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KDE 3.0 beta 1 is out
From the development team who tries to break every development speed record (last month they released KDE 2.2.2) comes KDE 3.0 beta 1, with lots of new features, new QT (3.0.1). It is beta 1 so expect crashes. You can find release notes and download locations over . A full feature list of whats planned to be on KDE 3.0 is also available (hmm, quite a big list) and some screenshots are available here. Please read the README files for your favorite distribution before installing the files as those packages are not replacing the KDE 2.2.X binaries (if you have it installed).
The feature list URL is incorrect. The right one is this
Don't Panic
I believe that this is the first KDE "release" where KPilotDaemon supports USB-based palm devices (such as Visors). Anyone know if there are meaningful conduits using the archeitecture, though?
Solution to blink tags: wrap them in another blink tag, with a javascript delay loop, so they cancel each other out
I've mirror'd the screenshot page here. Included are also the full size pictures of the screenshots. Enjoy. Mirror Link
I am Jack's HTTP Server
That's what I first hoped. That Slashdot had finally started to mirror URLs they link to, to protect other sites from the rampant bandwidth rape which comes with a mention on /.
Alas, it was only a typo...
KWin
magnetic borders for window resizing, gallium
At last! I'm so sick of gluing my windows in place, and the glue makes the screen blurry.
Hold on, don't magnets make the screen dark and erase the hard drive?
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
I have been part of the KDE team for a few years now, and slow development is certainly not something which I have experienced.
Development is not always about graphical updates to the interface - and KDE 3.0 encompasses some architectural and some extended functionality.
We are all (KDE and GNOME) evolving fine, and if you are concerned about it, why not help?
--- Jono Bacon - http://www.jonobacon.org/ Writer - Web Developer - Musician
What did you expect? Animated icons? fancy colors? A new task bar?
... .If it aint broke, dont fix it!
There is this old saying
What is wrong with the GUI elements of KDE 2.2? And why should they be changed in 3.0?
Microsoft needs to change the visual appeal with each new version of Windows, because tahts the only thing that catches the user's attention. Its a pity you are comparing the 'eye candy' of every new release with the real work that is done in newer version of Gnome and KDE.
Think about it...
Don't Panic
I have been very excited about KDE since the latest version (2x) series came out. Can anyone explain what the 3.0 series is going to offer? Some of the technical details of the lists will go over my head.
A few people have been complaining here that KDE 3.0 looks the same as KDE 2.x. I just wanted to clear a few things up:
- First of all, KDE 3.0 is largely an architectural upgrade - we have moved to the new Qt 3.x series, and this needs to be reflected in KDE 3.x. The Qt 3.x series has a lot of bug fixes and additional features such as database connectivity, better handling of data structures and the like - this increased stability is passed on natively to KDE 3.0.
- In terms of interface updates, KDE 3.0 will see some updates but bear in mind that this update was aimed at primarily porting the codebase to Qt 3.x. Any additional interface updates will be added as the need arises - we always like your suggestions and bug reports are always welcome.
- KDE 3.0 is largely about increased functionality - examples include better JavaScript, a more integrated Konqueror, new modules such as the KDE Educational Module, the font installer, kernel compiler etc. These things are really likely to appear in 3.1 and further releases.
- For those of you who are gonna bitch and moan about KDE, GNOME, XFree86, Kernel, Mesa etc...why not just help to correct the things you don't like. You don't need to be a coder to help ny project - *everyone* can help an open source project.
Please be patient folks and keep those bug reports coming in - we value your help.
Jono Bacon
--- Jono Bacon - http://www.jonobacon.org/ Writer - Web Developer - Musician
I'll come straight and say it... it looks like KDE is pulling some considerable distance between GNOME and itself. Look I have a lot of respect for the GNOME people... anyone who donates their time to such a massive complex system such as a user enviroment deserves a round of golf claps. The fact is though is that I used to be a GNOME user. And then one day I accidently* logged into KDE 2.2.X (whatever is with RedHat 7.2) and was blown away by the speed and grace. If linux ends up on the desktop in it's present form (X sucks but thats a different story), then most likely it'll be KDE that everyone thinks is linux. They seem to have the perfect model right now... release quickly and update often. Quite impressive really, considering how much shit goes into a project of that magnitude.
