Diary of a CrazyFrench

Ronald, as you say, KDE seems to be miles ahead. It is somewhat true if you think about the architecture. They have a mature toolkit, Qt, that is licensed under a Free Software license^[1], and that runs on 3 major platforms, 1 free (X11), 2 non-free, allowing to capitalize on a truely Free Software experience will providing freedom of choice: develop for a Free Software operating system (Linux, BSD, or whatever else) and seemlessly port to non-free operating systems: MS-Windows and MacOS X. The other things KDE have are technologies like DCOP, KPart, a web browser component (KHTML) and even imaging (look at KImageEffect). And even if some of this have similar counterpart in Gnome, the developers find them easier in KDE^[2]. But I have always had issues with KDE UI which unlike Gnome is much less polished and much more "provide everything you can"^[3].

But let's go back to DCOP. DCOP has been around for over 6 years and provided a simple to use structured IPC mechanism for KDE, on top of X11. I would have had implemented a scripting architecture for KDE, I would have used DCOP as the IPC subsystem. But DCOP is now deprecated for KDE4 in favor of D-BUS. See thiago's post. Guys, you did the right thing. We need to share this infrastructure middleware amongst the free desktops. Why? Because it leverage the ability to provide other high level layer to integrate between Gnome and KDE. I'm thinking about my ideas on scripting. Maybe Gnome should just do like KDE: ditch Corba.

Unlike originaly planned, I won't attend Guadec this year.

Update: Afterwards I learned that my proposed talk had been scheduled for the Sunday in the WarmUp weekend. Sorry about that, had I known earlier I may have taken another decision as I tend to dislike missing a committment I made like that.

Sven: concerning Gimp user installation, I have just one thing to say: TMI. Just do it silently. The user do not care, and asking a question is actually asking the user to make a decision that he probably does not know how to answer.

Reminds me of amaroK asking if you want to use sqlite or MySQL at the first run.