Easier than I though

About a year ago I switched from Redhat to Debian, and a few months later I started using KDE instead of GNOME, and I've not looked back.

I've been a programmer for years, but mainly on windows systems with C++. When I was using GNOME I tried coding for it, but had a hell of a time getting anything to work properly. It wasn't impossible, just everthing was hard work. I tried using wxWindows, but it always felt like adding an extra layer of complexity rather than abstraction. This was the reason, I believed that Linux wasn't making much headway on the desktop.

Then I had problems with GNOME on Debian ( I couldn't get it to load properly ) so I installed KDE, to get a browser going so I could get help with my problems. I finally solved it, but I had been quietly impressed with KDE. I found myself loading KDE instead of GNOME for quite a few things. Until I realised I wasn't using GNOME at all. Then the programming came back into it.

One of my interests is 3D rendering, and I've used Povray only a little, found it confusing and ended up using Truespace instead. I decided to try Povray again early this year, and I discovered KPovModeler. I enjoyed using it, and it made some of Povrays working methods more obvious to me. Looking at their website I found out they where looking for programmers to handle different things, one of them being heightfields. This is something I'd coded before for Windows, so I dived into the code and almost immediately understood some of its workings. I emailed the maintainer (Andreas Zehender) that I could code this up. He was interested and asked for patch's.

So I started coding, took me a little longer than I though but eventually I had a patch that worked so I set it to Andreas, He liked it but it had a few bugs, I eventually got the kinks out and he committed it. Then I sent him a patch to add some extra functions to the lights, and he committed that as well. Then he suggested I get a CVS account, I asked for one... and that was it I was in.

Considering the rubbish I'd heard around the GNOME developers Mailing lists and different forums about how closed shop KDE was, I was completely taken aback by how wrong they are. If anything I found contributing to KDE the easiest by far on any project I'd attempted. From first patch to CVS access took less than a week.

I had CVS access a basic understanding of the current code, a desire to learn, and a lot of encouragement from the maintainer, and most importantly free time. So I started coding. The things thats struck me time and again, is how easy Qt/KDE programming is. Everthing just works they way you want it too. You definitely get the feeling that Qt has been designed by hackers through experience, and not by committee through best practice theories.

Then the Feature freeze came up. I've added bugfixs to the code, I've also committed a few one-liners to other projects. No one's complained and no one's criticised ( suggested better, but no flaming ). All in all I'm a happy programmer. I've started doing a plug-in for KPovModeler while waiting for the end of feature freeze, and most of my problems now are the not getting the program to behave the way I want, Its what is the behaviour I want.

Considering I started in August, I'm now more confortable with KDE than I ever was with Windows after 5 years. Another six months and I expect to be as competent as I was coding for my old Amiga ( remember them? ). If you haven't contributed yourself, pick a program your interested in, tackle a problem that exists in the current code, and send it to the maintainer ( or post it on the mailing list ) and you'll enjoy coding like you used too.