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I think I should post a link to an informative thread I found on dot.kde.org. It's about possible causes for relativly slow performance of kde and how to avoid them.

Don't know how the binaries of this KDE2-RC packed though, but anyway, people thinking of KDE2 as slow should at least check if their install is built with QT-exceptions. The post of fura in the above thread explains how to do that with your installation.

You want a good, lightweight, fast browser for Linux or your favorite flavour of Unix? Want it now? Try KDE and the new Konqueror browser!

> People who view these screen shots [...] enjoy having sex with children.

Since you know what's on those screenshots, you must have viewed them as well, ergo you also enjoy having sex with children. Correct me if I'm wrong :-)

I was actually thinking something along those lines when I saw the screenshots, and it strikes me that a lot of geeks seem to be into the repressed sexual phantasies thing, be it the pedophile or just plain nudie pics angle. Also check out the latest screenshots of KDE 2, where the guy might think that he covered up his desktop wallpaper strategically. But the desktop thumbnail gave him away. Dirty young man!!!

(-5, Offtopic, Flamebait)

KDE.

Fully GPL'd -- and then they use other people's GPL sources, and link the resulting programs with a non-GPL library.

Thankfully this is over now, but in my book using code without permission is stealing it. :(

Pretty unethical, as well as being illegal.

...about as much as Mozilla does, as far as I am concerned, but it is always nice to be able to choose!

I mean, how long have they been working on Mozilla?

And when did development of the Konqueror HTML widget start? I am really surprised they could build a good-functioning (speaking as of the final-beta ) web-browser in such a short time!

How did the KDE developers manage this? Or did it just not get the same attention (as Mozilla) and have they been working on it for quite some time before it got into the public?

Actually, when this came up on kde-devel, instead of a flamewar it generated a patch for klipper's faulty handling of the $47 in the URL.

---------

-iceburn- Sitting quietly, doing nothing. Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.

-iceburn- Sitting quietly, doing nothing. Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.

why don't you update your packages by cvsup...it's easy and fast. Look out for "cvsup" at the KDE Website cheers Franz

Check out the latest KDE2 beta at www.kde.org or konqueror's own web site (with screenshots) at www.konqueror.org

Linus was apparently frustrated by the slow progress that Minix was making, which drove him to start work on his own Unix clone.

Read This USENET thread archive for more information about embryonic Linux. It wasn't just that Minix was crappy for practical use, it was that Andrew Tanenbaum wouldn't let anybody distribute modified versions of Minix.

Here you go dude konqueror its open source, supports https (which mozilla doesnt seem to yet) supports all netscape plugins e.g flash etc. and is pretty damn fast im using it now and unlike any of the gtkmozembed browsers i have used, remembers cookies correctly so i dont have to login to slashdot every time i wanna post something. i do like where mozilla is going but its still too slow for me at the moment.

Its an interesting view from the developer's pov.
To quote
Many of us woke up this morning and read Richard Stallman's editorial on
Linux Today with a growing sense of incredulity. At first, some of us thought it
was a joke -- it didn't make any logical sense, after all. But after it sunk in
that Stallman was doing yet another snowjob on KDE, a lot of our incredulity
turned to anger.

They certainly have every right to be pissed off. Stallman has a chip on his shoulder and is looking for any way -- however unfair -- to trash the KDE project.

RMS has lost alot of credibility in my eyes. It's a shame someone who has done so much good could be so righteous to the point that it actually hurts the 'community' effort.

Dick Stallman is the one who needs to beg forgiveness.

Bidi HTML rendering is of course great, but not enough. I admit i haven't tried running it yet (don't currently have access to a Linux machine :( ), so maybe i'm just talking bullshit and correct me if i'm wrong, but AFAIK:

1. Qt/KDE doesn't yet support true BIDI input and selection.

2. The Hebrew po (translation) files for KDE seem to be visually ordered, which means that stuff like button/widget/dialog labels, window captions etc are not truly reordered.

3. Again, _correct me if i'm wrong_, but it seems that in current KDE beta widget placing in a window is left-to-right and it's hard-coded. In a completely internationalized system the direction of the entire window/dialog/whatever should be localizable. Pango seems to already get it right; compare the screenshots: Pango (look at the end of the page) and KDE (notice the colons at the wrong side of the labels).

Now i don't mean to diss KDE; the opposite is true: i love it, i just wished for a long time that they developed a complete bidi solution. Now that both Qt/KDE and Gnome/Pango are both clean GPL they can easily share code and will really speed things up.

Not much. See details here.

