I've been having a long discussion via e-mail with a friend
of mine who is an ardent QT/KDE developer. Boiled down,
his question was: "If you want to program in C++, why are
you hesitating to develop using QT?"
Previously, my answer was, "Because QT isn't Free." But
since TrollTech is now issuing QT (for X Windows, anyhow)
under the GPL, that argument really isn't valid
anymore. "I don't much care for the signal/slot
weirdness," I say. But then callbacks aren't all that
great either. And I must confess that the standard
look'n'feel of QT is way better than GTK+, IMO.
So ultimately I started feeling a bit foolish. Here's this
excellent C++ toolkit, which is Free (in both libre and
gratis senses) and well-supported.
Realizing that I was acting rather stupidly, I decided then
and there to give QT/KDE more of a fair shot. So this
weekend I'll delve into the tutorials and HOWTO's and see
if I come out any happier than when I went in. One thing I
will say right off: KDevelop beats the pants off any
equivalent GNOME IDE I've seen so far, even at this early
(and rather unstable) stage of the game.
I wrote an OSOpinion piece some time back which was
critical of KDE (particularly the fact that they eschewed
CORBA for a home-rolled solution), but as my friend pointed
out, many of my concerns have been addressed.
Who knows? I may yet find C++-happiness in Linux!
All that said, I'm still anxiously awaiting GNOME 1.4/GTK+
2.0. There's a whole slew of interesting stuff coming down
the pipe, along with a *major* clean-up of the API. (I'll
be happy if they can just stop the annoying flicker on
screen redraws!)