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?

[Vario]

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

"overbloated"?

[Anonymous Coward]

As opposed to underbloated?

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"?

[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.

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

[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.

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?

[Mornelithe]

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

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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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.

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...

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

[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.

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!

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!

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.

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!

Flamebait?

[donscarletti]

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

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?

[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!

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 ...

[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.

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?

[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.

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.

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.

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: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: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.

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.

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.

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. =/