Preview of KDE 3.5
tr_x_data writes "There is a quite interesting KDE 3.5 preview with screenshots on JLP's Blog. I thought there wouldn't be so much improvement to KDE 3.4 since everyone is working on porting KDE4 to QT4, but obviously there are quite a few changes. Look forward to "Storage Media Notification", "Adblock" for Konqueror, new Tooltips, better Workspace-Pager, and so on. Read for yourself."
No.... This post of yours is dumber!
8 25840
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=152845&cid=12
ac.
The new KDE looks good. Except for the one pet peeve of mine-->the taskbar is way too huge. It would be much better at half or even a quarter of it's size. The real highlight is storage media reconizing. This is a whyI have loathed KDE-->the lack of such.
Go to the w3.org and put Slashdot.org through the validator.
The storage medium notification is not untuitive the way XP (and now KDE 3.5) does it. Basically, the user puts in a disc and then some time later, gets a notification that interrupts whatever is being performed.
A better way to do it would be to stick a little message notification bubble above the system tray. This would also prevent movies from auto-running.
A big problem with XP is that DVD movies often have crap software that auto-installs on the computers of people who don't know any better. If OSS wants to become a widely used desktop, then it needs to be better than the status quo, rather than a copy. This means that it has to protect users rather than facilitate spyware and junk.
More
I haven't been this excited since the preview for KDE 3.4!!!
I'm a big tall mofo.
Then, we will talk.
What do I have to do to get a sig around here?! www.bearscanfly.org
KDE's default theme is a little XP-esque, but there are plenty of alternatives to choose from. Sadly, the clutteredness (is that a word?) seems to be inevitable: the consequence of squeezing in many good ideas, without really thinking hard about how to organise things so that the environment becomes intuitive.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Personally, I've always found the resemblance to Windows to be entirely superficial, and KDE's excellent integration across a wide-range of apps and its nifty kio_slaves (along with a whole bunch of other reasons) made me fall in love with it. I'll let a GNOME fan argue the other side :)
There are too many times I have frozen my machine just by using the search feature and opted to the command line instead (which I'm still not an expert with) Although I do like the sort of tooltips in the kicker.
Although I'm quite enthused for the new feature in home: I like the idea of having a mac-like user folder so easily accesible for things like dropbox functionality.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
It seems that all four major camps (Apple, Microsoft, GNOME, and KDE) keep improving their environments by leaps and bounds. They look better and better, become more and more usable, and slowly pick up features that make them more flexible (remote desktop, for one). It may not all be Real innovation, but it's definitely Real progress.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I'll probably be modded to hell itself for posting this on a KDE /. article, but:
if you are a Gnome kind of person, try GnomeBaker or Graveman for your cd/dvd burning needs.
Personally, I've noticed an interesting trend in KDE. When KDE started, it was something of a Mac/Windows Fusion design that tended to make both users comfortable. After stumbling around on design for awhile, KDE has decided to be more XP-like. The newer the version of KDE, the more it feels like XP. 3.4 is especially guilty, as the window frames are damn near an exact copy.
Not that I'm complaining. 3.4 is an awesome release, and makes KDE feel a lot more solid.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
A better way to do it would be to stick a little message notification bubble above the system tray. This would also prevent movies from auto-running.
That's a good idea. I don't know that autoinstall is a problem because you have to choose an action before anything happens, according to the synopsis. However, I've always hated autorun because it's intrusive - if I put a disc in, I probably know what I want to do with it, and it's guesses are usually wrong.
A nice little bubble as you suggest would help a lot. Hell, I don't know if they take suggestions as such, but you should give it a try.
It looks way better than XP, that's for sure. I'm glad they don't take the "looks bad but you can make your own skin" route. The default look is professional and clean.
Can't comment on the feel. Last time I tried to get KDE running on top of OS X it did nothing (unless crashing is one of its hidden features).
I think, therefore I am...I think.
You don't really expect that people will do that work for you? For an overview what is going on right now, check out "this month in SVN": http://www.hoult.org/~canllaith/svn-features/14-07 -05.html
Don't bother scrolling down to read the comments in the blog, they are just a bunch of racist jokes and rants pasted in from somewhere else.
It might be a good idea for the blog author to turn off commenting for this post.
It appears the KKK has a serious interest in KDE, I have to wonder if they think it stands for Klan Desktop Environment.
even across installs
That doesn't reflect my personal experience of upgrading KDE... :-)
That aside, I agree with you 100% that the similarity with XP is only skin deep. As I said further up somewhere, the main problem with KDE is that it feels like someone threw a lot of features in without thinking about how to organise things intuitively.
Having said all of that, I still use KDE whenever I need to fire up a GUI.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Windows NT was at version 3.51 like what, 11 years ago ?
KDE comprises a huge range of applications, these are contained in multiple packages.
You don't 'need' to install them all.
kdebase and kdelibs contain the core environment, and while not being stripped to the bone, are hardly bloated.
The specific example you have problems with ktuberling (Potato Head) is actually contained in the additional package "kdegames".
k3b is in the additional package "extragear"
Now all I want is the ability to close a tab by middle-clicking it, same as I have set up in mozilla. I've searched around in vain for any place I can change the default behavior.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
.. but I still wish they would just bite the bullet and improve the button layout to the way MacOS (and Gnome) does it.
First of all, KDE is still ridden with [Ok][Cancel]-buttons. These are sooo 1992-like and should be replaced with verbs, like they have correctly done with [Add to panel] in one of the screenshots. This should all be changed, and no new dialogs should be accepted until they confirm.
In addition the most common action should be on the far right where it is much more visible and obvious, thus:
[Don't Save][Save] rather than [Save][Don't Save]
The importance of this becomes far more obvious when there are three or more such buttons, and the default one often is "hidden" in between less likely buttons (See the [Configure][Ok][Cancel] in the Autoplay dialog, here Ok is the most common choice).
Politics I guess is the main reason for not doing this, that is pleasing the hard-core crowd who wouldn't notice progress if it bit them in the ass.
