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<title>KDE2 is Just Around the Corner. Are You Curious? LG #53</title>
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<H1><font color="maroon">KDE2 is Just Around the Corner. Are You Curious?</font></H1>
<H4>By <a href="mailto:frc@linuxsolutions.com.br">Fernando Ribeiro Corrêa</a></H4>
<H4><EM>Originally published at <A HREF="http://www.olinux.com.br/interviews/11/en">
www.olinux.com.br/interviews/11/en</A></EM></H4>
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<P><EM>Mosfet is a key developer in KDE Project and ahead a great reponsability as the world waits for KDE2 and KOffice suite releases. Mosfet told OLinux about the details related to KDE2, its current development stage and how "KDE2 intends to compete with Windows head-on in all features".</EM>
<P> <b>OLinux: Tell us about our career: college, jobs, personal life (age, birth place)</b>
<P> <b>Mosfet</b>: Well, I'm 25 years old and was born in Chicago Il, USA. When I was a child we moved to Austin, Texas and I'm currently living in Indiana. As
far as a personal life, that is mostly just something that exists in
theory for me ;-)
<P> I went to school at Purdue University in Indiana and started doing Unix
admin professionally when I was 19. I started with Unix when I was
around 15 yrs old with a bootlegged copy of Xenix because I wanted to do
32bit graphics programming. Previously I was making DOS calls in
assembler to the extended memory manager, throwing myself in protected
mode to do calculations, then going back to real mode. Unix was pure joy
compared to that :)
<P> Once I got older my career has been pretty much swinging back and forth
between work and education. For most of the time work involving Unix has
focused on both administration of Oracle and either Digital Unix (now
Tru64) or HP/UX database clusters and custom application development for
database interface applications. Recently, with the advent of Linux and
user interfaces such as KDE, I have been involved with that and am now paid by Linux Mandrake to work on KDE2 full time.
<P> <b>Olinux: What are your responsibilities at KDE? Do you have any other jobs?</b>
<P> <b>Mosfet</b>: KDE2 is my sole focus at this point. I am responsible for widget and
window manager style engines (dynamic look and feels written in C++),
widget and window manager theme code, the plugin mechanism for the
window manager, a lot of the new panel's code is mine (although recently
Matthias Elter is working a lot on this), some of the KDE graphical
effects engine, and a new extensive image management system called
"Pixie".
<P> Of course, being free software people can pretty much choose what they
want to work on and when. The best place to see what myself and others
are currently working on is my KDE2 development webpage at
http://www.mosfet.org.
<P> <b>OLinux: How is KDE organized? Try to give us an idea of how KDE works? How the work is coordinated and managed (servers, directories, contribution, staff payment)? ow many people are involved? What are the main problems?</b>
<P> <b>Mosfet</b>: KDE core development is based on contribution from a large group of free
software developers. KDE's core system gets several thousand commits
(developers doing stuff and making improvements) a month - you can get
exact numbers for a given month at http://lists.kde.org. This is
excluding the hundreds of applications not maintained in the KDE CVS and
part the KDE project itself. As far as the exact number of individual
authors I don't know off hand but there are a few hundred developers
registered with our source management system (CVS).
<P> If you write code and it rocks it gets into KDE. Anyone can contribute
to KDE, although each project has it's own maintainer and if you want to
do extensive work it's best to contact that person first. Once that is
done you can work either in our CVS or via patches.
<P> There is a difference between software included in the KDE core packages
(such as kdebase, kdegraphics, etc...), and those maintained by
individual authors. The core packages are largely a collaborative effort
and gets the attention of a large group of developers. Individual
packages are usually the efforts of either individuals or small groups
of people. As an application developer, the approach you take is largely
a matter of style. Do you want a potentially huge group of people fixing
things and adding features to your code or do you want to maintain
strict control over the development of your app? This largely mandates
if your going to be a core developer or maintain a separate app outside
of the core of KDE.
<P> <b>OLinux: Does any private company supports KDE? Everyone is volunteer?</b>
<P> <b>Mosfet</b>: Many companies support KDE development. Most notably Linux Mandrake, Suse, Caldera, Corel, Red Hat, and Troll Tech all have developers
dedicated to KDE - and that's just what comes to mind. There are also
several non-Linux distribution companies I know of that are acquiring
KDE developers for free software development.
