The future of KDE Development on Windows

[Jaroslaw Staniek]

On 3 April 2014 03:50, Aleix Pol <aleixpol at kde.org> wrote:
> Hi,
> To be honest, I didn't expect people to use the occasion for ranting. We all
> know it's been hard to do multiplatform development on kdelibs 4, that's for
> granted. That's why some of us went through kdelibs and made it become the
> KDE Frameworks 5. It's been a massive project, and we've done it for cases
> like KDE Windows.
>
> I think we should take this occasion to take a step back and re-consider the
> project. Let's figure out how we want things to work, what we liked from
> what we used to have and what we didn't.
>
> Some questions pop in my head:
> - We want KDE on Windows to keep being a distribution? Should it be a
> development platform or a site to download installers?
> - Do we want to focus on applications?
> - What's the Plasma role in KDE Windows?
> - What frameworks to we want supported on Windows? [1]

Thanks for the topic,
Random thoughts:
The original focus of KDE on Windows was applications. Plasma came
much later, by the way, perhaps as a showcase, never replaced native
experience even for most hardcore users.

I understand that making app feel native on Windows or Mac is a
tedious work, more tedious than conceptually complex. I remember bits
like dbus were once complex on Windows. Sometimes a matter of
disabling features. Making the app more standalone. Being standalone
has its own challenge however, apps do not integrate too well as they
often come with a copy of dependencies.

I find people expect native installers on windows, be it exe or msi.

If you ask I'd look at priorities to see what apps to maintain on
Windows, look what type of app is otherwise unavailable on
Windows/Mac. Krita or Kexi comes as example. For apps that exist on
Windows/Mac already and are hugely popular, like web browsers or text editors
(Notepad++ which is FOSS), porting KDE equivalent (Kate) still can
happen but mostly if there's special interest at KDE side. I do not
expect particular popularity just because the app comes from KDE,
expect when other ported apps benefit from them as components (here:
Kate part).

> - How has Windows changed since 4.0 release?

Windows' default compiler MSVC is now much more standards-compliant
than at the time of 4.0.

> I think there's a huge space for discussion there and now it's the moment
> when it should take place, so that we can plan the bigger picture by taking
> Windows into account.
>
> Aleix
>
> [1] http://community.kde.org/Frameworks/List
>
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>



-- 
regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek
 Kexi & Calligra & KDE | http://calligra.org/kexi | http://kde.org
 Qt for Tizen | http://qt-project.org/wiki/Tizen
 Qt Certified Specialist | http://www.linkedin.com/in/jstaniek