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Interview with David Faure of Mandrake & KDE
JigSaw writes: "OSNews features an interesting interview with David Faure, the french KDE developer who works for Mandrake Software. His code can be found on Konqueror, KFM, KWord and he is also the main bug hunter for KDE. David talks about KDE 3's enhancements and speed improvements, the future of KWord, the debugging tools under Linux, and even Gnome2, .NET, MacOSX and Mozilla."
...between GNOME and KDE. Despite what some Windows fans may claim, I don't think it's detrimental to have two leading desktop managers for Linux. As I see it, the competition is really pushing the two development teams to outdo themselves. Healthy competition -- as long as it does not translate into flame wars on the Internet -- is a good thing, and we're all the better for it. I mean, look at how the UI for Windows has evolved in the past five years (and I'm not talking about eye-candy here - yes, alpha channels are cool, but it does not add any kind of usability)...It seems obvious to me that MS could use a little competition on the desktop before its GUI stagnates further.
(Hmm..."stagnate further"...is that an oxymoron?)
Reminder: find a new sig
I think that the print side of Linux is still very very lacking in ease of use and setup. Theres really no reason for this, especially when I can install Mandrake and have a nice wysiwyg gui ask me a bunch of questions and things just work (for the most part). CUPS should just come with something this powerful itself (and yes, im aware of the web interface, but it lacks.. bad).
Tis better to be silent and thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt --Abraham Lincoln
Here is an interview that he with linux.org. A little outdated but still interesting.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=586
read this...
Try ROX and something like icewm or sawfish.
and programs like abiword and gnumeric are very speedy (without having to do the M$ trick of loading it into memory when your system starts).
when everything is working perfectly.. BREAK SOMETHING before something else FUCKS up!
but what's preventing many people from switching to Linux is the lack of more specialized applications. For instance, 3D modelling, audio/video editing, advanced scientific apps, accountancy apps...
This is very true. People talk about Linux 'taking over the desktop' which is good, but there is much more immediate niches to fill in other areas. They are good spot for Linux because the people doing that need a complete system, but don't need it to work with every other computer out there, and aren't worried about being able to buy the latest games etc. Printing is another one which he didn't mention but someone here did. Linux needs a better print system, and whoever is in a position to do it could probably even take a look at MacOS X for some very good ideas. 3D is getting the royal treatment and is a very good place for linux right now with XFS, ReiserFS, PRman, BMRT, Mental Ray, Maya, Shake, Softimage XSI 2.0, Houdini, and all sorts of high end graphics stuff, no 3D production studio is locked into windows or SGI anymore. Video and audio on the other hand, really need work. The video toaster ran on an Amiga for fucks sake, that should be proof that ultimate compatibility isn't needed and a self reliant system can do the job well. This is where I really see Linux taking off, is with distributions specifically made for different niches. They could come with all the libraries needed for the different programs you might run, and of course have all the free ones already installed. It will take a few startups to do something like this, however, and startups aren't in a good position right now.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
I see no speed difference between Gnome and Windows 2000 on my machine. Both are fast enough for me (I have an Athlon 900 with 640MB of RAM).
If you have an older machine, Gnome and/or KDE may be slower than Windows - but you can always use something like IceWM or Sawfish (without Gnome). Both are very fast and require little memory.
Reminder: find a new sig
Mr Quick, :(
if you can, PLEASE edit OUT the copy/paste you did on Slashdot of the OSNews article. The bandwidth problems we have is mostly when we have MANY and BIG images on our articles, NOT on articles like this. Please edit out our article from the Slashdot forum. It is a violation of our copyright. You should have asked us first...
Thank you,
Eugenia
What users REALLY want is translucent window backgrounds
They already have it. You're screen shot shows a transparent konsole. That's been around since 2.0.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Please edit out our article from the Slashdot forum. It is a violation of our copyright. You should have asked us first..
I'm sorry, but there's just a fine line here. If half the people out there can't read the article because it's Slashdotted, how can you benefit? Would you rather Slashdot not link you at all?
I don't know how many times I've had to read an article from a post because the site gets railed. Frankly, I'm glad there are people like Mr. Quick out there - otherwise I'd miss half the articles on this site.
Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
----- rL
I recently set up a epson stylus c60 for my g/f. It works great, but... She is on redhat 7.2, and I used printtool with the latest packages from the redhat site to configure everything.
It looks like when I print plaintext, the printer does a great job, printing using the black cartridge and doing it very fast.
For ANYTHING postscript (ie, web pages from mozilla, or text from abiword), the printer makes black by mixing color, even if there is NO COLOR on the page (hell, even if there is, if the text is black, print it with black ink, dammit!!! (it did this with the redhat postscript test page too). Is there a way around this stupid behavior short of creating a 'black-only' print queue?? Never mind that solution too, since many times I want color, but I want anything black to print using BLACK!
I am using the stp driver for the Stylus 760, since there wasn't a C60 specific driver listed. Would switching over to cups solve my problem? Is there a way to get this working with the current LPRng supplied with redhat?
>I'm sorry, but there's just a fine line here.
Indeed.
>If half the people out there can't read the article because it's Slashdotted.
This is the fine line. OSNews is *NOT* Slashdotted. Slashdot has linked us over *25 times* the last few months, and we were never down because of it. We are always prepared for Slashdot. We have the bandwidth needed for Slashdot's links and we delivered accordingly.
Each time I put a bigger article online, I calculate what we can handle and what not. If our bandwidth can't handle something, I just do not put it online, or I use one of our 4 mirrors (OSNews uses some mirrors for some of its images).
So, your excuse does not hold. At least in this case.
This is the fine line. OSNews is *NOT* Slashdotted.
I used the link. It worked. I read the article on your site. I wouldn't even know OSNews.com existed if it weren't for Slashdot.
If a site is down, I *immediately* check the posts to see if there's a copy there, which I then read. This is probably what most people do.
If a site *IS* Slashdotted, only a few thousand people have it in their cache to post before its gone for 10-12 hours or more. He thought you wouldn't have the capacity, so he posted it WITH FULL CREDIT. Unlike most rubes who are probably just karma whoring, he actually had a reasonable reason - even though he was wrong.
I'm defending him because I often use posted articles - because I don't have some "Slashdot was just updated with an article!" indicator. I can't beat those people - by the time I check out a site sometimes, it's down. But I only check the posted version of an article if the original is down. If the site doesn't go down, the post is usually modded down and disappears.
The truth of the matter is that Slashdot is a forum where anything goes for as long as Slashdot exists. The DeCSS code is here, along with other copyrighted materials. If you don't want to be linked on Slashdot (and most likely have your article copied by anyone, even though it is illegal), then tell the maintainers and I'm sure they won't link you
There's always going to be someone that will post your story to Slashdot. People can post anything to Slashdot. It's a crime and it sucks, but it's the truth - and it's permanent.
----- rL
The attention is the gift horse - free traffic. Without Slashdot there would be no traffic and half of us wouldn't have heard of OSNews.com.
It's like celebrities bitching about being famous and not having any privacy. You take the good attention with the bad attention.
I'm not justifying the copying, I'm saying that when attention comes, not everything is good and merry. Sometimes people take your article because they want to read it - especially those in the "everything on the 'Net is free" mindset. This happens to the big boys too and you hardly see them posting to Slashdot, discouraged.
Most people use the site link. I did. Big deal if the article is posted, who the heck browses at 0?? Am I the only one here who actually trusts moderators to do a good job?
----- rL
There is nothing wrong with competition. Its great that you can go and choose from all the different types of cars you can buy. However, incompatibility is bad. It's not like buying a Ford will limit you to using certain roads. Case in point. KDevelop is a far better IDE than Anjuta. Yet, Evolution is nicer than KMail. What to do? I'm not sadistic enough to run apps from both desktops (too un-asthetic), so I put up with Anjuta just to stay with GTK. The KDE/GNOME application landscape is rife with such choices. The base of GOOD Linux desktop applications is too slim to be divided up among multiple desktops. While I doubt there is anything that can be done about these multiple projects, but its a bad state of affairs nonetheless. Of course, none of this would be a problem if the desktop was in the X server, where ALL apps could use the same set of services, but apparently, nobody had heard of dynamic loading (to make the desktop a plug-in to the X server) when X was designed.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Subscribe to the mandrake club.
