IBM developerWorks: Interview with KDE League Chairman Andreas Pour

[ Thanks to Frank for
this link. ]

“developerWorks: Andreas, who are you and what
do you do?”

“AP: (laughs) What I do is I work a lot. I have
a company called Mieterra, which among other things hosts two of
the KDE Web sites, www.kde.com and apps.kde.com (see Resources
later in this interview). I’m also involved in KDE promotion. As
Chairman of KDE League, I do all the KDE press releases, and I’ve
got a background as a lawyer, so I can help deal with any legal
issues that might come up. I do a little bit of development, and
keep up with the KDE mailing lists.”

“dW: So what’s the big difference between KDE
and GNOME?”

“AP: They have in common that they are both
graphical desktops for UNIX using X11, but GNOME and KDE use wholly
different underlying toolkits for the desktop. GNOME is based on
GTK+, which started as a toolkit for GIMP, and I always thought the
GIMP interface was quite unfriendly. It had some nice filters, and
some nice effects, but in many ways it was worse than Windows 3.1,
even. It breaks from the well established menu paradigm, at least
in large part, and it separates the toolbox dialogs from the
drawing windows as if they were entirely separate applications. I
should mention that I think recent versions are improving quite a
bit in usability, but I still find the fundamental design
flawed.”

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