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."

Comments

Server go boom?

[JPamplin]

Mirror for SimpleKDE, anyone?

Re:Server go boom?

[TheOtherAgentM]

How light can it be? It won't even load!

Re:Server go boom?

[mrmagos]

The server for Plasma isn't much better...
Mirror for Plasma, anyone?

Re:Server go boom?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please explain to me how the first post can be redundant.. anyone?

Re:Server go boom?

[Vario]

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

Re:Server go boom?

[Charles W Griswold]

Meta-modding unfair when it is based on bias of OS/religion/etc rather than fact doesn't seem to help either.

Speaking heresy against the Church of the Sacred Penguin? Feel the wrath of my mighty -1 Troll mod, infidel! Hail Tux! All hail Tux and his prophet Linus Torvalds!

:-)

Re:Server go boom?

[ImaLamer]

Well that does me no good when it just links to a bunch of slashdotted sites!

"overbloated"?

[Anonymous Coward]

As opposed to underbloated?

Re:"overbloated"?

[deutschemonte]

Now, I don't care who you are, that's funny.

Re:"overbloated"?

[VitaminB52]

Overbloated? Given KDE's origins, you'd better call it 'überbloated' :) .

Re:"overbloated"?

[donscarletti]

Underbloated: adj.

Something which might be a little better to use if it didn't have its features so closely audited. See: Gnome.

Re:"overbloated"?

[SpeedyGonz]

Half full or half empty? :)

Re:"overbloated"?

[Anonymous Coward]

The apostrophe doesn't mean what most people think it does, either.

Re:"Overbloated"?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:"Overbloated"?

[Spy der Mann]

Overbloated:

Compare with "lightly overweight", "overweight", "obese", "exceedingly obese" and "ugly mass of fat that doesn't even fit in the bathtub". This last one would be KDE.

Re:"overbloated"?

[stilborne]

*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.

Re:"overbloated"?

[Charles W Griswold]

über doesn't mean what most american's think it does.

Whö cärës? Ït's göt ümläüts. :-)

Seriously though, as far as I can tell über means "above" or "over", as in something being superior to something else.

Re:"overbloated"?

[Charles W Griswold]

The engineer's answer: twice as large as it needs to be.

Re:"overbloated"?

[SidShakal]

As opposed to double-super-bloated.

mirrordot too slow

[AngryScot]

Seems mirrordot wasnt able to cache the screenshots before the server went down :(

Mirrors

[Anonymous Coward]

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

SimpleKDE screenshots and homepage.

All links courtesy Mirrordot.org.

Re:Mirrors

[Mornelithe]

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.

Re:Mirrors

[Momo_CCCP]

Yes it's important to point out that nothing of this exists in software currently, it's only mockups and ideas being debated for inclusion.

Re:Mirrors

[strider44]

I can't wait for Plasma, simply because Kicker is way past its use by date. Kicker is in my opinion one of the apps in KDE most in need of improvement. Also an integration of superkaramba and kdesktop will be fantastic.

Re:Mirrors

[stilborne]

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.

Re:Mirrors

[spectre_240sx]

Hopefully someone will come out with a theme like that, though. I kinda like it :)

--
Damned 20 second rule...

bloat for KDE too?

[bogaboga]

I thought it's only members of the fairer sex that get bloated. How exactly does a system get bloat?

Re:bloat for KDE too?

[KDR_11k]

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.

Re:bloat for KDE too?

[pianoman113]

Aircraft, watercraft, and often automobiles are referred to as women. Why not desktop environments?

Re:bloat for KDE too?

[gclef]

Since when was Windows female? (though that would explain a lot, now that I think about it....)

Re:bloat for KDE too?

[Mornelithe]

"Bloated" is geek slang for "does useful things."

Re:bloat for KDE too?

[ssj_195]

Ha - well said! :) As the saying goes, "One man's 'bloat' is another man's 'essential feature'". As long as it is well-programmed and optimised, I always welcome this kind of bloat with open arms.

Re:bloat for KDE too?

[LWATCDR]

Actually most feature bloat should show up as an increase in memory requirements and not CPU.
One of the "problems" with KDE and Gnome is that they are too configurable. They could be much smaller and lighter if they had less options. I am afraid it is a case of you can not have your cake and eat it too.

Re:bloat for KDE too?

[the_arrow]

Bloat is a geek codeword for Feature Oriented Programming.

Re:bloat for KDE too?

[SomeoneGotMyNick]

You need to use a Spyuretic once a month to remove the spyware bloat.

Re:bloat for KDE too?

[l3v1]

As more and more features get implemented, some of them constantly eating performance, the ressource usage of the system increases.

That's all stupid, just like the "arguments" saying the problem with kde is its high configurability. I only speak for myself here, but I have to tell you my current kde 3.3.2 desktop with superkaramba is the best desktop [in functionality, usability, speed and niceness] I've had for years, both on highly customized windows versions and on earlier kde/gnome/xfce/e versions. Since I know kde fairly well, it took me about 10-15 minutes to configure all the available options from looks to behavior, from menu items to mime associations, to suit my needs. And no, the availability of the many customizable options doesn't make it more resource hungry, bad configuration does.

At some point you need a freaking 3GHz GPU just to run a text editor.

Also, highly and badly stupid. [And I'm not surpised you get a 5 Informative for that, either.] One just needs to know the neighborhood before moving in. I could in this moment show you quite normal [i.e. fast enough, no unnecessary wait] launch times for kate, kwrite, kedit, kword and even oo.org writer.

Re:bloat for KDE too?

[ssj_195]

I could in this moment show you quite normal [i.e. fast enough, no unnecessary wait] launch times for kate, kwrite, kedit,

...and to add to this point, these are no mere "text editors", either.

Re:bloat for KDE too?

[bhalo05]

Gnome too configurable? You must be talking about Gnome 1.0... not anymore.

Re:bloat for KDE too?

[It'sYerMam]

For the moment, at least for me (AMD 2800, 512Mb RAM) Gnome is fine (no idea about KDE,) and I value the configurability of it. Certainly, there are some things that could do with cutting down, and sure there are always config files, but it's always nice to have a soft, cushiony GUI config app if you only need to do something quick.

Re:bloat for KDE too?

[sykjoke]

"Bloated" is geek slang for "does useful things." but doesn't work

Re:bloat for KDE too?

[LWATCDR]

I am running Gome and KDE on a 600 mhz P3 and they are both ok. I think KDE is a little faster. Yes I do have faster machines but I like to use this box as my test box. Helps me fight bloat in my own code.

Re:bloat for KDE too?

[Lost Found]

Everything you have said is true. Of course, the problem is most prevalent in fucking 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).

I run KDE both at work and at home, on decent machines, and I find the performance to be excellent (certainly faster than Windows 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 KDE will let me do Y" I find out that I'm not the first to have thought of it; it's actually implemented!

Re:bloat for KDE too?

[stilborne]

actually, they don't all do the same thing. one is for embedded use, one is for people who like an xmms style players and another for those who like jukebox style players. then there is kscd which is for, well, playing CDs.

now, you could say that there should be one app that does everything. and that would certainly be bloatware.

Re:bloat for KDE too?

[ultranova]

"Bloated" is geek slang for "does useful things."

No. "Bloated" is geek slang for spreadsheet programs whos programmers decide to add a flight simulator game as a secret feature because it doesn't increase program size or resource usage much, relatively speaking.

"Bloated" also refers to programs which grew by constantly adding new features to sell each new version, with very little concern about how those features affected the whole. As a result, a bloated programs interface has 100+ buttons, menus need their own management system, and actually using the program is nightmarish since you always have to wonder if one of the 1000+ automatic features will suddenly decide to reformat the document, save it and delete every previous version, destroying all your hard work in its zeal to be helpfull.

"Bloated" also means delivering help texts in the word balloons of an animated paperclip (and providing a programming API for making additional helpfull characters). It means having a spellcheck running in the background constantly, giving the program a vaguely heavy and unresponsive feel. It means setting parts of the program to be loaded during operating system boot, since starting the program would otherwise take too long. And it means integrating a Web Browser with both kernel and shell just because you can. And supporting automatically executing scripts embedding in text documents.

In short, "bloat" in programs is similar to clogged arteries in human beings.

Re:bloat for KDE too?

[chris_mahan]

Well in that case a window should be female.

because in french, and I am a native speaker (went k-12 in fr), it's "La Fenetre"
"La" is feminine.

Re:bloat for KDE too?

[Ogerman]

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).

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 .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.

I run Java both at work and at home, on decent machines, and I find the performance to be excellent (certainly faster than .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!)

Re:bloat for KDE too?

[Ogerman]

Gnome too configurable? You must be talking about Gnome 1.0... not anymore.

Ironically, GNOME is no less "bloated" than KDE in terms of memory usage in a typical desktop session. In my experience, KDE is simply more efficient. Both environments require a relatively modern machine to perform well, but KDE gives you far more features and configurability in the process.

If you're asking me, it's because KDE is less driven by politics and more by what users want.

Re:bloat for KDE too?

[Ogerman]

As long as it is well-programmed and optimised, I always welcome this kind of bloat with open arms.

Modularity doesn't hurt either. Bloat is your best friend as long as you can turn it off. :)

Re:bloat for KDE too?

[marlinSpike]

Kudos. That just about sums it up!

Re:bloat for KDE too?

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"No. "Bloated" is geek slang for spreadsheet programs whos programmers decide to add a flight simulator game as a secret feature because it doesn't increase program size or resource usage much, relatively speaking."

Office 2000 SP1 removed the flight simulator from Excel. It is not present in Excel XP or Excel 2003.

"Bloated" also means delivering help texts in the word balloons of an animated paperclip (and providing a programming API for making additional helpfull characters)."

Agreed. Office assistant sucks. You don't have to install it, though. Microsoft Agent has essentially been dead for years.

"It means having a spellcheck running in the background constantly, giving the program a vaguely heavy and unresponsive feel."

That's the stupidest comment I've ever heard about Word. Wavy-underline-spell-check is one of the most useful features to *ever* be added to Word. I don't know what you're talking about with "unresponsiveness", but Word 2003 uses about 14MB on my system and uses less than 5% of the CPU while I type.

"It means setting parts of the program to be loaded during operating system boot, since starting the program would otherwise take too long."

Not true since Word XP.

"And it means integrating a Web Browser with both kernel and shell just because you can."

