New subject: GTK 3 TQt Engine Styles

28 Jul 2021

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.
--
dep

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Re: GTK 3 TQt Engine Styles