KDE Developers Discuss Merging Libraries With Qt 196
An anonymous reader writes "A proposal has been brought up with KDE developers by Cornelius Schumacher to merge the KDE libraries with the upstream Qt project. This could potentially lead to KDE5 coming about sooner than anticipated, but there's very mixed views on whether merging kdelibs with Qt would actually be beneficial to the KDE project, which has already led to two lengthy mailing list talks (the first and second threads). What do you think?"
Focus on the now. (Score:4, Insightful)
Keep the specifications as they are. Fix all the current issues and make a SOLID product. It's good, but could be a LOT more stable and tight. When that's done, then go for the big merge and add new features.
Tamran
3 phases of software (Score:5, Informative)
Basically, there's three phases of software:
1. Software that's in development. Sure, there's bad decisions made, but at least things are changing. After a decade of neglect, Windows seems to be back in development mode. KDE is definitely in development mode. Developers love this, because nothing has to be "finished" or "bug free." Everything can be a quickly hacked-together proof of concept.
2. Software that's in support mode. Almost nothing happens, except for a few patches. Mac OS X seems to be in support mode these days, same with Gnome. Support mode is actually a good thing for users who are used to the product, but developers will get bored.
3. Software that's dead. No patches, the developers abandoned the project. Eventually the users will disappear as well.
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As with any sufficiently large project, some parts of OS X are in developent mode, some are in support mode and some are only in support mode becuse they aren't quite old enough yet to drop outright. I
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KDE SC 4.5+ is a lot more stable than earlier releases. It was good enough for me to switch back from gnome (I switched to gnome a year or 2 ago due to KDE's instability).
To all those who think gnome is great and kde is unusable...well, gnome is great, I'll admit that...but with KDE so many apps have tabbed interfaces and for my work that means a lot less windows open and I can group similar tasks together. It makes a world of difference to productivity. Also mulit-monitor support is much nicer - I can
Re:KDE needs some competition. (Score:4, Informative)
What's actually wrong with Gnome?
I love it. It's not changed massively in the last few years, true, but I don't really get why it should. It works, it looks fine, it's pretty responsive and light enough for general use....
GNOME usabilty fixes (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead of a huge change like Gnome Shell, they should (also) be fixing just a few basic usability issues:
-when you select a file in Nautilus and do Ctrl+c or Ctrl+v, they icons should indicated that they've been copied or cut.
-the "Recently Used" in the File Open dialog saves you from a lot of needless folder hopping. But it should also include recently used folders as well (the folder of a file you just saved, plus folders you created recently). "Recently used" should also be present in Nautilus.
-if you c
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-the "Recently Used" in the File Open dialog saves you from a lot of needless folder hopping. But it should also include recently used folders as well (the folder of a file you just saved, plus folders you created recently). "Recently used" should also be present in Nautilus.
One word: No
Dynamic menus are the work of {insert malevolent deity}, as they break consistency and prevent any kind of meaningful support. What's on-screen for user A won't be the same as for user B, or for user B half an hour later.
And visible histories is also a privacy concern. If you do a presentation, you have to avoid bringing up any of the favourite menus, or your coworkers will see that your favourite folder is /home/user/Music/Britney Spears.
If you need to keep a folder visible, bookmark it.
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I agree with dynamic menus being bad (a la Windows XP and Office).
But this isn't that. It's just like the Recent Files in gedit, jedit, OpenOffice, and just about any other application.
The reason this is handy is because, on average, you're very likely to be wanting to manipulate a file you just saved. Example: I save a screenshot (with standard GNOME screenshot save), but I want to crop it. I go to Gimp, and in the Open File Dialog, click on Recently Used in the left hand list box, and it's the first file
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Thanks for providing a stepping-off point for my favourite rant of late. Speaking of Nautilus usability issues, how about fixing the following file browser deficiencies?
- Click-and-drag to select files does not exist
- No integrated file search feature
- The separate file search program provided in Gnome doesn't allow for even viewing, much less editing, a file's properties
- User date format preferences are not honoured in file open/save dialogs
- When a user clicks on a soft-link to open the file browser, Nau
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GNUstep has a lot of potential. However, there is a paucity of applications actually written for GNUstep in Objective-c and it is really going nowhere.
