This is just bollocks I'm afraid. The toolkits in existence today cannot just be dropped, and there is absolutely nothing that Microsoft are doing, in Avalon or anywhere else, that cannot be done with existing tollkits and tools. What we need is just more unity, and I think we're going to get that. Qt is a commercial toolkit that companies are actually using - no one is going to obsolete this.
I'm suspicious when people say that GTK and Qt will become obsolete - this may be related to some political bollocks going on at Novell. Whatever, it is no excuse to tell everyone that you are inventing something new for the sake of it.
You heard me right. The right way to do a toolkit is to make it networkable in a client/server fashion. There are a few reasons for doing so:
I've seen Qt apps go over a network, and they look great.
This is markedly different from the current situation with GTK, QT, and all other Unix widget sets, each of which implements its own look and feel. A client/server architecture can, and should, abstract out the look and feel of the widget set.
What is required is some low-level commonality, not an entire over-arching new toolkit, otherwise you will simply get the forking situation we have today. We need to bring GTK, Qt, Java and others together in a decent common way that does not impact on the diversity of those toolkits and environments.
Do it that way and I think it's likely that you'll finally eliminate the one big problem on the Unix desktop: the disparity in look and feel between applications written for different widget toolkits.
This is Microsoft talking. You are not going to get one, Mono anything:). We need some common standards and implementions to bring all of the great existing technology together. If you go for one toolkit everywhere then you will literally doom free desktops to failure before they've even started. Linux/free desktops are not like bloody Windows, there is going to be diversity, and I just wish people, partiularly at Ximian, would get it through their heads.
I've seen this debate brewing for years, and as a developer on other platforms I find it plain silly. For years people around Gnome have said "Oh C, it's great, it is neutral and you can write your own bindings etc." It is quite clear that this is BS because you actually have to write that software with a language, toolkit and architecture that is structurally sound for what you are doing.
KDE solved this years ago by recognising that object-oriented development needed to be done, but at a reasonably low-level so that the base of the desktop environment was compiled natively and ran efficiently. Even at the time this meant C++, but C++ toolkits were never very good at all, even on Windows. That was the rational behind using Qt. This debate ended pretty much on the first day that KDE was conceived!
I laugh really, as the people who have whinged and whined have been proven to be, well; whingers and whiners.
I won't trust them. This just seems to be a long-term move to integrate a lot of stuff into hardware, including the trusted computing stuff, and try to convince us it is all for security.
Well a green processor is nice, but considering a modern Pentium consumes between 90 and 15 watts of electricity at idle, they should be looking elsewhere.
The CPL is not an open source license at all, as can be witnessed from its use on Eclipse. Use the GPL of the LGPL where appropriate (or BSD at a push) or nothing. I'm rather suspicious of the use of the CPL by IBM in Eclipse.
The lack of a GPL avenue for Eclipse has really halted its use within many open source projects of all kinds that are primarily GPLed. Notice that Eclipse has not been integrated into any desktop environments at all, even where the licensing is not a problem. So will be the case with this meaningless bit of tosh.
The prism54 drivers are good. However, there are a lot of cards that are leaving prism chipsets behind and using cheap crap. I bought a SMC card that I know works well with prism54, but when I got it I found out that it was the version 2 rubbish. Why can't manufacturers just stabilise wireless? No one will rely on it like ethernet if things continue.
Anyway, the SMC is going back because it has a problem with the receiver that makes the speed jump all over the place. Some of these wireless cards are just cheap muck. I've ended up going with a D-Link G520 (Atheros), but they're discontinuing them!
Is what all this identity management stuff is about. They have also said they want to embed it into hardware, not that I want to start any conspiracy theories or anything.
There's a long tradition of hysterical personal attacks from KDE supporters: remember Red Hat, Sun, Ximian... all have been subjected to this. Frankly, you are better off ignoring them; you can be certain that business people do.
Ximian, subjected to attacks. That's very funny. I think you can be certain that business people ignore Mguel Icaza and Nat Friedman.
Why, then, is Novell continuing with Evolution and not Kontact? Hmmmm?:-)
Novell is not continuing with anything at the moment. Besides, Suse hasn't been a part of Novell for long.
Also, a lot of KDE users use Evolution as well.
Don't know where you get that idea. I certainly don't.
Take a look at the design of each, Evolution's is superior (well, except in the case of imap - they both suck there, but I've noticed just today that there is an all new IMAP implementation in the Evolution source tree in CVS which looks to be _really_ good).
I have. Kontact is nice and modular, meaning you can embed its components in other things. Besides, it depends on what you're looking for.
I've also looked at KMail sources as I'm overall a KDE fan and was the first mailer I had thoughts about contributing to but their codebase is a complete mess.
