Hello all,

It seems to me that linux desktops going to a really bad direction for a long time already.
why a specific application should be depend on its underlying platform ?
why there are kde-apps, gnome-apps, xfce-apps ?
where is the modularity ?

on windows I have a desktop
and I have applications that are not depend on it totally
I can update my burning software without having to do a full update for my desktop

library sharing has its benefit, but there's a point when I think
too much sharing is bad sharing

what do you think ?
Eli

I think you should not compare the freedom that using GNU/Linux applications provides with the captive audience games a certain standards-ignoring, proprietary, commercially licensed product plays.

The situation is not as bad as you portray, largely due to freedesktop.org Specifications. I recently changed from Gnome to Xfce and was delighted at the degree of interoperability. Initially I continued using some Gnome applications (gnome-terminal, gedit ...) and didn't have issues with any of the ones I tried. Xfce was smart at picking up a lot of application/menu items from Gnome. Gnome launchers on the desktop, configured to start Nautilus showing particular directories, worked without fuss even to the extent of Nautilus taking over the desktop without causing any disruptions. During the transition I kept switching between Gnome and Xfce which share some configuration directories. When I did want some items to be used within Xfce and not Gnome and vice versa it was trivial to configure that behaviour.

Hence, in my experience, the modularity is fine.

Less fine is the evolution toward desktop meta-packages that wrap up a whole load of specific applications -- including system configuration tools -- as "the desktop".

Less fine, too, is how Metacity (the current Gnome window manager) aims to be an "invisible" package within Gnome thus making Gnome look more monolithic. IMHO the window manager is just another module of the desktop that better has its own identity so we can easily find it, configure it and swap it for another if we choose.

I don't know
if I want to install a single program that is a part kde
I need to install almost the entire desktop

a good example is keotepe which you need to upgrade to use with yahoo
(with the new servers)
but you can't just upgrade keotepe, you need to upgrade the entire
kde to 4.3 for this

as a programmer, modularity is the key, also this is the notion that linux is built upon, so this things seems really weird to me

I think you have it all wrong. Your program still does not depend on which platform you run. It only needs the libraries it was built with to be installed on your system.

Here is the full list of dependencies that kopete (not "keotepe", get the name right please) needs, according to Debian's apt. And it's a fairly small list, really. (I've removed the version numbers to make it more readable.)

Your real problem is that kopete depends on some libraries (and versions) that are different from the libraries your desktop depends on. It's really just a simple dependency conflict. When you try to install kopete, it needs updated versions of the libraries, which in turn force any programs that depend on them to also update themselves.

Unfortunately, in this case, this happens to be just about the entire kde desktop environment.

So really, at the heart of this is the way the kde project has botched the transition from kde3 to kde4. They haven't left any decent mechanism for maintaining an up-to-date kde3 desktop environment for those of us who want to wait until kde4 is more mature. They are, in my opinion, moving too quickly to simply replace all the kde3 libraries and programs with kde4 ones, forcing many of us to upgrade things before we are ready.

In my opinion they should have instead kept kde4 as a parallel set of libraries and packages so that you could run whichever desktop you wanted to, with programs for either version existing simultaneously (and yes, it is possible to mostly run a mixed desktop due to the kde4 libs' backwards-compatibility support, but it really doesn't work very well in practice.).

In other words, I sympathize with your plight, because I've had to go through the exact same experiences myself. But we need to direct the blame to the right place.