27 Apr
2012
27 Apr
'12
5:08 p.m.
If a switch to
KWin4 would mean that new releases of TDE no longer work on
RHEL6 and clones then I think this is a very bad move.
Initially I would expect kwin4 to be shipped next to twin, so this issue
will never occur.
Also, I do not think the impact of shipping a Trinity
specific Qt4 that only contains the dependencies needed for kwin4 would be a
huge issue. Maybe it is even possible to compile kwin4 statically on
such platforms?
Basically what is needed now is that a Trinity (or maybe
just a non-KDE4 specific package?) is provided. The next step would be
testing.
Then maybe some work could be done to enable configuration
in a proper way. Of course right now configuration would be a mess
because each DE has its own Control Center/System Settings and the window
managers that exist now all integrate into their original target DE only
regarding configuration.
My prediction, as someone who is just observing:
Nothing is going to happen on the Trinity side regarding
this (soon). Not because people are not interested, but because of
limited developer resources. Twin works and the work needed to get kwin4 is
cleanly integrated at least _appears_ to be bigger than keeping twin
fixed. Keeping twin fixed right now is just a single fix at a time.
Integrating kwin4 is a single big job which would prevent regular fixing
from the Trinity side only in the future. The big job is just not appealing at this
time.
If the two steps I indicated above could be done by others,
I would give kwin4 adoption by Trinity a much bigger chance of
succeeding.
Maybe the kwin4 developers themselves could provide a
stripped-down version of kwin4 for multiple popular distributions? I would
imagine starting with adding a kwin-lite package to Debian/Ubuntu
which would only have the limited set of dependencies. Maybe people on
other DEs would like to use this package as well.
The second problem is the integration of the configuration.
This is not a Trinity+kwin4 specific issue. Also KDE4 and Gnome for
example have issues where two configuration panes are required to
configure certain settings. It would be the cleanest to develop a generic
solution for this through freedesktop.org that can be used by all DEs and
WMs.
Once these two problems are solved, I expect Trinity would
implement the required freedesktop.org standards to allow configuration
pane integration with other DEs. I think there is already an
option to switch to another WM in Trinity. I also think Martin's claims about
the superiority of kwin4 over twin are true, so I would expect
most Trinity users to switch to kwin4 because they will enjoy the better
experience. At this point twin will be deprecated.