Slashdot Mirror
Five Years of KDE
Jacek Fedorynski writes: "Looks like KDE is five years old. Five years seems like a lot of time but just look how much they've achieved in this time." I think the hard part is just beginning - KDE has got all the basics down, and now they have to resist adding too much more crap.
KDE has got all the basics down, and now they have to resist adding too much more crap.
I think KDE team is doing their good job. What do you mean by "adding more crap"? Do you mean adding more apps into the window manager? Well, you can always only download kde-base and other necessary ones if you don't like KOffice, KDevelop, and other stuffs...
Meanwhile, I like the idea to integrating their office suite with KDE. That way, you can get consistencies in user interface so that Windoze users don't get too much shock on migration.
Moreover, they're getting better every release. More stable, speedier, and more usable to users. Five years to develop this brilliant stuff is just unbelievably short. Not even Microsoft can build their lousy Win3.1 to another lousy Win2K, that took them more than 5 years...
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
And after 5 years I'll bet most KDE users are using pretty much the latest version. Nearly 7 years after its release it is not odd to find Windows 95 still in use (about 100 of the 500 boxes I support are running 95), enough so software and peripheral companies still benifit from supporting it. Why is it still in use? For one, the price of upgrading all the software, secondly, the value of not replacing old systems for many orginizations. Comparing KDE and its five years of development and any five years of development in Windows history demonstrates the strenth of free software.
A company should have a focus - instead of trying to be all things to all people (MS == content provider/os maker/game station maker/you name it). KDE is a great example of what is possible when a project is not non-competitive, and focuses on providing one thing, in this case a desktop environment. Some might argue that KDE's focus is too broad. I don't use it that much, so I couldn't say.
Anyway, good work KDE people! Keep it up!
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
A) There are way less users of KDE than of windows
B) Users of KDE tend to be the admins of their own machine
C) Installs of KDE tend to be highly isolated compared to the mass installs you will find of windows at a corporation
Anyone who does custom work on their own (especially when there is OSD dogma pushing them forward) will of course upgrade as soon as possible. Corporations always move slower.
Ummm, Macintosh?
The QT libraries continue to evolve nicely, and thanks to Troll for GPL'ing the code.
Konqueror is an excellent browser product, and I consider it to be on par with the excellent Mozilla product.
KOffice is a competitve, well integrated product for people with moderate needs. I haven't had any problems yet I could not solve with KOffice.
KDevelop is the closest thing the Visual Studio on linux.
Other lesser-known product like Qunata, Kate and KXML are starting to show real promise. I would like Kate in particular to really catch fire like Emacs has over the years - its time for an editor that it totally integrated with its visual environment.
Its the integration that keeps me using KDE over GNOME, which I admit may have some stronger individual programs but just isn't stitched together like KDE is. Its amazing that this entire system is free and has source code available. I look forward to the next five years of this fantastic set of products.
I agree that KDE should resist the urge to add too much nonsense. Tighten up what is there. Keep it fast and sexy. Gnome is still slow and bloated. Don't give in to feature creep.
Otherwise, all you've got is winblows on Linux.
This is a really unfair comparison.
I couldn't agree more. There are very few (if any) paid KDE developers. Basically all of the work that went into producing KDE was done for free by people on their own time. Considering that Microsoft pays its Windows developers, they don't have to work another job at the same time, and there are quite a few more of them, I'd say it's even *more* remarkable that KDE has come as far as it has in such a short timeframe.
It's only software!
I agree that these five years worth of progress is very impressive. However comparing them to Microsoft's work isn't entirely fair. Microsoft was developing an Operating System, not just a GUI for it. KDE has the advantage of using somone else's GUI library to work with as a basis. Plus they don't have to worry about the complexities of Operating System's.
Don't get me wrong, i don't mean to not give KDE credit where credit is due...but we gotta be fair, comparing KDE to Windows is hardly an equal comparison.
They did, and it's called "Windows NT" and for the most part it still hasn't been done right. Take IIS for example. A web server written FROM SCRATCH (ie no legacy code at all), they could have learned from a couple of DECADES of Unix mistakes in writing secure software, but instead they decided to ignore it all and write what is effectively an SUID-root server process with SCADS of remotely exploitable holes. Microsoft are a lot of things, but "top notch programmers" are not one of them, unfortunately.
When KDE 2.2 came out, someone said that this 3 months of work was a bigger upgrade than MS's 3 years from 95 to 98. When I installed it, I agreed.
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
And calling KDE a mere GUI isn't fair either ;) Sure, the end result may often be a GUI, but the KDE project has produced much more than a toolkit.
Huh? C++ is the only popular standardized language that supports multi-paradigm, large scale, performant coding. C will always be there but for developing component architectures there are numerous reasons to go with C++.
