OSNews: When OSS-based Corporations and (Some) OSS Hackers Clash

“It is well known to the readers of this site that I am for
interoperability when it comes to the two main X11 desktop
environments, KDE and Gnome. In my opinion, this is the only way
forward for the Linux desktop’s massive adoption. Most Linux
graphical apps are written in either Qt or GTK+. And every new
platform needs as many quality apps as it can get (BeOS taught me
as much at least…) to stay viable. Therefore, it is important for
any Linux-based operating system company to be able to support
both. Red Hat was the first distro to make the big step on trying
to unify the look of the two toolkits with the use of the BlueCurve
theme. Freedesktop.org goes a step closer to a more real
integration that would bring an end to the problems we get today
between the two environments (major app behavior differences, no
full DnD support for all apps, different dialogs, UI HIGs, menu
system, notification area etc etc).

“All these differences are a huge pain for the average user.
Expert users, or users with a ‘religious’ background (against the
one or the other DE) will assert loudly that they don’t mind having
a different breed of apps running under the same desktop while
others will assert that they either run GTK+ apps or only Qt apps
and that they don’t bother with the ‘competitor’s’ offerings…
Sorry, but the big Linux companies I know ALL want to have full
interoperability and same app behavior and looks for both their
Gnome and KDE and the same goes for the average user. Why? Because
it makes sense! The userbase these companies are trying to capture
are Windows users who are used to seeing apps that work and look
the same, no matter the toolkit or language they were written on or
compiled with…”

Complete
Story