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KDE 4 Promises Large Changes
HatofPig writes "As the dust settles from aKademy 2005, the annual KDE conference, it's a good time to take a look at what the KDE developers are working on. Though KDE 3.5 isn't even out yet, developers are already working on KDE 4. Plenty of work has already gone into porting existing code to Qt4, the GUI toolkit upon which KDE is based, and KDE developers are working on projects that could radically change how the world's most popular free desktop looks and works."
In the past, I've successfully made myself a "KDE lite" by getting rid of the biggest resource hog: the desktop and the window manager. OpenBox (At least: version 2, I assume version 3 is just the same) honours the same windowmanager hints, and can (could?) offer a system tray as well.
.xinitrc (or an .xsession, I usually have a symlink from the first to the second), which starts openbox at the end
In a nutshell:
* Make a
* Start docker (The OpenBox system tray replacement), kicker, klipper, and whatever other kde components you want to launch.
Tadaa. Done. KDE-lite.
Parent Is a copy/paste troll .. Incase anyone missed that fact and moderates it insightful again.
Surely you're looking for XFCE? I'm not convinced that making the software more "lightweight" is a good argument, that's clearly not what they're aiming for. Although if there's actual structural problems, or bugs, causing the OTT memory usage, yes, those should be dealt with.
Because, unless I am very much mistaken, it would require that almost all of the project be re-written or thrown away and started on again. You can still have a radical change without having to throw away all of the code that's already been written. Also, they are porting the whole of the KDE project from the Qt3 toolkit to Qt4, since Qt4 is not backward-compatible with Qt3, so in a sense, they are changing the toolkit - but they are porting to one that is very, very similar to the one they use now. ;) What's wrong with Qt anyway that might make you want to port away from it? You might say that it's GPL and not LGPL, which might discourage proprietary developers who don't want to fork out for the alternative license, but that's about it, anything else is really just a matter of preference.
The write-up also seemed rather sparse in details, so while I am writing this post I may as well chuck in a few links:
Interesting interview with Aaron Seigo
Another good interview with Zack Rusin
Official site for KDE Plasma, the KDE4 desktop.
i agree, Konquerer makes for a great file manager, but as a web browser it needs work, i think i will stick with Firefox or Opera for web browsers...
there is a project called SimleKDE i am going to keep an eye on- http://www.simplekde.org/ i hope SimpleKDE makes a good fork (little brother) of KDE...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Interesting. I've found the opposite to be true, especially with the Start/K menu. If you want to speed up Konqueror's file browsing features, turn off stuff like document previews.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Read about Qt 4 here. If Trolltech are to be believed, we are getting more features and better performance. It's not a case of the two being mutually exclusive.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
As for web page rendering, if you look at the benchmarks konqueror is the fastest Free browser, beating all the gecko-based ones hands down. Where it does get slow is running javascript, that needs to be improved.
I am trolling
NX (or maybe 6, as in FreeNX, but I digress...)
Have a look at www.simplekde.org
The slowness of remote access has absolutely nothing to do with "outperforming the premier Linux desktop". Such things work on a much lower level. VNC does suck compared to RDP, but look at NX.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
You could also use a unified theme such as QtCurve which supports gtk/gtk2/kde all in one shot...http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?co ntent=5065
This is not a sig.
It's a nuisance when Windows Explorer on an average Athlon is slightly more responsive than Linux and KDE on an AMD64 x2.
Let's be honest here, you're really comparing apples to oranges when you compare completely different hardware like that. KDE and Win overall performance *as a desktop on the same hardware* is similar. KDE certainly isn't perfect, particularly it's task bar, but I'd be hard pressed to say Windows is so much better. On a side note, for a desktop, I think dual CPU boxes simply aren't worth the fractional performance gain they offer vs. their added cost. However, from a geek-cred standpoint, they do offer bragging rights that single unit systems don't.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
kbear never got into any official KDE release. The instability of the project is full responsability of its author and the project itself seems dead for almost 2 years now.
Why did you have to mix kbear (as any other independent app) with KDE itself? Just because its made for KDE?
Would this mean that if I, eventually, developed a nice calculator for windows that says 2+2=69 instantly Windows would be so buggy that 2+2=69?
It's already done, both CVS and SVN are integreted to Konqueror when you install cervisia and kdesvn
KDE 4 will greatly simplify this. Basically we will drop artsd (which nobody ever liked) and instead have a simple API that apps will use. The API will use gstreamer underneath (you can change this if you want).
Apps which require more complex use from a multimedia engine will have to support gstreamer directly.
Of course, for all I know such a plugin architecture already exists...
It DOES exist. And it's used. Everything in Konqueror is a plugin, so it is used a lot. When you install Cervisia, for example, it automatically integrates with Konqueror. I don't know what the grandparent's problem is, because I'm always hassling with turning that *OFF* because I don't want it.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
"On a LAN with X remote you can't tell you're not working on the local machine, it's that good."
Oh, dude!
I'll read it to you:
"She told me that she wanted to use a remote client to work on her work machine from home."
Does this sound like "LAN" to you??
And I'll read you some more:
"She told me that windows xp did it so significantly faster that she dumped linux because she could not stand the wait."
And I tell you one more thing, from experience: She is right. She's absolutely fscking right! Repeat after me, three times:
Remote X over a DSL dialup link is unusable for work. Remote X over a DSL dialup link is unusable for work. Remote X over a DSL dialup link is unusable for work.
And FreeNX over the same DSL link is blazingly fast. You can hardly tell the difference of FreeNX-over-DSL from a local session. And it is nearly as fast over a dialup modem or dialup ISDN link.
FreeNX beats Windows RDP out of its pants.