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Besides Kopete, what other clients support video-chat via MSN?

Qt is now GPLv2 + GPLv3 + commercial + QPL (in the case of the X11 version) + any future GPL version as publicly accepted by Trolltech and the Free Qt Foundation. Additionally your own code can be under one of various licenses as stated in Trolltechs gpl exception.

I use a desktop wiki as my browser homepage. I use moinmoin because I'm a python cultist but there are several others that should work well.

Didiwiki weighs in at 40k and, iirc, has a built-in web server.

It's in the debian and ubuntu repos.

If you use KDE check out Basket

http://basket.kde.org/

KRunner also acts as a simple pocket calculator. Just type a mathematical equation in the form of "=1337*2" and KRunner instantly shows the result.

Let's quote the Plasma FAQ (disclaimer: I'm no KDE dev, but I wrote it):

Q. I can't my favorite [ insert feature here ]!

Don't forget that Plasma is still in its infancy (it's brand new, after all) and that KDE 3 was an extremely polished codebase: it took seven years to get to that, while Plasma had about 18 months to get to its current status. With time, the Plasma developers plan on reintroducing features that have been missing and fix regressions. As KDE progresses through the KDE4 cycle, Plasma will improve with it.

Bonjour for services hasn't taken off in a big way on Linux (or Windows outside of Adobe Products/iTunes for that matter). However, most Linux distros now ship with Avahi which is fairly mature but there are comparatively few programs that can use it (its main use currently seems to be for autoip configuration). Some distros also firewall it off by default (but Kubuntu isn't in that list).

I've noticed music programs (Rhythmbox, Amarok) often support it but they are trying to interoperate with iTunes which is another issue again.

By the way I think someone said they might work on a Kopete bonjour plugin a few weeks ago.

I'm also a little sad that OSX has dropped default support for printers annouced over CUPS broadcast but thems the breaks. If you know what you're doing it's possible to renable it (and set your Macs to broadcast too but that's another story).

Even if you don't develop for Mac, GNOME or KDE, these documents have a fairly good set of guidelines, some of them are specific to the uniformity of the "experience" however. I would imagine Microsoft having atleast some type of guidelines for interface design in MSDN.

http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/XHIGIntro/chapter_1_section_1.html
http://usability.kde.org/hig/current/

I don't think the sourceforge page is used by anyone, kopete.sf.net redirects to kopete.kde.org. If you want a response of some kind, I suggest submitting it to their mailing list, see https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kopete-devel

http://kde.org/ It's set to come out in 12 days.

I'm not trying to nitpick, just clarify, but actually WebKit is an "Apple thing" right now. WebKit is based on KHTML (Konqueror's rendering engine) but Apple went off and did their own thing with changes to KHTML. There was talk on dot.kde.org about reintegrating the projects back together, and it looks like WebKit has been ported to QT 4, so maybe we'll finally see "one rendering engine to bind them" in KDE 4. That would be nice.

http://dot.kde.org/1152645965/ for more info.

In KDE dev language, a release candidate is a beta.

Actually, in the latest release cycle, a release candidate is actually an alpha. It's telling that the announcement for Release Candidate 2 included "The codebase is now feature-complete.". Yup, that's right, they actually called something that wasn't feature-complete "Release Candidate 1", despite not being remotely finished.

I thought this was RC2? Why would the appearance not be finalized?

I can only hope they make rather drastic changes. The worst part is that in general the KDE team always puts out great sets of icons. Trully very nice looking stuff. It is the rest of the appearance, such as the starting(k) menu, large screen space use for apps at the bottom, large clock, ugly file browser and so forth that looks so wrong right now by default. This looks a little better but is a larger screen size than the ars technica shots.

I thought this was RC2? Why would the appearance not be finalized?

I can only hope they make rather drastic changes. The worst part is that in general the KDE team always puts out great sets of icons. Trully very nice looking stuff. It is the rest of the appearance, such as the starting(k) menu, large screen space use for apps at the bottom, large clock, ugly file browser and so forth that looks so wrong right now by default. This looks a little better but is a larger screen size than the ars technica shots.