* - About the accident... usually I install both enviroments on my machine so I can use apps from both (I always liked KDE's media player and Kmail).
Basically I just always ignored KDE and then one day was checking out what windows managers was available and forgot that I had highlighted KDE and logged in. The rest is history... haven't gone back since.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
I notice that the trolls have already defeated the Slashdot [link.url] thingies though, take a look at the AC replying to your post with the google.com kde.gif link. It fools both Slashdot and IE, if you mouseover it says it's a link to google. Amazing. To discover the trick, you have to use the "Copy Shortcut" command and paste it into your URL bar. Think what creative energies like that could do, if they were turned to the light! Think of the programs that could be written with talents like that! And yet whatever sad person thought that up sits here at Slashdot finding ways of fooling a few people into seeing the wrong website, until the post is modded into oblivion 2 minutes later. It truly is sad...
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Apple's interface hasn't changed for 10 years (until OS-X). It was just good, people were used to it. The interface doesn't need to change every year (like Windows seems to suggest). On the contrary.
I think the KDE interface is getting near perfect (as far as look&feel is concerned). Making changes just confuses users and adding ever more bloat (like the WinXP themes) is counterproductive.
As for myself, I have been using bare X11/twm for the past 15 years and have no reason to change that. It does the job (for me, admittedly not for everyone), I'm used to it.
It is sad to see how many people even in the Open Software camp seem to be infected by the Microsoft idea of never ending "upgrade" cycles.
If your in the UK and need a fast download of KDE, or just about any other download, try http://www.mirror.ac.uk/ or ftp://ftp.mirror.ac.uk/ http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/ unstable/kde-3.0-beta1/
ftp://ftp.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/u nstable/kde-3.0-beta1/
One thing that I really would like to see is a better integration of Gecko in Konqueror. I know it's already possible to switch rendering engine, but it's highly unstable in my experience.
Now here's an example of an area in which many of the largest open source projects (Mozilla, GNOME, KDE) could collaborate, benefit from each other's work and find a common standard - the HTML rendering engine. Imagine the Konqueror, Galeon, Mozilla and Nautilus teams putting their efforts behind Gecko development...it would be one important step towards a more unified Linux desktop. Unified as in common standards and shared components, not unified as in lack of choice.
Hello, my name is Robert Lerner, and I pronounce Lernux as "99% cpu"
The biggest problem with KDE (IMHO) is the unresponsive feeling - especially when starting up programs. Are there any changes to this in KDE 3.0?
I know it is mainly something about a compiler/linker issue, but what is the progress in that area?
> KDE is a good product, don't get me wrong. But why does it have to look just like MSFT's products?
The point is, it doesn't have to, it just can.
If you don't like the style, change your style engine. If you don't like the theme, change the theme. KDE is totally customizable.
When I first used WinXP for half an hour or so I was really impressed. I though, 'this looks nice, it has more of the stability of win2000, it's really enjoyable to use and well integrated'. Then I actually began to use it properly, and discovered that it makes itself look more powerful than it really is. There are no advanced features behind the pretty GUI. When I'm back in KDE or GNOME I feel like I have a great deal of power - and I do. The options are there to do various different useful functions that just aren't present in windows.
Windows copies other people's innovations and claims it as it's own. Then people like you think that Microsoft came first and claim that linux is copying. I consider KDE more advanced than the windows GUI, not catching up (there are some deficiencies in KDE compared to Windows, but overall it is better).
Hmmm. Well, releasing screenshots certainly invites the user to view the 3.0 release as primarily visual. You can hardly fault the original post for that. But I would make two other points. First: yes, the GUI is lacking in some areas, and could stand some fixing. For example, whenever Gnome fans throw up a screenshot of Gnome and say "looky looky, we look lots better" -- well, as a KDE fan, I have to admit that Gnome does look better. But that's only the icons. Gnome has a better artist working for them somewhere, and KDE could stand to find a master artist of their own. That could be part of KDE 3. As an aside, I prefer KDE because KDE has better widgets. Ever looked at a row of checkboxes in KDE? It's obvious what's checked. Now try that with Gnome. It's not at all obvious to me. KDE has better scrollbars, too. Oh! And one other thing: KDE's default titlebars make great use of "grip" (the bumps that you can "grab" to move the object around), but the rest of KDE pretty much ignores grip. It shouldn't. When you resize a window, the bottom right corner should have grip bumps. Any area that you "grab" that has room for grib bumps should use it, it's a useful visual cue.
