[lug] Re: recycling code [WAS Fwd: NICHOLAS PETRELEY: "The Op en Source" ]

[lpotter]

At 14:22 3/22/2001 -0700, you wrote:

>I would like to extend this to KDE. I personally feel the KDE apps
>are still very immature compared to (I know I may get tracked down
>and physically burnt for this but I must) the MS GUI (not the kernel, not
>necessarily the object model, definitely not the code, just the MS window
>manager) and the apps written for windows.

The REAL difference is that M$ pays big bucks for thousands of developers 
to hack
on the code everyday, whereas most development on linux is volunteer.
Most likely done by college students.



> > Where KDE has features and integration, and is rapidly approaching
> > "ready for prime time" status, I see Gnome foundering.  Why?  App bloat.
> > Everyone and his borther is putting out apps, and designs...  But they
> > aren't
> > getting finished.  Scratching an itch, writing a Gnome mailer in Perl
> > because
> > of the hack value, this is all good and well...  But the 'user
> > friendliness'
> > of Gnome has suffered -- I find apps that are somewhat unstable (I
> > averaged a

To me, gnome has always had this problem.

> > The Gnome UI still feels 'kludgy', and has some rendering glitches.  It's
> > still a major "developmer's platform".  This isn't a bad thing, because
> > the
> > people who use it will fix bugs that annoy them. Gnome doesn't feel like
> > it's
> > progressing as fast as KDE did in the same stage.  There's lots of apps
> > still
> > in the 0.x stage in the code...  And Gnome is trying to push v2.0 out the
> > door.  The backend framework is there, but the USABLE apps that
> > [(boss)|(parents)|(kids)|(joe sixpack)] can use JUST ISN'T there.
> > Admittedly, with KDE, the entry barrier that you encounter with Unix
> > (multi-user over single, different concepts, etc) is still there...  But
> > still, I find KDE much easier to use and more friendly, especially when
> > looking at it more from a novice perspective.

Personally, I feel this all has somewhat to do with the underlying libraries.
QT is a breeze to code with, nice, intuitive function names, and is well 
thought
out, and great documentation. Whereas, when I  checked out developing with
gnome, I found it a rather  hogepodge of functions.  I dunno, maybe it was 
just
me, and a few years ago, but it just didn't seem thought out at all. I 
couldn't get
the feel of it, and it needed a wrapper to write in C++. Not that QT isn't a
wrapper for C++, I just don't like C.

I also think kdevelop has alot to do with it. The app wizard, and now QT's
designer, enables getting a basic KDE app in no time at all. I don't know 
if gnome has
any tools such as this.