No, seriously, I was curious how it was shaping up, design-wise, and I check out the site and find stuff like this:

http://www.kde.org/announcements/announce_4.0-rc2/krunner.jpg

And this:

http://www.kde.org/announcements/announce_4.0-rc2/dolphin.jpg

Colours, fonts, and icons are all over the place. Insane and useless borders and gradients cluttering up the interface, and an overall lack of clarity of any kind. It's like a big joke.

I mean, just look at that krunner screenshot again. What is that thing? Black, white, black, white, then suddenly grey and shaded and colourful icons, and fonts right out of a VGA BIOS.

No, seriously, I was curious how it was shaping up, design-wise, and I check out the site and find stuff like this:

http://www.kde.org/announcements/announce_4.0-rc2/krunner.jpg

And this:

http://www.kde.org/announcements/announce_4.0-rc2/dolphin.jpg

Colours, fonts, and icons are all over the place. Insane and useless borders and gradients cluttering up the interface, and an overall lack of clarity of any kind. It's like a big joke.

I mean, just look at that krunner screenshot again. What is that thing? Black, white, black, white, then suddenly grey and shaded and colourful icons, and fonts right out of a VGA BIOS.

KDE is being re-licensed to GPL 3+ as we speak. See the draft licensing policy. Once that is near completion, it is likely that Qt will also be relicensed to GPL 3 since Trolltech has proven to be receptive to the idea.

• GNOME (and Novell) do not support the standardisation of OOXML. They are both members of the ODF alliance, both use it as the default file format, and if it was even remotely realistic to have a decent office product without OOXML support (where the Windows desktop is unfortunately in such an insane over-dominance currently), then they would of course be all for it.
• The implementation of OOXML is all about interoperability. I don't see anyone (wrongly) trashing Samba as a project, and yet its existence and the effort to implement OOXML support is virtually identical in terms of free software.
• You like software freedom and hate the software patent system? Great, so do I. Free implementations of proprietary solutions, though, are a good thing; not a single one of my friends are going to be using Linux if they can't submit their assignments to their lecturers. We need interoperability, to ease the transition for people coming from the proprietary world.
• The KDE/Koffice developers issued a statement basically saying they didn't have the resources or the time to implement OOXML, and suddenly a lot of silly talk gets thrown at GNOME. If I volunteered to implement OOXML support in Koffice I doubt (i) that they would object, and for sure that (ii) any distribution would not include it.
• Even if you dislike Jeff Waugh, it's pretty tough to find a rational basis for criticising him based on the podcast or his approach to the problem other than (i) not getting the GNOME statement (again, which you really can't fault) out soon enough, or (ii) giving Roy the publicity he wants.
• The itwire article plays Roy as some sort of victim in the podcast talk. That is ridiculous. Unfortunately -- and to the detriment of the FLOSS community -- Roy is an incredibly prolific, poisonous person willing to do or say anything that might cook up some self-publicity, and with an irrational hatred of Novell. And in fact on the contrary, Roy skipped around every question that was directly asked to him; instead opting to just give background on Microsoft's "evil" nature and talking about how bad OOXML is (both of which we palpably know).
• Finally, even if you decide to ignore all the other above facts, please tell me why you're not also staging wide protests against OpenOffice.org or your distribution for including OOXML support, as well.

> Grrr... and I was refusing to touch KDE because way back when they linked
> other people's GPL code against pre-GPL Qt. I'm not happy now.
> Fuck you Novell, for being Microsoft's bitch.

You think that the KDE project ever linked against other people's GPL code?
Read this and think again:

http://www.kde.org/announcements/rmsresponse.php

Hell, I'm perfectly content with "about" accurate stuff.

I was looking on the KDE website. They say it was released Nov 2007. http://www.kde.org/

You'll probably want to get a helper app for viewing docs from the above site, too. (And there are other front-ends, like KPDF.)

