Slashdot Mirror
Deep Inside the K Desktop Environment
Lemmingue writes "Ars Technica published a very good article about the KDE architecture. It's a essential read for anyone wondering how Konqueror can open documents in the same window or just understand the license issues regarding the Qt use.
The article describes most of the technologies behind the KDE (Qt, KParts) and how the project is organized.
The article is full of links, screenshots and diagrams."
Jesus, like 6 months old.
And it makes to to slashdot only four months late! Unless Ars made a stealth update I'm not aware of?
"In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, 'Make us your slaves, but feed us.'" -Dostoevsky
The freeversion of Qt is under two licenses: the GPL and the QPL. While most people have a rough idea about the GPL most people don't know about the QPL, Like you for example.
100% Crunchier
The idea is to have software the integrates and takes advantage of everything the kde environment has to offer. There are two ways of doing this. 1. Pull your hair out trying to cajole existing applications originally created off of an entirely different framework, to take some, limited advantage of what kde has to offer. 2. Start from scratch with an environment that makes fast development very easy and very quick, without massive quantities of hair left in your hands.
...and IN SOVIET RUSSIA, beowulf clusters imagine 1, 2, 3 profit!!!! jokes made out of YOU!!!
Slashdot posted it when it came out.
I'm convinced--the editors absolutely do not read Slashdot. The last straw was last week when Michael duped a story from three hours earlier that was still on the front page.
Actually Konqueror/KHTML and Kontact are not really reinventing the wheel.
;) ), and second, everybody is reinventing the wheel all the time anyway, so what?
The work on KDE's filemanager and HTML engine dates back to the days when the only usable *cough* browser was Netscape4.x and Mozilla seemed only like a great failure.
Kontact is basically an aggregation of long time existing KDE applications like KMail, KNode, KNotes etc., pre-dating e.g. Evolution.
That said, this question about reinventing the wheel is stupid anyway. First, there are many things about KDE that KDE has had first (like, the first usable Linux GUI
How does 'kopete' relate to 'chat' or 'instant messaging'? How does 'Konqueror' relate to 'browsing the web'? How does 'Apollon' apply to p2p?
I suppose one way of figuring this out would be that the default menu entries for these apps clearly state what they do.
Kopete is found under taskmenu--internet--Instant Messaging (Kopete). Konqueror is lister as "Web Browser (Konqueror)"... etc.
I can't say that I ever had troubles finding the right apps in KDE, even when I was a total noob.
"Qt is GPLed, and as such, prevents FOSS developers from using any OSS licenses that are not compatible with the GPL. Ironically enough, XFree86's license is not compatible with the GPL, and hence XFree86 could not include a Qt configuration utility."
Your first statement is wrong. Should I bother reading the rest?
http://www.trolltech.com/developer/faqs/license_gp l.html#q19
http://www.trolltech.com/developer/faqs/license_gp l.html#q114
Having a smoking section in a public restaurant is like having a peeing section in a public swimming pool.
How hard is it to press the K Button, choose internet and then Instant Messenger to start kopete?
In case you haven't noticed, kde is using a new naming scheme in its menus: What it is for (App Name).
For example: Web Browser (Konqueror) isn't that hard either.
Believe it or not, our article web pages are statically served. It may be low-tech, but it's cheap, scalable (for our volume of output), and the server can take a licking and keep on ticking. So the server doesn't even bat an eye at the Slashdot crowd. Now when a major Mac article comes out and the entire online Mac community is trying to load the page at the same time... well, that's the one time when we're maybe thankful for Apple's small market share :0)
The news on the front page, on the other hand, is served dynamically by a CMS.
Senior CPU Editor | Ars Technica | http://arstechnica.com/
IMHO, the best theme for KDE is plastic but almost all themes are "low-impact". Only a few used to use fancy ways to render their widgets, I don't know if any survive.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
For easy eye-candy setting, run kpersonalizer (Alt+F2 and type kpersonalizer, hit enter) and turn everything off, though you can perhaps leave font anti aliasing on.
.NET-style (which is the fastest).
Style-wise, if turning off the eye-candy doesn't suffice, choose either one of the "Light styles" or the
Version-wise, if Mandrake 10 doesn't include it. upgrade to the latest KDE 3.2. KDE has experienced continual speed improvements since the release of 3.0.
Last but not least, RAM is the key. I had KDE running with on a rather slow box, too (P3-450) and found that more RAM works wonders. For KDE and KDE-based apps, 128MB should suffice - but be aware the Mozilla and OpenOffice have a rather big memory-footprint, so if you plan to use those regularly alongside KDE, go 256. No amount of style/eye-candy tweaking will help you if your PC doesn't have enough main memory.
