I am pretty new to Linux, I have been in computer support for years and lately with all of the frustration that MS gives you to make sure your product is registered and validated as well as the cost as well as the improvements made especially to KDE I have finally made the switch to using Linux (Mint KDE) as my primary OS not even a month ago.

However I found a couple of things that does not make sense to me about the focus of KDE.

Why does KDE focus on creating its own applications instead of using other open sourse apps and make it easier just to integrate them into KDE.

Some programs include,

Koffice
Konqueror - which REALLY SUCKS for web browsing
Amarok

While there are others right now this just my quick observation.

This to me seems like a huge waste of resources. In my personal opinion I would much rather having them spend time on fixing bugs increasing hardware support than to focus on applications to compete with mainstream like Open Office, Firefox and Songbird which are very good and very popular at the moment and do a great job of what they are intended for.

Just my thoughts...

In relation to KOffice, because it can do things other applications cannot - see the Office Sub-forum for threads on this.
In relation to Konqueror, that is not my experience. I use it everyday in my work accessing sites across the world and it is quicker and more reliable than any other browser I have used.
With Amarok, this was an application which was initially developed outside KDE and then decided to join KDE.

The point is that nobody says what applications developers should develop; if they develop them and people use them, then they tend to carry on being developed. If someone makes a suggestion and nobody goes with them, then it does not get developed.

It's also worth pointing out in relation to OpenOffice that Sun controls contributions; so it is simply not possible to develop new ideas and test them out in the community easily as you can within KDE.

I should also point out that Amarok is considered one of the flagship linux programs, and is almost certainly the most popular music player on linux and has been for a long time. It is also one of the main linux programs that people request be ported to windows and mac (a port is in progress but not stable yet).

Further, songbird is a very new product, amarok has been around for about 4 years longer. Similarly, koffice was first released 3 years before the initial release of openoffice. So it is the songbird people and the openoffice people who duplicated work that already went into amarok and koffice, not the other way around.

Further, it is not like KDE makes it difficult to integrate other products, but they also cannot force other groups to integrate. KDE can provide the tools that let software integrate, and they do, but it has no control over whether other groups choose to or choose not to make use of those tools. Lots of software does integrate very well, but some groups have simply not made the effort to do so.

wtbennington wrote:Why does KDE focus on creating its own applications instead of using other open sourse apps and make it easier just to integrate them into KDE.

Well, a few reasons:

1. Open source development often means people work on what they want to work on. There are exceptions to that of course, but it's good as a general rule of thumb.
2. Integrating other people's software into KDE/Gnome/MacOS X/Windows/whatever and make it look "at home" is harder than it may look like if it wasn't written for the specific environment to begin with.
3. Friendly competition is good for everyone involved. For example, without Konqueror Apple's browser Safari wouldn't be what it is today. It's a bit of an over-simplification but Safari is based upon Konqueror.

Also, to build upon your examples...Amarok is older than Songbird (and if you ask me, better) so that may not be the best example. And as far as Koffice vs. OpenOffice goes...well, KOffice does a few things OpenOffice do not. The word-processor is not as well developed in KOffice (at least not yet), but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It depends on what you need from a word-processor. KWord is definately good enough for casual use, although I wouldn't use it to write a thesis paper or novel. Then again, I would certainly prefer to use Krita and/or Karbon14 over OpenOffice draw any day of the year.

I should also add that, generally speaking, hardware support is NOT done by KDE. KDE usually uses general linux hardware interfaces like bluez, networkmanager, and HAL. So although KDE developers do sometimes fix hardware bugs when they really need to, hardware is really not KDE's responsibility in the open-source environment.

TheBlackCat wrote:Further, songbird is a very new product, amarok has been around for about 4 years longer. Similarly, koffice was first released 3 years before the initial release of openoffice. So it is the songbird people and the openoffice people who duplicated work that already went into amarok and koffice, not the other way aroun

And don't forget Konqueror - it's initial release was in 1996, long before Netscape's code became Mozilla. And don't forget that it was Konqueror's KHTML code was turned into WebKit that is used by all the new browsers (Safari, Chrome, Arora, etc). Before Apple took the code and turned it into something completely incompatible, KHTML was the fastest rendering engine around.

Amarok is just really a classic of KDE. How can it be replaced?

You can also ask why KDE exists at all - why not putting all powers on improving Gnome, for example?

