LWN: Comments on "Fedora 19 released"

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

mpr22 — Sat, 06 Jul 2013 20:59:00 +0000

Maybe they perceived Tk as strongly coupled to Tcl, and didn't like Tcl.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

anselm — Sat, 06 Jul 2013 19:33:28 +0000

Your comment only tells us that you apparently haven't done much with Tk.

The GNOME people took an atrocious toolkit (Gtk) that had very little traction at the time and was barely good enough to support one single application (The GIMP) and spent massive effort to make it into something they could use for their written-from-scratch desktop environment. They could have put the same sort of effort into Tk and made it into something vastly better with less work. Tk, for its flaws, is really quite well-engineered and well-documented and it would have been absolutely feasible at the time to build a desktop environment based on it (at least as much so as building one based on what was then Gtk). I'd personally be inclined to think the main reason the GNOME people didn't do that is NIH and/or ignorance and/or not wanting to work with the Tk community.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Cyberax — Sat, 06 Jul 2013 19:20:30 +0000

The reason why Qt was picked is actually quite simple - Tk was (and still is) butt-ugly and hard to extend. And there was nothing else really available at that time.

GTK developers faced the same exact situation, except that they were against proprietary Qt.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

anselm — Sat, 06 Jul 2013 12:27:15 +0000

When KDE started out there were no other free desktop environments (there were lots of free applications but nothing that tried to present a unified »look and feel« similar in scope to, say, that of the Mac). KDE took its inspiration from CDE, which at the time wasn't free at all. You can't really cause fragmentation if you're the first on the scene.

Personally I would of course have preferred to see a free desktop environment based on something like Tk rather than Qt. However, the KDE developers did not see fit to consult me before they got started ;^) You would have to ask them (more specifically, Matthias Ettrich) to find out exactly why they picked Qt. There is some information about their reasoning available on the KDE web site, but that very likely includes some hindsight.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Cyberax — Sat, 06 Jul 2013 01:03:15 +0000

So why hasn't KDE chosen Tk instead of proprietary QT?

Sorry, you can't have it both ways. Either GTK was a logical step to create a free UI toolkit, or KDE caused huge fragmentation by choosing a proprietary UI toolkit instead of working with free UI toolkit developers.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

anselm — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 23:27:08 +0000

Tk has been themable for a number of years now; there is no reason to believe that with appropriate effort that could have been built in earlier. As far as cross-platform support goes, you are misinformed; in the late 1990s Tk ran on Windows and the Mac as well as on X11 (including unusual X11 platforms like VMS), with native-looking widgets. In the late 1990s, TrueType font support was basically up to the X server, so if your X server supported them then Tk would too. (Now that we have XRENDER Tk of course supports that.) »Ugly« is in the eye of the beholder; Tk was originally built to look like Motif, which in the early 1990s was the obvious thing to emulate. In the meantime tastes have changed, and with Tk's theme support there is no reason why a Tk GUI should look any different than a Qt or Gtk GUI.

Tk also had some good things going for it in the late 1990s, such as very flexible geometry management, reasonable UTF-8 support (which at the time no other popular toolkit bothered with), or the canvas and text widgets which were really quite useful. It always seemed silly to me that somebody would spend vast amounts of effort to make Gtk into something that anyone except the GIMP developers would actually want to use; the same amount of work put into Tk would easily have taken care of all the things that people like bashing Tk for and then some. But then of course there is no accounting for taste, and »NIH« is a very powerful motivator.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Cyberax — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 21:39:22 +0000

Tk is... well... Tk.

It had its own problems and idiosyncrasies: it was not themeable, it had poor cross-platform support, no support for TrueType fonts and so on. Oh, and it also was butt-ugly.

"Approaching user interface design with a programmer's mindset can only end in pain, tragedy, and Tk." (c) David Vallner.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

anselm — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 21:25:27 +0000

Nope, GTK creation was an entirely logical step at that time. Dislike of C++ might have played a role, but it wasn't decisive.

