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The Unicomp keyboard is kind of flimsy compared to an original Model M; however, PS2 to USB adapters are very hit-or-miss so it's a pain to use a Model M with a modern computer.

I think it's safe to say that I'm more obsessed with the Model M than pretty much anyone else I know - I have a dozen of them (both classic Model M #1391401s and several of the Space Saver editions sans numpad on the right), but I was getting really tired of needing the special cable (on the ones that have a detachable cable) and a PS2/USB adapter for each one to use it. I have more computers without PS2 ports these days than with, so USB is kind of necessary.

So... with a friend's help, I learned how to design electrical circuits so I could manufacture a new brain for the M.

http://c133.org/ibm-keyboard-pcb.png is the PCB layout, and http://github.com/clee/rump/tree/master is the source code for the firmware that runs on the microcontroller.

I'm actually typing this comment on a Model M I bought on eBay, but it's running my firmware on my board, talking USB natively.

Re: the stab at GNOME - heh. Wasn't meant to be a "stab" really, just that the GNOME guys targeted Linux initially. :)

And it looks like you were actually at least partially right - I see that in revision 1.24, the index.html page logged a commit to change the 'Linux' string to 'Unix' which is funny. It's definitely from before I ever got involved in the project. (The commit date looks about right - I know I didn't start following KDE until 1998 at least.)

(Also, for the nostalgic, I copied a checkout of that laptop picture - it's now at c133.org/files/kdelaptop.gif for those of you who're interested in ancient KDE history.)

Actually....

If you'd bother to use a version that isn't almost a year old (hint: KDE 3.2, we've had alpha and even beta releases out for a few weeks now) you'd know that it does pass. At least, it sure looks like it does to me. Granted, the CSS isn't quite perfect (the floating box in particular looks like its offset from the right edge is incorrect) but Konq is surprisingly good these days. And rendering errors like this one are getting fixed all the time.

-clee

Yes, but rhythmbox is a itunes clone pretty much. juk isn't.

Of cours,e that begs the question, why doesn't anyobody make a itunes clone for KDE? Oh wait..

The problem goes a lot farther than aesthetics (although they did a good job of screwing those up, too.)

The problem is that RedHat has no qualms about releasing prerelease software and labelling it as "release". Granted, fontconfig adoption might have taken slightly longer than it has if RedHat had not pushed it so heavily in their distro, but the problem lies in things like RedHat using their own custom patches to a stable Qt version to add fontconfig/Xft2 support, and installing prerelease glibc versions that KDE hasn't been tested on, and other various immature practices.

The fact that they use incorrectly-sized icons, and then the icons don't scale properly, and make KDE look like ass, is only icing on the cake. Also, the fact that their Bluecurve desktop theme is really crappy doesn't help either.

And just for when you say "Well, why don't you do better?" - I have. See my homepage - I write KDE styles, and even though I've only released one, I have a few more that I'm currently working on. (As well as a few applications that are in various stages of development.)

So the complaints against RedHat's KDE are slightly deeper than "They use ugly icons!". And the fact that they choose a butt-ugly theme for KDE by default means that KDE looks butt-ugly by default, which is a serious usability nightmare.

I personally don't care if you're a GNOMEr or a KDEr, but RedHat has some serious quality assurance/control issues, and it's not just limited to KDE. KDE just happens to be a high-profile example.

Well, it took slightly longer, but that also includes the packaging, the screenshotting, the uploading, and so on and so forth. You can download the new dotNET tarball from here or just go to KDE-look or c133.org and download from there.

Please, in the future, if you have any more such feature requests - don't hesitate to send me an email!