Working together (Was: D-Conf)

[Kevin Krammer]

On Sunday 06 March 2005 14:01, Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> 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.

True, but you wrote "need to start", which is IMHO quite unfair regrading all 
the hard work for shared things so far. 

> 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.

And it is happening if I have a look at the posting of the last few days, 
isn't it?

> 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

Well, yes, ideally the GUI part of an application would be runtime changeable 
to fit the ideas and workflow of the current user.
Realistically I'd say that is not very likely in the near and mid-distant 
future, but it is realistic that the actual functionality can be shared 
between different applications for the same job, e.g. PDF renderer between 
PDF viewer applications, bookmarks shared between browsers, addressbook data 
shared between address resource frameworks, etc.

> 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.

I think that is too much simplified. The main goal is the same, providing easy 
to work with GUI, but there are a lot of different ways of achieving the same 
task, so there will hopefully always be respective applications for the same 
task.

It is the long time of few companies dictating how something should be done 
that makes us forget that there are different and possibly better ways of 
doing it.
For example it is surely nice to search for an application on a download site, 
download it and run the installer, but I really really prefer searching in my 
distributors package repository and have the application downloaded, 
installed and configured in one go.

> 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.

You can still run the other desktops' applications and if we start argumenting 
about percentages how come we don't just implement the Win32 API, after all 
that is very likely the one most application developers target now.

I remember one of the KDE developers once wrote in his blog that is doesn't 
matter much if we draw user over from GNOME but a lot if we draw users over 
from platforms that have user numbers magnitudes higher than we do.

> I like to stress that these discussions are an attempt to get the
> concept of a common configuration-system accepted. 

I might have fallen to a misunderstanding here, my native language isn't 
English, but I got the impression that the concept and advantages of a common 
configuration system are accepted and that the interested parties are already 
discussion details?

Cheers,
Kevin