but you will sacrifice some ease of use and look and feel qualities in some applications. But that is not such a bad thing, people who are forced for financial reasons to use older hardware are getting the added benefit of an opportunity to learn about computers in a much more thorough way than his/her counterpart with KDE, W2K. I greatly admire how far KDE has come. But we must remember who they cater to. KDE is to woo people away from W95/NT in the corporate/business setting. What about the rest of the world with an old computer? If you read and apply the above document you will have a very useful desktop that gives away *no* functionality and is based _mostly_ on free software. I have a fairly powerful desktop but love the speed and stablity my system has after applying what is in that document. I have applied it to my girlfriend's 486 and it is not all that much slower. I enjoy it; I hope you all do too.
I boot _MacOS_ for that sort of thing.
...er, things didn't exactly work out that way...
Linux offers me things that I CANNOT get from MacOS or Windows, in a million years, not in Jobs and Gates' wildest dreams. At this time, mostly what it offers me is an escape hatch. I am typing this in MacOS, from which I've been reading interesting news such as the fact that newer MacOSes are bringing in auto-update behaviors that are the antithesis of what I can tolerate on my computer.
I don't think either KDE or Gnome are remotely comparable to MacOS for usability. I don't _ask_ Linux to be as usable as what I pay for with MacOS. Instead I ask different things of Linux: first, I ask that it be there if I need it, and second, I ask it to be something I can completely control and audit, the power to reconfigure the system being in _my_ hands- lastly, I ask it to not forget this, but I am thankful that the nature of Linux is to preserve areas of difference and iconoclasm where I'd be able to settle.
I dispute that a desktop environment adds functionality. I _totally_ dispute that. I use one every day in MacOS and I still dispute that claim... what's happening is that the desktop environment is _attempting_ to provide _other_ _interfaces_ to data and ideas that might otherwise have to be jotted down as notes or interacted with by words and sentences.
This is a far cry from providing _added_ functionality. Particularly with the Windows paradigm, it's actually a loss of functionality in many ways- the attempts at other interfaces end up so strange and convoluted that the 'visual' environment has more unwritten rules than the old CLI environments had. This all must be memorized, just as CLI rules were: another nasty gotcha is the tendency to assume that the GUI approach is inherently so 'intuitive' that controls and objects can be strewn around and reshuffled arbitrarily.
These new desktop environments are not remotely new- they are simply implementations of 'the other paradigm' in computer interaction. First there was language-based interaction, and 'talking' to the computer with words, commands, and remembering what it said in reply. Then there was the graphic-based interaction, which was originally intended to convey the sense of a logical, consistent environment like a physical object such as a desk, 'mapping' to direct physical manipulation of realworld objects, and operating on specific rules worked out in advance.
But I have a question that might stand a chance of being answered here. It is this: What more could a Unix user want? Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that KDE suffices to mollify those vendors and users who are really just interested in Winix. But what about the real hackers? What do they want?
Obviously, it's not Winix. But what is it?
they have large amounts of code hidden inside which radically simplify tasks which used to be extremely complex
Like what? I use 'plain old WindowMaker.' I'm a law student and computer enthusiast and tend to deal with mostly all documents, html, ps, pdf, etc.
My ideal 'desktop environment' needs an emailer (mutt)(non-kde/gnome), a browser (netscape/soon to be mozilla)(non-kde/gnome), a text editor/word processor (nedit/wordperfect)(non-kde/gnome), a file manager (mc)(non-kde/gnome), a presentation tool (mgp)(non-kde/gnome), and a figure drawer (xfig/gimp) (non-kde/gnome).
What is KDE making easier in my life? I've used it, and found that it is pretty nice, but after about 12 hrs of use, my memory is is really bogged down at 144MEG of RAM.
I believe in spartan simplicity. In WMaker with the combination of keybindings and edited menus, I can move around my desktop and my most frequently used applications in eye blinks. Clicking around is such a waste of time and energy, I think it actually raises my stress level to have to click my mouse more than twice. I prever hitting F12, have my menu pop up, use arrows to find my app and launch it. This takes about two seconds.
