1 Feb 2001 mrorganic   » (Journeyer)

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!)

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