But there is another aspect to your post that could stand to be responded to. If 3.0 is not going to be about eye candy, and is instead about the underpinnings of the product, then what about the big criticisms that get lobbed at KDE? Will 3.0 find ways to seriously optimize its code for speed/performance gains? I just skimmed the to-do list, and didn't see speed getting much of a priority. What about reliability? I see that Qt 3 is supposed to deliver some of this. What about the built-in database that comes with 3.0? Can that be used to bring some of the BeOS file management features to Linux? And let's merge the GUI stuff with the speed issues: ever moved your mouse around the screen while an app was launching? Notice the very cool animated icon "attached" to your mouse arrow -- the icon of the app, to let you know it's launching. Well, aside from how cool that feature is, it's also slow -- you can move the mouse arrow all the way across the screen, and the poor animated launch icon will be halfway behind. I'd like to see that fixed. In fact, I'd like to see it completely integrated with the mouse arrow, transforming the arrow icon for those few seconds, to make it visually more cohesive.
To sum up: speed, reliability, speed, reliablity, icons, speed, reliability. That's what I'd like from KDE 3.
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Well, I just installed the beta on my SuSE 7.3 workstation, without issue. KDE3 is much snappier, it feels much mpore crisp when opening apps, windows, etc. It has apparently better font rendering. Kpilot, while unfinished, I can tell is much improved in terms of feature and interface, next up is to actually test it with my USB Visor. Konquerer file manager has much more solid support for multimedia previewing/viewing within the file manager window. As a browser, Konquerer still crashed and burned on my Chase banking web site, so Mozill 0.96 is still the way for me. It seems faster as well in KDE3, albeit initial startup is still a bit slow. I've been using Evolution 1.0 for mail, and it still works fine in KDE3. I still cannot cut and paste an URL from an Evolution email into my Mozila browser. KMail looks a bit more fine tuned and launches quicker than before, I have yet to test its use though. KDE3 it seems is primarily an architecture shift to QT3, but the results are impressive in the feel and response. Visually, while a bit cleaner, its the same KDE that you already either like or not.
Check out the icons at kde-look.org
I noticed on the list of features that they are going to extend the keyboard shortcut mechanism to support more extended keyboard shortcuts and enable them to make DCOP calls from shortcuts. Why is this so important to me? I have a Gateway multimedia keyboard, which, for the "special" buttons sends 3-4 keycodes per button, the windows key combined with at least two letter keycodes and other modifier keys depending on the button. Until now I haven't seen a clean way of getting these keys to work (the few apps concerned with this are limited to single keycodes...). Now I can bind this to applications. Now, is there a DCOP enabled mixer that supports XOSD, or am I going to have to write one? The KDE mixer should suffice. Can't wait to get off of work and try this sucker out, for this stupid little feature alone.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Also, it's interesting but maybe the kde folks have been holding themselves to a very high standard *because* of that bug. Maybe it just forced them to write code as slim as possible and when that bug is removed it will really pay off :)
Liberty.
I don't really know why you want Gecko so much
A number of sites I visit won't work under Konq, but work perfectly under Galeon. That plus the fact when I've got 1/2 dozen browser windows open and the software dies with Galeon it retrieves them upon next boot but with Konq I lose them all and have to start hunting for them all over again. Hence my switch. These two factors oughtweigh by a wide margin any slight increase in speed.
In fact I now prefer Galeon to IE. The first reason is the tabbed browsing option. Secondly, my IE locks up the parent page until its pop-up window has loaded. This makes browsing very frustrating under Windows. Now if only plugins installed automatically...
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Yes. At first sight, KDE looks a lot like Windows. KDE is supposed to make the switch from Windows to Linux easy.
However, there are true advancements. Those are not eyecandy. You won't see them at first sight. But if you begin to use KDE, you'll soon love them.
