6
Apr
i slept on the living room floor last night. it felt good. a large body pillow on hardwood. mmmm. the computer played music to my sleeping head all night and the cats enjoyed not having to jump up onto the bed to harass me.
weekend after next i'm at Linux Fest North West in Bellingham, WA presenting on three topics: KDE 3.2 (and beyond), deploying KDE and developing with KDE. i'm driving out on Friday the 16th: ROAD TRIP! ok, so it's "only" 10 hours of driving. close enough. i hope to meet lots of cool people and help provide some KDE promo and support in that neck of the US of A. i wonder if i should pre-announce my presence there somewhere KDE-centric, in case some KDE folk would like to get together ...
and now for something completely different....
in his blog, Richard Dale moans about people hyperventilating over small differences between KDE and GNOME like file dialogs. i empathize. IMHO the #1 problem is that during development the two projects have different ways of approaching things.
KDE tends to look around and pick from what works if there isn't something already home grown. even when there is, cooperation is often a key point in decision making. look at the KOffice file formats, DBUS, XDG menus, etc, etc... this makes sense for KDE and for the larger desktop ecosystem.
GNOME tends to not care and just come up with their thing, whether or not its extensible beyond their own platform and whether or not it sucks. look at how they picked to switch button orders on dialogs. look at their new file dialogs. look at their VFS layer. yadda yadda yadda.
note that i used the word "tends", because both projects have acted out of character in certain situations. but generally, it's the way the two projects work.
personally i have nothing against trying new things and applaud those who are willing to give it a go. but i value consistency and a sane user experience over newness, and i also have a measure of respect for the travails of those who use a mix of apps (even though I don't personally do so).
predictions: watch what's going to happen with the new Evolution back end stuff. watch what's going to happen with KDE's multimedia layer in KDE4. watch the UI of KDE components like KDM (hint: it's already in kdenonbeta ;) and the UI of GNOME components like their file dialogs.
it's my pet peeve with the GNOME project, and one that i believe is a source of endangerment for the Free Software desktop as a whole. to be fair, i have pet peeves with the KDE project, but they aren't over issues that have extraproject ramifications. while the GNOMEs are stroking their collective chin over language issues, we need to remember the things that are truly important and lead by example by continueing to work on those things.
and no, i won't utter the word "GNOME" once in my LinuxFest NorthWest talks. i have a personal policy of not arguing in front of the kids ;-)
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look at the KOffice file form
look at the KOffice file formats, DBUS, XDG menus, etc, etc… this makes sense for KDE and for the larger desktop ecosystem.
Dead right. There are times when I haven't used a KDE application, and I've been glad to see these standards working so transparently.
GNOME tends to not care and just come up with their thing, whether or not its extensible beyond their own platform and whether or not it sucks. look at how they picked to switch button orders on dialogs. look at their new file dialogs. look at their VFS layer. yadda yadda yadda.
Well I agree there. Several people at Ximian have been jumping up and down like Steve Ballmer shouting "Oh my God! We must have an answer to WinFS!", and then we have the ill-conceived GnomeVFS/iFolder crap knocked up. Some of the WinFS stuff looks interesting, but I agree with Hans Reiser. Let's look at how it should be done and push forward the development of filesystems in general - a collaborative effort. ReiserFS 4 and onwards should be interesting, and it should spur on standards for Unix/Linux filesystems in general. That's how it should be done. A lot of what is going on around Gnome is just an attempt to integrate everything into Gnome, and it doesn't really do free desktops or free software any favours. What was that about Microsoft again?
watch what’s going to happen with the new Evolution back end stuff.
I can see what you mean there, and personally, I don't see the point in a lot - well - any of it.
watch what’s going to happen with KDE’s multimedia layer in KDE4.
Not quite with you there. What is going to happen to KDE's multimedia layer? Whatever it is, I hope it is sane first and foremost and not some daft drive for interoperability.
watch the UI of KDE components like KDM (hint: it’s already in kdenonbeta and the UI of GNOME components like their file dialogs.
