On Wednesday 28 July 2021 12:32:34 pm dep wrote: > First, I'm on the list, so you needn't cc me. Sorry about that. I'm still new to this "mailing list" thing xD. > Second, just look at the latest Plasma desktop. It does nothing worth doing > that KDE3 didn't do, but it makes those things far more complicated and > difficult. In KDE3/TDE, if you want to add an application to Kicker, you > drag it there. The end. In current KDE, there's a whole wad of > incomprehensible crap you have to go through, and none of it is optional. > > Nor is this anything new. When the late, unlamented KOffice was coming > along, it had filters that would import many file formats -- but not save > in them! It would save only in its own little format, which made it > entirely useless if the document were to be sent to anyone else. (It > wasn't even good for documents you intended to print onto actual physical > paper, because KPrinter kinda sucked (this was pre-CUPS). The boys were > happy with themselves while users were wondering what the hell the boys > were thinking. Asked about it, the boys would reply that if you weren't > happy, you were free to write something else. This what I mean when I > refer to "enthusiast development." > > You may or may not have been around during the great Qt war. Gnome had been > rumored and promised for a long time and then, in the middle of 1998, > along came KDE 1.0 and right out of the box it was great. But it wasn't > reported or discussed as such. Instead, it was always "it will do until > Gnome gets released." Then came the "and Qt isn't free" cries of doctrinal > impurity, that on a whim Troll Tech could kill KDE or make people pay for > it or something (as if the trolls were, say, going to become the > reprehensible Darl McBride of Caldera). The trolls freed up Qt, at least > to the extent that it was no longer even an imagined risk to KDE. Ah, but > Gnome is going to be so great! > > Leading the charge in many ways was Miguel deIcaza, a brilliant programmer > and along with Nat Friedman founder of Ximian. (I still have and > occasionally wear one of their teeshirts, though I like my Progeny Linux > Systems teeshirt more, because it draws comments from a better class of > people, the Debian snobs.) Miguel truly is brilliant -- he's the guy who > wrote Midnight Commander, a quarter century later still the single most > essential application on any Linux machine. And he and Nat are really nice > guys; I spent some time with them during the Ximian days, at their office > in Boston. But they were both influential and unfair in their appraisal of > KDE and Qt. Let it be noted that they both work now, as they have for > years, at that bastion of free and open-source software, Microsoft. > > Much of that is an aside; my point is that the QT suspicion remains, which > is the chief reason that Gnome and GTK are taken seriously. > > But another of the reasons is the attitude by the KDE developers. I > remember when the KMail addressbook was a simple, human-editable text file > comprising name and email address. (This was when just about everything in > Linux was configured by simple, human-editable text files, the passing of > which I still mourn. Opening a file in a text editor and scrolling down to > change the value of "scrollbar-width=10" gave users enormous power that we > no longer have.) The boys decided to make it more elaborate and simply > eliminate support for the old format. That was bad enough; worse, their > brilliant new addressbook *didn't work*! I remember staying up nights > hacking the new KMail to get it to use the old addressbook. The boys not > only didn't like this, they were snotty in their boasting about their new > addressbook which, again, *didn't work*. They took the same attitude when > they made the (fatal, in my estimation) file format decision in KOffice; > by the time that got sorted out we had StarOffice, then OpenOffice, then > OpenOffice.org, and finally LibreOffice. Perhaps realizing that the Gnomes > had no fair criticisms of KDE to offer, the boys set about creating some > entirely fair criticisms of KDE. > > So now both desktops in their current manifestations do whatever they damn > well please rather than allow users choices in these things. Gnome can do > it because, hey, it's Gnome and freeeeeee unlike Qt-tainted KDE; KCE does > it because the boys will be the boys. > -- > dep Thanks for the history lesson.. Yes, I wasn't even born then! One of my first experiences with Linux was with Kubuntu in 2017, with Plasma 5 (yucky). Never wanted to touch it again. Never really tried GNOME itself. ____________________________________________________ tde-users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Web mail archive available at https://mail.trinitydesktop.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
