KDE 4 to Support Apple Dashboard Widgets

Ryan writes to tell us Applexnet is reporting that Zack Rusin, a lead developer of KDE, has confirmed that KDE 4 will be able to run and display Dashboard widgets similar to Mac OS X 10.4. From the article: "Basically, this means that a layer (similar in some ways to layers in Adobe Photoshop) in the KDE desktop could function the same way that Dashboard does in Mac OS X. Widgets themselves are not inherently difficult to write nor properly interpret, since they are usually just HTML and Javascript (although Cocoa code can be included, the developer's skills permitting). Furthermore, since Konqueror and Safari share very nearly the same rendering engine, KHTML and WebKit, this too will simplify the process."

Comments

who knew

[User 956]

Who knew that the "write once, run anywhere" promised to us by Java, would be beaten to the punch by an Open Source project?

Re:who knew

[Anonymous Coward]

Who knew that the "write once, run anywhere" promised to us by Java, would be beaten to the punch by an Open Source project... ...copying something from Apple.

Who indeed?

Re:who knew

[theAtomicFireball]

Sure... if you define "anywhere" to mean "anywhere but windows"

Re:who knew

[Anonymous Coward]

HTML widgets were invented by Microsoft.

Re:who knew

[Anonymous Coward]

Anywhere that matters...

--
crm14

Re:who knew

[heinousjay]

Except, if you read the summary, you'd see it isn't, since OSX widgets can include Cocoa code, which KDE doesn't support.

In other words, you'll get your modpoints for bashing Java, but you lose in reality.

Re:who knew

[User 956]

Except, if you read the summary, you'd see it isn't, since OSX widgets can include Cocoa code, which KDE doesn't support.

They *can* include Cocoa code, but it's not required. So you can write a Konfabulator widget and it'll run just fine on OS X, Windows, and now KDE.

Re:who knew

[scbysnx]

the mojority of personal computer users don't matter?

Re:who knew

[heinousjay]

You're being pedantic. My point was, you posted an anti-java troll by playing loose with the facts. Don't let it worry you - I know you're probably chasing karma, and I'd hate to stop you in your quest to bump the invisible number.

Re:who knew

[Decaff]

Who knew that the "write once, run anywhere" promised to us by Java, would be beaten to the punch by an Open Source project?

Wow! So this means that these Dashboard widgets can run on my mobile phone? On Windows? On IBM z-Series mainframes? Can you write databases using these widgets? Application servers? Distributed network applications? Numerical applications?

Excellent! Then I'll abandon the hundreds of thousands of lines of portable Java code I have written and translate it into HTML and JavaScript after reading your informative post.

Oops! Hold on! Let's take a look at the article:

"KDE's runtime will be limited in that it will not be able to run widgets properly that use AppleScript or Cocoa in some way. Likewise, it's possible that Mac OS X users may also have to face not being able to run some widgets that depend on KDE somehow."

Oh well, back to Java....

Re:who knew

[jZnat]

Yeah, who would have known that HTML and JavaScript/ECMAScript would have been more portable? Hmm...

Re:who knew

[ZeroZen]

majority.

but yes i agree. not that write once, run anywhere, is part of the article, but if windows doesn't support these widgets, maybe someone should write software that makes it so...

Re:who knew

[User 956]

You're being pedantic.

...says the kid who's pointing out inconsequential, irrelevant "facts". Yeah, ok.

Re:who knew

[andy753421]

Yea, but my question is whether the KDE implementation going to be 'run' anywhere, or are the folks over at Gnome going to have to rewrite the program to display Mac OSX widgets for Gnome, and then will someone else have to rewrite it again to display them on things such as WindowMaker, Fluxbox, FVWM?

Re:who knew

[Anonymous Coward]

How on earth does this kind of nonsense get modded up to a 3? This may actually be the dumbest single comment I've read on slashdot all week. For a start being able to run a widget on two different flavours of unix does not, frankly, constitute "write once, run anywhere", secondly Java not only does work fine but has done since about 1997. Currently the Java stuff that I write is typically written and debugged on a Windows machine and runs on Linux, AIX, Solaris and z/OS without any problems. Jesus. I know Slashdot loves to bash Java but this is so far removed from reality it is frightening. Mod to -1 troll...

Re:who knew

[krakelohm]

Alright. You two both go to separate corners for using works that hurt my brain.

Re:who knew

[Anonymous Coward]

Copying something from Apple? Apple got the code that makes it all work from KDE in the first place. Dashboard is based on WebCore, WebCore is based on KHTML, KHTML was developed by the KDE developers for use in Konqueror.

Re:who knew

[orasio]

I only care about _my_ desktop.
About users, I only care about their web browsers.
They can be using my apps from a Kenwood blender, for all I care, if they have a good enough browser.

Re:who knew

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed that the comment was not so great, but it's more than two platforms. It's going to be OS X, of course, plus anything KDE runs on, which is much more than just Linux -- which I assume is the second platform you alluded to.

Re:who knew

[scbysnx]

thanks for that.. I don't put much thought into spelling on the internet something you may be interested in though if you are a windows user is konfabulator (now yahoo widget engine) http://www.konfabulator.com/

Re:who knew

[pluggo]

This is what I think is one of the more interesting aspects of open source: the cross-pollenation that occurs, with a feature moving one place, mutating, then moving back into the original source. The whole thing smacks of memetics.

Re:who knew

[theAtomicFireball]

Depends on what you mean by "matters." I'd guess that most software developers would consider anybody who wants to pay for a license as somebody who "matters", and for most commercial software there's a lot more potential licensees using Windows. For most software companies, money matters more than elegance of design so yes, Virginia, Windows matters, whether you like it or not.

Re:who knew

[hkmwbz]

"Wow! So this means that these Dashboard widgets can run on my mobile phone?"

In theory at least.

Re:who knew

[jeffehobbs]

I'll ask again, as perhaps you missed the question the first time:

What's the relationship (if any) between the "Chuck Norris Facts" linked to from your .sig, and the "Chuck Norris Facts" originally from here? They seem strikingly similar. You wouldn't be ripping off someone else's content in order to sell t-shirts, would you? That would be crappy.

~jeff

Re:who knew

[Metrol]

Heck, who still uses that legacy stuff anyway?

Re:who knew

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the relationship (if any) between the "Chuck Norris Facts" linked to from your .sig, and the "Chuck Norris Facts" originally from here?

Hey nimrod: it's a fucking Conan O'Brien reference. If you're going to bitch about it, there's about 279,000 results on google you can spend your afternoon chasing down.

Re:who knew

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one of the dumbest comments I've ever seen on Slashdot. How there are people that are stupid enough to mod shit like this up is beyond me.... First of all, these widgets will only work under KDE and OS X, which is not even remotely close to "write once, run anywhere". Secondly, the KDE developers have worked tirelessly trying to port the code to KDE and even still, since most of the current widgets use AppleScript or call the Cocoa API's, most widgets will never work on anything other than OS X. This is nowhere remotely close to "write once, run anywhere" and only a complete fucking idiot would suggest that.

Will this work on Windows? Will this work under Window Managers other than the bloated mess that is KDE? Will this work on my cell phone? How about main frames? It's more like "write once then recode for every platform you want to support."

Re:who knew

[Kadin2048]

Mod parent up.

For web developers anyway, this is (or ought to be -- if browsers were platform agnostic and standards compliant) the correct attitude to have. In fact, the user's choice of browser shouldn't matter either in an ideal world, that it does is unfortunate but for the present unavoidable.

