Comments on GNOME Foundation?

Aaron Gaudio icy_manipulator at mindless.com
Mon Aug 21 14:33:28 PDT 2000


And lo, the chronicles report that Gael Duval spake thusly unto the masses:
> 


> >From the beginning I've understood that LSB was graphical-desktop
> independant which means that Gnome or KDE are not in the scope.
> However I personnally think that this is a huge issue because modern
> applications require graphical libs to run. Under Linux there is no
> default high-level API for graphics programming [X11/Xlib is lowlevel
> and who would program a big app with the native X11 calls?]: basically
> you have the choice among KDE-libs, Gnome-libs and LessTiff.
> 
> LSB can't make a choice between those environments, especially between
> KDE and Gnome for the reasons that everybody will understand here.
> Nevertheless I *do* think that LSB should consider this graphics
> environment problem because modern OSes are much used through a
> graphical screen and a mouse pointer.
> 
> So why wouldn't LSB decide that Linux has *two* default graphical
> interfaces: Gnome AND KDE?

I think LSB should remain completely environment neutral until one
environment overwhelmingly dominates the installed base. It's 
confusing to provide two completely different standards. Hopefully,
one day, Gnome and KDE can come together and, if not produce a single
environment, can at least cooperate on the lower-level aspects and
thus provide a commonality that LSB or another standards project
could base their work on. 

Also it should be pointed out that KDE, Gnome and LessTiff do not
fit together. LessTiff is a widget set, whereas KDE and Gnome are
environments. KDE, Gnome and CDE are the three big environments that
are competing (and one day, maybe cooperating) in Unixland. If Sun
sticks to their commitments, CDE may be on the way out (although
it's still used extensively on other commerical Unices). As for
widget sets, there are plenty, but Qt, Gtk+ and Motif/LessTiff seem
to be the biggies. I haven't kept up with Qt licensing issues, but
I have a feeling it wouldn't be accepted into LSB (and I personally
don't think it should). LessTiff is an implementation of Motif, which
few in the free software world want to use anyhow. Gtk+ is the dominant
widget set, I'd say, and if the LSB gets into the scope of graphical/X11
environments, I would argue that it should include Gtk+ (and its 
dependancies) as requirements, regardless of desktop environment employed.


-- 

Aaron Gaudio
icy_manipulator @ mindless.com
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"The fool finds ignorance all around him. The wise man finds ignorance within."
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