Interesting, but not all brilliant

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Interesting, but not all brilliant
by Tom on Friday 09/Jan/2004, @09:39

This, at first, seems excellent. In theory we could now see lots of GNOME applications, particularly those for which there is no suitable KDE equivalent, integrating nicely with KDE's most important technologies, namely the kio_slaves, DCOP etc.

But one thing worries me: maintenence. Will Beep Media Player need to be patched in every release to make this work, and will someone step up to do this, to provide a KDE version? It seems that if a development team chooses GTK & GNOME, they do it because they want to use those toolkits, and so it will often require outsiders to maintain KDE versions, which could only make things far messier.

Unless, of course, in the future this thing can become standardised so that you select in KControl or some similar place to use KDE widgets in place of Gtk/GNOME ones, and it automatically applies to all applications, without needing any recompiling. But that seems unlikely.

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Re: Interesting, but not all brilliant
by Derek Kite on Friday 09/Jan/2004, @10:01

What this makes possible is having applications use the services of the desktop under which it runs. A user is confronted with one set of standard dialogs, file open, print, etc., no matter what applications they run.

The applications could check what desktop is running, and display the appropriate dialogs.

Yes it would be more maintenance for the developers, but a huge step forward for the users. Imagine all applications using the same print dialog, no matter what framework they are based on. It's not a matter of which print dialog is better.

Derek

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Re: Interesting, but not all brilliant
by Tormak on Friday 09/Jan/2004, @10:12

What I think they need is an intermediate library that both KDE and GTK/Gnome apps use for things like file open's, etc. that chooses the correct dialogs depending on the environment you are in.

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Re: Interesting, but not all brilliant
by cies on Friday 09/Jan/2004, @10:33

You worrie about maintainance? I guess quite some distro's will hapily apply/maintain/contrib patches to GTK apps that dont have a Qt/KDE equevalent.

I'm even looking forward to distro's that will go so far in 'polishing' their desktop feel.

I don't use and will not use GNOME, I have enough speed and i like my desktop to look good. I think this effort for building bridges between Qt/KDE and other toolkits (GTK, OOo) is special, if not unique.

Hopefully GTK/GNOMEers will also put efford to 'naturalize' Qt/KDE apps, this way their desktop experience will also grow.

Cies.

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Assumptions
by Ian Monroe on Friday 09/Jan/2004, @15:20

You assume that Beep wouldn't accept a patch to have an extra KDE compile time option. As the tutorial shows, it could be done without adding much source code bulk and no binary bulk to those who don't want it. It wouldn't be that much maintain. There wouldn't need to be a fork or anything. Thank you C macros.

Gentoo users could decide which way they want it, other distros would decide for their users based on what their primary desktop is.

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