International OSS Desktop Conference aKademy 2004

Torsten Rahn writes "The KDE Project is pleased to announce the successful completion of the KDE Community World Summit ("aKademy 2004") in Ludwigsburg (Germany) taking place from August 20th to 29th. With more than 230 KDE core developers, usability and accessibility experts, translators, editors and artists participating, the event is expected to have a huge and lasting impact on the next major releases of the leading Linux and Unix desktop environment. In addition, 270 visitors from the KDE user base and from other Free Software projects brought the total number of attendees to 500. The international participants, coming from 5 continents, took part in 65 talks, 10 full-day tutorials and numerous BoF-meetings over the course of 10 days. Thanks to this huge turnout and the numerous activities, the event evolved into the largest conference ever held that focused on a single open source desktop environment."

Comments

Re:KDE 4?

[AresTheImpaler]

maybe this can give you some info

Re:WOW!

[be-fan]

You probably do, it's just that you're so used to it that you accept it as being normal. I've got a 2.0GHz P4. Using GNOME for me is very hard, because it feels "heavy." The heavy feeling comes from three major places:

1) Menus are displayed before icons are loaded, so the first time you use a menu, all the icons get loaded from disk, and you have a blank menu for about a second until the loading is done.

2) Window redraw and resize is handled poorly. Even the simplest GNOME apps (eg: Gedit), can't resize smoothly without the content area lagging behind the window frame. Moving or resizing a window above another window causes all sorts of ugly effects as the toolkit takes it's sweet time handling the expose events.

3) The lack of multithreading causes the UI of apps like Epiphany to lock for several seconds when loading/rendering complex pages. This is a major no-no. I don't care if the app is simulating the universe --- the GUI should always respond immediately to the user.

Yes, most of these things are cosmetic, but cosmetic things can have deep psychological impacts. The redraw problems, in particular, make it seem like the computer is having trouble keeping up with my workflow, and destroys the otherwise solid feel of the GNOME desktop. The lack of a solid feel, in turn, makes the desktop irritating and tiresome to use in the long-run.

PS> You're "if I wanted speed I wouldn't even install X" comment is bogus. I like lynx a lot, but I'd rather surf Slashdot with a graphical browser, thank you very much.

Re:flamewars? doncha have something better to do?

[kalpaha]

If you think KDE is lacking a standardized general user accesible IPC port, you obviously haven't heard of DCOP, which can be used to control programs from the command line (with the dcop utility), python or perl scripts, C++ programs, etc. and is easy to add support for.

Some command line examples of dcop in action:

dcop kmail default checkMail

tell KMail to check for new mail

dcop kwin default setCurrentDesktop 4

switch to desktop 4

dcop kmail default compactAllFolders

tell KMail to compact all folders

dcop kdesktop default logout

logout

dcop konqueror default openBrowserWindow www.kde.org

open new konqueror window with www.kde.org

I am _not_ new here, but it never ceases to amaze me how people are so eager to flame away without any factual support for their rants.

This has nothing to to with Konqueror

[brunes69]

It has to do with KDE's superior underlying IO subsystem, that Gnome is just starting to try to duplicate with VFS.

The fact is with KDE you rarely would every *have* to copy the file over, since every KDE app can just access the file as if it was local anyways. You can edit a KWord document on an FTP/SFTP/WebDAV server just as easily as you can in your $HOME.