My last problem is the underscoring of file names, which looks unprofessional. Making it an option to turn it off is a typical example of geeky "unbreak me" options.
Otherwise, KDE has a very nice "crispness" to it, with nice and clear icons and a nice solid feel to things.
That's funny, that's what they said about windows back in the day.
Have you seen a list of things that will be removed from KDE4? I shudder at the thought of the sort of feature loss that Gnome suffered. I can't find it now, but on some mailing list Havoc Pennington wrote, in reference to the switch to Metacity from Sawfish, that people will learn to live without the features. I think someone asked about the window manager remember window size/position, because I missed that and was searching for info on it.
I switched to KDE, originally, because of the 'changes' between gnome 1.4 and 2.0.
Then on the other hand you have KDE, which is so configurable you can select all sorts of settings, which can be chosen based on individual windows.
I'm not saying the Gnome approach is wrong (although I didn't like the attitude of Pennington), but they're filling that role and KDE should continue to fill theirs.
Google Search of KDE Change Logs
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
KDE has a much better set of base libraries i'd say, but the KDE team often really doesn't look into usability.
E.g. konqueror has this feature called multiple view profiles, one for file management and one for browsing. Very nice, but i *really* would want to have a separate home URL for each profile.
I think if some companies would back up KDE, like they do with gnome, this might improve?
Such as? Care to point any tangible examples? If you are referring to the number of apps, then the solution is simple: don't install them.
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Sorry but I can say exactly something else.
Look across Gnumeric for example and look at it's options. Someone wrote a bugreport about Gnumeric not following the Toolbar changes for icons, text besides icons etc. These things are even keyelement of the HIG in the version 2.0 and the bug was marked as 'not a bug' and closed.
Later on I dived into the Preferences of Gnumeric and found various really braindamaged settings that people should even care less about. E.g. DPI settings. I mean DPI ? Which normal user know what DPI is and why should it rely on an application ? Usually the DPI is set through the X server during startup or should be set globally in a small application but not through the app again.
There are plenty of other issues around GNOME, mainly small issues that summed up makes a big issue out of it. I think the people who haven't thought correctly about their applications and their architecture are the GNOME people.
KDE otoh has everything nicly and tightly integrated, the things work. Ok I agee sometimes stuff can be simpler for the user but then the stuff works, their applications behave consistent, the applications makes a solid and function experience and don't look like it's hacked up in a hurry.
Sorry to say but you don't really know what you are talking about. It's impossible to get everyone working on GNOME to pull on the same rope, as long as this ain't possible as long we are stuck in problematic issues around GNOME.
The bug that was marked as 'not a bug'.
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=311349
Here another bugreport that explains why 311349 indeed is a bug, including references to the HIG and other stuff.
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=311655
This is just one small example of many examples that I can easily throw and demonstrate.
I kan't wait to see that release koming
Karma kwhore.
I find KDE has a lot of bloat (KDE 4 should have less to my understanding). K3B is still the most useful burning app but really, who needs an icky looking Mr. Potatoe Head game as an included part of a desktop environment.
I don't burn CDs very often, so I think I'll call KDE bloated so long as it has K3B. On the other hand, my little brother uses the "icky" game all the time.
Maybe we shouldn't rush to call something bloated just because it has a feature we don't use often. Plenty of other people use them all the time. The "icky" game isn't costing you anything but a miniscule amount of hard disk space, so why worry about it?
Bloat is when you've got lots of truly unnecessary features that actually take up memory or CPU in the normal course of operation. What you call bloat isn't.
Seriously... I do.
It was light, fast, stable, and pretty enough. Using wmaker right now because XFCE4 has a few drawbacks. While I might look at KDE 3.5 just to see, i still might cobble together all the 1.0 code and try to run it on my fbsd 5.4/athlon system. It oughta fly balls!
do() || do_not();
I thought it was "Kool"?
The official answer from the KDE FAQ is "Nothing -- it is simply the K Desktop Environment, just as the X in the X window system."
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
People who say that Gnome or KDE are bloated need to be slapped, because they invariably have no idea what "bloat" means.
Both DEs are designed around a functional, reusable framework. In essence, every single thing you see is like a shared library. This allows the end-user applications to have a huge amount of functionality with little work, and is almost the antithesis of bloat.
If KMyMoney had code to allow me to load and save my accounts over an SFTP (or IMAP or webdav) connection, I'd agree with you. However, it simply uses the kio-slave features of KDE to support that automatically (as does almost every other KDE application). It's not bloat to include an excellent programmer's editor in every application when that editor is written as an embeddable object. It's not bloat when Konqueror can view PDFs because KPDF is written as an embeddable object.
I really don't think you have any idea what you're talking about. Writing the same code individually for each application would be a tremendous waste of resources. Designing the system from the ground up to lean heavily on reusable objects and a featureful core system is nothing but good.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Have the KDE people figured out how to make the desktop icons line up properly yet? I'm sorry if this sounds like another "Why can't KDE be like Windoze?" whine, but when I turn on icon auto-arrangement in Windoze, I get nice, neat vertical columns of icons. Do the same in KDE and I get some quasi-random scattering of icons. I have no idea why that is. If I right-click the desktop and select Icons > Sort Icons > By Type, it works fine. But the auto-arrange seems to use some completely different arrangement algorithm that creates multiple columns, some of which aren't even full, and some of which only have one icon. WTF?
And for those of us who like heterogeneity?
Why don't you download a liveCD and try it out for yourself? Many of them include KDE 3.4 already.
When my sister in law's kids com over and want to play with the computer I load up Mr. Potatoe. After all, one of them is OCD and my copy of Civ or Sim City is a bit too much for him, and the other one gets hyper if allowed action games. Mr. P. keeps them happy during computer time (20 min each)
We are the Borg...
http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/kde- 3.5-features.html#finished
I think it's too bad we'll have to wait until 4.0 to see an improvement in the default setup. Everyone agrees that it's ugly and not very useful, but there's been so little done to change it. If they start the process with 3.5, then they can get some feedback for 4.0.
