Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] ANNOUNCE: Rosegarden-4 v0.1.5 released
From: Stefan Westerfeld (stefan_AT_space.twc.de)
Date: Sun May 05 2002 - 21:24:57 EEST
Hi!
On Sun, May 05, 2002 at 10:04:09AM -0400, Paul Davis wrote:
> >rob wrote:
> >If people want good quality, well-supported music applications for Linux
> >then they'd better leave their preconceptions at the door. We should
> >eschew the geek in favour of the average user.
> >
> >Make use of the toolkits that already exist - make life easier for
> >developers and users alike - provide quality software that's stable,
> >functional and enjoy using.
>
> Yes, but by using the "desktop environments" a developer risks several things:
>
> 1) require the user to have that desktop environment installed
Usually, applications should only require a part of the environment, and
distributors should make these dependancies. For instance, you don't need
konqueror to install/run rosegarden or brahms, but you will need kdelibs
(which is a fraction of what the actually desktop environment is).
Given the growth of hardware capacity on one side and software size generally
on the other side, this isn't too expensive.
> 2) require the user to have that desktop environment in use
No. Applications written for KDE (or GNOME) should run just fine if you are
not running the desktop environment. Everything else is a bug in the desktop
environment. But for instance I know that Brahms works just fine under icewm
even if it was written using the KDE libraries.
> 3) require the user to understand that particular desktop environment
Desktop environments should make life simpler, not harder. This is, given an
application type, one application that uses a particular desktop environment
should be easier to understand/use than the same application implemented
without using a desktop environment. This is because desktop environments
do two things
a) they can implement features that are useful to the user but expensive too
implement (and too costly to add to a simple application), like the ability to
open files directly from network
b) they add consistency, so that you only need to understand how to achieve
one particular thing (how do I customize my toolbar/keyboard shortcuts) once,
and that knowledge can be reused for other applications
I see one argument frequenly made against desktop environments, which goes:
as geek and programmer I don't use a desktop environment personally (which I
can understand very well, coding all the day in vim and terminal windows), so
applications shouldn't depend on them.
But I think that means making a tactical mistake: if we concentrate on the
desktop environment way, we'll end up with more users, more end user friendly
and consistent software, and finally, more resources to develop new software,
drivers and so on, and thus going this way is better in the long run
regardless of whether you use a desktop environment or not personally.
Cu... Stefan
--
-* Stefan Westerfeld, stefan_AT_space.twc.de (PGP!), Hamburg/Germany
KDE Developer, project infos at http://space.twc.de/~stefan/kde *-
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