On 15 Apr 2003, Alexandre Julliard wrote:
I strongly disagree. The Win32 API may not be so bad in the abstract (though I'd dispute that too), but it's a very poor choice for a Unix toolkit. It exposes way too many low-level details that don't have an equivalent on Unix. If you want a cross platform toolkit you should use a higher level one that abstracts a lot more of the platform details; and if you don't care about other platforms then you should use a Unix native toolkit. I don't think we would be doing anybody a favor by encouraging the use of Wine for new Linux developments.
Absolutely -- nobody these days write apps directly in the Win32 API. People do use a higher level toolkit such as MFC, QT, GTK, etc. Yeah, I agree, the Win32 API exposes stuff that's hard to implement on Unix. But stop for a second and think at the following ideal scenario: - all QT versions were free (and LGPL) - GTK had a proper Win32 port, where they would not reimplement the widgets, but use the native ones like QT does - we had a stable Wine 1.0 :)
Now, Linux apps use either QT/KDE, GTK/GNOME, or wxWindows as a toolkit. If things are done right, we would have binary compatibility for the toolkit backends, so that one can choose either the GTK/Wine or GTK/X11 backend at runtime.
These cross platform toolkits are hiding all these low level things that are hard to implement, so we don't have that problem. But we would have a unified platform that would be quite cool.
I don't think we're that far off. QT has a Win32 backend, it's doable, the only problem is that it's not free. GTK should be portable to Win32, and wxWindows already has a working Wine backend. Bonobo should easily mix with OLE given it's development history.
What you get: -- Linux apps using their toolkit of choice. None of the silliness we have now where you have to choose one or the other almost like they are different platforms (there is hope with BlueCurve) -- Iteroperability across the board, including _native_ Windows apps! -- a LOT of good apps, free and comercial. Look at SF which are the most popular apps. Windows apps! -- a lot less duplication of efforts, etc, etc.
Yes, there are problems, it will not be 100% pretty, but what is? In fact, all things too pretty tend to fail (I think Python is a lot prettier than Perl, but Perl is doing so much better).
And I think a better name would be WIDE for: -- WIne Desktop Environment -- WIDEly Integrated Desktop Environment -- Wide Is a Desktop Environment -- WIld Desktop Environment :)))