The Grand Unified Desktop

What is left to achieve a nice GUI? Menus and icons. A desktop entry standard that describes, regardless of the environment, how to build menus, how to launch each application and so on, already exists at freedesktop.org. It does have some limitations, namely the lack of a common place where .desktop files should be put and the hardwiring of menus, coming from the fact that they simply mirror how these files are located on disk. A virtual folder extension to the standard is being written to overcome these limits. Another specification with a similar scope is available to standardize icon locations and theme selection.

Yes, if you distribute the source, everyone can compile and install your program, but why make it hard for others to figure out why the program can't find which libraries are installed? Why hard code things so they will work only on one distribution? The Linux filesystem hierarchy from the LSB group is your friend here, whatever application you plan to write.

I have nothing against pure KDE or pure GNOME. I only hope that the next generation of desktop applications will make it easier for everyone to build his or her own environment from any combination of programs without sacrificing real functionality and performance. The methods and tools described here are a good way to build such applications, and I am grateful to their developers. Many thanks also to Havoc Pennington, Keith Packard, the members of the kde-devel list and everyone who answered on the linuxjournal.com web site to help me in writing this article.

Resources