Common Interfaces for Gnome and KDE Released 186
An anonymous reader writes "Today OSDL and freedesktop.org announced the release of Portland 1.0, a set of common interfaces for GNOME and KDE. From the article: 'Specifically, these tools make installing and uninstalling menus, icons, and icon-resources easier for developers. They also can obtain the system's settings on how to handle different file types, and program access to email, the root account, preferred applications, and the screensaver. There's nothing new in this kind of functionality. What is new is that developers can use these regardless of which desktop environment -- KDE or GNOME -- they're targeting.'"
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing wrong with that. (Score:3, Insightful)
Like, maybe we can get one mail client that's really good, instead of two half-baked ones, etc.
Re:what's the point? (Score:3, Insightful)
Looks like you got caught up in the overloaded use of the word "interface". You're thinking in terms of the GUI, but this is about application interfaces. KDE and GNOME will still look as different as always, but now applications can use a single interface to install menu items for either KDE or GNOME. This is good. It's one step on the long road to wooing commercial ISVs onto Linux.
The only open question is whether or not this will work in the long run. For example, at one point the LSB [freestandards.org] was supposed to standardize filesystem locations across distros so that installers wouldn't have to know if your distro uses "/etc/http.conf" or "/etc/apache/httpd.conf" (LSB appears to have dropped that pipe dream). If distros and developers don't pick up and use these new interfaces, it doesn't much matter that they exist.
Re:But there's still two toolkits, right? (Score:2, Insightful)
Stupid self-martyring twat. I wish slashdot would let us filter out comments that start with this phrase, or maybe have the lameness filter nip it in the bud.
The danger for developers (Score:4, Insightful)
Plus, not to put too fine a point on it, this will be one more thing that developers will have to worry about. Right now, we have something like:
if (kde) { -stuff- }
else if (gnome) { -other stuff- }
else { -handle neither being installed- }
Now, well have something more like:
if (portland) { -stuff- }
else if (kde) { -other stuff- }
else if (gnome) { -yet more stuff- }
else { -handle neither being installed- }
Is it that big a deal? I don't know, I don't develop Gnome/KDE apps. (I wish I did!) But I hope that it either sweeps the G/K development world by storm and is adopted very, very quickly, or that it dies immediately. Otherwise, it makes things more complicated, not less.
Re:Nothing wrong with that. (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay, so the last one was a made up example.
It's not about combining Gnome and KDE (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably to make it easier for developers to more cleanly support two different kinds of users with their applications? Developers have little control over which desktop a user decides to use. Personally I hope that desktops don't end up uniting in a way that restricts the choice for a user.
This isn't about uniting the user interfaces, though. It's about making things more convenient for developers by providing a common set of developer interfaces, helping developers to make applications that will work more smoothly with either desktop, and in the longer term, maybe even other desktops that don't exist yet.
Re:The KDE/Gnome thing just bugs me. (Score:3, Insightful)
That already exists; just run gconf-editor, or Applications->System Tools->Configuration Editor if you prefer menus. This gives you access to all the settings that actually exist but don't get exposed. You can also set these on a system-wide basis for all new users, either by editing the system-wide files, or using sabayon (which lets you edit the default settings in an Xnest session).
For settings you want that don't exist, either (in order of preference):
As for the rest of your post, it sounds like you have support problems caused by different distributions doing things in different ways; I suggest either standardizing on one distribution company-wide (which you can easily do as long as your employees have no preferences amongst them, generally true for most non-computer companies), installing a separately-packaged desktop environment distribution into
Re:The danger for users (Score:5, Insightful)
That's right. It's pointless to have two different sets of libraries. Since the KDE libraries are clearly far superior to the GNOME ones, the KDE ones should be adopted and GNOME-libs abandoned.
GNOME advocate: Hey! The GNOME ones are better! Let's abandon the KDE libs instead!
[argument ensues]
That, in a nutshell, is why we have both. As long as there's people willing to work on them, and people who want to keep using them, both sets are going to exist. There's no know-nothing manager with the power to force people to abandon anything here in the OSS world.
Re:Developers, not users (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the next sentence is more important:
As an example, I run a GNOME desktop with KMail as my primary email application and a locally-installed Firefox (i.e. not the distro-provided one) as my primary web browser. As things are, I not only had to to tell GNOME that KMail and Firefox are my email and web apps, but I had to track down the KDE control center (which isn't in the menus under Fedora's GNOME config) in order to tell KDE that Firefox was my preferred browser. Otherwise, KMail would try to load everything in Konqueror, because it uses the KDE settings even when running under GNOME.
Targeting an app to Portland instead of to GNOME or KDE would let the app pick up the settings from the desktop the user is actually running (as long as the desktop used the Portland API).
Re:The danger for developers (Score:3, Insightful)
I assume you do, since you know enough about it to know that yes, technically, Linux is a kernel. Which means I have reason to think you understand what I was say and know that your response is pretty well beside the point.
Re:Bluecurve (Score:3, Insightful)
Why should Linux neet to "overtake or compete on a widescale in the United States or Canada"? If you mean compete with Windows, there's not really a comparison. Linux is a kernel -- Windows is a Kernel and OS.
It'd make more sense to claim that KDE (for example) might compete with the Windows UI one day. Specifically what's running underneath it isn't really relevant. In any case, I don't see why KDE and Gnome would need to unify for a non-Windows interface to become competitive.
I'm tired of whiners... (Score:2, Insightful)
The idea that GNOME apps would appear automatically in KDE menus is a great one, and a good thing. Some commonalities are a good idea too.
On the other hand, Linux's big strength, in my mind anyway, it that there are all sorts of different users. Hand holding types of interfaces for grandmas, and a glorified CLI for minimalist geeks. The rest of us are probably distributed across the spectrum. The point is that there is something just right for everyone.
Let's not be blinded to what makes Linux a great OS by the "beating Windoze by imitating them, but doing it better" mentality.