Here goes:
http://kpdf.kde.org/

I do now: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=153316

I agree... That is a annoying bug. Do you have a bug link where we can vote on to fix it?

In fact, it requires QT 4.3

http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started/Build/KDE4#Qt

"right now there's a daily VM image floating around" Here, in fact:

http://dot.kde.org/1195829316/
http://etotheipiplusone.com/kde4daily/docs/kde4daily.html

Yes, just google for kde 4 windows. You'll see that a Windows port of KDE 4 is ongoing. See this Wiki.

But for the moment it's just a project so if you are really interested in seeing KDE 4 ported to Windows, jump on the boat and help !

Further rumours of running Windows apps natively in OS X, are nothing new. A decade ago, the idea was touted as Red Box.

Many posters have argued that for Apple to actively support other platforms natively such as Win32, .NET, KDE, GTK and Java are counter-productive in terms of promoting their own native Cocoa and iApps. However providing OS level hooks to run .Net/Windows applications through mono/wine would allow 3rd party volunteers to complete the efforts. [Off-topic]Similarly, Apple mightn't be an active participant in the virtualization area such as porting Xen but providing implicit support in XNU wouldn't hurt either[/Off-topic].

I have another wild theory: It might actually exist and be a, currently, hidden Apple internal subsystem for running cross-platform applications in XCode. Since the NeXT days, there's been a Cocoa subsystem for Windows which facilitates Apple building iSuite apps for Vista. The missing piece? Click Run in XCode and an embedded Wine-subsystem will launch enough of Windows to show you, with high fidelity, how the application will behave under Vista/XP.

That scenario would save Apple a lot of time in terms of testing their Windows applications. If they wanted to re-launch Cocoa as a cross-platform deployment platform makes more sense, to me at least, than the proposal that Apple will endorse running natively the Windows version of Photoshop et alia.

Try Kontact (part of KDE Personal Information Manager).

You are right, it looks the same on a recent Konqueror and FF.
However, I bet the GP was misled by the fact that the layout looks absolutely horrible: an almost unreadable piece of text slammed to the left of the browser window, using only a fraction of the screen width.

You probably made a good choice installing vanilla Ubuntu on the thing. Look at the memory usage comparison over here.
I found that very interesting. Even though there are very lightweight WMs out there, after you load them with apps, you get to see a different picture.

Matt

Let's try the opposite: most benchmarks and testcases show the same apps run faster, and use less memory on GNOME than KDE.

Once you have reliable statistics based on the current version of each desktop, you might be surprised about which one is faster and consumes less resources.

How about e.g. http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/?

Oh come on, remember how this works. In today's Free Software projects, we've learned how to develop as professionals and deliver product on time instead of when it's donewhen we feel like it. How do we accomplish this? Simple. We pick a date and when that date hits we freeze the code, bugs and all! We pick what bugs we really want to fix, even though it's obvious from the Bugzilla it's riddled with bugs of all kinds. The bugs we pick are deemed "crucial" after careful deliberation via a mailinglist flamewar full of nerds. After we fix, say, half of these, we ship the release and let the distributions break it with all sorts of patches. We continue pushing out new features disguised as bugfixes, which take approximately an eternity to trickle down to the end-users (we write for the distributors, God forbid we make it easy for end users, they might hurt themselves). Debian especially, never content to just let shit be, applies ten thousand patches that turn KDE into a desktop environment almost but not entirely unlike a regular KDE install. Eventually it approaches stability and polish, but somehow it always manages to pull back when someone decides to add new glitz. Notice to Free Software developers: Why not code in mind for the UNIX nerd in the Terminal content to ./configure && make && make install shit? The distributors will patch the piss out of your code anyway. See this [kde-buildsystem] mailing list post if you want to know what I'm talking about. Thank Christ the reply I linked to was written by someone with a grasp of reality. As for me, right now, I'm on Windows 2000 and loving it. My ThinkPad T21 has a no-Linux policy mainly because the kernel pukes when it talks to the hardware, but even after I fix that (in a no-GUI boot which you Ubuntards wouldn't understand), I find myself using an OS exactly as this comment describes. I'll come back to GNU/Linux when GNU gets its shit together and glues its compnents together into an actual GNU system; Linux developers write competent, consistent and standardized userland tools and APIs; and distributors/GNOME developers (they're the same thing at this point) stop writing castrated crucial components like safety scissors a la NetworkManager. Modern GNU/Linux distributions are like houses of cards. Despite all of this, I love KDE with all my heart and I wish I could try KDE 4. I miss Unix. However, I don't miss the current state of affairs in userland 'N*X, especially Ubuntu. Until I find a solid distribution I can actually use to its full potential (besides Slackware), I'll resist temptation and stay far away.

