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KDE 4 will probably be released in the end of 2006 or beguining of 2007. But it could take even a bit more time!

So please people don't get confused. There's yet no single KDE 4 screenshot at all, because they're still working in the base libs which are getting ported to Qt 4 and developed. All those screenshots are just MOCKUPS from KDE users who want to contribute to the brainstorm...

If you want to see KDE 4 screenshots, keep an eye on dot.kde.org and who knowns, maybe around summer you will see something interesting ;-). (But that's just my opinion/feeling)

"Fuck, the text doesn't even fit in some of the configuration windows unless I resize them!"
Fuck, you just discovered a well known and annoying kubuntu bug, not a kde bug.
Same goes for the default layout. It's kubuntu specific, not the KDE default layout.
So all you showed us so far is two kubuntu problems. Well done.

Oh, and btw.:
http://usability.kde.org/

Have fun!

Are you expecting them to look at the laptop, use the system, discover its features and finally exclaim, "Wow, this is fantastic, what version of Windows are you running!"

You are more likely to hear, 'Where is the Start button!?!'

Take a look at this screenshot.

Yes...NIIIICCCCCCEEEEEE tip there. 'Just hit alt-f2 and type in the program name'.

Yeah...that will go over real well with your average Joe-Non-Power-User.

> I believe that it works with KDE as well, but I'm
> not sure

I don't think so. KDE has the problem that it is based on C++ and Qt. I think the KDE people will reinvent the wheel, again. See this posting:

  http://dot.kde.org/1135084395/1135100106/

This is a really stupid approach. When apple offered them a superiour codebase for khtml they rejected it because it was not "their code".

Now the same happened with cairo, with glitz and xgl. Same arguments: "no thanks, we can do better", "this doesn't fit into our codebase" etc, etc.

" watching someone get through their daily grind faster "

How is all that animation stuff going to make things faster? It's faster to just display/vanish a window immediately, rather than draw the animations. You could of course do the animations in a "ghostlike/background" way, and allow immediate access to whatever is now actually on top, but the animations could still be distracting and get in the way.

Experienced[1] workers really wanting to do stuff faster should get rid of these "cutscenes".

Now, something like this might make things faster: Bug 121349: Allow direct selection of last active tasks with keystrokes / key combos

You can do this one already: custom keyed menu sequences.

[1]
How many of you would get confused by things appearing/disappearing immediately when they are consistent with _your_ intended actions? You click on close and a window vanishes immediately. I call that good, not confusing, it's more likely to be annoying/confusing/worrying if you click on close and a window doesn't close.

Oh yeah, while I'm idly wondering, what are the odds of this making it into mainstream desktops ( stock gnome/kde )?

Well, to some extent it's already there: KWin uses COMPOSITE to do translucency and shadows, for example.

There are plans to extend use of these features in KDE 4. Zack Rusin from KDE, has been working on this sort of thing (you can see an interview with him from the Summer). There's also the Plasma project, which has beauty and usability as its key aims built in from the start.

And best of all, you can get involved and help make KDE 4 the best ever!

Oh yeah, while I'm idly wondering, what are the odds of this making it into mainstream desktops ( stock gnome/kde )?

Well, to some extent it's already there: KWin uses COMPOSITE to do translucency and shadows, for example.

There are plans to extend use of these features in KDE 4. Zack Rusin from KDE, has been working on this sort of thing (you can see an interview with him from the Summer). There's also the Plasma project, which has beauty and usability as its key aims built in from the start.

And best of all, you can get involved and help make KDE 4 the best ever!

Why not just keep the current job, and on side start helping out one of the cool open source projects, such is KDE, FreeBSD or Haiku?

If you are making tons of money, then there is not reason to give that up. Why not just save some extra money, and help out one of these cool open source projects. You could do anything you'd like to try out and do. You want to code Operating Systems? Then join FreeBSD team or Haiku team for example. Or if you like to make desktop applications, then join the KDE team and help them out.
Of course, if you are making a lot of money, these projects would be more than thankful if you donated some to them.

Be lucky that you have a good paying job. Its hard to find a job that pays better, however its easy to join one of the open source projects and do what you like.

