Ubuntu 14.04 Looks Toward Qt 5.2, Qt Mir In 14.10

[anda_skoa]

What I see, both KDE and Gnome are inefficient and lack standarization in many ways (KIO vs GIO, kdewallet vs gnome-keyring, phonon vs gstreamer...).

Two of the three examples are pretty bad ones.

The maintainers of KWallet and GNOME Keyring have worked together on a common system called "Secret Service".

Phonon and GStreamer is even worse, since they are not two different implementations of the same facility at all. Phonon is a simple Qt style API on top of platform media frameworks such as GStreamer.

It's a shame to not see a lightweight competitor to Evince and Okular in XFCE, for example (there should be a proper framework to read documents and that code shared between major apps).

That also exists and is called Poppler or libpoppler. Both Evince and Okular, as well as other document viewers, use it. I believe it is even one of the few projects hostet on freedesktop.org infrastructure

Cheers,
_

[anda_skoa]

Sponsorship.

Hmm, right, but why would a company sponsor another company? Or are you more thinking in terms of investing in Canonical, e.g. buying some kind of participation?

Cheers,
_

[anda_skoa]

KDE developers, sorry.

Ah, that makes more sense.
I am not sure though what you are trying to convey. Being a KDE developer does not require one to sign any paperwork, being a Qt contributor does not require one to be a KDE developer or vice versa.

Cheers,
_

[anda_skoa]

What I see, both KDE and Gnome are inefficient and lack standarization in many ways (KIO vs GIO, kdewallet vs gnome-keyring, phonon vs gstreamer...).

Two of those three examples are not really good.

The maintainers of KWallet and GNOME Keyring have worked on a shared specification called Secret Service. They have either already implemented it or have staged it for upcoming releases of their respective storage service.

Phonon and GStreamer are aren't even two implementations of the same facilities. Phonon is a simple Qt style API for easier use of platform media frameworks such as GStreamer if the application use case does not require full media framework capabilities.

It's a shame to not see a lightweight competitor to Evince and Okular in XFCE, for example (there should be a proper framework to read documents and that code shared between major apps).

Actually there is. It is called Poppler and unsurprisingly used by both Evince and Okular.

I just hope Freedesktop.org effort gets stronger and standarize a lot more parts of the desktop ecosystem.

Progress there is often not very obvious but happening nontheless.

Cheers,
_

[anda_skoa]

Digia sponsors KDE for now. Because it adds more value. Having Ubuntu doing Unity8 on Qt will provide Digia with a far more interesting target for advertisement.

I would assume that the small investment into KDE is always doable from Digia's perspective even if they get some cooperation with Canonical for other things goiing.

I think that is pretty clear the Ubuntu is bigger than KDE.

That will take a while, assuming that Canonical or the wider Ubuntu community keeps their current development direction. KDE's product portfolio is huge.
I am not sure if there is any other single vendor that exercises all of Qt's APIs.

One thing is sponsoring Ubuntu, another thing is selling licenses(closed) and support to Canonical.

Hmm. I can see Canonical buying commercial licenses but I don't see them as someone buying Digia's services. They are more likely to hire their own Qt experts.

Cheers,
_

[andydread]

What kind of freedom are you talking about?

Honton is the resident CLA troll here on Phoronix. Just about any article about Ubuntu will have him popping up and trolling about CLA red herrings. Its a red herring. Ignore his posts.

[tomtomme]

Of course they appear happy. There is no other way. No Qt, no KDE.

Then where is the problem. Let them be happy. And maybe - in the future - they will regret the binding to Qt. But why do you make THEIR potential future / fate to YOUR problem? Have you been a Qt-dev?

Exposing new API takes time, code and justification. This is not free to Qt or its customers. Nokia did it because they wanted Qt to become phone toolkit (and failed). KDE was not asked if they liked this or if the new ways suited them well. Hell Plasma Active was started by former KDE/Qt people because KDE was no longer a good fit for the new Qt. THAT is disruptive.

For me as a user KDE developed very well in the last years. More stable, faster etc. The mobile stuff / plasma active I did not test because I did not care. Maybe they failed in this part. But I experienced no disruption on plasma-desktop. So no problem for me that they throw workforce.

"KDE5" is being sold as a huge leap forward, but it is nothing more than catching up with Qt's disruptive behavior and fixing some long standing bugs along the way.

I read about KDE5 much and nowhere it was sold to me as a huge leap forward. They always say it will be a small transition compared to kde3 to kde4. And this catching up with Qt - wasn?t that always the case? Qt developed something new and KDE afterwards tried to make use of it.
I still do not have a clue why you interpret all those things in such a negative way - interesting - spock would say

[Daktyl198]

It's not like there was any kind of formal takeover, if that's what you're asking. It's just that Gnome has always been one of the biggest users, and biggest contributors to the toolkit. Basically, they control it simply by virtue of being the ones doing all the work.

Ah, okay. That makes sense

[smitty3268]

"KDE5" is being sold as a huge leap forward, but it is nothing more than catching up with Qt's disruptive behavior and fixing some long standing bugs along the way.

What are you talking about? Everything I've seen about KDE5 says it's a simple straight forward port. The only thing that's really changing is their breaking up kdelibs into separate parts to hopefully make it more useful to standard Qt developers.

Plasma2 is a bigger change, with the Wayland support, but that's fairly separate from KDE5.

[timofonic]

Two of those three examples are not really good.

The maintainers of KWallet and GNOME Keyring have worked on a shared specification called Secret Service. They have either already implemented it or have staged it for upcoming releases of their respective storage service.

Phonon and GStreamer are aren't even two implementations of the same facilities. Phonon is a simple Qt style API for easier use of platform media frameworks such as GStreamer if the application use case does not require full media framework capabilities.


Actually there is. It is called Poppler and unsurprisingly used by both Evince and Okular.



Progress there is often not very obvious but happening nontheless.

Cheers,
_

Poppler is a PDF renderer. There are LOTS more documents formats out there:

- LaTeX
- PS
- Tiff
- CHM
- DjVu
- Images (they can be considered a "document" in some way)
- DVI
- XPS
- ODT
- Fiction Book
- Comic Book
- Plucker
- EPub
- Fax
- Mobipocket
- Microsoft Word

http://okular.kde.org/formats.php

https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evince/SupportedDocumentFormats

If you say: use the following libraries... That's not realistic, as there are just two applications supporting the major formats (and the best one is Okular, using Qt and having many KDE dependencies). A proper "DocKit" framework would be nice to have.