More than that, the unchangable UI things need some improvement. KDE has really bad right-click menus in almost all cases. The options availible there need to be pruned down, moved into sub-menus, or "hidden" as accelerators attached to clicks.
I'm a big fan of the "hermetic interface", where simple commands are availible from the menus, buttons, and so forth, but really powerful commands are "hidden". They don't clutter the UI, the newbie doesn't care about them, and the old-hands will find out how to use these features.
An example from gnome is the hidden type-in box in the file selector. It's extreme (type-in isn't that ugly a thing to have in a selector!), but once you know you can hit "/" and just enter a path, it is really cool.
Gnome's new "three top-level" menus is also pretty cool, if you've used it. It helps to take the clutter out of the menu.
(Not to say I love everything gnome. The KDE apps are much better in general. Konqueror is more useful than nautilus to me. Konsole is worlds better than gnome-terminal. KDVI is without peer.)
Oh, I should say something nice about 3.5. The changes to konqueror are great! It cuts the fat out of the menus. Technically, it makes sense to make a file-browser and a web-browser use the same code, but the UI should be different in each mode. This is a very positive change for konqueror.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
Why?
:)
;) The Mac is quite pretty and quite nice to use, but whenever I use it I always find myself wishing I was back on one of my Linux machines.
1. You are locked into a single vendor
2. Want to upgrade your desktop? That'll cost you. Thanks very much
3. What if someone produces a better desktop GUI? I switch GUI's every few months as improvements are made. Sometimes I just want something small and sweet like Fluxbox, othertimes KDE for some eye candy
4. Not all development work requires a GUI. Even if it does, the logic should be seperate, not built into the GUI itself (Visual Basic anyone?). This allow the choice of GUI to become a seperate issue. You can use web, cli, GUI.... whatever
5. Your window manager won't start? Thats a tradgedy under MS Windows as well as a Mac (OK, not as bad on the Mac). Under Linux I can just choose another window manager until I sort my problem out.
6. Bah... thats enough for now.
I encouraged my Fiance to get an iBook as her latest machine, mainly so there wasn't a MS machine in the house. We still don't have *any* MS machines
You might like the Mac, thats fine by me. Choice is good thing as it helps drive improvement. Competition improves the breed. Myself... I like the flexibility to have my machines the way I want them, not the way some company wants them.
Adblock for Konqueror!?
Don't these people know that they're missing out on free internet content?!
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.
- George Orwell
I'm not sure, but can't this be done by creating a few symlinks which activate Konqueror with the appropriate command-line options? Stick them somewhere on your desktop, call them "local files", "web" etc....
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
will it be in time for SUSE 9.4 which will be released in mid October?
No, I mean something that has 16 virtual desktops.
Who cares?
I do. If you like MacOS X, want to pay for it, make Jobs even richer and use it, great. I OTOH really like the ability to "tune them to world's end", plus the overall flexibility of Linux.
I would agree that the Linux GUIs (kde, gnome, whatever...) are not perfect - probably not as good as the MacOS X GUI, but they are constantly changing and improving. If you don't like it, don't use it, but don't disparage those of us that still value freedom and choice.
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Bloat, yeah... you mean it has features, and they are available to every KDE application instead of reinventing the wheel every time, making them coherent and integrated. And of course your post is modded "Insightful". No wonder Linux desktop is still where it is, with such bright attitudes.
I didn't mean "symlinks" - sorry. I meant *.desktop files.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I'm glad they're slowly tidying up the interface. My current pet peeve is the default icon set is really ugly. I know that you can replace it, but when I look at the KDE screenshots I don't get excited at the improvements to the interface or to Konq. I am put off by how ugly it looks with the icon set.
Right now K doesn't stand for anything, its just the "K Desktop Environment".
However, it started out as the Kool Desktop Environment. Read the 1996 project announcement on usenet, and the interesting replies.
The real path to male liberation
Actually it has been in the "unstable" since Sarge was released, before that it was in "experimental".
Also, keep in mind that lots of that can be uninstalled.
Still, there definitely is *something* taking up more ram, but whether that is the system maturing, bloat, or somewhere inbetween is not entirely clear.
KDE 3.4 is really slow on a Pentium MMX class machine with 192 mb of ram.
Soemtimes, you have to make sacrifices. However, XP can run on that machine nicely. I haven't found a Window manager to make such a machine run properly (and conviently), so I bought new discount new motherboards with integrated via epia processors. (~$15)
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
About your last problem: underscoring
Open Konqueror, Settings, configure konqueror, Appearance, underline filenames
I don't burn CDs very often, so I think I'll call KDE bloated so long as it has K3B.
It doesn't. K3B isn't part of KDE at all. It's just perhaps the best CD/DVD burning application available on Linux, and it just happens to be built using KDE libraries.
The KDE website has a list of upcoming features at:
- 4.0-features.html
http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/kde
Judging by how many items there are on that list, and that this is a port, not a re-write, I think that KDE4 will be full of features. Though there are some which could go, really minor useless ones.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Huh? Ouch?
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
What "bloat" are you referring to? Could you give some real examples? As to speed.... I find KDE to be fast enough.
Here's a news-flash for you: you are not required to go through all the settings. But if you want to change something, they are there. But you could use KDE just fine without ever touching the settings at all.
Windowmaker is a windowmanager, not a desktop environment. So you are comparing apples to oranges. It's like comparing Microsoft Edit to a full-blown office-suite. But hey, if Windowmaker has the features you need, whereas KDE does not, then by all means use Windowmaker. KDE-developers are not required to satisfy your whims. Instead of making demands, why not thank them for spending their time to give you this kick-ass piece of software for free?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
It should be interesting to finally see KDE native to windows, as the free QT4 is now supported for windows.
Imagine Windows (or ReactOS), running KDE as the desktop, with applications like Firefox on top. This is Windows?
I'm still waiting for them to make Kmail compile in 3.4.1 - it barfs on the Outlook Express import filter at the moment, of all things. http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=99643
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=106274
Tell you the truth, I've actually moved to Thunderbird + Enigmail now - it rocks.
