Why KDE people makes KDE alternatives

[Tsuroerusu]

On the last show (#125) where Zack Rusin was on, Dann mentioned that he thought that a bunch of KDE projects kind of mirrored what was already being done with GNOME stuff.... (Listen to the show from 108:00 for Dann's full comment), Zack mentions that a lot of the KDE projects started before their more well known competition such as OpenOffice, Evolution etc., Dann uses XSane and gThumb as examples. One thing Zack didn't mention, was integration. One of the things I really love about KDE is the close integration between programs, for example, Kontact is a lot of apps that actually can work as one through KDE's KParts technology, sometimes I don't feel that I wanna start up a big groupware suite to check my mail, so I just fire up KMail running as a standalone app and get my mail checking going. To my knowledge, and please correctly if I'm wrong here, there isn't a way to make KDE and GNOME apps interact in this close way because they're written for different desktops and apply different user interface guidelines to them. For example, one of the things digiKam eaisily could integrate with would be KMail, Konqueror, KOffice and a few others, for example you could make an option in KMail to eaisily pull an image out of your digiKam collection when you wanted to send it to a friend, have it automatically scaled down (Which is already present in digiKam) if it's large and then you just click "Send", also if you were doing a presentation in KPresenter, you could eaisily insert pictures from your digiKam collection, without having to navigate through it with the KDE file dialog. In the case of XSane and it's KDE alternative, Kooka, it could be something like scanning and importing into KOffice....
Also if you look at the open source desktop's history, KDE was started before GNOME. GTK and GNOME was actually started because of the free software guys' concers that Qt was not free software, it just had a "gratis edtion", so GNOME was actually born to be a duplication, and in the end it ended up being good for KDE that GNOME was being developed because Trolltech was kind enough to release Qt under the GPL, so in the ended, the process of developing GTK and GNOME actually "liberated" Qt (I'm in RMS mode here).

'Ey Dann if you read this, I hope the above makes sense.

Also another thing I like about having both a GNOME and KDE app for doing the same thing is then you don't have to have both Qt and GTK libraries loaded into memory and thereby saving some resources, for example, right now I use CastPodder, which is a GTK app, for receiving podcasts (I could use BashPodder, but I like an app that I can sort with and stuff like that) and it's typically a little slower than the other Qt/KDE apps I run.

And finally as Zack also mentions, choices are not bad, and competition are certainly not bad. Why is it that Microsoft's products and support are so bad? It's because they run a big monopoly and always kill their competition using the courts and lobbying instead of actually making a better product and now that strategy is biting them in the ass.

I always think that "Free software and open source enables competition", for example Red Hat and Novell may be a little cranky at each other over the whole XGL/AIGLX /accelerated X subject, but in general I see them as compeditors, not enemies. For example, I believe Red Hat ships Ximian's Connector plugin in some of their enterprise products if I remember correctly, that's good for the users in the end.

[Jza]

I remember reading GnomeJournals some months back (I think it was issue 3 or 4) where they talk about the community. I think that for many years Gnome was FLOSS, basically Gnome is really where the exciting programming was happening and where the hacking was being done. The community was chaotic and lone rangers drop tonz of code and even if it was a mess in the end and it was extremely hard to make it work. The Gnome project really was a great coders party.

Those were the years where GTK 1.x was reaching maturity, and really exciting stuff was really making the GTK apps come together and being part of the Gnome universe.

However something happened, and the Gnome people and the Ximian people really came into a more structured methodology and decided to start getting on a 6 month release. A lot of development has to be cut and focus on other things (what later became usability).

It has been like 2-3 years since then and well now we see how the excitement really abandoned gnome and went into KDE and other projects. I think Gnome now is really not as exciting as it used to be, developer wise.

Is also interesting how attude has change, most linux users were also hackers, they use linux as a coding platform really. They talk with similar linux hackers and the users... well who cares really.

The interesting part is that even if some users (consumers) feel the divine right to push developers to do what they want. Really FLOSS was a very different picture from now. With Novell pushing Ximian and Gnome eventually to make the Gnome suite a consumer product. KDE has inherit the free developers and people that just want to code.