The freedesktop.org discussion in three simple points

Thursday, 29 January 2004  |  tjansen

I think the whole discussion can be simplified with three points that hopefully everyone can agree to:

  1. In the next 12-24 months the only way to get a somewhat competitive desktop is to pile up code from all sources, including kde and gnome, and try to integrate them somehow
  2. If you think about the architecture of a desktop in 5-10 years, this mixture of pure C code, Gnome/Glib C code, KDE C++ code, Python, Bash scripts, maybe Mono C# code etc, all with different API conventions and wrapped by various wrapping mechanisms, all that sounds like a horrible nightmare that no one really wants
  3. Whether you like freedesktop.org or not depends on whether you want to have a usable desktop soon (thus today's desktop has a high priority for you and the future a low priority), or whether your goal is to have the best desktop at some point in the future (future: high priority, today: low priority)

Make your choice.