Beauty and Magic for KDE, with Zack Rusin

Linux Today points to an interview with Zack Rusin which was conducted at aKademy 2005. Topics include his employment by Trolltech, his contributions to X.org and upcoming technologies and eye-candy Zack demoed at the conference. A German version of the article was published by Golem.de.

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Comments

by manyoso (not verified)

Zack, "Plasma will blow you away. Nothing you've ever seen or will see in the coming years will come even close to what you'll experience with Plasma. And that's a promise."

Now that is some serious hype! Not that I doubt you and Aaron and the rest can achieve it, but that is one heck of a promise.

Now, what I want to know is... how is the Zack-Super-Snackerific-File-Manager coming along? ;)

by ac (not verified)

Zack talks like that all the time... pay no attention. ;)

by Mark Hannessen (not verified)

at least he's a motivated open source guy then ;)

by am (not verified)

"I don't think I'll be releasing a huge secret when I say that Qt will soon natively support SVG 1.2 and will utilize it on many different levels (that includes support for animations!)"

This is HUGE! Will this be integrated with QT 4? Is this native or will it be using KSVG2? Finally SVG will be supported somewhere else, besides on mobile phones (SVGT).

I don't know how *soon* that can be since the 1.2 spec is changing all the time right now, but this is very encouraging news.

Great work and how about some screenshots of the presentation?

by Christian Loose (not verified)

> Will this be integrated with QT 4?

the quote is a little old but probably still valid:

"We intent to support SVG better in the future (possibly Qt 4.1)"
http://lists.trolltech.com/qt4-preview-feedback/2005-01/thread00062-0.html

by Mario Fux (not verified)

I thought or better read in the past that the development of Xgl was stopped (by RedHat?) but Zack says that Xgl is the future?

by Jean Roc Morreale (not verified)

Jon Smirl is no longuer working on XeGL but xgl is still alive, and Zack made the promise to finish xegl when he'll have time.

by manyoso (not verified)

No worries, shouldn't take Zack more than an afternoon or two...

by furanku (not verified)

I have no doubt about that since I have read that he even adds impossible things to Qt ;) :

"If something is either impossible or incredibly hard to do I go off and make sure it works there before we add it to Qt."

by mOrPhie (not verified)

Qt is the driving-force for Zack, to implement lowlevel features which Qt will benefit from. Has doing that took you to discussions with GTK/Cairo-people about whether they could benefit from it to? After all, we have 2 popular toolkits, not one. :)

I'm a KDE user, but I'm just curious. ;)

by Levente (not verified)

Probably it's just me, but I think if gtk people want some of those features, they should be the ones to pick them up and port them to gtk, not the other way around.

by Jack H (not verified)

On the other hand, KDE and GNOME aspire to many of the same goals. Even if they try and approach them in very different ways, surely there is a means by which they can work together, so that they don't do the same job twice. It seems as if KDE and GNOME both need the underlying graphics technology to be capable of a certain number of things in order to enable them to accomplish their dreams, so in order to achieve this level of technology, it seems to make sense to me that they should co-operate.

by anon (not verified)

Don't worry, they do... it's called X.org ;)

by Jack H (not verified)

Haha! Well, I hope you're right. Are there really very many people from KDE & GNOME contributing to X.Org? I'd be very interested to know.

by Tim Sutton (not verified)

Wow. So many acronyms....so little clue what they all mean :-p All I can say is if it means a slicker, shinier, more visually rich linux desktop experience, bring it on!