They should freeze the main libraries and infrastructure, and contrite on getting a nice web browser made. This is one thing that does not really exist yet. Yeah, you can run FireFox under Windowmaker, but it's ugly and bad. What they need is a lean, mean, webkit-based browser that is like a lite version of Safari.
Then we can bootstrap a few other necessa
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Why? You can run any browser you want in windowmaker. I recently went back to using windowmaker myself, and have to say it's really nice to use a wm that doesn't keep changing all the time, plus it's got to be *the* most configurable wm there is. Stays out of my way, everything works like it should. Install wmaker, wmakerconf, gmrun, terminal emulator and web browser of your choice, mc or worker, and that's your whol
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The crucial difference is that Windowmaker is not equal to GNUstep. You can run whatever you like in Windowmaker, but it will look all weird.
A GNUstep browser will have the good menu off to the side, instead of it being captive in the window.
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Why? You can run any browser you want in windowmaker. I recently went back to using windowmaker myself, and have to say it's really nice to use a wm that doesn't keep changing all the time, plus it's got to be *the* most configurable wm there is. Stays out of my way, everything works like it should. Install wmaker, wmakerconf, gmrun, terminal emulator and web browser of your choice, mc or worker, and that's your whole desktop right there. I think the only real reason people want a full-bloat DE is so they can clutter their desktops with silly doodads and not have to learn how to use the CLI tools.
The person I assume is alluding to the notion of a Native Cocoa WebKit Browser on Linux, within GNUStep, that leverages Services and an Extensions API to just develop for both Safari and say, Quest [Safari-Lite], for the GNUstep platform on FreeBSD and Linux.
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Having used both, I think that prize goes to FVWM. WindowMaker is nice, though.
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ok then, using your favourite OS, and without using the CLI do the following:
* you have a directory containing 1000 jpeg files with random filenames but with a .jpeg extension. .jpg extension instead (yes, using the GUI)
* rename them all to have a
* first, realise that what you've actually typed during this process is only about 3 keystrokes less than the CLI version (if your OS even lets you do it).
* now explain to someone else how to do it.
The CLI is much easier for some tasks. Sure, we shouldn't require
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Ever heard of Apple's Automator?
It's super, super easy to do this with Automator.
Now, let's try this one out:
You have 1000 JPGs that have a Adobe RGB profile. Make a CLI command line that will convert them all to sRGB, and rename them from .jpg to .jpeg.
This is a hell of a lot easier in Automator than on the command line.
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Using imagemagick: .jpg`.jpeg; done;
for f in *.jpg; do mogrify -profile sRGB.icc $f; mv $f `basename $f
You'll need to supply sRGB.icc, but otherwise it seems to work just fine for me.
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Why do so many programmers are still unaware of Bash's string-parsing built-in capabilities,
and prefer to use the 'basename' command instead?
For the above renaming one would suffice to type:
mv $f ${f%.*}.jpg
See: http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#Shell-Parameter-Expansion [gnu.org]
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Why do so many programmers are still unaware of Bash's string-parsing built-in capabilities,
and prefer to use the 'basename' command instead?
Why do so many 2nd generation Linux users presume that everyone uses bash?
Keep script snippets bourne shell and POSIX compatible, especially when posted to the public, so anyone can copy/paste them into the shell they use. Even if they use bash.
For this example, it's far from unthinkable that it would be run on a mediacenter appliance, most of which don't have bash (embedded tends to use busybox), but do have ImageMagick.
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I wouldn't say GNUstep's "it doesn't quite work" beats Apple's "it just works", even though the latter doesn't actually hold true all the time.
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When you desktop environment requires a RDBMS, you know something is broken.
For what possible reason do they require a true RDBMS rather than something like bdb or even sqlite if you want to get crazy? But frankly, why wouldn't you simply use xml (bottom of the list), flat files, csvs, or some such thing behind a configuration server?
