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My two cents ... again and again
by Artem S. Tashkinov on Friday 28/Mar/2008, @14:23
I couldn't help saying that. (Before you start parrying, please bear in mind, that I've been using Linux/KDE for the last five years exclusively).

Aaron utters very nice words but in general he's lying here and there.

First of all, enterprises do not care about cross platform possibilities of KDE/Qt. They care much more about money savings and viability of their software solutions. Do you know why Windows is still tenfold more popular amongst developers than Linux and even Java? Because once you wrote your application you can run it for decades (!) without recompilation and burdensome duty of keeping track of your [open source] API breakage which happens daily in Open Source libraries. Do you know why people are very much unwilling to move from KDE 3.5.x to KDE 4.0.x? Because while KDE/Qt devs think how wonderful new KDE and Qt are there are plenty old really necessary applications which are almost abandoned by their own developers and it's next to impossible to use them in your newer shiny KDE. Open Source is wonderful but general users are *not* programmers. And general users have strong habits. My wonderful KDE 3.x applications are now left in dust because ... no one cares.

My second point is that ... we already have Java. We have .Net managed code. We already have XML driven user interface. While KDE4 is a fantastic DE, the world has already moved further to a point where recompilation is not necessary at all. And you just cannot supply your shiny KDE4 binary to Windows users.

The third point is that ... well, Qt is not a native UI renderer in Windows. It doesn't feel native in Mac OS. Have you ever seen Qt applications in Windows - they all look oddly. They have many problems with elements positioning and they feel and act differently then native Windows applications.

The fourth point is that Qt is not under LGPL or any other less restrictive than GPL license. That's why most ISVs use LGPL'ed GTK+ libraries under Linux. I still hope that Nokia will relax Qt's license and I hope KDE E.v. will follow.

The last and and not the least point of weakness is applications start up time. KDE team alone have more than 50 active developers and the same application compiled for both Linux and Windows, will start in Windows at least two times faster than in Windows. Users *do* want instant applications launch.

Other random thoughts on the topic of Linux/KDE.

One of KDE developers has recently said: "nobody in their right mind would choose Windows over GNU/Linux based on the desktop experience alone." I became almost furious over this sentiment.

Do you know why people still prefer to *pay* for buggy, virus prone, registry breakage prone Windows? Because Windows offer extremely *polished* desktop experience. Once set up properly Windows doesn't tend to crash here and here. Windows offers *keyboard only* driven GUI (you can virtually do anything without using a mouse) - the thing which is still *not* possible in *any* Linux DE.

KDE developers still argue that smooth scrolling is not necessary, while Windows users have had it since ... 1997. And some people dare to say that smooth scrolling is very CPU expensive. Down right lies.

What people really care is the smoothness of their desktop experience. The absence of crashes and annoying bugs. And there are bugs and wishes kept abandoned for years whereas hundreds of users vote for them.

It's all so sad.

I'm very glad KDE has progressed that much in recent years, but I feel like nothing has changed since 1998 when I'd first encountered Debian Linux.

All hail KDE!
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Re: My two cents ... again and again
by Borker on Friday 28/Mar/2008, @14:41
If that cost you 2 cents I'd ask for my money back if I were you. Perhaps the clue store is having a sale and you could pick one up with the money you saved.
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  • Re: My two cents ... again and again
    by ZOMG BBQ on Saturday 29/Mar/2008, @02:15
    LOL - I give that a 10 out of 10.
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Re: My two cents ... again and again
by Borker on Friday 28/Mar/2008, @14:46
to expand a little... when calling someone a liar it might be nice to back it up with something a little more solid than your vague opinions
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Re: My two cents ... again and again
by Leo S on Friday 28/Mar/2008, @15:35
>> First of all, enterprises do not care about cross platform possibilities of KDE/Qt.

And you know this how?

>> Do you know why Windows is still tenfold more popular amongst developers than Linux and even Java?

A true PFTA statistic

>> The third point is that ... well, Qt is not a native UI renderer in Windows.

Qt integrates very well into Windows. I've never received a complaint from a customer that it is not native. Lots of windows apps use Qt and nobody even notices.

>> They have many problems with elements positioning and they feel and act differently then native Windows applications.

You obviously have no idea what you're talking about.

