You are not logged in.

Why so many apps?

Dear visitor, welcome to KDE-Forum.org. If this is your first visit here, please read the Help. It explains in detail how this page works. To use all features of this page, you should consider registering. Please use the registration form, to register here or read more information about the registration process. If you are already registered, please login here.

dawynn

Beginner

  • "dawynn" started this thread

Posts: 1

  • Send private message

1

Monday, November 22nd 2004, 2:45pm

Why so many apps?

OK, I know that this is a long-standing debate in the Linux community, but I would think there could be consensus at least for the good of the KDE community.

Why so many duplicate applications? Take for example text editors. Windows comes standard with Notepad. That's it. If you want something a little more like a Word Processor, without paying the price for it, Windows has Wordpad.

But KDE is free. So, price is not an issue. So why do we have Kate, KWrite, and KEdit? Text Editing is such a simple thing, that we shoud be able to agree on how to do it, and build a fairly simple tool that would also include bells and whistles for those who want them. It would seem to me that improving a single product would be far more beneficial than spending time writing three separate inferior products.

Multimedia Players are also an example. Why both Noatun and Kaboodle? Juk can easily play everything, *and* it has supports for saveable playlists. If Juk could be skinnable, like Noatun, it would be awesome. Again, instead of building three separate inferior applications, why not just build one superior application?

I too believe that there's room for choice in the free market, but as long as everyone keeps building their own versions of each separate kind of application, we lose opportunities to build really superior products.

Thanks all for making KDE the great product that it is. Let's keep making it better and better!

mart_k

Trainee

Posts: 147

  • Send private message

2

Monday, November 22nd 2004, 6:13pm

Re: Why so many apps?

Quoted

Original von dawynn

Why so many duplicate applications? Take for example text editors. Windows comes standard with Notepad. That's it. If you want something a little more like a Word Processor, without paying the price for it, Windows has Wordpad.

But KDE is free. So, price is not an issue. So why do we have Kate, KWrite, and KEdit? Text Editing is such a simple thing, that we should be able to agree on how to do it, and build a fairly simple tool that would also include bells and whistles for those who want them. It would seem to me that improving a single product would be far more beneficial than spending time writing three separate inferior products.
Every of the listed programs has his adventages and disadventages. If you want to edit something very quickly, kedit is your textbrowser. If you want a lot of extra things like syntax-highleithing, you open kate.

kwrite is just a stripped kate, and so it doesn't cost a high amount of develop time, while you can have an extra editor with extra adventages.

Quoted

Original von dawynn

Multimedia Players are also an example. Why both Noatun and Kaboodle? Juk can easily play everything, *and* it has supports for saveable playlists. If Juk could be skinnable, like Noatun, it would be awesome. Again, instead of building three separate inferior applications, why not just build one superior application?
I don't know the exact situation on audio-players. It is likely that it there are designed for a certain propose, and then grow to each other.

Quoted

Original von dawynn

I too believe that there's room for choice in the free market, but as long as everyone keeps building their own versions of each separate kind of application, we lose opportunities to build really superior products.

Thanks all for making KDE the great product that it is. Let's keep making it better and better!
In Open Source Software, the really basic things are in separate dependencies. Through that, it is a little easier to write the programs, and thus it is possible to make three of them, each with another philosophy. For example, the application does not decode mp3 itself.

anda_skoa

Professional

Posts: 1,273

Location: Graz, Austria

Occupation: Software Developer

  • Send private message

3

Tuesday, November 23rd 2004, 12:46pm

Re: Why so many apps?

Quoted

Original von dawynn


Why so many duplicate applications?

This comes up every few weeks, the answer is usually quite the same.
It's the same situation on all other platforms. There are always a lot of applications doing similar things, just look into any categorie at Tucows.com.

Quoted

So why do we have Kate, KWrite, and KEdit?

I am sure you already have read that before but here we go again:
KEdit is needed because the Kate engine is not yet capable of right-to-left text handling (e.g. arabic languages)
KWrite is the simple editor like Notepad, only better :)

Kate is for people with advanced needs, for example programmers. You can't force everyone else to use Kate just because some people need it.
If a user doesn't need Kate, he shouldn't install it.

Quoted


Multimedia Players are also an example. Why both Noatun and Kaboodle? Juk can easily play everything, *and* it has supports for saveable playlists. If Juk could be skinnable, like Noatun, it would be awesome. Again, instead of building three separate inferior applications, why not just build one superior application?

So you are saying that it would have been better if Scott Wheeler didn't develop JuK because at that time Noatun and Kaboodle were already available?

I am not sure a lot of people will agree with you, I think that JuK is quite popular.

Quoted


I too believe that there's room for choice in the free market, but as long as everyone keeps building their own versions of each separate kind of application, we lose opportunities to build really superior products.

How so?

Cheers,
_
Qt/KDE Developer
Debian User

daihard

Trainee

Posts: 89

Location: Lynnwood, WA, USA

Occupation: Senior Database Software Engineer

  • Send private message

4

Sunday, December 12th 2004, 9:11am

Re: Why so many apps?