Also, for what reason does one application and/or desktop need to relate to another application and/or desktop? This smells of a classic example of what happens when developers
Quanta? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why don't we finish some unfinished projects (Quanta) that many people are waiting for before changing things again.
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Good question! I was quite upset by Quanta lagging behind in kde-webdev kde3 and Kubuntu messing further with a kde-webdev kde4 missing quanta and mentioning it in content from the readme. How one can consider Kde seriously with such inconsistencies. By the way, I still enjoy Quanta as it is, despite some of its shortcomings of performance issue when you enter href or load project with thousands of files.
Re:Quanta? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because if you've paid any attention to the KDE project since 4.0 betas, you'd have realized they don't give a rat's ass about completeness, performance, stability and usability. They just want to change everything all the fucking time until all the users flock to something less flashy and more productive, and then the KDE devs will be free to play Starcraft all day long.
At least that's how it looks like from my perspective, as a developer who has been royally pissed ever since KDE 3.5 was deprecated. I lose gobs of time to bugs and crashes, but am also terrified to update for fear of breakage, as has been the tendency with every minor release of 4.x. I still can't make reliable use of something as fundamental as FTP and SSH kioslaves. You think Quanta's fucked ? I've reverted to a Kate + kioslave workflow and I still run into issues - screw debugging, I can't even tell if my file is going to save properly.
I think the KDE devs need to call for a feature freeze, get what's already in there into a usable and stable condition, long before contemplating superficial topics like merging libs. Necessity trumps vanity.
Re:Quanta? (Score:4, Interesting)
They just want to change everything all the fucking time until all the users flock to something less flashy and more productive, and then the KDE devs will be free to play Starcraft all day long.
So why haven't you moved to something less flashy and more productive? I certainly have and I suspect a large number of others have too. The straws that broke this camel's back were the ridiculous weight of the "semantic desktop" and the seemingly endless supply of visual fluff that adds nothing to utility.
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XFCE for the last few years now... before that was IceWM, and before that was GNOME 1 or at least GTK1 based GNOME.
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I changed to xfce recently after trying KDE 4.x for the 2nd time after 12 months (debian lenny to squeeze). The first time, I backed out of my upgrade. The second time, I took a friend's advice and switched to xfce. It's more stable than KDE (kdm locked up my screen twice in a day), much faster, and things mostly work the way I expect.
Re:Quanta? (Score:4, Interesting)
I have: XFCE. I still use Kate and kio though. A few times a day, I have to run a few killalls to reap zombie kio processes, but at least the WM doesn't get in my way anymore.
Re:Quanta? (Score:4, Informative)
You do realise that the guys writing kdelibs aren't the same ones who'll be working on Quanta, right? Quanta should be the domain of the kdevelop/kdewebdev guys, not the kdelibs/kdebase guys.
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I wish I had such talent, I was using we in the figurative sense.
Trying to find an "in" (or just some good status updates) into the Quanta project is currently an effort of reading through multiple outdated development sites. Those that I had found more resent babble on about it being included as plug-ins or something in the new KDE development tools but does not seem to be approachable yet for a web developer like me.
What about Qt? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What about Qt? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure it would be convenient for the KDE folks
If you read the mailing list threads, you'll see that many KDE people don't find that proposal convenient at all because it has the consequences of massive restructuring, different release cycles that don't match SC's, Nokia's currently lacking code submission process, etc.
Maybe and just maybe some select KDE components may end up in Qt but that can legally only happen if Nokia moves away from the currently mandatory "right to relicense" (not the same as copyright assignment but similar in practical terms).
Qt: Bringing code from home can corrupt a project. (Score:2)
Could you explain the "right to relicense" and provide a link? I don't see a reference to that on the Qt web site.
This paragraph [nokia.com] illustrates two issues with Qt: 1) a possibly impossible licensing provision, and 2) managerial sloppiness. Quoting exactly:
"You must purchase a Qt Commercial Developer License from us or from one of our authorized resellers before yo
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Not really, Qt is LGPL licensed and you can switch from GPL to LGPL licensing (according to the FAQs) so the worst case is that you have to follow the LGPL as far as the Qt libraries do.
