Great News for Qt and KDE ..and a bit of Red Hat!

Digia announces

“the plans to acquire the Qt technology from Nokia. This transaction secures Qt’s future as the leading cross-platform development framework. It also brings over a part of the Qt team previously at Nokia who, together with the Digia Qt R&D team, will be able to keep developing Qt further.”

And the good news continue as Digia seems to care also about KDE and not just Qt. Some parts of this announcement prove it.

“We want to continue the symbiosis with the KDE community and the KDE Free Qt Foundation.”

“The KDE community is a key driver and contributor to Qt and we therefore would like to further develop our relationship with you, via an even stronger dialogue and cooperation in the future.”

“We look forward to working with KDE in order to further strengthen and extend Qt’s global reach.”

Who is Digia

Digia Plc is an large company (with nearly 1,200 employees, operates in Asia, Europe and America with offices in Finland, China, Norway, Sweden, Russia and the USA) that runs a variety of activities and just one of them is developing and selling Qt Applications by taking advantage of Qt dual licensing and cross platform capabilities.

After the shut down of the open source Qt department of Nokia the future of Qt feels again safe but more importantly the KDE developers and KDE community are getting again excited to continue their work and push further the KDE ecosystem.

I wouldn’t had mentioned the above because almost every blog post it, if I hadn’t try Rebecca. So I basically used it like an intro. It was a KDE double doze for me!

Rebecca Black and KDE

Rebecca is an Ubuntu with KDE (aka Kubuntu) spin that comes with Wayland/Weston (the new display server protocol that promises to change Linux Desktop future once and for all) pre-installed and I tried it, to test the compatibility Wayland/GTK/Clutter. Of course you can install Weston in any Distro, but in Rebecca is ready, so it saves you time.

When you’re starting Rebecca, it asks you if you want to use Wayland or Xorg (Xorg isn’t working anyway, but that’s normal :) ) and of course  I picked Wayland. To be honest I don’t think that was Wayland but I didn’t even check. I was just stayed thrilled with what I saw!

This is the first screen of Rebecca OS. KDE 4.8 or 4.9 I don’t know and it doesn’t really matter. KDE rocks, is the best traditional / modern Desktop ever made. I was so excited with what I saw, that I was wondering, “Why the nostalgic guys of Gnome2 don’t just try KDE?”. Further more I really doubt that if Gnome had kept the classical concept of Gnome2, could be able to compete this astonishing KDE.

You want a Extra Pane, well here it is! Of course KDE is much more than an Extra Pane. It has a plethora of innovating features but I won’t discuss these, actually I wasn’t caring at all for them. What I want to emphasize is the SUPER AMAZING SMOOTH animations, transitions and transparencies that they seem like coming from the future. And all these inside a Vbox!

The impressive System Settings of KDE! You probably can change even the color of your shoelaces and make them a bit transparent but.. but this is actually and the problem with KDE. KDE has options for everything and sub-options for the parent options. Alright, someone could say, just don’t mess up with them. But isn’t only about the options. KDE looks like an aeroplane cockpit or more correctly with a spacecraft cockpit with buttons and features everywhere. You just can’t ignore them, you just can’t avoid them, there all are front of you!

While the actual visual design of KDE is more than impressive, the design workflow lacks behind. I couldn’t never use such an advanced Desktop UI. If things get simpler I’ll try it for sure!

That was the original reason I tried Rebecca, to see GTK running on the top of Wayland. But I guess I forgot that (coz I stacked with KDE), I’ll come back to this with another post :)

Red Hat Vs Digia Vs Canonical

This is not Versus at all between the three companies but just some thoughts of me. Qt has Digia to support it. Ubuntu has Canonical (which basically is the same company, so is a bit different) Gnome has mostly Red Hat.

But what’s Red Hat?

According to Wikipedia

As of April 2012, Red Hat was the largest corporate contributor to the Linux kernel.

Red Hat became the first one-billion dollar open source company in its fiscal year 2012, reaching $1.13 billion in annual revenue.

Red Hat is much bigger company that many people may think. RH inside the last year has almost double its shares value on Nasdaq (Intel has RH shares), they have almost 4000 employees and very good predictions from the big financial institutions (you know these guys that rule the world?) about their future.  RH is more than 5 times the size of Canonical but it seems that they (RH) strangle behind them (Canonical)  in Desktop development.

While Red Hat is busy with Server and Virtualization development and deployment, they seem to ignore that all comes from desktop first. The people that are now using Ubuntu it is more likely to deploy in Ubuntu later on in Rackspace for example.  And Rackspace will probably give more support to Ubuntu. And this is how the cycle goes.

I can name dozens of commercial and open services that giving support for Ubuntu and not for RHEL. The only services that support RHEL more than Ubuntu server nowadays are those that are on the market for more than 5 years.

My point is if we suppose that Gnome is a Red Hat product (which I don’t believe) why we should care and blame Ubuntu for not supporting it? Where is Red Hat? Why Shuttleworth has the right to make fun to Red Hat through his personal blog?

I don’t believe the above, but I am just giving another perspective. Red Hat and Canonical are two extremely competitive companies each other. Why should one support the other? Open Source is not genuine any more, and that is so obvious when huge Open Source Companies and Organizations (that I won’t name)  have their headquarters in tax-free havens, stealing (in a way) the money of people. Of us.