Hi All,

As I know Qt cross-platform toolkit is the mother home of KDE so I'm wondering:

Why KDE applications are not cross-platform just like many Gnome applications?

P.S.
I'm Qt developer and I've this question in my mind since 5 years ago. I tried to look for the answer but I couldn't find any reasonable answer.

They are.
http://windows.kde.org/

They are.
http://windows.kde.org/

No, this isn't what I meant windows.kde.org isn't a pure cross-platform solution just like Qt applications.

By the way, many important KDE applications still missed in windows.kde.org such as KDevelop and the project itself isn't stable (many applications like umbrello closes without any warning)

Before Qt4:
Qt for windows was commercial-only (no GPL version) but (some) KDE applications could be compiled and used through an X server for Windows.

Qt4:
KDE apps are now as portable as Gnome apps are - that is, some are and some are not. Qt is portable, but that doesn't mean that all libraries a specific application uses are too.

One of the examples is the library that deals with currently running programs (used in the tasks plasma applet). It doesn't exist for windows (although there is current work to implement it)

Ivan wrote:Before Qt4:
Qt for windows was commercial-only (no GPL version)

That is it;D this is reasonable reason for portability. thus mean that most KDE4 application should work as cross-platform applications, is it?

As I said, it solely depends on the application. The apps that use only qt/kdelibs should be.

mbnoimi wrote:

They are.
http://windows.kde.org/

No, this isn't what I meant windows.kde.org isn't a pure cross-platform solution just like Qt applications.

By the way, many important KDE applications still missed in windows.kde.org such as KDevelop and the project itself isn't stable (many applications like umbrello closes without any warning)

The problem is that there isn't many developers using Windows, so noone really has the expertise and development environment set up for porting stuff to it.

And as ivan said, most apps don't just need Qt and kdelibs, and most of them expect a UNIXish environment (that's why some apps open in /C: on windows by default, for example). And for example K3B requires certain OS features which just aren't available on Windows.

sandsmark wrote:And as ivan said, most apps don't just need Qt and kdelibs, and most of them expect a UNIXish environment (that's why some apps open in /C: on windows by default, for example). And for example K3B requires certain OS features which just aren't available on Windows.

Well, a not working package for K3B for Windows has been created some time ago (I mean K3B 2.0 is still in alpha3, I think nobody pretend it works on Windows automagically).
http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-windo ... 03624.html

However as said by other people: it's just a matter of effort. As of now only some developers are interested in making its software to work on Windows. I think a lot of developers don't use Windows anymore, and some even don't have a copy (you know, you still have to pay for some OSes).

It's just a matter of lack of interest (and of developers).

So: it's just the same as GNOME, some programs work, some don't. Oh, and you can run Plasma on Windows, while you can't run GNOME Shell.