Huh?

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.