>> will start in Windows at least two times faster than in Windows

Now you're not even making sense.

>> KDE developers still argue that smooth scrolling is not necessary

Thank god. I hate smooth scrolling
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  • Re: My two cents ... again and again
    by Andreas on Friday 28/Mar/2008, @21:10
    >>> KDE developers still argue that smooth scrolling is not necessary

    > Thank god. I hate smooth scrolling

    I like it but not when it feels laggy. It takes longer to smooth scroll because the animation takes (a little) time so delays are unavoidable. Thus, smooth scrolling is laggy. Maybe with a speed setting or a very high default speed we could talk about it. In fact, smooth scrolling when using search in KPDF/Okular is awesome =)
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  • Re: My two cents ... again and again
    by MamiyaOtaru on Friday 28/Mar/2008, @22:24
    Ditto that. Smooth scrolling drives me nuts. At least Kopete offers a way to disable it.
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    • Re: My two cents ... again and again
      by Artem S. Tashkinov on Saturday 29/Mar/2008, @16:25
      > Ditto that. Smooth scrolling drives me nuts. At least Kopete offers a way to disable it.

      Somehow 1 billion Windows users don't run mad over it. How come?
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      • Re: My two cents ... again and again
        by Segedunum on Saturday 29/Mar/2008, @17:24
        "Somehow 1 billion Windows users don't run mad over it. How come?"

        Because they're stuck with it if they have it, that's why.

        It has a tendency to feck screen readers as well as mouse scrolling. It's not a spectacular feature. Really.
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Re: My two cents ... again and again
by Jos And on Friday 28/Mar/2008, @15:41
Lying is not the right word.. he's just promoting KDE 4.0.x and he just shouldn't because the quality is not there.
You can do what i intend to do if you stick with Linux/*BSD/Whatever and things do not improve substantially for 4.1 - use Gnome as desktop and KDE apps as needed. I'll try to get used to Gnome even tough its going to be pretty annoying and use my prefered KDE apps - Kmail, Kate, Quanta, Konqueror etc.
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  • Re: My two cents ... again and again
    by Grósz Dániel on Friday 28/Mar/2008, @17:08
    You can use KDE 3.5.* until 4.x matures. Kate and Quanta (AFAIK) are not yet ported to KDE 4 do you have to use the KDE 3 version so it makes more sense to use KDE 3 as DE.
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    • Re: My two cents ... again and again
      by Paul Eggleton on Friday 28/Mar/2008, @17:48
      FYI, Kate is working, Quanta for KDE 4 is a work in progress IIRC. I'm happily using KDE 4.0.2 on Kubuntu here on my laptop, with apps like K3B, Kontact, KNetworkManager, digiKam still as KDE 3 applications.
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      • Re: My two cents ... again and again
        by Grósz Dániel on Friday 28/Mar/2008, @17:51
        Sorry, somehow I associated with Kile. Kate in KDE 4 is great, indeed.
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      • Re: My two cents ... again and again
        by Jos And on Saturday 29/Mar/2008, @01:19
        Kate KDE4 is not doing it for me, so i just removed it and most other KDE 4 apps. In fact only my wife uses KDE 4 apps - and it is only the games; patience and minesweeper of some kind.
        What i find pretty amazing with KDE is that there is no compliancelist for apps and Desktop enviroment and therefore no way to verify apps and DE. So in fact releases are made without verification and improvements are mostly bug-squatting. That, I suppose, is the reason for - NOT the bugs - the missing functionality.
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  • Re: My two cents ... again and again
    by Artem S. Tashkinov on Saturday 29/Mar/2008, @16:33
    > Lying is not the right word..

    My fault, sorry.

    However KDE will not ever become a good development platform without the things I've mentioned. Even relicensing of Qt/KDE libraries under LGPL will greatly increase the adoption of KDE amongst developers. Even most prominent distros (Ubuntu and Fedora/RHEL) have chosen GTK over Qt due to this reason. And Qt is such a great toolkit (actually much more than that)!
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    • Re: My two cents ... again and again
      by Segedunum on Saturday 29/Mar/2008, @16:47
      "However KDE will not ever become a good development platform without the things I've mentioned."

