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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."
First accepted submission! (and first post?) Today is my lucky day!
Silicon & Charybdis McLuhan Kildall Papert Kay
O_o changes is good. Evil is good, good is evil so evil is good!
Bah.
These need to be the main focus of KDE now. There's tons of features but it needs to be faster and more rock solid.
It's a nuisance when Windows Explorer on an average Athlon is slightly more responsive than Linux and KDE on an AMD64 x2. Also Konqueror struggles with some pages, rendering them really slowly.
I would really love(not that i don't now) a KDE thats lightweight and as functional. Not the memory hog that it is now..
KDE developers are working on projects that could radically change how the world's most popular free desktop looks and works.
Here we go. The day KDE stops hyping and starts delivering will be an interesting day. The KDE seems to specialize in making up shit that will get posted on slashdot, whereas the GNOME project actually delivers the goods (accessibility, working multimedia framework) without the all hype. P.S I'm a Windows user... an outside observer if you like. The KDE project seems a lot like Windows (promise a lot, deliver little, rely heavily on mouthpieces to do your marketing), but without the huge user base.
If there are any KDE devs reading this:
PLEASE PLEASE OPTIMIZE FOR MEMORY USAGE!
Its really sad that Windows with all its services and stuff uses 1/2 the RAM of KDE alone.
LL
"The most obvious application of Tenor would be desktop search, giving KDE an analog to GNOME's brilliant search tool Beagle. But the Tenor project's chief architect, Scott Wheeler, wants to go further, asking, "how can we make it easier to work with the data we accumulate on the desktop?" So rather than just making it easier for users to search for documents, Tenor will provide application developers with data that can transform their interfaces. For example, the KDE Control Center, which currently organizes the configuration modules into a confusing hierarchy, may provide a search interface with results that show related items and learn from usage patterns."
Cheers,
Ian
If it's going to be a "radical change", why not change the toolkit and/or the programming language while they are at it?
C'mon. I use KDE and I find certain things beter than in gnome, konsole, kmail, ... well ... maybe KDE even is the "most" popular by certain standards, but why do they have to shove it in my face everytime????
/.
It goes on in the article: "radical changes"... boy... having a nerw icon set and a mail client that is somehow integrated to a half-finished kalendar ist not a "radical" change...
That is really anoying... especially you also read this from "official" KDE PR people, not only from KDE fan boys posting to
-p
KdenLive/PIAVE - non-linear video editing
Linux is *not* user friendly, and until it is linux will stay with >1% marketshare.
/tmp or the installer will dump core. After the installer is done, edit /etc/X11/XF86Config and add a section called "GL" and put "driver nv" in it. Make sure you have the latest version of X and Linux kernel 2.6 or else X will segfault when you start. OK, run the Quake 3 installer and make sure you set the proper group and setuid permissions on quake3.bin. If you want sound, look here [link to another obscure web site], which is a short HOWTO on how to get sound in Quake 3. That's all there is to it!"
Take installation. Linux zealots are now saying "oh installing is so easy, just do apt-get install package or emerge package": Yes, because typing in "apt-get" or "emerge" makes so much more sense to new users than double-clicking an icon that says "setup".
Linux zealots are far too forgiving when judging the difficultly of Linux configuration issues and far too harsh when judging the difficulty of Windows configuration issues. Example comments:
User: "How do I get Quake 3 to run in Linux?"
Zealot: "Oh that's easy! If you have Redhat, you have to download quake_3_rh_8_i686_010203_glibc.bin, then do chmod +x on the file. Then you have to su to root, make sure you type export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5 but ONLY if you have that latest libc6 installed. If you don't, don't set that environment variable or the installer will dump core. Before you run the installer, make sure you have the GL drivers for X installed. Get them at [some obscure web address], chmod +x the binary, then run it, but make sure you have at least 10MB free in
User: "How do I get Quake 3 to run in Windows?"
Zealot: "Oh God, I had to install Quake 3 in Windoze for some lamer friend of mine! God, what a fucking mess! I put in the CD and it took about 3 minutes to copy everything, and then I had to reboot the fucking computer! Jesus Christ! What a retarded operating system!"
So, I guess the point I'm trying to make is that what seems easy and natural to Linux geeks is definitely not what regular people consider easy and natural. Hence, the preference towards Windows.
are they going to switch to using C? that would be nice. Or use GTK as a base.
I think it's sad that they can't afford good artists.
It'll be like a second Christmas!