If it had been up to me personally, I would have put the same effort that the GNOME people put into making Gtk usable (it was really bad at the time) into Tk instead (which was freely available and a lot farther along than Gtk). But of course the GNOME people didn't like that idea, either – NIH, remember –, so they basically had to roll their own no matter what. A bit like what the Canonical folks are doing today.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Cyberax — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 21:09:46 +0000

Ok. Imagine yourself in 1998 and you want to start building a free desktop, which can be used for commercial products as well.

What do you do? Spend millions to clone a crappy UI toolkit with a guaranteed lawsuit afterwards? And what for, just to appease a bunch of developers of a marginal desktop environment (KDE)?

Nope, GTK creation was an entirely logical step at that time. Dislike of C++ might have played a role, but it wasn't decisive.

Of course, NOW we have QT under a reasonable license and it's much better than GTK. But we're talking about ancient history.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

anselm — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 21:03:49 +0000

Now think about it, suppose that I spent $100^500 to clone QT - what do I achieve?

Nobody needs to clone Qt now. For one, Qt is now available under a reasonable selection of licences, and secondly, Qt is by now uncomfortably large and complicated.

Cloning Qt instead of implementing GNOME and most of Gtk from scratch would have been a more reasonable proposition 15 years ago when Qt was a much smaller piece of software. We might have avoided the desktop environment fragmentation that plagues us now if we could have standardised on KDE at a fairly early stage instead of coming up with a competing desktop environment.

On the other hand, chances are that even if Qt had been available under the LGPL from the beginning, the GNOME people would still have started GNOME just to be contrary. GNOME was initially as much about NIH and not wanting to use C++ as it was about Qt licensing.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Cyberax — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 18:14:50 +0000

That simply won't work for complicated C++ stuff. Too much logic in the interface.

And anyway, you have now moved on from stuff that a small company or a collection of individuals can do to the stuff that requires a large company with a legal department.

Now think about it, suppose that I spent $100^500 to clone QT - what do I achieve?

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

anselm — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 09:17:48 +0000

It turns out that it's far easier to re-implement an existing API when you have a large workforce funded by the sale of a business than it is when you're a college student.

Probably. After all, everyone knows that a college student would never be able to come up with something really big and complicated – like, say, an industry-strength Unix-like operating system kernel.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

anselm — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 09:13:14 +0000

This is what clean-room techniques are for. You have someone write a spec and/or tests and have somebody else, who hasn't seen the original (Qt or whatever) source, write the actual implementation to suit the spec and tests.

You obviously can't copy something that you have never seen, and anyway your own implementation will probably differ enough in detail to no longer look like an outright copy of the original to begin with.

It is probably worth noting that at the time we're talking about (late 1990s), Qt used to be considerably smaller and simpler than it is now.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

dark — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 07:53:54 +0000

But Qt is C++, which means a lot of the implementation can be in the interface. For example qlist.h contains the entire QList implementation (mostly as templates). On the one hand, it would take an expert to figure out what you can change without breaking compatibility. On the other hand, it's 900 lines of complicated code and it seems unlikely that a court will decide there's no creative expression in there.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

anselm — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 07:31:12 +0000

Any realistic API-compatible clone of QT would be deemed a derived work because of the overwhelming number of literal copying that'll be required.

If there is stuff that you need to copy literally because it is the only way to do something then that stuff is probably not eligible for copyright in the first place. Given that copyright is supposed to protect the output of the creative process, generally a work needs to be creative in order to be copyrightable, and if there is only one possible way of writing something down then coming up with that way is not especially creative.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Cyberax — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 07:16:06 +0000

> However bad Qt may have been at the time, Gtk was many times worse. Its main raison d'être was supporting The GIMP, and it took a major effort on the part of the early GNOME crowd to get it anywhere near where Qt was.
Duh. So what? It was obvious that some time will be required to reach a level where GTK is better than QT for most applications.

>Which, looking back, seems all the more silly given that there were better free alternatives around – and supports the thesis that GNOME was at least as much about NIH than it was about Qt licensing.
Which alternatives? Lesstif? Or maybe early EFL?

