KDE = Joy [LWN.net]

KDE = Joy

Posted Dec 13, 2005 20:18 UTC (Tue) by mgb (subscriber, #3226)
In reply to: GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition by cventers
Parent article: GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

>One of the reasons KDE continues to be such a joy for me is because of
>how many features are hiding right under the covers.

Yesterday I had a problem with an application window that had content off the right side and resizing disabled. It took ten seconds of clicking to discover some KDE controls which allowed me to temporarily override the window size. Right click title bar - Advanced - Special Window Settings - Geometry. Exactly where any logical person would look for them.

And the Qt libraries are just as logical. GUI programming is easy and fun with Qt. GTK may be easier than Xlibs, but its nowhere near as productive as Qt.

We've started with the default Gnome in several distros but always become frustrated and switched to KDE. Now we always install Kubuntu - on our own systems and for our clients.

And yet: Long live Gnome! Competition helps both.

--Mike Bird

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KDE = Joy

Posted Dec 13, 2005 22:06 UTC (Tue) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link]

For comparison, where does other window managers put that control? How would you go about doing the same thing in Gnome?

KDE = Joy

Posted Dec 14, 2005 6:00 UTC (Wed) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link]

Historically I've reconfigured all the window managers I've used for more than a few hours such that they don't understand the "disallow resize" window hint to begin with. Sometimes the "reconfiguration" is done by editing the config files...you know the ones...every window manager has them...they typically come in a big tarball, and you edit the ones ending in ".c", then type "make" or something similar to update the WM config. ;_)

Hints that disable window controls seem kind of silly to me. Putting on my naive-user hat for a moment, I expect that if you can resize one window, you can resize any and all windows. Actually, before I actually used a Macintosh for the first time many years ago, I had read about user interfaces and I assumed that you'd be able to pretty much move, edit, and resize anything you like in any application while it was running. Needless to say, I've been disappointed with everything that has come since.

IMHO, applications that can't cope with window resize at all (e.g. those that behave in some anti-social or useless way when the WM blithely ignores the application and reconfigures its window anyway) should have some kind of default panning or scaling behavior imposed on them, preferably transparently so that the clueless application has no idea this is happening. The only reasonable excuse for disabling WM controls would be in an airport-kiosk type of situation--in which case it would make more sense to disable the controls globally in the window manager, so having the application WM hints makes no sense in that situation either.

KDE = Joy

Posted Dec 14, 2005 7:27 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Every WM respects at least one hint to disable controls: the transience property. As long as you have to support that, why not make the control more configurable?

Hints

Posted Dec 14, 2005 14:19 UTC (Wed) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

That hint doesn't really mean to do that, it just means the window is associated with another application window and that it is likely to be short-lived. In fact, some window managers don't disable controls on transients. Many do, but there is no requirement that they work that way.

Hints

Posted Dec 14, 2005 20:16 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The vast majority that provide any decorations at all disable them on transients: in fact, given the common use of transients for things like pop-up help bubbles, any wm that didn't disable decorations on them would be unbearable to use.

Hints

Posted Dec 14, 2005 23:45 UTC (Wed) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link]

Pop-up help bubbles (and menus and drag+drop handles and other weird window cases) usually use override_redirect, not wm_transient.

I don't see a reason why transients (even real transients like dialog boxes) should not be organized or decorated differently--in fact, I think that's usually a good idea. The thing I insist on is that I retain the ability to arbitrarily move, size, raise and lower them (including the often-denied privilege of restacking a dialog window behind its parent, and independently minimizing parents and transients), regardless of decoration or initial position.

I do see many cases where the transient windows *themselves* are often a bad idea, but that's application misdesign that a window manager can't fix.

I've used truly hintless window managers (ones that don't move the keyboard focus from parent to transient and place the transient randomly, so I have to aim at the appropriate window with the mouse cursor for every single transient) and hintful window managers (ones that respect all of the hints to the letter and even impose restrictions of their own). If these were the only choices (thankfully they're not) then I'd pick the hintless WM, because it's at least possible to sensibly arrange windows with the hintless WM, even if I have to do a lot of extra work manually.

KDE = Joy

Posted Dec 14, 2005 3:55 UTC (Wed) by njhurst (guest, #6022) [Link]

People often comment that QT is more productive than Gtk, yet the only big QT apps I use are scribus and qcad (and both rarely). On the other hand, we have the gimp, inkscape, abiword, gnumeric and gnucash; none of which have comparable QT versions. Maybe it is just the company I keep, but most of the top notch programmers I know prefer Gtk. Why is that do you think?

