Extensions and applications

Extensions and applications

The GNOME developers designed Gnome Shell so that it could be *easily extendable*, much like Firefox, through extensions written in javascript. (The developers are still finalizing the extension mechanism and the documentation about extensions. Most of that will probably land before Gnome 3.2. There are a few extensions already out in the wild, though.) So, the Gnome guys actually designed the shell to invite people to play with the desktop and change the way it behaves to suit the users' needs. They want Gnome Shell to be a power user's playground as well as a place suitable for newbies.

This sounds a lot like what KDE 4 does with Plasma, although I may not be completely up-to-date with the terminology and whether it's specifically a particular flavour of Plasma or not which manages this. Generally, I find the "people who aren't real developers can tinker with JavaScript" attitude somewhat condescending, even if it is possible to make some serious extensions in these environments, but maybe the attitude towards languages other than C and C++ (and the about-face in adopting the awful JavaScript as a concession to "everyone else") is traditionally more of a problem within KDE than GNOME.

I have to say that the applications are what make KDE 3 interesting for me, although the theming obviously plays a role in making everything look largely consistent, and the desktop furniture plays its part by doing what one asks of it in a non-annoying way. Some applications are based on KDE frameworks which would suggest that those frameworks help developers to build decent software, so maybe the real test of a desktop environment should be whether it manages to cultivate applications one would want to use, not whether the designers thought up some radical paradigm that gets in the way of getting to those applications.