Trident ("Internet Explorer") has not, is not, and - to the best of my knowledge - will never be a part of the Windows kernel. It is a series of libraries (mshtml.dll, showdocvw.dll, and some others) - not unlike Gecko ("Mozilla"), KHTML ("Konqueror") or WebCore ("Safari").

"And supporting automatically executing scripts embedding in text documents"

Word documents are not text documents, first of all. And, second of all, macros have not executed by default since Word 2000, and in Word 2003, you have to go through a multi-step process to even see the dialog that lets you execute them. Macro viruses are essentially dead.

Re:bloat for KDE too?

[nazsco]

i agree with you.

gnome is simply stagnated. no more preferences (i'd like to resize my windows with alt+LMB, please!) and lots and lots of futile memory eating crap.

that's why i use exclusively ion3

Plasma

[wot.narg]

Plasma is /really/ hot, and is the stuff that matters.

The atoms of truth in it might be a bit messed up right now, but once the facts cool, it will be rock solid.

When plasma comes out, if your not there, you might as well be a lame liquid.

Personal Opinion

[mfloy]

The fact of the matter is that both of these cater to different users with different tastes, and it is better to have both developed than one version that tries to be everything to everyone.

Re:Personal Opinion

[Iriel]

One of the reasons I'm looking forward to Plasma is the same reason I like using 4CD/DVD install distros in general. I install just about everything to start, then I weed out what I don't want/need until I might have something that looks like a candied-out SimpleKDE with a few extra tools.

Re:Personal Opinion

[It'sYerMam]

ooooh, I can't stand 4CD installs... It's far easier to install what you need to uninstall what you don't (for me) because of dependencies. Unless someone has a solution for what to do about the dependency problem - when you install something and need some library, how to know which libraries to get rid of later?

Re:Personal Opinion

[Iriel]

This is why I install almost everything with a DVD sized distro so far, not to discredit anyone:

1. I'm still not totally familiar with all the ins and outs of Linux systems, so until I get more proficient with them, I find it easier to have all the dependancies there to start and worry about getting rid of unused ones when I learn how to tell the difference.

2. I learn/experiment with a myriad of progamming languages, web development tools and technolgies, so it's nice to have all the options there so I test for myself what programs and interfaces work best for me without having to worry about installing and dependancies in between tests.

This is just my methodology, which will probably change with time and experience, but that's what I find to be the appeal of Linux; not only are there eight million different tools for any given job, each tool comes in roughly 12 different assorted shapes and sizes ;)

Re:Personal Opinion

[FLAGGR]

gentoo and portage.

Re:Personal Opinion

[It'sYerMam]

Until such a time as I have the opportunity to try out gentoo (which, hopefully, I'll get around to) I'd prefer a debian-orientated solution :)

Re:Personal Opinion

[Kyro]

For debian based distros, install 'deborphan'

It lists all packages no longer depended on by anything.

Re:Personal Opinion

[dr.badass]

The fact of the matter is that both of these cater to different users with different tastes, and it is better to have both developed than one version that tries to be everything to everyone.

Unless of course neither version satisfies anyone.

Re:Personal Opinion

[dknj]

FreeBSD and ports.

Re:Personal Opinion

[FLAGGR]

lol, were posting in a story about kde, which implies desktop, which excludes freebsd. freebsd is dead.

hehe just joking around, lighten up mods.

Re:Personal Opinion

[Feztaa]

Have you tried Ubuntu? Going from Fedora with a 4CD install / 3GB disk used on the default install to Ubuntu with a 1CD install / 1.5GB disk used on the default install was very refreshing -- then I enabled the universe repositories and installed the few things that were missing. I don't even know what other crap Fedora was installing, but I sure aren't missing any of it.

Re:Personal Opinion

[It'sYerMam]

Even better. Aah, CLI genius... Can even link it to a script, except there's a few things there that are depended on by source built apps, aMSN and the like.

Re:Personal Opinion

[It'sYerMam]

I use Ubuntu, partly for that very reason. I also went from FC(3) to Ubuntu, and not only found the lack of extra fluff refreshing, but found the great speed increase surprising. For a heavily GUI-orientated distro, Ubuntu does extremely well in keeping the weight down. So much so that applications themselves load noticeably quicker than they did in FC3.

Now if only they'd do inter-release updates without having to resort to backports.

Re:Personal Opinion

[mrogers]

Debfoster removes orphaned packages from Debian systems.

Re:Personal Opinion

[dmaxwell]

I used to do that until my skills and expectations gelled somewhat. Now I like to install minimal base systems and apt-get things until it looks like what I what. Not that I spend much time doing that when I discovered dpkg --get-selections > selections.txt, dpkg --set-selections selections.txt followed by dselect-upgrade.

The nifty thing about that method is that I can dance about debian based distros and get my usual environment + whatever the distro in question brings to the party. And yes, I'm crazy enough to turn Sid into Ubuntu into Mepis just by changing apt source lines and just sorta muddling the dependencies by hand when the package database gets pissed at me.

Once you have your ideal desktop, tuck the package list somewhere. I find it easier to add small new things to what I'm used to rather than the shotgun effect of removing 2 gigs of cruft that I idly run once.

Re:Personal Opinion

[Feztaa]

Yeah, I have mixed feelings about the debian idea of "stable" as practised in Ubuntu... it's a great thing on a server where you don't want to bugger around with updates every other day, but on a desktop it's kind of annoying running a version of gaim or firefox that's a couple minor versions out of date, especially when the updates have bugfixes and features that you really want.

Backports is kinda nice but it doesn't seem to be enough.

Good God

[Rinisari]

This story hadn't even been live for 5 minutes and we'd already brought down the majority of the sites in the story.

Good job, people. We're getting good at this game.

I was going to link to the story on Mirrordot, but it appears that even Mirrordot couldn't get 'em fast enough...

Re:Good God

[Linus Torvaalds]

It's not anything to do with Slashdot really - the hosting for many KDE projects is abysmal at handling even mediocre loads. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen them fall over. This has been going on for years, I guess they don't think it's enough of a problem to sort it out.

This could be important

[m0llusk]

One of the aspects of the Macintosh that keeps users coming back is the overal simplicity of it. The interface is mostly blank until users work with it and then it reflects them and their usage and their data. Having a minimalist yet fully functional mode could be important not only for appeal but sorting out the system as a whole.

Re:This could be important

[cmdr_tofu]

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!

Re:This could be important

[mnemonic_]

Also, OS X doesn't include 4 different music players that do the same thing.

Re:This could be important

[bhalo05]

KDE is slow? When was the last time you tried it? Do you know it has improved a lot in that regard since KDE 3.1?

Re:This could be important

[hyperstation]

doesn't *include*....last time i checked, windows media player and realplayer did not come with Tiger.

Re:This could be important

[KillerBob]

Even KDE 3.1's speed could have been greatly improved... the single biggest detriment to KDE's performance is still there: by default, it logs all errors to console. That adds clock ticks, and if you want to turn it off you have to go into the code and comment it out.

Besides which, there *is* a whole lot of bloat in KDE. I don't *need* to use arts, for example, when I already have ALSA working. KDE runs a whole bunch of different servers that aren't needed, because that functionality is already present. Gnome does the same thing. Sure, it provides a standard platform and allows program developpers to write to it, but it also means that KDE simply can't be as quick to start up or as zippy as a lean window manager.

Sure, there are some interesting ideas showing up there, but KDE isn't the first group to develop them. I'm gonna stick with XFCE for now. At least there, I've got the xfce-goodies project which provides most of this functionality already.

Re:This could be important

[Lost Found]

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.

Re:This could be important

[bani]

osx is pretty useless without them. at least, you can't view 98% of online content without media player and realplayer.

Re:This could be important

[jbolden]

KDE is a GUI not a windowmanager. You could try running KWin on its own and see how that compares. In any case XFCE was designed for speed so I'd assume it would beat KDE in this regard.

Re:This could be important

[oldwolf13]

>> Go to an average Mac user's desktop, right click on an .MP3, and see how many "Open in" options it gives you.)

What's this right clicking you speak of?

Plasma...

[Anonymous Coward]

Plasma probably describes the remains of the poor server.

See mirrordot or CoralCache for the pretty screenies.

Re:Plasma...

[Provocateur]

You're wrong. Plasma is the word that is used in every episode of ST:TNG when they have to call it something.

My brothers and I would watch the show only to see if they did NOT mention it at all.

So simple!

[earthbound kid]

I can vouch for the simplicity of the new KDE:

All I see are a white page and my browser's loading animation!

Re:So simple!

[sharkey]

So simple... No wonder it's 503!

Seems really cool...

[Pecisk]

(Disclaimer: I'm GNOME fanboy)

This is looks really cool and useful. Both ideas are very welcome. And for those who asks why Linux doesn't have one desktop - this is the reason - Innovation.

Re:Seems really cool...

[stilborne]

if i hadn't been posting like a fool to this story, i'd give some mod points to this. you are, IMHO, exactly right.

innovation, spreading risk and allowing us to address a broader audience by appealing to a wider variety of personal tastes.

vive la open source desktop!

Re:Seems really cool...

[Brandybuck]

Actually that's a benefit and side effect to having multiple desktops. The real reason we have multiple desktops is because we have the freedom to work on whichever damned desktop we want to.

I've never understood why some people want only one desktop. If they had their way, there would be a one-party democracy, and with a completely straight face would declare it "freedom."

Re:Seems really cool...

[coolGuyZak]

Innovation? If by innovation you mean both leading desktops copying Microsoft's desktop interface, then sure its really innovative... but never say Microsoft isn't innovative.

Maybe it's just me, but I didn't see him say anything about MS... albeit you did rather nicely.

Also, neither Gnome nor KDE copy Microsoft's desktop. (Albeit it is definitely possible with KDE to do so).

I'll probably get marked as flamebait, but...

When one is informed about the topic, one can post without such disclaimers. It is far more enlightening to discuss than to flame. ;)

Re:Seems really cool...

[Jugalator]

And for those who asks why Linux doesn't have one desktop - this is the reason - Innovation.

No, because a single group of people can innovate too. Google is a company that has came up with several innovations. Microsoft is one that hasn't. It's about several groups of people wishing to innovative different things, and prefer splitting up instead of adjusting themselves to a common belief in what's best.

Re:Seems really cool...

[oldwolf13]

Are you honestly trying to say that MS hasn't come up with one innovation?

I'm not an MS fanboy, but I mean, come on... you can't be that delusional.

usability question

[Anonymous Coward]

Good stuff. Will this include the idea of Restricting mouse in popup menus?