Why not just keep the current job, and on side start helping out one of the cool open source projects, such is KDE, FreeBSD or Haiku?

If you are making tons of money, then there is not reason to give that up. Why not just save some extra money, and help out one of these cool open source projects. You could do anything you'd like to try out and do. You want to code Operating Systems? Then join FreeBSD team or Haiku team for example. Or if you like to make desktop applications, then join the KDE team and help them out.
Of course, if you are making a lot of money, these projects would be more than thankful if you donated some to them.

Be lucky that you have a good paying job. Its hard to find a job that pays better, however its easy to join one of the open source projects and do what you like.

So what would I recommend? Well, if you're using Linux, I can think of at least ten things better but XMMS would probably be my favorite.

I'm waiting for someone to suggest Amarok for Linux. It's most definitely the best player I've ever used.

You can have a desktop linux NOW. Fetch a modern commercial distro (http://www.ubuntu.com/>Ubuntu, Mandrake, etc) or any of the free ones and you'll have an excellent desktop with little issues, if any.

    The people that bitch about the "linux desktop" haven't normally ever tried Linux and want something that feels like their WinXP desktop. If you're looking for that, yes, there's nothing like it now and probably won't be for a while. If you want an useable Unix desktop, there's a lot of excellent ones arround.
    You have a wide choice of desktops and window and managers, and there's a lot of excellent software for them. A linux desktop is useable today, and by anyone - i had Ubuntu on a desktop for a while and my mother, who's 'computer-imparied' had zero issues using it. Besides being unable to find the blue E icon ;)

Microsoft have said that Acid2 is not a priority for them, and I doubt the final version of IE7 will work either.

Last.fm is great. Especially when you leave the same album, with only 12-13 tracks, running for days on end. It's fun!

seriously, I think Last.fm has a serious advantage, mostly because there's plug-ins for Linux media players. Heck, amaroK has built in support for it. So, until Pandora has that kind of 'market share' Last.fm will be way better, at least in my eyes.

Kate is probably what you are thinking of.

So he can run AmaroK. By itself, it's enough of a reason to run Linux.

Of course, immunity to viruses and worms is a big plus too.

(a) Importation into the United States, without the authority of the owner of copyright under this title, of copies or phonorecords of a work that have been acquired outside the United States is an infringement of the exclusive right to distribute copies or phonorecords under section 106, actionable under section 501. This subsection does not apply to-- ....
(2) importation, for the private use of the importer and not for distribution, by any person with respect to no more than one copy or phonorecord of any one work at any one time, or by any person arriving from outside the United States with respect to copies or phonorecords forming part of such person's personal baggage; or ....
(b) In a case where the making of the copies or phonorecords would have constituted an infringement of copyright if this title had been applicable, their importation is prohibited. In a case where the copies or phonorecords were lawfully made, the United States Customs Service has no authority to prevent their importation unless the provisions of section 601 are applicable.

(a) Importation into the United States, without the authority of the owner of copyright under this title, of copies or phonorecords of a work that have been acquired outside the United States is an infringement of the exclusive right to distribute copies or phonorecords under section 106, actionable under section 501. This subsection does not apply to-- ....
(2) importation, for the private use of the importer and not for distribution, by any person with respect to no more than one copy or phonorecord of any one work at any one time, or by any person arriving from outside the United States with respect to copies or phonorecords forming part of such person's personal baggage; or ....
(b) In a case where the making of the copies or phonorecords would have constituted an infringement of copyright if this title had been applicable, their importation is prohibited. In a case where the copies or phonorecords were lawfully made, the United States Customs Service has no authority to prevent their importation unless the provisions of section 601 are applicable.

Although I fully support any effort Google puts into widespread usage of *nix systems, there are a couple organisations that are way ahead of you (and Google) when it comes to your three points: freedesktop.org has already been and continues to standardise the desktop frontends and backends so that your desktop environments will work great together and not even your typical Windows user would get confused by it. Then there is KDE who have made such huge advancements in your fancy-shmancy integration and synergy that I'd be more worried for Apple that they won't be the holder of the "fanciest desktop environment as perceived by the general public" award anymore. Of course, there is GNOME, and although it's become a very good desktop environment for beginners to computers or those who just want things to work, it does have many artificial limitations in how you can control it, so I recommend KDE to those who want any sort of control over their GUIs.