Now I purposely made the same mistake as you in the first post - KDE was started before Gnome. One of the reason for Gnome's birth was the license of Qt, the widget toolkit KDE uses. Now this isn't a problem anymore (Qt is licensed under both GPL and LGPL). Should we tell the Gnome developers to ditch their work and come to KDE instead?

As you probably can tell, it doesn't work this way. Gnome and KDE are developed with different toolkits, but also built on different design philosophies. You'll find that this thing the KDE developers do is common in the FOSS world. Sometimes it makes you annoyed (why are there so many package management systems? If there was only one, I could install this Ubuntu package on my Arch system. And why, oh why, so many Linux distributions to begin with?), but I also believe that that's one of the strong sides of Free and Open Source Software. It's called choice.

Edit: By the way, according to Linuxquestions.org Amarok is by far the most popular media player application for Linux: Audio Media Player Application of the Year (2008). Of course the results aren't 100 % accurate, but give a pretty good indication.

Hans wrote:Edit: By the way, according to Linuxquestions.org Amarok is by far the most popular media player application for Linux: Audio Media Player Application of the Year (2008). Of course the results aren't 100 % accurate, but give a pretty good indication.

Wow, not only is it by far the most popular, it is nearly as popular as all the other media players combined.

As for KOffice: as has been said above, "KOffice came first - why don't OpenOffice.org people move to KOffice?"

The thing is, in so, so many ways, KOffice is far superior to OpenOffice - it's more lightweight, it's got cleaner code and uses more code-sharing, it's better integrated with KDE, it's built with a modern system in mind, it's easier to extend, modify and improve, and it's development is faster with 7 part-time developers then OpenOffice's development is with over 300 dedicated developers (which says a whole lot, I can tell you!). If KOffice had those 300 developers behind it, it would quickly outpace all the competition... but that's what's missing: interest.

It's also important to note that, at least for OpenOffice and Webkit, these open-source projects are developed by large companies that have products to sell that piggy-back off them: OpenOffice by Sun that uses code created in OpenOffice for Star Office, their proprietary office suite, and Webkit by Apple that has Safari to market, which they in turn use to market their iPhone and iMacs/Macbooks/etc. There's no such thing for KDE, which is why, for example, KHTML, once the fastest rendering engine available by a long shot, is now left in quiet isolation while everyone jumps on Webkit. I think KDE integration is the only thing really going for KHTML now - it's nice and fast on the pages that it does render, but it doesn't render all pages. It's a real shame, too, since the developers of KHTML are volunteers and few people are interested in carrying on developing it (sure, we get a user-contributed patch every so often - there was one low-priority patch for HTML5 video and audio tag support using Phonon, for example).

TheBlackCat wrote:

Hans wrote:Edit: By the way, according to Linuxquestions.org Amarok is by far the most popular media player application for Linux: Audio Media Player Application of the Year (2008). Of course the results aren't 100 % accurate, but give a pretty good indication.

Wow, not only is it by far the most popular, it is nearly as popular as all the other media players combined.

P.S: holy cow.

I'm not familiar with the office suites, but even in 4, the KDE applications are far superior to anything I know of.
Incidentally, I may be critical of the KDE4 Desktop, but the basic applications are pretty exciting. As a web browser, Konqueror is okay, but it's not essential. As a file manager, it's absolutely irreplacable. Only Dolphin comes close, but Dolphin is really just a remix of Konqueror. The best thing about Konsole is the way that it's integrated with Konqueror and Dolphin. It's where the text and graphical interfaces meet, and you can move back and forth at will. Dolphin actually has an embedded terminal window in the file manager that automatically CDs to follow you ans you click through the directories. Nautilus (booooo!) actually makes you install a plugin in order to open the terminal from the file manager. That tells me their priorities are f'd up. Some people think that the command line and the graphical interface are rivals, but they're supposed to be partners. It's not about one tool being better than another tool, it's about two tools being better than one tool. Bringing the CLI and GUI together is where the power is, and nobody does like that KDE.

I think everybody has an good answer but I think it is really simple:

People want to develop them! It is pure and simple as that. It is not necessary rationalize open source decisions , and thats one of the main driving forces behind open source: Freedom to create what you want, when you want.

/Mats

john_hudson wrote:In relation to Konqueror, that is not my experience. I use it everyday in my work accessing sites across the world and it is quicker and more reliable than any other browser I have used.

I vote this as the most ridiculous thing I've read in a long time.

@StopTheFail: Please stop being negative. Simply because Konqueror does not work for the sites you frequent does not mean it doesn't work for others, and the sites they frequent.