KDE / QT 4 / C++: October 2009 Archives

I've stayed fairly quiet on the controversy over Mono, the open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET protocol and C# programming language that's been grabbing a greater share of the desktop in various Linux distributions in recent years and months.

Reading this article by a Samba developer on the Tux Deluxe blog on why Samba/SMB — itself an iteration of a Microsoft technology — is much easier to justify using than Mono, I know that I have quite a way to go before I completely understand the issue.

Briefly, Jeremy Allison says that an agreement between the Samba project and Microsoft allows all users to implement Samba without threat of legal action over patents.

But with Mono, a similar agreement only covers users of software distributed by Novell, which signed an infamous patent agreement with Microsoft awhile back. That means the rest of us are not so well-protected:

... my basic issue with the Microsoft Community Promise is that Miguel (de Icaza) doesn't have to depend on it like everyone else does. Miguel's employer, Novell, has a patent agreement with Microsoft that exempts Mono users from Microsoft patent aggression, so long as you get Mono from Novell. Miguel takes pains to point this out. This is not a level playing field, or software freedom for all. This is a preferred supplier trying to pretend there is no problem. Sure there isn't a problem, for them. If it isn't good enough for Miguel, why is it good enough for other developers?

Allison's contention is that while he can understand original Mono creator Miguel de Icaza's reasons for wanting to code GUI apps in C# rather than C or C++, Allison would rather that the open-source community turned to Java instead in its quest to build out the graphical environment. There is some talk about, at the time Mono was started, Java not being available under a free license, but Allison contends that it has more to do with potential or real rivalries among developers wishing to use Java or Mono/C++, as well as control over their respective projects.

Although I'm not a developer, this is a very real issue for me, and it should be for all who use Linux/Unix — and especially GNOME — on the desktop. Two of the biggest Linux distributions — Debian and the Debian-derived Ubuntu — are based on the GNOME desktop environment and seemingly have Mono apps taking a bigger chunk of the system with every release.

Right now, the most common Mono apps, many of which are in the default install in Ubuntu, are:

Tomboy notes
F-Spot photo manager
Banshee music player
Gnome Do "intelligent launcher"

For a longer list, look at this portion of the Wikipedia entry on Mono.

This is no easy issue to resolve. On the one hand, there are always apps that can do the same things that don't use Mono, although in the GNOME environment some such as the Rhythmbox music player aren't very active in terms of development.

There's always KDE, which uses the QT 4 toolkit that is under the GPL license as well as the C++ programming language.

Personally I've avoided KDE as a desktop environment because in the distributions I've tried, it's a great deal slower than GNOME (and Xfce). Despite that, KDE has many extremely compelling apps that include the music player Amarok, CD/DVD-creation program K3b, photo-organizer digiKam and photo/paint app Krita, not to mention the still-seemingly young but very promising Kdenlive video editor.

Still, there is that relative slowness in KDE — and my perceived trouble with the KOffice suite, which seemingly lost its way the past couple of years. Then there's a gaggle of text editors (Kate, KWrite, Kedit, Kile) that previously didn't thrill me but do merit another look. I'm using Gedit in GNOME as my main text editor, and while I'm happy with much of what I see, the lack of any easy way to change the case of letters from the keyboard has my eye wandering.

Do I give abandon GNOME and give KDE another try? Maybe with a multi-core CPU, modern graphics hardware, a few GB of RAM and disk space for days I wouldn't care so much, but now with a 1.3 GHz Celeron, 1 GB of RAM and an Intel graphics chip that Xorg has been waterboarding for a year or so, I have to pay attention to the potential strain on my system, and thus far GNOME has provided a very nice combination of features and resource load.

On the other hand, seeing Mono as the "Miguel de Icaza-who-works-for-Novell Show," keeping in mind that I know little about him and have never met him, doesn't give me a good feeling about how GNOME is tipping every more closely into becoming a Mono-powered world.

Getting down to the application level. I do have Tomboy notes installed on a couple of boxes. I haven't used it much; I tend to write my notes in regular ol' text files or in Google Docs.

I've been using Rhythmbox a bit and have thought about trying out Banshee (which might become the default Ubuntu music player) ... and I probably should.

F-Spot is the default photo manager in Ubuntu, and I do use it and generally like it. I tried Google's Picasa for a day and thought it more than a little clumsy (and I wasn't a big fan of it scouring my system for images without my "OK" on it). I've used digiKam in the past and found it quite similar to F-Spot, with the added bonus of digiKam being the only Linux application I've ever used that pays even the slightest attention to the IPTC tagging that just about 100 percent of professional photographers add to their JPEG images via Photoshop or other proprietary apps such as PhotoMechanic.

I deal with this embedded metadata in between dozens and hundreds of JPEGs on a daily basis, and this IPTC code, in case you didn't know, is not only uneditable in the GIMP, MtPaint and presumably other Linux/Unix image-editing software but is generally erased by these programs whenever an image is modified within them.

So basically I'm a whore who can be bought by the first FOSS app that allows me to fully edit the IPTC data in JPEGs. I'm showing a whole lot of leg, but it seems nobody either knows or cares. I'll load digiKam again and see how it's doing on IPTC; I don't need a photo archiving program to edit images for Web publication. And if it did the job (and I don't think it will), I'd gladly use Krita — or anything else. I'm thinking of WINE and IrfanView, the latter of which I use heavily in Windows, just to be able to do more work in a FOSS OS and be able to use Windows even less than I already do.

Back to the point. I've totally run off the rails on my investigation of Mono. I still don't know exactly what to think of it. I'll keep looking around at what others are saying. If you wish, leave a comment on this post (you can now sign in with AOL, Wordpress.com and Yahoo accounts in addition to the other ways, including signing up for a Movable Type account on our server; Typekey/Typepad is broken at present, and yes, I'm looking into it).