      KDE is the only Linux desktop with a half-decent development platform, and that comes from using Qt. Gnome doesn't have any kind of development platform that developers can pick up and use in a straightforward fashion, unless they use Mono. Beyond that, you're pulling in GTK, libXML, Cairo and all sorts of other libraries that behave and program completely differently. No ISV looking from the Windows and Mac worlds will touch that with a ten foot barge pole.

      "Even relicensing of Qt/KDE libraries under LGPL will greatly increase the adoption of KDE amongst developers."

      Qt already has a very vibrant software community, and quite frankly, I see very few actual ISVs out there using GTK (at all) because it is simply LGPLed. ISVs want quality development tools they can pick up, not zero cost stuff that doesn't work well and isn't usable.

      The dual licensing means that investment goes into Qt, and KDE then gets better with each successive version of Qt. LGPLing something means that you accept people will have less incentive to contribute code back to the software, and that's the price you pay for 'developing for nothing'.

      I suggest you do some googling, because this has been discussed umpteen times before.

      "Even most prominent distros (Ubuntu and Fedora/RHEL) have chosen GTK over Qt due to this reason."

      Ah, not that old chestnut. It's done Ubuntu and Red Hat a fat lot of good supposedly standardising on GTK. The quality and depth of the graphical tools produced is woeful, and as long as that continues GTK will continue to hold Ubuntu and Red Hat back.
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    • Re: My two cents ... again and again
      by Kevin Kofler on Sunday 30/Mar/2008, @00:27
      What do you think this is?
      http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/KDE
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Re: My two cents ... again and again
by Grósz Dániel on Friday 28/Mar/2008, @17:36
"Because once you wrote your application you can run it for decades"

If the software is maintained, recompilations do not make a problem and for open source software under Linux it is usually done by distributors. Unmaintained open source software usually is not worth much and one cannot rely on it. Closed source Qt software are usually available with statically linked Qt - in this case future API changes (which occur only at major version changes) also do not matter.

"My second point is that ... we already have Java. We have .Net managed code"

I am not sure if it would be better to interpret some bytecode for the convenience of providing one binary for all platforms. (More precisely, I am sure: I wouldn't waste my CPU with using non-native applications much.)

"the world has already moved further"

Say the world has moved (or is moving). I am not sure if further.

"recompilation is not necessary at all"

On Linux that is done by distributors. For Windows binaries, AFAIK it will be done by the KDE on Windows team. Up to this point it works smoothly (as KDE developers do not have to care about compiling, just writing the code and binaries appear in distros). If you develop proprietary software, it is more difficult to make it work on all Linux distros (although solvable with static linking) but it is not more difficult to compile (statically) a Qt program on Windows than to compile a native Windows program.

"your shiny KDE4 binary to Windows users"

Again, you can, just an other binary.

"will start in Windows at least two times faster than in Windows"

What do you want to say?

"Windows offers *keyboard only* driven GUI (you can virtually do anything without using a mouse) - the thing which is still *not* possible in *any* Linux DE."

What can be done with keyboard on Windows that cannot be under KDE?
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  • Re: My two cents ... again and again
    by Imruska on Wednesday 02/Apr/2008, @04:43
    "Windows offers *keyboard only* driven GUI (you can virtually do anything without using a mouse) - the thing which is still *not* possible in *any* Linux DE."

    "What can be done with keyboard on Windows that cannot be under KDE?"

    Well, I do not know, but unfortunately there are certain things that cannot be driven by keyboard in KDE.
    One issue in question are the vertical "side tabs" in Konqueror. Navigating between the various tabs (root directory, home directory, services etc.) can only be done by mouse (I tried to find a possibility to assign a key combination, but I failed. So if there *is* a way to do it, I would welcome any suggestions.) The same with Kaffeine and Amarok (they also have these vertical "side bars").
    [ Reply To This | View ]
    • Re: My two cents ... again and again
      by jos poortvliet on Wednesday 02/Apr/2008, @06:47
      with tab you should be able to give these tabs focus, and then you can open them... Haven't tried it, though.
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      • Re: My two cents ... again and again
        by Grósz Dániel on Saturday 05/Apr/2008, @04:46
        I could open sidebars with tab but I couldn't focus in them. Anyway, I don't se any reason to navigate such an interface with keyboard - with keyboard typing in paths with completion is much more convenient. I don't think many users choose Windows because they can navigate such things in Windows.
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Re: My two cents ... again and again
by Jonas on Friday 28/Mar/2008, @17:38
Well, I will only respond to two points here.

