LinuxWorld: Why KDE Apps Have A Bright Future

In what started as a series on KDE versus GNOME, columnist Nicholas Petreley has concluded the run with an article that details why he feels the future for KDE/Qt is so bright. He points out a few shortcomings in KDE (like the lack of tabbed browsing in Konqueror or underlining of typos in KWord -- both in CVS!) and says he feels confident that the KDE developers will fill those gaps. "Put simply, the KDE class libraries and examples are a brilliant testimony to reusable objects done right. Features such as the sophisticated file dialog and toolbar functions are obviously a part of the standard KDE class library, which is why most KDE applications now include them. If you upgrade the file dialog, all applications that use it get upgraded automatically." Basically, it's a essay for the layman explaining why a good foundation of coding tools is important for the final product.

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Comments

by harhar (not verified)

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by Evan "JabberWok... (not verified)

I like KDE. This is a KDE site. The articles you quote have only one semi-point to them: KDE is slow. Check out the developer and user mailing lists, and you'll see that's a top priority right now, and has been since KDE 2.0. Other than that, they are pointless as an emotional "Windows Sucks!" or "OSX Rules!" essay - they carry no information. From reading both of these, I can glean totally nothing about Gnome2, or why it might be better.

Now, having said that, I'll ask you (and all other Gnome users and fans) to seriously search for a good essay on the strengths of Gnome compared and contrasted to KDE. The final result can be "Gnome is a better system". For that matter, I'd like to see articles on KDE compared to Windows XP, compared to OSX and compared to anything else out there. All of those articles would be on topic on a KDE site. I'm sure Navindra wouldn't mind publishing such an article, and I *know* that many people here would be interested in reading a well thought out essay that compares KDE against other desktops - even one that comes to conclusions unfavorable to KDE.

After all, a well thought out essay on KDE's flaws can turn into a roadmap for future development. And that's what open source is all about. Don't forget - we're all on the same team. Gnome's early html render engine was based on kfm's engine, and KDE and Gnome have worked together towards interoperability on quite a few levels. There is no "winner", except for the user who has a desktop he likes, and a developer who can be proud of what he or she has created.

--
Evan

by aleXXX (not verified)

A quote from your second url: "... but the KDE project looks increasingly like a house of cards sitting on a dodgy foundation."
Did you ever write a single line of code for KDE ?
Then you would know how ridiculous wrong this statement is.

IMO KDE has currently only two problems: speed, and maybe too much options/configurability.

If Gnome 2.0 turns out to be better, we will do our best to catch up.
We both want to "win" :-)

"Ueberholen ohne einzuholen !" ;-)

Bye
Alex

by norman (not verified)

The base desktop is very stable (The kicker, icons, WM) But some of the applications are not. Konqueror tends to crash a lot and it even hangs on pages that it shouldn't. Konqueror isn't very stable when it comes to HTML, and it could do with faster response times when looking through large image diretorys. Im even losing confidence in Konqueror and I am using Mozilla 1.1a instead. which is the most stable Alpha program I've ever seen. I think if The KDE team added a crash reporting system like Mozilla and WinXP has it would help find those stability bugs.

by Xarva (not verified)

I think KDE is alot better than it was 4 year's ago. Develouper's should come to relize the computer's are getting alot faster thing's are getting alot better, But just because the speed is there doesn't mean they need to add another line of code. They should refine some of what's already been written to optimise for more responsive load times. Also the Xine video player is awesome just they forgot that some dvd movie's have special features and button menu's there is no way from what I could tell to select those. That's a feature that's needed to enjoy dvd music video cd's.

System:
Mandrake 9.0