Re: Sun de-emphasizes GNOME devel platform, supports KDE apps

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On Tuesday 16 September 2003 07:36, Timothy R. Butler wrote:
> GTK-Friendly Apps
> =================
> OpenOffice.org
> Mozilla

how are these GTK friendly, exactly?

> KDE/Qt-based

personally, i use the KDE equivs for all the apps you listed, with the 
exception of the GIMP,  in the Gtk+ section and find that they meet or exceed 
the Gtk+ apps for my needs ... 

having watched the "GNOME has all the apps" meme develop, here's my take on 
it: the concept was a fall-back position popularized by various people in the 
GNOME community (most trolls on web boards, it seems)... when KDE 
increasingly became the desktop env of choice, the GNOME supporters started 
saying "ok, so KDE is the DE, but GNOME is the provider of the apps". 

this was a combination of truth and overstatement. the truth in it was that  a 
select group of applications such as the GIMP, XMMS, gaim, etc. were simply 
better that anything available on KDE. the overstatement was that they 
implied that w/out Gtk+ apps you couldn't do much of anything, and that KDE 
didn't have any truly useful apps.

things are changing, however. today KDE has Juk and Kopete, which IMHO 
outclass XMMS and GAIM. KGPG is a lot nicer than Searhorse, IMHO. Kontact 
draws the Evolution gap closer. KWord is really quite useful, as are KSpread 
and KPresenter. so KDE's apps are no longer such a sore spot; there are very 
few app needs that remain unmet within the Qt/KDE world, including a solid 
paint app and project management.

at the same time KDE is coming out with some ground breaking (at least for 
Free Software) desktop apps, such as desktop sharing, kwallet, KDevelop 3, 
Quanta, Umbrello, KStars, Kig... there are Gtk+/GNOME apps for some of these 
user needs, but nothing that really measures up...

but the meme persists, and it becomes self-fulfilling sometimes as people 
often default to using whatever the Gtk+ "superior app of the day" is.

this is somewhere that KDE could stand to see some PR work done to help 
educate people on the application choices available to them. after all, if 
you're running KDE as your desktop environment, running KDE applications will 
ensure better integration and smarter resource consumption.

> My point, if you are wondering, is that I would suspect that most
> developers might be prone to building apps using the same framework that
> the applications they already use, use. 

i don't think so... the language a developer's email app is written in rarely 
if ever has an impact on their choices. they may use that same language, or 
write to the same toolkit, but rarely is it because of that app. in fact, 
it's far more common for a developer to picks apps that match their 
development choices  (e.g. I write apps with Qt and KDE and therefore favour 
Qt/KDE apps)

- -- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43
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