F.e. there is the kio layer. Any KDE program can load from and save to any file service. Open a script in your IDE directly from a FTP server and save it back to the server. kio accepts plugins. If you write a Freenet plugin, any program can load from and save to freenet.
And this is just one example. Look at how programs and components can be integrated using kparts. Or at how nationalisation is done.
That's all. Hope I didn't ask too much
That's funny, I only have 256 MB of RAM, so why doesn't my HD swap when I use KDE?
[jharris@servo jharris]$ free
total used free
Mem: 255516 199036 56480
Swap: 265032 0 265032
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
SVG Icons, SVG widgets, 60fps animation on widgets and icons, genie effect,motion blur, alpha channeling,morphing animation windows widgets and menus, full use of Gforce special effects on the GUI is how you can help the interface. Theres no excuse why we shouldnt take advantage of graphics cards that can render millions of polygons per second and do all of these effects i mentioned with ease. And when you have 1-2-3-4ghz CPUs and 512-1gig of ram it makes absolutely no sense why you should be worrying about your resources.
Its time to update the GUI, and make use of this new hardware. Why have 80s style GUI and software on 2000+ hardware? Really the GUI and software hasnt changed much since the 80s except for games, development tools and $10000 photoshop like tools.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
So you're claiming your KDE needs 450MiB memory? Wow, I wonder how I managed to run it on a machine with just 96MiB RAM and 128MiB swap (and a lot of free memory was still available).
Seriously, understanding 'top' or 'ps' output is not that simple as it seems. The formula for computing used memory from numbers given by 'top' is : Used_memory = mem used + swap used - cached - buff . Now go again to measure your memory usage, and if your number is still higher than 100MiB for plain KDE, there's something wrong with your install. For me, the number for a booted computer with plain KDE started is less than 50MiB (I'm not sure how much exactly and I'm not going to close all apps and logout just to find out).
Also, important portion of KDE's memory usage comes from gcc/glibc/binutils inefficient handling of C++ libraries ( see http://dforce.sh.cvut.cz/~seli/en/linking2 ). This is being worked on.
It would be nice if this got moderated up. I'm getting tired of repeating it.
Well, if you want maturity and stability, just ignore the new stuff. Distros like debian stable make this really easy for you.
I think it's a clear advantage to have both new, possibly bleeding-edge stuff and old, probably rock-solid stuff available.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
But why does it have to look just like MSFT's products?
...
Because, like it or not, the MSFT products it looks like (i.e. not XP, which out of the box is horrible IMHO) do a really good job at making day to day tasks simple. There's more than 20 years of research behind that (Xerox PARC ripped off by Apple ripped of by MSFT), so why should the KDE-team spend unnecessary time redoing that research?
This is of course not to say that they shouldn't if they feel they can come up with a better solution, but the one they have now works well enough, so
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
a) KOffice gets a Word and Excel Input/Output doc filter which works reliably.
While I don't have much trouble with Word/Excel doc import (big fancy ones yes, but straightforward ones no), I don't know why straight RTF isn't supported in KWord. Crazy.
b) Konqueror speeds up - I loved it and then its startup time seemed to slow down drastically.
I hear that Konq has totally rewritten their JScript interpreter. I hope the hell they fixed the popup problem... popups normally get a prompt action for me (i.e. "this site is trying ot use a popup. Allow?") but for Flash sites the popup never ever gets prompted, which drives me insane. Especially when 8 or 10 windows pop up because the JScript interpreter doesn't provide the right answer. UGH!
Speedups will be good though. I wonder if they were able to speed up any further than the 2.2.2 and prelinking. Startup time is still ugly for most KDE apps. That is one thing I noticed right away. Every time I start up xchat, it's onscreen almost immediately after I click the button. Konq, KWord, KMail... ~3-5s pause. Prelinked. On a Cel300 @1024x768x24 with 256M of RAM and no swap. Shouldn't be this slow.
That works if konqueror *crashes*, but if it just hangs indefinitely, and requires an xkill (CTRL+ALT+ESC), that kills all the konqueror windows (at least in my experience).
Try http://hints.linuxfromscratch.org/hints/kde.txt instead...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I have yet to be able to render java pages correctly with konqueror. The cnn.com/QUICKNEWS pages never renders the headlines correctly. I would very much appreciate if this was fixed or if someone could tell me what my dumbass maneuver has been. I am using FreeBSD with KDE, and have built the jdk. It still will not use it correctly even though the java option is set correctly in the konqueror options.