Get your own free personal location tracker
What you call bloat, I call very useful features. KDE 2.0 just wouldn't cut it for the day-to-day work I do now. Konqueror alone, with all it's features since 3.0, plays an integral part of my everyday work.
For example, I want a file manager that can do sftp, ftp, smb, nfs, etc. I'll agree that those elements make the code bigger and possibly slower, but I make use of them. I know a lot of other people do as well.
I also find that dcop plays a very important role in messaging between apps and KDE. Sure, it's another app that sucks up some RAM, but maybe some people like me use it.
Considering that most elements in KDE are embeddable objects (eg. Kate, Kedit and Kdevelop all use the same editor), I'd say bloat is cut down a lot. Nobody is implementing three different text editors when one will do the job.
I, and every other reasonable person, expects KDE 3.x to be larger and have more features than KDE 2.x. Such is the nature of software. That's not because coders are lazy or don't care if their program is bloated, but because hardware is catching up to their dreams. Programmers are able to implement things today that they couldn't do a few years ago.
If you don't want those features, then run Blackbox.
Personally, I don't think you know what 'bloat' is -- you seem to think that because 3.x is slower than 2.x it must be bloated. I think you've just heard that term so often that you repeat it to sound knowledgable.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
One thing I haven't liked about KDE is that there are many small apps lumped together into the huge packages like kdemultimedia and kdegames, so you often get everything if you just want one of them. However, that problem is gone with KDE 3.4 and Gentoo, since the individual apps can be built and installed automatically. Though they still come from the same ponderous source tarballs and take a while in the "configure" stage, one doesn't have to install unwanted apps. One can still install the big packages if so desired.
This is a good example of the philosophy of flexibility so pervasive in Gentoo's portage, but splitting up the big packages would probably be a good idea for binary packagers too. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if someone has made RPMs or DEBs of individual apps.
Oh, thank you. I hate all the whining about "bloat". If you want to use a minimalist WM and everything, you have dozens of options. Use them and stop whining. I'll keep using KDE with Amarok, KDevelop, etc. It's fast, and it has a hojillion useful features and a great UI. That's not bloat.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Why do they try to make it look like windows? If I want windows I use the genuine item, not some clone!.
/mnt/hda8 in the terminal you are in /mnt/hda8 (very clever, I always liked this, since KDE 1, in 1998). It you do this from 'My Computer', in the terminal you always remain in your home directory. That is, if I navigate to /mnt/hda8 from my computer and open a terminal from the tool menu, the location in the terminal is in my home directory,not in /mnt/hda8. The notations of partitions in My Computer are confusing. Accdording to the UNIX tradition I dont give names to different partitions (again, this is not Windows, there is no need for it, I identify the prtitions by their device names: /dev/sdb4, /dev/hda8, etc). In My computer two partitions with exactly the same size and no windows style names have exactly the same name, say '10.2 GB Volume'. Why dont they put the pathnames /mnt/sdb2, /mnt/hda4, etc. The way it is, 'My Computer' is totally useless, better trash it.
The standard KDE settings are getting worse and worse, you need to waste time to change them. For example recently they disabled the delete contextual menu, if you dont enable it yourself, it is a disaster. The KDE trash is not very functional, if you move some items from other drives or partitions to the trash the items are copied to the partition where your home directory is, in the trash directory, and only then you can delete them. Why dont they make a trash directory on each partition like in MacOS and Windows?. What happens if I want to delete a 12GB directory from a removable drive and and my home directory has only 8GB available?. KDE tries to copy the thing to the trash but there is not enough storage for that. The file manager is useless, the only solution is the rm command.
A couple or releases ago they introduced 'My Computer'. This is not Windows, there is no need for this. 'My Computer' in KDE is a bad Windows imitation and does not function like the regular KDE file manager. In the File Manager if you open a terminal from the tool menu, the location in the terminal is the same as in the window. If you opened the terminal from
Other inconvenience is produced by KDE automounting removable drives: for some obscure reason the removable devices mounted by KDE do not show up when I use the df command (Why?).Actually, I dont need automount, I usually disable it, if I attach an external drive, I read the name of the device given by linux from dmesg and mount it from the command line wherever I like, this way the mounted thing would show up in df, it is easier to figure out what is going on.
Bloat is the fact that each is designed around a different framework, so they don't get reused as much as they should be because you have to install both to get all your applications to work.
:-) IT would be great to have all apps have a KDE native interface (so you can tap into all the framework benefits of KDE/QT)
I agree. Good luck getting the Gnome devs to switch over to KDE.
AFAIK, at least Debian does it this way. I wonder if it is not a nightmare to maintain, though.
Bonus points: name an OS - any OS - that only includes one application framework. Windows has MFC and .Net. Mac has Classic, Carbon, and Cocoa. Solaris had CDE and OpenWindows. Amiga had Gadtools, MUI, Reaction, etc.
Somehow, though, it all boils to "KDE and Gnome are bloated", even though every single widely-used system ever invented went through (or is currently in) the same situation.
Besides, I disagree on principle that this indicates bad design. KDE and Gnome seem to have fundamentally different approaches to several core functions. It's not fair to refer to them as redundant because they're really not once you get below the surface.
At any rate, the top poster's position was that KDE is, by itself, bloated. Your point addresses a different non-issue altogether.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
"KDE 3.4 is really slow on a Pentium MMX class machine with 192 mb of ram. Soemtimes, you have to make sacrifices. However, XP can run on that machine nicely. "
I call bullshit. XP consumes most if not all of 128 meg just to load and if you have any apps running in your system tray (NAV, MS Antispyware, etc) you've just blown past that 192 mb RAM. Not to mention that the minimum requirement (an industry joke) for XP is a "Pentium 233-megahertz (MHz) processor or faster (300 MHz is recommended)". Pentium MMX stopped at 200mhz.
