The Portland Way

Filed in archive Utilities on February 14, 2007

How many times have you encountered a problem of needing an application that is only available on the other desktop environment (DE)? For instance, if you use KDE, using Gnome's Evolution might be possible but it would have been better if it were written for both DEs. Programmers prefer one DE over another and that makes it a pain for end-users. A project, called Portland, aims to make it easier for both programmers and developers as well as end-users to get application on their favorite DE. Here's an excerpt from Cameron Laird's brief introduction of Portland.

Portland is a new open source project that promises to simplify the deployment and commercialization of Linux® applications by helping them run on multiple desktop environments, including Gnome and KDE. Although still young, Portland is available today, and it looks to be improving rapidly. Get started using the XdgUtils toolset in Portland 1.0.

Whilst still in its infancy, I believe that this is the way to go. How do you think other platforms are doing it? Just one single desktop environment, one single look-and-feel.