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Adopt a KDE Geek
sultanoslack writes "In an effort to bring together KDE hackers that are students, unemployed or by other means lacking in hardware and capital with users in that have spare goodies, Adopt-a-Geek has been launched. More details are available on how to help out. Been wondering what you can do to help out? Here's your chance!"
It's a nice idea, but aren't there better places to donate, like poorly funded school? The Geeks in question already have some skills and computers available, so how abotu we try and do the same for those who have neither?
If you want hardware, go work at K0mart or mcdonalds for a few weeks, a new cpu motherboard and case isnt THAT expensive... but yes, it WILL require you to get off of your fat lazy ass, so i suppose that might be a bit too much to ask then..
You try, unsucessfully, being funny.
The problem to be tackled here is that some KDE core developers spend over 24 hours in a full compile. That is way off from your "Hello world", surely made from already compiled libraries.
A Case of Bawls - $29.99
Caffeniated Soap - $6.99-$14.99
Caffeine Candy Sampler, v3.0 - $19.99
And various other assorted goods and sundries.
Now, some people make think this is a joke post, but its not. Even if its not hardware, I think anyone who uses KDE should feel compelled to donate something. As someone who does a lot of Volunteer work for local charities, it always feels good when someone recognizes all the hard work you've put into a job. And since alot of these guys can't really spend alot of money on luxury items, I say give em something to make a geek's day a lil brighter.
Mod Points: Helping you keep your opinion to yourself.
The idea might seems quite funny to at first glance, but it actually makes sense.
I am involved in KDE (maintainership of one of the web sites), and I know of cases where lack of hardware has indeed prevented people from working on very interesting projects. It is not only about the speed of compilation, it is also about disc space. This is especially true for projects dealing with Gnome interoperability, as this sometimes requires to compile _two_ huge desktops from source.
Of course, lack of hardware will not stop things forever - other geeks or some distribution will step in eventually - but it has slowed down interoperability effords.
During my formative years as a geek I (as I'm sure many of you did) had to make do with whatever was available. Although being pampered and showered with cool gear would have been nice, my lack of up-to-the-minute equipment did not damage me - in fact, I would go as far as saying that my abilities to fix equipment in the middle of a field come directly from those early days and put me and my skills in demand today.
The reason the requirements for Windows keep increasing and increasing, every release requiring the most modern hardware is because the developers all have modern hardware and don't see it as a problem to make full use of it. (Games are even more of a culprit here, but that's a little more forgiveable)
Whatever hardware the developers have is what the hardware requirements will be in the end; if that is a gameboy and a piece of string then so much the better for the project.
Carpe Daemon
The analogy is flawed. KDE doesn't have a kernel, drivers, window server (? whatever XFree86 is) etc to compile, which Windows does. So of course Windows will take longer to compile, Windows is much, much more than KDE will ever be.
And on this machine Windows XP is more responsive than KDE for some reason. Go figure.
-Mark
Sponsoring a hacker and giving money to oxfam, concern or whatever are not mutually exclusive.
At the same time, you can't really say people should only give money to charities that give food to starving children in Africa. People give to what seems important to them. I can understand those who'd give contributions to KDE that might directly benefit them in terms of a better desktop, as opposed to a charity that works in the 3rd world which doesn't.
Also remember that although these charities do good work and should be supported, they are effectively running at full speed to keep things where they are. There's a reason Africa is still such a hellhole, when South America and Asia are dragging themselves out of grinding poverty. Every time a part of Africa looks like it might be about to make serious progress, various tribal tensions are played off against each other and it degenerates into civil war. Of course that's a gross over-exagguration, South Africa for instance is doing quite well, but considering that Zimbabwe has basically gone downhill since they were given independance, largely because Mugabe leveraged tribal mistrust and favoratism, I think it's perfectly reasonable for people to want to give to a cause that they know stands a good chance of moving things forward immediately.
Don't get me wrong, since about a month ago I started giving some money by direct debit to Concern, who do a lot of such work in 3rd world countries. But I'm not kidding myself. My money will do some good, but it's unlikely to actually improve things, it'll only stem the misery.
LOS(KDE) + LOS(Linux kernel) < LOS(Windows)
QOS(KDE) + QOS(Linux kernel) > QOS(Windows)
The analogy is not implicitly flawed it's just incomplete. Also, KDE includes *lots* of applications, Windows does not. You'd better start adding in the amount of cruft in Office as well.
Comparisons like this are always going to be subjective. I can say right back at you that on this machine Windows XP is less responsive than KDE. Does it prove anything? Nope.
Carpe Daemon
And my obsolote motherboard or CPU will help them live another day?
I have no intention to give my money to anyone for free. I can, however, give away my obsolete motherboard or CPU which I couldn't sell for a price that would justify the hassle of auctioning/whatever it.
Bot Assisted Blogging
Show me a single comparable desktop that can run well with 128 MB RAM... (the 500 Mhz CPU is not really a problem). MacOS X or WinXP definitely cant.
The goal of KDE is to create a competitive desktop, not a desktop for your C64...
As someone who regularly compiles KDE from sources for Solaris where I work, it isn't quite this simple. When running the configure script there is an option, --enable-final, which causes the build process to create a single .cpp file that includes all of the other .cpp files in a library. This has two advantages over compiling all of the .cpp files separately. 1. The total compile time is shorter, and 2. the compiler can better optimize the code through inlining.
What is even more time consuming seems to be linking. For some reason libtool takes forever before it starts the actual link process.
Granted, not using --enable-final will speed up the patches, but compiling is still a long and demanding process.
As for debugging, with all the shared libraries, gdb will easily consume 200MB of RAM just to load symbols. God forbid that you link with something like Electric Fence and try and start up a process. A couple of years ago I used this to debug a problem with konsole crashing and starting one konsole session with EF consumed something like 200MB. Loading the resulting core file in GDB took forever since the machine only had 512MB of RAM.
It takes a lot more horsepower to debug and profile code than it takes to run the final code.
-Aaron
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
KDE developers put their computers through a lot of work. Building KDE on my modern desktop (1.4 GHz Athlon, 512 MB RAM) takes 6-8 hours. Many developers are working on systems which cannot fully build KDE in under 24 hours, and many KDE developers do so several times a week. Profiling and debugging tools for optimizing code are very processor and memory intensive. Hardware often is a bottleneck to KDE developers' productivity.
What doesn't make sense is that hardware is so cheap these days and yet some of these developers are using old crap. Why? Are they really that dirt poor? Seriously! We're talking about like ~$50 Athlon xp 1700, ~$50 motherboard, ~$80 512 MB RAM. Lets say $200 with shipping. Is there anyone who can't afford that kinda upgrade even if they have to save a couple months? $200 is a drop in the hat even with a $30k/year income. It seems these guys either have no concept of managing their personal finance or else they're purposely living in poverty / self-pity. I would hope it's simply the former, because KDE is a really excellent project and its developers deserve a lot more than they give themselves credit for.
Just a thought: Try consulting on the side.. A handful of consistent clients is enough to support a reasonable lifestyle.