KDE and Gnome

[Taj Morton <lists wildgardenseed com>]

Hello Everyone,
Yes, I know you are tired of everyone complaining about how KDE and
Gnome don't work together very well. However, I have come to plea for
that very thing.
If Linux is *ever* to get to the desktop, KDE and Gnome apps *must* be
able to work with each other.
This means that drag-and-drop should work between Nautilus and KEdit.
This also means that I should be able to have Wanda down on my KDE
system tray and the KPrinter manager on my Gnome system tray. It would
also be nice if Gaim didn't need two different sets of code to put it's
little icon down there...

Now that I've ranted my head off and probably offended a lot of people,
let me explain some of my ideas.
The way to do some of this is to add it at the X level. For example,
it's very lucky that we have a XClipboard. If we didn't, we'd have
Klipboard and gBoard. You wouldn't be able to copy and paste between
gEdit and KWord--not good.

The answer to several other things is _standards_. For example, we need
a desktop standard. We should just have one ~/Desktop folder which holds
items on the desktop. That way, you could eaisly swap between Gnome and
KDE without loosing your desktop. True, links contain different
information, but they are basically the same. They include the name in
any number of languages, the icon, the location, etc etc . This also
needs to be standardized.

Another thing that needs to be standardized is Recent Files. When I open
a document with Word Perfect or OpenOffice, I *expect* it to show up on
the Documents menu. With Linux, I can't really expect anything, unless I
use only KDE or only Gnome apps. What fun is that? There are some things
that KWord is missing that Abiword has, and vise-versa. This maybe
should go under something like standardization. For example, you could
have one ~/.winmanager/.recent file which contained information on
recent files.

Also, interfaces need to be standardized. When you start an app in the
Windows world, you *expect* the interface to look the same. You *expect*
Ctrl+C to copy and you *expect* Alt+F4 to close. Having the *look*
change is very confusing to newbies. I have installed Linux for a couple
of people and the one thing that they say that they don't like is how
apps look different. This *must* change.

I can imagine how to do several of these things. Instead of relying on
applications to do things the right way, why not write a shared library
called something like windowMan.so.<ver>? This would include useful
functions like MakeLink, AddToRecent, AddToStartup, CopyToClip, etc etc
similar to the Windows API. That doesn't seem like it would be *too* hard...

Now, I'm not into some kill KDE or kill Gnome. Nor do I like Bluecurve.
It was terrible (IMHO, anyway). I would just like to see the KDE and
Gnome team working together, rather than duplicating each others work.
There really isn't much difference between KWord and Abiword, except
they use different toolkits. If the Abiword team was working with the
KWord team (or vise-versa) on the same project, this one project would
be light-years ahead of where it is right now. Also, it doesn't really
help that much having two different word processors that do the same
thing. It splits the development power, making *both of the projects*
work more slowly.

I think it's time to work together.
Thanks for listening and I hope I haven't offended anyone.
--Taj