Alot of people claim to support open source but only a few thousand seem to be putting their money where their mouth is. Theres mandrake club, theres transgaming, and plenty of other ways to fund development of open source.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
There *is* a speed boost in KDE3 that delays loading the bookmarks until after the app is launched. For people like me (with 4000+ bookmarks), that might shave a bit of time off launch, but I don't really notice a problem.
BTW - one of the primary advances in KDE 3 and 3.1 is speeding everything up. That's about 20 days or so away.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
And the moral thing to do is to respect the wishes of the author. End of story. There is no "technical out", "legal arguement" or "that's life" to it.
If you want to behave in an immoral fashion, go ahead - you'll likely get away with it throughout your life. But don't try to justify... a quick "fuck you" to the author is more polite by simply being more concise, and states your position to all those around you.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Hmm, on my 300MHz/256MB machine (my 1.5 GHz Athlon is in the mail ;) Galeon running under IceWM absolutely crawls,
False. I'm on a P233 with 128Megs. Windowmaker.
I always use galeon and it's fine (except for rendering huge pages). Your "mistake" is creating new windows: Galeon has tabs, which work MUCH better than windows (faster, don't clutter the desktop as much). Opening new windows stresses a lot more stuff than necessary....
Do you have the source code to this true alpha-blended, updates-as-you-solid-drag-it-around transparency? Just a question. If so, good job getting it. If not, then you'll never pry it from Apple's grip.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
a quick "fuck you" to the author is more polite by simply being more concise, and states your position to all those around you.
I think you misread my post - go read it again. It was less of a "fuck you" and more like a "that's life on the Internet".
If you don't like the game, don't play it. I love the people and businesses that start using an open medium and then try to close it up and wonder why people won't accept it. *I'm* going to accept an author's wishes, but a heck of a lot of other people aren't simply because the Internet does not enforce such behaviour. I am not justifying their behaviour, I'm explaining WHY it exists.
OSNews.com could format their news in a dead-tree magazine and probably not have to worry as much about people stealing, because it's more time-consuming than just making a digital copy and it reaches less people, so it's not worth it. Web sites have to understand that while they have a legal right to their content, the morals of Internet users (and the rules of the sites people read, like Slashdot) aren't forced to coincide with legal rules. If they did, the Internet (and the sites it contains) would likely be less popular.
People like the Internet as a free medium. Don't be surprised when there's a backlash against anything that tries to take away that freedom.
----- rL
In the end, we're all free to do whatever we want - we just pay the penalties. That runs the gamut from murder to posting an article on Slashdot (yes, I said "runs the gamut", I'm not making a comparison). In things like ignoring authors wishes, it's unlikely that anybody will ever suffer legal action except in the rarest of cases. But the penalty is that if and when you author something, you've contributed to a culture that dosen't give a damn about your wishes.
Respect is lacking on the internet now. Has been for a little over a decade (interestingly, about the same time that Spam and commercial intrests have been in here).
People like the Internet as a free medium. Don't be surprised when there's a backlash against anything that tries to take away that freedom.
A freedom does not have to be used in all cases. Freedom of speech is an utterly vital concept, but the simple act of being polite and the property of respect seems to be getting lost in the rabid defense of "Information must be free".
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
If you really have to ask that, then you must have never hacked on a GPL'ed piece of software in your life. When you've got the source, you can do whatever you want with it, the sky's the limit. And just because you yourself can't think of anything clever to do, that doesn't mean someone else can't.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Respect is lacking on the internet now. Has been for a little over a decade (interestingly, about the same time that Spam and commercial intrests have been in here).
I don't think it's any co-incidence that commercial interest in the Internet sparked lack of respect. Like I said before, content makers were trying to make an insecure system secure, and only ended up alienating an audience that liked the "free exchange of information on the the Internet" idea.
So people disrespected companies who were new guys coming along and saying "ok, this is how the game is going to be played on the Internet now because we want to make money". No wonder people don't respect them - the companies haven't earned it if they act like that.
As the Internet flooded with more people, we (humanity) lost focus as to the purpose of the 'Net: an information source, not a commercial venue where you can buy ideal real estate in a domain name and sell books at close to cost price.