Many years and versions ago, KDE decided they were not in the packaging business.

Yes, so they don't have to deal with all the headaches that go along with packaging for multiple platforms, not so they can stop caring about quality.

The truth is that version 3.5.8 is rock solid for me on Kubuntu. Again, where's the rush?

Where did I say there was a rush? I'm the one arguing that they should have delayed the release, remember? I'm accusing the KDE developers of rushing. Do you seriously not get that?

However, since there is no buggy 4.0.0 build to speak off and a release is still months away, all your talk is just that: talk.

They are planning on releasing 4.0 in less than three weeks. Not to mention the fact that "Release candidate" means they are telling the world that it is virtually finished.

Just because you have an opinion, it doesn't make it the truth.

One - big - troll.

Once more, you are accusing me of not telling the truth and calling me names, yet do not point out anything I have said that is not true. If anybody here is dishonestly arguing to wind people up, it is you. Either address what I am saying, or be quiet. Don't bother calling me a liar and troll unless you can back it up.

Answer me these two simple questions:

1. Do the developers deflect criticism by saying 4.0 isn't the real thing and 4.1 is?
2. Do any of the press releases or articles talking about how great 4.0 will be mention this fact?

• kinda slow
• buggy (unreliable moving of plasmoids*, missing repaints...)
• feature-incomplete (you can't even move the panel)
• uses big chunks of custom code that will go away in a few months when Qt 4.4 comes
• many design decisions remain to be done (such as, should scripting in langs other than JS be supported?)

• Small atomic tasks (dictionary, feed reader...) should be presented in a flat, flexible plane where the human spatial sense can come into play
• Everyone, yes probably your sister too, can create and distribute a plasmoid of some complexity (aided by frictionless copy&paste, abstractions like the DataEngines, and it-just-makes-sense tools like the Plasmagik packaging system -- think XPI)

• kinda slow
• buggy (unreliable moving of plasmoids*, missing repaints...)
• feature-incomplete (you can't even move the panel)
• uses big chunks of custom code that will go away in a few months when Qt 4.4 comes
• many design decisions remain to be done (such as, should scripting in langs other than JS be supported?)

• Small atomic tasks (dictionary, feed reader...) should be presented in a flat, flexible plane where the human spatial sense can come into play
• Everyone, yes probably your sister too, can create and distribute a plasmoid of some complexity (aided by frictionless copy&paste, abstractions like the DataEngines, and it-just-makes-sense tools like the Plasmagik packaging system -- think XPI)

Am I alone in thinking that people are abusing the term "Release Candidate"?

No, you aren't alone, but according to KDE fanboys, beta means that it compiles and release candidate means they've decided what features are going in. And if you disagree, then you're an idiot who doesn't understand open-source.

Whether 4.0 will actually be usable depends on the way in which you ask. If you read the press releases or praise the developers, then 4.0 will be the best thing since sliced bread. But if you are worried about the quality and wondering why they are dropping features that were in KDE 3, then 4.0 is merely a preview release and 4.1 is going to be the real, finished thing. That way, they can get all the praise, but write off any criticism as "it's not ready yet", regardless of how finished the final release is.

