GNU/Linux vs. Windows as Python platform

[Paul Boddie]

"Alex Martelli" <aleaxit at yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<9e1gof0o7l at enews1.newsguy.com>...
> 
> I mostly use Windows these days, but my brand-new machine will
> be Linux again (at long last!) so I did some tests.  Huge advantage
> on Windows: thanks to COM (and win32all &c), Python is already
> integrated with *everything* you can possibly think of.  E.g: no
> doubt there _are_ office-packages, 3D CAD/PDM applications, and
> so on, that you can fully automate with Python on Linux... but you'll
> have to search a lot, maybe write some C, etc.
> 
> On Windows, it's exactly as it should be: no commercial app today
> can fail to expose a reasonably complete COM object model, so you
> CAN drive it from Python.  No ifs, no buts.
> 

[...]

> ...but I sure WILL miss COM...!

Some other people on this thread mentioned KParts and Bonobo (the
respective component models for KDE and GNOME), and having installed
KDE 2.1.1 recently, I can report that there is some quite elegant
"remote control" possible within KDE already. Similar to one of the
win32com demos, KDE provides a tool called DCOPS which allows the user
to invoke methods on the interfaces exposed by various KDE
applications and, just as I could open and experiment with Word using
COM on Windows 2000, so could I open and experiment with Konqueror on
KDE.

I'm not claiming that there are any KDE applications which expose
object models as rich as those exposed by Microsoft applications, but
it seems to be getting there. Something else which came with KDE and
which really impressed me was the aRts multimedia framework with the
aRts Builder tool - you can drop audio processing components onto a
canvas, connect them together and have all sorts of weird sound
effects going on, even piping your MP3 streams through them to hear
what happens!

Anyway, it would be interesting to hear what kind of Python modules
exist to make these frameworks available to UNIX-based Python
developers.

Paul