KDE 4 and other thoughts
I gave KDE 4 a try today. It was very slick and smooth with all the draw of something severely underdeveloped. If there's one thing I should do, it's give the KDE team credit for being brave enough to label it a 4.0 release. I understand they are getting alot of flak for releasing something so unpolished, but they still have to release sometime.The one item that struck me as odd though is how much reinvention of the wheel there is. The Compositing effects added a level of depth and integration into the desktop that Compiz Fusion probably wishes it could have. All this is done entirely through KDE's own codebase. I had to ask myself why didn't they just partner up with Compiz Fusion and make it work for them already? In fact, why don't they just unify their codebase with Gnome, and then we'd have one really awesome Linux Desktop.
The reality of the matter is that by unifying the code base, it would make it harder to introduce changes. Theoretically, someone could fork any free software project they want, when they want to try something experimental. But the more I thought about it, making new projects tends to lead to cleaner code, that is sometimes more competitive than the status quo. When I think about the number of tiling window managers available, and how many of them are going to disappear as XMonad becomes more developed, it becomes more obvious how this works out.
In other news, the FDA declared cloned meat safe for eating. I wonder if it's kosher.
2 flames:
The question regarding Compiz/KWin has already been answered in the release notes:
In short the answer is that Compiz still lacks certain features and for example does not provide a fall back. It was easier to improve KWin to gain composition capabilities than to improve Compiz to become the other missing features.
"In fact, why don't they just unify their codebase with Gnome, and then we'd have one really awesome Linux Desktop."
And how should that work out? KDE uses Qt, Gnome uses GTK+. Both of them will never give up their toolkit. Additionally, KDE is C++ and Gnome is C or C#, so there is nothing to share as well.
But these parts were sharing makes sense it already happens: icons (Tango specs), inter process communication (D-BUS), search machines (Xesam language), multimedia backend (Phonon), hardware (HAL, NetworkManager), etc.
Also, please keep in mind that KDE 3.x always had a way to make Gnome apps look like KDE apps. Gnome never had something like this afaik.
Um... That was a hypothetical question I answered to the contrary two seconds later.
I'm arguing *for* the split between KDE, Gnome, and Compiz Fusion.
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