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KDEvelopers on KDE Users
An anonymous reader writes: "KDE developers spent some time this week on their mailing list discussing what motivates them and the extent to which user concerns figure in their decisions. Dennis E. Powell's column on Linux and Main draws excerpts from the exchange, in which he participated, and says that he believes a lot more of this kind of discussion is needed."
It's good that the KDE people are doing research into such things, as companies with successful GUIs like Apple and Microsoft have done.
Although with what little funding they have, it is difficult to do much more than this sort of 'market research' polling. Actual experiments set up to monitor GUI usage and human reactions may be more difficult to organise.
Still no woody, so still no KDE3 debs.
Users tend to forget that there are many different views on how a project should progress. Just because a developer does not implement a certain feature the way the user wants (or at all), the developer isn't "ignoring" the user. Developers have to find one way which pleases him and the users the most. This necessarily means that the implementation will deviate from almost all individually preferred implementations. Guess why software has so many tweakable parameters, many hidden deep inside configuration files or registry entries. Users who fail to accept that the developers are not on a mission to please every individual user are adding frustration to thin-skinned developers' lives and further the "I don't care about users" attitude. Constructive criticism is always welcome, but people who want their personal pet feature implemented for free should try to put themselves into the position of the developer.
I personally wouldn't trust anything written by DEP about KDE. He has been known to go on personally bashing KDE developers and contributors in his articles, instead of presenting real arguments. This seems to be attributed to some kind of an ancient personal hostility DEP has towards the KDE developers, which may be traced back to a political background, no less.
You see, about two months ago, DEP was behind an editorial on Linux And Main that blamed the KDE developers for promoting antisemitism and nazism (!), believe it or not.
Here's an excerpt from that article:
It seemed as if the mystery had finally been solved.
The mystery is what the "K" in KDE stands for. There have been various explanations offered over the years, but nothing has "stuck."
For a time last week, one might have had reason to suppose that "K" was chosen because it is the letter that most resembles a goose-stepping soldier, arm raised in a salute not widely seen since the dark days of the early 1940s.
You can read the whole thing here.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
This has already been adressed here on Slashdot by Alan Cox.
Slashdot | Feature:Cathedrals, Bazaars and the Town Council
... by Slashdot reader, and all around grand master hacker Alan Cox
Alan Cox has submitted a piece he calls "Cathedrals, Bazaars and the Town Council". It addresses a lot of really important issues for those involved with distributed software development. It's definitely a must read.
As a KDE User and member of the French translation team. I want to react to the mud hurled by Dep to the KDE team just to create some traffic for his website.
I had contact with several key members of the KDE developper team (David Faure and Laurent Montel from Mandrakesoft and Stefen Westerfeld of Arts fame) and I found that they were nice people, very ready to listen to my point of view.
I'm one user amongst many others, I'm not waiting for them to code my own private shopping list of desired new features next week. But, I certainly don't feel an underclass citizen in the KDE Community.
As a French man , I also want to react against the shameful anti-German utterings of Dep. If KDE is succeeding, it is because it has endorsed some very German qualities : technical excellence, good organizational skills, decision by consensus, a low ratio of overinflated egos, a strong sense of common good and a respect for disagreement.
The KDE project is one example among many others where you can see how much the young generation in Germany is different from what their grandparents were.
Charles
As a new developer for KDE I can completely understand your point of view. Just last week I decided it was time to just dig my heels in and learn to use kdevelop and QT. I am already very fluent in C++ and loathe C (let's not start a fight, these are just my feelings towards the languages) so I thought KDE and QT would make a perfect fit.
It took me about 2 days of hunting a pecking to get it right, and hopefully here in the next couple of weeks I am going to write a complete, up to date tutorial for beginners with kdevelop. My largest problem was trying to understand how QT designer fit into the project, and how to get ui files to place nicely with everything else.
My suggestion on learning this stuff is to go to www.trolltech.no . TrollTech's docs on QT3 are great. I started off just reading about QT and going through the tuturials that DONT use QT designer - that finally clued me in enough to what was happening to be able to write some lines in Kdevelop (BTW - I never use the default class that is created by the wizard - it just doesn't make sense, I do, however, leave it there for now) - and get some basic GUI stuff up and running.
Then from there I just used the kdevelop docs (in the books tab - if you don't have them, you need to get them!!! They are great!). There was one document that said "Using QT designer with kdevelop" or something like that - and that happened to be just the little nudge in the right direction that I needed - and now I am almost done with my first app and will probably be releasing it next week. (It is a graphical front-end to Gentoo's rc-update program for anyone interested).
Just keep looking through google - and just tell yourself your not going to stop looking until you figure it out and you will get there. The rewards are definitely worth it!
Derek