Plasma Windows

[Jaroslaw Staniek]

Steven J. Terrill said the following, On 2008-08-28 15:48:
> Hello, 
> 
> I became aware of the effort to port plasma to replace the explorer shell a few weeks back from a dot.kde.org digest. I would be interested in contributing to this effort, I do not have any OSS experience, I'm currently a senior student of Computer Engineering. Could I have a point of contact on this effort to talk with and possibly get pointed in the correct direction.
> 
> Apart from kde itself, I'm also interested in discovering the interfaces microsoft provides for replacing the shell. I am a Windows Vista user, but should be able to obtain a copy of XP for vm use if plasma on vista doesn't work at the moment.

Steven,
The reality is that if these interfaces do exist, are really unofficial^h^h 
private. You'll do whatever you want in your KDE installation, and perhaps 
I'll be curious what you'll achieve. Having what you proposed as an option is 
of course welcome, since it's all FOSS development.

But my opinion is that changes like this, made to the interface not designed 
for being replaceable, can break 3rd-party applications that depend on the 
defaultdesktop. Thus I trust in the _default_ setting of the KDE on Windows 
being relatively nonintrusive.

And my advice (from the very beginning before even Plasma things emerged) has 
been that "if you want good desktop experience, use the full Desktop on a Unix 
platform".

If you want example of nonintrusive 3rd-party technology running on top of 
different desktop, look at Wine: the Windows applications, while running on 
Linux/Unix, do not try to do any harm the underlying desktop layer, no matter 
it is GNOME, KDE, or FluxThingie WM[tm] :)

Regards, with a hope you'll find your area in the KDE development :)

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek
  Sponsored by OpenOffice Polska (http://www.openoffice.com.pl/en) to work on
  Kexi & KOffice (http://www.kexi.pl/en, http://www.koffice.org/kexi)
  KDE Libraries for MS Windows (http://windows.kde.org)