Getting back to the original point of widgets, I think the Windows-compatibility issue (or lack therof) is irrelevant. Most widgets that I've seen are written by small hobby developers or individual users, or very small software companies. This is something that Mac and Linux users are familiar with, but based on my experience Windows users less so. For whatever reason, the Windows platform doesn't seem as favorable to small freeware developers. When I had to use a Windows machine and wanted to download any kind of small utility or application, it seemed like there was always a price-tag attached. That's not to say that there aren't Konfabulator widgets written by small developers for Windows, (and not having used them I can't comment on their quality), but if you're looking to write some freeware and aren't trying to make a buck from it, it seems like Linux or Mac OS are better platforms: sure, you have a smaller userbase and smaller audience, but you can achieve surprisingly deep penetration (and, to a certain extent, notoriety) into that market if what you write is good.

To make a very broad generalization, based on my experience with Windows and Mac/Linux freeware: there is obviously less of it for the less-popular platforms, but the quality seems to be significantly higher on average. Most of it is actually free (less shareware), and what does cost money is generally commercial-quality. I've never gotten the feeling I've had looking at some Windows shareware (that the author is just trolling for money from ignorant users), on any "alternative" platform.

Re:who knew

[jeffehobbs]

Hey nimrod: no it's not. Maybe you could actually check the two links. Conan O'Brian pulls a lever and shows a random non-sequitir of a clip of "Walker, Texas Ranger". The page here is a community-based thing which people have contributed jokes to, jokes that he's not attributing.

But thanks for being a total jerk.

~jeff

Re:who knew

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you use the same username on Fark? Or do all douchebags happen to use User 956 for a handle?

Re:who knew

[mrchaotica]

Huh? Since when was a Konfabulator widget the same thing as a Dashboard widget? As far as I know, they use similar technologies but aren't compatible.

Re:who knew

[mrchaotica]

Now all they need to do is merge KDE and GNUStep, and we'll be in business!

Too bad the K name is taken

[tepples]

Konfabulator?

Re:Too bad the K name is taken

[User 956]

Konfabulator?

Nah, didn't you hear the news? Konfabulator has been renamed to "Yahoo widget engine". Which means "konfabulator" is up for grabs.

Re:Too bad the K name is taken

[big tex]

Actually, it's SuperKaramba.

Desktop widgets, and it's been out for years.

Re:Too bad the K name is taken

[zarr]

Kkonfabulator! :)

Re:Too bad the K name is taken

[Ruff_ilb]

Ah, but you've forgotten the wonderful -ix suffix. Now the KDE Widgets app kan be kalled Konfabulatorix!

Re:Too bad the K name is taken

[N7DR]

... SuperKaramba. Desktop widgets, and it's been out for years.

And unfortunately it crashes almost daily, at least on my machine. Because of the instability of superKaramba, I have been waiting for Konfabulator to be ported to Linux, but maybe this KDE4 feature will arrive first. I will say that I originally thought that all these desktop thingies were nothing but eye-candy, but it turns out that I actually find them very useful.

Re:Too bad the K name is taken

[robolemon]

Except for trademark law. Just because someone stops using a trademark doesn't mean they give up the rights to it. At least for a long time.

Re:Too bad the K name is taken

[Anonymous Coward]

He was "joking". Look it up.

A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[hahafaha]

Apple already took a lot from UNIX. It pretty much *is* UNIX. Perhaps it will lend something to KDE.

Most UNIX-people use Apple because it still is UNIX but with a better GUI. Perhaps KDE will convince Apple to make the GUI Free Software.

Or maybe Apple will just sue the socks off of the KDE project.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[HowIsMyDriving?]

It will never happen. Apple needs OSX to be able to be in the market place. Apple, while making money off of the hardware will need OSX, especially since going to the Intel platform to make it different. If they opened it up to white box computers no one would buy Apple hardware, and they would soon be stuck with just iPods and iBooks and Powerbooks. The cannot do this, for it would kill the company.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[Billly Gates]

The early powerpc clones almost killed apple. Another quarter and Jobs would not need to save the company since it would already would have been dead.

Sometimes whats best for consumers is not best for the companies who make the products. Software is used to create lockin and artificial high barriers to entry to jerk up prices. Bill Gates discovered this and Apple does the same with tying its hardware and software together.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[linguae]

Most UNIX-people use Apple because it still is UNIX but with a better GUI. Perhaps KDE will convince Apple to make the GUI Free Software.

And don't forget about the ability to run commercial applications such as MS Office and Photoshop. I believe Macs are preferred to a standard Linux or BSD desktop configuration mainly because of mainstream application and hardware support; the GUI just makes the experience more worthwhile.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[m50d]

they would soon be stuck with just iPods and iBooks and Powerbooks. The cannot do this, for it would kill the company.

I don't think they would die. There's no sense them giving up their desktop division while it's making money, but they could survive perfectly well on the other lines you mention.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[kimvette]

The clones failed for Apple because Apple was bent on continuing their existing model (almost giving away the OS, but charging high prices for the hardware). If they had a more sensible plan - that is, following Microsoft's model by being OS-and-app-centric for their revenue, where the hardware is a means to sell that software solution, there's a good chance that they'd have gained more of the installed market share back. Back when they killed the clones I was about to buy a dual processor clone. Good thing I didn't. I have one Mac - one G3 a customer gave me because the NIC died on it. I do a lot of work on Macs, but would never pay Apple prices on the hardware because they simply are not worth the money for a new one (well, aside from the Mac Mini). They're great machines but given a choice between a dual G5 and a dual Opteron, a dual Xeon, or even a dual core (Opteron/Pentium D) PC, I'd go PC/Linux. I'd get far better value for my money, and a much faster video card in the deal.

If Apple gets a clue between now and the OS/X x86 release, I might switch from Linux to OS/X but I doubt they will see the light and will do everything they possibly can to break compatibility between OS/X and standard PC motherboards.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I too doubt Apple will go open source with their GUI system. I think that's a longer shot than Apple selling the OS to work on generic computers, though I would like that, I would buy several licences if they did such.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple already took a lot from UNIX. It pretty much *is* UNIX. Perhaps it will lend something to KDE.

Most UNIX-people use Apple because it still is UNIX but with a better GUI.

Please stop spreading this crap propaganda. OS X is barely a UNIX OS, and for most UNIX people, it serves as more of a frustration than a solution. For light users who need to write a 3-line wget script now and then, or people who run 'top' because they like to stare at all the pretty status information, yeah, it works. But if you want to, say, develop a Python module in C, you'll find yourself erasing OS X and installing Linux after about an hour and a half of cursing and spitting at the machine.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[ZakuSage]

While I think Apple open sourcing Mac OS X is a pipe dream and unrealistic, I do think it would be more realistic and nice if they offered more interoperability with KDE. Perhaps more in the vein of offering it as an alternative desktop shell right off the bat in a future OS X release.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[Billly Gates]

I agree. I really like their laptops. I am hoping the prices for their intel laptops will be reasonable compared to wintel counterparts. I pray I can run windows on them as well since that is important.

If they are only a few hundred more I would buy them simple because linux no longer just works and its a mess. I am a former BSD biggot so I am biased. I like macosx because it just works and is tied to the hardware. AN escape from rpm hell and apt-get hell is nice too. Why is it so hard to upgrade to openoffice 2.0 with ubuntu without installing things from unstable? With macosx I just point and click to upgrade or install packages. Not to mention some nice commercial software exists for the macs. I dont think they will break compatibility. but I do picture them using different sized agp and pci cards. I think Apple wants more hardware for their platform so we will wait and see.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[aztracker1]

Considering that *most* computer sales are laptops, it may well be a good thing to F/OSS their OS... you would get *real* support for branded hardware, and OSS community support for other hardware... Honestly, it's the *only* way I would trust apple to have an OS for non-apple hardware is an OpenSource license, considering what happened the last time they allowed 3rd party vendor licensing.