Every time KDE is mentioned we have the claim about no standards or people needing QT to develop KDE apps.

Actualy what you need is to folow the stile guide.

KDE Standards and Style Guides

Ohh. And here is an interview with Kurt Granroth.

If it's half as cute as this one, then Konqi has a real run for his money. How long until the media pick up on this inter-mascot war?

Check out MoralDefense.com for some excellent Objectivist rhetoric.

I run Linux at home. And my personal boycott against MSFT products has been active since Windows 95. There's no reason to reiterate how much MSFT sucks to the /. community.

But, I also feel that a boycott should be the extent of my ability to limit Microsoft's power. Only the individual can lash out against a corporation: by not buying a product. The government has no place in this matter.

If you don't like Windows, be a geek, go to Fry's, and build your own friggin' computer so that Bill never gets his greasy hands on your prized possession. What's the issue?

Don't invite the government to save "the public" on this one. If you bought a MSFT product, you only hurt yourself. I hardly think that "the public" needs protection from MSFT.

Even worse with the case of MSFT is that they've actually provided a decent product to fill a market niche (albeit an incredibly large niche). MSFT has been offering a superior consumer product for years at an excellent price. Windows has brought law and order to the consumer computer market and helped to make computers useful for grandma smith and uncle bob. Windows is an excellent product in that regard.

Even worse, it's obvious that MSFT has had competition through the entire battle. As I recall, AAPL's headquarters are smack-dab in the middle of Silicon Valley; and SUNW's headquarters aren't far down the road. And SGI's and even the now defunct SCO (Tarantella?). There were plenty of choices out there if you really wanted an alternate. But, again: MSFT was providing a product that better suited people's needs at a much better price. Even today one can argue that Windows ME/2000 provides most people with more functionality than they'll ever need.

If you want to destroy Microsoft, don't waste your time with the government. Hack Eazel, GNOME, KDE; or some other Linux component that threatens the power or Redmond.

Do you realize that GNOME itself is the 1st successful software project based on Corba ?

Why should a technology not produce any good results for over 10 years and then suddenly become worthwhile when an open source project starts to use it ?

Not just any Open Source project either but one with lots of backing and funding from everywhere.

You see Corba is broken. but only a little. In order to use it you must build something else on top that actually talks to your apps. Gnome usees Bonobo. KDE used Kom. Despite being built on the same technology they couldn't communicate with each other. Not even when Gnome used the same ORB as KDE ( Mico ).

This is the power of the Hacker mentality at work. They took a broken twisted pile of junk and built a wonderful interface on top of that. Best of all being Corba makes it 100% buzzword compliant. Read this post to asses how much of a "buzzword" it is.

Sorry... I forgot to mention... KDE *does* have UI guidelines up at the developer site: http:/ /developer.kde.org/documentation/standards/kde/sty le/basics/index.html

"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"

The article linked to on the front page was obnoxious, and I feel personally attacked, not for my code's merits, but just on "general principle", because I happen to code for GNOME. I, as many other developers want to be left alone by such rabble-rousers. I just want to do my thing.

I've never attacked anyone on the basis of doing the KDE project - on the other hand, we're all making good progress, and I believe that one borrows ideas from the other on a regular basis. The "inefficiency" of having two projects with such overlap is blown out of proportions by many comments here. They merely represent two different approaches to a problem, with two different solution sets. No one side has all the best solutions.

Here are links to the publicity/news pages on both sides of the camp, so you can compare the badmouthing-article counts:

KDE news, GNOME news.

They speak for themselves. Thanks for your attention and stuff.

Take a look at the language binding page. I can only speak about the Python bindings from some slight experience; they're quite nice and seem complete.

Bonobo is way to fat for a DE. The statement on the KDE technology page sums it up pretty well. You can find it here.

In short, Gnome more resembles well-known commercial projects than does KDE. The involvement of commercial software houses is supposed to improve this?

Which one to you looks more like a commercial product we all know about? (here or here)

They look almost the same to me.

No, but you can embed GTK apps into KDE apps. : )

Just email Simon and ask him for that tarball.

No, but you can embed GTK apps into KDE apps. : )

Just email Simon and ask him for that tarball.

To quote an earlier post of mine:

That's what I thought - but apparantly, that's not true.

Although both projects are GPL'ed, Gnome can use KDE code (their html widget came from KDE 1.1), but KDE can't use Gnome code (the classic example is the threatened lawsuits over kgimp).

For more (admittedly one-sided and rather frustrated in tone) information, read this thread off of the KDE general mailing list.