As Qt is licensed per developer, they would presumably be covered when working from home as well.
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Qt is on LGPL for some time now. What you wrote was true few years backwards.
http://qt.nokia.com/about/licensing/
It's still true today. You can probably do anything you need to do under the LGPL, but in the event you find some need to have a commercial license, then you still have exactly the same old impossible model. Whoops, we have to rewrite all the code from scratch, since we didn't begin development with a commercial license. Or we can just pretend we started over from scratch, since there's no way to prove anything.
Their commercial licenses are a completely stupid model.
Easy for a company to make a legal mess? (Score:4, Interesting)
"Can I switch from using Qt under the LGPL to commercial afterwards?
"No. Users of the LGPL versions of Qt need to comply with the LGPL licensing terms and conditions. Qt's commercial license agreement contains a restriction that prohibits customers from initially beginning development with the LGPL-licensed version of Qt and then transitioning to a commercial version of Qt."
Four sections earlier, the FAQ says this, in part:
"... If you are uncertain as to whether or not you will be able to comply with the LGPL requirements at the time you begin your development, our recommendation is that you purchase a commercial license as it gives you the flexibility to decide licensing (commercial or LGPL) at the time of distribution."
It seems to me that it would be easy for a company to create a legal mess for itself. What a company will do in the future cannot be foreseen.
What would happen if a developer at a company who did not have a commercial license, but was using a free license, contributed to a commercial project? Often there are discussions about architecture, and someone may contribute ideas for an architecture that are later adopted. The sociology of programming is not as clean as Qt licensing apparently considers it to be.
Note that this problem was not created by Nokia. It existed when Qt was owned by Trolltech.
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That clause was a clear shot at people trying to get away from paying for Qt. Without the clause, one could basically develop commercial applications without paying for Qt licenses, then cough up only when caught, claiming previous development followed the open-source license and "just so happens nobody asked us for the source code".
Trolltech used to depend entirely on revenue coming from Qt licenses, so obviously they wanted to minimize this sort of loopholes.
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If you read the mailing list threads, you'll see that many KDE people don't find that proposal convenient at all because it has the consequences of massive restructuring, different release cycles that don't match SC's, Nokia's currently lacking code submission process, etc.
It would also be extremely inconvenient for the KDE folks to have to make their code work with standard C++. Exception safe KDE will not happen any time soon.
Re:What about Qt? (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea was to merge the parts that would be usefull in Qt, so that answers the questions: Yes, for the parts that makes sense it would be a benefit: Better datetime classes, better config system, asynchronous IO, MIME parsing etc.
It is also obvious that some parts of kdelibs (especially runtime parts, such as ), really wouldn't make sense in Qt anyway.
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they should wait for the smoke to clear in qt, so postpone this by 6 months or so.
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The thing I'd worry about here is not so much bloating Qt as diminishing Qt's code quality. Qt's code base is one of the best C++ libraries I've seen. Whether you're a fan of KDE or not, I hope you will admit that it's a bit arcane. Cause and effect are often difficult to connect, and complexity is rampant. Whenever I've tried to debug KDE apps, I've felt like the learning curve was more of a wall. It would be a shame to take something clean like Qt and push KDE into it wholesale.
Now, if it were
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I'm not much of a programmer, but as a Debian user I agree whole-heartedly. I use Gnome, and I really don't like the seemingly superfluous K-bloat I get stuck with when installing some packages. If this proposal is adopted, then anything Qt-related will bring in still more unnecessary bloat.
BTW, this kind of bloat seems to be on the increase throughout Linux.
No! (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll fork it if I have too!
Re:No! (Score:5, Funny)
Qt is working on modularizing itself. So you could just not compile the bits you don't want.
Dear lord, it has already become alive and self-modifying? Someone shut it down before it's too late!
GPL vs. assignment? (Score:2, Insightful)
I don’t really see how they should be able to merge as long as Nokia requires copyright assignment.
KDE is GPL. Qt is unfree OR LGPL OR GPLv3, as the developer wishes. Qt with KDE could only be GPL.
And I don’t see a reason to deprive free software developers of the advantage which KDE offers them over developers of unfree software.