"We kicked that bug infested moronic kopete from kdenetwork because it doesn't even match the most simple quality standards and so the developers can release new versions from time to time instead bugging users by letting them wait for another kde release or fumble some SVN compiles into their package management." "We looked up 'consistency' and tried to get the spirit: KDE now after the upgrade will look the same, use the same fonts that you set in kcontrol, use the same bloody arrangement of your taskbar instead of randomly loosing launchers, meddle with their spacing or switch window/taskbar positions at random, oh, and the ~/.kde/*/*rc files are only altered as much as absoultely possible instead of warping them to something that'll never allow you to downgrade unless you want to start over arranging settings for every frickin' application or where clever enough to make backups." (Yeah admitted that backup thing was my fault in the past) "KMail now actually is usable by keyboard."
who needs an icky looking Mr. Potatoe Head game as an included part of a desktop environment
My 4-year-old, for one. He loves all of the educational games that come with KDE. He now has his own box that I got him for his birthday this past weekend. He came to me this morning and said "I wanna play with my Linux, dad. Dad, I like Linux"
bash: rtfm: command not found
Where KDE is offering an alternative to XP in a sort of similar style, this version of GNOME is being aimed at the OS X fans with the implementation of a Dock replete with funky icons - because it's all about choice, innit?
They also claim it's just K because it's the letter before L, as in Linux. Does that mean that GNOME, because of the G, is made for Hurd? :P
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Does it now work with Google maps and gmail?
I know you could argue that Google should make them work but Konqueror has such a small market share that I know Google will not.
Will the new version of KDE render faster? Use the 3d in my video card for eye candy?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Absolutely agree, but the big grouping makes sense for kde to keep things manageable, together and so people know where to find things, the sub-components are easilly fragmentable by distros and as you have pointed out, at the very least gentoo does that already.
:)
On the other hand its quite handy to have a raft of similar/associated applications installed together, since users will often then "browse" and be impressed or surprised when they stumble across something interesting.
But again... the original post was wrong KDE isn't bloated, it's packed with features. If someone decides to install everything and the kitchen sink, they can't then complain oh there's way too much useful stuff here.
the similarity with XP is only skin deep
True and I'd say it's the color schema who is to blame for the majority of those comments, using clear blue colors like windows. As an example compare comments to reviews of Mandriva and Suse, you never see the "copying windows" comments for Suse. The reason are Suse's default green colors. Try writing a Gnome review using the clear blue colors in the screenshots, I bet you get the "copying windows" comments in the first 20 comments.
1. Yes, you're locked in. This is both good and bad. It is bad in the sense that the hardware costs more. It is good in two ways however. Firstly, when you sell it three or four years later, you actually get back about half what you paid. Some box I built myself will be worth nothing (as new ones are so cheap). Secondly, everything works. I never have to configure anything when I get a new Mac. I put it on my desk, plug it in, and press the on button.
2. Upgrading will cost you? I can go buy a hard drive, ram, video card, etc, from all sorts of 3rd party vendors. The only thing I can't upgrade is the processor, and that's only on the new G5s. Sucks, yes.
3. A better desktop GUI than OS X? Well I suppose you either love it or you don't, but I personally am confident that it will be the best thing around for awhile. Besides, I can always run KDE or Gnome if I really want to. Plus you can always dual-boot.
4. Xcode is fantastic. There is no reason written in stone that "everything should be separate". If an integrated solution works best, then use that.
5. I've never had a Mac where the "window manager" wouldn't start. There's only one window manager, and hence there is no configuration files to go bonkers or anything to worry about. If it isn't working for you, it isn't working for a lot of other people too.
6. Mhmmm.
I would like to build my own boxes, yes. But as I said, the resale value negates much of the initial expense of buying a mac, and Apple certainly makes good hardware. The Mac is the best solution for what I do (art-related dsp and opengl work), so that's what I use.
Is KDE a window manager or a collection of applications, or both? In case of the latter, which one of those is it the most? And when will they remove all those games that no-one really plays?
It shouldn't be hard to maintain with proper automation. Indeed, glancing at a couple of KDE ebuilds (scripts which build packages in Gentoo's portage package manager), they are very short; barely more than stubs. Much seems to be factored out and inherited by all of the ebuilds.
Gentoo's FAQ says that the maintainers are committed to doing it this way, though there have been some complaints about the large number of packages.
Debian does it this way.
I think all moder distributions does this, like Suse and Mandriva.
I wonder if it is not a nightmare to maintain
Why should it be, it's done automatically when building the packages. The same way distributors have split packages into app, lib and devel packages for years.
Indeed. I just downloaded a copy of VLOS yesterday, and queued it up in line for review. I have to say, there's a certain irony in the more Macish desktop (KDE) becoming Windowsish, while the Windowsish desktop becomes more Macish. ;-)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
> Have you seen a list of things that will be
;)
> removed from KDE4?
i haven't either. perhaps you could educate all of us
if you're afraid KDE4 will be "KDE, without the features" then perhaps you're thinking of that "SimpleKDE" fork thing or perhaps you just got wrong information.
we are certainly aiming for a more usable KDE, but not a featureless one. popular perception aside, the two are not mutually exclusive.
so you are comparing a desktop of one hardware family to a laptop of another desktop family running two wildly different versions of an operating system ... and figure the difference is the desktop environment that runs on top of all that? heh.
2.0 was hobbled and very slow in many ways compared to 3.4. put them side by side for work tasks and the improvements are pretty obvious.
but for your measure here, i'd suggest loading KDE 2.0 on your IBM laptop, or 3.4 on your Ultra 1 =)
Hello,
Just resize the toolbar. It's either in the control panel or right-click on the toolbar itself.
KDE is quite nice that way. No matter the screen resolution, I can modify the size of pretty much everything. It's not perfect, but really good.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I agree that it's unfair to complain of "bloat" if one chooses to install everything, but it seems that the KDE practice of distributing many apps together in a large tarball promotes bloat, since a build with default configuration doesn't give one much granularity. Since most people install KDE using a package manager, they have to do it how the packager wanted to do it. If there are only binary packages of kdemultimedia, kdegames, and kde*, the user will probably have to install much more than he needs. That's why I'm glad that I'm using a package manager that does allow me to install the individual apps.
