On April 19, 2003 05:44 pm, Francois Gouget wrote:
So I would rather put efforts into making sure Gtk, Gnome, KDE and QT are suitable solutions.
Really? Do people think that KDE & QT would be a more suitable solution? Do *anyone* here think that KDE & QT are a better alternative then WIDE for Linux as a _platform_?!? Newsflash: QT is GLPed. KDE depends on QT. If you want to develop non-GPL apps on Unix using KDE/QT, you have to pay thousands of dollars to Troll Tech for each developer. Is this the _free_ platform we want to build? You can develop apps for free on Windows (see MinGW, Borland, OpenWatcom), or for a small price buy MSVC, yet you'll have to pay through the nose on our free OS! Isn't that fantastic? And the best part is that we give the Trolls complete monopoly, whereas they can do what they want to the price in the future. We trade the (very little) control that MS has over Win32, with the big one that Trolls have over QT. Splendid!
So, can someone please tell me a *single* advantage of having KDE & QT as the GUI platform for Linux vs. having WIDE?
I have waited with this message a week to calm down, but I didn't :) so I have to say what I have to say.
You guys rave about the big, bad, bloated, ugly Win32 messing up the nice Unix GUI API. WTH are you guys talking about? There's no traditional Unix GUI API! You want bad, bloated, and ugly? Fine: -- ugly: Xaw, what can I say? -- bloated: Motif, it's good it's dead. -- bad: QT, can you spell non-free?
So the _only_ viable Unix GUI API is GTK/GNOME. But version 2 of that API came out only a year ago, and Evolution is not even ported to it! Do you consider that traditional? It's so new it's not even funny. And maybe that's fine, but the problem is that they lost steam: at the moment it seems that most development is done by RedHat, Ximian, and Sun. And it's going slow. The two platforms (GNOME and KDE) seem to diverge more and more, and if you look asymptotically, do you see a bright, integrated future?
I don't think that WIDE is the greatest idea since slice bread. It's just something I thought of as a possibility during the discussion, and I threw it in there as a way to show there are other ways of looking at Wine. But I also don't think it's such a bad idea either. And I really don't understand the irrational fear (oh, it comes from MS, it *must* be evil), and the overly emotional and unsupportable defense of 'Unix API'.