> That which didn't use Motif or even other things like Tk which were more popular. (Tcl/Tk used to be pretty big in the (commercial) VLSI design scene, for example.) AFAIR, Gtk at the time had a fairly small slice of the cake as far as commercial development went.
VMWare used it, several commercial suite also used it. Then lots of software started to use Eclipse which on Linux is based on GTK.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

anselm — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 07:11:48 +0000

Most ISVs simply looked at Linux and decided it's not worth it to fork over tons of dollars just for a crappy UI toolkit (and QT _was_ a crappy UI toolkit back then).

However bad Qt may have been at the time, Gtk was many times worse. Its main raison d'être was supporting The GIMP, and it took a major effort on the part of the early GNOME crowd to get it anywhere near where Qt was. Which, looking back, seems all the more silly given that there were better free alternatives around – and supports the thesis that GNOME was at least as much about NIH than it was about Qt licensing.

BTW, actually try look at commercial Unix software - I think most of it used GTK back then.

That which didn't use Motif or even other things like Tk which were more popular. (Tcl/Tk used to be pretty big in the (commercial) VLSI design scene, for example.) AFAIR, Gtk at the time had a fairly small slice of the cake as far as commercial development went.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Cyberax — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 07:04:54 +0000

> So you say. I suppose that if one has no legal qualms about cloning .NET, what would keep one from cloning Qt? After all, Microsoft probably has more lawyers in the East Podunk, North Dakota, branch office than Trolltech ever had employees in the whole company.
Microsoft explicitly allowed cloning, by standardizing .NET. They've also granted a royalty-free license for their patents on core .NET technologies.

Any realistic API-compatible clone of QT would be deemed a derived work because of the overwhelming number of literal copying that'll be required.

> And what does that have to do with anything? Presumably if Miguel de Icaza had devoted the same amount of energy to cloning Qt that he later put into cloning .NET all those machines might now be running his free Qt clone.
See above.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

mjg59 — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 07:03:52 +0000

It turns out that it's far easier to re-implement an existing API when you have a large workforce funded by the sale of a business than it is when you're a college student.

Based on personal experience: it's less difficult to write something with equivalent functionality than it is to write a re-implementation of something with a specified API.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

anselm — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 06:57:23 +0000

Cloning was never a solution, from the legal standpoint.

So you say. I suppose that if one has no legal qualms about cloning .NET, what would keep one from cloning Qt? After all, Microsoft probably has more lawyers in the East Podunk, North Dakota, branch office than Trolltech ever had employees in the whole company.

Also, you might note that Mono right now is actually used on more machines than the total amount of classic Linux desktops.

And what does that have to do with anything? Presumably if Miguel de Icaza had devoted the same amount of energy to cloning Qt that he later put into cloning .NET all those machines might now be running his free Qt clone.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Cyberax — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 01:16:15 +0000

>The fact that GNOME co-founder Miguel de Icaza later went on to develop Mono tells us that he doesn't seem to have a problem in principle with trying to clone huge pieces of very proprietary software such as .NET. Compared to the Microsoft stuff, Qt in the late 1990s was positively liberally licensed.
Sure, and the Boston bomber is simply an angel, compared to Hitler. Why people want to keep him imprisoned?

>Also, once a hypothetical free Qt clone had been finished to the degree that KDE ran on it, the KDE community could simply have abandoned the original Qt, thereby removing the necessity to track Qt forever the way Miguel de Icaza gets to track .NET.
Nope. Cloning was never a solution, from the legal standpoint.

Also, you might note that Mono right now is actually used on more machines than the total amount of classic Linux desktops. Mostly because it is THE ONLY real language and framework that can be used to create software for ALL of the major mobile devices.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Cyberax — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 01:11:41 +0000

Most ISVs simply looked at Linux and decided it's not worth it to fork over tons of dollars just for a crappy UI toolkit (and QT _was_ a crappy UI toolkit back then). The company I worked back then in Russia simply decided to use Java and SWING instead.

BTW, actually try look at commercial Unix software - I think most of it used GTK back then.

