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-   -   How does DE choice affect program compatibility? (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/how-does-de-choice-affect-program-compatibility-4175490190/)

jms89 01-05-2014 12:46 AM

How does DE choice affect program compatibility?
 
I'm planning on doing an installation of different DE's (desktop environment) on a virtual text machine, but I was wondering how the choice of them affects ones ability to run programs. Are certain programs only compatible with certain DE's, and if so why?

I would think that when building a GUI front-end for your program, you would request the various elements of the GUI with a set of API-like calls, which the various DE's would then handle in their own ways - surely developers don't have to write a different version of a program for every DE they want it to run on...

Thanks.

dolphin_oracle 01-05-2014 05:39 PM

sometimes they do, at least on the gui-frontend. or they just include whatever appropriate libraries they need. for instance, you can install kdenlive on a gnome based distro, but its going to pull in a lot of kde libraries to go along with it.

bigrigdriver 01-05-2014 05:40 PM

Quote:

surely developers don't have to write a different version of a program for every DE they want it to run on...
I would expect that developers use a detection routine to determine which capabilities a system has, then uses those capabilities.

You could try looking at the source code for GUI apps to see how it's done.


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