My main personal objection against KDE is... it's boring like hell. They don't aspire to anything really outstanding and pushing boundaries. Well, yeah, a solid Linux desktop with a good old season 1997 design is outstanding. But what next? They didn't dare to implement CORBA for some performance considerations and scratched their own, incompatible component framework (Moore's law, anyone? Do we need to design systems to strictly fit this year's performance limitations? And what did ORBit folks smoke when they were planning their thing?). Konqueror feature-wise is where Netscape 3.x have been years ago. And KDE doesn't have crazy companies on its side, who can use up 11e6 bucks to develop world's most trippy file manager and don't ask money for anything meaningful.
GNOME folks may be verbose, but they do look as a bunch of illuminati, who deliver to the world rather than "the rock-solid Linux desktop". ORBit, Pango, Bonobo are not GNOME-bound, they're just great new open software! Gnome-VFS, Ximian Setup Tools -- yes, because we're living in friggin' 2001.
They've built their own development IDE based on C++ (arguably the most popular development language for large-scale projects).
For large-scale projects where everything is written from scratch, maybe. But for core libraries used by hundreds of applications written in dozen of languages, it's a pain. Name mangling rules change with every other release of a particular compiler, and forget about linking output of different compilers. TrollTech folks have to be cautious to add new virtual methods to base classes, because it breaks binary compatibility.
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My main personal objection against KDE is... it's boring like hell. They don't aspire to anything really outstanding and pushing boundaries. Well, yeah, a solid Linux desktop with a good old season 1997 design is outstanding. But what next? They didn't dare to implement CORBA for some performance considerations and scratched their own, incompatible component framework (Moore's law, anyone? Do we need to design systems to strictly fit this year's performance limitations? And what did ORBit folks smoke when they were planning their thing?). Konqueror feature-wise is where Netscape 3.x have been years ago. And KDE doesn't have crazy companies on its side, who can use up 11e6 bucks to develop world's most trippy file manager and don't ask money for anything meaningful.
GNOME folks may be verbose, but they do look as a bunch of illuminati, who deliver to the world rather than "the rock-solid Linux desktop". ORBit, Pango, Bonobo are not GNOME-bound, they're just great new open software! Gnome-VFS, Ximian Setup Tools -- yes, because we're living in friggin' 2001.
For large-scale projects where everything is written from scratch, maybe. But for core libraries used by hundreds of applications written in dozen of languages, it's a pain. Name mangling rules change with every other release of a particular compiler, and forget about linking output of different compilers. TrollTech folks have to be cautious to add new virtual methods to base classes, because it breaks binary compatibility.