For example, the much exalted Plasma has been hyped since long before it ever existed. It had its own website when it was nothing more than mocked up screenshots and vague descriptions of how awesome it was going to be. And it was hyped right up until the alphas, when people were wondering where it was. It seems to be a last-minute job, and when people on dot.kde.org complain that "basically nothing works" in response to the third beta, one of the core developers responds with "i'm not particularly taken by the heartstrings people are plucking here. there are lots of things to test and bump around with in these betas. stop fixating on plasma for the moment; you'll get to play with more of its features as more releases come. [...] there is exactly one release that counts for plasma, and that'll be 4.0, though the rc's leading up to it will be important as well. there is also exactly one canonical place to gauge the "workingness" (hm. neat word.) of things right now and that's svn.". The KDE project is not interested in using the release cycle as a method of quality assurance, they release betas in order to show off how far they have gotten with features for the people who can't compile it themselves. As somebody else put it: " I know Plasma is barely more than a fetus at this point, and it doesn't even fully replicate all the features of the old desktop." - that's in response to the third beta, and still people tell him to wait. Shouldn't a core part of the desktop be relatively finished by the third beta?

Disclaimer: I've used KDE since the 1.0 betas. I'm no GNOME troll. I just think the attitude the project is taking towards 4.0 seems to be all about ego and has dropped the transparency or quality that I've become used to with open-source projects.

PS: I think it utterly sucks that I have to add disclaimers like that because otherwise I get called a troll (which is apparently the term for people who do something other than emit unadulterated praise for the developers on dot.kde.org). Christ, look at the fawning that is normal on the dot: many people says that kde3.0 was untable, full of bug and that kde will be the same, but kde4 look really stable, some parts crash, but the are apps like juk, kwin4 like composite works without problems, dolphin stable, i have hope that when kde4.0 is released can be used like kde3.5.x." That's right, it's not unstable or full of bugs if some of the apps work, and it's considered praiseworthy to hope that KDE 4 is as good as KDE 3.5. This is ridiculous.

Am I alone in thinking that people are abusing the term "Release Candidate"?

No, you aren't alone, but according to KDE fanboys, beta means that it compiles and release candidate means they've decided what features are going in. And if you disagree, then you're an idiot who doesn't understand open-source.

Whether 4.0 will actually be usable depends on the way in which you ask. If you read the press releases or praise the developers, then 4.0 will be the best thing since sliced bread. But if you are worried about the quality and wondering why they are dropping features that were in KDE 3, then 4.0 is merely a preview release and 4.1 is going to be the real, finished thing. That way, they can get all the praise, but write off any criticism as "it's not ready yet", regardless of how finished the final release is.

For example, the much exalted Plasma has been hyped since long before it ever existed. It had its own website when it was nothing more than mocked up screenshots and vague descriptions of how awesome it was going to be. And it was hyped right up until the alphas, when people were wondering where it was. It seems to be a last-minute job, and when people on dot.kde.org complain that "basically nothing works" in response to the third beta, one of the core developers responds with "i'm not particularly taken by the heartstrings people are plucking here. there are lots of things to test and bump around with in these betas. stop fixating on plasma for the moment; you'll get to play with more of its features as more releases come. [...] there is exactly one release that counts for plasma, and that'll be 4.0, though the rc's leading up to it will be important as well. there is also exactly one canonical place to gauge the "workingness" (hm. neat word.) of things right now and that's svn.". The KDE project is not interested in using the release cycle as a method of quality assurance, they release betas in order to show off how far they have gotten with features for the people who can't compile it themselves. As somebody else put it: " I know Plasma is barely more than a fetus at this point, and it doesn't even fully replicate all the features of the old desktop." - that's in response to the third beta, and still people tell him to wait. Shouldn't a core part of the desktop be relatively finished by the third beta?

Disclaimer: I've used KDE since the 1.0 betas. I'm no GNOME troll. I just think the attitude the project is taking towards 4.0 seems to be all about ego and has dropped the transparency or quality that I've become used to with open-source projects.