Re:usability question

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh boy, who comes up with that crap? Some people actually can handle a mouse and aim less erratic than a drunk spastic. NEVER ever move my mouse cursor unless I moved the mouse in the same direction. NEVER ever change my mouse speed and acceleration settings. I mean it. The instance you do any of that, your program parts with my system. Even if the program is the key to finding a cure for cancer, if it touches my mouse settings, it's history.

Humans have a very intuitive grasp of motion. Don't mess it up by arbitrarily changing the action-reaction coupling. It's bad enough that people have to use mouse acceleration because they use mice with insufficient resolution.

Re:usability question

[Orgazmus]

Yeah, that comes from the war.
It has nothing to do with you "surfing" habits

Re:usability question

[jci]

The link (at the very end, I know its hard to read that far) did say it would be optional...

Re:usability question

[Felonious Ham]

Break this and you're off my system, no second chances.

If KDE does this, will you demand your money back?

Re:usability question

[coolGuyZak]

Awesome. Truly awesome.

God... damn... slow down cowboy... shit. such a pain in my ass.

Re:usability question

[andersa]

Hear hear!

This is somewhat akeen to the stupidest "feature" in Windows, when you are dragging a scrollbar and move the mouse too far away from the bar, it will jump back to it's original position. Fucking moronic.

Resticting mouse movement is bad.

Re:usability question

[drsmithy]

This is somewhat akeen to the stupidest "feature" in Windows, when you are dragging a scrollbar and move the mouse too far away from the bar, it will jump back to it's original position. Fucking moronic.

To some of us, this is an exceptionally useful feature.

Re:usability question

[andersa]

You are probably just trolling, but heck I'll bite this one.

Why oh why would you ever want this? The standard way of canceling a mouse drag action is to right click. That should be enought. And no other OS has this. That should give you some hint that it is a bad idea.

Re:usability question

[andersa]

Oh forgot this..

Why is it annoying?

Because many times you will want to drag a page for a long time while reading or looking though some stuff. After a while you can't be expected to hold your precision with the pointer exactly to the small area in which the drag works. Eventually the pointer will venture out because you are not keeping an eye on what you are doing with it. So suddenly while you are reading something, the text jumps up to it's original position. Then you have to remove your attention from the material and focus on bringing the scrollbar under control. Totally annoying!

Another point. A lot of times on smaller scroll areas you just want to scroll all the way to the top or bottom. In all other OS's you can just click on the scrollbar and move the mouse very fast to the bottom of the screen and let go, and you know you will get the result you want. Not so in windows. Because you have to keep the mouse pointer in close proximity of the scrollbar for scrolling to work correctly you have to be very carefull about not making too erratic mouse movements. So it slows down the work yet again because you have to focus your attention on scrolling and not on the content you are looking at.

Fortunately edge dragging (on touch pads) and mouse wheels alleviate many of the problems with windows scroll bars. Otherwise I think I would go insane..

Re:usability question

[drsmithy]

Why oh why would you ever want this?

I use it for quickly flicking back and forth between locations in documents. I know many people who do likewise.

The standard way of canceling a mouse drag action is to right click. That should be enought.

That's not what it's there for.

And no other OS has this. That should give you some hint that it is a bad idea.

Quite possibly one of the most idiotic lines of reasoning I've ever seen.

Re:usability question

[drsmithy]

Because many times you will want to drag a page for a long time while reading or looking though some stuff.

Scroll wheels ? Touch pads that emulate scroll wheels ? Learning to control your mouse ?

After a while you can't be expected to hold your precision with the pointer exactly to the small area in which the drag works.

I can't say I've ever had a problem. A quick experiment would suggest that "small area" is on the order of 6x - 7x the width of the scrollbar, on either side. On my 19" screen @ 1280x1024, that "small area" is about 3" wide.

So suddenly while you are reading something, the text jumps up to it's original position.

Yes, as I said, some of us find this a useful feature for bouncing back and forth between different sections of a document.

Then you have to remove your attention from the material and focus on bringing the scrollbar under control. Totally annoying!

You hardly need to change your focus, just move your mouse slightly back in the direction it came from. Or are you one of these people who can't change the volume on their car radio without looking at it ?

Because you have to keep the mouse pointer in close proximity of the scrollbar for scrolling to work correctly you have to be very carefull about not making too erratic mouse movements.

Firstly, if you consider ~6x the width of the scrollbar *on each side* to be "close proximity", I find it amazing you can use a GUI at all.

Secondly, the worst case scenario - when your mouse has wandered to far to either side - simply means you need to move it back towards the scroll bar.

So it slows down the work yet again because you have to focus your attention on scrolling and not on the content you are looking at.

Right. You're slamming the scroll thumb from the start of the document to the end, but somehow managing to read it on the way past ? At least try and keep your examples _somewhat_ rational.

Re:usability question

[andersa]

I think you misunderstand. Those are two seperate cases. In one case I slowly read through content, and thus move the mouse slowly. In my experience the mouse tends to drift off to the side after a while, thus the text suddenly shifts position without me wanting it. In the other case i just grap the scroll bar and move it all the way to one end, without looking at the content. For instance when you are editing some text and want to add some new text at the end.

I'd say that the drag area extends just under 2 inches out from the bar on my 19 inch monitor, which runs in 1280x1024. But to me any size is too small, and I think you just got used to a 'misfeature' in windows, so much so that now you can't live without it. I am used to not having it this way, so I hate the feature. We probably will never agree on whats the best solution. If only we could get a config option to turn off that behaviour, we would both be happy.

Re:usability question

[oldwolf13]

ok now that's the funniest thing I've read in awhile :)

Re:usability question

[sillybilly]

I agree completely with your story, but there are two sides to everything. I often find myself sliding off deeply nested menus, especially on other people's computers. Trying to click - start, programs, accessories, tools - you may slide off the program menu sideways, and have to start all over by clicking start.

How to rectify this? If I keep the left mouse button held down, then you can restrict my motion. Then when I arrive at the spot, and I let go, jump me over to the submenu, where I click and hold button down again.

Another solution could be where I hold both buttons down at the same time, and then you don't have to "time" a single button. Getting both options could be nice, together with disabling them.

well done

[CdBee]

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.

Re:well done

[KlaymenDK]

Slashcode should append ANY link with ".nyud.net:8090", that's what I think. Problem solved once and for all.

Re:HI I*m Carrie

[aurb]

Who modded this offtopic?? I've almost missed my only chance to meet a girl, you bastards!

KDE Servers

[iphitus]

Look like they're plasma right now.

What's the deal

[zegebbers]

with the monochrome kicker? There's a reason why I have cones in my eyes!

Re:What's the deal

[radarsat1]

Ha, true.. ;-)
But I'm actually a big fan of tasteful use of solid black & white shading. This is really pleasing to my eyes, almost enough to make me switch back from Gnome.. ;-)
It's something about the simplicity... maybe this'll be available simply as an icon theme at some point. I'd love to use it in XFCE too.

Re:What's the deal

[nine-times]

I like it. Besides being very non-abrasive, it would make it very easy to use color as a visual cue. If the components are generally black and white, it really stands out when something red pops up.

Re:What's the deal

[coma_bug]

There's a reason why I have cones in my eyes!

Eh? Homo sapiens evolved chromatic vision to perceive kicker icons?

Flamebait?

[donscarletti]

I'm a Gnome developer (librsvg) and longtime user. It was meant as a joke, have a sence of humour about it.

Re:Flamebait?

[Henry V .009]

Trust me, we're laughing with you, not at you.
*snicker*

Re:Flamebait?

[owlstead]

Lets hope your documentation makes more sence :)

What about Slicker?

[AceJohnny]

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

Re:What about Slicker?

[AceJohnny]

AFAIK, slicker's lead developer (leineir) has turned his focus to the Plasma project.

Is(was) he really Slicker's lead developper? On the Berlios project page, he's noted as "doc writer", though I see he wrote the usability paper for Slicker. The project admin is danalien.

Re:What about Slicker?

[TomorrowPlusX]

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!

Re:What about Slicker?

[Sark666]

That's a shame. I had forgotten about this project myself, but as I soon as I saw the shots it came back instantly. 'Oh, that cool project!, what happened?' It just looks advanced, it looks right, it looks like a truly forward thinking desktop interface. Maybe someone with the skills will get motivated to continue it.

KDE Fork ...

[BonoLeBonobo]

Well, I think this KDE fork is going to die very quickly. Why have the developers of Simple KDE not contacted KDE developpers and have spoken with them of their usability and noob-ness concerns ? I think it's not a serious fork. To maintain such a large project, it needs a huge team (see the KDE one). Just imagine the translations, if the UI changes a bit, even with a good merging tool (svn for instance), it will be impossible for Simple KDE to follow. They should better have cooperated with KDE team which is very open ...

Re:KDE Fork ...

[Momo_CCCP]

It looks like it is mostly integration to their distro (turkix) with a few extra.. er sorry minus a few features.
Commenting out code ain't that hard, but they certainly had better join the plasma effort to make their voice heard rather than doing this imho...

Re:KDE Fork ...

[BonoLeBonobo]

Commenting out code won't help since on such a big project it has to be rather automatic if you want to keep time for coding.

Re:KDE Fork ...

[m50d]

They're forking because they want something contrary to KDE principles, namely less choice. (Why they don't just join gnome I don't know, but presumably they have their reasons). I hope they will continue, limping along, so someone doesn't try and do the "simplification" thing to mainline KDE and end up with abominations like the gnome file dialog. More buttons is never a bad thing.

Re:KDE Fork ...

[hexix]

Seriously? Is there still a GNOME vs KDE flamewar? I thought that died back in 2001.

Re:KDE Fork ...

[Coryoth]

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.

Re:KDE Fork ...

[m50d]

It's not a flamewar, just a disagreement. The two projects have different directions, and people who prefer one or the other will generally support that one. It's all reasonably amicable, but at the same time there are deap-seated differences.

Re:KDE Fork ...

[FLAGGR]

Except... gnome is still bloated. Obviously these guys like KDE, they just want a lite version. What good is gnome to them? I call troll.

Re:KDE Fork ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why have the developers of Simple KDE not contacted KDE developpers and have spoken with them of their usability and noob-ness concerns ?