To be really fast, I have my terminal, editor, browser and file manager in a custom menu that I have attached key bindings to. So alt n starts netscape, alt t starts terminal (wterm -tr -wm) (for a beautiful transparent term for wmaker that takes only 1K of RAM), ctrl alt m start midnight commander (gmc is no where near the functionality, kfm is closer but what a mem hog at 11K, gmc is only 6K. MC is 1.5K and in wterm there are clickable areas for everything. It's so fast.
The only functionality I miss is being able to drag files to a trash can before I decide to permanently delete them. But I use the OffiX-files and OffiX-trash applications to get that functionality.
What I would love to see is GNUstep get a lot more attention. Applications based on GNUstep and WINGs are fast, light and pretty. Linux should be optimized for stablity and speed first and ease of use second. Feature parity with Win is a waste of time. We need feature parity with NEXT and Apple.
I'm not sure whether to be pleased or insulted that my arguments are so memorable to top KDE people without having them actually convice said top KDE people ;) ("insulted!" ;) )
It _is_ a matter of thinking. And yes, I _have_ tried both KDE and Gnome. KDE let me log onto the net using kppp before I'd even sorted out pppd. I owe KDE lasting thanks for being an important part of my Linux adoption process.
That said, you're completely, stubbornly wrong about your assumption that it's all just a matter of habits. That's a crock: it's also both uneducated and insulting that you're claiming I hated KDE simply because it was unfamiliar- if that is the case, why did I enjoy bash? My objections to _BOTH_ KDE and Gnome are simply that they attempt to do desktop interface _badly_. They bring nothing new and make little or no effort to actually present a consistent, predictable visual 'picture' of the computer.
In fairness, I will point out one of the major points that always leads me to this conclusion- I have never seen _any_ file manager, other than the MacOS Finder, that behaves as though the user's placement of an icon or object is in any way significant or worthy of notice. It's always 'and now we sort everything and line it up in neat rows, because we can'. I _realise_ that's what everybody but MacOS does, but can't you see that it screws up people's orientation? That's not how a desk behaves. On a desk, you put stuff down and it stays where you put it- witness the cluttered workbenches of a thousand techies all over the world. If someone came in and organised everything alphabetically, they would be _lost_. Why do you and just about every other GUI maker insist on taking control of the graphical objects and reshuffling them?
To add to this, you may well do better than most X developers (particularly singling out the GNU developers, who should know better!) at providing keyboard shortcuts to operations. However, you seem to not have a clue as to how prevalent and consistent this is in the environment I'm talking about- it really loses you credibility to claim that my switching to KDE and doing everything that way is merely a matter of habit. You don't seem to know what you're talking about... so you insist, repeatedly, that it's just a matter of my being personally prejudiced against your way of doing things, which you maintain is not merely comparable but equal. Do you have _any_ _idea_ of how many millions of dollars a company like Apple spent on human interface design? On how many hundreds of hours designers like Bruce 'Tog' Tognazzini spent designing and testing and working to make these things sensible and usable? Have you actually read the work of others in this area? Hell, you could read _Microsoft_ Human Interface Guidelines- they don't obey their own rules, but they too have put the effort into this area, and that's for just one reason: it's not just a matter of what people are used to, there are actual rights and wrongs involved.
I don't care if you say 'I personally believe your mac is probably better in usability'. I am saying this: as somebody who is concerned with human interface design, I would like to see you making less assumptions. Yes, the world is heavily biased (polluted?) due to the vast numbers of people who have been extensively taught Windows HI rules. Yes, I personally am out in left field using a Mac but espousing purely CLI human interface guidelines, something I haven't even really begun to properly develop on a large scale. Still, every time (and it's been several times, hasn't it?) I see you come back at a critisism with 'That's just your habits speaking, there's no difference so just try it and lose your other habits', I cringe. You CAN'T learn anything if you deny there's anything to learn. KDE is ill served by those assumptions. Keep them if you must- I choose to challenge them.
www.troll.no/qpl Granted right #3 says that all your modifications (which to port to win32 would be a LOT of changes) must be distributed as patches. A similar restriction on minix hamstrung its development and was one reason for linux. Why the Open Source definition allows these games to be played is beyond me. Requiring changes to be distributed as patches is, for me, only one step above running the source through cpp before release.
