Funny discussion becomes serious

Thx to aseigo the discussion changed from a dumb rant against windows users (and programmers) into a really serious discussion. I hope this discussion will continue on Akademy (I'm afraid I can't be there) and comes to a conclusion so we don't get the same discussion every year...

Maybe some of you should think about their opinions about windows devs. Just because we're developing on a platform you don't like we're not evil in any way. We respect your work as we hope you respect ours. I'm developing on kde4/windows because it makes fun (there is not much difference between linux and windows development) and I've got a lot of knowledge about windows development because of my work (Yes, open source devs also need to do some paid works sometimes). All work I've done for kde4 was done in my free time...

I'll be away for the next three weeks. Hope that I've the luck to meet the kget developer Manolo Valdes and do a 'cuba akademy' - wouldn't this be a nice place for the next akademy? ;-)

Funny discussion

Although I know it's impossible to win a discussion with aseigo (I even wouldn't win them when I would write in my mother tongue) I try to ask some questions and show my point of view.

For me it looks like the fanatic linux guys (the one from the other side aren't better) are afraid of loosing something when a program is running on both os. But nobody could explain what they think they'll loose. You say when an app is available on windows too, they user never comes to the idea to switch to linux. I say - if the program is not available on windows, the user will never use it at all and also will never know that this program is available on linux.

Like you don't see a plan how the porting to windows can make the free os more attractive, I don't see a plan how you want to convince the windows users to switch to linux. Do you really think that creating nice programs and telling a windows user how good this program works on linux is the best way to make him switch to linux? You may say that he can use a live cd - but I don't think that using a live cd for a few hours is the right way to gain new users...
And you don't have to boggle from us - we don't use the win32 api more than you use the linux-kernel api. ;)

Maybe a sentence why I don't use linux as my primary platform. I really don't know why. I maybe easily could switch to linux. Nearly all programs I use (non of them is a kde app because it's currently not possible to use a kde app on windows...) are available on both platforms or have a (more or less equivalent) counterpart. It's just a matter of taste - and isn't this what foss stands for - having the opportunity to use what you want and don't get stuck to a specific operating system?

One note for Derek Kite: It's just stupid what you say. Either you use a framework and learn to use it (with all it advantages and disadvantages) or let it be. It's totally nonsense to blame a platform independent framework like Qt to not support all platofrm specific goodies.

K3Process porting progress

Just a notice to all our app developers. If you want your program compiling and running fine on windows, you have to make sure that you don't use k3process anymore. Since ossi added the new kprocess class, k3process does no longer work on windows (because of this, kdelibs was broken the whole last week for us). We ported kdelibs, kdepimlibs and kdebase (though there are still some references to k3process - but this code doesn't compile on win32 either).
Here the link to the wiki page with all sources containing k3process: K3ProcessPorting. Please add a note when you successfully ported your code to kprocess.

And no - the screenshots from my last blog are not taken from a mac. It's just a custom windec which I used for testing purposes. But since I like this style - does it mean I should try out a mac?

kdeedu screenshots

Compiling and running kde-edu apps on windows is quite easy. Although they depend on kdelibs, they don't use much functionality from there. The hardest part were the various mathematical functions for kalgebra.

As you can see, all programs start fine and the most functions are working. Now we just need working kioslaves (impatiently waiting for thiago to fix them at akademy) and a nice installer because there's no way to convince a normal windows user to run cmake and nmake some hours only to play khangman ;-)

dbus on windows

Yesterday there was a request on qt-interest about the current state of qdbus/windows. This is now the second request on this topic from a company evaluating the use of dbus on windows :)
The other one already contributed to the windbus code base. They want to use it on windows CE - looks like we can soon compile Qtopia with dbus there. Let's have a look until someone is interested in running kde apps on winCE.

Some people may ask why we still don't have a working windbus implementation in the mainline dbus cvs. I think the main problem here is that our gnome friends don't have a real interest on porting their apps to windows and therefore don't care much. Hope they'll change their mind with the increasing (commercial) interest using dbus on windows...

Patch for Qt 4.3/GPL and msvc is coming soon

I'm currently working on a new patch to make Qt 4.3/GPL compile with msvc. As Trolltech now ships the source code of configure.exe, I can create a modified one which doesn't complain about the wrong QMAKESPEC anymore. This will allow us to enable MMX, 3NOW and SSE support (mingw seems not support this and therefore it is disabled then) which should improve the performance in some places. The modified executable also removes the need to patch qconfig.cpp/qconfig.h after the configure-run :)

Afaics Qt 4.3 will be the last version where I can create a patch for. I'll get a commercial license in the near future and therefore I'm not allowed to create a patch for the GPL-version anymore.