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KDE's future: Plasma & SimpleKDE

Posted by Hemos on from the the-evolving-world dept.

A reader writes: "KDE continues to grow. Early screenshots, mockups, and developer blogs show that the new Plasma Project (KDE 4.x branch) will bring innovative approaches to desktop computing. On the other hand, the very first screenshots of SimpleKDE, an unofficial fork of KDE, were meant to be a response to those who criticise KDE as being overbloated."

14 of 351 comments (clear)

  1. Mirrors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Plasma screenshots, mockups, developer blogs and Plasma Project homepage.

    SimpleKDE screenshots and homepage.

    All links courtesy Mirrordot.org.

    1. Re:Mirrors by Mornelithe · · Score: 5, Informative

      If those are the appropriate links, then the things listed as "plasma screenshots" are actually mockups.

      As far as I know (and I've been following this pretty closely), there is no plasma yet. It's still separated superkaramba, kicker and kdesktop, which they are now porting to Qt 4, and will later combine and alter into what will be plasma. Thus, there are no screenshots, as they're not far enough along yet.

      There's lots of interesting mockups at kde-artists.org, though.

      --

      I've come for the woman, and your head.

  2. Re:bloat for KDE too? by KDR_11k · · Score: 4, Informative

    Many people think "hey, wouldn't [Feature] be nice to have?" and implement it. As more and more features get implemented, some of them constantly eating performance, the ressource usage of the system increases. At some point you need a freaking 3GHz GPU just to run a text editor. That's what they call bloat, inappropriately high ressource usage.

    --
    Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
  3. Re:This could be important by cmdr_tofu · · Score: 2, Informative


    Is this why olvwm is so successful?

    Actually I like olvwm a lot, and enlightenment.
    KDE is pretty, but I am unable to bear its slowness for long.

    Enlightenment is the king of all wms!

  4. Re:Server go boom? by Vario · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://mirrordot.org/ has some of it already cached. Try this link: http://mirrordot.org/stories/352335d7edc4f5541c0e9 bfc28ab7cd0/index.html

  5. What about Slicker? by AceJohnny · · Score: 5, Informative

    Plasma somehow reminds me of Slicker. It was a great idea for replacing Kicker, and IMHO was a nicely innovative one too. I mean, look at these nice mockups.

    Unfortunately, these are just mockups, and it seems the project has stalled for more than a year. Slicker could use a little attention, don't you think? So if you have some spare time and a love for moving the Linux desktop in cool directions, how about giving it a try? :)

    PS: I'm totally unrelated to the project, just disappointed that this cool idea is rusting

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  6. Re:Plasma looks like ass! by Mornelithe · · Score: 4, Informative

    Jesus, those are just mockups by one artist of his ideas. There are 2 or 3 other artists that regularly post on kde-artists.org, and a whole bunch of other people also contributing ideas.

    Calm down a little and don't jump to conclusions. Do you really think that Plasma will only have one theme, and that single theme will be pure monochrome? Making judgments of the final product based on one guy's preliminary ideas is ridiculous.

    --

    I've come for the woman, and your head.

  7. Re:Innovative? by BonoLeBonobo · · Score: 2, Informative

    "The only innovative thing I've heard about that comes to mind recently, is Apple's Spotlight and a filing system that uses labels rather then folders (is Apple going to be doing this? Or is Microsoft? Or is no-one and I'm only hoping someone eventually will?). " You should search for tenor on google. Tenor is a search engine framework which should be included in KDE 4. It should be more powerfull than Spotlight

    --
    Bonjour !
  8. Re:"Overbloated"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    I believe he's saying there exists an acceptable level of bloat and KDE is exceeding it.

  9. As far as Gnome and KDE go... by TooncesTheCat · · Score: 2, Informative

    I switched over to Linux as a desktop about a year ago after learning 99% of my knowledge in Linux / Unix systems server wise through a shell prompt on Windows. What sucked is that when I installed Gentoo as my first distro, I was really fucking suprised that my P4 @ 2.6 GHZ and a gig of DDR400 was having problems running KDE as smoothly as I thought it would be considering everyone hyping KDE / Gnome desktops as ass raping the hell out of the windows desktop / GUI / shell. IMHO both desktops are bloated, and yes I know that they can be minimalised which I did but it just doesnt seem to help when it takes like someone said a 3ghz computer to run a text editor. What was really appaling with the current major linux desktops was the time it takes for some menus to expand...jesus christ I thought Windows was slow. I opted with the Fluxbox solution, made my own theme and had at it. =]

    1. Re:As far as Gnome and KDE go... by Dasher42 · · Score: 2, Informative

      There are a few major keys I've found to getting a nimble KDE desktop that should be posted in big letters, but often are not.

      First and foremost: prelinking. The way gcc3 compiles C++ source code greatly increases the load times of KDE. Gentoo's got good documentation here, though I think they should reference it more. "emerge prelink" and go for it. (PS - Ubuntu users, that goes for you too: "apt-get install prelink" and "man prelink" for you).

      Obviously, you want not only the best video, but sound drivers. I've taken special care to use the Nvidia drivers for my X.org desktop, and the NForce drivers for in-hardware sound mixing. You need hardware sound mixing for any multimedia or gaming, period.

      Finally, I would suggest setting Konqueror to pre-load two instances if you aren't cramped for RAM.

      Having done these things, I find KDE to be a very responsive and yes, memory-efficient desktop, because its shared infrastructure means applications don't need to load multiple redundant libraries for similar tasks. Paying up front once is smart.

  10. Re:KDE Fork ... by Coryoth · · Score: 2, Informative

    It strikes me as similar to project GoneME which was started with much sound and fury by people when GNOME 2.0 came out and started dropping features and moving options into GConf instead of extra tabs in preferences dialogs.

    It turned out that all the noise was really just a few very vocal people and some trolls, and thus GoneME turned out a few patches (reversing button order for instance) then promptly died. I think their last patch to "fix" all of GNOME came to a whopping 22k.

    I expect the same for this project trying to drag KDE in the opposite direction. Ho knows though, maybe there are some people really intereste in this. We shall see.

    Jedidiah.

    --
    Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
  11. Re:Let me guess by gotem · · Score: 1, Informative

    maybe you would want to try this: http://kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=19297

  12. Re:"overbloated"? by stilborne · · Score: 4, Informative

    *sigh* ever since this year's GUADEC i've heard this fallacy more and more. Red Hat defaults to GNOME, but also ships KDE. SUSE defaults to KDE and offers GNOME as a choice. NLD ships both and you choose. Debian ships both and you choose. Ubuntu has GNOME and KDE flavours. Mandriva defaults to KDE and offers GNOME as a choice. Xandros, Linspire, Knoppix and Slackware provide KDE only. the list goes on.

    as you can see, despite some people loving to claim from the roof tops that GNOME is the default desktop in Distroland, it's a falsehood.