Submitted by “Just because KDE has been designed to be portable across Linux, FreeBSD and other UNIX/X11 environments for an age now, doesn’t mean we aren’t up for the occasional challenge. With version 4, Trolltech released Qt for the Mac, Windows and now even embedded environments under the GPL. Since Qt is the base upon which KDE is developed, KDE is now free to offer native support for these platforms. Today I am focusing on the KDE/Mac developments for KDE 4.”
KDE 4 brings great advances to the Mac porting effort, thanks mostly due to Qt 4, and the new KDE build system, based on CMake. For KDE 4, the KDE/Mac applications are downloadable as standard issue, Mac .dmg files, available from the KDE on Mac OS X website.
Benjamin Reed has been a one man KDE porting machine for years; he first brought KDE to Mac OS X years ago. This is all thanks to him.
I’m not one who’s found the MacOS to be all that it’s cracked up to be. I think KDE is better. The ability to run KDE as it is on x11 would be a plus.
(though I could have the wrong idea because of the enclosed screenshots, the wording seems pretty clear)
I understand why it won’t be the same though. Apple has such a tight fist control over OSX that modularity takes a big hit.
*EDIT* Don’t misunderstand… Apple has the right to control their environment. They built it, their name is on it, it’s theirs. But that’s entirely the problem, is that they didn’t build it for themselves. We buy it, and alot of us out here change our products.
This why I often times view a mac as a permanent loan. Yes, you bought it and it’s forever “yours”, but will ultimately always be apple’s.
Edited 2007-01-16 04:27
yeah but why buy a mac unless you want to run macosx? this is for running kde apps on the macosx that mac users chose
Edited 2007-01-16 04:38
Well, maybe you do want to run OSX for some reason, but you just don’t like the desktop environment?
You might need an app that only comes for OSX (or Windows), like Photoshop or Pagemaker or Quark. You might like its relative security. You might like the hardware and think it runs OSX better than it does Windows.
But none of this means you particularly have to like the desktop environment it ships with as a default. Its not silly to prefer KDE to the OSX desktop environment, its just a difference of taste. OSX and Windows both would be enormously improved by a choice of desktop environments. No-one would have to use them if they didn’t want to, after all.
Personally, I can’t wait for Enlightenment to be ported to Vista….
I could to probably just aswell use FreeBSD + KDE instead of OS X but the thing with OS X imho isn’t the OS but the apps, sort of like with any other OS on the planet. It’s the apps I use and care about.
If there was more commercial apps for bsd/linux/qt it would be more intresting to use it for more people. On the other side I hate the shareware market on OS X which seems to be huge, I don’t wanna pay for player buttons in the menu bar and such
I already ported KDE/X11 to Mac OS X, it’s been stable for about 4 years, and is available through Fink.
This is *new* support for a native Qt/Mac, as opposed to using Qt/X11 with Mac OS X’s X11 server.
Great,
More options for us MacOS X users. Now we can freely roam between MacOS X apps, open source native apps (NeoOffice, AbiWordm, NVU), open source X11 apps, open source KDE apps, Windows apps through Darwine, CrossOver or Paralells/VM Ware.
Frickin excellent.
– – –
http://www.edu.org/
More options for us MacOS X users. Now we can freely roam between MacOS X apps, open source native apps (NeoOffice, AbiWordm, NVU), open source X11 apps, open source KDE apps, Windows apps through Darwine, CrossOver or Paralells/VM Ware.
All of that has been possible for quite some time, though ~ I thought.
At my place, OS X (ppc arch) now runs NeoOffice, OpenOffice, X11, MPlayer, RasMol, Gnome (occasionally; a little slow on the G4
) and one or two other FOSS apps but I forgot their names.
[i]yeah but why buy a mac unless you want to run macosx? this is for running kde apps on the macosx that mac users chose [i]
Becus it is cheap hardware i did not buy my macbook for osX. when i bougth it there was not any pc in the same price class. Apple have some really nice student offers.
KDE becomes only mainstream desktop environment capable of running natively on all major operationg systems (I don’t count cygwin-like stuff which is a sort of sandbox approach). This is what will differentiate it and attract many lurkers to try open source desktop. Consequently, I believe community will grow significantly, as I don’t see a reason why the environment wouldn’t become quite popular, given the rudimentary, dumbed down nature of WinXP and Vista shell components (Firefox vs. IE6 analogy in a new, Konqueror vs. Windows Explorer case). Maybe this can also be a migration path to Linux desktop, as desktops will have an option to gradually adopt people to a new UI.
OTOH,mulitple target platforms will certainly require more maintaining work and careful development to avoid breakage, but this idea was driving KDE4 platform development.
This is a true portability. User can login to any platform and work in familiar KDE, without even knowing what the platform was. I never cared about operating system I use, as long as it provided me with what I need. It was just another layer that I needed to deal with in order to do my work.
But, I doubt MAC and Windows users would care…
DG
But, I doubt MAC and Windows users would care…
It doesn’t matter i if Mac or Windows users care.
What matters is, if application developers care.
Making it possible to develop for X11/Mac/Windows
in one codebase would cut down development costs
and make it easier to ship and support applications
on more platforms, giving them an opportunity to
expand their markets.
Making it possible to develop for X11/Mac/Windows
in one codebase would cut down development costs
and make it easier to ship and support applications
on more platforms, giving them an opportunity to
expand their markets.
Application developers have been already able to do this for a long time now with Qt.
Application developers have been already able to do this for a long time now with Qt.
True! However KDE as a framework adds quite a lot of extras, e.g. embeddable components, desktop integration stuff
Qt-only allows to target a wider range of systems, e.g. for vertical applications, while Qt+KDE makes it easier for end-user desktop applications.
>Application developers have been already able to do this for a long time now with Qt.
True! However KDE as a framework adds quite a lot of extras, e.g. embeddable components, desktop integration stuff
Agreed, and that’s an important point. The abstraction work the devs are doing to “isolate” KDE4 from the actual desktop platform can’t be understated.
Qt is a proven stack for developers, but it’s a little frustrating that Windows represents it’s largest commercial development base but the ISV’s aren’t leveraging the cross-platform capabilities, they’re simply using it as an alternative Windows-based development framework. At the same time, Qt alone doesn’t fully enable simply porting of complex desktop applications, there are platform specific issues that still need to be addressed and that increases costs for the ISVs.
While I’d love to see KDE4 used to it’s full potential as an application framework, I’d be happy if ISV’s simply leveraged portions like Solid or Phonon in order to facilitate cross-platform development, and I think Apple’s adoption of KHTML for Webkit validates that the quality and viability of using existing OSS frameworks for commercial applications. The KDE4 team is doing the heavy lifting in managing that abstraction layer, which addresses one (but not all of) the pain points for ISV’s considering alternative platforms.
If successful, this could be a significant step towards reducing the upfront investment required for ISV’s; linux (and OSX) development could require only incremental resources by leveraging the larger base on Windows, rather than requiring seperate development trees, shifting the ROI favorably. It’s not a total solution and the real business issues/concerns are a little more complex, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.
That KDE4 will also be ported to Windows, meaning Windows users (which make up a HUGE amount of the desktop market) will be able to feel the power that is KDE!
This could backfire however. Why run Linux when Amarok runs on Windows just fine? K3b? (both f**king amazing apps for KDE have no alternative on Windows imo) So maybe not port everything all at once?