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KDEvelopers on KDE Users

Posted by timothy on from the you-mean-we-have-users dept.

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."

3 of 179 comments (clear)

  1. Dennis E. Powell's Journalistic Integrity? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:well this shouldn't surprise anyone by MeNeXT · · Score: 3, Informative
    You make it sound that Apple did this overnight...I'd like to point out that OS X has it's roots in NeXT. If I'm not mistaken, that is over 10 year of trial and error befor Apple bought it. It was hard to get people to look at it let alone use it.

    --
    DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
  3. Re:problem no 1.: lack of tutorials and beginner d by friedmud · · Score: 3, Informative

    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