Hi, On Friday, 2010-06-11, mafeusek@xxxxxxxxx wrote: > I work with group of people that used windows and now `have to' use KDE. > They are not computer scientists, just day to day computer users. In > general they like KDE (modern look and feel), except one part they don't, > it is firefox/open office integration with KDE. This highly depends on the operation system and, in case of Linux, Linux distribution. I'v heard that for example Open SUSE has great Firefox and OOo integration. > My concern is why KDE team spends time on developing separate programs > (konqueror/koffice) instead using their invaluable capabilities to > integrate firefox/open office? There are several distinc points in this so I'll try to address them separately. 1) KDE team members working on providing integration KDE, as a workspace and platform provider puts quite some work into offering integration points to independent software developers. KDE developer actively participate and often spearhead work on specifications shared between Free Software desktop projects, so interaction and integration is not bound to using a specific software stack. Whether or not application developers use these (directly or libraries implementing them) is of course up to them. E.g. they might not want to follow icon theming and thus not use the icon name specification, or want to provide their own password storage and thus not using the D-Bus secret service API (though this one is a very new addition). Mozilla, for example, intentionally tries to avoid certain aspects of desktop integration to allow their products to look and behave similar across platforms. 2) KDE team members working on external programs for integration Generally, as described above, the idea is to provide integration points for application developers interested in improving desktop integration. Some KDE developers might be users of such applications and not be satisfied with their current offering and attempt to become a developer at these projects as well. This might or might not be easy, largely depends on how the other project's community is organized, etc. To some extend this happens at distributions that ship both the application and KDE workspaces, e.g. using plugin functionality present in the application to plug KDE integration (using integration point available in KDE) into these apps. 3) KDE team members working on KDE software That's obviously what most KDE developers do, by virtue of being KDE developers. Sometimes other communities start to work on a kind of application that some of KDE's developers have been working on as well. Whether or not it then makes sense to stop working on the KDE applications depends on a lot of things. The KDE framework based application could offer additional advantages, e.g. creation of libraries other KDE applications can the use as well, or provide tight integration with other KDE apps, or being easier to port to other kinds of compites (e.g.mobile devices). The KDE framework based application could only require little effort because it is "only" a wrapper around an already exisiting KDE component. For example, Konqueror is a web browser shell around one of KDE's web engine components. Compared to the work required for the engine component, work on the shell is minimal. Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring
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