Server? I use it as a workstation. KDE runs like a charm on it.

http://plasma.kde.org/

this service already exists by musicbrainz, and if you use amarok then you have already witnessed it in action.

seriously, do people google before they ask slashdot?

Or wait for IBM, of course ;)

Or wait for IBM, of course ;)

Sure, check out http://plasma.kde.org/ for their project overview. Basically it's an umbrella project for better human interface and eye candy for the KDE project. It involves a community re-write of portions of the KDE libraries, and is already quite far along. Check out the link http://plasma.kde.org/cms/1069 for a neat looking mockup of some proposed functionality.

Sure, check out http://plasma.kde.org/ for their project overview. Basically it's an umbrella project for better human interface and eye candy for the KDE project. It involves a community re-write of portions of the KDE libraries, and is already quite far along. Check out the link http://plasma.kde.org/cms/1069 for a neat looking mockup of some proposed functionality.

Everybody here forgot that KDE is made with the help of mainly unpaid and anonymous contributors? Didn't anyone take account of the fact that KDE e.V. is more like a charity that like an enterprise? Did anyone know that the amount of money directly collected by either the kjs or the konqueror teams from selling their products amounts to zero?

I'm sick of this Windows/KDE comparations (not the mention the Windows/(GNU/Linux) ones). You Windows weenies will have a point against gratis and free software as soon as M$ stops charging for their products and support.

Besides, if you don't believe whether the patch solves or not the problem you can go and get a diff yourselves. Easy, huh? Try that somewhere else.

Having a good permission system enables systems where you can decide how people interacts with the system (i.e. adding or viewing content) and where. The extensions enables i.e. drawings editing in a wiki-like scheme and its integration enables i.e. putting portions of blogs in wiki pages or including editables spreadsheets in.

My biggest use of it was for documentation, mixing blogs for tracking progress of projects, adding editable diagrams of networks, organizing and grouping the information in wiki pages and giving different kinds of priviledges to the development people (editors) from different kinds of viewers. But a lot of people gives a lot of different kinds of uses for it i.e. KDE project or voip-info.org.

Thanks to Open Source, we can check ourselves whether Safari is affected.

You can see from the patch referenced from http://www.kde.org/info/security/advisory-20060119 -1.txt that the vulnerable functions are: encodeURI, decodeURI.

Now you can download JavaScriptCore from http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.4. 4.ppc/. It contains the affected source file kjs/function.cpp, but a quick look at it reveals that it doesn't have the same encodeURI, decodeURI functions nor the same flaw.

It will be patched before the number of talkbacks reaches 350, or 24 hours, which ever comes first.

Er, wait... it's already patched, and talkbacks are only at 194 !!!
http://kde.org/info/security/advisory-20060119-1.t xt

Wow... announced yesterday and patched over night.

This is the text of the patch. Look at the nice variable names :P

And this is the contents of the guilty source code file. It's filled with such variable names and obfuscated code! Some variable names -> zzzzzzz, yyyyy, xx, uuuuu.

I really never thought that this kind of code was in a project such as KDE. I assume that it's a fairly unique file, but even then it's just really stupid...

This is the text of the patch. Look at the nice variable names :P

And this is the contents of the guilty source code file. It's filled with such variable names and obfuscated code! Some variable names -> zzzzzzz, yyyyy, xx, uuuuu.

I really never thought that this kind of code was in a project such as KDE. I assume that it's a fairly unique file, but even then it's just really stupid...

Deploying Linux in business environments, I haven't seen a site that absolutely required IE in a long time. Even the banks I deal with have long supported Mozilla and Firefox.

