| Repeat after me: No more Linux desktop forks |
by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (Mar. 15, 2005)
In front of me, I have an interview from The Modding Den with Emre Sokulla, the leader of the SimpleKDE project.
Sokulla said SimpleKDE's goal "is to create a KDE based (which can be the best base in my opinion), enterprise level, simple, easy to use, secure desktop environment. So we want to make something between Gnome and KDE. Some people consider our relationship with KDE [similar] to the one between Gnome and Xfce. But this is not true; we are not that far to KDE, we are forking KDE."
Oh. No.
This is just what we don't need: Yet another Linux desktop fork.
Sokulla and friends are doing this because, "The main reason is that we find KDE too cluttered and too bloated; and we want something faster, more simplistic and easier to use."
Fair enough, but they should be working on this within the KDE community, not from one step outside it. After all, a few months back SimpleKDE was doing just that as it prepared to become part of the KDE Quality Project.
Perhaps, Sokulla, who is not a native English-speaker, was misunderstood by the interviewer?
No, alas, he wasn't.
Sokulla went on to say, "We have changed some of the KDE libraries; so in order to fully enjoy SimpleKDE, you need to use our libraries. But this does not mean that there's an incompatibility between the projects. KDE folks have officially contacted us, and wanted us to keep the compatibility. And we ensure everyone that SimpleKDE will remain fully compatible with KDE."
Sigh. That is a fork. If you need different libraries, you've forked the project. And, this, this is a bad thing.
It's not that KDE couldn't stand some improvement of the kind he's talking about. It can. But, by forking the desktop interface code, the SimpleKDE developers are making it one more step harder for there to be a universal Linux desktop.
That was the whole point of the OSDL's (Open Source Development Labs) Desktop Linux Working Group, meeting late last year.
To quote, John Cherry, OSDL's Initiative manager for the Linux desktop, the developers finally got that "we've got to stop acting like a bunch of disparate organizations and work together on the Linux desktop for it to be successful."
Exactly.
Since then the Portland Project, which was founded during that meeting, has been working at the goal of making it easier for desktop software developers to write Linux desktop programs without having to worry about whether the distribution or user is using KDE, GNOME, or a more obscure Linux desktop.
If you're changing the libraries, though, to take out the clutter and the bloat, if you're adding yet another desktop to the Linux mix, you're making it harder for any Linux desktop to ever become popular.
I've seen this happen so many times before in the software business that I don't want to even think about it. Every programmer is sure that his way is the right way to solve a problem. That's why we have flame wars that become religious wars over KDE vs. GNOME, vi vs. EMACS, and so on.
While we're busy fighting these battles, Microsoft, in the meantime, keeps plodding along, running later and later with Vista and dumping features like UEFI support (United Extensible Firmware Interface). By this time next year, people will be developing Vista applications and having no doubt that they'll run on the system.
If the Linux community continues to have significant desktop forks, ISVs (independent software vendors) will continue to be reluctant to write for Linux.
So, SimpleKDE developers, may I ask that you reconsider "forking" the code and work to get your improvements into the main KDE libraries? If that doesn't work for you, at least please contact the good people at the Desktop Linux Working Group and work with them to make sure that your project can work and play well with the Portland Project initiative.
Seriously, you'll be glad you did, and so will the rest of the Linux desktop community.
 About the author: Ziff Davis Internet editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has been using and writing about technology and business since the late '80s and thinks he may just have learned something about them along the
way.
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