Silicon & Charybdis McLuhan Kildall Papert Kay
Parent Is a copy/paste troll .. Incase anyone missed that fact and moderates it insightful again.
What linux needs for the desktop market is an easy to use, and simple desktop. The problem with this on current installs is the lack of communication between desktop and kernel etc.
:|
For example, Sometimes, sound on linux can be an absolute bitch to get going. Even something as trivial as playing an AVI caused me *way* too much drama. Not that I couldn't get it to work, but then if I wanted sound to work with other things, I need to use a sound daemon. Fair enough, thats not too hard - but then the audio/video sync was out because of the latency in the sound daemon.
The point is, that as long as simple issues like playing a video become mammoth tasks, then the average person will just stick with something simpler. Hell, 90% of the time I can just install Windows and everything will work right out of the box.
This is what needs to be worked on. While all the technical side of things on Linux just rocks, I doubt that many people have worked on the 'end user experiance' because at the moment, it just sucks.
There is a reason Apple is gaining market share - as well as mind share - and it's the OS that does it. I can do the majority of things I can do on a linux system (console and X side), and have a nice, pretty and *FUNCTIONAL* GUI for everything else. The end user experiance is second to none. This is what Linux should be looking at - not making 'sweeping changes' that you still need to spend a week on getting to run just right
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing an editor and a MTA.
ENOUGH OF SLOW KDE
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.
*Insert ASCII goatse here*
Just getting bigger not better is my first impression. My PC is often faster and more responsive under W2K then under Suse/KDE. It only can get worse with even more gimmicks.
That looks really nice, but the main problem with kde is the time it takes to do things. Quite often I wonder why I'm loading so much into memory on my precious laptop battery when Window Maker is sufficient.
You notice how much is going on when dragging a window across the screen.
Why UNIX?
I guess the acid test for KDE 4 (as for KDE 3) will be KBear, then - the strangely named fpt client with the strange user interface that seems to come with each release whether you want it or not.
Will it run this time? Or will it revert to its lovable self and crash shortly after starting up, taking the kicker down with it?
Madames et Messieurs, faites vos jeux!
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
that could radically change how the world's most popular free desktop looks and works.
Good! It's about time that they move ahead, and I so hope that they finally abandon the "let's copy everything from windos" meme, which is not a winning strategy. If you want to copy, at least do it from the original (MacOS) and not another already crappy copy (windos).
#1 reason I'm not using KDE: It looks and works like windos, and windos usability is rock bottom.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Is it just me, or does 'Appeal' sound a whole lot like 'Apple' ?
Exercise caution when modding this message up: the author acts like a jerk when his karma is excellent.
NX (or maybe 6, as in FreeNX, but I digress...)
In Windows I use TortoiseCVS/SVN. It absolutely rocks. Using Cervisia after using Tortoise is anything but pleasant. I don't want to offend the Cervisia devs with this, but I would be glad if a new Cervisia release would integrate in Konqueror like Tortoise does with Explorer.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
Have a look at www.simplekde.org
List
Wonder if he's being paid for this or if he's just a dick.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
2) Work with GNOME, Trolltech and Free Desktop and produce a common widget theme engine. I don't care if an app runs QT or GTK, I don't care if it's part of KDE or GNOME. I do care that the average Linux desktop looks severely schizophrenic and unpredictable from one app to the next.
The parent made a very important point: anything has to do with the desktop, because the desktop must provide an interface for it. So, the filesystem has to do with the desktop. The font system has to do with the desktop. And so on.
What is called tenor here is already existing albeit in a very rough state as kate.
It isnt really very functionnal yet, but it will be included in Mandriva 2006, which you can think of as a mistake from mandriva or as a gesture of trust and commitment toward that application and what it will become:
http://kat.mandriva.com/
Personnally, I removed it, but I'm also glad my favorite distribution is doing this kind of choices. After all, they included KDE by default when it wasnt very popular to do so, and it was quite a good choice in the long run.
When I see the kind of interactions that will be done later with a good data miner engine behind the desktop, i understand why they did that.
They final get rid of 'artsd'. It has been a huge wart on KDE since the day it was inserted. Let's face, sound support in your typical freenix distro already has some fundemental limitations http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=200 50901024119 and artsd only makes things worse (much worse).
I think you'll find that the desktop search tool Beagle, was in development long before Spotlight was even announced. So, if at all, it would appear both Spotlight and Tenor took their cues from Beagle.. not that it matters at all, of course.
