On Tuesday August 25 2009 5:27:08 am G T Smith wrote:
On a more pertinent note, one also needs to consider those who voted with their feet...
Do they? You mentioned the importance of choice. Why should KDE people care about what non-KDE users think of KDE? Believe it or not, there are those who leave other desktops for KDE, as well. If you find that uncomfortable, go ahead and disbelieve it, but ask yourself if Gnome people should care what non-Gnome users think. There are still features I miss from OS/2's Workplace Shell, but I wouldn't go back to it. I actually made a feature request on this a long time ago, but I'm guessing it didn't interest too many people. I'd still like to see KDE eventually have work folders that act like mini-sessions that you could create by saving the current running programs as a folder and launch them by clicking the folder later, though.
The only thing I used on a regular basis that was QT based was konqueror as a file browser. (I am not impressed by dolphin). This was largely mitigated by mc and the discovery that Nautilus no longer did crazy things on my setups. The few other KDE things I use on occasional basis had GTK or X based alternative. KDE AFAIK is the only QT based desktop, and there are rather a lot of non-QT based desktops. So I realised that it it did not make much sense for me install KDE or the QT libraries or invest time in setting up KDE4 (YMMV).
You've actually inspired me to uninstall Gnome. The only GTK apps I use are Firefox, Openoffice (of which I will be using the QT version if that's ever finished) and GIMP, and with the exception of GIMP, these thankfully don't *look* like GTK apps. I've had Gnome on my machine forever and it's kind of a waste of drive space.
PS There is now a further factor to consider. When Nokia acquired Trolltech hence QT, it was not to get a foothold in the PC based Open Source market place (it was more likely part of a strategic response to the potential threat posed by android, and the need to update the Symbian OS GUI). Nokia are largely indifferent to Open Source based development and its community, (and can afford to be as Open Source based development in of handset applications is marginal). In some ways Nokia can make M$ seem positively cuddly...., and Nokias relative silence about the future of QT outside of their core market is probably more of a cause of concern than if they had said anything.
This point is more or less moot. The open source community has a fork of QT that will be available forever. I actually hope that Nokia changes the policy on the commercial QT, but it's actually not in their interests as a separate QT would be major competition and developers would be able to write commercial applications using the free QT without paying a fee to Nokia/Trolltech. Keeping a unified QT means that free and commercial QT applications remain compatible and the commercial version remains relevant. Nokia's kind of stuck on this one. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org