Of course, there are tradeoffs between distributing monolithic tarballs like KDE and individual ones a-la GNOME. The monolithic ones are probably somewhat easier to maintain and test, at least in a default configuration, while separate packages allow more flexibility among developers and for the user.
If you run in GNOME, KDE applications look bloated. If you run in KDE, GNOME applications looked bloated. It's a side-effect of having two different frameworks that different applications use.
Exsqueeze me, but the new KDE desktop looks zack same as old one.
I don't see that. KDE-apps load in about second or two here, with no errors about "ksyscoa". And besides, programmers are in the minority in the end
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Deiban is currently undergoing a C++ ABI Upgrade. Since KDE is practically all C++, this is a bit of a problem.
Once all the libraries are upgraded to GCC 4.0, KDE will follow, and will then be 3.4. Theres no point upgrading the KDE packages if they have to do it all again in a few weeks.
If a first you don't succeed, your a programmer...
My biggest problem with KDE is the lack of usable documentation. There are tons of great apps. The desktop is very configurable, but documentation is, shall we say, sparse? I have way less patience than I used to.
Test 1 2 3 4
K3B is on KDE extragear, so is half-KDE
I disagree, so that blows the whole "everyone" argument out of the water. I find Gnome to be uglier and less useful. I think Gnome's goals of simplicity are good, but those of us who are used to the power and supposed "complexity" of KDE find it addicting. I hope that KDE and Gnome continue to be different along the lines of power -vs- simplicity. This means that there is something that suits both types of users.
One problem is that ALSA is not available on all platforms. For example, I run KDE on Solaris and use aRTS because Solaris doesn't have any mixing capability (I wrote the original aRTS Solaris sound driver). There is talk of moving to gstreamer, but it also looks like gstreamer has a ways to go yet and the last I looked it didn't have any support for Solaris either. KDE is not Linux specific.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Agree Kmail and Kontact are not being held to a high standard when it comes to stability. They need to focus more on fixing major bugs and less on new features. Like you I prefer the kmail interface but I am still using Thunderbird because of the crashes.
Everything you mention was true about 3.0.
They did the same thing with KDE 2.2.2. ===> 3.0 migration. How long did it take for 3.0 to arrive to Debian? 10 months (all that time it was about to be inclided "really soon")? I got sick of the waiting and moved away from Debian.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Actually, you proved his point, and that is: use whatever works for you.
Choice is freedom, and viceversa.
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
Yes, many of them do include KDE 3.4. This article is about KDE 3.5. Also, I asked what's really new since 3.0 that isn't just an incremental improvement. I've run KDE before, at least once during each major version from before the dawn of time (I forget the exact version and year, but I ran it on a Sparcstation IPX running OpenBSD, during high school) through 3.3. I'm no stranger to KDE - I just wonder what is so special about the 3.5 preview that makes it front-page "news for nerds" or stuff that even remotely matters.
More than that, the unchangable UI things need some improvement. KDE has really bad right-click menus in almost all cases. The options availible there need to be pruned down, moved into sub-menus, or "hidden" as accelerators attached to clicks.
I'm a big fan of the "hermetic interface", where simple commands are availible from the menus, buttons, and so forth, but really powerful commands are "hidden". They don't clutter the UI, the newbie doesn't care about them, and the old-hands will find out how to use these features.
Now I'm just the opposite. I like having all my options available in my menus and was quite surprised to see "Delete" disappear with my last upgrade. If I want a file gone, I want it gone. But hey, at least they left a way to put it back in the control center and config.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
"Technically, it makes sense to make a file-browser and a web-browser use the same code"
How does it make technical sense for a file-browser and a web-browser to "use the same code"? I've never heard a good reason for this and believe that KDE just copied Windows in this respect. Microsoft made Windows behave this way so that they could more easily make the claim that IE was an integral part of Windows and could not be removed.
Shift+Delete seems to be the standard "Delete without moving to trash" key combo.
...feels much snappier! Oh, wait, wrong thread...
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Many come with 3.4.1 now, actually.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
"invariably have no idea what "bloat" means"
I know that my computer runs 10 times slower when using KDE or GNOME (and that's without any applications running). Reusable code is all well and good but why are these DEs so slooow?
And what about enlightenment 0.17? Its cvs version is very functional and there is a version packed for slackware. I'm using it and can't wait to see all the features enabled and working.
http://www.michel.eti.br
I took care of that double-click shit by going to Settings, Configure Konqueror, Cookies,
/ads/ and other stuff.
Policy:
Default Policy: Ask for Confirmation
Site Policy: Add to Domain any and every IP range and domain name variation for double-shit and
(If you want to be REALLY "malevolent", just set the cookies as "session cookies" so they stay in memory and never get written any disk medium. But, Yahoo! and other sites might complain or stall, or never let you get past a notification window. I wonder, sometimes if they're whoring themselves out to marketing cookie meisters.)
Then, I use Etherape to SEE where traffic is going to and coming from regarding MY BOX. Use of a website, in my mind, does not grant double-click and cookie monsters rights to TRESPASS on my machine. Track whatever the hell you want on the visitED SITE, not the visitING machine.
Then, I go to firestarter and add the same stuff, domain names and domian IP ranges.
I hate double-click with a PASSION. They're just the digital version of and a combination of all those 70's paper catalog customer info files. I don't want them or any entity for which they act as a front being an affront to me by tracking and selling my surfing habits.
Finally, I periodically scour my cache and delete their junk, sometimes locking down my own cache under ROOT, even if I have a slower surfing experience.
Note: I am not against ALL cookies, just some of the more pernicious, insidious, and infuriating issuers of cookies. When I cannot block cookies, such as logging in with Yahoo!, I make sure to block the ads. I don't care to see most of them, and even if I let them run, I might click on maybe 1 out of 1000, and I tend to make sure I log out after copying and and pasting the URL, then I run the URL. I AM aware there might be a "web beacon" in the URL's page anyway, but that's something to quash on another day.
