Re: Possibility to add gwenview, krita, kdict, and enable Java in browsers?

[Gavin McCullagh <gmccullagh@gmail.com>]

Hi,

On Wed, 11 Jul 2007, José L. Redrejo Rodríguez wrote:

> > Actually that was Petter and mine objection at the Edubuntu gathering in 
> > London summer of 2005. One of the Edubuntu developers said every 
> > edu-application should be gnome-based. We objected saying that every 
> > application should be included for its educational merit, disregarding which 
> > developer environment used to make that application. Richard Weideman has 
> > pointed at the same. He is Education Programme Manager at Canonical: 

> That's a non-sense. First we are thinking in our students education. I'm
> a gnome user and will never understand that way of thinking. Probably
> the will include java apps and not kde apps. I think we should include
> the best apps for every target.

I wasn't in London, so I can't comment on what was said there.

However, in their defense, I don't think the broad argument was "we can't
have kde apps" but more like "we'd really prefer to have gnome versions of
the apps".  My understanding was that the reasons were purely technical --
having chosen gnome as their desktop, the cost of adding KDE apps was large
on the CDROM and on hard disks due to the added weight of KDE libraries.
You also tend to have slower start-up times and greater RAM footprints when
you mix the two environments.

As far as I'm aware, every version of edubuntu so far has included the KDE
Education apps as like you, they are thinking of the students' education
first.

There was talk for a time initially of trying to clone the KDE apps in
GNOME and later of trying to collaboratively port the KDE apps to GNOME
though sadly I'm not aware of any noticeable progress on either.  A similar
project exists with openoffice.  I think it would be great if you could run
lots of educational (and other) apps using either toolkit but perhaps there
are better value ways to spend efforts.

Gavin