Of course, we have to justify the expense of all of this architecture. Governments and companies would not invest so heavily in the Internet if it was merely a free-for-all and had no commercial value. And we too take the good for the bad here: improvement in the network in exchange for pop-up, pop-under and pop-to-the-side ads and sites that require registration, more strict enforcement of copyrights (like, I can't copy you even if I do give credit).
But it would be nice if all of these commercial guys kept that in perspective when they use the Net to make money (or even to break even). There were always be a small population that will resist - if only because they can - to subtly spread freedom about the land. Robin Hoods of the Net, if you will.
I will not participate, but I agree with many of their points - and only wished there was a more constructive way to "fight back" against the commercialization of the Internet.
----- rL
I'm using tabs. Even then, creating a tab in Galeon takes several times longer than opening a whole new window (or three or five) in IE. After using Windows NT and BeOS for the last several years, I have very high expectations for OS speed, and few GUI apps on Linux cut it. Take, for example, ROX. Quite a fast little program. In BeOS, it would have been run-of-the-mill as far as speed goes. For god's sake, it was months before I even realized that the OS had a busy cursor!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Umm, a new window in Konq (new-window from file menu) takes longer than a new tab in Galeon and several times longer than a new window in IE6. Hell, just opening the options menu in Konq incurs a very noticible delay.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Have any benchmarks for that? First, half a second is a damn long time. Second, while IE6 will pop up windows as fast as CTRL-N will repeat, Galeon will make you wait for each one. I doubt its something with my install, since I've seen this weakness in EVERY SINGLE Linux distro I've ever tried, and FreeBSD too.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I get very snappy performace, and I use a stock SuSE 7.3 install. The only time I've ever gotten a sudden horrific degrade in performance was when I upped my resolution to 1280x1024 with three monitors. Dropping back down to 1024x768 or turning off one of the monitors (configuration-wise, not the button on the front) fixed it. I figured that it was an ATI-Matrox thing.
Other than that, I've gotten great "feel" and response on several different machines, mostly using SuSE of late.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
It makes me really happy to know that really soon, the Mac world will be able to say with pride "we have a network transparent windowing system that will allow you to display apps running on our platform on any other platform with a given server with complete transparency and no additional programming. Oh... and it's fully extendable too." Yes, soon. Any day now. Really.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Why not? If you want to throw the "Information Wants to Be Free" argument at me, be my guest, although it's pretty useless since I never made that argument and never will.
I never said you couldn't like the features of OSX. It's a great system with a lot of nice features. However, you are still bound and gagged by Apple. Want to run Aqua on non-Apple hardware? Not a chance in hell, as useful as this would be. Want to learn about how their features are coded so that you can gain understanding from them in an academic sense? No chance. Want to help speed up OSX (yes, the speed problems are in aqua) just to show all those naysayers on slashdot how fast it really can be? No chance.
And as for cookies, you can enjoy them the same way you can enjoy OSX, but if you wanted to actually do something with the cookies, you probably couldn't without the recipe. You could certaintly get another cookie recipe, which makes your example rather stupid, but for the sake of argument I'll assume that Nieman-Marcus is the only one that makes this particular kind of cookie... hell, we can even call it an AquaCookie if you'd like. Now, what do you do when Nieman-Marcus decides to stop making aqua cookies with Chocolate chips, which are your favorite kind? How about if start using peanut oil to make them, and you're allergic? You can't do much of anything without the recipe. Now, since this is the real world with a billion cookie-suppliers, you could simply go somewhere else. But this is the computer world that you're trying to make a point about, and in this world you simply don't have that kind of freedom. You have Apple, Microsoft, and UNIX. That's it.
So you can throw your sad little references to arguments I never made, and you can come up with your pithy little analogies, but the sad fact is that you, as an OSX user, are completely under Apple's thumb if you choose to stick with their OS. I am not. I am free to do as I choose, while you are a slave. A well treated slave, with plush couches and wonderful music... but a slave nevertheless. I hope you enjoy it, but I'm not running back to Apple no matter how slick their cage may be. It's not about information wanting to be free at all. It's about me wanting to be free, which is something you may never understand.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."