Re: KDE and Gnome

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Tue, 2003-08-26 at 12:14, Julien Olivier wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-08-26 at 16:45, Sean Middleditch wrote:

> > 
> > You have that ability.  Use a real mainstream tookit and not a cracked
> > out niche/custom one.  If you use a weird toolkit, you must not have
> > cared about conformity.
> > 
> 
> Well, if you use native themes (not bluecurve), GNOME and KDE have very
> different looks by default (GTK's default VS Keramik). So even
> mainstream toolkits can have clashing looks.

Redhat and Mandrake both solve this.  I'm sure SuSE will too, if they
haven't already.  Other distros may or may not care enough to use a
unified theme; if they don't, they are the wrong distro to use with
people who care about this stuff.

> 
> More over, if someone uses GNOME and changes its theme, it just changes
> GTK theme. So, even if his GTK theme used to look like his QT theme, it
> won't be the case anymore after changing his GTK theme.

This is teeny bug, and doesn't need a massive toolkit purging or theme
redesign to fix... just write a little spec for picking theme name
(using XSETTINGS, perhaps) and the likely few lines of code needed for
it, and you're done.

Let's not fix the loose nail with bulldozer.

> 
> > > app, you have 2 possibilities: whether you create an app with the
> > > standard look or you create a skinnable app (like XMMS). You don't have
> > 
> > XMMS is dying, thankfully.  The sooner, the better.  The UI is worst
> > monstrosity I've seen in a long time.  I still can't figure out how half
> > of it works.
> > 
> 
> I agree but that's not the point. The point is that you always have the
> possibility to creacte a skinned app and, so, override the default
> standard look if you really want to.

Right.  Just like you can not use GTK/Qt if you want to.  It looks and
acts different because _they wanted it to_.  You can offer all the
unification you want, but if people don't want to use it, it's not going
help any.

> > If they cared about integrating w/ GNOME/KDE, why in the nine hells
> > would they use a niche/custom toolkit anyhow?  Mozilla's interface was a
> > mistake, one which has already been corrected w/ Galeon/Epiphany/Camino
> > and more for other platforms.  OpenOffice.org is another mistake, one
> > which is based mostly on the fact it's legacy code that can't be easily
> > converted.  Many other apps based on a Motif are also that way only due
> > to legacy code.  How would new theming methods help all these legacy
> > code anyhow?
> > 
> 
> It would help them because at least they would know which look to
> emulate. I mean, if you want to create a toolkit on Linux, which look
> will you give to it ? Windows look ? GTK's default look ? QT's default

Why make a new toolkit, other than to not look/act like what we already
have?

> look ? MacOSX' look ? How do you define what is Linux' default look ?

Linux doesn't have a default look.  Linux is a kernel.  GNOME is a
desktop - you make an app to work with the GNOME desktop.  Make the app
be a GNOME app or not.

> Without a themeing library, you can't even say what is the standard look
> as it depends on the toolkit AND the theme used on this toolkit. Even
> the "standard" themes of th 2 main toolkits (GTK and KDE) clash, to say
> the least.

You are obsessing on such trivial pointless stuff.  Who cares about
default themes?  Who even _uses_ default themes?  Distros these days
don't give you the default theme by default, quit worrying about it.

And back to your theming library, what is it going to solve?  What?  You
can't unify anything except in the toolkit itself - the whole method
used to draw widgets varies between toolkits.  They vary based on
backend (X, Cairo, FB, etc.).  It's not feasible.


> > No, it'd be a waste of time.  ;-)
> > 
> 
> Well, I really don't think so. But it's all about open source. So you
> have the right to think it's a waste of time and someone else can hack
> on it if he wants.

Righty.  I'm offering my arguments here to prove why it's a waste of
time, versus a lot of base speculation and uninformed guessing, so as to
hopefully dissuade anyone so talented from wasting time, and perhaps
working on real solutions to solvable problems.

I.e., just making KDE and GNOME sync themes, instead of trying to
revolutionize the toolkit space that no one else has ever been able to
do.  ;-)

> 
> > > 
> 
-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.