[Discuss] Desktop Managers

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2014-08-03 15:53-0700 John Blomfield wrote:

> On 08/02/2014 10:41 PM, John Blomfield wrote:
>> On 08/02/2014 05:46 PM, Alan W. Irwin wrote:
>>> By the way, it appears from that review that KDE5 is already available
>>> for opensuse.  So do you plan to give it a try as well? 
>> I've only seen Unstable versions of the KDE 5 Framework and Qt5 available 
>> so far on OpenSuse in order to "ease the transition" to KDE 5 desktop, so I 
>> don't plan to try it yet. Nor have I investigated Qt5 to see how much 
>> impact that upgrade will have on Qt4 applications. That is, will wholesale 
>> re-writes of the applications be required or will it apply to new apps 
>> only? My guess is that a move from KDE4 to KDE5 is probably a year away, 
>> perhaps on version OpenSuse 14. The latest OpenSuse is currently 13.1 and 
>> there are likely to be a 13.2 and 13.3 out first. 
>
>
> After further reading I realize that I had not understood the changes that 
> are occurring in the new KDE release. It seems that under KDE 4 you 
> downloaded and installed all the components required to produce a Desktop 
> Environment, namely, Qt4 libraries, KDE4 libraries (KDE4 Frameworks) and KDE4 
> Plasma Desktop plus some basic Applications. The KDE4 Frameworks and Plasma 
> Desktop were bundled and referred to as KDE4 Plasma Desktop. Qt4 has always 
> been separate and could be used on any Desktop Environment.
>
> Now with the latest version of KDE, KDE5 Frameworks and KDE5 Plasma Desktop 
> are quite separate entities. Plasma of course depends on KDE5 Frameworks and 
> KDE Frameworks depends on Qt5 but KDE5 Frameworks does not require that you 
> download Plasma 5 Desktop. So I guess in principle we may see Desktop 
> Environments and Applications built on KDE5 Frameworks other than Plasma.
>
> To date there are stable releases of KDE5 Frameworks and Plasma 5 Desktop but 
> not KDE5 Applications as far as I can tell. This may explain why there are no 
> Distros that have released a Plasma 5 Desktop version. It may be initially 
> that we will see KDE4 apps running on Plasma 5 Desktop with a KDE5 Framework 
> wrapper. Although the changes required in Qt4 code to migrate to Qt5 are 
> "minor" they still require a lot of digging through the source and tracking 
> down bugs. One blog suggested that some of the changes could be automated 
> with a script.

Hi John:

Was your second-last sentence above just an aside about porting
strictly Qt applications/libraries (such as the PLplot qt device
driver) that have nothing to do with KDE from Qt4 to Qt5?  If so,
could you comment further about what you have read about the work
required to port KDE applications from KDE4 to KDE5?  That might be a
much more difficult port than a simple Qt4 to Qt5 port (which in the
qt device driver case required no code changes at all).

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
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