I don't know what sort of distro you are on, but I think this will work on any of them... you can go to the KDE menu, then Settings, Desktop Settings Wizard and that will walk you through optimizing KDE for a slower machine. Particularly, the bit about "Eye Candy". Then at the end of the wizard, it will let you get into the Control Center where the rest can be tweaked.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
:wq!
If all operations from a GUI are slower, I'd be a bit suspicious of your graphics card and X driver. What graphics card do you have? I have and nvidia g-force ultra, and when I use the default driver that comes with mandrake, (which is really the one that comes with XFree86), it is indeed much slower. However, when I install nvidia's (proprietary, non-open-source) driver and kernel module, it is much much faster. (and I can play 3d games :) ).
It's even more broad that that. The QPL does not specify OSI-approved licenses only, it only specifies that the source code be available with rights to modify and redistribute. Pine and povray might possibly qualify. Old BSD licenses with advert clauses most certainly do. qmail and djbdns probably not.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
>I was a bit taken aback that the install ran slower >then windows 2k on my celeron 400.
>When i say slower, i mean that browsing the web >took longer and programs took longer to load and >execute. Windows took longer to move around the >screen. Menus took longer to "pop up." Basic stuff,
>really.
I've got the release of KDE that came with RedHat 9, and I will say that it has gradually been winning me over, lately. Konqueror is a very useful file manager when in twin-pane mode, and Konsole also makes my life a lot easier.
That said, one thing I have noticed is somewhat poor performance on slower machines, and even on my own setup (Celeron 1.7, 512 Mb ram) things can get a bit choppy at times. I would tend to conclude that KDE is built primarily for aesthetics and secondly for functionality, with efficiency being a fair way down on the list of priorities.
If you're sufficiently computer literate that a few less frills won't bother you, I'd recommend Fluxbox, a smaller and lighter window manager which from what I've seen has become rather popular with the LFS crowd in particular. XFce is another possible choice, and personally I've always been a huge fan of Enlightenment. E can be a bit slow initially, though...you'll need to turn off some of the more frivolous additions such as the desktop micro-window and so on, but I used to run that on a Celeron 400 myself and had no problems.
I didn't used to like KDE at all I will confess, but I've learned recently that it does have it's place. Resource efficiency however is not what it was designed for, so you really need to have the horses to drive it.
Though I do feel it is a real stretch to say a GTK application is a "derivative" of QT. The vaugeness of the GPL in defining derivative work make this a difficult issue.
The GPL doesn't define derivative work, US copyright law does. The FSF has officially recorded opinions on areas of copyright law that are vague and those opinions may or may not have influence on a possible future lawsuit.
In any case if the app requires QT to work its a derivative work if it can run independently it isn't. But KDE is exclusively GPL so any "KDE app" must be GPLed regardless of whether it uses QT or not.
And just to hold off the comparison with Linux: Read the Linux license the very first line gives an explicit exemption for applications (unlike the standard GPL which KDE uses) and thus the situation doesn't apply to the Linux kernel and end user applications.
I read the KDE article a few months ago so looked at the Prescott article. It was difficult for me to comprehend completely.
l what a great article. This primer in integrated electronics practice and theory was interesting in itself. But the fact that it made Moore's classic paper understandable made it especially valuable reading.
r &ie=U TF-8&oe=UTF-8
m DgW2sJ: qubit.plh.af.mil/RelatedArticles/related/moore65.p df+moores+paper&hl=en
So I looked at the primer article 'Understanding Moore's Law' http://arstechnica.com/paedia/m/moore/moore-6.htm
One errata however the original Moore article archived at www.intel.com/research/silicon/moorespaper.pdf is 404.
I eventually found it by googling like so:
http://www.google.com/search?q=moores%20pape
html version here:
http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:956ps
"The fact is, Linux distros like Fedora, SuSE, and Mandrake are resource hogs, particularly running a big desktop environment like KDE or GNOME. So, you've got the following options: 1) upgrade your hardware, 2) use a slimmer window manager, 3) try Gentoo (compiled specifically for your HW), or 4) live with it."
.00001% of the time the computer is waiting on ME.
No, No, No!!
I've been using SuSE since 6.1 (and therefore KDE 1.x) on the same P2-400, and it keeps getting faster. (except for KDE 2.0. That one kind of sucked.) I put in more RAM about three years ago (cut out the swapping) and that's about it.
How is Gentoo any faster than all of the i586 binaries and the customized kernel that SuSE ships? Can't be more than
Shit, if I tried to compile everything myself I'd damn near need a faster box.
I think I need a new sig here.
Wrong. KDE libs are LGPL, only apps are GPL.