If you read German, here is an article comparing the best software offerings amongst each other. Linux/KDE still can't hold a candle to Microsoft Windows. Interestingly, they admit that Linux/Gnome is not quite as bad as KDE.
I've been running KDE on Fedora 4 for a while where it was rather slow.
Recently I changed to the beta/rc from Suse and can't complain anymore on the speed/responsiveness of KDE. This improvement is definately not caused by the 'later' version (3.4.0 vs 3.4.2) on Suse.
Note that in Fedora I disabled all eye candy, while on Suse I'm using the default settings.
My machine is an 800 MHz AMD with 300MB mem.
I was a little frustrated with Gnome when I saw the "use Gnome"-answer from the gp poster. Gnome is nice sometimes, and sometimes it sucks. Which desktop doesn't? However, my experience with GNOME and KDE always led me to prefer KDE in the past. Maybe its because of the work I do (I browse often with a file manager in my fileserver, and so far Konqueror always outperformed Nautilus). Also, I always felt Gnome to be more sluggish than KDE, as if the latency was higher. But yeah, I should have written an "IMO" there.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
But Spotlight is more than a desktop search tool, and that's what's being hinted at in the KDE descriptions. You could also use it to search through control panels, for example. Or music libraries - iTunes uses it. That's the point.
It's not to knock Beagle that I made the post, it's more to point at the lack of creativity in the KDE plan dressed up in "but our developers are already thinking further"-type language. They're not thinking further. They're cloning Spotlight. A bit more honesty about that from the article wouldn't have gone amiss.
Cheers,
Ian
that it was the most popular? No this isn't a troll I'm just finding it funny how so many people start saying things like that. On what basis do they deem they are the most popular?
Looks like we're in for some treats in a years time then! Having tried many desktops (such as Mac OS X, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Gnome, etc) KDE is by far the best in every aspect. It is much faster, more stable, easier to use and basically a joy to work on. Rather than becoming annoyed and aggrivated with something like, say, the Microsoft Windows desktop, using KDE is just a much richer and more pleasurable experience.
Innovative and intuitive window management, a wealth of icons and themes to allow customisation to the way I like things. Tabbed applications extended beyond the browser bring a more complete integration of the way things work. A wealth of applications such as Kword and Korganizer extend KDE beyond any other desktop available. Its all there and its all great!
I'm really looking forward to KDE4 - as I'm sure many of you are!
That this is basically the development model for Linux and _some_ it's desktop enviroments and applications -> Add features, add features, some innovation, add features, some optimization and bug fixes and then add more features...?
I use GNOME on top of GNU/Linux (Debian/Ubuntu) everyday and GNOME 2.12 is such a delight to use, but I would rather see more integration of bugfixes of the different frameworks such as gstreamer rather than more half-worked features.
Let's get the basics out of they way, first. I do not have many problems with my install and user experience, but let's make it easier for normal users to do things such as mounting and using hardware (video cards, USB drives/mp3 players, USB mice/keyboards/cameras, and )
It seems to me that we reinvent the wheel and reproduce too much effort in the FLOSS community.. there needs to be more sharing on security and bugfixes across the platform. Thanks!
All they can do is mod down dissenting voices. Read the article linked in parent, and then comment. Just because somebody doesn't agree with you doesn't mean that they're a troll.
Add some mem, 512 meg is OK, 1 gig is better.
I would read the article, but site appears slashdotted right now. All is get is Connection refused.
to the future, to the next version. Never their mind on where they were. Hmm? What they were releasing. Hmph. Bells. Heh. Whistles. Heh. A Guru craves not these things. You are feature driven.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Stop naming every new application with a 'K'!!! Open the task bar menu, oh look 20 separate application items all beginning with 'K'. Kan't they thing of anything better??
http://www.gnustep.org/
Write code which should pretty much just port to OS X without too much trouble.
I've always wondered why KDE and Gnome get so much attention.
Deleted
Every time I've tried to use KDE it swaps out my 512MB workstation. And I run a basic workstation with nothing that should be considered out of the ordinary for some home development. But to use up that much RAM is just crap. I don't care who you are or how F/OSS you are or how fanatical your supporters are. That's crap.
When they come out with something that doesn't take minutes to load and wipe out all my RAM then I'll be interested in it. It sure does have a lot of eye-candy and twiddly features, but the cost in performance is prohibitive.
