Mark Shuttleworth interview (Linux Format) [LWN.net]

Mark Shuttleworth interview (Linux Format)

Posted Oct 3, 2006 9:44 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
In reply to: Mark Shuttleworth interview (Linux Format) by micampe
Parent article: Mark Shuttleworth interview (Linux Format)

it looks that Gnome pushed (more actively, I know there are KDE developers that share these ideas) much more for its "standards" to be accepted outside of it (and it has often been harshly criticized for doing so) and for the creation of freedesktop.org, making them now standards without quotes.

On the contrary, fd.o was explicitly a forum to develop standards for BOTH GNOME and KDE. At the time it started, KDE was far ahead, but some people on both sides recognised the advantage of having compatible implementations for desktop icons, system tray icons, etc.

Transparency and shadows: KDE had them for ages, Gnome refused to implement them as "hacks" insisting that that's not the job of the GUI tool kit and a true solution would involve changes to the X server.

KDE's solution involves changes to the X server (specifically, the composite extension, which is needed and has been available for some years). Gnome even today doesn't implement it, as far as I can tell (unless you use the recent XGL/AIGLX stuff).

KDE was the first to implement:

Anti-aliased fonts (using Keith Packard's render extension and XFT)
Transparency and shadows (using the composite extension)
Integrated support for resizing the display (using the XRANDR extension)
and much else...

Even for something as simple as running an alternate program, like xplanet, for your background: compare and contrast the instructions for KDE and GNOME.

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