Desktop Environment for Proprietary Applications? 146
nushoin writes "Gnome and KDE are the two major desktop environments used on Linux today. However, Gnome is growing more and more affiliated with Microsoft's proprietary technologies (Mono, OOXML). Targeting the Gnome desktop environment could prove dangerous in the long run, assuming that one would like its applications to run on distributions other than SuSE. On the other hand, TrollTech is being bought by Nokia, whose commitment to the desktop world remains to be proven. Assuming that one would like to develop a desktop application (either free or closed source), which desktop environment would you target, and what widget tool kit would you use?"
Re:FUD (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand, QT costs a lot (I'm not going to pay that much money for a desktop toolkit) and its price IS going up with each release.
GTK produces revolting UIs on Windows and Mac, so it's not good either.
The only other somewhat good cross-platform UI toolkit I know is wxWidgets. It doesn't look like shit on Mac, at least.
Re:FUD (Score:4, Interesting)
The concern with patents is a valid one, because of the sad situation with the (US) patent system. This is an issue with all desktops, and we all need to be aware of it. I do agree with you that Mono is more vulnerable to this issue than other random technologies, simply because we know of Microsoft patents relevant to it. So I can understand if someone is wary of Mono (but I, myself, am not too concerned about this). Yet, as you say, GNOME isn't Mono and certainly does not depend on it, so this is a non-issue. Especially if all you use is GTK - that certainly has no connection whatsoever to Mono. Hence, given that GTK is LGPL, which is a big benefit if your app is proprietary - it doesn't cost money - this seems the best idea for you.
(Btw, not sure what you mean by 'other problematic technologies' aside from Mono. Like what? OOXML? That is also not related to GTK in any way... it might appear in Gnumeric and OpenOffice, neither of which is directly GTK-related.)
I wouldn't be enthusiastic about wxWidgets - it's a nice concept, but doesn't seem to have enough momentum behind it. In particular there are few applications using it compared to the other platforms, GTK and Qt, and for good reason.
Methinks the community doth protest too much... (Score:5, Interesting)
Even more concerning is influence that Novell simultaneously exerts over the KDE project. In this case, Novell certainly doesn't have the impact on KDE that TrollTech does - however, they do have the legacy SUSE team, who were (are?) huge KDE advocates, users, and comprise many of the developers.
So, does Novell present a nexus of influence and control on the core of Linux's desktop systems? Can they exert undue influence on these projects and, therefore, bend them to the good of their corporation - as opposed to the projects being driven primarily by unaffilated community developers? (Or at least a community of developers with varied and diverse affilations, effecting the same net result...)
And, then, the question that naturally flows from this discussion is "Is this a good thing?". While I don't think anyone one entity should have paramount influence over two competing projects, in this case there may be some significant advantages. Having a unified driver behind both GNOME and KDE could allow a desktop to take advantage of the best from each. We've seen Novell already attempt to do this in their own distro - SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 has many useful KDE features ported to GNOME and integrated into their standard desktop configuration.
I guess at the end of the day, it comes down to two questions: 1) Do you think really can influence both projects (or even either one)? and 2) Do you trust Novell to drive the desktop in a direction beneficial to all?
Re:Tk (Score:5, Interesting)
Hmm...so are you advocating writing GUI apps completely in Tcl, or writing the app in some other language, but doing the GUI parts in Tk? From what I've heard, Tcl itself is a reasonably nice language. But personally I don't want to learn a whole new language just so I can use a particular GUI toolkit, and if I'm going to write my app in a scripting language I'd prefer to use Perl or Python, due to their excellent, comprehensive libraries.
I've done a Perl/Tk GUI app, and my experience was decidedly a mixed bag. On the one hand, I found it very pleasant and efficient to code to the Perl/Tk interface. On the other hand, I ran into some major issues with code quality and the fact that nobody is actively maintaining the code base. If you look through the Perl/Tk source code, you see page after page of C that handles pointers as if it was still 1978. This led to one major snafu that made me decide never to touch Perl/Tk again: there was a null-pointer bug [cpan.org] that interacted badly with a GTK release that came out ca. 2005, causing Perl/Tk applications to crash randomly. I submitted a patch, but it took ages for it to be applied, and during that time all Perl/Tk apps were crashing frequently on, e.g., all the recent releases of Ubuntu.
Read Miguel's blog (Score:1, Interesting)
"Mono right now shines as a platform for developing desktop applications, and we want to make sure that the developer experience there is great. Once we have conquered that space, we can organically reach into other spaces, but lets first get the first generation of Mono-based GNOME applications rock solid and shipping." - Miguel de Icaza
The focus on the "developer experience", the conquering, the reaching into other spaces... creeps me out, you?
Do you think Miguel is most concerned with the technology itself or it's penetration? Why?