Re: KDE Interop [Was: D-BUS background]

[Vadim Plessky <plessky cnt ru>]

On Sunday 09 March 2003 23:44, Loban A Rahman wrote:
|  /me douses some flames, then looks for particular question's to answer.
|
|  > I am curious to know where GNOME is ahead of KDE.
|  > I try every major GNOME release and still can't find it useful (as of
|  > 2.2 version).
|  > On the other hand, KDE became useful since 2.1 version.
|
|  These statements are not very useful. If we are to improve Gnome (I am
|  assuming that is why you wrote this email - rather than just to flame),
|  you need to tell us what you need in a desktop, for it to be useful,
|  that Gnome 2.2 failed to deliver.

well, the first thing which I (as non-native English speaker) do when load new 
Desktop - is adding Cyrillic support/installing new keyboard/layout.
In KDE Control Center, it is:
  Regional & Accessibility -> Keyboard layout -> Enable keyboard layouts

Without Cyrillic (Russian) keyboard installed, complete desktop is practically 
unusable for me. In case you use for browsing Mozilla - you don't need any 
kind of desktop, IceWM or BlackBox would do the task just fine.

So, I need keyboard switcher activated, with possibility to switch keyboard 
layouts via different key combinations (I use Alt+Shift)

I understood that GNOME 2.0 was kind of developemtn release, targeted at 
developers. But, frankly, I was surprised that GNOME 2.2 still doesn't have 
this feature.
Now I even not sure that GNOME 2.4 would have this implemented...
Or someone is working on this?

|
|  > So, I am really curious to hear your arguments.
|  > I doubt "enterprise customer" in current economical environment would
|  > wish to pay lots of money.
|
|  Regardless, they would still pay more then mere "home desktop"
|  customers.

May be, this is valid for US market.
This is definitly not the case for Eastern European markets (about 25 
countries, if you count CIS countries as well)

|
|  > c) KDE's Control Center is superior to GNOME's one
|
|  Alright, if you say so, but please elaborate a bit more. If your
|  complaint is that the KDE one has _way_ more options, then you will
|  forever view Gnome's CC as inferior because it's aims are different. I,
|  personally, very much like Gnome CC's simplistic and tidy approach. If
|  there is some configurability which you believe Gnome lacks and should
|  have, do elaborate and file bugs - we'll appreciate it.

As I said above, keyboard settings is kind of crucial for desktop adoption.
I can survive without many other options presented in KDE CC.

Another  thing which is important IMO is Browser Configuration.
(Internet & Network -> Web Browser)
I'd like to hear here opinion of GNOME hackers on browsers/browser integration 
into Desktop.
I understand that non-KDE users usually use Mozilla for browsing, and Mozilla 
is not integrated, besides, it has separate code base outside GNOME CVS.
Are there any changes planned for GNOME 2.4/2.6 or GNOME 3.0?

Apple recently picked up KHTML/KJS for their Safari browser, and cooperation 
here is quite good. Besides, they did excelelnt job separating KHTML from Qt, 
so I guess KHTML with Apple modifications can be used not only on MacOS X, 
but on Linux as well.
So, integration of KHTML as a native browser engine into GNOME 2.x sounds very 
reasonable to me, and I'd like to hear opinions on this.

|
|  > Mozilla is incredibly slow and resource-hungry, and it fails on too many
|  > pages to be useful.
|
|  LOL, now that is an interesting statement. By itself, it could be true.
|  It can be slow, is somewhat resource-hungry (but not overly so), and
|  does fail on some pages. But, I would seriously doubt anyone would
|  corraborate that it fails so many more than Konquerer that it would be
|  deemed useless compared to Konquerer.

Well, I haven't said that Mozilla is useless.
I have tried many Mozilla releases, and memory usage of all versions I tried 
(up to 1.2.1) is very high.  You would not notice this on 256MB+ PCs, but I 
have laptop at home (PIII/600Mhz) with 128MB, and older laptop (PII) at work 
- I can't use Mozilla or Netscape7 on any of those systems.
On the other hand, Konqueror is quite useful - I can easilyopen 20+ windows in 
Konqueror (KDE 3.1), system is stable and doesn't crash/hangup.

|
|  > There is no licensing issue with Qt/KDE already for 2.5 years!..
|
|  I believe what the original poster was talking about was how companies
|  could write and release _commercial_ Gtk apps without paying licensing
|  fee's, but that is not possible in QT.

I have yet to see commercial GTK applications :-)
On the other hand, kdelibs can be used in commercial distributions, recent 
"Desktop-oriented" distribution demonstrated this quite well.

|
|  > Do you know that Intel+HP were demonstrating recently Itanium2-based
|  > Superdome server, and it was running (together with HP-UX, on another
|  > partition) Linux with KDE?
|
|  Awesome.
|
|  > What version of GNOME would have usable File Selector?
|  > (comparable to KDE 3 or Windows 2000 File Selector in terms of
|  > functionality and usability)
|
|  I believe the plan is 2.6. Yes, we all know is very overdue. :-)
|

When it's planned to be released?

|
|  My spoon is too big,
|  Loban
|
|  /-------------------------------------------------------------------\
|
|  |   Loban Amaan Rahman  <-- anagram of -->  Aha! An Abnormal Man!   |
|  | loban earthling net, loban caltech edu,  http://loban.caltech.edu |
|
|  \-------------------------------------------------------------------/
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-- 
Best Regards,

Vadim Plessky
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