I really like OSX 10.4, and would really like more support, the intel move will help this a little. Open-Sourcing the OS could help a *LOT*, maybe restrict the license to use without redistribution, or something... Which would allow for download/install, but limit competing vendors.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[orasio]

And don't forget about the ability to run commercial applications such as MS Office and Photoshop.


Those are proprietary applications.
Specifically desktop proprietary applications.

Mysql _is_ a commercial application.
SuSE _is_ a commercial software distribution.
Lots of free software packages are for commercial used, distributed and supported commercially.
Open office, Netscape, etc. all have commercial support available.
The difference is proprietary against free.
Or open source against closed source, if you care about that sort of thing.
Commercial software itself has no problems with non-uniform free software platforms. Proprietary, closed source software does, because among other things it's harder to maintain binary-only distributions when only a small group of people have access to the source.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[Shawn is an Asshole]

I just have to say that is one of the main reasons I bought a Mac (PowerBook). This way I can load up Photoshop, and still have Quanta and a responsive GIMP open at the same time. No more dual booting.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[Eil]

Perhaps it will lend something to KDE.

They already do. Safari is descendant of Konqueror and contribute (perhaps inefficiently) their patches back to KDE. However, since this is KDE's own effort to reproduce Dashboard from scratch (Dashboard isn't open source even if many of its components are), Apple has no reason or incentive to contribute any of their work on Dashboard to KDE.

Most UNIX-people use Apple because it still is UNIX but with a better GUI.

This needs to be qualified a little better because the a large number (most likely the majority) of "UNIX-people" are still happily using a non-Apple Unix. For example, I use KDE and don't see that changing anytime soon because KDE is, for me, a much more powerful UI environment than OS X. Most of my geek friends and co-workers are in the same boat, though some are considering Powerbooks for the occasional on-the-road work.

Perhaps KDE will convince Apple to make the GUI Free Software.

Not going to happen and literally everyone at Apple has said as much. The simple, elegant OS X GUI is Apple's trump card. It is the main reason to buy a Mac. If they give that away, then anyone on the planet can implement it and Mac sales go down the tube. Sure, there are many reasons to buy a Mac but the OS is definitely the biggie. This is why Apple is putting so much effort into making sure that OS X does not run (easily) on plain Intel boxes.

Or maybe Apple will just sue the socks off of the KDE project.

I don't see how that's possible unless Apple went patent-squatting on the desktop widget engine idea. Dashboard may be the most popular implementation, but it was hardly the first to exist.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[Hatta]

And don't forget about the ability to run commercial applications such as MS Office and Photoshop.

That's what Crossover Office is for.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[LKM]

Most UNIX-people use Apple because it still is UNIX but with a better GUI. Perhaps KDE will convince Apple to make the GUI Free Software.

Threby making sure that people won't have to use Mac OS X anymore?

Or maybe Apple will just sue the socks off of the KDE project.

And why would they do that?

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Most UNIX-people use Apple because it still is UNIX but with a better GUI.

Uh, no.

"Most UNIX-people" use Apple because the Apple desktop users outnumbered other unix desktop users, so when Apple switched to unix, they instantly became the #1 desktop unix brand. You're swapping cause and effect.

True, there are some people who moved from other unices to Apple, and if so, great; they went with what they liked, but don't make it sound like the entire unix world moved en masse to Apple when OS X came out.

Also, one other thing: by some counts, Linux users now outnumber Apple users. I will only make a passing mention of this because it's debatable.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[Elektroschock]

I think this is a Marketing legend.

Mac OS X is great for some people. But you need to justify the prize. And when you are a Unix geek you have to justify your switch to a GUI system. So here post-marketing takes place. You bought it and they give you a reason why: Because it is Unix (?!)

I think for most Apple users this is no reason to use or buy a Mac.

Because for Apple users it is irrelevant whether Mac OS X is build on foosys or Unix. When you run a C64 emulator on Linux which is distributed as a game console to play games you cannot say "this is a real Linux" only because a techie can open a linux console. For the average use it is C64. And for the manufacturer it it was a rather technical choice what runtime plattform he chose. When you look at a diamond you can also think of carbon and sure it is.

But all these Apple freaks which want to belong to the Unix family do not understand that the essence of Macs is not Unix as it was not PPC. And when Apple switches tomorrow to Intel and from BSD to foosys, Apple users will find other silly arguments to rationalise their apple preference.

In my opinion KDE is more productive for me. But it depends. What is the real problem is hardware drivers and configuration stuff. Not difficult to get beaten by the most proprietary plattform. When you do not have to support the whole hardware cosmos things get easier.

Now KDE wants to support the Apple widgets. Nice, I call it interoperability. You can use KDE on BSD as well and then KDE is a "real Unix". But the fact is, it does not really matter.

What matters is that KDE is great and free and Mac OS X is stylish and proprietary. KDE unlike Mac OS X cannot die. But KDE can assist the survival of some parts of the Mac OS X universe. GNUSTEP is one approach. KDE is another approach. The time for a free Mac OS X is close.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[ThousandStars]

Considering that *most* computer sales are laptops

This is wrong. Most computer sales are desktops. The WSJ had an article about that very issue a few months ago. The absolute number of desktops purchased is far higher than the number of laptops. It is true, though, that laptop sales are increasing faster as a percentage than desktop sales, and at sometime in the future they may pass desktop sales. It's also true that the laptop/desktop split changes if you consider the amount of money spent in dollar terms, since laptops are generally more expensive than desktops.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[Angostura]

Bit of a bee in your bonnet there, no? The parent poster nowhere suggested that open source programs couldn't be commercial. Nor did he suggest that commercial programs could not be open source.

He just gave examples of two commercial desktop applications that run on Macs, but not on Linux distros ... and which happen to be closed, proprietary apps.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[Overly Critical Guy]

Perhaps KDE will convince Apple to make the GUI Free Software.

How could anyone possibly think this, and actually post it? Everyone knows this will never happen.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is true for Apple tho -- they sell more laptops than desktops.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[JulesLt]

One thing is that O/S upgrade revenue has been pretty important to Apple over the last few years - I believe Tiger has had a far higher take-up amongst existing OS/X customers compared to the first 12 months of XP, and that's not insignificant money.

The question is whether they've grown used to that cashflow, or whether it's been a short term strategy (i.e. there have been a lot of software upgrades in the last 12 months - were they to keep momentum until the new hardware).

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[orasio]

And don't forget about the ability to run commercial applications such as MS Office and Photoshop.


I am replying to the "running commercial applications" fallacy.
Giving examples of commercial apps that run on GNU/Linux, I was pointing out that the characteristic of being "commercial applications" was not what prevented those apps from running.
Citing them as an example of the "ability to run commercial applications", may imply that that's the issue with the apps.
Being proprietary and closed source is part of what stops msoffice and Photoshop from being supported by more platforms. Being "commercial", whatever that means, has nothing to do with that.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a ridiclous argument. Most Mac users don't use Unix features and could care less. Therefore, by definition, they are not "UNIX-People". The vast majority of Mac software runs on abstraction layers that effectively hide the Unix underpinnings.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Better GUI? The Apple GUI feels old-fashioned. I would rather have the tool bar on the window. I would rather that focus goes to the window with the cursor and not top-most window. However, since I'm new to OS X, maybe those things can be done. If so, please show me how.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[markiv34]

Apple would not lose anything by Dashboard widgets running on KDE, they might get some good will in the market and also more widget developers this way. Stopping KDE guys support Dashboard widgets would not be wise move on Apple's part, Apple could learn a thing or two. Just my 2 cents

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[rdoger6424]

Actually, I think it's ported from Darwin, an open-source version of NextStep, a version of BSD.

Bonus: BSD had a derivative called NextStep, an operating system created by NeXT. NeXT's CEO, Steve Jobs, executive produced Toy Story, in which Woody, a character, was voiced by Tom Hanks. He starred in Apollo 13 with Kevin Bacon .
Do I get mod points now?

