5 ms·

In hindsight it feels like KDE was fighting the last war's battles, eagerly marching on on the path towards an OOP modularity promised land, still trying to one

by usrusr 7y ago

In hindsight it feels like KDE was fighting the last war's battles, eagerly marching on on the path towards an OOP modularity promised land, still trying to one-up Microsoft's OLE and COM long after those fell out of the hype spotlight at Redmond. I'd be surprised if there wasn't even a lot of CORBA in KDE at one point.

makomk 7y ago
If I remember rightly, one of the big differences between KDE and GNOME was that GNOME fell for CORBA in a big way whereas KDE rejected it.
- gioele 7y ago
  GNOME went for proper CORBA (in the form of Bonobo [1]), KDE preferred something non-standard but easier to work with and much more performant (what is now KParts [2] + DCOP [3]). Bonobo has been abandoned around GNOME 2.4. KParts are still used in KDE 5 and you have probably heard of DCOP's child: D-Bus. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo_(GNOME) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo_(GNOME) [2] https://api.kde.org/frameworks/kparts/html/index.html https://api.kde.org/frameworks/kparts/html/index.html [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCOP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCOP
  - gmueckl 7y ago
    D-Bus is now mandatory system level software on Linux thanks to systemd. KHTML became the grandfather of practically all modern browsers except Firefox. In those terms, parts of the KDE project were extremely successful. It's a bit sad that the desktop as a whole didn't profit that much fron that success.
    - dTal 7y ago
      >D-Bus is now mandatory system level software on Linux thanks to systemd Oh, it was mandatory before that, if you wanted a graphical desktop, or the ability to print, or Network Manager to work. Quite a lot of "magic" that doesn't obviously happen through files or sockets, happens over D-Bus.
      - gmueckl 7y ago
        But these features are pretty much desktop specific. You didn't really need to run d-bus on a server before systemd happened.
      - vetinari 7y ago
        D-Bus is basically standardized marshalling over socket, so all that magic mentioned does happen through sockets.
  - usrusr 7y ago
    Thanks for that interesting bit of history, also to the co-replyers.
- boudewijnrempt 7y ago
  That's correct. Initially we wanted to use corba, but quickly discovered that all that led to was complexity and performance problems. Then at the first KDE conference some people cobbled together dcop, which later morphed into dbus when Gnome also gave up on corba.

by usrusr 7y ago

makomk 7y ago

If I remember rightly, one of the big differences between KDE and GNOME was that GNOME fell for CORBA in a big way whereas KDE rejected it.

gioele 7y ago
GNOME went for proper CORBA (in the form of Bonobo [1]), KDE preferred something non-standard but easier to work with and much more performant (what is now KParts [2] + DCOP [3]). Bonobo has been abandoned around GNOME 2.4. KParts are still used in KDE 5 and you have probably heard of DCOP's child: D-Bus. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo_(GNOME) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo_(GNOME) [2] https://api.kde.org/frameworks/kparts/html/index.html https://api.kde.org/frameworks/kparts/html/index.html [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCOP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCOP
- gmueckl 7y ago
  D-Bus is now mandatory system level software on Linux thanks to systemd. KHTML became the grandfather of practically all modern browsers except Firefox. In those terms, parts of the KDE project were extremely successful. It's a bit sad that the desktop as a whole didn't profit that much fron that success.
  - dTal 7y ago
    >D-Bus is now mandatory system level software on Linux thanks to systemd Oh, it was mandatory before that, if you wanted a graphical desktop, or the ability to print, or Network Manager to work. Quite a lot of "magic" that doesn't obviously happen through files or sockets, happens over D-Bus.
    - gmueckl 7y ago
      But these features are pretty much desktop specific. You didn't really need to run d-bus on a server before systemd happened.
    - vetinari 7y ago
      D-Bus is basically standardized marshalling over socket, so all that magic mentioned does happen through sockets.
- usrusr 7y ago
  Thanks for that interesting bit of history, also to the co-replyers.
boudewijnrempt 7y ago
That's correct. Initially we wanted to use corba, but quickly discovered that all that led to was complexity and performance problems. Then at the first KDE conference some people cobbled together dcop, which later morphed into dbus when Gnome also gave up on corba.