On Wednesday 04 August 2010 14:51:25 Sebastian Kügler wrote:
Besides that, when seeing how much energy is poured into delivering different UIs on the same system, it simply makes me cry. And it makes me wonder how much longer this is sustainable. It might come as a surprise, but it's completely braindead to support two (or more) full UI stacks, with different applications, desktop interfaces and all that. It's in my not so humble opinion one of the major weak points of most Linux-based Operating Systems out there.
If you frame it as maintaining to redundant stacks, it doesn't sound like it
would make sense, but I think that's not an accurate description of the
situation.
We have a rich set of applications using all kinds of different programming
languages and toolkits. Providing a platform which runs them great and gives
the user at lease some choice is something which openSUSE excels in. Of course
there still is room for improvement, but we are well prepared for that, e.g.
by having key people of different desktop communities on board.
If you look at the UI stacks, there is a lot in common and a lot you actually
can't remove (neither removing Gtk nor Qt makes any sense for example). If
dedicated people go the extra step of providing a polished desktop experience
based on Plasma or GNOME Shell or LXDE or whatever, that's wonderful and
satisfies actual user demand. There is really not much to lose there.
Of course it's possible to optimize allocation of efforts, and if it's
necessary for openSUSE to put effort in replicating an application just to use
another UI toolkit is debatable. But I think this discussion is better done at
the application and actual use case level than at the desktop community level.
--
Cornelius Schumacher