You must be a noob yourself. MANY MANY MANY people have complained that KDE is bloated. It is no secret, and it's a very commonly heard criticism of KDE. Chances are the developers of Simple KDE have, in fact, already tried to make various requests and suggestions. The KDE team does what it wants, and I personally don't see them ever getting rid of the bloat on their own--it's pretty much out of their hands.

Re:KDE Fork ...

[BonoLeBonobo]

Well, i'm maybe a noob but not an anonymous coward ;)

As far as I know of my personal experience of young (who said n00b :p ?) KDE developer, KDE is not so bloated.

As far as I know, bugs.kde.org works really well. As a KDE developper, I browse such lists from time to time and check out bugs, feature requests. Popular confirmed request are each time implemented.

As you said that it is a "very commonly heard criticism of KDE", please can you quote somebody ?

But, if Simple KDE guys want to do something clean and without configuration options, they can do it. It's forking, it's allowed, it works (see Xorg). But here I *think* that for them it could not work, as KDE is a so a big project.

Btw, re-reading my post, I think I probably misexplained my thoughs as I said noob-ness. I do not qualify SimpleKDE developers of noob, I don't know them and wouldn't allow me to say that. I just wanted to say that their concerns were about making KDE available to noobs... well, english isn't my mother tongue...

Re:KDE Fork ...

[The Master Control P]

X eats 1/3 of your CPU drawing the screen? I'm running KDE right now, and X/KDE eat next to no CPU time. Unless of course it's redrawing the screen, when you'd presumably *want* it to use as much CPU as it can get so it'll finish up... Also, even if Nvidia doesn't support your card anymore, do you have the hardware drivers for it? That might be part of the problem.

And I'm using an aging 1.57 Ghz Athlon with 256MB of ram. ps aux shows X, Konsole and Konqueror consuming a combined 2% cpu, about as much as my mp3 player. Did you try Linux on a Pentium-150?

BTW, if you want Konqueror to start in about 1.5 seconds, tell KDE to preload an instance. Konqueror -> Configure -> Settings -> Performance

Re:KDE Fork ...

[sznupi]

Uhmm..beeing non-bloated is not about browsing or fixing bugs. Furthermore, it IS adding every popular feature request, among other things...

Re:KDE Fork ...

[Brandybuck]

90% of the "bloat" in KDE can be solved by merely changing your configuration. It's not something a noob can do, but for a distro, it's a piece of cake. Don't want two text editors, dump one! Don't want artsd running? Don't run it! Don't start kdesktop and keep the icons off the root window, or put a "start here" icon on the desktop and don't run kicker. Dump all the incredibly useful kio plugins, don't install any widget or window manager themes, etc, etc.

In short, you can make KDE as simple as you want. Just start stripping out functionality.

Re:KDE Fork ...

[BonoLeBonobo]

> BTW, if you want Konqueror to start in about 1.5 > seconds, tell KDE to preload an instance. > Konqueror -> Configure -> Settings -> Performance Yes, you're right to say this. If Internet Explorer starts fast under Windows, it is that it's preloaded at startup.

Re:KDE Fork ...

[Brandybuck]

Something's wrong with your installation then. KDE uses 1% of my system's resources. Always has since the 1.0 days. A konqueror windows (either file system or browser) pops up in under one second, quicker than Firefox does in Windows.

On the other hand, I had a weird problem at work last friday where MS Word would take five minutes to load, so slow you could see Windows draw each individual element in the windows.

Re:KDE Fork ...

[Com2Kid]

• Also, even if Nvidia doesn't support your card anymore, do you have the hardware drivers for it? That might be part of the problem.

What does that mean exactly?

In the latest version of their drivers, Nvidia dropped support for the Geforce 256 SDR, ("Legacy" chipset), the newer Linux kernels do not support the older drivers without lots of patches and such applied to them, and even when applied, I still can't get accelleration working!

Sucks.

• And I'm using an aging 1.57 Ghz Athlon with 256MB of ram. ps aux shows X, Konsole and Konqueror consuming a combined 2% cpu, about as much as my mp3 player. Did you try Linux on a Pentium-150?

Two machines, one of them a 2.6GHZ Celeron with 256MB of RAM, and the other a 1.5Ghz Athlonw ith 512MB of RAM, same results on both. 1024x768 res, 85hz.

Re:KDE Fork ...

[Com2Kid]

• quicker than Firefox does in Windows.

Well that is not saying much...

Re:KDE Fork ...

[Brandybuck]

Of course, not even a minimalist text mode browser can compete with a browser already running in the background. Which is why Konqueror is so fast under KDE, it's running in the background as well.

Re:KDE Fork ...

[m50d]

Gnome is trying to make things simpler, and in their view more user-friendly, by removing some of the array of options and features available, with the downside of reducing customisability and (to some) functionality. KDE has rejected this view and offers as many features as it thinks could possibly be useful, which may make things confusing for new users and adds to bloat. Gnome is still bloated, but there is a concerted effort to get rid of the bloat, whereas in KDE that would not happen at the expense of features. If they like KDE that's fine, but if you don't hold with the "features above all else" ideology, I can't see why you would prefer KDE. I'm a KDE supporter and user, but in all honesty once you've replaced the horrible default theme gnome can do most of the stuff KDE can, and the things KDE does that gnome doesn't are presumably the same things they'll be stripping out to make a "lite" version.

Re:KDE Fork ...

[The Master Control P]

I meant that even though their current driver download doesn't support your card, do you still have the previous one that did? It appears you do. Also, I too once had a problem with making Nvidia's accelerated drivers work with Linux. When you tried to use the old accelerated drivers, did your screen either get to the desktop then lockup when you did anything or hang on the white screen that says "Nvidia?" It kept doing that to me, and I found out that it needed to compile it's own kernel interface module. Does that help?

As for X/Kde eating 36% CPU idling on 1.5Ghz+ machines, I've got no explanation. Did you try ps aux to see if there's something crazy in the background? One possible explanation is that if you run kded and then unplug a USB card reader, kded starts eating huge amounts of cpu trying to get to the reader.

Re:KDE Fork ...

[Com2Kid]

• I meant that even though their current driver download doesn't support your card, do you still have the previous one that did? It appears you do. Also, I too once had a problem with making Nvidia's accelerated drivers work with Linux. When you tried to use the old accelerated drivers, did your screen either get to the desktop then lockup when you did anything or hang on the white screen that says "Nvidia?" It kept doing that to me, and I found out that it needed to compile it's own kernel interface module. Does that help?

Apparently Linux does not support my older Nvidia drivers (in change log), go figure...

• As for X/Kde eating 36% CPU idling on 1.5Ghz+ machines,

Well it's idling with buttloads of eye candy, idle in terms of me not touching the mouse.

KDE first on OpenSolaris!

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE favorite for OpenSolaris project, read more here

http://blogs.gnome.org/view/calum/2005/07/18/0

Innovative?

[aussie_a]

Early screenshots, mockups, and developer blogs show that the new Plasma Project (KDE 4.x branch) will bring innovative approaches to desktop computing.

I'm sorry. I saw nothing innovative. It doesn't mean KDE 4.x won't be innovative, it's just that none of the links hint at this. It was slashdotted, but all I saw mirrored was

1. animation of a calender built into KDE
2. Contacts grouped together with a pop-up (I assume it's a mouse-over effect) saying how many people I'm talking to and who the latest person was.
3. Search bar built into the taskbar and results are shown in a pop-up.
4. A dedicated button to profile information in the taskbar.
5. A dedicated button to computer settings (including a shut-down option)
6. Digital or analog clock option
7. Taskbar can change colours
8. Taskbar can show icon or icon and name of the file (along with pop-up summary cut off to avoid it being too large)
9. A start button
10. System alerts appearing above the taskbar
11. Dedicated buttons in taskbar can be customised
12. Dedicated weather button

Grabbing existing programs and building them into a desktop is not innovative, so #1 isn't innovative (it allows pop-ups to be grouped or split, I assume so you can keep it on your screen. Useful? Yes. Innovative? No. It's just grabbing stickies (present in ICQ in 2000) and using them).

#2 Microsoft already sort of does, and I have found it annoying, rather then useful. They've added a tiny bit more information (which can be indicated with flashing), but isn't innovative. Useful though? For some perhaps.

A program does #3 for Google Desktop, so even if it is innovative, it wasn't KDE's innovation.

Dedicated buttons are not innovative, and it's really just what Microsoft does with the icons displayed next clock in Windows. So #4, #5 and #11 aren't really innovative.

#6, #7, #9 and #10 is already done either by KDE itself or Windows.

I have no idea why weather buttons are so popular (I prefer the method of sticking my head out the window), but they are. I'd hardly call it innovative though.

So perhaps the blog has this innovation talked about in the summary? Well, no. It mentions pulling a bunch of things (to be reworked I presume), the only thing it mentions on adding is:

we'll have a new clock applet in plasma

I hardly think that's innovative.

With Windows barely changing since 1995, I was looking forward to finally seeing some innovation in desktop interfaces. Unfortunately this article on KDE and plasma didn't include anything that could be remotely called innovative.

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?).

I do hope KDE does bring innovation into the desk-top. I hope someone, ANYONE brings it. But I've yet to see any indication anyone will be anytime soon.

Re:Innovative?

[LMCBoy]

I hardly think that's innovative.

Ah, the indignation of the armchair Free Software Critic. Note how he comes to conclusions based on a cursory glance at a few mockups, and is able to sneer in plain text. Especially skilled is his repeated entreaty that someone, ANYONE, give him a Free desktop which meets his exacting (if completely unspecified) standards for usability, innovation, and excellence.

Their existence in the geek ecosystem is a bit of a mystery, since for all their bluster, they generally contribute nothing to the actual development of the projects they rail against endlessly. Suggestions that they actually help by making suggestions on a mailing list, or filing a bug report or wish, or (perish the thought) actually write some actual code, usually fall on deaf ears.

Re:Innovative?

[BonoLeBonobo]

"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

Re:Innovative?

[Qzukk]

a filing system that uses labels rather then folders

I've thought about set-based filesystems before. Rather than having directories, a file would belong to one or more sets, like for instance "System Files", "$USER's Files", "Mail Files", "2004 Vacation Pictures", "Porn", etc. In a multiuser system, all the users' mail spools would be located by looking in "Mail Files". An individual user's mail would be located in "$USER's Files"*"Mail Files". My porn would be in "root's Files"*"Porn", completely separate from "jdoe's Files"*"Porn", but I could still see all the porn on the system from "Porn". A team project could contain files in ("User1's Files"+"User2's Files"+"User3's Files")*"CPSC120 Assignment 3". The biggest issue with this, implementation-wise, would be the storage requirements for N sytem-defined sets, plus user-defined sets, and their indexes. Some method for file disambiguation would be necessary too, if I have an "All User's Files" set, what would each user's .bashrc look like?