Your opinion. I could say that no one in their right mind develops object-oriented GUI applications in C.
Evolution has at its core (asked on irc once) around 10 developers total, including GtkHTML development and QA. Kmail (which is only *part* of the KDE PIM suite) has approximately 50 developers (according to their website - kmail.kde.org)
Mmm, nice try. There are a core of developers paid to work on Evolution, and then there are numerous contributors. It is, afterall, a Ximian product. With KMail I expect you are looking at the authors page and every person who ever contributed to the project! This doesn't mean that they are still involved and it certainly doesn't mean that they are paid to work on it. Besides, I'm not talking about KMail.
Lets assume for the sake of argument that the contacts portion of the KDE PIM suite is only 1 developer and that there is only 1 developer on the KDE PIM Calendaring component. That's still 40+ developers more than the Evolution team, which, until recently, had almost no outside contributors (even if you add up all the contributors and count them as Evolution developers, you'd still have a far smaller count than 50).
See above. Besides, you're saying that if KDE PIM has one developer then that is 40+ more than Evolution. So Evolution has -39- developers does it?
Oh, and KMail at the very least has been in development for a number of years longer (ie. at least 2+ years).
I'm actually talking about Kontact here, which is something I can actually compare to Evolution. Kontact as a whole has been around for less than two years.
Shit, it even relies on a preprocessor to provide its signals and slots, and has its own implementation of simple STL constructs.
Yes, because everything else is shite. And the preprocessor crap - every bloody time. What do you think they should do? Write a compiler for every platform?
Slashdot Mirror
We currently use kde but are switching to bluecurve because of it's polish.
LOL! Care to define polish? This seems to be a marketing term bandied around by a hadful of people, and it's bollocks.
This is just bollocks I'm afraid. The toolkits in existence today cannot just be dropped, and there is absolutely nothing that Microsoft are doing, in Avalon or anywhere else, that cannot be done with existing tollkits and tools. What we need is just more unity, and I think we're going to get that. Qt is a commercial toolkit that companies are actually using - no one is going to obsolete this.
:). We need some common standards and implementions to bring all of the great existing technology together. If you go for one toolkit everywhere then you will literally doom free desktops to failure before they've even started. Linux/free desktops are not like bloody Windows, there is going to be diversity, and I just wish people, partiularly at Ximian, would get it through their heads.
I'm suspicious when people say that GTK and Qt will become obsolete - this may be related to some political bollocks going on at Novell. Whatever, it is no excuse to tell everyone that you are inventing something new for the sake of it.
You heard me right. The right way to do a toolkit is to make it networkable in a client/server fashion. There are a few reasons for doing so:
I've seen Qt apps go over a network, and they look great.
This is markedly different from the current situation with GTK, QT, and all other Unix widget sets, each of which implements its own look and feel. A client/server architecture can, and should, abstract out the look and feel of the widget set.
What is required is some low-level commonality, not an entire over-arching new toolkit, otherwise you will simply get the forking situation we have today. We need to bring GTK, Qt, Java and others together in a decent common way that does not impact on the diversity of those toolkits and environments.
Do it that way and I think it's likely that you'll finally eliminate the one big problem on the Unix desktop: the disparity in look and feel between applications written for different widget toolkits.
This is Microsoft talking. You are not going to get one, Mono anything
iAm sick of this iCrap. It is called iMarketing and iBranding. Are you Winsane?
I've seen this debate brewing for years, and as a developer on other platforms I find it plain silly. For years people around Gnome have said "Oh C, it's great, it is neutral and you can write your own bindings etc." It is quite clear that this is BS because you actually have to write that software with a language, toolkit and architecture that is structurally sound for what you are doing.
KDE solved this years ago by recognising that object-oriented development needed to be done, but at a reasonably low-level so that the base of the desktop environment was compiled natively and ran efficiently. Even at the time this meant C++, but C++ toolkits were never very good at all, even on Windows. That was the rational behind using Qt. This debate ended pretty much on the first day that KDE was conceived!
I laugh really, as the people who have whinged and whined have been proven to be, well; whingers and whiners.
I won't trust them. This just seems to be a long-term move to integrate a lot of stuff into hardware, including the trusted computing stuff, and try to convince us it is all for security.
Well a green processor is nice, but considering a modern Pentium consumes between 90 and 15 watts of electricity at idle, they should be looking elsewhere.
The CPL is not an open source license at all, as can be witnessed from its use on Eclipse. Use the GPL of the LGPL where appropriate (or BSD at a push) or nothing. I'm rather suspicious of the use of the CPL by IBM in Eclipse.
The lack of a GPL avenue for Eclipse has really halted its use within many open source projects of all kinds that are primarily GPLed. Notice that Eclipse has not been integrated into any desktop environments at all, even where the licensing is not a problem. So will be the case with this meaningless bit of tosh.
