Nokia & GNOME Mobile

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Quim just gave his keynote, announcing that maemo will switch to Qt as the main toolkit in the future, with GTK+ being a part of the maemo platform that will become supported by the community. Not a big surprise, since Nokia acquired Trolltech a while ago.

GNOME Mobile in future maemo

The interesting thing, though, is that, listening to Quim's talk, maemo is still a big GNOME Mobile user: the maemo platform will actually still more or less be GNOME Mobile, except that it will be using Qt instead of GTK+. This may come as a surprise to some people since for many, GNOME is GTK+ and GTK+ is GNOME. GNOME is actually way more than GTK+ and the GNOME Mobile platform in particular covers a good number of technologies (glib, dbus, gvfs, bluez, telepathy, avahi, gstreamer, gconf, etc.). All of those technologies are historically close to GNOME (usually living on freedesktop.org), or even part of GNOME.

So while the move to Qt is a logical move from Nokia, it's good to see that Nokia stays firmly committed to GNOME Mobile. It's actually quite amazing to see that what we built there is attractive to a big industry player like Nokia (and, well, a bunch of other players ;-)).

Comments

1. Robert [04/07/2009@18:10]

And this is the reason why I consider Maemo a Nokia "proprietary" platform (I am using a very strong word here, I know, but please follow my thoughts). Nokia decide to switch toolkit by themselves, no community involvement in that decision. what are the reasons, just because "we (Nokia) own QT"???

I do not see a strong future for Maemo, It is and always will be a Nokia platform for a few not advertised enough Nokia devices

My dream was that Maemo and Moblin projects shared ideas and become only one project, but my point of view is that Nokia just want its thing, just different than the others.

2. ethana2 [04/07/2009@18:18]

Frankly, I understand Qt to be the best gui toolkit on earth and applaud their decision. It's also nice to have reaffirmed, however, that various gnome technologies are worth using.

I wish there was more than one DE that used Qt..

3. Dylan [04/07/2009@19:07]

This is a nice, living example of the wonderful benefit we get from keeping reasonably desktop-neutral. Kudos to the FreeDesktop crowd, especially, for promoting it.

Still, I am a bit worried about this. I've played with Qt based apps on Maemo already (QTMapper is a nice example) and I think they do feel a bit snappier, but Qt brings in a boatload of stuff on its own. They had better use a sensible rootfs for their next device or the platform will be unusable with a horrible maze of dependencies brought on by installing useful gtk apps like Gnumeric.

Oh, and there had better be a one-stop way to go from QtCreator to my nearest Maemo device :)

4. Markus [04/07/2009@22:54]

Does not this mean simply that it will be very easy to run or adapt KDE-programms - and on the contrary with GNOME-programms? That's the core of it all, isn't it?
Markus

5. Richard [05/07/2009@01:24]

Hmm. It feels like someone just stole my girlfriend :)

It would be nice for someone thoroughly understanding the decision to outline the grittiest reasons why it was made so the GTK+ camp can understand if there's anything they could have done to remain the nutmeg in Nokia's eye. Perhaps being written in C? :)

While I enjoy having multiple desktops, I think I would like them to eventually be based on a single toolkit.

By the way, I love the dragon silhouette to my left as I type this.

6. me [05/07/2009@01:41]

Any software engineer knows that technically Qt is the better choice, since it provides a software development platform, and not just a "graphical toolkit". Nothing against GTK+, it has been chosen by loads of projects. But probably mainly because of it's, by the time of the decision, more liberal license.

7. Vincent [05/07/2009@09:31]

@Markus: hrm, I can't tell for sure, but I would think that a major issue for KDE apps is that they require the KDE libraries, which won't be part of maemo (but maybe the community will make them available).

For GNOME apps, this was less of an issue since the core of the GNOME platform was in Maemo; in the future, it's probably unclear how things will go, but the goal seems to be to have GTK+ in maemo maintained by the community. If this happens, then there should be no major changes for GNOME apps there.

8. Vincent [05/07/2009@09:31]

@Richard: well, one of the major reasons this decision was taken is most probably that Nokia now has a good number of people working on Qt because they acquired Trolltech ;-) It also makes some sense to align the maemo platform to what they're pushing elsewhere. It's hard to know more than that without asking a Nokia insider, I guess.

9. Vincent [05/07/2009@09:33]

@me: Qt indeed covers more than just the toolkit. That being said, it's not a complete platform either — a look at the maemo architecture is a good example of why. (I'm not saying Qt is bad or whatever; it's just that nowadays, a platform really covers a lot of things)

10. nf2 [05/07/2009@16:09]

I always thought that the right model for the Desktops would be freedom of choice in the GUI toolkit/programming language level, but standardizing on a "lingua franca" for APIs in the basic platform technology layer. For that purpose GObject - although hard to code - seems to be a good choice.

I don't have that much time to work for open-source, but i did a bit of research prototyping:

http://live.gnome.org/GObjectIntros... (A Qt/C++ --> GObject bindings generator).

http://live.gnome.org/KioGioBridge (runs KIO on top of GIO/GVFS)

luckily GIO/GVFS is pretty desktop neutral, but the technologies it's depending on might be a problem for KDE (keyring, gconf). That doesn't seem to be an issue for Maemo, which has chosen to use those technologies anyway. I think Maemo+Qt might be a pattern, how the future of the KDE software stack could look like.

The major areas where the desktops basis still feels too fragmented and chaotic are filemanagement, configuration and credentials storage. GNOME developers who work in those areas - and i think are creating neat stuff - should collaborate with their KDE counterparts more actively. And perhaps even help coding and designing APIs. GNOME would benefit from that a lot, cause there *are* very cool KDE and Qt applications.

11. Kelly Clowers [15/10/2009@06:54]

>glib, dbus, gvfs, bluez, telepathy, avahi, gstreamer, gconf, etc

While there is a strong connection between these and Gnome (some more than others), they mostly live at fdo (as mentioned), and there is a lot of sharing with KDE, and likely to be more in the future.

Telepathy is coming to KDE, and it seems likely that gst will eventually become the default backend for phonon.

D-Bus, BlueZ and Avahi are very neutral, and already used in KDE as well as Gnome. Gconf will be replaced by Dconf, we will see if Dconf ever makes it to KDE. Also, I hope that Akanodi may make the jump from being used only by KDE to being used by Gnome as well.

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Saturday 4 July 2009

Nokia & GNOME Mobile

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by Vincent