This of course ignores the fact that every tool and user is geared towards hiearchical filesystems. Even if Spotlight can pull stuff up by category, that stuff still resides in /some/directory, and thats where the program goes when it opens it. It would be possible to "fake it" a little simply by hacking the "cd" operation to intersect sets, but the order of set intersection doesn't matter, so cd set1/set2 gets you to the same place as cd set2/set1, which will cause tools using directory recursion to blow a gasket. Assuming of course, you provide all the possible intersecting sets as subdirectories to the current set intersection directory. cd .. should remove the most recently added set, meaning that from /set1/set2, cd .. would take you to /set1 while from /set2/set1 (which is the same "place") it would take you to /set2. Finally, from /, you'd see every file on the system (again, you'd need a way to disambiguate files with the same names). Even if that's all worked out, kludging cd to work in sets doesn't provide for a way to take unions of sets or perform other useful set operations.

Re:Innovative?

[Linus Torvaalds]

I saw nothing innovative.

The Plasma developers use the Microsoft definition of the word "innovative". I was told that I had bought into marketing lies for daring to point out that innovative meant something new.

Re:Innovative?

[p0z3r]

Extenders and Plasmoids. The ability to "tear things off" noted by some of the animations.
A ZUI layer similar to Dashboard, but more integrated. Although not completely innovative, innovation are steps in evolution built upon preconceived ideas.

The clock applet shows one example of using some of the bindings languages to create applets/plasmoids. Which in turn lowers the bar for people to get started in hacking away at kde. C++ is there to create applets/plasmoids still as some will require performance.

You also missed the ALI instead of KMenu in KDE 4.0. Seems your review requires more research. ;)

Re:Innovative?

[ssj_195]

For what it's worth, I think you were completely in the right. They way people rallied round that other chap was depressing.

Re:Innovative?

[travail_jgd]

Free software is supposed to be "Free as in speech". If people can't criticize without submitting uber-l33t code or registering for bugtrackers, how is that freedom of speech?

Try thinking outside the box: a user has reviewed the developer-designed mockups, and rejected it. There's your bug report.

Don't like criticism? Keep your code and your projects to yourself, and keep all of us in the unwashed masses out. Everyone will be happier that way.

Re:Innovative?

[BonoLeBonobo]

Innovative for KDE is part of KDE4. If you have ideas, feel free to share them :) What we aim to do with KDE4 is to build a desktop for everyone, easy to use, but with good configuration options for power users. But the first thing is to make something usable for you daily task. So for this it should be some innovation note here at this time.

Re:Innovative?

[zoomba]

Ah, the indignation of the Free Software Zealot. Note how he misses the entire point of the post and takes it as an opportunity to throw out the old tired line of "If you don't like it, code it yourself!"

His points were very accurate. All of the features shown in the screenshot that was DESCRIBED IN THE ORIGINAL POSTING as "innovative" can be found in existing Operating Systems and desktop utilities. Innovative implies new and exciting. The features on display were not innovative.

Your attitude here is exactly the reason many of us don't bother submitting suggestions or critiques anymore. I spent some time a while back going over the Gentoo install documentation, making notes where clarification could be used and how it could perhaps be structured in an easier-to-follow format. My suggestion/report was just discarded with "It works for us"

Usability is the "un-fun" portion of building a desktop. It's just not cool to go through and code and edit to make it all flow together. It's fun to build the fancy widgets, or the pretty themes, or some system tool or whatever. That's the fun stuff. Going through the entire damn thing and editing it to make it mesh together is tedious and boring. Most people, when working on a project for free, are less inclined to do the boring stuff.

Then there's the whole attitude that "Well, lets see YOU do it better!" which is just a load of crap. This is why Linux is lightyears away from being a user-oriented system. The average user would take one look at GNOME or KDE and go "Yuck!" And you can't really expect them to come in and code a new UI for you. And don't start with "Well, then maybe they're not smart enough to use it..." If you want Linux to succeed on the desktop in a meaningful way, you have to make the thing end-user-friendly.

So get off your high horse and come taste a bit of reality. You know, that place the rest of us live. I know it may seem harsh and may conflict with your unrealistic expectations, but a brief stay might be good for you.

Re:Innovative?

[stilborne]

you're right that nothing you listed is innovative. there will be lots of things that aren't innovative in plasma, such as how it will continue to use popup menus! *gasp* ;)

i've commented elsewhere in this story about innovation in plasma. feel free to find it =)

and really, please hold back on the analysis until we publish something. i'm happy that people are all excited and posting this to /. every couple of weeks, but you may notice that it isn't myself (i happen to be the project lead) or even other plasma developers, just very enthused users who have probably talked to me directly on irc or elsewhere and have an idea of where it's going.

anyways.. yeah... give us a few month, m'kay? i promise i'll keep you all updated when there's something i'm content with trotting out =)

Re:Innovative?

[bluGill]

I have no idea why weather buttons are so popular (I prefer the method of sticking my head out the window), but they are.

The problem is you are sticking your head out the window. Therefore we can assume that you spend most of your day on the inside of that window. Weather is an interesting phenomena when you spend most of your day indoors (with central heat and AC). When you spend your day outside it is something you need to keep track of.

Just because it is sunny now doesn't mean much if you need things to be sunny for the next 5 days once you start cutting the hay. If might be cool this morning, but that doesn't tell you if you need to bring the 5 gallon jug of water (because it will be 100 in the shade and you will drink it all), or just can of pop for break time (all the water you need for 70)

Yesterday may or may not be anything like today, and things may change latter on in the afternoon. This is important when you work outside.

Re:Innovative?

[zpok]

Oh, OK.

It's on /. but shouldn't be criticized. It's free, so it's innovative. Poster doesn't do code so should shut up.

Strange, someone who actually takes the time to look at the stuff the article hints at and calls innovative should in your opinion shut his trap or get involved.

You know how to turn prospective users on, that's for sure...

Re:Innovative?

[spitzak]

Your ideas match pretty much what I have heard as the way to implement labels.

We certainly don't want a different interface for opening hierarchial files and labelled files. Unfortunatly one fear of having Apple or Microsoft do this is that they won't get it and will put in a different interface, possibly botching it so bad that you cannot use a string to identify a file.

The directory "/set1/set2/set3" would contain all the files that are in all three of those sets. If any of those files are also in another set (set4) there *may* be a subdirectory called set4 containing those files. Assumming a finite number of sets the directory hierarchy will end after a point, though the same file will show up more than once if a search (possibly huge numbers of repititions).

To fix existing programs some background tree-balancing algorithim would keep an actual directory matching one of the possible names for each non-empty subset. All other connections would be shown as symbolic links, which would stop most existing hierarchial searching programs from going down them. Notice that this has nothing to do with the implementation, it is just how the API works. I doubt building a label system without fs support would work.

Re:Innovative?

[Chandon Seldon]

If you're actually going to change the file system that radically, you have a new operating system on your hands - therefore there's no reason to preserve the "cd" directory change syntax (especially since you don't have directories any more).

On the other hand, this type of concept could be implemented on top of an existing file system structure at the desktop environment / graphical file manager level.

Re:Innovative?

[spitzak]

Well, no, I'm thinking the opposite. The whole point of the design is so that existing programs can work and you can communicate a "label" identifier of a file to it. I don't see any reason that the vast majority of programs won't work with a file system that interprets names this way. As the first poster pointed out, there may be problems with programs that search directories recursively.

On the other hand, trying to make my proposal atop an existing filesystem would require the creation of vast numbers of very small directories, this is probably way too expensive. I think the file system has to change.

Putting it in the GUI library is NOT the thing to do. We need open("name") to work. This is also why we need FUSE. It is useless that KDE lets some programs open a filename with http: at the start, we need *all* programs to open it, and there is no need for any other interface, thus I think the only correct thing to do is replace the open() system call. Same is true of any label-based filesystem.

Re:Innovative?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your attitude here is exactly the reason many of us don't bother submitting suggestions or critiques anymore.

Good. I'm a developer and if there's one thing I truly hate, it's when some nobody comes onto the list and starts bossing people around. "Hey guys, I have no knowledge of this project or coding and hell, I only started using the software last week but I think I'm an expert, so I think you should do this because... well... like I'm brilliant and stuff and you guys should listen to me". They then sit back and wait for all the developers to leap into action, implementing the whims of this nobody with an inflated ego. Then 4 weeks later after he has been rightfully ignored, the brainiac gets all indignant and shouts "You guys never listen to what I say, you're the problem with Linux, if you don't do what I say then Linux will never be a success on the desktop". If we wait a bit longer then he goes away, possibly back to Windows, we honestly don't care.

You see, you're under the mistaken impression that we give a damn if you use Linux or not.

Re:Innovative?

[darkwhite]

Have you used KDE lately?

It is no OS X, but KDE is light years ahead of other DEs in terms of usability and consistency, not to mention features. It definitely needs work in terms of device management and GTK integration, and some modules still harass the user with indecipherable options, but it is massively more usable than anything else on Linux.

I agree with you 100% that usability and integration are paid way less attention to than they should be. But if there's a project that's doing its homework in the un-fun, usability department, it's KDE.

Re:Innovative?

[labratuk]

You jump at the fact that he mentioned the word code, though he mentioned several other ways complaining users can do something constructive.

I spent some time a while back going over the Gentoo install documentation, making notes where clarification could be used and how it could perhaps be structured in an easier-to-follow format. My suggestion/report was just discarded with "It works for us"

Your problem is that at no point do you entertain the idea that your suggestions weren't very good.

Usability is the "un-fun" portion of building a desktop. It's just not cool to go through and code and edit to make it all flow together.

Completely wrong. UI stuff is the 'cool stuff' because anyone can put on the 'HCI expert' hat and then make a stink when people don't do exactly what they say. It's the stuff that allows people to say "You see the way those widgets are arranged? I did that."

You have a great way of making excuses for not doing anything productive about the situation yet continue complaining bitterly.

The average user would take one look at GNOME or KDE and go "Yuck!"

I know a lot of 'average users' who would disagree with you.

So get off your high horse and come taste a bit of reality.

