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:WOW!

[be-fan]

Except for startup-speed, KDE is faster than GNOME. Poor resize and redraw plagues GNOME apps.

flamewars? doncha have something better to do?

[3seas]

KDE may be the most popular but its not the best that can be done.

getting to the best may just require siome stepping stones, like kde, gnome, your favoirite desktop, etc..

But I think it is amazing how there is still a lack of a standardized general user accessible IPC port so that users who so chose can automate some things on their own.

Free software will never be free until it is easy enough to create that most anyone with a basic undertsanding of software concepts can create software thru the use of general automation tools. Be it that they use such tools to do simple scripting or complex programming.

But one thing is for sure. A standardized user accessible IPC port is required to reach that level of computing usability.

Flamewars? I'm sure there is plenty better to do..... Or are you all waiting for MS to show you via "software factories" of which they are pursuing.

Re:flamewars? doncha have something better to do?

[3seas]

to those comments refering to dcop and dbus...and even corba

Yes guys, I'm aware of these, however neither are standard in the general scope of linux or FSF software but are instead desktop specific or to complexicated, and this only helps the divide of flamewars.

for whats it worth I even have a bounty set up for anyone who wants to create a bridge between linux and AROS (Amiga Research OS -- a FOSS project on sourceforge -- that can run hosted on linux. bounty thru Team AROS) via such existing projects as dbus ... or dcop... or hell, a bridge that will allow communication to/from AROS to linux IPC whatever used.

but ease of use and ease of adding to existing open source applications (this IPC port) and documentation of what functionality is accessible thru the port in such applications, is needed.

perhaps there is something to be learned from how Amiga did it, and it became standard, easy to impliment and use and generally the apps include documentation of accessible functionality.

dcop only deals with a small percentage of available packages... and dbus currently even less, but not even a handful of apps.

Standard doesn't mean having numerous and obscure way of doing it (IPC at the user level), as that is quite the opposite of standard.

So.... there are better things to do than flamewar over destops... as such is only a non-productive distraction.

its important, I cannot stress that enough, given what MS is up to in teh direction of "software factories" methodology --- their book has missed two publishing dates so far but they are doing what they do instead.... collect feedback on the scope of this direction via shorter articles, websites dedicated to software factories, etc...

google on - software factories MS book - and if you really understand what they are up to, then you too will realize the importance of getting an easy to use and impliment standard IPC in use. ... shrug...

Maybe that will be dcop or dbus.... A plan, good, fair or poor, is better than no plan at all. Being destop specific is not a plan for the bigger picture or scope of FOSS packages.

still 10x slower than BeOS

[kad77]

Forget flamewars... How about some efficiency standards?!?

Why is it that this candy-coated windowmanager runs like a *DOG* when it's just moving windows and drawing text on a 512mb 550MHz PIII system, and BeOS 4.0 (pre)release could run multiple video streams effortlessly without lag (may as well mention almost instant boot) on a 166Mhz PPC 604 with 128 MB RAM? 5 years ago.

Maybe getting paid for your work and quality go hand in hand in some products?

Re:still 10x slower than BeOS

[be-fan]

Well, the first thing to remember is that good technology doesn't ensure success. Indeed, the general rule is that the first product to be "good enough" is the winner, not the "best" product.

Now, there are a couple of reasons why BeOS was so great:

1) It was pervasively multithreaded. Each window had it's own rendering thread that ran independently of the application logic. This allowed apps to be very responsive, even under heavy load. It's sad that even on my 2.0GHz P4, Mozilla still blocks the UI for several seconds when certain pages take too long to load or render.

2) It had a phenomenal scheduler. It wasn't comparable, in many ways, to Linux's O(1) scheduler (it wasn't very scalable), but it was wonderfully optimized for interactive use. It's interactivity estimation was lightyears ahead of what's in the O(1) scheduler now.

3) It's multimedia subsystem was very good at moving data around the system efficiently.

4) It's toolkit was well-coded with respect to smart redraw and resize behavior.

Interestingly, the OS wasn't all that structurally different from Linux. It had a fairly POSIX-complient modular kernel. It run it's video and audio subsystems as a seperate process (like X, aRts, and Jack). It was just very well-implemented with an eye towards a fast and elegant UI.

Of course, the OS had it's darksides. The toolkit wasn't font-sensitive and layout-based, the VM was antiquated, I/O and network performance was only decent, etc. However, for the average desktop, this really wasn't a big deal, and not something that couldn't have been fixed had BeOS survived to today.

Re:still 10x slower than BeOS

[LnxAddct]

Check it out here: BeOS Max Edition. It's freeware now and has a pretty good selection of apps. It has BeFS which is everything WinFS wants to be but never will be, and BeFS has been around since 1996. There are some really great things about the OS, but the lack of supported hardware, and afew other things are reasons why I don't currently run it anymore (although that may change). Linux is great and if tuned right, performs really well. If you want fast boot times, there are a few articles about making linux boot faster, or you can try FreeBSD which has always booted extremely fast for me. There is a whole world of operating systems out there, if I were you I'd try each one because each one seems to excel where no others do. Lots of different interesting ideas implemented. SkyOS is another good example of an interesting OS, its damn near all written in Assembly, and it was all pretty much written by one man. The major flaw with SkyOS is that it is closed source. ReactOS is really cool too. I could go on, but you'd probably be better off just hopping on google and trying out a few.
Regards,
Steve
P.S. If you don't feel like installing each OS on your computer, use qemu, it runs every OS I listed just fine.

