Slashdot Mirror
KDE's future: Plasma & SimpleKDE
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."
Mirror for SimpleKDE, anyone?
Stiny! Get me a danish!
Good stuff. Will this include the idea of Restricting mouse in popup menus?
for what its worth, this is about the 3rd time I've seen plasma.bddf.ca (not made into a link for obvious reasons) linked from the slashdot site and each time it went down immediately.
If I were them, I'd do a bugzilla and block all links from here.. meanwhile perhaps the editors/submitters should note that bddf.ca simply cannot cope with it and there's no point linking directly.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
KDE favorite for OpenSolaris project, read more here
http://blogs.gnome.org/view/calum/2005/07/18/0
KDE 4.0 is going to be KDE 3.0 with a face lift, just as Longhorn is going to be Windows XP with a face lift?
Come on people, lets innovate a little.
Here's an idea:
The kde kicker has to go. I find it highly inefficient to move my mouse to the bottom left corner of the screen and then navigate a maze of menus each time I want to run a program. Why can't right mouse buttome always be reserved for program selection? This program menu should also have the current running windows.
If this is the case then the left mouse should always be reserved for program control. If Apple can get away with one button mice for controlling programs why can't linux?
The whole purpose of this is to reduce mouse movement.
----------
I'm sure my idea isn't going to get any consideration from the kde team since there is plenty of polical motivation not to innovate. With ties to IBM, Red hat, etc the last thing they want to do is change the GUI significantly so it looks weird to potential corporate switchers. We are stuck with a crappy windows look-a-like.
Yeah, E17 does something similar. I always found this method to be better. It really helps my wrists and is much more efficient then the kicker. At least Rasterman and company are looking to make the desktop experience easier.
Possibly so. Personally I use a Greasemonkey script which adds Coral and Mirrordot links to every URL in mainpage stories.. If /. did go for the "mirror everything" approach there's a possibility that it would deprive those sites which can take the traffic of pageviews, and click-through revenue on their ads, though - which is hardly fair.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Hey, you made my day. I am the father of Slicker -- it started as an attempt to write something for KDE along the lines of (classic) Mac OS's tabbed finder windows. See my posts in the Gentoo forum where I posted about its development: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-29746-highlig ht-.html
So, basically what happened was simple. I really was only interested in using it as a way to access Konq, as panels which would slide out based on mouse-to-screen edge movements. I made it relatively plugin-extendable and people whipped up all sorts of nice extensions, like terminal access, K-Menu access, etc etc. People also wanted it to become a sourceforge project and more public, which I was fine with. So, I handed it off, and it promptly died since the people who took it on bickered day and night about website design and themability, and never bothered to write any code.
I then moved on to OS X, where I continued the work that matters to me ( robotics & AI ).
But anyway, it had potential!
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
I think it would be interesting for the KDE devs to implement some kind of preset system for the level of user experience... if you're a 'NOVICE' user, it hides most of the toolbar buttons and simplifies the interface. But personally, I hate OS X and can't get any work done in it. I am a software developer, and so I maintain a very intimate relationship with the computer and lean a lot on all of the advanced features the modern GNU/Linux desktop offers me. Moving from Windows 2000 to Linux won me a 2x increase in productivity; moving from either to OS X is comically tragic.
yes, that's not a final art mock up. it's like how you draw circles and squares on a [white|black]board to map out plays for a sports team? yeah, same thing.
> but its appearance here is horrendous
;)
seeing as nobody's seen it yet, that's an interesting statement to make
right now we are working with a large number of artists who are all throwing ideas and concepts for different parts of plasma into a pot. i, and a few others from the project, go back to the artists with feedback, questions, critiques and the cycle starts over.
we've done perhaps 1 or 2 cycles thus far and have a few months more to go. the final look and feel is by FAR not decided upon. in fact, in august we'll be getting together with the artists doing Oxygen (a new theme and icon style in quiet development that is aiming to be the default in kde4) while at aKademy and banging out some hopefully hi-octane work then.
> lets not forget that we don't want to go with
> too radical a change all at once
yes, i couldn't agree more!
when working out how plasma might work, i ended up at some rather radical concepts. but as you note, we can't drop some totally new way of doing everything on people.
it needs to be introduced step by step.
thus plasma will be familiar enough in its default configuration for people to transition without really noticing it from KDE3, Windows or Mac... but it will introduce subtle new concepts that will allow us to start edging in a direction that gets us out of the WIMP-jail.
the first concept is that the desktop is not a file manager view, but harmonizes with your panels.
the second concept is that the desktop and panels are meant to be first class citizens that actively enable your workflow.
i'd love to say more about it, but i don't particularly like talking about things which i can't let people play with right now (aka "vapourware") even though development is going forward at a terrific pace. i also don't like it when people snag ideas and run off with them, as has happened a few times in the last couple of years. =/
Of course, the problem is most prevalent in Java software, which the KDE developers thankfully seem to be avoiding. (I remember a remark someone made about Eclipse... 512MB RAM = slow, 1GB RAM = fast... which is ASSINIE for a text editor).
.NET/Mono or whatever. With a large application, that VM overhead shrinks rapidly and becomes negligible. And of course, VM's provide very nice security features as well.. again something well worth their overhead memory cost.
.NET on either machine). I've grown to love the so called "bloat" - that is, it seems that any time I think to myself "I wonder if Java will let me do Y without reinventing the wheel" I find out that I'm not the first to have thought of it; it's actually implemented! (..same analogy applies to Java as KDE!)
Eclipse is not a text editor. It's an extremely powerful extensible IDE and as such it is quite efficient and useful. Eclipse saves developers an incredible amount of time and that time is worth a few orders of magnitude more than the cost of the extra RAM it uses over a lightweight IDE. Given the cost of a comparable commercial IDE, the RAM cost is absolutely laughable. Incidentally, the number you quoted is quite exaggerated as Eclipse runs perfectly fine on a 512MB machine for most purposes. Of course *any* serious development machine should have 1GB+ anyhow given how cheap memory is today. If your company can't afford $50 to make you vastly more productive, you'd better start looking for a new job quick!
As for Java in general, KDE developers are not "avoiding" it. It's just not the right tool for developing lightweight DE software. Java is neither slow nor bloated when used in the context for which it was designed. The mythical Java bloat is simply the memory overhead of the JVM. You'll have that in any managed code environment so get used to it because it's the way of the future for many types of apps -- whether Java or
I run Java both at work and at home, on decent machines, and I find the performance to be excellent (certainly faster than
?
/.ers have scripts running to make them "first up" to see the page when the loading drops to a manageable level?
/. articles to demand that when Slashdot links to them that /. sponsors a temporary mirror? Maybe even host that mirror on /.'s back end?
/. ad revenues, and create more work for /. staff, but some subjects probably cannot even get business done. Imagine if some of these smaller dev sites have e-commerce that is disrupted...
Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (11)
I thought since another URL might be accessible from within their site, I tried some and got the above...
That comes from their URLs:
http://www.simplekde.org/node/11
and
http://www.simplekde.org/?q=node/2
Does that mean a MySQL database can easily be slashdotted? (Seems so...)
If the slashdotting doesn't subside, is it because some
If so, is that technically a form of distributed "DDOS" attack?
Is it feasible or practical for subjects of
I know that would eat into