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

Re:My gripe with KDE (& Gnome)

[mao che minh]

Well, KDE 3 with a variety of kernels runs great on my P3 600mhz, 256mB of RAM, and crap video card. This is even when I am performing tests and running Apache (with a ton of mods) and mySQL. I have tried Windows XP on this get up. It wasn't pretty. I think that KDE 3.x.x running over Linux kernel 2.4.18 is the fastest GUI that I have come across.

C++ templates and Qt compile speed

[truth_revealed]

I'v been using Qt since 1996, and I think it is the best written set of GUI classes out there. I also think C++ is the best compromise between performance and abstraction for graphical user interfaces. That does not mean there aren't some problems, however...

Does anyone else think that Qt should forward declare more classes than it does? The compilation time of Qt projects has went up five fold since Qt 1.x due to excessive of C++ templates. Sure there are ways to cope with it: distcc, ccache - but this is not addressing the primary problem - C++ compiles are too bloody slow and getting slower all the time.

On another topic, who else thinks C++0x should make provisions to forward declare templatized class instances? Including all these template definitions in every header file is complete death for compilation time: #include <string>, for example. Precompiled headers help a little, but are easily corrupted and the cause of many bad builds.

Re:C++ templates and Qt compile speed

[truth_revealed]

...and it does not look like gcc will support the C++ 'export' functionality for a long long time, unfortunately. It would require a complete redesign of the link system to make it smarter. The C++ compiler would also have to defer code generation for all code referencing the exported templates by value to the link phase because it would not necessarily know the size of classes/structs until link time. I agree this 'export' would be good, but I don't see widespread support for it in the next ten years (from GCC, at least). It changes all the assumptions that C++ compilers have made in the last 10 years.

Re:C++ templates and Qt compile speed

[mat.h]

Everyone's benchmarking machines for framerates in games, but what I'd like to know is this: What is the smallest/cheapest machine that can compile KDE 3 (kdelibs, kdebase, kdenetwork and koffice) in one night (say 7 hours)? And: Have the OpenBSD folks fixed their toolchain so that linking KDE doesn't need 800 megs of virtual memory anymore?

My Druthers

[Anonymous Coward]

I like KDE3 better than KDE2, because when I swap from a console, it doesn't throw my mouse into the top right corner, but it's so bloated.

Even worse, there are now way too many configuration utilities...I can't keep them straight. Instead of adding features and bloat to make things easier for stupid Windows users, how about ganging together and documenting how I can to Task X from a console? Better documentation means that you don't have to dumb down the product, you just end up with smarter users.

Re:How about de-branding KDE?

[InodoroPereyra]

Not only your posting is a troll, but you got modded all the way up, this is a double annoyance:

To me, KDE isn't a software development project but rather, a parade.

Have you even bother looking at the source code at least ? You'll notice it IS a software project. High quality software. You may prefer some other desktop environment, fine, but no need to flame.

They see how Apple and Microsoft like to throw parties and festivals for their releases, all in the name of marketing, and KDE sees this and gets the awful notion that this is an area they need to compete in. That marketing somehow matters to them. From this they get strange ideas that its wrong to change this branding, that every computer the software gets installed on is thiers.

Look, I think it is you who is having strange ideas. KDE is the default desktop in most of the top Linux distributions. It is extremely well integrated. It includes one of the best file/web browsers. It comes up as the preferred desktop in most polls. And all of this is because they provide a great desktop based on a great development platform. They didn't get where they are by marketting, they got there by coding damn well.

But I am wasting my time, the fact that you compare them to microsoft tells more about the intentions of your post than whatever I may say ...

Re:Fundamental differences will always divide Win/

[b0r1s]

Well, welcome to the world of *bsd.

Having separate userlands and kernels is a mess, and only linux is willing to deal with it. The rest of the unix world seems to realize that the kernel maintainers should also handle the basic userland applications.

That said, it's still time for someone to build a new UI server that isn't X. X is big, and X is nice for serving to a bunch of terminals, but it's a mess for desktop machines.

Re:Fundamental differences will always divide Win/

[cposs]

You may find remote windowing "grievous" and bloaty, but I know many people like myself who use this feature everyday. You have to remember that X is often actually run on servers (without heads, even). Sure, it might make more sense to have the remote server in a different package... oh, wait, it is. If you take responsibility for your own pacakage management it's not hard to slim X down (or any other *nix program, for that matter).