Forgive me if these are silly questions but i''ve never done any development for Linux before and I''m quite confused by some things. Let''s assume I''m running KDE and I write a program with a GUI using Qt and it works fine in KDE, what do I need to do in order for it to run in GNOME and any other desktop environments that exist? Unfortunately I can''t test this because I only have KDE installed and I don''t fancy waiting 12 hours or so for GNOME to emerge. Also, what about window managers which don''t have their own GUI APIs like Fluxbox? How do they run programs written for KDE or GNOME? Thanks for reading.

If you write a program using the KDE libraries, then you''ll need KDE installed to run it. Ditto GNOME. If you write a program with Qt, you''ll need Qt installed to run it. However, almost all distributions come with the Qt runtimes, so just using Qt shouldn''t be a problem.

Note: Qt is not KDE. Qt is a GUI toolkit; KDE is a desktop environment that uses Qt for most of its GUI work. This means that Qt programs look most at home in a KDE system (the widgets will look the same as the rest of the apps), but they will run with any window manager. A window manager like Fluxbox or XFCE, for example, won''t be able to run a KDE program (ie one that links with the KDE libraries), but a Qt program will be fine.

The program will RUN on both environments.

The only difference is that when run on GNOME, those KDE libraries that you use are not loaded into memory already, so the program''s startup will be slower, and will consume a large amount of memory. (since just that program is using a pile of KDE libraries)

it''s not as bad as it sounds, but people definately prefer to use applications written for their environment, but if its good enough then they''ll use it anyway. (I used to use kwrite in gnome, until anjuta improved significantly.)