PS: I think it utterly sucks that I have to add disclaimers like that because otherwise I get called a troll (which is apparently the term for people who do something other than emit unadulterated praise for the developers on dot.kde.org). Christ, look at the fawning that is normal on the dot: many people says that kde3.0 was untable, full of bug and that kde will be the same, but kde4 look really stable, some parts crash, but the are apps like juk, kwin4 like composite works without problems, dolphin stable, i have hope that when kde4.0 is released can be used like kde3.5.x." That's right, it's not unstable or full of bugs if some of the apps work, and it's considered praiseworthy to hope that KDE 4 is as good as KDE 3.5. This is ridiculous.

Am I alone in thinking that people are abusing the term "Release Candidate"?

No, you aren't alone, but according to KDE fanboys, beta means that it compiles and release candidate means they've decided what features are going in. And if you disagree, then you're an idiot who doesn't understand open-source.

Whether 4.0 will actually be usable depends on the way in which you ask. If you read the press releases or praise the developers, then 4.0 will be the best thing since sliced bread. But if you are worried about the quality and wondering why they are dropping features that were in KDE 3, then 4.0 is merely a preview release and 4.1 is going to be the real, finished thing. That way, they can get all the praise, but write off any criticism as "it's not ready yet", regardless of how finished the final release is.

For example, the much exalted Plasma has been hyped since long before it ever existed. It had its own website when it was nothing more than mocked up screenshots and vague descriptions of how awesome it was going to be. And it was hyped right up until the alphas, when people were wondering where it was. It seems to be a last-minute job, and when people on dot.kde.org complain that "basically nothing works" in response to the third beta, one of the core developers responds with "i'm not particularly taken by the heartstrings people are plucking here. there are lots of things to test and bump around with in these betas. stop fixating on plasma for the moment; you'll get to play with more of its features as more releases come. [...] there is exactly one release that counts for plasma, and that'll be 4.0, though the rc's leading up to it will be important as well. there is also exactly one canonical place to gauge the "workingness" (hm. neat word.) of things right now and that's svn.". The KDE project is not interested in using the release cycle as a method of quality assurance, they release betas in order to show off how far they have gotten with features for the people who can't compile it themselves. As somebody else put it: " I know Plasma is barely more than a fetus at this point, and it doesn't even fully replicate all the features of the old desktop." - that's in response to the third beta, and still people tell him to wait. Shouldn't a core part of the desktop be relatively finished by the third beta?

Disclaimer: I've used KDE since the 1.0 betas. I'm no GNOME troll. I just think the attitude the project is taking towards 4.0 seems to be all about ego and has dropped the transparency or quality that I've become used to with open-source projects.

PS: I think it utterly sucks that I have to add disclaimers like that because otherwise I get called a troll (which is apparently the term for people who do something other than emit unadulterated praise for the developers on dot.kde.org). Christ, look at the fawning that is normal on the dot: many people says that kde3.0 was untable, full of bug and that kde will be the same, but kde4 look really stable, some parts crash, but the are apps like juk, kwin4 like composite works without problems, dolphin stable, i have hope that when kde4.0 is released can be used like kde3.5.x." That's right, it's not unstable or full of bugs if some of the apps work, and it's considered praiseworthy to hope that KDE 4 is as good as KDE 3.5. This is ridiculous.

Am I alone in thinking that people are abusing the term "Release Candidate"?

No, you aren't alone, but according to KDE fanboys, beta means that it compiles and release candidate means they've decided what features are going in. And if you disagree, then you're an idiot who doesn't understand open-source.

Whether 4.0 will actually be usable depends on the way in which you ask. If you read the press releases or praise the developers, then 4.0 will be the best thing since sliced bread. But if you are worried about the quality and wondering why they are dropping features that were in KDE 3, then 4.0 is merely a preview release and 4.1 is going to be the real, finished thing. That way, they can get all the praise, but write off any criticism as "it's not ready yet", regardless of how finished the final release is.