The reason I'm irritated by some of these cookies is that they coordinate banners based on what I might be doing, and I don't like that unless I OPT IN. I'm in the minority, I suppose, so what I'm doing won't run the sites out of business. Besides, the cookie baker has to pay for impressions, not responses, I think. So, whether or not I block the cookie and banner, if I am required to CLICK the banner but don't, then the site gets no click-through stream revenue ANYway. So much for some of the arguments of cookie and banner proponents. By blocking the cookies and banners, I cut down on distracting twilight-zone swirls and dancing junk. And, since I dart in and dart out of my email, I don't credibly spend enough time leaving the cookie or banner ad visible for the site to legitimately claim revenue anyway. It's not like I'm Gary Mitchell, reading 400 pages in 1 minute.
Am I being an ingrate? Making noise? Deserve my system being sabotaged or forced to endure 1-minute-crawling page loads (which has seemed to happen when I turn off cookies, or it's a bad KDE base at work in the 3.3x version...)
(anti-script word image: audacity (which is what I am full of in this posting...heheh))
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Kmail and Kontact are not being held to a high standard when it comes to stability.
/me ducks :o)
Hmm, I know about Kmail, but I've never used Kontact... maybe the KDE guys are just trying to make all those Outlook users feel more at home!
It is easy to confuse the meaning of a "yes" or "no" response if the question isn't correctly stated. It leaves the possibility of a double negative which can easily confuse the user - especially if that user uses english as a second language.
By using verbs as button labels, you don't get these problems. For example, imagine the message box that occurs when closing a document - "Do you wish to save the changes?" - or something similar. The options might be "Yes", "No", and "Cancel". Here, the difference between "No" and "Cancel" is obvious to most people, but not new users. An alternative would be to use "Save", "Don't Save", and "Cancel". Here, three verbs are used to describe the three different opperations. To new users, this is far less confusing. There is less chance of error.
For the majority of people out there, computers are needlessly complex. If the KDE group wants KDE to be usable by the majority of people, little changes like this have to be made. It might piss off some of the regular users, but thoses regular users can quickly adapt to the changes. In fact, most of those pissed off users will probably admit to prefering the new system once then have gotten used to it. Just look at the original backlash to OSX by traditional Mac users. I liked the traditional MacOS, but after using OSX for some time I must say that it has a vastly superior UI design then the old MacOS.
without any applications running
So your computer is running ten times faster doing nothing?
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
my personal points of love since 3.0 are mostly found in kontact. (kerberos support in pop3/imap/smtp) and ongoing improvements in the groupware scene. kde text to speech was also a quite fun addition with many potentials. (but I would like a better backend with support for natural voices...) konqy fixes are render bug every release and speed has increased nicely overall. all in all I think there will just be less announcements like when we got our first kmail release or kopete messenger, simply because most apps are already there. I think kde is slowly getting to a point where more and more time is spend on polishment. the major framework is getting there where it should be. but don't get me wrong... getting everything cleaned up is VERY important.
E.g. konqueror has this feature called multiple view profiles, one for file management and one for browsing. Very nice, but i *really* would want to have a separate home URL for each profile.
Settings -> Save View Profile "Such-and-Such"; tick the "Save URLs in profile" box - isn't that what you mean? (Not sure I understood the problem.)
KDE 3.4 is really slow on a Pentium MMX class machine with 192 mb of ram
I disagree. Just a couple of weeks ago, I installed slackware-current on a laptop hard drive fitted inside an i-opener upgraded to an AMD cpu running at 200MHz and 128mb RAM. KDE 3.4 was usable enough with the 2.6 kernel running. This is just an anecdote, but still...
KDE's nice, though, if you have lightening-fast hardware.
I read it as "Aging slut applies more makeup" instead of "Preview of KDE 3.5." Does that make me a GNOME zealot? Anybody?
$
I agree that modularization is a great means to avoid bloat. I am using Eclipse (Java IDE and more), and it is very feature packed, with hundreds of additional plugins. This includes an MP3 player plugin. It's not bloat, since it is not enabled by default (actually, you need to donwload most of it).
But I would consider it bloat if it would make my interface less usable. So bloat is not only when you have unnecesary code, but also (especially) if it clutters up the application. The trick is to make it feature packed *and* usable.
This was the last time I looked at the default RedHat and SuSE desktops (both brand new installations), so any daemons or applets would have been the ones that those distros run as default.
As usual I was unimpressed with both, and in this case replaced them with Slackware.
Thanks for answering my question. :)
The one thing KDE always lacked for me was an applet that would check my IMAP boxes over SSL. A central KDE configuration section for mailboxes that kmail and the various xbiff-thingies would all use would probably be a nice thing. But I don't use KDE anymore. I use XFCE in Linux and will soon even be done with that, in favor of MacOS X all-around.
It's fast, and it has a hojillion useful features and a great UI. That's not bloat.
Actually, it only has a bajillion useful features. That's why we're holding out for amarok 1.3 and KDE 3.5 to compliment the new KDevelop 3.2.1.
There is no reason why konqueror should consume 70-80% CPU on PIII 600MHz just moving the mouse on a menu. I strongly wish I had Windows explorer as a file manager. The UI and bloat of konqueror just blows.
Even then, a lot of the "bloat" people complain about is in the standard install, but a lot of distros let you fine tune what you install. Don't want the games? Don't install them. Wow, that was hard.
kio_slaves is awesome. It's just awesome. Gnome's attempt at something similar is a joke and OS X doesn't come close either. It's one of the things I really miss about KDE. (And Windows... heh... I don't even need to say anything beyond that.)
KOffice may still need quite a bit of work, but Konqueror and KMail are already really good applications. All three benefit greatly from their integration with and/or reuse of other KDE components, which you don't get with the alternatives you suggest.
If you actually gave them a fair chance and used them on a daily basis as I do, I think you'd see the difference.
Just some minor corrections:
a file manager that can do sftp, ftp, smb, nfs, etc. I'll agree that those elements make the code bigger and possibly slower
Not really, as each protocol is a separate ioslave and only gets loaded when it is requested.