Get off your own high horse. Just because people don't always listen to you or do things the way you say they should be done doesn't mean they're unresponsive and arrogant.

Re:Innovative?

[Chandon Seldon]

I tend to think that theres nothing wrong with /usr/bin/perl or /bin/bash or /etc/resolv.conf - these paths work so there's no reason to go out of our way to change them.

On the other hand, it'd be neat to have this label functionality for user files. Here's how to implement it very simply on top of, say, Linux/KDE:

1. Store all files in their owner's home directory directly, or with an "~/b/bu/bus/business-letter" structure.
2. Have a directory called "~/.labels". Put a file in it for each label that's a sorted list of the files with that label. Also have a file called "~/.labels/reverse-lookup" which maps filenames to labels.
3. Replace the file manager and standard file dialogs (Save As and Open) with versions that use labels instead of directories, with whatever GUI you want.
4. Leave the programming interface and command line as is.

What I've described gives you 90% of what you want, or 100% from the non-power-user perspective without requiring any radical restructuring of the core OS.

Re:Innovative?

[spitzak]

That does sound good. In fact the labels can point anywhere and thus the user can label anything that can be named, such as url's or files in other user's directories, etc.

I very much want to see a non-GUI api that the gui is built on top of, in it's own *relatively small* library. The fact that you have to link in all of kde/gnome in order to use their prefix filename scheme is making that a dead-end, if kde/gnome is required for this it is going nowhere. As I see it, some interface to take a set of labels, and another that takes a standard "single string" representation of a set of lables, and returns a list of matches, would work. Also the ability to add or delete any label from any file.

The actual filename can be left up to the program. However I expect the GUI will just present the user with the ability to add as many labels. It will pick one to name the file, adding suffixes as needed to avoid name collisions.

"Overbloated"?

[Kurt Wall]

...SimpleKDE, an unofficial fork of KDE, were meant to be a response to those who criticise KDE as being overbloated.

Umm, "overbloated" meaning what? If something is bloated, it seems to me that it is by definition "distended beyond the natural or usual size." So how can KDE, if bloated it be, be "overly bloated."

I can say with definity I don't like SimpleKDE

[strider44]

SimpleKDE seems like a good idea at first but they've gone too far. I'm looking at the screenshots and seeing them removing things like virtual desktops. I don't mind them reducing the amount of settings and configuration required for the newer computer users but these are some brilliant features that increase organisation and productivity here that they're removing.

Re:I can say with definity I don't like SimpleKDE

[bani]

i love how grandmothers are the benchmark for usability. if the grandmother is the ruler that UI usability shall be measured by, that means we have to use 75 point fonts for all text as well for grandma's poor eyesight.

Re:I can say with definity I don't like SimpleKDE

[strider44]

four times the space to put programs in...

Re:more tinkering around the edges

[ssj_195]

What would constitue "a deep way", in your opinion? Examples would be nice. I've always been of the opinion that a lot of good ideas and innovations could come from the user base, where the people who have to use the thing have good ideas about what they'd like to see, and what would make their lives easier. Plus, there's a hell of a lot more users than developers, so a bigger pool of ideas to draw from - Open Source should not just be about adding code. So let's get some brain-storming going!

E17

[dduardo]

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.

Re:E17

[ssj_195]

I wouldn't want to sacrifice my right-mouse button (this would be a *huge* change - just think how many apps depend on it!), but mapping additional buttons to this kind of thing would be neat - a sort of "uber-contextual-menu" could spring up around the mouse, and you can add whatever you want to it - some kind of taskbar representation so you can change apps with a quick mouse click and then a small movement (perhaps just the scroll wheel, like the Firefox All-In-One-Gestures menu?); your favourite list of apps that you can start; the sky's the limit. I'm really keen on the idea of getting as many people to suggest ideas as we can get, no matter how far-out, whacky, or at first glance, useless (if someone told me that tabs and gestures in a Web Browser would eventually become indispensable to me a year ago, I'd have laughed in their face!) - necessity is the mother of invention, so a userbase's wishes should be the wellspring of innovation.

And to the OP - the beauty of open-source is that we are not reliant on the KDE team to do all this for us - people very frequently write desktop mods. Write them yourself (or suggest it to someone else who is looking for a project), get it out there, see what people think of it and, if it turns out to be a good idea, eventually it will probably be absorbed into KDE itself (like Karamba into Plasma, for example).

Everyone who thinks they have a good idea - go on, and suggest away! F/OSS has already proven it can create good quality code by harnessing the collective IQs of thousands of people around the planet, but so far has a poor reputation for innovation. I see no reason why this open, collaborative framework couldn't be extended to harness the enormous pools of creativity out there, also.

Re:E17

[Mornelithe]

KDE is quite capable of displaying the programs menu (or many other menus, for that matter) when you right click on the desktop, just like Enlightenment.

Or were you referring to something else?

Cacheing everything is possibly unfair

[CdBee]

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.

Re:Cacheing everything is possibly unfair

[ciroknight]

It could automatically insert a second link with the text "[1]" with links to Coral caches next to the original link and "[2]" to mirrordot. That way the original link is untouched, but the first and second are automatically available if the server is down.

Re:Cacheing everything is possibly unfair

[owlstead]

Or we could create a simple firefox extension that enables us to look at mirrored versions instead of all that mucking about with copying and pasting stuff.

Re:Cacheing everything is possibly unfair

[KlaymenDK]

there's a possibility that it would deprive those sites which can take the traffic of pageviews, and click-through revenue

I see your point (and raise you one).

The crux of the matter is "missing out on ads&pageviews vs. burning down the server/exceeding monthly bandwidth". No one solution is ever going to be 'right' for 'any' random site (the suggestion with appending "[1],[2]" wouldn't mitigate that problem either).

IMHO however (how rarely I see *that* disclaimer here on /.!), it is a far greater inconvenience to have all your bandwidth spent in one (possibly mid-month) afternoon, or to get billed for unexpected excess bandwidth usage, than it is to miss out on a potential monetary windfall. One thing is outright punishment, another is a lack of reward -- I know what I'd prefer!

Re:Cacheing everything is possibly unfair

[ciroknight]

A script in the story posting system would be more effiecent to both copy and pasting and a Firefox extension. Besides, it'd really only be a small hack; simply load all links into an array, and go through the array finding ".com|.net|.org" etc, and inserting in the nessicary "nyud.net:8090" or whatever it is. Not that difficult and would instantly leave us with the ability to choose.

Plasma looks like ass!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I'm not just flaming for the sake of flaming, it really is a giant step backwards in appearance.

Plasma may well be a massive technological advance but its appearance here is horrendous. The monochrome color scheme is awful and, as if that wasn't bad enough, the icons are so vague and artsy-minimalist-cryptic that they make it harder to figure out what they mean or do and therefore will impair productivity.

I realize that these are mockups but, I really hope that this doesn't go any further as it would make the best looking desktop look like ass.

Also, lets not forget that we don't want to go with too radical a change all at once. KDE is supposed to be a mature product at 3.x & 4.x release and it should not be necessary to retrain the users because the GUI changed so drastically from the previous version that they can't recognize anything. Change and improvements are good but, if they are too drastic their effect will be a detriment.

Re:Plasma looks like ass!

[Mornelithe]

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.

Re:Plasma looks like ass!

[czarangelus]

What the other responder said, and:
I'd assume that there will always be the option to turn this stuff off, and that it'll be easy enough to skin it as KDE 3.x, Windows Longhorn, or just about any other OS theme you can think of and more. That's the great thing about KDE... options, options, options.

Re:Plasma looks like ass!

[stilborne]

> 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. =/

Re:Plasma looks like ass!

[shmlco]

it needs to be introduced step by step.

I disagree. If you know where you're going, and you're positive it's a place worth going, then just do it.

Better, like Apple, to take the big step all at once so people see how it all fits together and everything works together in a consistent fashion. Otherwise, if you spread it out over a long series of releases, people are going to become skittish. "What are they breaking this time?"

Re:Plasma looks like ass!

[sznupi]

Uhmmm...you mention artists...but what about useability experts? (I hate the word: lately it means "web designer" kind of people; I mean the REAL ones; I dunno, guys after psychology & cognitive science aren't bad at this among other types) You know, it's meant to be _used_ primarily.

Re:Plasma looks like ass!

[stilborne]

> it's meant to be _used_ primarily.

of course ... we have a number of usability pros around these days. within the Appeal project, which Plasma is associated with, we have 2 of them that are core members. they are a real asset.

seeing as i've been one of those people working on various usability issues within kde for some time now, it's probably safe to say that it's high on my agenda =)

btw, why does everyone on /. state the obvious, and do so rudely as if the obvious would never occur to you? bah. no wonder i dislike this site so much =P c'mon people, don't be haters! enjoy each other's company. or.... is this how you always are? in which case, please don't invite me over for dinner ;)

Re:Plasma looks like ass!

[stilborne]

i don't think we need to continuously break things to do this, and i also don't want to alienate our users by delivering a completely alien desktop.

if you think MacOS X introduced a bunch of "brand new ways" of doing things all at once, then i suggest you go back and compare OS9 with OSX and ignore the eye candy.

they certainly have layered in the new concepts with each release, and the initial release was still pretty mac-like. the biggest deviation (and probably their biggest mistake =) was the dock, really.

plasma will provide a number of new concepts and changes, and it will be coherent. but perhaps getting rid of application windows is a bit much right out of the gate, no? ;)

Re:Plasma looks like ass!

[happyhangone]

and what about SVG rendering of the theme, icon, desktop, windows, etc.

Re:Mac os expose?

[l3v1]

No. It look exactly like (super)karamba integrated into the desktop. Which [(super)karamba] was inspired by Samurize on Windows. Both are rockstars of my desktop pop scene :D

If you wanty to see something like expose, better take a look at kompose.

Re:more tinkering around the edges

[nickos]

"C++-based bloat"

C++ does have it's faults, but OO is a good fit for user interface coding and C++ is certainly more efficient than any other OO language. A lot of less experienced programmers seem to make the mistake of applying every OO paradigm at every given opportunity, but this is hardly C++s fault.

Re:more tinkering around the edges

[bhalo05]

It's still the same C++-based bloat

Of course. 'Cause everyone can tell it's C++ just by looking at a screenshot :P

Actually...

[eno2001]

...this is the second time in two weeks I've seen the URL to the main page of the Plasma project listed. And both times, I get "server could not be found" messages. What's up with DNS?

