Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4570 mails)

["Steven T. Hatton" <hattons@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sunday 13 November 2005 05:16 pm, Ted Harding wrote:

> Then there was the complicated tangle in which the wonderful
> WordPerfect-5.1 for DOS finally ended up as a downgraded
> relic peeking through the glitzy lace curtains of a Windows
> GUI (and the back-port to Linux did not fare much better).
> In particular I regretted the degradation of the "printer
> editor", which enabled you to fine-tune formatting of special
> things. I'm not blaming Novell for this (though that's where
> it ended up) since the rot set in before Novell got hold
> of it. But they did not treat it with the respect that it
> deserved, preferring to use it simply as a competitive lever.
> They had an opportunity, and preferred to ignore it.

Ironically, one of the strongest motivations driving me to contribute what I 
can to the KDE has been the repeated butt-kicking I've seen Novell take from 
the monopolistic software vendor.  I happen to not agree with you regarding 
WordPerfect and the GUI releases. WordPerfect 8 was usable on Linux.  
WordPerfect 9 was a bold effort, and an abysmal failure.  Corel Linux had 
some very nice, corporate-friendly features.  I remember setting it up at 
DISA and thinking: wow!  This network admit tool is the real deal.  I was 
seeing NIS, SMB, and NetWare shares on the network "out of the box", in an 
intuitive GUI at that!  

 I believe WordPerfect for Windows provided substantial improvements in 
usability.  I don't judge everything in terms of how easy it is for _me_ to 
do things.  My primary editor is Emacs, and my favorite systems 
administration UI is an xterm running bash.  My Dad, a retired engineer is a 
loyal WordPerfect user from the DOS era, and he certainly seems to like the 
Windows versions. 

My favorite KDE project is KDevelop which currently falls very short of what I 
believe it should be.  The reason KDevelop is so important to me is because 
it makes it easier for a person to get started with C++, and KDE development.

I've also toyed with MonoDevelop, and tried to provide positive and helpful 
feedback when I did work with the SVN bits.  So let it not be said that I am 
"anti-GNOME".

I'll agree that the KDE is not about snuggling up to corporate executives.  
The goal of the KDE is to provide a USER interface for HUMAN BEINGS.

This article by Matthias Ettrich reveals a lot of the philosophy behind the 
KDE.  There is a technical point which I believe probably should be 
corrected.  I tried to sustain the postion put forth in this article on the 
C++ newsgroup, and was forced to concede that passing pointers as a general 
rule is probably not the best design.  The person who persuaded me of that 
is, BTW, a Microsoft engineer.  I will say a dew my share of blood on the way 
down.  :)  The most important part of this entire article is this one 
statement: 
"An API is to the programmer what a GUI is to the end-user. The 'P' in API 
stands for 'Programmer', not 'Program', to highlight the fact that APIs are 
used by programmers, who are _humans_."

http://doc.trolltech.com/qq/qq13-apis.html

Steven