Kate, Kedit and Kdevelop all use the same editor
I think you mean KWrite, not KEdit. But you got the general idea.
I hope they include support for the MS Intellimouse. The extra buttons work in Firefox so why can't they work with Konqueror?
enough said.
> This is a good example of the philosophy of flexibility so pervasive in Gentoo's portage Actually it's a pain in the ass. Apparently it causes a lot of problems, considering the amount of gentoo users that come to the KDE IRC channels, having problems because they haven't got package X installed to get KY working. > In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if someone has made RPMs or DEBs of individual apps. Breaking news: Debian has splitted packages for _years_.
Firefox is not an KDE-application. I do have it installed, but I prefer Konqueror instead.
OO.org is a lumbering beast, whereas koffice is lean and mean. And OO.org is not a KDE-application.
Thunderbird is not a KDE-application. And it doesn't integrate with Kontact.
Seriously: why should I use the apps you listed, instead of their KDE-equivalents? Couldn't it be said just as well "Don't use Thunderbird, use Kmail instead". Whyv should we drop Kmail in favour of Thunderbird and not vice versa?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Hmm...I'll try slack...
I'd been using SuSE 9.0-9.3. It sucked, royally.
How fast is 'usable enough'? Any multi-minute wait times? For opening apps and the like?
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
(For those unfamiliar - it performs random web searches and mixes the resulting images into a collage).
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I doubt it. First of all, you can't conclude from three sentences that I'm a "crowdist wanker" (wtf is a crow dist, anyway...). I notice for one thing that you have read my comment. If you really think posting a comment to a web forum is being a crowd-ist wanker, then why do you post and read things there? Why do you read or care about the comments? Also, nothing that was bulk-pasted in the comments gave me any information that I couldn't get from a wine-o begging me for money in the subway. And there was too much to read, so why would I bother? It didn't seem interesting, just normal trollish spew. The only thing the person accomplished was to disrupt information exchange between people in the forum.
much obliged :-)
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
also keeping shift while clicking on contextual menu item does the same.
:)
btw, there was an issue where they (kde) proposed to change menu item from 'move to trash' to 'delete' if shift key is held. small, but nice change
Rich
Maybe it's a pain in your ass, but not mine. Also, someone has already mentioned that Debian has split packages. Are Debian users a pain in your ass too?
I thought Potato Head was about the dumbest thing I had ever seen, but from what I've seen, kids of a certain age group LOVE it.
Some of our friends have kids, and without exception, they have no trouble using KDE, and they really like the games.
It's like getting a free babysitter in your box of cereal!
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
The newer the version of KDE, the more it feels like XP. 3.4 is especially guilty, as the window frames are damn near an exact copy
...), mouse clics, ...
This is NOT what I saw at all. You seem to be wrong on this one.
You cited at least one example, so I will give one too.
Before, I just wanted to say that YOU perhaps make your KDE feel like XP. The one on my wife's desktop surely has nothing to do with XP.
Now, to show you why I strongly disagree with what you say, I will take 2 examples :
- The default tooltips for the icons in the taskbar in KDE 3.4 surely have NOTHING to do with the ones in XP (you can still go back to the old behaviour, with zooming icons).
- The trashcan now in the taskbar
There are a myriad other things that XP never had natively, like thumbnails or preview of files (text, video, audio,
I would say KDE has taken its own direction.
And saying KDE 3.4 feels like Windows XP feels like an insult really.
You are a very strange person, you know that?
...), mouse clics,
:-)
The default tooltips for the icons in the taskbar in KDE 3.4 surely have NOTHING to do with the ones in XP
The tooltips are very pretty, but they do not make the interface. Things like the XP-ish frame, the XP-ish "Display Settings", the XP-ish "System" icons, etc. make the interface. That's not to say there aren't differences, but that doesn't stop it from feeling like XP.
The trashcan now in the taskbar
Really? Are you sure you're not using a customized version?
There are a myriad other things that XP never had natively, like thumbnails or preview of files (text, video, audio,
1. The Thumbnail previews are in XP already. Just click "View|Thumbnails". It's automatically activated for folders that Windows detects are being "full of images".
2. Single Mouse Clicks can be activated in Windows Explorer by clicking "Tools|Folder Options|Single Click to Open an Item." This was added in the Internet Explorer 4.0 beta program (of which I was a member) where it was made the default. This feature along with a wireframe globe background for Windows Explorer were disabled in the final release due to usability issues they caused. ActiveDesktop and Channel Bar also lived on for a short period of time before being disabled or scaled back.
In other words, sir, you yourself are very, very wrong. If you're going to argue the relative merits of OSes, it's always a good idea to actually *know* these OSes. Or as the military axiom goes, "Know Thine Enemy".
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
You're only going to see those messages if you run the program in a terminal. Otherwise, the output is piped to stderr, which winds up being /dev/null.
Actually the default is Plastik these days. Keramik was the bubble-gum like one you're talking about, which is no longer the default.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
I think that the KDE devel team wanted to have Konqueror be an every-protocol browser, be it local files, manpages, LAN browsing, or Web browser. It is a wonderful file browser and LAN browser and has been for some time. However, its Web browsing prowess has only recently gotten decent. I am very looking forward to having a "Block images from..." context in Konqueror 3.5 as this it about the only thing keeping me using Firefox. I think the KHTML rendering engine in Konqueror is faster and prettier than Gecko and it sure loads a bunch faster.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
Anyway, good luck in school. If you're at all as clever as you think you are, you'll get over yourself. (Trolling an article which probably only I, one person, will ever read? Ouch, talk about bored....)
``First of all, KDE is still ridden with [Ok][Cancel]-buttons. These are sooo 1992-like and should be replaced with verbs, like they have correctly done with [Add to panel] in one of the screenshots. This should all be changed, and no new dialogs should be accepted until they confirm.''
That's just pure evil. Consistency is absolutely key in a GUI. If you're going to use different verb pairs for everything, you might as well use different languages for every panel as well.
Swahili, Yankee, Japanese, Portuguese, French, and Texan, anyone?