Re:Let me guess

[WhiteWolf666]

I believe that one of KDE's design goals is to emulate Windows 'enough' that is should be easy for switchers to come to KDE.

Keep in mind you can modify KDE for behavior you find more appropriate.

Also consider enlightenment; that sounds like something you might prefer. One of the nice things about Linux is choice; you don't have to use KDE. Many distributions come with a wide selection of Window managers, and enlightenment is often on the list (it is for SuSE).

None of these are as 'integrated' as KDE, however, but I do not think you can fault the KDE project for acheiveing their design goals, especially because I consider their goals admirable (think, for example, of the recent Novell switch to desktop linux. Do you really think it would have been possible without Windows-like KDE and Gnome?)

I understand that you acknowledge this, but the political motivation really *does* make a lot of sense, especially when you consider that many of the KDE 'developers' work for or in conjunction with the 'ties to IBM, Redhat, (Novell)' that you speak of.

That's unbelievable!

[Piroca]

Don't get me wrong, but we are in 2005 and the "Linux desktop" is still behind the 10-years-old Windows 95 desktop in terms of consistency and usability. The situation is really scary given that Windows 95 interface (as well as its 98, 2k and XP derivatives) is actually a piece of shit. But, at least, it didn't make basic mistakes:

• Fonts are readable and well aligned inside widgets
• Spacing was consistent between elements of the interface
• Contrast between what the user has to recognize/interact and backgrounds/empty areas/decorations is quite high
• Widgets, colors, fonts, decorations, etc. all look the "same", without major discrepancies in style or form

KDE (and Gnome) make *all* the abovementioned mistakes, shamefully. It's amazing how these problems still persist and *none* seems to care about them, energy seems to be used in the creation of stupid themes and wallpapers as opposed to real, obvious issues (look at the fonts issue, for instance, if you don't use ttf fonts stolen from a windows install the desktops look really bad). I should stop my flamebait here, but it's obvious that Apple is going to put the last nail in the "Linux desktop" coffin, for good.

Re:That's unbelievable!

[Yrd]

I'd dispute all those points for a recent GNOME version. Good fonts, good layout, some fabulous themes... sure we've got overall integration problems, stuff which isn't designed for GNOME really looks out of place, but some of your criticisms are unjustified for GNOME and for KDE as well.

And if you've not looked at Apple lately... they seem to have thrown interface consistency out of the window, and are making increasingly bizarre decisions along UI lines.

Re:That's unbelievable!

[Lost Found]

Fortunately, you're totally wrong. I'm posting from KDE Konqueror right nwo, and I seem to be able to:

1. Read my fonts, which are aligned perfectly inside my widgets;
2. Witness consistent spacing between elements of the interface;
3. Use contrast to clearly see differences in the elements of my interface;
4. Witness excellent consistency not only in appearance but actual *functionality* between my KDE apps.

There is still the matter that a lot of X11 apps disagree about their desktop toolkit. Thankfully, the majority of the apps I use have powerful KDE versions, and gtk-qt-engine cleans up around the edges (though is certainly far from perfect).

Re:That's unbelievable!

[Johan Veenstra]

Others have already told replied to you, telling you what you're saying about Gnome/KDE is not quite true.

Let me be the one telling you, that what saying about windows is not quite true either. I can only comment about Windows 2000, but I guess most is true for 95, 98, ME and XP as well.

>Fonts are readable and well aligned inside widgets

Fonts are readable, but butt-ugly because they lack anti-aliasing. With anti-aliasing turned on in win2000, my eyes get tired real quick (dunno why).

On win2000, on a high res screen, the fonts get really small. So you set the system font to 'large', suddenly a lot of dialogs are too small to hold the text.

> Widgets, colors, fonts, decorations, etc. all look the "same", without major discrepancies in style or form

Have you ever installed win2000 yourself? I just did, during the install (and the subsequent updates) I must have seen about half a dozen different progress bars (I lost count).

Re:That's unbelievable!

[testerus]

Windows 95 ... didn't make basic mistakes: Fonts are readable lol. Anyone remembers how much was the additional Plus Package to Windows 95, that included the font smoother?

Re:That's unbelievable!

[mattyrobinson69]

the msttcorefonts package is an old one, which was licensed in a way that allowed people to install it anywhere. its not 'stolen from a windows install'. whats wrong with bitsteam vera sans anyway?

Re:That's unbelievable!

[Cyno]

Yep, and yet a default install of ANY Windows OS is still years behind almost all Linux distros in terms of functionality.

Care to explain how consistency and usability is more important than functionality? Your rant seems to suggest the color of my icons is more important than having a fully functional word processor, spreadsheet, and image/audio/video editor. I wonder how many Windows user pay more for their software. Considering my OS cost me $0.00 I have very little to complain about, really. Us Linux users get a heck of a deal.

As far as Gnome and KDE go...

[TooncesTheCat]

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. =]

Re:As far as Gnome and KDE go...

[Dasher42]

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.

Re:As far as Gnome and KDE go...

[Quattro Vezina]

my P4 @ 2.6 GHZ and a gig of DDR400 was having problems running KDE as smoothly as I thought it would be

I call bullshit.

One of my old machines was a PII 450. Back when I used it as my secondary machine, I ran KDE 3.0 on Mandrake Linux 9. I had very little problems. Sure, it didn't run completely smooth, but that's the same complaint you had, and there's a world of difference between a PII 450 and a P4 2.6.

Let's see...if running a light distro on a P4 2.6 has noticable smoothness problems, then a bloated distro on a PII 450 should be unusable. Yeah, it's safe to say you're lying.

a 3ghz computer to run a text editor

I know you're exaggerating, but anything even remotely near that is bullshit. My 1.86 GHz laptop has run everything I've thrown at it at lightning-fast speeds, no matter how huge or bloated it is.

Re:As far as Gnome and KDE go...

[testerus]

What was really appaling with the current major linux desktops was the time it takes for some menus to expand
You are not using transparent menus with composite disabled, are you?

Slashdot is getting powerful

[suitepotato]

Instant /.ing of almost any site. At first it was thought to be just dinosaurs running System V derivatives, badly tuned boxes, and of course anything running Windows. Now /. can even take down its own favorite, Apache on Linux. Got multiprocessors and a DS-3? Piffle. We can melt that down no problem.

Too bad, because I wanted to see what the news was about. The more I use FC the more I like Gnome and dislike KDE. KDE is going to have to offer some amazingness before I think about switching my default desktop. I don't see why so many authors aim their apps at KDE. It's only slightly easier and more polished than Gnome. Not enough to make a change for me and most KDE-centric apps actually run fine under Gnome even if they're calling up KDE code within it.

Re:Let me guess

[gotem]

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

Re:more tinkering around the edges

[FLAGGR]

Alright, since you know what your talking about, I nominate you to go write a window manager in assembly code. God knows you can write better assembler than a compiler.*

Honestly, have you ever written a Qt/KDE app? It's a breeze! OO makes everything make sense, and even though in most cases its overused, for UI its perfect. I don't know what barrier your talking about.

*Uh well gcc does kind of suck, so you've got a chance...

Overbloated?

[dave_mcmillen]

. . . were meant to be a response to those who criticise KDE as being overbloated.

I think the word "overbloated" is bloated, by four letters.

Bloat vs. features

[de Bois-Guilbert]

I keep reading stuff about how KDE is "too bloated", slow and so on...

This really isn't my experience at all. I've used kde (3.x) on an old, old PII 400 (kernel 2.6), with most of the visual crap turned on and found it quite fluent and totally usable. With some of the most taxing features turned off it flies... so what's all this about bloat?

Re:Bloat vs. features

[binary paladin]

I don't get it either. About the only thing that annoyed me was program launch time but seriously, at the start of a work day I open all my shit and then it's not an issue anymore.

The other annoying part about all this "bloat" talk is that you can do a fairly minimal install of KDE.

As a file manager Konq is VERY customizable. It can be everything from minimal to bloat central. I loved using KDE. I still run it on my FreeBSD box. I just made sure to use Qt/KDE apps as a whole. I wish they had a gecko based browser. I love Konq, but as a web dev I need to test under more than just Konq.

Re:i posted this in another page...

[FLAGGR]

Oh god, yes. We don't already have enough variety and split efforts, lets make more divisions, that spurs innovation and is the key to winning the desktop, providing Average Joe with 50000 file managers. Honestly, why do you think KDE/Gnome exist? They are window managers. They are meant to be a package which allows you to have a desktop on the X11 server. The more you abstract, the closer you get to KDE turning into blackbox (blackbox is cool, but thats not the point of kde.)

Re:more tinkering around the edges

[stilborne]

i'm amazed you could tell all of that from those 3rd party mock ups! wow!

well, you're wrong on just about every count. while plasma itself is being written in C++, language bindings for javascript+html, python, ruby and java are all committed to (e.g. we have people to do them =). a visual designer is also on the roadmap.

as for applications not talking to each other .. well ... wait a few months until there's something to play with. i think you may be impressed =)

Those are gray icons by dannya

[akincisor]

They are part of his most extensive "flat" icon theme. Check them out at kde-look.org

Re: put up or shut up

[spitzak]

Like the other responders, I would like to see screen shots showing exactly what you are talking about. Use the Vera fonts, which are included with Linux. If you have good examples, maybe it will get people to fix them.

It's true there is a lot of "why don't you code it yourself" responses, when in reality it is extremely difficult to fix code you are unfamiliar with, even if you are a programming genius, while somebody working on the software already may be able to fix it in a minute.

But conversely, doing absolutley *nothing* to help (or even to prove that you have actually observed what you are talking about) is equally bad. Screen shots and comments like "it would be better if this is moved 10 pixels to the left" *are* useful and also prove you are not just flaming but actually have observed and thought about what you are complaining about.

Re:more tinkering around the edges

[cahiha]

C++ does have it's faults, but OO is a good fit for user interface coding

OO is an excellent fit for user interface coding; too bad that C++ implements it so poorly.

and C++ is certainly more efficient than any other OO language.

It most certainly is not. The problem is not that C++ gives you low-level access, the problem is that it forces you to worry about low-level concerns even when you should be concentrating on algorithms and design.

Plasma Project (KDE 4.x branch)

[Austin Milbarge]

Too many branches make the tree fall over.

Re:Plasma Project (KDE 4.x branch)

[be-fan]

What the fuck are you talking about? It's CVS branch in preperation for the KDE 4.0 release, not a fork!