Re:still 10x slower than BeOS

[kad77]

Thinking back, I was asking that rhetorically. However, I am really glad that someone else that used/uses this wonderfully designed and very well thought through OS decided to recite some specifics that made it so.
That's why we come back to Slashdot!

I'd also like to point out, that in the interest of fostering development, once I signed up with the company, without cost to me they sent pressed OS releases very often, updated MetroWorks compiler and toolkit releases, and even some clothing!

Would Be, Inc. be influencing linux to become more modular, multi-threaded, and bulletproof (like QNX) if they were still around, given many popular linux apps would be running on it today?

Re:still 10x slower than BeOS

[IamTheRealMike]

It's worth pointing out that the pervasive multi-threading of BeOS was arguably as much a weakness as a strength.

Multi-threaded coding is hard and don't any coding jocks tell you otherwise. It is significantly harder to do 100% correctly (and nothing less than 100% correct will do) than single-threaded coding.

Indeed, according to one of the ex-Be engineers one of the things that hurt BeOS was that writing software for it was quite tricky, it basically meant writing robust thread-safe code even for a simple text editor. There's a good discussion of it here.

Anyway it's sort of academic. One of the main uses of multithreading in BeOS according to be-fan was to do window rendering in a separate thread. Linux will get something very similar within a few months when X compositing lands. OK so it won't be a thread inside the same app, it'll be a separate process which is rendering the entire screen at once but the effect is the same - no matter how busy the app is, you won't be able to "rub out" the contents of the window.

Re:still 10x slower than BeOS

[MrHanky]

But one reason why BeOS was so snappy was because apps also took advantage of its pervasive multi-threading and the scheduler. This was, AFAIK, because the API sort of forced you to write multi-threaded. So Be had a lot of small, snappy, but crappy, applications that you could use to show off its responsiveness. But most of the serious apps had to be ported, and then the advantages just disappeared.

Have you tried running Mozilla on BeOS? I mean, not a rotten old port of M18, but a recent build of Firefox. Yes, it's still being developed, and it's been getting a lot better. But its responsiveness is a lot worse than under Linux (not to mention the font rendering). Even when comparing a 266 MHz, 64 MB Powerbook running Linux to a 1.4 GHz, 256 MB Athlon XP running an RC of Zeta.

But no, the PB can't run multiple videostreams. It has problems running just one. But video codecs have become much more demanding since the sub 200 MHz days. And so has computer use in general. Net+ was a small and simple browser, but it's practically useless these days, like all small and simple browsers are. You need features to do stuff, and stuff takes up space. That's why a small and simple OS is hopelessly outdated, and big and bloated environments like KDE (500 MB for a basic install?) and OS X (~2.5 GB for a basic install) are the future.

neat

[NanoGator]

" the event is expected to have a huge and lasting impact on the next major releases of the leading Linux and Unix desktop environment."

I personally hope they are all having a good hard look at Apple's stuff. The main reason I'm not running Linux is that there's a lot of choice out there, and it shows. I hate running to Google every time I want to do something simple. Despite my many years of using Windows, I had no trouble using a Mac when the need arose.

Anyway, sorry if that sounded like a rant. I'm just hoping some of the work that comes out of this gathering deals with the end-user experience. I'd love to get away from Windows.

Re:neat

[NanoGator]

"Re. 1: Do you need to draw while standing around away from a desk or table? If not, you can just get a drawing tablet and a regular Mac desktop or laptop. Drawing tablets work with Macs too, you know -- and they have the best handwriting recognition also."

I moved from a tablet to a TabletPC for a couple of reasons:

1.) I wanted to be able to dry right on the screen. The only device I've seen that does that is a Wacom Cintiq, and those cost $2,500. Plus, they only run at 1280 by 1024. My TabletPC cost $2,000 and it runs at 1440 by 1080. (Toshiba M-200, not a bad machine at all.)

2.) I like being able to draw from places other than my desk. The couch, for example, is where I do a good deal of my work. (My back is aching right now while I write this. Heh I need a new chair.) This thing goes to work with me sometimes. My studio is very small and cannot afford to buy me all the neato things I think I need, including a TabletPC or a Cintiq, so at least I can take this one with me.

3.) This doesn't happen too often, but just the other day I handed the TPC to my boss so he could make a minor refinement to my work. Not the biggest deal in the world, but I suspect this'll be a more popular feature down the road, especially when we make presentations to higher-ups.

