Re: KDE and Gnome

[Archit Baweja <bighead users sourceforge net>]

Ah, if only there was One desktop environment, all these problems would be 
solved (or to be precise never would've surfaced).

There is a cost to diversity.
Archit Baweja

Taj Morton <lists wildgardenseed com> writes:

> 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
> 
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