KDE consumes huge amounts of resources and starts up lots of processes.
Blackbox is nice on starved boxes, but for anyone who has a PIII or higher, KDE sessions are quite useable.
The KDE/Qt licenses (GPL/commercial) restrict my ability
Wasn't QT GPL'd??
KDE is replicating an old paradigm--the Windows desktop; I don't think that's where the industry is going.
Huh? XP, OSX, Win2k, all are polishing up their WIMP interfaces. Even task-oriented systems like the PalmOS are being supplanted by general WIMP interfaces as people demand more functionality.
The KDE/Qt licenses (GPL/commercial) restrict my ability to create open source software (say, under BSD or LGPL licenses).
Wrong. All KDE libraries are licensed under the LGPL.
Qt is actually triple-licensed: GPL/Free Qt/Commercial.
Free Qt allows development under other "open source"-licenses than GPL.
and Apple did it before Microsoft
and Xerox did it before Apple
and Doug Englebart did it before Xerox (c. 1966??)
Actually, this is nonsense. Linus started Linux in Finland. Right. But it gained momentum only when it started to be developed on the Internet. Matthias posted his call for developers from Germany. True. But KDE was born on the Internet. From the very begin, KDE had developers in Germany, UK, USA, Australia,...
This is true for all big OS projects: They are truly international projects.
Uwe (uwe@polytechnic.edu.na)
Competition the sole purpose of open source software? No. I'm inclined to think world domination. :)
Seriously though, competition is just one of them. Freedom is another one. Bitchingly good code is yet another. Doing stuff just for the fuck of not getting bored yet another. Dodging the MS-tax yet another.
There are *lots* of reasons.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Well, that's (in my experience) not something girlfriends are typically afraid of. ;)
Well this wasn't Matthias Ettrich's first and only accomplishment. He also gave us the first and only usable frontend to latex.
I (and many other people!) swear by lyx for their scientific papers. It is absolutely great. Only after this did Matthias Ettrich start KDE.
First he created a GUI for the best OS text processing system, then he went on to create the best GUI for the entire unix OS!
Unlike some other guys (Miguel, Bruce, ...) he did not become a poster child of slashdot kids, but he deserves our gratitude for his great work towards a linux (and BSD) for the end user and on many desktops.
THANK YOU!
Moritz
I'm not sure if "modular" is the right word, but here is my gripe:
I installed KDE2 for the first time a few weeks ago and I love it. It's a great desktop and everyone who helped in its development deserves thanks. But when I decided that I wanted to upgrade KMail so I could have the new IMAP functionality, I found out that I can't upgrade just KMail. I would have to upgrade my entire KDE2 installation, which is no easy task for those of us who are new to it.
At least I have broadband. Imagine the poor guys on dialup that have to download all of KDE just to upgrade the mail client.
So for now I'm using Balsa which seems to get the job done. But I miss KMail... other than lacking IMAP support, the version I have is great (easy filtering, nice GUI, etc.).
And yes, you could claim that you just need to upgrade the knetwork package. But that requires other ones which require other ones. Following the dependency trail you end up installing the whole KDE system again. Don't you think you should allow upgrades of individual components?
-- null
First, could we stop doing arbitrary comparisons between Microsoft products and pieces of Linux software? It's pointless. The comparisons, as the previous post intended to point out, are hardly fair, since major chunks of the Free Software space were developed in spare time or for fun.
;)
Second, KDE does not compare to Windows 2000 or Win XP. KDE is a GUI layer on top of a Linux OS-- hell, it's not even entirely that-- since it needs X to run. KDE is also a bunch of applications from the superb (Konqueror) to the not-so-spectacular (Konsole would be a good example of something that could use more work). Win2k/XP (as I understand it) integrate the GUI and the kernel.
Third, calling Microsoft a groundbreaker is just a load of BS. They have never broken any ground that I'm aware of. I have yet to see a single feature on the MS machines I use five days a week that is truly original. In fact, I distinctly recall a point in time where I knew zero about running Windows, but managed to hum along nicely because I'd been using a Mac since 1987. And even still, using the eye-pleasing Liquid theme for KDE, my KDE/Linux experience is a lot more Mac-ish than Windows-ish.
All that said, KDE is my GUI of choice. I'm in the process of learning C++ simply so I can write applications that work with Qt/KDE (yeah, I know they have "bindings" in Python and a couple other scripting languages, but I think it's time to learn C++ anyway). The GUI I have in front of me is simply the nicest looking, most functional (in terms of easily customized and sensibly constructed) interface I think I've ever used. If I could change any one thing, I don't know what it would be. Maybe a better terminal emulator and a KDE port of emacs.
I do not have a signature