"Re. 2: They say Macs are usable longer than PCs"

This was true a couple of years ago. Lately, though, this hasn't been the case. My big bottleneck isn't my PC, but the time I have in getting my work done. Faster computers buy me faster rendering, but they don't do much to help me model or paint. My TPC is only 1.5 ghz, and despite the fact that my main machine is a dual 2.0 athlon, it isn't significantly slower. I haven't made major upgrades to either machine in a very long time.

You've got a good point, don't get me wrong, but should I decide to upgrade my desktop, I'm not going to be out much more than $500. (maybe $1,000 if I go dual again.) That's at least a year or two away.

Maybe in a year or two if Apple has a stylus-based laptop, I'll make the switch. I'm not trying to talk myself out of it. It's just a bigger leap than I can handle right now.

Re:neat

[RdsArts]

That's not quite where I was going, but actually yes, it can cause nasty problems. If there were 10 browsers (heh there probably is, good thing Firebird seems to be the de-facto default) for Linux all specialized at doing their own thing well, would that be good or bad?

Good. Guess what, not every app is a swiss army knife. Most shouldn't be. Users are different. This is why you have 2000 computer types and, wait for it, 2000 different type of people buying them. People's wants and needs differ. If there are 20 or 30 browsers, maybe one, MAYBE, will be what the person wants to use.

But even with that said, you'll note that of the handful of browsers out there most use Gecko or KHTML. So they share backend code, which is good, but can do different things for the user, which is... Oh, ya, good.

Skip the flamewars, what about organisation?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the GUI, OS, Drivers, Firmware, Hardware. Organisation is key to modularity. In case people haven't noticed, we've been slowly losing both in almost all technology nowadays.

Also, the lack of modularity leads to more proprietary technology, which only increases the difficulty of defeating evil, evil DRM et cetera.

Oh, it'd be nice if someone could point me to a good open source perfect 1:1 CD and DVD copying utility. CD protection is pissing off my ideas of Fair Use (I actually AM creating backups, God Forbid!) Road trips aren't conducive to the status of the average digital medium.

Re:WOW!

[timmarhy]

if you want a fast desktop which is completely usless and painful to do anything in just go the whole hog and use twm. the rest of us who want our desktops to be useful and a pleasure to use will stick to kde

Managed code for next KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since it seems that Gnome 3 (from what I've heard anyway) is going to be coded mostly in C# via Mono does anyone know if KDE has any plans to move to a managed code solution?

I'd like to see a natively compilable Java solution myself.

Re:Managed code for next KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Coding everything in C# would be ultimately stupid. I'm not sure if Miguel was misquoted there. I'd like to think that he's intelligent enough to understand how big a mistake that would be. I've been a GTK+ and C fan for years. Only recently I've started doing some application coding with Qt and C++. Boy, what a difference. The UI code was about half the size of the equivalent GTK+ code. I know you can use glade these days, but it should tell you something.

Back to the KDE/Gnome thing, in my experience KDE is more responsive, and their core libraries are still ahead of the game. Call me when all Gnome apps are bonobo compliant.

Re:WOW!

[renoX]

Personnaly it is 3) that bother me the most in many applications: Mozilla also freeze way too often when it opens a new page, which of course reduce the "user's experiment" of having several tabs or window at the same time (BeOS was great in this regards: very responsive)..

Changing applications to use more multithreading to improve "user's experiment" is unfortunately a very big job, which won't happen soon, but I hope that with the multi-core CPU coming soon, perhaps developpers will be more receptive for using more threads in their application..

As for 1) if the menu you're talking about contains only icons, I don't think that there can be much things to do:
- if you wait until all the icons are retrieved before displaying the menu, it feels slow.
- if you display an empty menu, then it feels slow too.
- the only solution would be to preload in memory the menu, but this would lead to too much memory usage IMHO.

Now if the menu contains mixed entries: icons and text, then there is a good solution which is sometimes used: display the menus with the text and a generic icon on each entry and then replace as retrieved the generic icons with the correct one.
Of course the menu should be fully functionnal even if some icons are not retrieved yet..

Re:WOW!

[Cthefuture]

Gah, it's probably your video card and/or your settings more than anything else (make sure GDK_USE_XFT is defined in your environment).

nVidia is the only way to go on Linux. Sorry but everything just works so much better with nVidia.

GNOME starts up hella faster than KDE. It feels a lot better, the fonts look better, I like the consistant button placement, and after getting used to the GUI OK-button-always-on-the-right I wish everything was like that. KDE feels "clicky", I don't know how else to explain it. Little things popping here and there like it's got sharp corners. Konqueror is a good example, it feels snappy but it renders many pages incorrectly and just plain doesn't work on a lot of sites that Firefox has no problems with.

With that said, I use KDE as my desktop. I do this for several reasons but there is one main reason. GNOME's ass panel. After many, many years it continues, to this day, to rearrange the applets on the panel. No matter what locking you do or whatever, it still does this. That is so annoying that I can't use GNOME. That and GNOME lacks a decent calendering application like KOrganizer (don't even mention that piece of crap known as evolution).

Nautilus is tons better than Konq also. At first Nautilus sucked but it has gotten really good lately.