Oh the vector, Cairo, Vairo, cector (whatever) thingumejog. The stuff attached to it is hype, it isn't spectacular from what I've seen and should be fairly easy to add onto KDE without meaningless fanfair. KDE already has really good support for SVG and alike, and it looks great. Useful, but the hype is rather like XAML, Indigo and Avalon?! Avalon - WTF is the hype with that? It's a nice name, but let's get a grip.
Don't know what you mean about the UI of Gnome dialogues - I'm looking at them and I don't like a lot of them. The new general file dialogue is nice, and the vertical scrolling of files and folders by default is much better. Something to learn there. There has beeen talk, however, of integrating Open Office into the Gnome HIG. I'd like to see that one!
On another note Aaron - are you allergic to capital letters? A busted shift key perhaps? Full stop, new sentence, capital letter is the general consensus. It must be the mobile phone text-messaging disease. Arrgghhh!
> are you allergic to capital
> are you allergic to capital letters?
yes. they make me sneeze.
are you allergic to capital
that's alright then!
GNOME tends to not care and j
GNOME tends to not care and just come up with their thing.. note that i used the word “tends", because both projects have acted out of character in certain situations
I think Havoc Pennington has a very pragmatic viewpoint - everything I've read or heard him say seems sensible. And I'm automatically a fan of anyone with a forename of Havoc :)
Here's how I see this sort of issue:
Q: What were you doing when the good ship OSS was heading straight for that huge white thing, the Microsoft iceberg?
A: Re-arranging the buttons on the file dialogs of course..
Havoc is pretty cool indeed.
Havoc is pretty cool indeed. there's been a few things i've heard him say that i haven't totally agreed with, but i can say that about anyone really (even myself... hehe) .. unfortunately Havoc isn't the GNOME project, anymore than Waldo is the KDE project. =)
Predictions
Maybe it's only me, but I didn't get it from your text: What exactly are your predicitions about the Evolution back end, the KDE 4 multimedia layer and the UI of KDM?
my prediction is that we'll s
my prediction is that we'll see the typical behaviours play out.
there's code in kdenonbeta that takes GDM XML layout files and displays them, with the idea of taking that and merging it with kdm. the end result, once all the coding is done (*knock on wood* ;), is that kdm and gdm will be able to share the same look and feel if desired. it will be yet another example of KDE working with the greater body of Free Desktop software.
the multimedia support in KDE4 is likely to find a new engine in replacement of aRts, if the discussions on kde-multimedia are anything to go by. all the candidates being considered are currently available multimedia systems, rather than a homebrew NIH-driven beast. one of those candidates is gstreamer, which shows how open the KDE project is to ideas no matter where they come from. (p.s. i'm not saying that gstreamer will become the KDE4 multimedia engine, so let's not start that rumour ;) i'm just noting that it's one of the options being considered)
on the flip side... the Evolution back-end for PIM stuff ... well, let's just see where it goes. i have my doubts that it'll end up as something useful outside of Ximianland.
or maybe i'm just a curmudgeon.
Ok wait a minute... maybe I'm
Ok wait a minute... maybe I'm just uninformed, but last time I checked, a lot of KDE developers were rejecting GStreamer because it uses glib and GObject. One even called glib "utter crap" or something. DBUS was flamed down because it had a dependancy on glib (note: glib is just a utility library for C and only depends on libc; glib is not GTK).
It's my experience that the KDE community is generally against adopting anything related to GNOME. A while ago there's a blog at kdedevelopers.org saying that we should abandon freedesktop.org. I've also read comments at dot.kde.org saying that libxml is a "gnome library" and therebefore KDE shouldn't use it.
Is it really true that KDE will adopt GStreamer as one of the backends? Does KDE 3.2 already support menu vFolders and the Freedesktop MIME spec (http://www.freedesktop.org/Standards/shared-mime-info-spec doesn't list KDE)? What about DBUS?
Heck, whatever happened to the shared GNOME-KDE HIG?
> One even called glib “utt
> One even called glib “utter crap
tell us another one
'we’ve been a standard bearer (excuse the pun) on FD.o'
bahahahahahahahahhahahahahahha