overhaul of some kcm appearance

[Louai Al-Khanji]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 1:24 AM, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> On Monday 16 March 2009, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
>> have you ever wondered why kde is an island beyond those apps which go
>> full monty, while gnome core technologies are more or less silently
>> penetrating not only the desktop (including kde), but the entire free
>> software market?
>
> i'd offer:
>
> * an allergy to anything that isn't C
> * greater concern about distributions than application developers
> * a total lack of pragmatism on the gtk+ people's part that prevents them for
> purely ideological reasons from using anything they haven't made
> * better political working with the distributions
> * and finally, people who work on lower layer things like networkmanager etc
> while kde remains focused a bit too much on the higher layers of things which
> then naturally biases the lower layers towards things written by "gtk+ people"
>
> and yes, before kde4 we had messy libraries with no internal structure. our
> libraries are still "big", though not insanely so, but libkecore and libkeui
> are better structured now.
>

Sorry to butt in on the conversation and further derail it, but I
think there is another important point that hasn't come up yet: it's
almost impossible to ship a stand-alone application which uses KDE
libraries on platforms other than *nix.

Last spring I wanted to ship a windows application contained in its
own installer, but that turned out to be almost impossible. I ended up
rewriting the interface to be Qt only. [1]

While imho Qt beats the gtk/gnome stack on portability, as a whole
KDE4 is very cumbersome in that regard. The code does compile and
work, but actually deploying it is very difficult.

[1] For reference, I'm talking about the mupen64plus emulator.
-- 
- Louai Al-Khanji