Re:Plasma Project (KDE 4.x branch)

[Austin Milbarge]

Relax, or you may pull a hemroid.

Re:more tinkering around the edges

[cahiha]

What would constitue "a deep way", in your opinion?

Well, "talking to each other in a deep way" in particular would mean getting rid of "applications" and "files" and crutches like KParts. You can't do it in a C/C++-based environment at all. More generally, innovating in a deep way would mean radically changing the way people interact with the UI.

Note that I am not claiming that such "new" ways of doing things are necessarily better, I'm just saying that as long as you just tinker around with Windows/Mac-like GUIs, you aren't innovating. And as long as nobody seriously tries, we'll never know whether they are better.

(Actually, 20 years ago, people were trying some of those things, but those approaches were killed by the junk that Microsoft and Apple started shipping around then, not because Microsoft or Apple were any better, but because they were cheaper.)

Re:more tinkering around the edges

[cahiha]

Alright, since you know what your talking about, I nominate you to go write a window manager in assembly code. God knows you can write better assembler than a compiler.*

Wrong direction. What makes KDE bloated, cumbersome, and inefficient is that it is using a low-level language like C++; going to assembler would make that worse, not better.

Honestly, have you ever written a Qt/KDE app? It's a breeze!

It's "a breeze" only if your standards are already low (MFC, Gtk+, etc.).

OO makes everything make sense, and even though in most cases its overused, for UI its perfect.

Well, wouldn't it be nice then if KDE actually were written in a real object-oriented language instead of C++.

Remember that Alan coined the phrase "Object-Oriented". He has this to say "I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind." (here)

Maybe Qt/KDE is a little nicer than Gtk+/Gnome, but from the point of view of the state of the art of OOP, GUIs, and programming environments, that's like worrying about whether flintstones or wooden sticks are a better way to start a fire. You guys are reinventing the stone wheel for the third time. Come on, get with the program and move into the 21st century.

Re:well done does this mean "too many connections"

[HungWeiWeiHai]

?

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 /.ers have scripts running to make them "first up" to see the page when the loading drops to a manageable level?

If so, is that technically a form of distributed "DDOS" attack?

Is it feasible or practical for subjects of /. articles to demand that when Slashdot links to them that /. sponsors a temporary mirror? Maybe even host that mirror on /.'s back end?

I know that would eat into /. 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...

Re:well done does this mean "too many connections"

[CdBee]

is it because some /.ers have scripts running to make them "first up" to see the page when the loading drops to a manageable level?

I wasn't aware that was possible, or happening (link?), but yes, and it most certainly would extend a DDOS.

Now Coral's been slashdotted too.

[CdBee]

Un-smegging-believable. CORAL is down. "too many connections" (to http://www.simplekde.org.nyud.net:8090/)

Enlightenment anyone?

[Jambon]

I know this is a bit offtopic, but why isn't their more buzz around http://www.enlightenment.org/? It seems that alot of the stuff KDE has been trying to do as of late using hacks has been the focus of Enlightenment. Anyone?

I think it looks interesting.

[cbreaker]

New is good. From the artist renderings, I think it looks interesting. Sometimes I look at some of these UI's out there and I see way too much color and things popping out at you all over the place, distracting you from what you're trying to do.

There's always going to be resistance but if you don't try to do something different, there will be nothing different about what you create.

Good luck; I look forward to seeing what comes next.

KDE

[AcidPhish]

I think the KDE project is growing quite quickly, especially with all of the new features in the QT libraries. I'm just hoping that the developers would not make the same mistakes already made by Microsoft.

Re:more tinkering around the edges

[cahiha]

as for applications not talking to each other .. well ... wait a few months until there's something to play with. i think you may be impressed =)

You've been at it for nearly a decade, but you are going to make it all right in the next six months: millions of lines of application code, the language, the toolkit and libraries, etc. OK, well, if you say so...

well, you're wrong on just about every count. while plasma itself is being written in C++, language bindings for javascript+html, python, ruby and java are all committed to (e.g. we have people to do them =). a visual designer is also on the roadmap.

Statements like that show that you don't even understand what the issues are, let alone what to do about them.

As I was saying, compared to Microsoft Windows or OS X, KDE isn't all that bad. But it is not "innovative" in any way.

Re:more tinkering around the edges

[cahiha]

It's pointless to post lengthy responses to anonymous posts, but in brief...

What's wrong with KParts? What would you like to replace them with?

Integration of the entire desktop environment in a single address space and language support for such integration.

And what would you like to see instead of applications and files?

Applications shouldn't exist at all. Files should exist, but the user shouldn't ordinarily see them.

And what makes you think that you can't do that in C/C++ at all?

Think of what would happen if you took everything the user is running in KDE and put it in a single address space. A single pointer error anywhere would crash the whole desktop. And that's just one of the problems. It's not that it is theoretically impossible, it's that it is impractical.

Re:more tinkering around the edges

[vrai]

What makes KDE 'slow' (note that I've had no problems running it on old hardware) is that it tries to do too much. Changing the language it's implemented in is not going to speed it up.

Incidentally, C++ is an excellent language for OO coding, as are Java, Objective-C and Python (there are probably others that I haven't used). 99.999% of the 'problems' that programming languages are claimed to have are the result of inexperienced, incompetent and down right crap programmers. Thankfully increased competition in the job market has removed a large number of them from the industry. Hopefully the next few years will account for the rest of them.

Re:more tinkering around the edges

[cahiha]

You just pointed out one of the key advantages of not having the whole desktop in a single address space. That's 1:0 for the current approach...

No, it's not an advantage, it's a workaround for a fundamental problem with C/C++. Almost no other modern programming language needs such a workaround, and the price you pay for it is horrendous, both in terms of efficiency and in terms of functionality.

What's ironic that some of the same people that keep complaining about X11's pretty well-designed client-server architecture see nothing wrong with the dozens of processes and inter process communication in Windows, Macintosh, Gnome, and KDE.

What would be the advantage from a user's perspective? And again, what is wrong with KParts?

Can I embed the KMail message list component in a side panel by dragging it there? Can I embed the media player component into a KWord document by dragging its window there? Can I add a button to the KMail user interface by dragging it there, then edit its function in place? KDE, like most current user interfaces, is extremely restricted in what it lets users and developers do. Look at the work Alan Kay has been doing over the last decade; unlike what KDE is doing, his stuff is actually innovative.

Re:more tinkering around the edges

[cahiha]

Is that really innovative, given that you can do the same thing with "Setting -> configure toolbars"?

That only lets you add buttons that the programmer decided to let you have.

I don't know, but it's certainly not too far-fetched, thanks to KParts.

KParts only lets you embed those things that have explicit code for being embedded.

I assume you mean things like http://www.croquetproject.org/ ? That's certainly a more radical change from what we have now, but it's just not ready yet for everyday use.

It's a "radical change" in the same sense that eating healthy is a "radical change" from eating junk food. If it weren't for 20 years of junk GUI programming in C/C++ by Microsoft, Apple, Gnome, KDE, DEC, and HP, it wouldn't be a "radical change"--Alan Kay's current work is merely the evolution of ideas that go back to the 1970's.

Re:more tinkering around the edges

[cahiha]

Would you like an OS/DE that lets everything integrate with everything? Then you might as well make that KDE (or GNOME, or whichever you prefer), and consider only apps that stick to KDE's rules. What am I missing?

The fact that mechanisms like KParts and DCOP are so cumbersome, opaque, and user-hostile that even experienced programmers don't bother using them.

Maybe I'm just not imaginative enough, but what kind of system are you envisioning? How could a desktop environment, no matter how innovative, let the user create buttons in a program that provide a functionality that the programmer hasn't provided for?

Have a look at Kay's Squeak: you can click on any UI element, move it around, replicate it, edit the corresponding code, script it, connect it to other elements, etc.

Heck, even editres for Xt was more flexible than what KDE is doing (you can still try it--it ships with X11, but toolkits like Qt and Gtk+ are too primitive and too non-standard to talk to it). The current crop of UIs have enormous amount of time invested in them in terms of theming, placement of buttons, etc., but they are technically worse than what we had 20 years ago.

Re:more tinkering around the edges

[cahiha]

What makes KDE 'slow' (note that I've had no problems running it on old hardware) is that it tries to do too much. Changing the language it's implemented in is not going to speed it up.

Of course it is. Implemented in a decent language, it wouldn't take a 10MByte process to put up a bunch of hotkeys, it would take a small function that takes up a few hundred bytes. And it would take more than a dozen processes just to get a simple desktop. Implemented in a decent language, I wouldn't have to download dozens of megabytes of source code and libraries just to change the behavior of a little applet, I'd click on whatever I want to change, get an editor, make the change, and go right along.

99.999% of the 'problems' that programming languages are claimed to have are the result of inexperienced, incompetent and down right crap programmers.

Yes, like the ones that think that "C++ is an excellent language for OO coding".

Thankfully increased competition in the job market has removed a large number of them from the industry.

Many competent programmers have left active programming in disgust because--what's the point? The tide of crap written in C/C++/Java just can't be stemmed. The best thing one can do is move up the food chain and hire people like you who apparently enjoy shoveling shit for a living.

Re:more tinkering around the edges

[cahiha]

But what practical use is it good for?

What practical use is KDE? Has anybody actually ever demonstrated that KDE is a better tool for getting work done than emacs on a vt100? Or xedit under twm?

At this point, assertions about the utility of GUI features are based on faith, for any GUI. But assertions of non-innovativeness are not: neither KDE nor Gnome are innovative in any significant way.

And if it's good, why is no one using it?

Xt-based toolkits were very widely used and probably are still far more widely used commercially than either Gtk+ or Qt. They were by no means perfect, but they got a lot of things right.

That is indeed interesting, I had no idea this existed.

And that illustrates the core of the problem: KDE and Gnome have been developed with ignorance and disregard of prior work. It's hard to improve on something you don't know. And KDE and Gnome both actually break a lot of things that X11 users used to take for granted.

since you're with the KDE project..

[oldwolf13]

might I implore you...

Enough with the K's already!

Re:more tinkering around the edges

[oldwolf13]

Could you be more of a condescending ass please?

Re:more tinkering around the edges

[cahiha]

but it does show that most people get their work done more efficiently with them (I know I do).

That shows preference, not efficacy.

Could you give a few examples?

Remote logins, remote applications, preferences, and file system access, for example. Basically, Gnome and KDE are Windows-like desktops that happen to use X11 for graphics (and inefficiently at that).