GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition [LWN.net]

GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

Posted Dec 13, 2005 19:14 UTC (Tue) by cventers (subscriber, #31465)
In reply to: GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition by Lockjaw
Parent article: GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

Fair enough - GTK can be swallowed easily by an individual developer
without the authority of management. But for some project (or series of
projects) in, say, Linux desktop applications at even a tiny companty to
be at all successful, your revenue will probably have to exceed
$1500/year quite a bit. So what's $1500/a head/a year to you, especially
when it includes support? Not saying blow your money... not saying you
made the wrong decision. Just saying Qt isn't particularly expensive.

If you look at Trolltech's commercial customers, they include companies
like Adobe. I'm seriously hoping that their Qt license purchases go to
making portable Photoshop, etc. Because frankly, for large projects like
Photoshop, especially, Qt is more "commercial grade". And it's backed by
a company with money to lose in lawsuits, which companies like for
reasons of assurance. And they sell support. If Adobe were to port its
suite to Linux, it still wouldn't be open source, but it would be very
good news for the Linux desktop.

Forge ahead, Trolltech. Forge ahead full speed.

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GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

Posted Dec 13, 2005 23:15 UTC (Tue) by mepr (subscriber, #4819) [Link]

You have put your finger on maybe the most relevant reason why a corporate, closed project would choose gtk over qt, the issue of releasing software packages for public use. Using QT means every time the c++ libraries go through another abi incompatability, the packages relying on that abi have to be rebuilt and rereleased. So you have redhat, ubuntu, suse, debian as probably the 4 most popular linux desktop packages, and none of them guarantee abi compatibility amongst themselves at any time. I upgraded my ubuntu install to breezy, and now flash is half broke, where by half broke I mean any given flash app has a 50/50 chance of working. And macromedia is one of the more supportive companies, as far as client, desktop, consumer software.

Welcome to library dependency hell.

GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

Posted Dec 16, 2005 1:10 UTC (Fri) by thedevil (guest, #32913) [Link]

cventers wrote:
If you look at Trolltech's commercial customers, they include companies
like Adobe.

Interestingly enough, though, Acrobat Reader 7.x is gtk. And in terms of
ui it seems to me better than any of the free PDF readers.