But, just for fun, last week I did a little experiment. I made a list of as many sites with embedded videos that I could, mostly news sites, and tested them against Konqueror and Firefox. I came up with 18 sites in total. The results were that eleven sites worked with both Konqueror and Firefox, three more worked in Firefox only, and only four had absolute requirements that precluded any Linux browser. These ranged from Flash 8.0, which doesn't yet exist for Linux, to ActiveX detection routines.

So, from a small, completely unstatistical sample of the most popular sites I could find, 77% were compatible with Firefox on Linux. 61% were compatible enough to work even in Konqueror. And of the sites that required IE, one was msnbc.com, and two were Viacom companies, mtv.com and vh1.com, that excluded Linux intentionally, citing "Windows DRM" as the reason.

For the tests, I used KMplayer and Xine as the video player, with both Real and Windows Media codecs. I needed the KMplayer plugin for Konqueror and the MediaPlayerconnectivity and User Agent Switcher extensions for Firefox.

If successful it will make Linux the #1 client OS, surpassing Windows and totally change the tech dynamics in 2/3 of the world.

Those aren't the numbers that matter for 2006. The main reason operating system market share matters is because people build products on top of these platforms. The buying power of the target recipients of these $100 laptops is very low because they are poor and they are children.

The OLPC project will be very influential on the future, however. The main goal of the project in the first place is to help educate these poor people, which hopefully will bring them out of poverty. Then the operating systems they use will actually matter.

When you combine the education they are receiving with the internet access they will eventually get, many of these people will be able to contribute to the open source software that they're using to make it even better. It will be interesting to watch the open source community change as these maps change.

(how many Linux fans that you know would run a closed binary?)

OK, good for you, you can spend an hour digging around to find the worst screen shot of your opponent and the best of your proponent. I've designed better. My main tenent still stands: Cocoa only holds for Macs, which have a 5% market share. Who cares about 5%?

The discussion is about C++. Who cares about other programming languages (Java, Python). Now compare the 3 API's. wxWidgets and QT are skinnable. What about GNUstep? Nope. "moc C++" OK I give you that. But its still a decent API to work with and a breeze to port. As in, you do nothing to port it. (been there, done that)

"That's not subjective either."

I saw no mention of wxWidgets or QT in there. Nice try.

" GNUstep runs on X11, Cairo, Win32/GDI, and it can also be recompiled on MacOSX." (But why would you want to? You have Cocoa? You are talking yourself in circles... ) ... "QT works on less platforms than GNUstep,"

x11? Check. Win32? Check. MacOSX? Check. Embedded? Check. Cairo? According to the KDE-Qt forums: http://dot.kde.org/1135084395/1135100106/113518523 0/ you could. but why? Qt already has all the functionality of Cairo. You could write a backend into Cairo if you really wanted to (mentioned in the same forum ... ) but Qt is quicker and has all the same functionality. Which begs the question... if GNUstep has plugins into Cairo, it must be missing that functionality (that Qt already has). Please respond:

I hate to post a reply to myself but I just wanted to give an addition for anyone who thinks I'm talking out of my ass regarding what you potentially could do. This particular idea, running X/KDE via Cygwin as the shell, is an example of what's possible. You don't have to load explorer.exe and there are alternative file browsers/web browsers, so what else does explorer.exe need to be around for? It's awesome how I got modded a troll by the slashbots, and I hate Windows and use Linux most of the time, I guess I must be astroturfing though, trying to give people ideas that Windows has capabilities they might not know about.

1. I'm very curious about usability. Are we going to see even more evolution in this area (e.g., KDE Usability Project)? How about some revolution?

2. With Google kicking everyone's a$$, are we going to hear some interesting stuff on that front? Linux-targeted Google APIs? What about curious intersections of Linux, Google, and advertising? Anything interesting there? For example: Jack up Google's Linux search?

Net-net is that I hope it'll be practical, hands on, juicy stuff.

There's a lot of free software out there that will give better skymaps than most books can. After all, the sky changes from minute to minute, not just day to day.

XEphem is my choice. The interface is pretty old-school, but the maps it prints out are perfect for my uses.

KStars has more bells and whistles but, in my experience, doesn't print as well.

As for advice on buying scopes, etc., check these places too.