Quoted

Original von anda_skoa

Kate is for people with advanced needs, for example programmers. You can't force everyone else to use Kate just because some people need it.
If a user doesn't need Kate, he shouldn't install it.

You can't force everyone to use Kate, but if Kate was the only editor available, people would probably go ahead and use it without complaining too much. :)

Quoted

Quoted

I too believe that there's room for choice in the free market, but as long as everyone keeps building their own versions of each separate kind of application, we lose opportunities to build really superior products.

How so?

I *think* he means you can use the limited resources more efficiently by focusing on one product instead of dividing it into three or four applications that have similar, if not identical, features.
Registered Linux User: #281828
Home: Fedora Core 6 / KDE 3.5.8
Work: CentOS 4.6 / KDE 3.5.8

anda_skoa

Professional

Posts: 1,273

Location: Graz, Austria

Occupation: Software Developer

  • Send private message

5

Tuesday, December 14th 2004, 1:54pm

Re: Why so many apps?

Quoted

Original von daihard

Quoted

Original von anda_skoa

Quoted

I too believe that there's room for choice in the free market, but as long as everyone keeps building their own versions of each separate kind of application, we lose opportunities to build really superior products.

How so?

I *think* he means you can use the limited resources more efficiently by focusing on one product instead of dividing it into three or four applications that have similar, if not identical, features.


Yes, I am pretty sure this is what the OP meant, but as always when this argument comes up those poster ignore that there is no way to compare possible solutions without any of them being implemented.
So the developer have to go the evolutionary route an develop their idea/concept of an application and have the market decide if it can match or even beat competing products.

For example I believe that beside the current lack in BiDi support, Kate's text editing engine is currently the most advanced text editor for KDE (and also used in KWrite so there is no duplication here).
But accroding to the OP's idea, Christoph Cullmann is resposible for "loosing" the opportunity to create the best text editor because he decided to create Kate.

Unless the OP proofs that it would have been easier to get the same or superior functionality easier by porting the edit engines of either Emacs or VI (definitely the two most advanced editors) to KDE, I call it a void argument.

Cheers,
_
Qt/KDE Developer
Debian User

mebrelith

Beginner

Posts: 8

Location: Torreón, Coahuila, México

Occupation: Linux aficionado, KDE translator

  • Send private message

6

Sunday, February 6th 2005, 6:34pm

People who posts these kind of questions are the same people who would post something like: "why only one way of doing this or that?". I think the spirit of Linux has always been about having other options, most of the times better options and thats that. Having these many apps is good for everyone because it offers choices.
Somebody mentioned the JuK thingie and I have to agree with him, Noatun and whatnot where not exactly what I needed, Im happy that Scott Wheeler came along with the fantastic Juk. Im extremely happy that I had the choices I had.
Alejandro Araiza Alvarado "mebrelith"
Linux zealot #373009, KDE advocate.
[Omnia mutantur, nihil interit]

judland

Beginner

Posts: 29

Location: Sask., Canada

  • Send private message

7

Wednesday, February 9th 2005, 2:45pm

RE: Why so many apps?

Quoted

Originally posted by daihard
You can't force everyone to use Kate, but if Kate was the only editor available, people would probably go ahead and use it without complaining too much. :)


Well that's true, but there's also the other side to that.

If Kate was all that was available, but I wanted something that did a particular thing that Kate doesn't have, (assuming I had the skills) I'd be free to take Kate and make it do what I needed. Being an open source appliation, I have the right to do so.

Then I take my re-vamped Kate application and share it with a few buddies of mine that wished Kate did the same things I need it to. Then they share with a few friends, and so on, and so on, and so on.....

Then, I decided that so many buddies and buddie's buddies are using it, I decide to post the re-vamped Kate application on my web page for others, who find it useful, to use.

And there you have it; two versions of Kate: original Kate and Judkate.

The beauty of open source is that it isn't like the movie Highlander. No one can tell you that "there can be only one" version of any particular application. That's left for the realm of Micro$oft.

If you really want to be told what to use and what not to use, then a MS restrictive environment is for you.

However, if Kate works fine for me as it is, then I also have the right and ability to NOT install any other text editor I don't need or want.

wysota

Trainee

Posts: 65

Location: Warsaw, POLAND

  • Send private message

8

Wednesday, February 9th 2005, 4:13pm

RE: Why so many apps?

If the approach to have only one solution for every category was more widespread and treated as the only pollitically correct, Linus would never start developing Linux kernel as there already was Minix available. So what that he didn't like it? Right? ;)
Live and let live - use the search engine.
"Use the docs Luke, use the docs!"

Rinse

Professional

Posts: 797

  • Send private message

9

Saturday, February 12th 2005, 12:28am

Removing kate is not a good idea, because kwrite is part of kate.
kaboodle, noatun and juk are not duplicates, they are different applications. Juk is a jukebox, noatun a full featured mediaplayer and kaboodle a small embeddable player.
JuK can't replace noatun, since it does not play movies etc..
I guess kplayer or kaffeine could replace both noatun and kaboodle.

Rinse
Help mee om KDE 3.5.5 in het Nederlands te vertalen