Re: [TCLUG:3372] We're stuck with X

["Shawn T . Amundson" <amundson@gimp.org>]

On Sat, Jan 16, 1999 at 03:58:17PM -0600, Christopher Palmer wrote:
> On Sat, 16 Jan 1999, Shawn T . Amundson wrote:
> 
> > > Do you know of another way of enforcing consistency throughout the UI?
> > > Asking everyone nicely to please use GTK?
> > 
> > Providing enough modivation to use GTK+ for the application they are
> > writing.  There are only 2 real competitors right now for toolkits,
> > and that's GTK+ and Qt.  Even if we have these two toolkits on the 
> > desktop at the same time, that's not horrible.
> 
> Is Motif really all that dead? Even among 'big-name' commercial vendors?

If 99% of the desktop is GTK+ or Qt and one app is Motif, then I'd
say Motif is rather outdated on that system.  And we are talking 
Linux here, and Motif is not a competitor at all for the consistant
desktop.  Even Linux vendors which have have shipped CDE in the past
have moved on to KDE and with the next release of Redhat, GNOME and 
a huge list of GTK+ apps will be everywhere.

> > If a desire to have an official standard widget set was a goal, then I'd
> > only hope that GTK+ was considered simply because it is flexible enough
> > and tested.
> 
> And free. :^) (I'm still a little wary of Qt.)

You should be wary of Qt.  Unless someone like myself can take their
'free' software and compete head on with their version, I don't think
it's even worth discussing.  Right now their patch clause is their way
to prevent any competition or segmentation of Qt, and that sucks.

> > > Granted, the move in Mozilla from Motif to GK is promising.
> > 
> > I find the number of GTK+ apps scrolling by every day on freshmeat
> > much more promising than Mozilla's decision.
> 
> Point taken. :^) Still, the only commercial vendor to take up GTK is
> Netscape.

Netscape != Mozilla.  I've never seen anything from Netscape saying
it was going to use the GTK+ version of Mozilla; and I doubt if they
drop Motif Mozilla from the source tree.

The biggest commercial vendor to take up GTK is Red Hat.  When there
is more documentation (books on GTK+ are coming this year), then I'm
fairly sure we will see more commercial GTK+ applications.  (And a 
lot more in general after GNOME is on every Red Hat desktop.)

--
Shawn T. Amundson               
amundson@gimp.org               http://www.gimp.org/~amundson

"The assumption that the universe looks the same in every
 direction is clearly not true in reality." - Stephen Hawking