On Sun, Nov 27, 2011 at 7:39 AM, Tom Horsley horsley1953@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, 27 Nov 2011 22:27:12 +0800 Ian Chapman wrote:
Thanks to Gnome 3 I may well be heading back.
Don't worry, in the current climate it is only a matter of time before the KDE developers are seized with the same "all the world's a tablet" disease and come out with a KDE5 where they try to win the contest and make it even worse than Unity :-).
You do not have to worry about this, unless someone kidnaps all of the core KDE developers between now and mid-2012. As the guy working on KDE's rendition of a tablet interface, Plasma Active, says: [1]
"...we do not believe in the 'one interface that runs on both your desktop and your tablet'. We believe in code reuse, in component-reuse (and, where beneficial, drop-in-replacement), compatibility and interoperability; but we also believe that a tablet interface and a desktop interface are not, and should not, be the same thing. The use cases and form factors are just too different.
"We have no plans of bastardizing Plasma Desktop into a watered-down attempt at a tablet interface that also sort-of-makes-sense on a laptop. We feel this only produces interfaces that perform OK but not great on either kind of device. We want interfaces that work great on each sort of device."
Furthermore, KDE 5 is just going to be an incremental release, moving some stuff from kdelibs to Qt 5 (which is also planned to be a minor incremental release) where it makes sense, and cleaning up the libraries to make them more useful for non-KDE applications. The current plans call for "recompile and test" to be the only thing necessary for porting to KDE 5.
-T.C.
[1] http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2011/09/more-on-active-strategy.html