Andy Wingo asks the question no one wants to ask: is Gnome development past the point of useful returns?¹ It’s a poignant question too, as so much care and attention is poured into these huge projects. Where are desktop systems going next? Should Gnome be looking further ahead?

1. Or KDE for that matter? ↩

A comparison of desktop memory usage, pitting KDE, Gnome, XFCE, and Plain XFree against each other in the battle for the smallest footprint.

Linus thinks out loud about how to apply Git to KDE development, including thoughts on social versus technical reasons for central repositories. A good discussion for anyone considering how Git would apply to something already in something CVS/SVN-like.

An explanation of why the KDE project switched to CMake (and how). So many build systems, so little time.

Nine things KDE should learn from Mac OS X, a contrast of the noisy (but configurable) popular Linux desktop environment and OS X.

A nice CSS tutorial on liquid layouts.

About the Spatial Debate…
GNOME, KDE, Xfce, and other Linux GUI projects are building good user interfaces and file managers to compete with Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS X. It is incredibly exciting to see Linux coming into its own as an easy-to-install, easy-to-use system for non-technical users. But that makes the spatial debate more worrisome, because a core aspect of the computing experience is being determined by speculative, unsupported, oversimplified arguments on both sides.

Safari and KHTML again
I just wish to weigh in on debacle to clear up some mistakes. First of all I would like to say I agree with Zack. The annoying part is not that Apple don’t cooperate as much as they could. They are actually helpfull in answering questions and tries at least to separate OS X specific features in the code (allthough they fail miserably at it). No, our problem are users who think Apple does more and underestimate the effort it takes for us to implement patches from WebCore. We are doing this for free and for fun, all we really want is appreciation for our effort.

So, when will KHTML merge all the WebCore changes?
Do you have any idea how hard it is to be merging between two totally different trees when one of them doesn’t have any history? That’s the situation KDE is in. We created the khtml-cvs list for Apple, they got CVS accounts for KDE CVS. What did we get? We get periodical code bombs in the form of them releasing WebCore. Many of us wanted to even sign NDA’s with Apple to at least get access to the history of their internal vcs and be able to be merging the changes incrementally, the way they can right now. Nothing came out of it. They do the very, very minimum required by LGPL.