Ubuntu Finds New Love With Qt

[Adarion]

following is somewhat OT

No, not really. A couple of people complained that Canonical is not contributing to the Linux kernel as much as Red Hat but w/e.

It was Greg K-H, right?

As far as I'm concerned, their work on accessibility, design/usability, compiz and qt is more important to the Linux community as a whole.

Well, I admit that it somehow brought a lot of people to Linux based OS, or opened it to more people. (Though I think something like even old Suse 9 seemed quite good to handle, but anyway.)
Yes more users is probably good to have more "force" in the market, but it also needs developers/development. Most Ubuntu users probably are not able to develop code (ok, basically this is likely true for any other distribution). And it needs a lot of coding to keep all these people with their different setups satisfied.
So I hope that the user masses that *buntu attracted will just support developers with donations or something. Or write decent and helpful bugreports.
But if Canonical makes money, more than to cover its own cost, it would be nice to see them putting some of that into kernel/userland development (as they showed here). So everyone will benefit from it.

(I for my part am not a code developer, I'm a user contributing money (from what I can spare) and sometimes a bug report for one or the other project. Or give help to new users in my reach. I develop chemistry. So sadly no time for being a kernel or userland hacker.)

[BlackStar]

I'm not 100% about Qt on Windows, but Microsoft ITSELF uses more than two different toolkits on windows (or rather very different versions of the same toolkit, with slightly different look and feel), and Java fakes the look and feel too (badly), so this is a moot point.

The number is closer to 5, but probably more. Let's see:

1. WinAPI (both 16- and 32bit versions)
2. MFC
3. WinForms
4. WPF
5. IE toolkit
6. Office toolkit
7. WMP toolkit (?)

All of those touch WinAPI at some point but they look, feel and behave differently. Java, Delphi and GTK applications also draw their own widgets. No idea about Qt.

Yeah, there's no rhythm or reason to this madness. Qt is the least of their worries.

[pingufunkybeat]

Canonical hired SmSpillaz back in October (linky). He is one of the main developers of Compiz.

Thanks, I wasn't aware of this.

According to this very article, Canonical "is driving the development of dconf bindings for Qt". Confirmed on Mark's blog: they have contracted with Ryan Lortie to contribute to Qt.

Sorry, but I do not consider this a meaningful contribution to Qt. That's GNOME development, not Qt development.

[BlackStar]

Sorry, but I do not consider this a meaningful contribution to Qt. That's GNOME development, not Qt development.

dconf, not gconf.

He is contributing code to improve the configuration system of Qt, so I fail to see how this can be called Gnome development. If someone improved Qt performance on, say, Mac OS X, would you legitimately call this Mac OS X development rather than Qt development?

[pingufunkybeat]

I was under the impression that dconf was also a GNOME tech.

http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2005/04/s...-of-dconf.html

[BlackStar]

I was under the impression that dconf was also a GNOME tech.

http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2005/04/s...-of-dconf.html

I had the impression that dconf is meant as a cross-desktop technology. Otherwise, why wouldn't they just wire Qt to use gconf and be done with it?

[pingufunkybeat]

I don't understand it either. But it was initiated by Havoc Pennington.

But I know that KDE does not use dconf, and they probably have no intention of doing so. It's only relevant for GNOME-centric distros.

So it's basically some work to have Qt apps integrate better into a GNOME desktop, not much more.

[pingufunkybeat]

I see that Waldo Bastian was also involved.

Anyway, just because something was designed to be desktop-agnostic does not mean that all desktops will use it. Look at Akonadi, for example.

[lem79]

No, I'm 100% serious. I have both installed and I prefer Brasero by leaps and bounds. It's simple, clean and it works perfectly.

Brasero is still immature compared to K3B, and buggy (as of Ubuntu 10.10), especially with multisession handling. The "span multiple media" feature didn't seem to work last time Brasero offered it to me either. There are other things that I can't remember now, but K3B > Brasero for anything more than simple burning tasks.

[cruiseoveride]

First Mono, now this Nokia shit.

Dammit. Where has my tin hat gone...