<P> The difference between KDE and competing projects is KDE developer
funding seems to be spread over a wider group of Linux companies. You
don't have one or two interests controlling an important group of KDE
developers. You have a couple people working on KDE in many different
companies and collaborating with each other. A vast number of different
interests both by volunteer developers and those working on distributing
free software are represented.
<P> KDE also seems to be the choice being made by commercial application
developers coming from Windows such as Inprise/Corel. Many of these
people can't imagine doing application development in a primarly C API
as a step above what they had in Windows, even if there are bindings,
etc... The KDE/Qt API is the only one which makes sense to these people.
Combining the power of Linux/Unix systems and the powerful C++ API of
KDE is a dream compared to what they had on other platforms and what
they could get with other toolkits and bindings. This is extremely
important considering Linux's growth. If Linux continues growing at it's
current rate most of the developers will be coming from non-Unix
platforms, where C++ application development has been the standard for
compiled GUI applications for almost a decade.
<P> Of course, despite all of the above, KDE core development is maintained
and controlled by volunteers. People do it for fun, make applications
because they want to, submit patches because they like to fix things,
etc... If they are good coders and want a job developing free software,
more likely than not they could get it with KDE.
<P> <b>OLinux: What are the main differences between KDE1 and the next release KDE2?</b>
<P> <b>Mosfet</b>: Pretty much everything ;-) The libraries have been rewritten to be more
extendable, most of the UI is configurable with XML integrated into the
core system, there is a new internet transparent I/O subsystem, a new
browser, new HTML capabilites with support for things like CSS,
bidirectional text, unicode, and soon Netscape plugins, a new window
manager, help system, configuration system, panel, a whole slew of new
widgets and classes, widget styles and themes... The list goes on and
on.
<P> The main difference is now KDE2 is heavily component based, focusing on
the browser. All of the KOffice applications (KWord, KPresenter,
KIllustrator, KSpread, KImageShop, KIllustrator, KChart, and KFormula)
as well as many other KDE applications such as the PS/PDF viewer, mpeg
and image viewers, and DVI viewers are all components now - internet
transparent and embeddable in the browser. You can even embed the
terminal application in the browser and change directories using the
arrow buttons ;-) Pretty cool. KDE easily boasts the most extensive and
complete component model support for Unix desktops.
<P> <b>OLinux: Do you consider Corba technology as a advance for KDE in matters of a
better functionality? Do you see a lot of programmers using it? Give us some advantages.</b>
<P> <b>Mosfet</b>: Well, actually we found it wasn't an advance for us ;-) The problem with
Corba is the API is not ideal and it's very difficult for new
programmers to learn. We rely on components more extensively than any
other free desktop project has attempted thus far, and the requirement
to learn Corba in order to do even trivial KDE development was a huge
restriction. AFAIK Gnome got around this by both using components less
and providing easier function specific bindings where non-Corba experts
are likely to be doing development (such as control panel applets).
<P> This did not seem reasonable or clean to us. Even though we were using
Corba for a long time (well before KDE2 development started), and had
hundreds of thousands of lines of code based on it with both KOffice and
KDE2, people started looking at other standard Unix technologies that
accomplish the same thing. Orbit (the Corba Object Request Broker used
by Gnome) was considered and was faster than the ORB we were using but
still didn't solve the problems mentioned above - which are inherent in
Corba. We then came up with the current KParts technology we are using
for components. It is all based on standard Unix libraries such as
libICE, and allows people to learn how to do fully functional components
in less than a half hour. Using KDE you get the most component features
such as browser embedding and internet transparency that are extremely
fast and require the least amount of effort. No need to purchase 1,000+
page Corba tomes at your local bookstore, you can learn it over lunch :)
Once this transition was made the development of KDE2 increased
significantly over what was occuring before (an increase of over a
thousand commits a month now usually compared to our Corba days). This
shows that we made the right choice for developers. As far as
interoperability, under the hood all the technology we use is in C and
accessible through that, XML bindings are available, and Corba
middleware is in the works. AFAIK a Java interface is also being looked
into. The interoperability argument for Corba is largely misleading
anyways, you need to do custom programming to interface legacy code with
the desktop's API's no matter what mechanism you use - it doesn't just
happen magically. Both Linux desktops introduce new component API's you
need to port to, but using KDE this is extremely easy to do without any
prior experience.