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[MikeFM]

To bad OS X's UI is actually even worse than KDE/Gnome - not as bad as Windows but pretty suck ass for getting real work done. It looks pretty though so it gets people to buy it. Functionality doesn't seem to matter. I'll be impressed the day they stop focusing on eye candy and actually make the system easy to use for complex work. Make the hard stuff easy.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple already took a lot from UNIX. It pretty much *is* UNIX.

Nope. It's pretty much NeXTstep. The fact that underneath that lies BSD is irrelevant. They could have very well used other technologys as a base, and support the same libraries and UI. There is a lot in Mac OS X that is not exactly Unix-like.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[penguin-collective]

You'll probably get flamed or modded down for that statement, but I have to agree: while not bad, I think the OS X GUI is overrated. Gnome and KDE both have reached the point where they are more than competitive with any of the commercial GUIs out there.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[MikeFM]

I'm sure I'll be flamed. In one statement I said I think Windows, OS X, KDE, and Gnome are crap. Thinking that a focus on looks over usability is foolish is about enough to get a guy killed most days. Still it's important to keep saying it so maybe others will notice that most attention is spent on eye candy and making things easy for stupid people.

All have their little bugs but I think KDE and Gnome are more usable than OS X or Windows if you're doing real (complex) work across several applications and windows. If all you do is look at porn and play minesweeper than any of the above will do for ya.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[CountBrass]

Why? And why would anyone choose KDE over OSX? It's like suggesting Rolls Royce should offer vinyl as an option on their car seats.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[theAtomicFireball]

Considering that *most* computer sales are laptops

This is wrong. Most computer sales are desktops.

Check your facts. Notebooks started outselling desktops this year. Haven't seen any follow-up since to tell if the trend has continued, steadied, or reversed, but as of June, 2005, notebooks were outselling desktops.

http://news.com.com/PC+milestone--notebooks+outsel l+desktops/2100-1047_3-5731417.html

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[rampant mac]

"Dashboard may be the most popular implementation, but it was hardly [wikipedia.org] the first [wikipedia.org] to exist."

O RLY?

System 6, released back in 1985 seemed to have some very neat desktop accessory applications. Creepy, huh?

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[conteXXt]

Eil (82413) has it correct (IMO)

Apple has hit upon a good thing:

1. Low level code in common with *SD *n*x (why do we do the * stuff exactly? I am not afraid of saying UNIX. Are you?)

2. Open access to (*)ALL X11 based portable apps (which fucntionally = all X11 apps)

3. Not Windows.

4. FULL hardware support for the hardware they support (!?!?).

By the above I mean:

      How are they different from Sun,IBM HPUX etc?

OSX is as much of a UNIX (there, I said it!!!!) as anyone else.

If Apple were to play rough with the KDS folks, I am reasonably sure that support toward Apple would dry up. Apple has benefitted more from US that vice versa. (Please cite cases if you disagree, and I politely request you remain polite while doing so, we can disagree without me being legally required to silence you (for hate(ers) speech :-)

That being said. I own NO apple gear, and have yet to play with OSX.

I am hoping that someday I will stumble accross some Apple gear in the fortune 500s where I usually consult.

Barring that, I will WAREZ some and do my own evaluation as to it's buyability(i.e feasability)for my clients.

(Grammar nazis need not respond, As I am still off due to Seasons Greetings Holidays)

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[JulesLt]

>Sometimes whats best for consumers is not best for the companies who make the products

While I would not dispute for a second that Apple's products are over-priced (it's public fact that they've been one of the most profitable computer manufacturers in the last year), I do wonder about the assumption that cheaper goods are always better for consumers i.e. in food and clothing, let alone computing, competition eventually drives quality downwards, as well as cost - or more precisely, good quality goods become a niche/premium market.

There seems remarkably little business in the middle ground (good value goods) - it's either high-volume, low-margin, low-quality or low-volume, high-margin.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[toddestan]

so when Apple switched to unix, they instantly became the #1 desktop unix brand. You're swapping cause and effect.

Hardly instantly. I seem to remember the uptake on OSX was pretty slow, with a good portion of the Mac user base sticking to OS9 until 10.2 came out. Heck, I bet there is still a sizable chunk of classic Macs out there.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[GrahamCox]

pretty suck ass for getting real work done

Obviously you're trolling, and obviously you'll get a stack of irritable responses from Mac fanbois. But what exactly are you referring to? Personally I find OS X to be as productive as it gets, on any platform, with any app that I use. Sure there is room for improvement, but much more room for the same on the other platforms. And in my experience, where poor UI is present on OS X, it's mostly down to bad choices by app designers. OK, let's leave the Finder aside for the moment - who uses that much anyway? Providing a decent widget library is down to OS X, using it wisely is down to developers. Some don't, but you can't blame the OS for that.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some foolish people here actually still believe that Apple cares about the open source community. Apple is not going to release any of its code as open source. They will continue to use open source products however contributing back is not even within the realm of possibility. Especially, when it's concerning their GUI.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[groot]

Or maybe Apple will just sue the socks off of the KDE project.

Won't work, the KDE team dons the "Miami Vice" look.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[rm69990]

Crossover's software support pales to both Microsoft's and Apple's. And even some supported software has quirks that make it almost unbearable to use.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[Anonymous Coward]

The vast majority of Mac software runs on abstraction layers that effectively hide the Unix underpinnings.

You could say the exact same thing about most GUI Linux programs.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[hahafaha]

Because they decide that the whole idea of the dashboard is theirs by patent

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[binary paladin]

If I had my points today you'd score one. That was fucking hilarious.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[Eil]

System 6, released back in 1985 seemed to have some very neat desktop accessory applications. Creepy, huh?

Hmm. Touché. I guess nothing's an original idea in GUIs these days.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[KarmaMB84]

Is that in terms of units sold or how much was spent on them? Notebooks tend to be pricier than dekstops.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[Sloppy]

Most Mac users don't use Unix features and could care less. Therefore, by definition, they are not "UNIX-People". The vast majority of Mac software runs on abstraction layers that effectively hide the Unix underpinnings.

By that reasoning, most non-Mac Unix users aren't "UNIX-People" either. My mom uses KWord on Linux, but talk to her about pipes or awk'n'sed and you'll get a blank stare.

In the 21st century, it's all the same:

• A Classic MacOS user starts an application, types stuff in, amd selects "print" from the "File" menu.
• A MacOS X user starts an application, types stuff in, and selects "print" from the "File" menu.
• A KDE user starts an application, types stuff in, and selects "print" from the "File" menu.
• A GNOME Mac user starts an application, types stuff in, and selects "print" from the "File" menu.
• A MS Windows user starts an application, wonders why it's so slow, types stuff in, selects "print" from the "File" menu, wonders why it's taking so long, and calls support to come delete all their daily-accrued spyware.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most UNIX-people use Apple because it still is UNIX but with a better GUI. Perhaps KDE will convince Apple to make the GUI Free Software.

Think about what you just said for a second.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[Khakionion]

The asterisks are wild cards. *n*x can mean Linux or UNIX.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[mrchaotica]

If Apple were going to contribute something GUI-related to Free Software, I'd like to see them make GNUStep 100% compatible with Mac applications. It'd be awesome to be able to use the same apps on my Linux box as on my Macs, and Apple would still have product differentiation because GNUStep would still have the old NeXT interface.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[mrchaotica]

I, for one, only gave Mac OS a chance because it became a UNIX. In addition, I've heard quite a few people (anecdotally) say the same thing.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[Ohreally_factor]

A good indication of this was that the OS X Tiger Install DVD that came with my new Powerbook couldn't be installed on my older Powerbook. I guess my "free" upgrades are over. Yeah, I know, not exactly fair or ethical, but easily rationalized by the large amount of money I spend on Apple gear. I didn't feel entitled but because there weren't such blocks in the past I felt that it wasn't a big deal for Apple.

