Re: Food for thought: Why (and how) should KDE and Gnome unite?

[Fredrik Liljegren <cof ebox tninet se>]

>Hi again,

Hello.
As presentation, I am a user of KDE, interrested in all X apps.

>  And there should be a cross-environment way of specifying mime-type /
>application bindings.  The $GNOME/share/mime-types/*  and
>$KDE/share/mimelnk/* are very similar after all, just independent. 
....
>  OK, I was wrong. It should be application-dependent, I meant to say
>'environment-independent'. Again, $GNOME/share/app  and  $KDE/share/app.
>Or plain /opt/...    
>  Ideally, either applications should install their language
>files in both, or KDE and GNOME would check both locations, OR,
>one $DESKTOP/share/app  place!

I don't know how it would work to install GNOME on my system, a Debian, but
I've noticed that debian overrides the $KDEDIR with a common /usr/share/ for
all applications.  If the content of GNOMEs and KDEs share/app would be the
same (witch I don't expect them to be), this thing would allready be solved for
debian systems.


>  Gnome chose to be WM-independent, but in order to take full advantage, a
>WM should be Gnome compliant. Advantage: more choice.
>  KDE chose an integrated WM. Advantage: more efficient.  Applicaitons
>communicate with the WM by invoking member functions directly, not through
>hints, as Gnome does. The first is more efficient, but doesn't work with
>other WMs.
>  Should KDE-WM be Gnome compliant?...

Making kwm gnome-compliant would in fact be a merge of part of the core,
wouldn't it?


As a programmer (allthough not in either project) my choice of GUI seems to be
done for me, because I prefer C++ in my apps. If there would be a decent
object-library (wich there might be, cause I don't know that much about GTK)
for writing apps in C++ for GNOME, then I would have a choice.


About standards for documents, the UNIX world have TeX and LaTeX. These are of
a somewhat dofferent type from MS Word, RTF and such, but is quite a nice
standard. They also convert very well with HTML, especialy with the style
sheets coming up.
LyX/KLyX, a kind of front end for LaTeX, is also an example of an application
both using KDE GUI (KLyX) and developing to work without it.


Regards, Fredrik

By the way, the new netscape, mozilla, exists in Qt-version as well.