Why is Qtopia much faster?

Yaroslav Halchenko site-openmoko.org at onerussian.com
Thu Jul 24 07:11:39 CEST 2008


just my few cents... please be gentle if I reveal some ignorance in any
part of my expressions

such a topic could go forever and include thousands of replies because
it debates some basic decisions which had been made and which have
sufficient amount of pros and cons for the each side of the debate.
Such segmentation of the 'human mass' could be partially attributed to
the heterogeneity of opensource community (among which as you see
there might co-exist different senses of freedom --- no pun intended,
thus don't continue on this topic). It would better be characterized
with a single neutral-tone summary on wiki listing the aspects of
different distributions, their current abilities, range of available
applications, and future possible improvements.

in my summary: QT with qtopia offers to a generic public a convenient,
somewhat well-established, somewhat featurefull, consistently looking,
opensource way to develop the applications for the phones. I really
appreciated and liked their qtopia distro for FR when I tried it
recently. BUT to get such responsive UI sacrifices had been made, thus
there is no X (I do not even want to touch GPL vs BSD/... issue here).
Such a choice has strong advantages (qtopia on FR looks and seems to be
working quite well), but it also imposes limitations on what part of
existing applications base can be easily ported or supported to co-exist
with native QT apps on such a box... actually it just limits apps to QT
apps. and that is imho the end of discussion -- at this moment it is
just the situation which has to be accepted.

But once again, many people like/develop apps which are not based on QT
due to various reasons (again... lets omit license issues), thus
their choice would be a generic X-based distribution such as 2007.2 and
ASU. Now they would lack (hopefully for not too long) consistent and
stable appearance/performance/API, but that is once again the choice
which had been made.

I really appreciate work of Trolltech ... Nokia toward making pure
qtopia available for Freerunner. Probably the suite of QT apps available
for qtopia would be sufficient for a large portion of FR owners, but
would not satisfy all of them. But that again simply comes to the
heterogeneity of the FR community. I can only hope that qtopia will be
kept constantly updated and enhanced for a long period of time, and that
some new gadget from Nokia will not shift the focus away from FR ;-)

On Thu, 24 Jul 2008, Cédric Berger wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 00:42, Torfinn Ingolfsen <tingox at gmail.com> wrote:

> > People, this discussion has turned _very_ off topic now.
> > Could you all please take further discussion on this subject in a
> > place where it is more on topic?

> > Thank you.


> Well not so off topic since we are at a point where choices are made
> about what direction development on openmoko will take... (even if
> maybe there will be several directions in parallel)
> (I mean not only for the OS and base applis, but also for applications
> one would want to develop)
-- 
Yaroslav Halchenko
Research Assistant, Psychology Department, Rutgers-Newark
Student  Ph.D. @ CS Dept. NJIT
Office: (973) 353-5440x263 | FWD: 82823 | Fax: (973) 353-1171
        101 Warren Str, Smith Hall, Rm 4-105, Newark NJ 07102
WWW:     http://www.linkedin.com/in/yarik        




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