<P> You can learn more about KParts and check out the "Learn KParts in 1/2
hour" tutorial at
<A HREF="http://developer.kde.org">http://developer.kde.org</A>. You can read a small
overview I wrote of why we chose the mechanism we did when the decision
was made a few months ago at
<A HREF="http://www.kde.org/technology.html">
http://www.kde.org/technology.html</A>.
<P> <b>OLinux: About Qt without X, do you think it will run in all Unix's machines and influence some special feature of KDE?</b>
<P> <b>Mosfet</b>: This is an interesting new development. Troll Tech has written a version
of Qt (the base toolkit used by KDE), that can run solely off the Linux
framebuffer and doesn't require X11. Originally intended for embedded
systems, combined with virtual windowed framebuffer windows it can
potentially end up as a very low overhead KDE desktop framework. It
already offers many advanced features directly influenced by direct
framebuffer access such as anti-aliased (smoothed) fonts and alpha
channel support.
<P> As far as what varients of Unix it will run on, I currently know it
supports Linux although any Unix system with a framebuffer (such as
Solaris) shouldn't be that difficult.
<P> Nonetheless, KDE will remain supporting X11. There is no reason not to,
one of the reasons for using high level toolkits like Qt is you don't
have to deal with the lower level stuff like if your running on a
framebuffer or an X server. Also, KDE/Qt is leading the way with this
technology and we are the first people to support it with a toolkit used
by a desktop. Some users will want access to legacy and non-KDE apps and
games, and X11 is essential as a common platform where you can run
applications developed under many different toolkits. As far as people
who only use KDE applications, they may very well get a quite cool low
overhead desktop...
<P> <b>OLinux: KDE1 use to be a heavy application, now that KDE2, adding all this new technology to KDE2, do you think that a new and potent hardware will be required for users to have a good system performance?</b>
<P> <b>Mosfet</b>: Hopefully not ;-) The component model of KDE helps a lot here. When you
start KDE1 a lot of things happen like the file manager and browser are
loaded, etc... Now KDE is designed to start the absolute minimum until
you actually use something - then dynamically load what you need. A lot
still happens, but now it is mostly low level stuff like initalizing the
client server I/O system and not things like loading HTML widgets.
<P> KDE2 is still alpha and there are issues getting in the way of making
this really giving users a gain yet, but it's being worked on. KDE2 will
certainly not require any more resources than KDE1, and hopefully will
require even less.
<P> <b>OLinux: What are the better features KDE will bring to users that Windows doesn't have? Can KDE already compete with Windows2000 in terms of GUI?</b>
<P> <b>Mosfet</b>: Absolutely! KDE2 intends to compete with Windows head-on in all features
- no excuses made. We got the components, the transparent access to the
web, the modern C++ API, developer support, and the applications needed
to seriously contend for user's desktops. As far as the GUI, that is a
matter I specifically deal with and I believe ours is becoming far
superior. Although as a fan of Mac and BeOS interfaces, I feel most UI's
are superior... what will be the default look and feel of KDE2 is
drastically improved from KDE1.
<P> <b>OLinux: When KDE expect to release KOffice1.0?</b>
<P> <b>Mosfet</b>: Alongside the release of KDE2.0, which is now in a library freeze
preparing for the second alpha release. I'm not sure if there will be a
third or if after that we will go straight to betas. KDE does have a
long beta cycle though, we will not release an official version until we
are sure it works well for the majority of people. We feel that is our
responsibility to the users of KDE, who have come to expect a stable
system.
<P> <b>OLinux: How do you see the Digital Society and future of Intenet five years from now? Say something about ecommerce, wireless internet, hand held appliances briefly.</b>
<P> <b>Mosfet</b>: Eeek, a long stream of buzzwords! Hell, I don't know. We will all
probably be out of shape and unable to tolerate sunlight because of too
much time on the internet ;-) That's about all I know...
<P> <b>OLinux: Send a message to programers in Brazil that work in Free Software/Opensource projects and to OLinux user's?</b>
<P> <b>Mosfet</b>: Brazil rocks! I lost my credit rating there last year...
<BLOCKQUOTE> <EM>
[By the way, I really like the animated image of the turning gears in
the bottom left of the <A HREF="http://www.kde.org">KDE web site</A>.
-Ed.]
</EM> </BLOCKQUOTE>
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Copyright © 2000, Fernando Ribeiro Corrêa<BR>
Published in Issue 53 of <i>Linux Gazette</i>, May 2000</H5>
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