Either give it away or get top dollar, but never sell yourself cheap.
...or (horror of horrors) compile glibc yourself with Jakub Jelinek's prelinker patches, if you can find them (they seem to have disappeared off the net).
The dynamic linking of libraries is by far the biggest cause of KDE program startup slowness. A big desktop environment has a lot of shared libraries to link to an application at runtime, it's expensive computationally (particularly for C++ libraries), and the way the glibc dynamic linker works right now, it's done every time an application is started or a library is dlopen()'ed (such as when embedding a KPart). It can also cause swap thrashing on machines with limited memory (the entire library must be read into memory to perform the address relocation, only after relocation can the VM drop pages of the library) and obviously, disk contention between this swapping and the application loading can slow things down even further.
What the prelinking patches do (don't get them confused with the objprelink hack which, while useful, is not a long-term or efficient solution) is move the linking time from application startup time to system startup time. A tool runs at system startup, immediately after ldconfig runs, which loads and relocates libraries in its search path, then notes down the relocation addresses. Then, later, when the dynamic linker is asked by an application to load a library, it simply uses the values that were cached earlier. Any libraries that have not been 'prelinked' are simply relocated as normal. The linker also makes sure that non-prelinked libraries are not relocated into the same address space as any prelinked libraries that are not currently loaded.
The next major version of glibc will hopefully include library prelinking by default, but I haven't been following glibc development closely enough to know for sure. Let's keep our fingers crossed. Note that it's not just KDE that will benefit from this, Mozilla will gain a great deal (it, like KDE, is mostly C++ code split into many shared libraries) and even GNOME will benefit a little - doing the dynamic linking on C libraries still costs processor time, although it's much less than with C++ libraries.
The next biggest cause of KDE startup slowness is icon loading - currently every app has to search through the entire set of available icons on startup in order to load the icons that it needs. Not very efficient. Given that KDE has several hundred icons available already and that is likely to increase over time, it needs a solution. Waldo Bastian is apparently working on an icon server for KDE 3.0, which will do that search once, cache the data, and then respond with appropriate icons when an app asks, rather than forcing the apps to do it themselves every time. I'm hoping it also makes it easier and faster to do image compositing (overlays and so forth) with icons.
To sum up: glibc 2.3 together with KDE 3.0 should make a huge improvement to app startup (and KPart embedding) time, and, assuming the KDE guys are tight with their code, may even make KDE 3.0 usable on machines that couldn't effectively run KDE 2.x.
I like it so far, but the idea of dropping half a grand on Redmondware sort of defeats my purpose in buying a non-Wintel machine. Trolltech's site says that Qt3 comes in a Mac OS X version, but I'm fuzzy on how much of KDE is Qt "skeleton" vs C "muscle." Could someone make a SWAG at how much effort would be involved in creating a working KOffice for the Mac?
"Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing."
I love how you pointed out a few neat features, but I want to add some. The ability to turn everything off. that neat animated applet is launching icon next tothe cursor? I dont want that, I want it turned off. I want a way to make KDE as fast as blackbox or as bloated as XP. if you add a feature it should be mandatory to code in a DISABLE_FEATURE checkbox or function somewhere.
I'm all for eye-candy and coolness (how about rendering the whole desktop in OpenGL with alpha shading and bump mapping? that would look awesome!) but forcing things down peoples throats that are not needed is plain silly, and is a trademarked Microsoft tactic. it has no place in any open source code.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
blackbox
afterstep
windowmaker
just about everything other than gnome and kde look completely different and act completely different.
My favorite is afterstep, small, super fast, and written in C instead of that damned C++ (because I know C and personally Hate C++, actually blackbox is awesome example of how C++ can fly!)