KDE = Joy

Posted Dec 14, 2005 15:05 UTC (Wed) by cloose (subscriber, #5066) [Link]

On the other hand, we have the gimp, inkscape, abiword, gnumeric and gnucash; none of which have comparable QT versions.

IMHO it the success of the corresponding KDE apps (krita, kword, kspread, kmymoney) that lowers the interest in writing Qt equivalents for those apps.

Maybe it is just the company I keep, but most of the top notch programmers I know prefer Gtk. Why is that do you think?

Maybe you're only looking for/attracting C programmers? I'm a C++/Java/Delphi programmer and I would never ever use a OO in C API.

KDE = Joy

Posted Dec 15, 2005 7:11 UTC (Thu) by njhurst (guest, #6022) [Link]

I had a look at koffice recently and though I was impressed by the progress, none of them are close to their gtk equivalents. kspread, for example, couldn't open a few computational excel spreadsheets I've collected over the years, yet gnumeric had no trouble. Karbon's renderer seems to generate wrong results regularly and couldn't open even some simple svg diagrams. The connector routing in kivio is crap compared to that of inkscape. Krita feels like gimp 1.4, though my wife prefers the oil paint effect in krita :)

Actually, it may be unfair, but the feeling I get from the koffice suite is that they are mainly playing catch up to their gtk counterparts and have just lifted chunks of code wholus-bolus (nothing wrong with this, but it makes me wonder what their aim is).

If you are a C++ programmer you should take a look at gtkmm. It is a lot more C++ than QT. Murray Cumming has done a much better job of understanding the C++ paradigm (ouch, did I just use that word..) than the Troll developers. And the people I'm talking about tend to program in more esoteric languages (they would say 'real languages') such as Haskell, ocaml and Mercury.

KDE = Joy

Posted Dec 15, 2005 8:25 UTC (Thu) by cloose (subscriber, #5066) [Link]

After looking at the following you will sure understand that I have a different opinion about gtkmm <-> Qt and KOffice. :)

http://cia.navi.cx/stats/author/cloose

KDE = Joy

Posted Dec 15, 2005 8:41 UTC (Thu) by njhurst (guest, #6022) [Link]

Sorry, I don't understand that comment - could you expand a little bit? As far as I can see you've just shown me a CVS log for some project I've never heard of...

KDE = Joy

Posted Dec 15, 2005 10:14 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

It's the (extremely nifty) KDE CVS interface program, with changes to kdebase scattered throughout as well.

So yes, I'd say it's not surprising he likes Qt and friends. :)

KDE = Joy

Posted Dec 15, 2005 11:07 UTC (Thu) by njhurst (guest, #6022) [Link]

Ah, so he's heavily biased, and I should discount his opinion... ;) Full disclosure: I work on inkscape, a gtkmm app :)

KDE = Joy

Posted Dec 16, 2005 3:27 UTC (Fri) by thedevil (guest, #32913) [Link]

njhurst wrote:
If you are a C++ programmer you should take a look at gtkmm. It is a lot more C++ than QT. Murray Cumming has done a much better job of understanding the C++ paradigm (ouch, did I just use that word..) than the Troll developers. And the people I'm talking about tend to program in more esoteric languages (they would say 'real languages') such as Haskell, ocaml and Mercury.

Your sense is not clear here. (Who are the "people I'm talking about", Qt people or Gtk?) Can you please explain?

From my post way above you'll see that I quite disagree with you, but
until you clarify I won't repeat that again :-)

KDE = Joy

Posted Dec 16, 2005 4:36 UTC (Fri) by njhurst (guest, #6022) [Link]

I said 'good programmer', cloose seemed to think I meant C++ instead of C or something, I said Haskell etc.

KDE = Joy

Posted Dec 17, 2005 4:18 UTC (Sat) by thedevil (guest, #32913) [Link]

Ok, now I see, you referred to a post up the thread. Here's where the
disadvantage of a web forum over a newsgroup or mailing list shows ...

I think the preference of Real Language people for gtk is very simple -
there are, by historical accident (or is there another tangible reason?)
bindings for Gtk in those languages, while there aren't any for Qt.

One aspect of Qt is annoying - its dependence on database libraries.
I don't know if that played any role in making Gtk bindings preferred.

KDE = Joy

Posted Dec 15, 2005 23:49 UTC (Thu) by pynm0001 (guest, #18379) [Link]

There are indeed a lot of good GTK apps.

But please let me know when GnuCash has finally left the stone age of GTK
1.4, then I might be able to stomach using it. ;)

Regards,
- Michael Pyne