The recent annual summit of the K Desktop Environment project witnessed several significant developments, one of which was the fact that developers got the HTML rendering engine used by browsers like Mozilla working with the KDE browser Konqueror.
Melbourne teenager Daniel Stone, who attended the summit in his capacity as release manager of freedesktop.org, said that during the coding marathon, which was part of the summit, "a few of the KHTML developers got together and made Gecko work natively with Qt, so you could use it as a drop-in replacement; use Konqueror as a browser and have it play as a native KDE app, but still get all the benefits of Gecko."
Gecko is the rendering engine used by Mozilla while Qt is the toolset used by KDE developers to build all the applications which form part of the most widely used desktop environment among Linux users.
freedesktop.org promotes interoperability between desktops and fosters development that doesn't fit neatly into either of the two main desktop environments that Linux uses - Gnome and KDE - usually a lot of underlying infrastructure.
Stone, who is on leave from an Arts/Software Engineering double degree at Melbourne, said there had been a lot of progress on usability issues as well.
"Quite a few people were present - KDE's own coders with a strong usability background, and some professional usability experts with a computer background. There was a large meeting of minds, and they discussed a lot of the current problems with KDE, and how to improve, including some nice bluesky ideas for making KDE far more usable in future," Stone said.
He said the work in progress at freedesktop.org would go a long way towards making Linux itself competitive on the desktop.
"We have D-BUS, a common message bus, so desktops can work on sharing configuration and stop duplicating applications which don't need to be duplicated. Now we're at the level where most of the infrastructural and (from a user's point of view) boring technical work has already been done," Stone said
"There's a big focus on making things just work out of the box and look nice for users, instead of requiring people to drop down to the command line and play with things they consider scary. Making the OS more friendly is a pretty big priority, and that's happening in spades from both the desktop environments and OS vendors."