Common Interfaces for Gnome and KDE Released

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.'"

Soon enough...

[chroot_james]

...it'll be a matter of which widget set you prefer. The api's, however, will be identical for both!

Re:Linux needs more tools like this!

[GotenXiao]

You just described Windows.

Seriously.

The KDE menu works fine (I can't speak for GNOME as I don't use it); a standardised storage location is all that is needed.
And the "more common area to install the software" is /opt if you really want to segregate stuff out, but /usr, /bin, /sbin and their ilk work perfectly fine. If you want to find something on Linux, use "which " or "whereis " or "slocate ".

Re:Nothing wrong with that.

[daff2k]

Evolution I get, but what's half-baked about Kmail?

Will the common APIs solve...

[bogaboga]

Will the common APIs solve the fact that I cannot paste a PDF web URL in Evince in GNOME and have Evince load it? This is one of the things that keeps me from using GNOME.

The other thing is that I cannot do the simplest file operations in the GNOME file selector. Will the common APIs solve this [burning] issue?