If your window manager is larger than 4 megabytes, it is no longer a window manager, it's an application integration environment.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Solutions to the problem are in the works:
objprelink
ELF prelinking by Jakub Jelinek
See a discussion on why Gnome is having similar problems
I concede that the browser icons in the Gnome screenshot look as sucky as KDE's icons. But look at Gnome's folder icon. Look at Gnome's icons in the task bar (the larger icons, probably 48x48 pixels). They're beautiful. The shading behind the folders, the gradient on the folder itself, these are gorgeous icons. In the words of Steve Jobs, these are "lickable" icons. Don't underestimate the power that beauty has to make a work environment more livable and comfortable. KDE needs this.
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...And my vote, not having seen all the other themes, would be that yes, this should be the default icon set. It's far stronger than the existing one, but it isn't flashy or obnoxiously kewl. It's just great. The real experts (I'm just a guy who cares enough to make a post or two, not an expert on the system) should decide if iKons falls apart as you drill down into obscure areas (are there icons for everything? or just enough to make the desktop look good?). Or, if it really shines all the way through. If so, I'd be seriously considering this "pre-built" solution.
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Huh? that is plain false. You can run as many kde
sesssions per machine as you want
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Umm, that's total bullshit. The STL (SGI's version anyway) is actually quite fast. It is certainly faster than most reimplementations of the standard data structures. Also, templates often speed up code rather than slow it down. Take, for example, a generic linked list structure. Say there is a Walk() method that lets you iterate over the list. Without templates, you pass a function pointer to the data structure and you incur the cost of an indirect function call for every item you iterate over. If each call does relatively little (as most comparison functions for generic data structures do, for example) then you totally blow code performance. With templates, however, the compiler can inline these small functions into the template, and you get rid of the overhead of the indirect call. As for virtual functions:
A) The STL doesn't use virtual functions. It's template-based.
B) Its just an indirect call. For most non-trivial functions the cost is negligible.
Now, don't get me wrong. C++ can lead to bloated code. However, it can also lead to very fast code. C++ pushes a lot of work on the compiler. The compiler can often do things to make high-level code perform as well as dirty/hackish low-level code. The template data structure I mentioned above is nice and clean. Yet, it is just as fast as writing seperate linked-list data structure for each object type (which even the Linux kernel doesn't do!).
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Honestly, KDE has few features that aren't present, for example, in WinXP. If Microsoft can make WinXP run as fast as Win2K (which is blazingly so), and decrease their already low app-startup times significantly, KDE must be doing something wrong. It's ironic, though. The Linux kernel blows away the Win2K kernel, especially in terms of process creation/switching times. XFree86 4.1 (with NVIDIA drivers anyway) is just as fast as the Win2K GDI. Yet, the GUI user experience on KDE or GNOME blows in terms of responsiveness. (Don't get me wrong, I love Linux, but I have to wait several seconds for Galeon to pop up a new tab on my PII 300MHz. IE can open whole new windows as fast as I can push CTL-N!)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
You couldn't really use templates in KDE, since the virtual functions are essentially set up as a clean callback method. A draw callback, for example, isn't implemented as function pointer, but overriding a virtual Draw() method in a view object. The two techniques are so similar at the low lever, however (deference a pointer and call the function found there), it should be possible to make KDE's load performance no slower than GTK+ or Xt's.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
because I know C and personally Hate C++, actually blackbox is awesome example of how C++ can fly!
That's because Blackbox did C++ right. C++ done right is awesome. C++ done mediocre is really mediocre. And C++ done bad is abysmal.
Unfortunately, the foundations of Qt were made while the C++ standard had not yet been finalized. And it is still portable to non-standard C++ compilers. Because of this there are a few hacks, quirks and workarounds that aren't good C++ and will never be good C++. Qt is a great library, and there are valid reasons for its kludges, but they still remain kludges.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Umm. Okay. Well, since you posted as an anonymous coward, I have no idea if you're a KDE developer or just some nerd like me who has an opinion. But I'm going to go out on a limb and say that regardless of who you might be, if you really think the best solution is to let Gnome be the superior tool here, well okay. I disagree with you, but you're free to have an opinion.
I don't see any conceivable way you could say that Gnome's icon of a folder is less usable simply because it looks better. That's absurd.
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Not according to the auhor, although he could certainly be lying. At this page (about 5 screens down) he writes:
If true, then I have no problem with this. Blatant copying is not legal, but "clean room" reimplementations have been upheld in court -- this is what Apple did to Xerox, and what Windows did to Apple.
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