On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 5:13 AM, Wade Brainerd <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I wonder if the differences between Sugar and a regular window manager > aren't so severe that it might be worth offering a simple desktop > environment which runs within Sugar as a Activity? > > You would download and launch this Activity, and its interface would > be a regular Linux desktop. It would support multiple windows, a > "taskbar", a "start menu", etc. (I'm using Windows terms here). You > could install and launch regular GTK+ applications in it, and they > would not need to be "sugarized" at all. The GTK theme used by the > Desktop would still match Sugar of course. > > If we did this, we would not be stuck with trying to shoehorn third > party applications into a UI they were not designed for (one toplevel > window, no menus) and would conceivably be able to launch any Linux > app assuming the needed libraries were installed. > > I'm not an X windows expert, but does this sound like possible way to > solve this issue?
Someone wrapped Xephyr in an activity, so you get something similar to the Classic environment in OSX. You could run a full gnome or a single application inside that activity. But then the application would run in a different X server and wouldn't be able to copy paste, drag and drop, wouldn't be able to use hw acceleration, etc. Anyway, the problem here are not "accidental incompatibilities" as would be trying to run a KDE app in a GNOME-only installation. It was decided to part from the traditional desktop scheme because we aimed to offer a system that supports education, not office work. And I don't think that we should try to shoe-horn applications into activities. If an application's architecture separates the controller from the view and thus can expose a simple view component without controller stuff, then it's a relatively easy effort to wrap that view inside a widget and provide python bindings. Thus kids can modify and adapt all the python code around that black box immediately after receiving the XO. Regardless of that, I can understand how current application authors may feel frustrated by the additional effort required to port apps to activities, and of course welcome any contribution to make that easier. Apart from the debate of being easier or not to port apps with one or another architecture, I would like to point out the fact that if the project reaches its goals for the next year, there should be more developers for our platform than for Maemo or even the whole GNOME. So it's not like we are Apple, we'd have a much bigger potential in the not so long term. Also, GNOME apps are currently encouraged to provide those embeddable view widgets, as today do Abiword, Evince, Mozilla,... because of the GNOME Mobile initiative. Heard that someone was working on that for Gnumeric and I'd bet wouldn't be that hard for Inkscape. My point is that reusing all that code inside proper activities is not so hard, there are just too little hands yet. Please don't interpret my words as an opposition to increase compatibility with existing applications, take it as one more point of view on the problem. Thanks, Tomeu _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel