Hello!
I reply to two letters in our mailing lists because they are linked
by the theme but subjects of them weren't so clear on theme.
Alexis López Zubieta has written on Thursday, 25 April, at 12:01:
I believe our goals are similar. At least what I always wanted from
DE? It should be:
1) lightweight: it should not be slow in any way on netbooks for example
2) easy to use: I should do anything with just few keypresses (or mouse
clicks for those who loves to hug their rats:)
3) comfortable: it should have some default settings to be nice for new
users without terminal tricks and in the same time let me change every
element of my desktop system if I am advanced user
4) modular: I should have the possibility to construct my desktop from
some elements if I want that
Also I know that accessibility is really thing which is required and it
even more important than any bells and whistles because those people who
need accessibility are more dependent on those things than we are.
You stated above what are computers your people have so let it be the
requirements which we have to support, i.e. LW DE should work fine on
them. I believe that is possible - my main desktop was 450 MHz Celeron
with 128 MB RAM just 4 years ago and it worked fine with KDE 3.5. It
started non momentally of course but I was able to watch movies, surf
internet with Firefox, edit documents, etc. I don't see any reason that
shouldn't be possible today.
And in other letter, Petr Vaněk has written on Thursday, 25 April, at 16:11:
I still write libfm, libfm-gtk, and pcmanfm with glib and gtk base. I
given up the GTK3 support due to reasons I mentioned before - there is
still support for GTK3 up to 3.4 but I hardly will even try to adapt it
to newer versions, even if users will ask me. But I belive GTK2 support
is something we still have to have. At least because some old systems may
(and will) work easier with gtk2. And also because some users may don't
wish to install Qt just because they use exclusively Gtk applications
otherwise.
>I'd like to hear your ideas of cooperation/integration for sure.
As I already said, together people may do much more than splitted.
Since we decided to give up GTK3 support, we want to have lightweight DE
based on two toolkits - GTK2 for old or small systems (Debian Squeeze on
Celeron II, Raspberry Pi, etc., etc.) and Qt for more modern systems to
allow more flexibility. I do not ask Razor people to start develop GTK
applications and don't ask LXDE people to start develop Qt applications
but everyone can help others such way GTK version will get features it
misses now and Qt version will get features it misses. Everyone in both
camps have own zone of knowledge and working together may make it better.
Of course, everyone will more or less get new knowledge but I don't see
anything bad in that.
>I'm little bit afraid of one thing in potential merging. I think it
>would be more "philosophical" clash of users than real usage affects.
>Current LXDE users might raise their voice with: "down with Qt, we want
>Gtk" because they don't understand (and they don't need to understand of
>course) the easiness of development etc. It can be quite hazard for name
>of LXDE.
It's what I want - just don't give up Gtk, at least until it will be
abandoned by their creators and major distros. I.e. we have LXDE which is
GTK2 based and Razor-Qt which is Qt based, but both have near the same
number of similar feature components (they are different for now but will
be closer and closer with time). Only developers will know those DE are
close one to other, users will see Gtk one and Qt one so no concerns are
raised.
>On the other side I don't see any point against the move.
>Here are some unordered thoughts about Qt world of Razor:
>- Currently we are using Qt4 with initial preparation for switch to
>Qt5 (which would be quite easy).
>- With Qt5 the Qt libraries are even more modularized tan in Qt4.
>- KDE guys are working on so called "frameworks" = KDE technologies
>and libraries split to *independent* modules mostly (where possible)
>integrated into Qt itself.
> - the independency should be real, meaning - no cross dependencies
>between frameworks and also no global packages in distributions
> - which means we could use eg. Solid (hardware info framework -
>batteries, automounting, ...) in Razor instead our own backends because
>Solid is much more tested and it works on almost all platforms while we
>are stuck in udisk/udisk2 only.
Many Qt applications still use GIO so why not use gvfs then? And some
things may be done via libfm which also uses gio/gvfs. When I prepared
release 1.0.0 I get rid of every memory leak so it should be memory safe
for now, valgrind finds no problems so far.
Anyway, I'm not going to learn more Qt in nearest future because I
have to bring libfm and pcmanfm to 1.2-beta state (there are huge number
of features to implement for 1.2 series, I want to clear FR tracker as
much as possible).
Cheers!
Andriy.