We’ll I’m going to dive into the deep end (flames welcome) because I have been talking to people about the Qt “possibility” since Nokia bought Trolltech and GNOME was considering what to do for the future of its toolkit.  I can see the headlines of yet another GNOME developer advocating using Qt4 as the basis of future releases but this simply is not the case.  It is, in its basic form, an exercise in “what ifs?” and an iterative process of looking inward at our ecosystem and seeing the pros and cons of certain directions we could take.

Is this going to happen?

First off this is a highly unlikely scenario. The planets would have to align, Qt would have to go LGPL, Nokia would have to loosen controls on contributions to avoid a fork, the Qt team would have to accept a community which has slightly different goals and the GTK+ team would have to signal their willingness to move. We are not going to turn our back on the great work the GTK+ teams are doing and most certainly the base libraries we use such as GStreamer wouldn’t change.

What are the possible advantages?

  • Less confusion for the non-insiders on what to learn and program for
  • We can get rid of the whole Freedesktop common widgets talk (e.g. Print and File dialogs) which is nonsense and a distraction anyway
  • Hopefully less bickering in the community meaning a more unified and focused front against larger threats
  • Focus can move from the lower toolkit layers to the higher level desktop layer which really define the value differences between GNOME and KDE
  • Easier technology sharing

Note that these are all only possible advantages and may not even happen even if there was a move.

 What are the possible disadvantages?

  • More bickering on how to write applications (who’s approach to usability wins out?)
  • Less focus and a return to writing applications without a shared guideline (just look at old XLib interfaces - almost like snowflakes)
  • A loss of identity
  • Loss of amazing GTK+ developers who may feel abandoned
  • Splintering of the community so we have parallel GTK+ GNOME and Qt4 GNOME development
  • Screwing ISV’s who bank on GTK+’s stable interface
  • GTK+ isn’t just a license - we would be losing a lot by switching away from the codebase
  • Falling into the growing pains GTK+ 2.0 brought GNOME and Qt4 is still bringing KDE
  • A loss of activity at Freedesktop.org which is actually sometimes useful in producing dialogue and shared practices
  • A loss of control over the direction of the toolkit effecting the quality and feel of the GNOME desktop
  • Really a lot of development is moving to the web - will toolkits be important enough to warrant the pain of the move

What this wouldn’t be

This wouldn’t be a merging of GNOME and KDE.  Each community has a different idea of what constitutes a usable desktop and Qt would simply be an implementation detail bellow GNOME.

Conclusion

This is pretty much a pipe dream.  It solves some issues while creating a whole host of different ones.  I’m not going to advocate it other than seeing what peoples reactions are.  On the flip side if the work was put behind it, the planets aligned, and both communities came to an agreement I wouldn’t object to the arrangement.  Needless to say, I’m not holding my breath nor would I be elated or saddened if it did or did not happen. To me it is all what is best for Linux, GNOME, Free Software and the wider market. It is unclear what direction would be best (any claims to that knowledge would be suspect) but honestly and actively looking at the possibilities is a useful activity, however remote. People reading should not put their “hopes and dreams” on this or believe it to be more than it is.

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