However, as you point out, given the upgrade cycle of OS X, with so many improvements at so many levels (under the hood, apps, GUI, etc.; in short, major changes and fine details), it is clear that Apple is investing considerable time, effort, and money into OS X and they want to see a return.

So I think they'll continue to see OS X as a source of revenue. As far as I can tell/guess, there is a roadmap past 10.5.

At any rate, I'm happier with the upgrade cycle, compared to the long stretch between System 7.x and OS 8. Man, those days sucked.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[The OPTiCIAN]

> Most UNIX-people use Apple because it still is UNIX but with a better GUI.

Wow - I don't think so. Not at all. I have a mac as my laptop but use gnome at every opportunity. It supports my hotkeys better, it's more 'trim', the consoles apps are more responsive, you can resize windows using the metacity mouse+control-key combos for controlling your windows. The gnome 'run' panel is far more effective than the fiddly, mousey dock in aqua. Workspaces!!!! Etc. I *far* prefer gnome, although the bugs in the clipboard ("Oh - you close the window you copied from? Well we didn't save your clipboard data!") piss me off all the time.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[hahafaha]

When I said that, I did not mean that *I* think so. I just meant that many people do.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[10Ghz]

Most UNIX-people use Apple because it still is UNIX but with a better GUI.

It's debatable that is the GUI "better". Better at what? Some time ago I introduced my wife to KDE. And while se used it just fine, she did complain about many things. About 9 months ago I bought a Mac Mini to try out OS X and to get a cool piece of hardware (which the Mini is). I thought that "if my wife has all those issues (although minor in the grand scheme of things) with KDE, maybe she would like OS X better". She has now used OS X for quite a bit and she complains just as much as when she used KDE! She hates the fact that closing the window doesn't close the app (really, what's up with that?), she hates the Dock and she dislikes the menubar.

And while the problems she had with KDE could have been fixed (for the most part) the issues she has with OS X are fundamental features of the GUI and can't be changed. There's no way to get rid of the menubar, you are stuck with the Dock, and I haven't found a setting that says "closing the window also closes the application".

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[buchanmilne]

And don't forget about the ability to run commercial applications such as MS Office and Photoshop

I guess you mean the availability of those applications.

There are plenty of commercial applications for Linux. Even proprietary ones. With GUIs. Expensive ones too ...

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[MikeFM]

OS X is horrible for managing a lot of different open windows and they've maimed a lot of basic functionality like the way the ALT-TAB, DEL/BCKSPC, HOME, END, PAGE UP, and PAGE DOWN keys work. Also using any networking features on OS X run much slower on OS X than they do on Linux or straight BSD (not as bad as Windows but still considerably worse). File management on OS X is another thing that is horribly slow in general. Yes, it's easy to use but that doesn't make it effecient for real work. Even Windows beats OS X when it comes to power of file management.

It's BSD roots even make the command-line tools less effecient than Linux as the GNU tools offer a lot of time/effort saving options that the BSD tools lack - not that most Mac users are likely to know the difference.

OS X has the eye candy thing down. I'd love for them to spend some serious energy in making it more effecient to work in. There's no shame in an option to switch into an advanced user mode. There might be shame in admitting that changing standard functionality (that's largely existed since the days of the typewriter) such as the behavior of HOME, END, etc was a bad idea and changing it back to that standard functionality but they should bite the bullet and just do it.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[andrewski]

It already is. Just look up GNUstep.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[discstickers]

Um, no. The clones failed to expand the Mac market; they just took share from Apple.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[JulesLt]

I believe, although not from personal experience, that shrink-wrapped copies of Tiger, rather than 'OEM' copies, can still be installed on multiple machines. As you say, that does mark a change in strategy - will they be phoning home to check for genuine Apple Advantage next??

That's always got to be balanced against the benefits of your customers upgrading, even if illegally. Developers will only take advantage of O/S specific features if they know there is / will be a large installed base, which will be the biggest problem for MS with Vista - it's going to take some time before software houses are going to start developing Vista only applications - unless there are developer oriented features (equivalent to, say, CoreImage) that dramatically cut development time.
Even then, the economics of it would probably dictate towards spending the extra time doing an XP version, wheras I guess the economics of Apple software development are currently different - far smaller sales / dev teams mean that productivity benefits have a bigger effect.

What I do hope they continue to do is bring the price down as the volumes increase - as has also happened with iWork (you now get 2 apps for cheaper than Keynote). It might just be the effect of the $ but Tiger was cheaper than Jaguar in the UK.

If you really want to see a nice piece of Tiger development, check out steelskies.com for CoverFlow - I can't think of a better advert for what one person can do rapidly using Cocoa.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[brian.reading]

I wish people would quit getting in a hissy fit every time someone mentions that there are plenty of people switching from other UNIX-like operating systems to Macs due to a "better" GUI. I'm one of those people. I also know at least two more people like this.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[brian.reading]

Ummm.. and NeXTstep isn't a Unix? From your referenced Wikipedia article:
a Unix-like operating system based on the Mach kernel, plus source code from UC Berkeley's BSD Unix
You can even compare that with wikipedia's mention of FreeBSD development:
Initial development of FreeBSD was started in 1993, and took its sources from 386BSD.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[brian.reading]

http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[Ohreally_factor]

Apple also offers a family pack for $199, which is probably what I'll buy when 10.5 comes out.

What I did for the older Powerbook was load an OEM copy of Panther Server I picked up for $179, because I've always wanted to dick around with OS X Server.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[hahafaha]

I'm one of those people. I also know at least two more people like this.

As evident by you sig ;-)

But seriously, I am not in a hissy fit. I myself use GNOME, but I myself know plenty of people who prefer Mac for the GUI, but still use Linux.

Re:A possible merge in store, perhaps?

[LKM]

Because they decide that the whole idea of the dashboard is theirs by patent

What patent?

Anyway, since WebKit is open source, so is most of Dashboard.

Lets slow down KDE Even more!

[HowIsMyDriving?]

Lets slow down KDE even more. The sad thing is KDE 4 is looking to be as bloated as a Microsoft Windows release. Too bad they cannot have a KDE lite without stuff that I don't need or things that I can do on my Mac.

Re:Lets slow down KDE Even more!

[chill]

You haven't used KDE lately, have you?

Each release has been faster than before with 3.5 being noticably faster than 3.4.1.

Finally, get off your whiney ass and compile it for yourself using Konstruct. Pick just exactly what you want and make it nice and slim for you.

That is what the source code is for, you know.

Re:Lets slow down KDE Even more!

[molnarcs]

You have absolutely no idea of what you're talking about... Slow down KDE even more? What version did you use last time? 2.2? With every release since 3.0 KDE is getting better and better perfomance on old hardware. I'm happily using it on a 700Mhz duron with 256Mb SDRAM (not my main machine though). Please don't spread FUD about KDE if you haven't used it for years...

On the other hand, if KDE is slow for you (on hw with speck >= to my duron conf.), than you screwed up your config (or your distro screwed up kde). KDE permorms admirably well these days...

Re:Lets slow down KDE Even more!

[HowIsMyDriving?]

I still consider 395 megs of memory used when using the K web browser and file system to be too much. I have built my own KDE running 3.5, and even on a P4 2.8 with 1.5 gigs of ram running Debian it is slower than Windows or OSX. The sad thing is, being that KDE is the most usable GUI for Linux/BSD, and has the best support for Open office, that I still use it. I still am fond of when A GUI took up 20 megs, ran well with 12 megs of memory, and was almost instainious in response to commands. (Mac OS 7.1 and Windows 3.1 on a 68030 and 486 respectively)

Re:Lets slow down KDE Even more!

