Anno domini 2021 Wed, 28 Jul 17:32:34 +0000 dep scripsit:

said Hunter:

| GTK3 is an eyesore, but I guess Qt5 is as well.

First, I'm on the list, so you needn't cc me.

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.

Nice writeup. I would like to add neomuck & zeitgeist, the two harbingers of "semantic desktop". Are these abominations still around?

Nik

-- dep

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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.