Sure hope they can actually improve this in KDE4. They sure haven't done that in the last 5 years. On the contrary, they have made it progressively worse.
On both windows (only ever tried it at home with XP) and of course linux it makes a huge difference. Neither does it have to break the bank. You will be suprised how many old dell P3's are are dual ready. Just buy 2 of them second hand, canabalize them and voila, high mem, big HD, dual CPU desktop that is far more responive than the fastest single cpu machine.
I do now only use linux on my dual machines, since I only keep windows for games and that is mostly single CPU until recently, but I tried XP for about a month and found it amazing stable. XP on a far faster P4 was far less stable, having those all to familiar freezes when explorer hangs on something and takes the entire desktop with it.
I think the most important elements of a good desktop are dual cpu, lots of memory, fast HD and only then the speed of the actual cpu. Lets face it, the days when your cpu wasn't fast enough to handle that mp3 are long gone.
Dare to buy second hand and enjoy stable, low heat dual cpu goodness.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Eh? WTF?
Sitting here, now at a 512Mb (actually 448Mb after the onboard graphics steals it's RAM) 1.2GHz machine with a PCI (PCI, for god's sake, there's no even an AGP slot on it) graphics card. Absolutely no swapping. Some apps take a little while to load but the only thing that actually MAKES my computer swap is if I run Word through Crossover Office.
This is the same computer that swaps like mad whenever I run XP on it, only other OS that doesn't swap too badly on it is 98.
I dunno what you are doing to make your machine swap but I'd point the finger at the machine or the config, not KDE. For reference, Slackware 10.2 plain install with KDE 3.4 (previously 10.1 with 3.3 and no problems then either), default settings except for the NVidia driver.
This is my primary desktop, runs Dreamweaver MX, Word etc. on top of Crossover plus all the OS-goodness I can find and still swapping doesn't get in my way. I have an extremely loud ATA66 hard drive that I could hear any swapping and a big red light for drive activity and yet most of the time, once a program is loaded, that's it. Maybe a small twitch when switching between tasks. Dunno what you're doing wrong but there's nothing there that's specifically KDE's fault.
Lovely article, that doesn't say huge amounts of anything other than marketspeak.
One of the main points I use when talking about Linux to non-techies is that you don't need to buy new hardware for each new release, the way you do for WinDoze. What are they doing about size and speed (e.g. the Firefox model)?
Further, how much of what they're doing is anything more than eye candy - what actual *functionality* does it need, when at least 75% of everyone uses their computer to email, Websurf, and maybe text message or play games?
Why does it need still more crap?
mark
Hey, pass her ("hot, blonde") the contact data of the FreeNX developers too, will you? See here:
FreeNX Project Members
These guys have achieved brilliant things. They deserve some female distraction. Especially pipitas, I think.
No way! This is my machine running KDE + firefox + a few things in the background.
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 514728 165464 349264 0 7344 84360
-/+ buffers/cache: 73760 440968
Swap: 0 0 0
How does dashboard compare? http://www.nat.org/dashboard/
That's being reimplemented as part of Beagle.
... would load a Commodore 64 binary file named SIG from device 8, the first 1541 drive.
Completely non-portable, you insensitive clod. Still, those of us reading Slashdot from a C64 might be tempted to load and run your binary SIG, thus potentially spreading a virus.
At least you could do:
10 DOPEN#1,"SIG"
20 INPUT#1,S$
30 DCLOSE#1
40 PRINT S$
Just as non-portable, but would actually work and not cause a security nightmare from running untrusted binaries. We 64 users have enough trouble with CSS not to have security issues on top of everything else.
sigs, as if you care.
On how much RAM should it work then? 256MB is the absolute minimium these days, with 512MB being the standard on computers.
True for folks who have newer hardware, but not true for everyone. Not at all.
Case in point: my largest box at home (out of seven boxes) is a 256MB PPro, but the rest of my machines vary between 64MB and 192MB, with most of them still sitting at 64MB.
The *only* platform I use that has a desktop which seems to require more RAM than I have on many of my machines is Linux.
On 64MB hardware, OS/2 Warp 4 absolutely flies, Windows 95B/98/NT4/2k varies from very fast (95B) to fast enough to not cause impatience issues (2K), and BeOS 5 Pro flies. Solaris 7 and 8 are also fairly fast (tho I hate CDE). My current Linux distros using lighter window managers (or older versions of KDE such as 2.2) are also quite fast.