[Anonymous Coward]

Kde4 should use less memory because it will be based on qt4. I've read somewhere that some apps use about 15%
less memory when compiled with qt4 instead of qt3 - so hopefully it wont be too bloated.And even if it is then you still have e17 ;)

Re:Lets slow down KDE Even more!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget that a lot of the slowness and inefficiency is because of X, not because of KDE and Qt.

Of course, if you want a truly bloated, slow and inefficient desktop environment, try GNOME.

Re:Lets slow down KDE Even more!

[melonman]

You forgot to add "and if you don't like it you should write your own Window Manager, that's the power of open source". That's my favourite knee-jerk dismissal of constructive criticism.

If the KDE community is happy for their user base to be restricted to those willing to hand tune and compile KDE, fine. But if we're going to stick with the "Linux Desktop takes over the world" mantra beloved by many here, the way KDE runs out of the box does matter.

I've been using KDE for several years. It's hard to say if it has slowed down or speeded up, as I keep upgrading my hardware. But this laptop I'm typing on ran XP and Office just fine in 256Mb of RAM, but needed twice that to run KDE and OpenOffice comfortably.

Now maybe that's down to KDE, or Open Office, or the Redhat Network icon for all I care, the point is that overall system performance does matter, especially when it is worse than that of Windows, and berating the users for noticing the bloat is not a great growth strategy IMHO.

Re:Lets slow down KDE Even more!

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally, get off your whiney ass and compile it for yourself using Konstruct.

I hope none if you are sitting here and wondering why Linux hasn't made it as an end user desktop OS.

Re:Lets slow down KDE Even more!

[NamShubCMX]

And like most things with KDE, this feature (desktop widgets) will be 100% optional and NOT running it will not affect performance.

Features != bloat (especially if off by default)

Btw, KDE has had this for years, namely SuperKaramba.

Re:Lets slow down KDE Even more!

[oneiron]

I have to admit, I am completely new to KDE/Linux. However, I just installed kubuntu on a HP omnibook p3 600 w/ 256mb RAM. It runs beautifully and flawlessly with zero post-installation configuration. I dare say the notebook is a good deal snappier than when WinXP was installed on it. I'm very happy with it, and I plan to run it in the future...whenever possible.

Re:Lets slow down KDE Even more!

[Anonymous Coward]

And now they've got Active Desktop!

Re:Lets slow down KDE Even more!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody expects end users to build their system. You should vote with your dollar and buy from a linux packager that makes a slim kde distro. At least in the linux world you have choice.

Or it could be like in the windows world, where you can't build it slim and don't have the choice of a vender that builds it slim.

Re:Lets slow down KDE Even more!

[kimvette]

If you find KDE bloated, you need to quit loading 3,281 programs in your system tray and turn off the eye candy. I found KDE 3.1 and later ran just fine on a dual Pentium III (which has since burnt up - literally. A power supply took it out) and KDE 3.5 runs just fine on a dual Celeron. Of course I can't enable the composite extension and alpha blending on the Celery but then, having half a clue, I know better than to turn on eye candy and expect great performance on a older, slower system.

Try running the Gnome desktop with all the eye candy and background applets and see how well THAT desktop runs on an older system - you'll then be saying that Gnome is bloated and we should all go back to fvwm2 (and the associated pain of customizing menus by editing .rc files).

Re:Lets slow down KDE Even more!

[10Ghz]

I still consider 395 megs of memory used when using the K web browser and file system to be too much.

I currently have following things running on my KDE-desktop:

- Konqueror with 4 tabs
- Kontact
- Konsole
- Basket
- Kopete
- Bunch of KDE-related services (Wallet-manager, Klipper etc.)
- The usual Linux-services

How much RAM is being consumed? 149 megs. Let me repeat that: KDE, with all those apps running plus host of other Linux-services, is consuming 149 megs of RAM. Not exactly the 395 megs you quoted, now is it? Let's make this interesting, shall we? I also often run K3b, Amarok (with 7gig music-library), Codeine and Kword. How much RAM is being consumed with those apps running as well (for a total of Konqueror, Kopete, Amarok, Kword, Codeine, Kontact, Basket and Konsole running at the same time)? 310 megs, it seems. So we are getting closer to your figure of 395 megs (which you claim KDE consumes with nothing but Konqueror running).

If I add System Settings (this is a Kubuntu-machine), KPDF and Kate to the mix, RAM-consumption jumps to 323 megs. Still not the same as your figure. Adding SuperKaramba, Info Center and Help in there, and the system consumes 338 megs of RAM. Kspread and Kedit make the RAM-consumption to jump to a whopping 347 megs, still not as high as your figure. And I don't even know what other apps I could be running here. My taskbar is full of running apps, and the RAM-consumption is more than reasonable.

I still am fond of when A GUI took up 20 megs, ran well with 12 megs of memory, and was almost instainious in response to commands. (Mac OS 7.1 and Windows 3.1 on a 68030 and 486 respectively)

Then keep on using those old GUI's. If modern GUI's are slow and bloated, why are you using them?

Re:Lets slow down KDE Even more!

[molnarcs]

395 megs of memory is too much. K web browser never uses that much. In fact, konqi's memory usage if far below firefox's. The least amount of ram you need for kde is 192. With 256, it should work smoothly (you can even have some konq. instances preloaded). Using purely KApps makes the experience smoother than with WinXP. Now if you start firefox (which is a memory hog) or openoffice, and $insert_app_here, and you find yourself running out of ram, don't blame kde!

This needs no special tuning whatsoever. Plain vanilla KDE will work fine without any tweaking on a puter with 256Megs. My main machine has 512, and even after extensive use, my swap partition isn't even touched. That with lots of apps loaded by default: skype, amarok, kmail, 4 preloaded instances of konqi, etc. My system begins swapping only if I start up firefox or ooo-build. (Or perhaps krita with an 50meg PNG :)

KDE's memory management is very efficient. In fact, considering what it does, I would say that I'd expect higher memory usage. Of course, we can throw numbers around here with little or no way to back up our claims, I realize that, but if you check the specs of people running kde (on forums) you'll see that configs like a 700Mhz duron with 256Mb RAM (I mentioned this in another post) is enough. I don't know where your K browser using 384Mb RAM comes from (well, except if you pull it out of your ass). Actually I made some screenies of kde 3.4.3 here. One of the screenshots displays memory usage. If you check the clock, you'll see that it shows the state of memory after opening a lot of apps, including scribus, with images loaded, etc (and you'll see what I have running in my systray). So I don't understand people who report excessive memory usage of KDE - it is either FUD, or they should switch distroes :)

Re:Lets slow down KDE Even more!

[heinousjay]

You're forgetting where you are. This is Slashdot, where anyone that isn't happy keyslapping arcane commands into a white on black console isn't really using a computer, and any piece of software that tries to do anything for the user is heretical.

Re:Lets slow down KDE Even more!

[HowIsMyDriving?]

And you are hitting your HD how much with this config? So are you saying that running KPDF should take up over 200 megs of memory if I need it running? Also, asking why I am not runing 3.1 or 7.1 is asking why did you start using the 2.6 Kernal when 1.3 was running fine? Oh, you mean I can run final cut on a 68030?

Re:Lets slow down KDE Even more!

[chill]

The criticism wasn't constructive, it was trollish whining.

I just installed Slackware 10.2 and upgraded to KDE 3.5 & OpenOffice 2.0.1 on my neighbor's computer over the weekend. 350 MHz P-II w/192 Mb of RAM and the system is very usable. It is faster in booting, program load and overall use than the Windows 2000 that was on there.

Firefox does load slower than IE did, but more than a few seconds. However, once up it is more than fast enough and the benefits of things like adblock make it more worthwhile.