For example, the much exalted Plasma has been hyped since long before it ever existed. It had its own website when it was nothing more than mocked up screenshots and vague descriptions of how awesome it was going to be. And it was hyped right up until the alphas, when people were wondering where it was. It seems to be a last-minute job, and when people on dot.kde.org complain that "basically nothing works" in response to the third beta, one of the core developers responds with "i'm not particularly taken by the heartstrings people are plucking here. there are lots of things to test and bump around with in these betas. stop fixating on plasma for the moment; you'll get to play with more of its features as more releases come. [...] there is exactly one release that counts for plasma, and that'll be 4.0, though the rc's leading up to it will be important as well. there is also exactly one canonical place to gauge the "workingness" (hm. neat word.) of things right now and that's svn.". The KDE project is not interested in using the release cycle as a method of quality assurance, they release betas in order to show off how far they have gotten with features for the people who can't compile it themselves. As somebody else put it: " I know Plasma is barely more than a fetus at this point, and it doesn't even fully replicate all the features of the old desktop." - that's in response to the third beta, and still people tell him to wait. Shouldn't a core part of the desktop be relatively finished by the third beta?

Disclaimer: I've used KDE since the 1.0 betas. I'm no GNOME troll. I just think the attitude the project is taking towards 4.0 seems to be all about ego and has dropped the transparency or quality that I've become used to with open-source projects.

PS: I think it utterly sucks that I have to add disclaimers like that because otherwise I get called a troll (which is apparently the term for people who do something other than emit unadulterated praise for the developers on dot.kde.org). Christ, look at the fawning that is normal on the dot: many people says that kde3.0 was untable, full of bug and that kde will be the same, but kde4 look really stable, some parts crash, but the are apps like juk, kwin4 like composite works without problems, dolphin stable, i have hope that when kde4.0 is released can be used like kde3.5.x." That's right, it's not unstable or full of bugs if some of the apps work, and it's considered praiseworthy to hope that KDE 4 is as good as KDE 3.5. This is ridiculous.

If it would be only a *tiny* amount of performance difference, there would not be alot of people in the forum mentioning that they prefer Gnome over KDE cuz Gnome runs faster

There are also a lot of people claiming the exact opposite, which lends support to my "tiny difference" theory. It's so tiny, the placebo effect completely overrides it.

KDE stills eats more RAM than Gnome. Bigtime.

Read the link, please - it actually doesn't. Here they are again:

KDE and GNOME identical to within a few MB!? How can we start a flame war with that? A very big congratulations to everyone working on the optimisation of GNOME! Now you just have to worry about what surprises KDE 4 will pull.

In a word... UGH! I've been using Dolphin under KDE3 for a good six months now and have been loving it (barring apps like Ark not having any integration with it yet), but what they've done to Kicker looks absolutely hideous, in keeping with what they've done to my beloved Amarok interface in Amarok 2
http://amarok.kde.org/blog/uploads/Amarok2preview30-07-07.png
http://amarok.kde.org/blog/uploads/jamendo_ktorrent.png

Can anyone show me any tasteful and useful implementations of Plasma? Or is it just being bandied about as bling-tastic fluff at the moment?

In a word... UGH! I've been using Dolphin under KDE3 for a good six months now and have been loving it (barring apps like Ark not having any integration with it yet), but what they've done to Kicker looks absolutely hideous, in keeping with what they've done to my beloved Amarok interface in Amarok 2
http://amarok.kde.org/blog/uploads/Amarok2preview30-07-07.png
http://amarok.kde.org/blog/uploads/jamendo_ktorrent.png

Can anyone show me any tasteful and useful implementations of Plasma? Or is it just being bandied about as bling-tastic fluff at the moment?

I mean you've finally managed to replace the similarily outdated GNOME logo so get your ass in gear.

And yet, despite all the extra features and configurability, KDE still manages to use about the same resources as GNOME:

It's built on QT4, so after they iron out a few details, yes.