Novell will (continue to) support KDE after all

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

On November 15, 2005 22:59, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> Christopher Browne wrote:
> >>I love it if they tried to bring the two together.
> >
> >I hate to say this, but that's the classic clueless response.
>
> Maybe clueless (in some contexts), but nonetheless valid.
>
> The 99.99% of the public that neither knows nor cares about the
> difference between C, C++, C# and whatever else is relevant, has a
> legitimate beef. To the non-technical end user, it's a legitimate
> wonder of how much effort has needlessly gone into duplicating
> effort.

My experience with the "clueless" is that they have no idea how 
complex software development really is so I doubt they are thinking 
of duplicated effort and such. They think that once you've finished 
painting the "screens", the only decisions left to be made are the 
colours of the buttons.

> How much better might the open source desktop be if all the
> programming, human design and documentation skills of the community
> been funnelled into one program rather than split between two (or
> more) desktop systems?

I think we would be poorer for it, not richer.

> This is not like the diversity of Linux distributions, because the
> differences in them is usually more than internal design or
> personal taste. Many distros serve different and specialized
> purposes. OTOH, KDE and GNOME serve very much the identical
> purpose.

That's a subjective thing. Having developed apps with GTK and with Qt 
(upon which KDE is based), I very much prefer Qt.

> This long ago stopped being a contest of innovation, since neither
> GNOME nor KDE really is doing anything groundbreaking (from the
> users' perspective).

I beg to differ. There are some innovative projects in KDE and Qt, 
e.g. DataKiosk and Qt-COCO to name two. There may be interesting 
stuff going on in Gnome as well but I do not follow Gnome very 
closely since I do not use it and avoid Gnome apps where possible.

> Elegance of internal design is a fine issue 
> for insiders, but there are many people who can't tell Riesling
> from Shiraz and there are many who can't (and don't want to be
> bothered to) pick a winner between KDE and GNOME.

So just because many can't tell the difference between Riesling and 
Shiraz, we should all drink Baby Duck? Where is that Marcel fellow 
from Chez François when you need him? Oh the horror!

> >They are implemented in different languages, with very different
> >designs, and even attempting to "fold them together" is certain to
> > be fruitless.
>
> Moreover, most of the ideas that one does first get re-implemented
> in the other.
> Korganizer, Evolution
> Kopete, Gaim
> etc. etc.
> versa, and in many cases neither is fully cooked or anywhere as
> easy to use as either the Mac or Windows counterparts. We're
> playing catch-up, while having our progress seriously impeded by
> religious arguments over languages and other issues that in the
> grand scheme of things are just geek minutiae. This isn't so much
> technical Darwinism as it is (in this case) a needless
> fragmentation.
>
> I interpret (and support) Ted's plea as wanting the FOSS desktop to
> be a collaboration of diverse input rather than a bunch of
> gratuitous and generally redundant wheel re-inventions.

The logical extension of your argument is, "Why bother with Linux?" 
Proponents of Windows, Mac OS, BSD, and other Unixes could also say 
that Linux is nothing more than "a gratuitous and generally redundant 
wheel re-invention" and they would have a point. After all, it is not 
like Linux is crafted by the gods or something.

> FOSS proponents dismiss such POVs at their risk.
>
> - Evan
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis Corporation
3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

+1 416-410-3326
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