Hooray for Bluecurve (Linux Journal) [LWN.net]

Huh?

Posted Dec 4, 2002 0:19 UTC (Wed) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510) [Link]

If nothing else, this could be an excellent opportunity to realize that decently functional, good-looking desktop interfaces can be built on the assumption that KDE and GNOME themselves aren't really necessary and important in the first place.

I'm having a hard time parsing this sentence. Since Bluecurve is built out of KDE and GNOME, what makes the author think they aren't important and necessary? Perhaps he's trying to say that the specific appearance of KDE and GNOME isn't necessary?

Improve, not abandon

Posted Dec 4, 2002 2:44 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

The article is written from a user-centric perspective. As it's common for the users who have never participated in software development, the author seems to assume that there are hordes of good programmers, who are fanatically dedicated either to GNOME or to KDE. Hence the suggestion for them to abandon their desktop environments (as if it's so easy) and unite the forces around Bluecurve.

My personal experience shows that there is a deficit of good developers, and the best programmers are not fanatics at all. The reasons for having more than one desktop environment are more technical than political. Closing the gap between desktop environments is an enormous challenge for technical reasons. Bluecurve is mostly a pretty facade on top of different underlying technologies (although I appreciate Red Hat's efforts to unify font support) - it's hardly a convergence point for the developers.

I agree that the split between GNOME and KDE is bad for the free software. It's good to have competition, but when it comes to word processors I'd like to see a competition between heavyweights like OpenOffice.org and underdogs like Abiword, not a competition between applications that adopted different widget libraries (i.e. Abiword vs. KWord).

Some program go as far as to offer different frontends. Ethereal, a packet capture software, offers frontends for Gtk+ and Qt, as if I care about the shape of the buttons when I'm sniffing passwords off the network.

But the solution is not in abandoning the existing software, but rather in making all popular toolkits work properly with all popular desktop environments. That way, nobody will have to write different frontends or different software to fill the same need on different desktops. Future projects will choose the best tool to do the job.

Bluecurve is a part of the solution. If adopted widely (possibly under some other, non-trademarked name), it would guarantee that the application using certain libraries (e.g. Gtk+ 2.x or Qt 3.x) would have consistent look and feel with other applications on the Bluecurve-enabled platforms. This is essential for serious, professional software. But it's just a facade. More work needs to be done on the interior.

There is one thing I don't like in Bluecurve. Stripping "About KDE" from the menu was unfair to the KDE developers. They should have been given proper credit for their hard work.

Ethereal: no qt

Posted Dec 5, 2002 23:37 UTC (Thu) by jmayer (subscriber, #595) [Link]

Just a small correction: Ethereal has a gtk interface, a gtk2 interface that isn't ready for
heavy use yet and an external win32 port with the name of Packetyzer. There once was
a port to qt/kde3alpha but it seems it was lost, the source is nowhere to be found.

Hooray for Bluecurve - Not

Posted Dec 13, 2002 18:22 UTC (Fri) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link]

Count me amongst the people who aren't convinced this is a good idea -- since what it amounts to is changing the 2-desktop-manager race into a *3*-desktop-manager race.

Alas, I don't think the linked story really makes it's own point all that effectively, and I'm a bit surprised -- the problem appears to be about 50/50 that the author didn't write a thesis sentence and outline first, and that he doesn't really speak sufficiently fluent and colloquial English to get the job done in an English-language publication.

In any event, no, I *don't* think it's really a Great Idea to try to stamp out competition in the desktop manager space. As long as everyone's apps will all *run* -- even if they don't look quite like they fit in -- I'm fine with it.

I think that, in the Long Run, the health of the operating environment is just as important as user comfort -- after all, look what the users have to cope with now, since Microsoft doesn't have much competition in the "Win32 API desktop operating environment" space...

But, as usual, maybe it's just me.

So many things are just me...