Re:GPL vs. assignment? (Score:4, Informative)
KDElibs is LGPL and has always been LGPL, common libraries in KDE have always been required to be LGPL so that they could be used by "unfree software" (as you write). Only KDE applications are usually GPL to protect themselves better.
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LGPL != right to relicense.
Obvious? Yes.
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Yes, I know that. I didn't adress that part on purpose. That is a political discussion, something that Nokia may or may not decide to change.
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And they'd lose the freedom to modify the license, like for example when they decided to make it LGPL as well as GPL. That is pretty big. And for what it's worth, many companies still reject any form of open source so dropping the commercial license would be rather huge loss of income for Nokia. In short, it's not going to happen just to please KDE.
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Qt is already LGPL, they have essentially already accepted that income "loss" in order to promote wider use of Qt.
God no (Score:5, Interesting)
After seeing the last attempt at cooperation over Phonon - which was half-implemented in Qt, then Nokia went with Qt Multimedia while KDE continued evolving Phonon but all the new things aren't in Qt I wouldn't want them to try. Some of the functionality that exists on the KDE layer should be pushed down into Qt, but most should stay out otherwise there will be far too much platform in the toolkit.
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Phonon is one example. Another brought up in the discussion was QPrinter vs KPrinter, though that has an entirely different background. With QPrinter, KDE was forced to make a suboptimal decision because KPrinter had no maintainer and it seemed unlikely to be even get ported to Qt4, let alone well integrated, before KDE4 was to be released.
Oh, hey, look -- (Score:5, Insightful)
KDE considers yet another massive reorganization and new version! Certainly this won't affect usability or the long term future of the project at all, just like the transition from KDE3 to KDE4 didn't!
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"KDE" considers nothing. A few people from within the KDE community play mind games but nothing is an official consideration by the whole KDE community.
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A reorganization wouldn't harm KDE too much. KDE 4.0 wasn't unusable because of the reorganization, but because of the new and unfinished desktop shell. The KDE apps that were ported worked quite well and their interface was pretty much the same.
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Somebody wants to change their brand, it's on them to make it known to me. I'm not checking *pedia 'just in case'.
Probably a non-starter due to copyright assignment (Score:3, Insightful)
Currently Qt requires copyright assignment (as I understand it) for code to become part of Qt proper. This is going to be a non-starter for a lot of open source folk. As I understand it,this was one of the biggest issues with the OpenOffice.org project in terms of community health, and one of the main drivers for LibreOffice. Qt has gotten away with it better because most of the things people want to do with Qt USE the toolkit instead of CHANGING the toolkit, but it remains a concern. As long as that restriction is in place Qt remains extremely dependent on Nokia continuing development. To date they've done an awesome job - Qt is arguably the best option for cross platform open source graphical application development out there - but longevity for open source is measured (at a minimum) in decades. Corporate good will is thin ice on those time scales - what if Oracle bought Nokia? Could "LibreQt" succeed as a community project without the considerable resources being funneled in by Nokia, if it ever came to that pass? (OK, the other side of this coin is that Qt is ALREADY essential to open source - that concern exists regardless, but it's something to think about in a move like this. Would putting the relevant kdelibs functionality in Qt result in less community familiarity with the code over time?)
Anyway, the KDE devs who wrote the code in question would have to sign on, and to me that sounds like a long shot. The other option - Qt devs implementing Qt versions of features currently in KDE and then KDE moving to the new stuff - sounds slightly more practical but would require a serious manpower commitment.
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It's not just the copyright assignment: it's also the fact that Qt is now controlled by a huge organization (much like OO.o is). Nokias goals for Qt may already be quite different to KDE
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It's not just the copyright assignment: it's also the fact that Qt is now controlled by a huge organization (much like OO.o is). Nokias goals for Qt may already be quite different to KDEs goals for kdelibs, and if something is certain it's that corporate interests change. We cannot tell what Nokia wants to do with Qt next year, or in in five years.
