| > They made a half-hearted attempt to port it to Linux but did so using Wine(lib) which back then was very rough, so Kylix had a poor UX and of course the problem was that the Delphi widget toolkit was the Windows toolkit which Linux didn't have. I think the UX was fine as it was made to work with KDE1/Qt1 which was very Windows-like (in appearance and behavior) at the time, but the real issue was that instead of trying to make VCL work crossplatform (like Lazarus' LCL does) they made a different framework (IIRC it was called CLX) which used Qt1 and was very incompatible. They released a free version with the limitation that your program had to be GPL, though at the time it was fine as GPL wasn't the boogieman it is today. Sometimes i wonder if Borland had released the entirety of Kylix under GPL and thus gained mindshare among open source programmers at a time when Linux had started becoming more popular among programmers if things would be different for Delphi - if nothing else it wouldn't be seen as some ultra-expensive tool that people only use because they have no way to move away from. At the time Borland made money from enterprises (which would buy the expensive enterprise version anyway) and proprietary desktop software developers (which wouldn't use the GPL version anyway) so having Delphi as a GPL'd program wouldn't affect them much but instead have the tool's mindshare expand and even have developers help Borland fix bugs with their framework and improve their compiler. I was thinking that a couple of years ago when i tried the free version of Kylix under my Linux installation and it failed to work with all sorts of errors despite my efforts - but errors that should be simple to fix if the source code was available. Then i tried it in a VM running some Linux version from the early 2000s and it worked, which made me think how nice it'd be if it was a GPL'd software i could modify. After that nostalgia session, i deleted the VM, downloaded the latest version of Lazarus and fixed the Gtk1 support[0] because i could as that is open source (ok ignore the broken images, that is because the shot is from a few months ago when i tried to remove the gdk_pixbuf dependency, normally they look fine but that is the only screenshot i had around :-P). FWIW the fixes were merged in (and i made some extra fixes since then). [0] https://i.imgur.com/su9JCUY.png |