OpenOffice also load slower than MS Works, which is what was on there. It is fast enough, though.

By "fast enough" I mean it doesn't elicit complaints about speed and no excessive swapping to disk. In most cases, faster than Win2000 w/Works on the same machine. K3B, Amarok and the overall interface get compliments on their responsiveness and feature set. The latest Kopete supports MSN webcams, and that was the last "feature request".

The machine is used for browsing, homework, playing music, IM and burning CDs. The number one compliment by my neighbor was "I'm not going to get viruses, spyware and trojans? I don't need to run anti-virus software? And it can play my MP3s and read my Word docs? Excellent!"

Yes, I took the time to set the local firewall, modify the KDE menus to remove 90% of the stuff they'll never, ever use and install a decent set of extensions to Firefox. I even tweaked Firefox on what domains to never accept cookies from.

As far as "how KDE runs out of the box" -- that isn't KDE's issue. It is an issue with the distribution packagers. The problem stems from trying to please all of the people all of the time.

Windows and Mac run nice "out of the box" because they contain no end-user software other than a few basics. Neither come with an image processing program worth a damn. No sound or video editor, either. You buy that stuff afterward. Less options up front means less configuration.

Hell, XP is only decent "out of the box" if you didn't get that box from a major manufacturer. Dell, HP & Gateway throw so much extra bullshit on there it takes 30 minutes to clean everything up before it is usable.

  -Charles

Re:Lets slow down KDE Even more!

[10Ghz]

And you are hitting your HD how much with this config?

Hitting the HD would increase the amount of cached/buffered RAM. But that wasn't what I was measuring. I was measuring the amount of RAM the apps themselves consume. Cached/buffered RAM is basically free RAM. Of course, if I loaded some huge file to Kate for example, the RAM-consumption would go up. But that's hardly KDE's fault, now is it?

So are you saying that running KPDF should take up over 200 megs of memory if I need it running?

What makes you think that? KPDF itself takes few megs of RAM. KDE itself might consume some RAM, but I hardly consider the amount it consumes to be a lot. With the two apps I use the most (Konqueror and Kontact), it consumes under 150 megs of RAM (that's including whole KDE, the apps, and the related services). And considering that 512 megs is the minimium amount of RAM shipped these days, that's more than reasonable. 256 megs is really, really low end, with 128 megs being unheard of. 128 would be a bit too little for comfortable use, but 256MB would be perfectly doable, with 512MB being more than enough.

Also, asking why I am not runing 3.1 or 7.1 is asking why did you start using the 2.6 Kernal when 1.3 was running fine? Oh, you mean I can run final cut on a 68030?

So you wanted the advanced features of the newer GUI's? Guess what? Those advanced features need RAM and CPU-horsepower! TANSTAAFL.

Re:Lets slow down KDE Even more!

[protomala]

I'm running 2 konqueror instances konqueror with 4 tabs each, kmail with some image attached email, konqueror, kinternet (suse dialer), konsole, knetmonApplet and xmms-kde on kicker, aMule, kget, kgpg, kwallet and amarok playing. 339 megs used. I still think it's a bit too much, but hey, memory those days is so cheap I even got more 256 (meaning a total of 512) 3 months ago. My PC is a built non-mark Duron 1.6Ghz and runs KDE 3.5 very well. Could it be faster? It will be faster with KDE4 I'm sure, because each new release of KDE just gets faster. I belive we should, yes, complain and ask developers to lower memory usage, but at same time congrat them because of their already in progress work on this matter.

Re:Lets slow down KDE Even more!

[monkaru]

I don't think memory use is much of an issue these days. You can buy a gig of RAM for peanuts so there is no reason not to have your box loaded with as much memory as it will take. All modern operating systems just love the RAM, Linux included. But, adding a new abstraction layer will effect performance, there is no way around that. However, if it's easy to turn off it's not that big a deal and, if you want blazing speed on old hardware, fluxbox is hard to beat. What it will do is make life harder for administrators because the end users love their eye candy and woe betides him who stands between them and the latest toy. That means users with 16 widgets, mostly written by amatures, crapping up their system and you know who they'll phoning to fix their 'puter. Great.

Re:Lets slow down KDE Even more!

[Dasher42]

Don't just go through a top display and decide KDE is hogging memory. If you use a properly configured KDE desktop you'll notice that despite the big numbers, everything seems to be running smooth. That's because the reality is that KDE is sharing memory very effectively, and people who just look at top without investigating further have been going off half-cocked about KDE for years.

Get the real story on this here and here, because KDE's code reuse is awesome, not bloated.

Re:Lets slow down KDE Even more!

[Karma Farmer]

Each release has been faster than before with 3.5 being noticably faster than 3.4.1.

Every time someone posts the "mozilla is great if you use the nightly builds" troll, Jesus rips the wings off an Angel.

Seriously -- stupid assholes cut-and-paste this stupid troll in every story, about every non-Microsoft project in existence. This isn't interesting or insightful or informative. It's redundant, stupid, misleading, and usually just plain wrong.

Re:Lets slow down KDE Even more!

[chill]

KDE 3.5 is a full release, and has nothing to do with nightlies or any other developer build. Notice the work "release" in my original post? That's the clue I wasn't talking about developer builds, nightlies, SVN/CVS builds or anything other than the official, stable packages.

Re:Lets slow down KDE Even more!

[Just Some Guy]

In short, you've demonstrated KDE's architecture quite well. All its applications are made of bits and pieces of system libraries and other applications. That means it takes a relatively large amount of resources to load the first program you specifically want to use, because it brings along tens or hundreds of other components.

However, the next program you load might only require a handful of components that over what the first program loaded. As you load more programs, the odds of each applications dependencies already being loaded by something previous asymptotically approach 100%.

I think that really explains the difference between loving and hating KDE. If you're a one-app-at-a-time user, then it will seem tremendously bloated, since each app is overwhelmed in size by its dependencies. If you use many apps at a time, though, you'll probably love it since the marginal additional resources required to launch a new program are nearly zero.

Re:Lets slow down KDE Even more!

[Anonymous Coward]

Each release has been faster than before with 3.5 being noticably faster than 3.4.1.

In my experience, 3.0 was much slower than 2.x and 2.0 was much slower than 1.x.

KDE has been slowing down with each major revision. They should go back to the 1.x design, as it was the cleanest, fastest version of KDE ever. It ran on a Pentium 133 with 128MB of RAM extremely quickly, and just plain looked better.

Re:Lets slow down KDE Even more!

[theAtomicFireball]

Hell, XP is only decent "out of the box" if you didn't get that box from a major manufacturer. Dell, HP & Gateway throw so much extra bullshit on there it takes 30 minutes to clean everything up before it is usable.

You know how to clean up Windows XP from Dell in only 30 minutes? Damn, you're good. The fastest I've yet been able to do it is how long a clean install of XP takes.

Memory Usage

[Arctic Fox]

Hopefully, they'll find some way to knock down the memory usage. A couple of widgets (weather, stocks, iCal) were killing my 1Gb Powerbook.

I switched to the ex-Konfabulator, Yahoo! Widgets and now my PB doesn't seem to thrash as much. That, and I've added a number of additional widgets.

Re:Memory Usage

[apflwr]

Hopefully, they'll find some way to knock down the memory usage. A couple of widgets (weather, stocks, iCal) were killing my 1Gb Powerbook.

You are aware that you can close individual widgets, right?

Re:Memory Usage

[Arctic Fox]

Of course.

But 150+ Mb for a weather widget? The Mac widgets were pigs. Though, I don't think it was the individual widget's fault. I think Dashboard was funky.

Like I said, I've since turned of Dashboard and am using the Yahoo Widgets, with far less trouble.