From what I have read about Plasma, the icons will be treated as "dashboard widgets" themselves. There shouldn't be a problem with that. Of course, this is a drastic simplification of the whole thing. For more information, I recommend you look at the Plasma Project and the Appeal Project. Reading Aaron Seigo's blog may shed some light on things as well.

Don't just go through a top display and decide KDE is hogging memory. If you use a properly configured KDE desktop you'll notice that despite the big numbers, everything seems to be running smooth. That's because the reality is that KDE is sharing memory very effectively, and people who just look at top without investigating further have been going off half-cocked about KDE for years.

Get the real story on this here and here, because KDE's code reuse is awesome, not bloated.

Apparently you didn't really understan when I wrote "You can have a Mac OS-like menu bar" ;) There's no way Gnome can have a Mac OS-like menu bar. When I say "Mac OS-like menu bar" I mean: "Have a common file/edit/help menu bar at the top of the screen which changes when you switch between apps"

If you look at the screenshot closely, you'll see it.

By the way, KDE also has a gdesklets equivalent called superkaramba which has been included by default in KDE 3.5.0 (I didn't put screenshots of that because I wanted to show "technology" not "eyecandy")

If I wanted to show eyecandy and aesthetics I'd have show something like this

AFAIK, only Safari passes the ACID test.

Konqueror has now become the second browser to pass the arduous 'Acid2' css compliance test. Apple's Safari browser was the first, which makes use of Konqueror's advanced rendering engine KHTML. Thanks to some fixes that were integrated back into Konqueror from Safari improvements, and the hard work of the KHTML programmers, Konqueror can now boast a high level of CSS compliance.

see where it kets you... for example Killustrator was forced to rename itself because adobe managed to convince a court that it's trademark on Adobe Illustrator was being infringed...

and last but not least it's STABLE... I've had so much trouble with the other two clients mentioned crashing and destroying data...
Are you speaking about the KMail(Kontact) that is part of KDE?
Bug 104956: dimap: sudden mail loss
Bug 87163: kaddressbook empties resource on some conditions (data lost)

and last but not least it's STABLE... I've had so much trouble with the other two clients mentioned crashing and destroying data...
Are you speaking about the KMail(Kontact) that is part of KDE?
Bug 104956: dimap: sudden mail loss
Bug 87163: kaddressbook empties resource on some conditions (data lost)

Why even post something like this? Who cares if you use amaroK? I know a lot of people, including myself, that hate amaroK and would welcome a decent open source music player. AmaroK's interface looks like it was designed by a 10 year old. It's the most cluttered application I've ever seen and that screenshot says it all. Two separate windows just for a simple music player and both windows are hideously ugly with clutter everywhere. Pathetic. But what else would you expect from the KDE camp.

You also need to install the bloated mess that is kdelibs just to use amaroK.

Aren't amaroK and Rhythmbox the open source iTunes?

I love Kmail, but it has one showstopping bug that makes it unusable for me. Email "disappears" from my inbox when using IMAP.

I wonder what's different between your usage and mine, because I've never seen this problem. I mostly use the "disconnected IMAP" mode, but I occasionally use the regular IMAP mode as well. I don't see this problem with either.

I searched the KDE bug database and this looks like your bug, but the bug report says it was resolved in KMail 1.6, which is in KDE 3.2. If you still see the problem, have you submitted a bug report? The only other bug I can find that seems even remotely close to what you're seeing is this one, but it only applied to the case where the connection to the IMAP server got lost during the move, and it seems not to be reproduceable.

I love Kmail, but it has one showstopping bug that makes it unusable for me. Email "disappears" from my inbox when using IMAP.

I wonder what's different between your usage and mine, because I've never seen this problem. I mostly use the "disconnected IMAP" mode, but I occasionally use the regular IMAP mode as well. I don't see this problem with either.

I searched the KDE bug database and this looks like your bug, but the bug report says it was resolved in KMail 1.6, which is in KDE 3.2. If you still see the problem, have you submitted a bug report? The only other bug I can find that seems even remotely close to what you're seeing is this one, but it only applied to the case where the connection to the IMAP server got lost during the move, and it seems not to be reproduceable.