Everybody is in agreement on where Nokia is. Mobile is tier one, everything else is tier two, the question is really if KDE should keep making thin convenience classes like KIcon on top of Qt's QIcon or just hand that stuff to Nokia. By being in kdelibs it should already be LGPL, so really the question is can Nokia do something useful with a little desktop-oriented code they could put in a fully proprietary app instead of a proprietary app using LGPL libraries. I suppose it's possible, but I think it's more
It depends (Score:2)
It depends on which functionality they really want to move to QT. If I understand it correctly they want to move the plasma stuff, which is GUI code, to QT. That makes sense. Just like moving GUI stuff from GNOME to GTK and GDK. However, it makes no sense if they want to move other parts of the application model to QT. It would not hurt, but there would be no benefit.
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1. It's Qt, not QT.
2. Qt contains far more than just gui code, and many of the underlying KDE libs would fit in well. I've seen MIME handling mentioned as just one example.
I say "No" (Score:2)
I don't know about you, but I had a REALLY hard time getting used to running tshark instead of tethereal.
Can you imagine the havok if we suddenly have KQtDE, KQtonqueror, KQtXSLDbg, KQtBibTeX, KQtSVN, KQtDiff3, KQt9Copy, KQtb3, and so on?
Madness! Re-tooling this many brains is NOT worth it!!
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There, that wasn't so bad, was it?
Not yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
How about they fix the steaming bloat-fest that is KDE4 before thinking about KDE5?
LK
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http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html [joelonsoftware.com]
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No one is arguing for software that does less. People are arguing for efficiency and stability.
Re:Not yet... (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no "KDE4". What do you mean by "KDE4"? Platform 4(.5)? Plasma Workspaces 4(.5)? The whole Software Compilation 4(.5)?
Uh yeah, that's part of the problem. Enough with the silly names. Did you really not know what he meant?
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as a longtime kde user, i don't really know what "software compilation" is. and i don't want to know. that brand-splitting was a bad decision - imho, of course.
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KDE4 is KDE4 and you can spam all the discussions you want, this will not change.
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Did you really not know what he meant?
No. What part is supposedly bloated? The applications? Is Marble bloated? Is Gwenview bloated? I don't think so. Therefore the applications part of the SC can't be the problem.
So the Plasma Workspaces. Plasma Desktop is meant to be used similar to classic GUIs like K Desktop Environment 3.5, GNOME 2.x, or Windows. The libraries that serve the foundation are small. libplasma is a mere 3MB in size. Since on top of libplasma KDE produces also a netbook shell as well as a smartphone shell and both run well on t
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Pretty much.
It really doesn't matter how you slice it up, the result is that my KDE4-powered desktop and my KDE4-enabled apps are at once a big step forward and a big step back. This was true well after the official 4.0 release of any of the above, and even 4.5 is still missing much of the functionality that made 3.5 great.
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I don't understand what you're saying. /bin on Linux doesn't contain all the user programs (like konqueror, gedit, and so on). Those are at /usr/bin . /usr/local/bin is designated as the receptacle for non-package managed programs (manually compiled). I think that works well because all of them are kept at one place.
And /opt is supposed (also) be a place for software packages. Chrome uses this, and that's good for software that has a lot of stuff in sub-directories.
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You do not know what you are talking about.
First of all, Windows Vista and KDE SC 4.0 has lots of differencies. KDE SC 4.0 was first release of the fourth generation of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE Plasma Desktop, KDE Platform, KDE Applications, KDE Development Platform. Does not include OS, System libraries, application libraries and most of the KDE or Non-KDE Apps) and in other corner, Windows Vista was a software system with NT operating system, Desktop, Application programs, Application libraries,
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Gnome VFS (Score:2)
>For example kio_slaves or gnome's vfs which are great features (for sftp, ftp, etc...)
This.
For those that don't know what he's talking about: Open up Nautilus. Do File: Connect to Server. You get a dialog asking your for your (S)FTP login info. Connect.
Now you can open up remote files in gedit or whatever. Copy/paste/drag, etc.
Works for WebDAV and Windows shares, too.