--
Evan

There exist (yet unreleased) DCOP bindings for C. (I'm still in the process of cleaning up and fixing some last issues) . I hacked up a small example which does exactly what you are talking about: It uses DCOP to embed a small GTK application into a KDE shell. And yes, it works "over the wire" :-)

There is also a nice bit of flame war starting journalism about the whole thing available here. Interesting reading...

Evolution : (magellan)
Gnumeric : (kspread)
Nautilus : (konqueror)

We all make mistakes sometimes. oh, and if you wanted to point out the great and innovative Bonobo technology (which KDE "doesn't have!") then take a look.

Look at this: there's a Flash animation running inside Konqueror! Man, I might make a visit back to GUI. OTOH, I am very used to CLI for whatever I use Linux for.

but if KDE is not scared, then why make a big fuss about it?

Has anyone taken a look at KDE.org lately? The last couple of days news appear to be in defense or "we're not worried" quotes.

I'm a GNOME user, and I'm a KDE user.

They're both great desktops, but what I really want is that little damn penguin or an avatar of some type play around on my desktop, fetch my mail and news, compile my programs, and learn from my user preferences and keep things all neat and tidy...

But for heaven's sake, don't make it a paper clip!

Okay... that's purely subjective... I actually personally like the look and feel of KDE 2.0 much better than Helix Gnome. I liked the "Feel" of KDE 1.x better than earlier Gnome, and since at the end of the day, I need to get work done, I went with KDE from 1.x.
But it's all subjective here - I don't think anybody wins on superiority,

When you start an Helix Gnome session, and type "free", you simply have 9 or 10 more free megs than when you start a KDE session (1.1.2 or pre 2.0), for similar functionnalities.

Yes, but I've noticed that KDE eats less memory per app. I *really* looked into this because of a memory leak in a beta of 2.0... I played with KDE + only Gnome apps, BlackBox + KDE apps, and some other combos. Lots of experimentation, but no hard numbers - the apps that *you* run may lead to different results. I'd wait until 2.0 is final release anyway... having followed the alphas for some time, they get leaner each release - the developers seem to take a "make it *work* now, and *then* optimize it".

Free software was supposed to bring "obsolete machines" back to life, or at least to slower the rythm of obsolescence. So, yes, this matters. The situation is similar when it comes to speed.

Not to me. I run dual Celeron 350, Pentium II 450, and a dual Pentium 700 as my desktop machines (work, home experiment, home office in order). Every one runs KDE of all flavors with no problem in 64 megs of RAM. (When I got the new dual 700, I had to spread out memory... it was a month before I got some new memory).

In average, a Gnome/Gtk tool is ~30-40% smaller than its KDE/Qt counterpart.

Okay, are you taking memory footprint or size of the file on disk? And *how the hell do you compare*??? Sure, on disk, the kword binary (a nicely featured word processor) is 3428 bytes, and abiword (a nicely featured word processor) is 1053 bytes. Somehow, I don't think that's the end of the story. Even when they're loaded, is it with an empty document? A paragraph? An embedded spreadsheet, several multimegabyte images, and an mpeg?

I've always hated the "show me the numbers" game (because it so often can be balanced either way), so I'm just going to say - all apps run fine on everything I'm going to use 'em on. They all do what I need. I like the potential of KOffice, and I think stability and interoperability is much more of a priority (not *better*, not *worse*, just a higher priority) than many gnome apps.

KParts seems to work pretty well, yet it's just a smart ad hoc and proprietary hack.

*Bzzzt.* Name calling is no way to promote *or* disgrace. Linux is a "smart ad hoc and proprietary hack". So is the GPL, Bonobo and how I set up my pavilion at SCA events. "Hack" is an elegant solution to a problem in *my* dictionary. Everything is propritary to the people who use it.

Roughly, it replicates OLE/COM.

Not a bad thing, if done right... and Konqueror is *damn* fast. As fast as IE on a speedy winbox, and that is fast.

I won't tak about Gtk+ and Qt, yet there's also a lot to say about this.

And it's going to be shortly clear who is hiding spite behind a veneer of religious indignation: http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde&m=9664 2933010813&w=2.

--
Evan "Who uses KDE2 on BlackBox for a lean, powerful desktop" E.

This is very personal, so I can advice /. readers to check both the See GNOME in Action KDE2 Screenshots screenshot pages.

Warm GPL fuzzies.

Again very personal and hardly of any concern for _real_ end users. Real end users do not have a strong opinion on the GPL or QPL.

Neato software.

You can run either programs in either environment, and let me assure you that some KDE programs are neater than GNOME's. Try KDE2 and see how well Konqueror is doing. Or try Konsole in fullscreen mode. ;-)

KDE tries too hard to look like Windows.

