Ahh, the pleasures of Linux GUI programming. When you'r writing a "portable" command-line application, generally "portability" boils down to 3 platforms - Windows, Linux and Mac OS. When you'r writing a GUI application, you'r dealing with 8 platforms - Windows, Mac OS and 6 major linux distros, each and every one of which do things differently.
Take a simple example - we'r using a specific, commonly-available fixed-width font in the Console interface. On Windows, it's called "Terminal" (the same one used in command prompt), and must be used at size 10. On Ubuntu Linux, it's called "Console", and must be used at size 16. On Fedora Core 4, it's called "console8x16", and can be used in any size. On Mandrake 10.1, it's called "Console" and must be used at size 10. On SuSE 9.3, it's called "Misc Console", and must be used at size 10.
I'm not even going to the QT vs GTK war that we will have very soon around here anyway. "But I want it native in Gnome/XFCE4/etc". Yes, sure, but then it wouldn't be native in KDE :).
Seriously, the only way to provide a consistent look and feel of your application across the myriad of Linux distros and configurations is to have a fully skinned app. And then everyone just shoots you on general purpose - "But I want it native! You'r evil windows-dev! Go away!". Been there, done that, thank you very much :)
So anyway, here's the plan - based on Distrowatch, the top5 distros are roughly SuSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandrake and Debian (not in any particular order). Hence, the plan is to support those completely, and everyone else needs to somehow manage as well - it's not humanly possible to support the gazillion of Linux configurations out there.
Now, since all our GUI stuff is being written using QT4, this puts GTK-based distros into a disadvantage - this includes Ubuntu and Fedora. I saw how it looks like on those distros, and I'm not happy; but then again, we have the same problem with Classic theme on Windows as well. So - either I figure a way to enforce Plastic skin (comes with QT) in those cases, or write some custom skin for that (doubt we have the time for the latter).
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Anyway, enough ranting. Finally got the core/gui comm stuff moving again tonight, despite the fact that we still have some unresolved problems in the Console (log window is a performance hog when lots of log data is in there already) - namely we have initial downloadlist and updates monitoring capabilities. It's still very buggy, but it's progress.
Hydranode r1697:
Windows Linux SourceMadcat, ZzZz
PS: Linux builds now also work on GCC4-based distros (e.g. FC4).