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Phoronix can turn half a sentence on a blog or a mailing list into an article. Then they do half a year of "still no sign of..." follow ups. The forums are good, so are some of the more obscure news but it feels like a RSS of a couple mailing lists (wine releases, linux kernel releases etc.) at times.
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It's a great source for following the development of Mesa and X.org.
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> I take Phoronix (and ArsTechnica's Open Ended) any day over badly researched sites with moronic troll admins like OSNews.
I read neither.
Phoronix is a pest and I would be glad if it died.
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You got that completely wrong. The reason there's Gnome stuff in Meego and not KDE stuff is because Meego is a merge of 2 older distributions that used Gnome stuff by default. They only added Qt because Nokia bought it in the mean time.
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Stop spreading lies. Nokia takes lots of KDE to MeeGo and helps KDE a lot. KDE also uses GLib in many places.
MeeGo IVI is not based on Clutter. It uses Qt. See http://meego.gitorious.com/meego-ivi-ux/ivihome/blobs/master/launcher.cpp [gitorious.com]
MeeGo Netbook uses Clutter because it's just the continuation of the older Moblin GUI which was based on Clutter and Intel found it pointless to rewrite it.
Nokia is probably the biggest (at least one of the biggest) corporate sponsor of KDE -- for example Aaron Seigo in employed
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You confuse the Netbook UX itself with applications.
Yes, Chromium is written with GTK. Yes, same with Banshee and Evolution Express.
MeeGo Netbook UX itself is written using the Mx toolkit and not GTK.
It's a bit confusing because you have to tell the difference between the MeeGo project and the code that resides in its git repo (which in this case is the UX and almost nothing else) and MeeGo as Linux distribution that ships with GTK apps.
I meant the former and I'm sorry that I didn't make myself clear.
Re: (Score:2)
Why would you do that?
Opera (Score:2)
The thing about Opera is it takes too much resources, and it's too slow. You can watch it redo a page, whereas Chrome is instantaneous with Ctrl+Page'ing through pages. That was Opera latest on Karmic.
offtopic (Score:2)
(nice offtopic trolling but) Opera works rather fine for me (i.e. instantaneous). I'm using Debian though.
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I realize it's offtopic, but I don't know why it's a troll.
I actually like the fact that there's competition in the browser market, and I usually install Midori, Chrome, Chromium, Epiphany, and Lynx, in addition to the default Firefox. Of those, Chrome+Chromium see the most usage, followed by Firefox, then occasionally Lynx.
I just downloaded Opera 10.63, and it's looking better than before. There are some annoyances, but some cool things, too.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, "too much resources and slow" line is usually trolling <troll>unless it's about desktop application written in Java</troll> as browsers nowadays must do many things. Besides Opera resource usage is based on total available/free memory AFAIR.
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Because it's pointless and Konqueror is far better in every way?
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Subjective. Besides Konqueror now uses Dolphin part for file browsing AFAIK.
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Don't think I didn't notice that some crappy behaviors of Dolphin have infected Konqueror. For example, if my cursor is midway through a large directory, enter a sub-directory and then click 'back', my cursor should be where it was, not at the top. I could make a list, but even if it was a mile long I suspect your opinion would not change.
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This works for me as expected for some reason (Debian testing: KDE 4.4.5).
Corporate-phobia (Score:2)
There's a bug going around the OSS community that causes some to see corporate monsters where there are none.
Not only that, but it also causes them to brainstorm or take pro-active action against corporate sponsors because their Palantirs say they "might" stop support at some unspecified future date. See LibreOffice. Does nothing other than annoy the corporate sponsor, divide the community, and thus possibly bring up that exact scenario in a self-fulfilling geek-martyrdom prophecy.
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>But may I ask: What does your "corporate-phobia" post have to do with the previous posts?
I have no beef with your post [slashdot.org]. Nokia is indeed a KDE patron.
I was just using corporate-phobia to describe the feeling that inspires "Qt (Nokia) doesn't care about KDE".
Which, IMHO, is just FOSS community whining that they don't really love us. I mean, do we need corps to rock RMS to sleep, and then we'll be satisfied?
Corporations use opensource for their own advantages, but that doesn't mean we have to constantly fe