Yes and no. Face it, the GUI of Microsoft isn't all bad. It's one of the best parts of Windows. Therefore KDE has taken many good aspects from it. And many aspects from CDE, BeOS, MacOS, etc. Check the screenshots again, I can assure you KDE does not have to look like Windows at all.

If you had been following this at all, then you would know that KDE 2.0 introduces a powerful object model called KParts. This is used in Koffice, and throughout KDE. You can find a detailed tutorial (a chapter from a forthcoming OPL book on KDE) at http://developer.kde.org/d ocumentation/tutorials/kparts/

Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears

That's what I thought - but apparantly, that's not true.

Although both projects are GPL'ed, Gnome can use KDE code (their html widget came from KDE 1.1), but KDE can't use Gnome code (the classic example is the threatened lawsuits over kgimp).

For more (admittedly one-sided and rather frustrated in tone) information, read this thread off of the KDE general mailing list.

--
Evan

I am by NO means a Linux expert, but isn't this the philosophy behind KDE? I was under the impression that part of the idea behind K is concerned with maintaining consistency in the UI. All K apps are supposed to have similar look and feel, yes?

Which brings up something else - isn't K the biggest memory hog for Linux as far as window managers go? Isn't Windows the biggest memory hog for x86 as far as OSes go? Why is it that highly standardized, highly consistent UIs seem to come packaged with inefficiency? Couldn't it be possible to design an efficient, consistent UI that didn't eat resources like crazy?

Hell, let's roll together a solution for all the problems with Linux's UI now, I say. Is there some project working on:
1) direct hardware access for 3D rather than going through X
2) consistent, simple, standardized UI that's easy to write apps for
3) a friendly, shallow learning curve for inexperienced users but with powerful configuration options behind it for the hackers among us
all in one?

Email me.
Don't trust anyone over 90000.

Try Konqueror in the latest KDE beta releases. You just might like it.

eg http://koffice.kde.org/faq/koffi ce-faq.html#KPARTS

--

They co-exist.
See http://www.kde.org/kde1-and-kde2.html.

They can coexist just fine. Check this link:

http://www.kde.org/kde1-and-kde2.html

-N.

Read this thread. An engineer at Sun has a page with the tweaks he needed to get KDE to work on Solaris. Note that the beta is from a week ago, so you may need to get new snapshots or CVS updates to get this to work. (Or you may not -- I have no idea.)

But if you have a look at their release schedule, you can notice that the release of Beta3 was planned to happen on August 24th. O.K., it is just 1 week late, I think it is one of the few projects which are only one week late.

It's not a dynamic protocol, and it's KMail-specific (whatever that means!). Yet, it could be used as part of a plan to move people from Exchange to a more open mail system.

If it can do that, then the same code could be adapted as part of a more general conversion system.

1. On another note, those who use KDE or KDE apps under another environment might want to look at ftp://ftp.us.kde.org/pub/kde/Incoming. Do you see what I see???? :)

Am I the only one who thinks the transparency is a cheap trick? KDE/Konsole have never had real transparency AFAIK. Is this going to change with KDE2, or did someone just load a tinted background picture into Konsole (as opposed to Konsole getting the picture from the desktop and auto-tinting and auto-positioning it)?

BTW, I use KDE and do get real transparency from Eterm; that's why I don't use Konsole.

In this image, we clearly see three folders in a browser window - one named Natalie, one named Portman, and another named StarWars. What can this mean? Obviously it means that osm is a KDE developer!

I found the release plan as of July 17 on the following site: http://www.kde.org/news_dyn.html

Current Status (as of July 17)
==============

3 days until the KDE 2.0 Feature Freeze
1 weeks until KDE 1.92 will be released
4 weeks until KDE 2.0 RC 1 will be released
7 weeks until KDE 2.0 will be released

Wow, less than 7 weeks until the expected roll out.

I'm ambivalent about introducing licensing issues into a discussion that's focusing on technical issues, but there's an interesting bit of news that I haven't seen mentioned outside of the kde-licensing list. Here's a post on a Debian mailing list in which RMS offers his view on linking apps to Qt. Basically he supports the view that GPL'd code like KDE, which is designed to link against a non-GPL library, should be considered to implicitly have permission to do so - and thus dosn't require any license modifications.

Now, there is still the issue of GPL'd code from outside sources, but this obviously removes 99% of the problem. So is Debian reconsidering, now that RMS has addressed their primary objection? Not really, as discussed in this kde-licensing thread.