The prism54 drivers are good. However, there are a lot of cards that are leaving prism chipsets behind and using cheap crap. I bought a SMC card that I know works well with prism54, but when I got it I found out that it was the version 2 rubbish. Why can't manufacturers just stabilise wireless? No one will rely on it like ethernet if things continue.
Anyway, the SMC is going back because it has a problem with the receiver that makes the speed jump all over the place. Some of these wireless cards are just cheap muck. I've ended up going with a D-Link G520 (Atheros), but they're discontinuing them!
Is what all this identity management stuff is about. They have also said they want to embed it into hardware, not that I want to start any conspiracy theories or anything.
I read this as Seeing Eye Computer Goes Blind!
No he didn't. Suse 9.1 ships with vanilla Gnome, not Ximian Desktop.
:).
SuSE isn't standardized on QT;
Oh well, they musn't be using Qt as the front-end for YaST then
There's a long tradition of hysterical personal attacks from KDE supporters: remember Red Hat, Sun, Ximian... all have been subjected to this. Frankly, you are better off ignoring them; you can be certain that business people do.
Ximian, subjected to attacks. That's very funny. I think you can be certain that business people ignore Mguel Icaza and Nat Friedman.
So it "only" took 27 months for KDE to catch up to Gnome using Qt. Go Productivity Go!
Ever heard of start dates? Kontact was started less than two years ago. Evolution has been in development for four to five years.
Why, then, is Novell continuing with Evolution and not Kontact? Hmmmm? :-)
Novell is not continuing with anything at the moment. Besides, Suse hasn't been a part of Novell for long.
Also, a lot of KDE users use Evolution as well.
Don't know where you get that idea. I certainly don't.
Take a look at the design of each, Evolution's is superior (well, except in the case of imap - they both suck there, but I've noticed just today that there is an all new IMAP implementation in the Evolution source tree in CVS which looks to be _really_ good).
I have. Kontact is nice and modular, meaning you can embed its components in other things. Besides, it depends on what you're looking for.
I've also looked at KMail sources as I'm overall a KDE fan and was the first mailer I had thoughts about contributing to but their codebase is a complete mess.
Your opinion. I could say that no one in their right mind develops object-oriented GUI applications in C.
Evolution has at its core (asked on irc once) around 10 developers total, including GtkHTML development and QA. Kmail (which is only *part* of the KDE PIM suite) has approximately 50 developers (according to their website - kmail.kde.org)
Mmm, nice try. There are a core of developers paid to work on Evolution, and then there are numerous contributors. It is, afterall, a Ximian product. With KMail I expect you are looking at the authors page and every person who ever contributed to the project! This doesn't mean that they are still involved and it certainly doesn't mean that they are paid to work on it. Besides, I'm not talking about KMail.
Lets assume for the sake of argument that the contacts portion of the KDE PIM suite is only 1 developer and that there is only 1 developer on the KDE PIM Calendaring component. That's still 40+ developers more than the Evolution team, which, until recently, had almost no outside contributors (even if you add up all the contributors and count them as Evolution developers, you'd still have a far smaller count than 50).
See above. Besides, you're saying that if KDE PIM has one developer then that is 40+ more than Evolution. So Evolution has -39- developers does it?
Oh, and KMail at the very least has been in development for a number of years longer (ie. at least 2+ years).
I'm actually talking about Kontact here, which is something I can actually compare to Evolution. Kontact as a whole has been around for less than two years.
And that's not even getting into the lack of more the advanced constructs shown in Microsoft's Avalon/Indigo NEXT GENERATION TOOLKIT demos.
:). It is still vapourware.
:). Do you speak German?
Yer really excited about that
A German website writes an incorrect story... IN GERMAN... zealots translate it WRONGLY... and post to slashdot make ridiculous claims. Dumpfkopf.
I think you'll find it isn't translated wrongly
Shit, it even relies on a preprocessor to provide its signals and slots, and has its own implementation of simple STL constructs.
Yes, because everything else is shite. And the preprocessor crap - every bloody time. What do you think they should do? Write a compiler for every platform?
Novell/SUSE Linux Desktop Lead
Pretty much tells you everything. Ximian has been disbanded and Nat has invented himself a new job title.
Already have, on a PII300. It runs very, very well.
Since there is Ximian Open Office, why would he mention a Qt-based Open Office at all?
The journalist completely missinterpreted this, saying that SuSE is going to standardize on QT.
Suse has standardised on Qt.
1. Evolution is by far the better product
Nice reasoning.
2. Evolution has fewer developers than Kontact
Mmm, don't think so. And Kontact did not need paid full-time developers.