Turncoat
I’m no fan of Gnome, but looking at this makes me feel like sitting up straight and taking notice over the next year or so.
I think the world is really waiting for KDE 4, and it’s going to be incredible when it actually comes out. I believe in the artwork and the usability initiatives of KDE. I also believe in Trolltech (as covered ad nauseum lately on this page). I think something as core as a GUI toolkit (and so much more, as of Qt 4) needs that little capitalist kick in the butt to keep going and improving.
GTK is a picture of open source hell. It’s bloaty, slow, buggy, and—worst of all—stagnant. Yeah, I’m a troll; no, it’s not totally true. But it’s true enough. Look: one of the reasons I have paused on Sigma is that about 50% of my code could be eliminated by linking against Qt 4. All the networking, most of the XML, most of the string manipulation. All without opening up a QMainForm and launching a GUI. Whatcha got for me, Gnome? GLib? Ha!
KDE just makes sense, but Ubuntu (yeah, and SUSE) is keeping GNOME alive. And, that’s not a bad thing. GNOME has good potential for the business desktop, because it’s so clean.
Idea: maybe what we need for the business desktop is the concept of a “shell,” like what we have in Windows. It includes the file browser and preferably a web browser.
Idea-Idea: Could you make Firefox (Gecko) into a shell?
That makes sense. Hmm… A “web desktop,” like Windows Me, but of course not really. You could just make a bunch of libX.so-style compatibility libraries that wrap to the Gecko engine.
Wow, that seems like a lifetime of work.