Working together (Was: D-Conf)

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Sun, 2005-03-06 at 12:49 +0100, Kevin Krammer wrote:

> Thank you for pointing that out, we must have been subscribed here for pure 
> fun reasons until now and only "incidentally" use the same specifications for 
> things like application starter menu, trash, notification area/system tray, 
> window manager hints, ...

It's still two completely different development environments.

It's still two completely different desktop user environments.

At this moment are all desktop distributions still or heavily based on
GNOME or heavily based on KDE.

Yes. We are working together at some levels: On the basic infrastructure
of a desktop. On the things users see as obvious (drag and drop.
cut,copy and paste. menus, trash, etc etc). Finally we are doing this.

The one thing I've so far found very nice and interesting is the fact
that the notification area/system tray of both KDE and GNOME
applications can work shared on both desktop environments. Thats indeed
"very" nice and it's this type of integration I want in "all" aspects of
the desktop.

I thank those people who are responsible for that evolution on the free
desktop platform.

What I mean with working together is that for example the configuration-
system, the VFS-layer, the window manager, the filemanager, the panel
and the session-infrastructure should (in the end) be shared softwares
or preferences of the user.

So basically and indeed .. thats everything of what we call "the
desktop". My opinion is that the difference between KDE and GNOME should
in the end be a DEVELOPER-only choice. In such a way that the user just
doesn't know nor has to know whether he or she's using a KDE or GNOME
application at a specific moment. The type of integration that it
doesn't matter at all.

The differences between KDE and GNOME most people experience are
configuration settings and defaults. I can perfectly create a GNOME
setup that will make it extremely hard for a common user to know whether
he or she is now using GNOME or KDE. We are NOT creating two completely
different systems here. We are sharing the exact same goals.

If Interface Guidelines are the main difference. Why not create an
option that sets your desktop environment in Apple or in Windows or in
whatever style? Why does it need to be GNOME and GNOME applications. Or
KDE and KDE applications?

In stead, at this moment, it's very very hard to get simple things like
themes match together. And on application development level it basically
means you have to choose sides. Or GNOME or KDE. 

And we are both loosing developers cause of this. When you develop a
desktop application, you're always targeting only 50% of all freedesktop
users. Never more. That makes it less interesting to develop it.

Note: I dislike wxWindows solutions. IMHO they don't solve the problem.

On a virtual machine which aims to let you create platform independent
applications, such solutions (SWT-style) make more sense. We can create
this desktop independence on a higher level.



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