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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Styles and CO (was: (offtopic) My mom is a born hacker)
From:       "Gerold J. Wucherpfennig" <gjwucherpfennig () gmx ! net>
Date:       2003-04-25 17:48:11
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On Friday 25 April 2003 05:23, David Johnson wrote:
> On Thursday 24 April 2003 03:33 am, Gerold J. Wucherpfennig wrote:
> > Windows "has" more applications. Many aren't very good either, but a
> > few are better than any OSS tool out there. (Sure, they have the
> > money to dev. such killer apps...)
>
> That certainly makes Windows an attractive choice for many users, but it
> has nothing to do with usability, ease-of-use, etc.

That's right, it's only a reason for many users to use Windows. 

> I'm not really sure what you mean by interoperability among toolkits.
> Drag and Drop under UNIX still has some snags, but on the whole it
> works very well and it is improving fast. I wish I could drag an audio
> file out of Xmms and onto Noatun, but then I again, I wish I could also
> do the same thing between MediaPlayer and WinAmp.

- for each major toolkit a style which points to a common shared library. That
library could implement a common style interface for all toolkits.( Redoing
 every popular style for every toolkit is just a waste of time.)

- some dcop compatibility stuff.

- a common ui guide, already in progress.. Thanks go to Aaron and Havoc :-)  

- a common text layout engine (put parts of qt and pango together into a
common library...) 

And there are other things, it mainly comes down to enlarge the
largest common denominator and make the underlying parts interchangable.

Sure this won't be easy but users and developers will benefit from that.

> The desktop is the only domain in which KDE resides. There's no way
> around that fact.

KDE can't be successful on the desktop if it doesn't abstract the underlying
system and creates some interfaces to it. Right now it just ignores it.

One example is to create an abstration of the handling of network interfaces
(the configuration, startup, shutdown, ...). How it works at the underlying
system doesn't matter, it's the job of the distributions to do the low-level
parts, no matter if the underlying system is a kind of linux or some
bsd variant or cygwin or something else.

> There will never be a Bill Gates to decree that there
> shall be but one printing subsystem and but one printing dialog. UNIX
> is not a monolithic welded mass, but a layered system with the desktop
> very near the top. We must treat it as such.

What are you talking about? I want to create interfaces/abstraction
to the underlying system and let the user choose what he/she wants.

And I don't want to get one printing system or one printing dialog I want
come kind of make the kde/gnome printing dialogs plugins,
so that the user or system integrator or distributor can choose
which one will be used system-wide.
I don't think that this is easy and don't know if that it's even possible :-(

> We have to stay on that KDE island otherwise we will drown in the ocean.
> But just because we aren't part of a monolithic welded mass does not
> mean we are helpless. It just means that we cannot (and should not)
> blindly copy the Windows way of doing things. The gross architectures
> of Windows and UNIX are too wildly divergent to even try.
>

I'm not talking about some monolithic mess. And it's not about copying 
Windows. Please read again...

We won't drown into the ocean, but instead create bridges to the outer world,
so we can gain by the wide world of open source. 


 
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