Oh, and if we're talking about fragmentation - why hasn't KDE used Motif? After all, it's totally free with JUST a $5000 per developer pricetag! I totally can't imagine why people would decide to write something that doesn't require forking over tons of bucks, with a vendor lock-in.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

bojan — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 00:32:57 +0000

> Well, mostly we're not QAing other things 'against' desktops, we're just checking that *the desktops themselves* work.

Yeah, the bar for Fedora QA is even lower and yet this many desktops are clearly not testable.

> In general I would expect that a third-party app designed to be 'desktop neutral' would run fine on *all* of them if it ran fine on *any* of them.

In general - very general.

In practice, if say Adobe wanted PhotoShop to work on Linux (say top 5 distros and all supported desktops they ship), they would have to perform regression testing against all combinations and they would have to make sure the software actually installs on all these different systems. That is a lot of effort for 1% market share with no clear direction "winner".

We can pretend it's something else, but IMHO it's just fragmentation.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

anselm — Thu, 04 Jul 2013 23:51:37 +0000

It was Cyberax who claimed that ISVs found the commercial Qt license too expensive, and I was replying to that. I have no opinion regarding custom in-house applications, which are obviously under different constraints than software for external commercial distribution.

Anyway, my main point was that GNOME was started not exclusively because of KDE's licensing issues with Qt but also because of NIH and dislike of C++ on the part of the early GNOME developers. If Qt's licensing had been the only problem, it would clearly have been less work at the time to come up with a freely-licensed Qt clone to support KDE than to write most of a new X11 toolkit and a complete new desktop environment from scratch, and that would not have led to the same degree of fragmentation that we see now.

The fact that GNOME co-founder Miguel de Icaza later went on to develop Mono tells us that he doesn't seem to have a problem in principle with trying to clone huge pieces of very proprietary software such as .NET. Compared to the Microsoft stuff, Qt in the late 1990s was positively liberally licensed. Also, once a hypothetical free Qt clone had been finished to the degree that KDE ran on it, the KDE community could simply have abandoned the original Qt, thereby removing the necessity to track Qt forever the way Miguel de Icaza gets to track .NET.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

rahulsundaram — Thu, 04 Jul 2013 23:19:11 +0000

Counting ISVs and excluding custom in-house applications which is the much larger market shows limited perspective again but even if you only include ISV's several major asian accounting software uses GTK for example.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

anselm — Thu, 04 Jul 2013 20:33:58 +0000

Which is obviously the reason why so many ISVs from »outside the US and some of Europe« have opted to base their proprietary applications on GNOME and Gtk instead. After all, the market is completely flooded with those …

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

rahulsundaram — Thu, 04 Jul 2013 20:06:46 +0000

It certainly is if you broaden your perspectives to include places outside U.S and some of Europe

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

anselm — Thu, 04 Jul 2013 19:17:11 +0000

According to the TrollTech web site (courtesy of the Wayback Machine), in 2000 a commercial Qt license was something like $1500 per year for a single developer, with discounts for multiple licenses (e.g., 30% for 7-9 developers). This included support and upgrades.

Considering what the cost of actually paying the developer would be for a year, that doesn't sound prohibitively expensive.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Cyberax — Thu, 04 Jul 2013 17:27:40 +0000

At that time QT required multiple thousands of dollars _per_ _developer_ to start developing commercial products. That was no-go for the most of ISVs from the start.

GTK, on the other hand, was provided under a nice friendly LGPL license.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

anselm — Thu, 04 Jul 2013 15:06:30 +0000

By the time the first official release of GNOME came out, Qt was already under a licensing scheme that ensured that it would continue to be available even if Troll Tech folded, was acquired, …. Licensing issues with Qt probably played a part in the decision to start GNOME – especially if one listens to the »official story« –, but NIH and »C++ hate« were also important contributing factors at the time.

