Qt/GTK Skinning

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Mon, 2005-07-25 at 11:08 +0300, Kalle Vahlman wrote:
 
> > For the user "shared themes" is one of the components to make this
> > happen. Other components are "shared infrastructure" like a shared VFS,
> > a shared configuration system, a shared calendar, a shared contact list,
> > a shared presence notification system, a shared panel, a shared file
> > browser and a shared multimedia infrastructure and framework.
> 
> Secondly, If you have all of those shared, what remains to be different?

In my humble opinion should the competition between KDE and GNOME not be
about competing on infrastructure. But rather about competing on desktop
applications their implementation.

Or perhaps nuances or little differences in "user" experience. I can
imagine that KMail would want to make a different "user" experience than
Evolution. They don't have to look exactly the same. That's not what I'm
suggesting or saying.

They should, however, share the contact list. And if both support
calendaring, they should share the calendar data!

And they could share the e-mail settings. That way switching between
KMail and Evolution wouldn't be a such a big step for the user.

Lets be honest: Our users don't care about us wanting them to keep using
Evolution or KMail. We, as freesoftware warriors, shouldn't try to make
it difficult for the user to start using that other application. We
created this environment to support our vision of a free software
infrastructure. Right?! Then how come we are making it difficult for
"users" to really "use" our softwares?

Why are we competing on infrastructure level?!! Why did we started doing
that?

> Unless you mean "way to store calendar data" by "calendar" for
> example, and then it's not infrastructure that should be shared, but
> standards.

I can imagine that a service would have to deliver this information to
the applications that are in need of it. That service, like a database
or whatever, being a process or not, being a standard or a file or
whatever, ought to be shared. At this moment: It's not.

Or the library (with or without daemon) that creates "the virtual
filesystem abstraction layer": This is infrastructure. Not just a
standard. It's a library. It's a piece of software. It's something that
ought to be shared. We didn't share it! Why not?

I question again: Why are we competing on infrastructure level?!! Why
did we do that?

> > Therefore I think it IS an appropriate question for xdg-list. Since it's
> > one of the important components that ought to be shared by KDE and
> > GNOME.

> A mutually used standard for theme description would be nice , but I
> suspect that at implementation level there is so much variation that
> it'll come down to toolkit-specific hacks (as is the case with
> metatheme) which kind of defeats the whole idea.

In that case both the KDE and the GNOME people should stick their heads
together on some meeting and decide to alter their theming engines so
that the concept of a shared theme becomes possible. It's not hard, it's
just combining some politics with engineering. My idea was that the
concept of a free software community was all about finding a way to
combine politics with engineering. But Oh my .. I was so wrong.

These days I'm not sure anymore whether or not I'd really like to be a
member (a developer) of this free software community. We suck at the
"politics" part, you know. We suck hard.

What do KDE or GNOME gain from competing on that level? How is it
interesting to force our users to install two themes? How is it
interesting to force our artists to create two themes? What are we
trying to achieve with that?!! World domination on the desktop? Trying
to do it that way is hilarious.

We are making our communities and softwares insignificant simply because
we decided to compete each other on the wrong level. Our potential users
will NOT accept our wars. Our potential users want it to "just work".
They don't care about ... KD-whatever or GNO-whatever.

So I repeat myself: The concept of "a shared theme" is an extremely
important subject for the freedesktop(.org) community.



-- 
Philip Van Hoof, Software Developer @ Cronos
home: me at pvanhoof dot be
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org
work: philip dot vanhoof at cronos dot be
junk: philip dot vanhoof at gmail dot com
http://www.pvanhoof.be/