A 64MB PPro box running any of the above platforms is perfectly capable of running a browser like FireFox 1.0.7 very quickly, can listen to/burn/rip CDs, can run graphics programs, play low-res videos, and run just almost any general application you care to name including the latest incarnations of OpenOffice (though some swapping will occur depending on platform), and it can also run a number of interesting games including a fair number of once fairly popular titles (UT, Tribes 1, Quake 1/2/3A, SC, TA, AOE I/II, Homeworld, NFS 2/3/4, Madden 2001, etc.).
Because of the above, I've really seen very little reason to upgrade my desktop boxes except for playing newer games, and I'll be doing that on a separate game system when I finally get around to building one.
Newer versions of KDE seem to growing (in terms of resource usage) at a very fast rate, and the desktop looks like it's gaining all kinds of visual candy, but I still can't get as much functionality out of KDE as I could out of OS/2, and its WorkPlace Shell was quite usable on a 16MB machine!!! One wonders, quite frankly, where all that space is going. Eye candy?
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I end up saying this every time this comes up on Slashdot, but...
I submitted my first talk on this topic a couple weeks before Spotlight was announced. I'm not sure that Beagle had ceased to be part of Dashboard at that time and become Beagle, but at the very least it was far from functional.
And standard mantra -- Tenor is more about relationships between data than content. "Contextual Linkage" vs. "Searching", so to say. Granted, at this point both Beagle and Spotlight are looking in that direction, but they're building context on top of indexing rather than indexing on top of context.
I guess that he's either trolling or had the system on forever and doesn't know how swap is used in linux.
Good link - thanks.
Cheers,
Ian
Who do you mean by "users"? People who run more than one GUI? This is a big part of why Linux isn't mainstream. Technogeeks can't look at things from the perspective of the mainstream computer user who isn't going to use multiple GUIs and just wants to use e-mail, write documents, browse the internet, and have new applications install with a simple click.
They need simpler design, I look at a standard application like this, and I think, "WTF" I have one that looks just like the shutdown button in windows, a blue arrow pointing right, and a bunch of other stuff that I'd have to look at a tooltip to just try and figure out what all those things do! Everything seems bulky with big boarders too, I like Win2k where everything was thin and space efficient. The taskbar at the bottom sucks too, why do you need so many buttons there, a launcher menu and a clock will suffice, and why is it so tall with big square buttons? Why can't it have have one row of applications, and be less intrusive? I'm not trying to nag here, and I'm sure someone will say, "Get used to it", but before I move from OS X, I'm going to want a little more zen in my applications. KDE always seemed to attempt to make things easy too, but when it gives detailed instructions on how to click something, "click this for the internet!", but then asks you for parameters for your dialup account, and IRQ's, etc, it just gets frustrating. We need tighter integration between the OS and the WM. Like WIndows and MacOS X
Sig: I stole this sig.
There are desktops trying to do their own thing and you know, all of them are quite unpopular because it's not familiar.
Poke around the Internet for Gnustep based applications/environments. There's another guy doing a mozilla-based desktop environment where he's stuffing menus in the corners of the screen.
Things that humans must re-learn mean change, and change is not something most people thrive on.
I can be very critical of KDE on a detailed level. But overall, it's very good. What I grow most tired of is people that lament a lack of innovation while they don't do much to experiment or contribute to innovative things.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Those stats are usually user polls, and asking the power geeks what they like most has almost no bearing on actual usage considering that there are now millions of non-geek users at libraries, schools and offices.
to counter your list:
- Suse is on its way out as a desktop, these days Novel is pushing Novel Linux Desktop, which is a gnome centric distro.
- Sun uses gnome in JDS.
- Ubuntu uses gnome only.
- Fedora and Redhat are both default to gnome.
so yeah, its a tossup which is really "in the lead"... which make such claims like in this story laughable and basically FUD.
Compared to SuSE or Debian, Fedora is a lousy distro. I ran into numerous problems with it, too. Indeed, as you found, things often run far better under SuSE, Debian, or basically any other non-RedHat/non-Fedora distro. While your machine isn't the most powerful beast, it should be more than sufficient for a decent KDE experience. It's unfortunate that RedHat/Fedora failed you so badly. At least you were able to get a solid SuSE installation working.