First, I've seen (and used) Qt apps run under Windows and they certainly feel native to me.

However, even if they were slightly different in an aspect here and there...well, they're in good company then. Not even Microsoft's own software maintain a consistent look and feel to them. Vista looks and behave in one way. Internet Explorer is slightly different and not consistent with Vista as a whole. Office 2007 deviates even more, and so does Windows Media Player. Windows users don't seem to mind, so if Kontact (for example) doesn't blend in completely is unlikely to be a major showstopper. It may or may not be suitable for other reasons but it's un-nativeness is essentially a non-issue.

And as far as your beloved KDE3 apps go...what's stopping you from using them in KDE 4? Those I've tried run just fine in KDE 4 with no recompiling necessary. True, they don't take advantage of the new features but a Windows app made for XP won't take advantage of Vista's new features either (but there's no guarantee that they will run. API breakage is not exactly unheard of in Windows or MacOS X either).
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Re: My two cents ... again and again
by fred on Friday 28/Mar/2008, @21:14
>> Do you know why Windows is still tenfold more popular amongst developers than Linux and even Java?

Because most of the best applications and the most useful applications for users out there are written for Windows. And the users are not programmers, they will not care if about binary compatibility ;).

>> My second point is that ... we already have Java. We have .Net managed code

Use java to build a ultra-complex Graphical User Interface to achieve cross platform and avoid recompilation? Thanks, but no.

I have already had enough experience with it. Java is good for server-side applications and client side applications that don't need too much ultra-fancy painting capability. Java VM + bytecode interpretation will make your program slow as turtle (I don't care if people say Java is not slow anymore, my measurement still says Java *is* really slow)

>> Because Windows offer extremely *polished* desktop experience
Maybe true
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Re: My two cents ... again and again
by Stefan Majewsky on Sunday 30/Mar/2008, @08:07
> Windows offers *keyboard only* driven GUI (you can virtually do anything without using a mouse) - the thing which is still *not* possible in *any* Linux DE.

A friend of mine has a notebook with a broken touchpad. He's using his KDE 3 just with the keyboard, and that does not slow his workflow down.
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Re: My two cents ... again and again
by jos poortvliet on Wednesday 02/Apr/2008, @06:44
Do you know why people still prefer to *pay* for buggy, virus prone, registry breakage prone Windows? Because Windows offer extremely *polished* desktop experience. Once set up properly Windows doesn't tend to crash here and here. Windows offers *keyboard only* driven GUI (you can virtually do anything without using a mouse) - the thing which is still *not* possible in *any* Linux DE.

Polished? Windows is anything but polished... Start ms word doc, minimize it, open a second word doc, the other one is maximized - totally crazy. Or try alt-tab - most apps open a 'hidden' extra window, making alt-tab incredibly annoying. Need more examples? Open a bunch of webpages so the taskbar starts to add all windows into 1 button. Now enlarge the tab bar - no matter how much room there is, it won't put em back individually. And have you ever heard of focus stealing prevention? Redmond clearly hasn't (Yeah, it's Lubos, our KWin maintainer who invented it some years ago). And I can go on and on... Linux does ALL of these things perfectly, has done so for years.

And you complain about keyboard driven gui - most Windows apps can't change shortcuts, entirely unlike KDE - where you can always change all shortcuts. We're lightyears ahead in that area...

If there is ONE desktop which is extremely unpolished, it's MS Windows. By far.
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Re: My two cents ... again and again
by Frank on Saturday 05/Apr/2008, @00:05
> My second point is that ... we already have Java.

How much market share has Java on the Desktop? Right.

> We have .Net managed code. We already have XML driven user interface. While > KDE4 is a fantastic DE, the world has already moved further to a point where
> recompilation is not necessary at all.

KDE also has "XML-driven User interface" (KXmlGUI). Of course that doesn't cover all your application, as the actual GUI is always only a tiny part of the app. And in Java, the vendor has to maintain binary compatibility as well.
E.g. you can't add a method to a public interface without breaking BC.
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