Re: KDE and Gnome

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Tue, 2003-08-26 at 07:03, Julien Olivier wrote:

> The oly sensible to have a unified look in X is to define a standard for
> pixmap themes usable in QT, KDE, GTK, GNOME, Mozilla, Java, Wine etc...
> Or, another possibility would be to use a shared themeing library. Each
> client would ask the library to draw each widget. So each toolkit would
> use this shared library to draw widgets and you would only need to
> create themes for this themeing library.

Well, there's a lot more to an interface than the color of its widgets. 
There is the whole feel/behaviour.  I can't stand using KDE apps (or
even Mozilla) because they act nothing like the other apps on my
desktop, even if I install a matching theme for them.  Buttons are in
different orders in dialogs.  Configuration panels are huge messes of
useless crap I can't find my way thru.  Widgets are laid out with no
thought to organization or cleanliness.  etc.  Even a good deal of GTK
apps I can't stand to use because the UI is complete and utter crack. 
(like gSynaptic.)

All this effort to make unified themes, or even use a single toolkit,
isn't going to fix the above.  The only way to fix it would be convince
all developers on a single UI design philosophy, which is impossible. 
Not to mention there will always be developers who try to do completely
insane and pointless things like the Mozilla cross platform UI, where it
fits into one platform (Windows) and feels totally alien on others
(GNOME, OS X, etc.)

The best solution for unified look is to just use GNOME apps.  Don't
like how Mozilla looks?  Then why are you using it instead of
Epiphany/Galeon?  OpenOffice too Windows-ish for you?  Try
Abiword/Gnumeric.

The only other solid option is to do what Abiword did - separate the app
core and GUI layer, so you can implement different interfaces (GNOME,
Windows, OS X, KDE, whatever).  I'm very sure KDE could have a native
Abiword interface if anyone cared enough to code one.

We'll never magically get all apps to integrate, tho.  There will always
be people like the Mozilla developers, or people who purposefully pick
odd-ball non-mainstream toolkits because they don't care about or
actively dislike the modern desktops.  Let's accept that and move on. 
;-)

> 
> But, well.. that needs to be:
>  - discussed
>  - agreed between all the differents toolkits (not just QT and GTK)
>  - implemented
>  
> (snip)
> 
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-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.