KDE Developer Sirtaj Singh Kang Interviewed

highwaytohell writes "Sirtaj Singh Kang is a KDE developer and an official spokesman for KDE in Australia. In this interview conducted by the Sydney Morning Herald he talks about how the KDE project manages to maintain its hierarchy, where he sees KDE in the future, Linux portability issues and the relationship between Trolltech and KDE developers. The article gives a good insight into how maintainers and developers work to maintain one of the more popular window managers for Linux. Certainly worth a read."

Comments

My gripe with KDE (& Gnome)

[Anonymous Coward]

Athlon Thunderbird 850mhz
512mb ram
Matrox G400 video card
Up to half a dozon clicks to open a folder because KDE is so slow and bloated.

I've got no desire to troll, but I know you'll mod this as such.
I just don't have will to upgrade my box every 8 months to the latest whiz-bang equipment just to have KDE (or Gnome for that matter) running at a speed faster than Windows ME on a Pentium. Improving speed and stability are far more important than adding features at this time - I think this needs to be realised.
I think for developers with 2gb of ram and the latest 533mhz system bus, it's easy to forget that all this fun-to-make eye-candy is not what users with sub $3,000 computers want. I'm not sure why I'm writing this. I'm just disillusioned with the direction I've seen Linux's desktop usability efforts go.

Fundamental differences will always divide Win/KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

The trouble with trying to demand that KDE and Gnome be as fast as Windows (or Mac, or Atheos for that matter) is that those window managers are built on top of X Windows whereas the GWE subsystem of Windows is built directly into the kernel.

This means higher overhead for GUI work on those X-based windows managers because of the extra library calls and extra complexity that X offers. There is a lot to be said for the stuff that is in X, but much of it is simply not needed by most desktop users (remote windowing, as the most grievous example).

Re:How about de-branding KDE?

[Synn]

But parading a brand around is exactly what KDE should be doing. For one, it generates attention for KDE and Linux in general.

If I hear about a KMail update, I know it's KDE related. If I see a lot of K-this and K-that apps, I think about KDE more.

Also it's easier for your Joe Average to grasp the idea behind a brand. They see Windows and they think about everything that comes with Windows. They see Apple and they think about the Apple experience(whatever that is, but hip people say it's cool).

MS and Apple aren't dumb and KDE trying to brand itself like they did isn't a waste of effort.

Re:Fundamental differences will always divide Win/

[be-fan]

X is actually faster than the GDI for most things. Don't believe me? Benchmark it yourself? I've benchmarked it before, and for stuff like line drawing or bitmap blitting, X stands up well even to DirectX. The main problem is that the toolkits (ahem, Qt) don't really use X all that well. That said, a lot of problem is due to the fact that a properly fast KDE/GNOME desktop needs a lot of proper configuration. My KDE 3.1 desktop, for example, is as fast as WinXP for most things (expect app startup speed, but glibc 2.3 and prelinking should fix that) but it required some custom compiling and renice tricks to get it that way.