If Qt licensing had really been the only problem with KDE, it would probably have been a lot easier to come up with a free reimplementation of Qt than to develop a complete desktop environment (including a toolkit – Gtk was nowhere near adequate at the time and needed major work) from scratch. On the other hand it would have been much less fun, and we know that, at the end of the day, fun for developers is what desktop environment development is all about.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

AdamW — Thu, 04 Jul 2013 04:40:41 +0000

Well, mostly we're not QAing other things 'against' desktops, we're just checking that *the desktops themselves* work. In general I would expect that a third-party app designed to be 'desktop neutral' would run fine on *all* of them if it ran fine on *any* of them.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

Cyberax — Thu, 04 Jul 2013 04:10:32 +0000

Miguel started GNOME and GTK back when Qt required a pact with a devil to use it. And a firstborn son to use it in commercial products.

Sorry, but blame is squarely on the choice of Qt for KDE.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

bojan — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 23:33:28 +0000

> In many cases Web app is a better choice.

Yeah, if only everything on the desktop could be solved with that approach. Unfortunately, real desktop still needs real applications - which is what actually distinguishes the desktop from the new breed of devices.

Fedora 19 released

Ed_L. — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 22:49:10 +0000

Well, antiquated or not, I probably use suspend-to-disk (aka "Hibernate") four or more times each day on my main "workstation" (I use the term loosely). Mainly because suspend-to-ram (aka "Suspend") no longer works. It did at one time, but any more when I select that option the machine suspends but momentarily, then resumes on its own accord. I'll have to check its BIOS to see if there's some flaky bits in there which need tweaking, but I don't recall ever seeing any. Its a niche-vendor custom mini-itx MB with custom AMI BIOS to match, and I've never been particularly impressed. Fedup doesn't seem to work either, at least not from F17 to F18 which is what I've tried. Mostly it leaves me clueless -- no big trick -- but on reboot the new fedup kernel sometimes mentions an incorrect BIOS value, suggests perhaps its time for a new one, and hangs.

I like your partitioning scheme. One might also mention that grub2 requires a larger embedding area or BIOS boot partition than grub1 when booting from an mdraid. 63 sectors -- 31kb -- is not sufficient. Make it at least a MB, like drag said.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

bojan — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 22:07:22 +0000

Just like Fedora release folks (yourself included) have trouble doing QA against so many different desktops (which is completely understandable), so would a third party application developer. Just consider the combinatorial explosion of the desktop/distro/version matrix that this poor third party would have to try to ensure the app works against. And all that to target 1% of the market. That is probably one of the reasons they stay away from it.

Fedora 19 released

AdamW — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 18:44:23 +0000

Huh, that's definitely worse than the cases we saw in testing. I've hit the bug myself, several times, and for me it's just ten windows or so and it's fairly easy to just close 'em all and start working. The issue does seem to be a timing bug, so maybe it's not only a case of 'happens or not', but there's a spectrum of how badly it happens, and your system is affected worse than most :( Sorry about that.

We don't really do official respins, but once there's a confirmed fix for the bug, Dan and I may throw up a strictly unofficial respin somewhere.

Fedora 19 released

hadrons123 — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 16:44:25 +0000

I am not seeing 2 bugs. The bunch of caja windows actually fills the screen with mate-panel using 99% of the CPU and I have to kill the X server in Terminal. Its not really bunch where you can just close all the open windows. Its about hundreds of caja-windows. AdamW, Thanks for the reply though!

First imressions

proski — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 15:55:01 +0000

Fixed it by running "dmraid -rE" and updating the kernel in chroot. No time to recreate the problem from scratch.

Off-topic desktop whinge, unrelated to Fedora per se

AdamW — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 15:41:29 +0000

...though I *do* wish all the desktops would buy in to Freedesktop.org / XDG standards a little more strongly, like was the case back in the middle of KDE 3 / GNOME 2. We had things working pretty well cross-desktop for a while there. It's a shame that particularly GNOME, Unity and KDE have gone off and sprouted a few mechanisms with no consideration for cross-desktop compatibility since then.

Fedora 19 released

AdamW — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 15:38:36 +0000

Um. The bunch of windows doesn't 'bring the system down': you can just close them all and the system will work fine. If you're seeing the system not working, it seems likely you're actually seeing *two* bugs. All other reporters so far indicate that the bunch-o-windows problem is entirely superficial.