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KDE On Windows Continues

Posted by Scott_Ruecker on · 9 comments
KDE.news; By Patrick Spendrin
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After Christian Ehrlicher announced that he would step down from packaging and bug fixing for KDE on Windows, some articles were written which suggest that KDE on Windows is on hold now that the main developer has moved on. Even though KDE on Windows is only a small project and from the loss of one developer will be felt, we are far from dead. The Windows port has not been a one-man-project and many other people are still involved. KDE on Windows will continue to be developed and packages will continue to be made.

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Comments (9)

The Debian GNU/Hurd project, http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd.html Always just around the corner, looking for new devs+testers, coming across another "unexpected hurdle", ... etcetera.

I guess my main question is this: Why should we care? KDE on Windows? Why would anyone want or need it?
Quoting:Why would anyone want or need it?


This is the wrong place to ask. I suggest you look for a forum with Windows users and ask again.

Nonetheless, I have my thoughts about it. The same can be said about KDE on FreeBSD; and the answer would be: Because people like FreeBSD and KDE, so the logical thing is to combine those. Same for Windows I guess.
I've thought the same thing about KDE on Windows. I heard a KDE developer talk about it on the Linux Link Tech Show.

I guess it's an effort by KDE to be more cross-platform and not rely on Unix-like tools. It should make for cleaner, more portable code.

As far as why you'd want to use it. If you really, really, really like KDE and are productive on it, but you have a Windows box that needs to stay with Windows for one reason or another, you can have both environments (Windows and KDE) at your disposal.

So for some people, I imagine it could work. And it's a great way for people to use KDE without wiping their OS.

Anything that doesn't = preaching to the choir is OK by me.
I may mark myself unpopular by saying it, but I think KDE on Windows is cool. I like the idea behind it and think that for some people it might be what brings them to FOSS full time or at least part of the time. It may not be for you, but its for somebody..

And it does make KDE cross platform, whether we like the other platform or not.
As a former kde fan who left for gnome after the forced switch to kde4, this is really symptomatic to me of the general decline of kde - I remember the former glory days, when kde was, hands down, the best desktop environment a linux user could get. The kde website proudly proclaimed it as a superior desktop for the unix environment, but alas, those days are gone. Ichabod.

It appears that the lack of direction in the kde project has resulted in a number of spectacularly bad decisions, and will quite likely result in a continued slow decline into obscurity.
Re: KDE on Windows. I don't know how well they're explaining it. It's one of those projects that's more of a head-scratcher than anything else.

I had assumed awhile ago that they were bringing KDE apps such as KOffice to Windows and not the whole desktop environment.

I'd still like to see KOffice as a native Windows app, especially if version 2 is so much better than v.1.
Quoting:I may mark myself unpopular by saying it, but I think KDE on Windows is cool. I like the idea behind it and think that for some people it might be what brings them to FOSS full time or at least part of the time. It may not be for you, but its for somebody..

And it does make KDE cross platform, whether we like the other platform or not.
Agreed. Yet unfortunately, besides the Hurd and now possibly KDE for Windows, other F/OSS projects with similar goals also initially offered cross-platform hope in the past, yet such projects ended up being essentially abandoned.

Two examples of such abandoned projects were the GNUWin II project (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUWin) and the OpenCD project (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCD) Both these two projects were "intended at easing the transition from proprietary applications and operation systems to free ones, by acclimating the user to widely used and cross-platform software"

Neither of these two projects remain under active development.

OTOH, one could possibly consider the current GnuWin32 (http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/) as an outgrowth of GNUWin II, albeit for very specific F/OSS tools that will run on almost any 16/32-bit Windows version. Similarly, the OpenDisc (http://www.theopendisc.com/about/) is an actively-developed collection of cross-platform F/OSS applications that will run in Windows just like its OpenCD predecessor. AAMOF, project leader Chris Gray himself left the original OpenCD project in 2007 to establish the OpenDisc project, and he continues to lead the latter project’s development to this very day..

From http://www.theopendisc.com/programs , here is a near-complete list of apps in the current OpenDisc compilation : Blender, Dia, The GIMP, Inkscape, Nvu, Scribus, Tux Paint, The Battle for Wesnoth, Enigma, Neverball, Sokoban YASC, Azureus, FileZilla, Firefox, HTTrack, Pidgin, Seamonkey, Thunderbird, TightVNC, WinSCP, Audacity, Celestia, The Really Slick Screensavers, Stellarium, Sumatra PDF, The VLC media player, GnuCash, MoinMoin, Notepad2, OpenOffice.org, 7-Zip, Abakt, Clamwin, GTK+ toolkit, HealthMonitor, TrueCrypt, and Workrave.

Quite a collection, really.

So the OpenDisc project is certainly "cool" and is very much the real thing.

Perhaps Gray or other OpenDisc devs can incorporate DE's such as KDE into this, and then eventually incorporate KDE-apps such as KOffice into this as well?

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