It bothers me that Fedora is often recommended to new Linux users, yet it is often nothing but problematic. Its low quality probably does more to turn users off of Linux than anything else, which is awful because most other distros are far superior to Fedora.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Some public relations improvements are also required. They are mainly needed because of incidents like:
6 46636
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=163348&cid=13
Indeed, it is completely unacceptable for developers of KDE and various KDE-related projects like KOffice to attack the users of their product like that. It gives all such products a horrible image when rogue developers are throwing around such awful insults in public.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
people want a fast, simple and reliable desktop, not an ugly and slow one.
Every time I've tried to use KDE it swaps out my 512MB workstation.
Not it doesn't so stop lying. That's just a lame anti-OSS troll.
I use both Slackware/KDE and Mac OS-X.
Eye candy is always nice, but I think the most important things are smart design and ease-of-use.
As an adaptation:
Easy things should be very easy. Difficult things should be smartly convenient.
Everytime I see all the work that's happening on KDE I wonder what's the point of having an OSS desktop thta relies on the proprietary Qt from trolltech. What a shame. I wish all the effort would've gone on something truly free like Gnome.
Qt is GPL -- it provides more guaranteed freedoms than Gtk+, which is under the Lesser GPL! In fact, a major complaint in the Gnome camp seems to be "damn them for choosing a toolkit [Qt] with a viral license!". Makes one wonder who actually cares more about freedom...
"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.
Well, Beagle might be a nice and working implementation (I never used it much and haven't read the code, so I can't tell), but it is not exactly what tenor aims to be. Tenor's primary goal is not about search, but about linking related desktop resources (a resource can be a file, a website, an email, a post-it note, an abstract idea, a person in your address book). So you get a "web of context" which makes it possible to present the user the information is actually interested in in his current context. This is beyond what beagle does: collect metadata, build an index, search it via search string. That is not rocket science, and was there on the web for a decade now. Also, it's limited, it can't find the picture my friend sent me via IM yesterday. Beagle is good because it already works, and tenor is still a concept, but from the idea behind it, Tenor is more compelling IMO. And it's not a Beagle clone by no means.
No. In many nations that would make the developers an accessory to a crime:
An accessory to a crime is any individual who knowingly and voluntarily participates in the commission of a crime.
If all it takes is a disclaimer to make legal troubles go away, many of my favorite NES rom sites would still exist!
Open Source Sushi
2005 is about to end and the best GPU work done on Linux (xcompmgr) is over a year old with no development. People with old computer have options like XFCE, but those that want a stable/accerated high end Linux desktop have none! Xorg is ready. Nvidia has the drivers. And no one wants to pick up the ball....
(Sorry if I sound like Mr. Smirl, but often I think he is correct!).
Open Source Sushi
One of the most common and most severe security holes is buffer overflows. C++ is one of the few languages that does not make buffer overflows impossible. When open source developers start to take security seriously, they will have to rewrite all of their code in another language any way.
I realize there are plenty of developers in denial that switching to another language will help. Yet the simple fact remains that buffer overflow errors result from common bugs that developers generally never even see when they are testing. We are not going to eliminate the very frequent buffer overflow exploits until we stop using C and C++.
And to those who complain that checking bounds all the time is too slow, you're part of the problem. Buffer overflows exist because people don't check their bounds! In order to stop buffer overflows, software needs to incur the overhead of checking bounds anyway.
Finally, those who complain that switching to another language is pointless because there are plenty of other security holes, those security holes are rarely as significant and they are far less common. Buffer overflows account for nearly half of all security holes. A move away from C and C++ would instantly make your desktop twice as secure. Furthermore, another language could take measures to reduce the likelihood of other security holes at the same time.
Switching away from C and C++ may not instantly make your desktop secure, but it is certainly an absolute requirement on the road to achieving that goal.
I have been using mandrake since shortly after it started. I have nothing but fast response time on it from konqi. In addition, this is where I did all of my development, until about 1 year ago, where I took a job that required both Linux and Windows. When I started, I was on Xp with MSIE. It was dog slow compared to konqi on Mandrake. But recently, I have gotten tired of Mandrakes lousy quality, and then they switched to doing a .x rev back (i.e., they installed 3.3, when 3.4.2 was current). So I finally switched to Suse and was shocked. The system is overall more stable. I see far less bugs. In addition, I have the newer KDE that I wanted. But it runs a great deal slower. In fact, I assumed that 3.4 was slow. But I upgraded one of my mandrake systems (not all are converted yet) to 3.4.1. And the speeds are much faster than Suse. Much faster. And much less memory. And yes, it does run faster than MSIE, while the suse version does not. Sadly, the Suse system is my biggest system.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.