"3. You may make modifications to the Software and distribute your modifications, in a form that is separate from the Software, such as patches."
A form that is separate from the Software? So yes, a CVS server is allowed, but this prevents you from making tarballs for people who don't want to use CVS. My original argument stands unmodified. Source tarballs are the standard distribution method for free software. I can see no reason for trolltech to disallow that other than to prevent independant development forks.
Bonobo is the GNOME component model. It is similar (albeit not as far) as the KOpenParts thingy I think. So in effect, it is a Gnome App.
***Beginning*of*Signiture***
Linux? That's GNU/Linux to you mister!
- Make sure that in optimizing the program interface for the two-minute beginner, you haven't pessimized it for the two-year daily-user.
- Keep it touch-typist friendly.
- Let me keep my eyes on the screen at all times, not on the input peripherals.
- Mimimize the context switches between mouse and keyboard. It slows me down. I can type much, much faster than I can mouse around.
- Minimize all required mouse use, because it causes RSI. Let me keep my hands on the homerow as much as possible, not dancing around the funny keys that require me to look down to find, like HOME, END, PAGEUP, etc. Put those on real keys.
- No prior Windows knowledge expected, required, nor in fact, even beneficial.
- All programs, configurations, library functions, and interfaces must be completely documented.
- Never make me do anything tedious and repetitive, like holding some an arrow key or a mouse for a long time just to move a large distance.
- I shouldn't have to read the library code to figure out how Gtk works, nor existing themes to figure out how to make a new one
- nor should I have to click on happycons to get some dribbled out set of web pages for how to run or configure a program
- The documentation should searchable, indexable, typesettable, and printable.
- Follow POSIX 1003.2 requirements that all commands have a minimal manpage.
- Scriptability. Automatability. All the knobs need to be exposed either via raw text files or else normal CLI programs.
- Respect for the user's existing preferences where applicable.
- X defaults -- If I have *visualBell: on, then that should suffice for all applications.
- stty settings -- If I think ^H is what I want to erase a character, don't make me use DEL or ^?, or worse still, the BACKSPACE key (which sends a ^H anyway) yet not Control-H). And if I have my werase set to ^W, pay attention to that, too.
- Preferred editor -- if I have an editor setting in my environment, don't make me learn a new one just for your program. Most toolkits' text widgets have insultingly idiotic editing abilities -- pop up my preferred editor instead, or at least, give me that option. Perhaps prefered newsreader, shell, mailer, etc should come into play as well, but the sorry excuse for an editor is the most annoying thing.
- A way to leverage existing knowledge of words. This may sound bizarre, but nothing is more frustrating to this Unix user than to have a program pop up a set of seventeen tiny graphical stickpin icons. Don't make me guess what your cutes idea of a neat bitmap for an exit or reload or search button is. Allow me the option of using real words, not happycons. And allow for keyboard shortcuts on all functionality.
- Don't make me suffer through a tedious manual search through scads of cascading menus each time I want to find something. There is no way to search, analyse, or print a cascading menu system. This is insane. A common mechanism provided by the low-level toolkit and managed by the desktop or window manager must be invented. Life is too short for hunt and peck. For example, the window manager could provide a way to search the menus of the current focussed program for a particular text string. That way you never have waste your life on an idiotic recursive but linear visual search.
That's enough for now. I'm sure it's far too late to expect almost anyone to read this. You might want to check out the short Unix as Literature or the longer In The Beginning for more background on Unix culture.