Re:Memory Usage

[Have Blue]

They already did. OS X 10.4.0 had a large memory leak in its XML HTTP fetch implementation. This was corrected in a patch some time ago.

Re:Memory Usage

[brainnolo]

In which way it was killing your system? It was really slower or you just used top or ps to see memory usage? Widgets use a shared memory so they'll all show up as sucking up a lot of memory but they'll actually all be using the same chunk of it.

Re:Memory Usage

[Nugget]

I think perhaps you were misreading the memory usage. Remember that each widget loads its own copy of the (rather large) shared webkit library which makes its apparent memory usage much larger than it is actually is. The Weather dashboard widget really only uses about 12MB of RAM and also the 150MB webkit which is shared with any other webkit-enabled application you have loaded.

If you're running Safari, or multiple widgets, then they're all sharing that same 150MB.

Re:Memory Usage

[theAtomicFireball]

I can't believe I'm posting hits, because I'm usually playing the drooling Mac fan-boy part in this here Slashdot play we're all in, but...

Do you realize how inefficient even a 12 meg memory footprint for something that pulls down like 20 bytes of weather data from a URL and then displays that data along with an image to indicate whether it's sunny, raining, or snowing? Widgets are a great idea, but they ARE memory hogs and take far more processor cycles than they should to do their job. They are not the best example of software engineering to ever come out of Cupertino by any stretch of the imagination.

Re:Memory Usage

[Anonymous Coward]

But 150+ Mb for a weather widget?

I call Bullshit. You just don't know how to read memory usage.

Re:Memory Usage

[elbobo]

This has been fixed. So long as you're running the latest patch level, that problem will be gone.

I have a 1GHz Powerbook with 768MB RAM, and I was initially having trouble running more than one or two widgets -- they were slowing my system down something awful. But with the latest Tiger patch level, I have five widgets running all the time, and the system is exceptionally snappy.

I was initially going to buy more memory to compensate, but the bug fixes that they rolled out saved me money and hassle :)

Re:Memory Usage

[thatguywhoiam]

Do you realize how inefficient even a 12 meg memory footprint for something that pulls down like 20 bytes of weather data from a URL and then displays that data along with an image to indicate whether it's sunny, raining, or snowing? Widgets are a great idea, but they ARE memory hogs and take far more processor cycles than they should to do their job. They are not the best example of software engineering to ever come out of Cupertino by any stretch of the imagination.

I see... so, tell me: when did you give up your mouse and switch to command-line chorded data entry? On your monochrome display no less?

Re:Memory Usage

[kesuki]

150MB webkit
Good gravy but is that bloated... they could be using gecko's rendering engine @ 15 MB of footprint.

Ram is cheap ($239 for 2GB (paired 1GB modules) @ DDR 400mhz 2-2-2-5 timings), but Not That Cheap....

Re:Memory Usage

[theAtomicFireball]

I see... so, tell me: when did you give up your mouse and switch to command-line chorded data entry? On your monochrome display no less?

Are you comments always so penetrating and insightful? Do you honestly think that only people who are willing to give up a technology should be able to comment on weaknesses, inefficiencies, or bugs in that technology?

I did not say that the widget was not useful, nor even that I do not use them, I merely commented that they take up more memory and more processor cycles to do their job than they reasonably should. I could re-write the weather widget as a native application and it would use a few hundred kilobytes of memory, max. The "dashboard" concept should add some overhead, but not this much - remember that that 12 megs is in addition to the added overhead in the Dock for hosting and maintaining the widget pane - all the memory for that, and the rendering engine and all the other good stuff is elsewhere. That 12 megs is just for executing a small script and a maintaining small bit of rendered HTML. It's inefficient; it can and should be improved.

Re:Memory Usage

[thatguywhoiam]

Are you comments always so penetrating and insightful? Do you honestly think that only people who are willing to give up a technology should be able to comment on weaknesses, inefficiencies, or bugs in that technology?

It's ok - don't take me the wrong way. My post probably sounded a lot snarkier than I meant it to.

My point was simply this: after constructing a GUI/mouse interface, and colour displays with 3D hardware acceleration, aural feedback, and all the other things we do to make computers easier to use and more accessible... it struck me as kind of funny that this is where you draw your line in the sand. Widgets? So the dozens of megs of RAM you use to manage windows is ok but hitting another 12 megs for 'executing a small script' is now over the line? So logically, at what point do you do away with icons because they are less efficient than a simple text label, for instance? ...That's all I meant. I pretty much agree with you insofar that widgets are fairly inefficient for conveying the information they typically present, but really, at what point to you say its reasonable or unreasonable? I raise the question. Its just very arbitrary. Thanks for the reply.

Huh?

[bombshelter13]

They're comparing a 'layer to display widgets on' to Adobe Photoshop? Something really doesn't seem right here.

I'm so glad they're putting so much work into shaving off the bloat in KDE4.

Re:Huh?

[jZnat]

Yeah; GNOME 2.12 is already far ahead at the "shaving off bloat" to the point where Linus said "fuck it" and switched to KDE. As long as the bloat is optional and configurable, everyone can be happy.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah but thats because most people define bloat as "having any one feature i personally dont have a use for"

Re:Huh?

[JulesLt]

I think it's called a metaphor. As in explaining that the widgets are presented on a layer 'over' the desktop. Maybe a metaphor that didn't compare one piece of software to another might be better 'it's like a transparency sheet'.

Personally, I'd prefer them 'on' the desktop and to bring them up via Expose, but that's me.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

where Linus said "fuck it" and switched to KDE.

Actually, Linus was never a Gnome user. He always used KDE.

Re:Huh?

[CarpetShark]

No, they compared a layer itself to a layer in photoshop. Big difference. As for "bloat": people accused desktops of being bloated without knowing what they talking about. Often, they're misreading how memory is used in apps, and when they're not, they're probably misunderstanding how systems like KDE share features. The whole point of a desktop environment is to create a platform that has lots of useful code built in, so that apps can be quickly developed from common widgets etc., without reinventing the wheel, and without wasting memory that could have been shared. In systems like KDE, the "bloat" is a feature. But, in GNOME, code-sharing is much less common due to it's lack of object-orientation. It really is bloated and slow, even with fewer features.

Re:Huh?

[Overly Critical Guy]

So, someone gave an opinion about KDE, and you responded by:

1.) Sniping at GNOME.
2.) Referencing what Linus Torvalds thinks for some reason, as if it has anything to do with anything (he also thinks Slashdot is a place where people who "don't know what they're talking about get together and have a public wanking session." This is a logical fallacy called appeal to authority.

I will never understand the emotional anti-GNOME hatred on Slashdot. To me, KDE never met a sidebar/button/dialog it didn't like. I like streamlined interfaces.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as the bloat is optional and configurable, everyone can be happy.

Everyone, that is, except the 98% of people who don't give a shit about "optional and configurable", never go spelunking through the 4000 preference windows that some applications have (hi KDE!), and don't really care if an app takes 5 MB or 30 MB as long as they can figure out how to use it.

If making "bloat configurable" really made "everyone happy", then fvwm would have taken the world by storm 10 years ago, and Apple would be out of business.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

[...] (he also thinks Slashdot is a place where people who "don't know what they're talking about get together and have a public wanking session." This is a logical fallacy called appeal to authority.

Are you sure? Have you read Slashdot?

Re:Huh?

[koko775]

Warning: long rant. I may be modded down for bitching about KDE, but these are my honest grievances. Disclaimer: I believe that for everyone but true power users, people use the GUI given to them. This is reflected in the following post. Honestly, as a desktop user, I don't give a damn about software bloat, so long as it doesn't eat up 100% of both hard drive and CPU. Computers aren't _that_ slow, and space isn't _that_ scarce. What I want is an easy, consistent interface, which Gnome gives me. I installed KDE on what used to be a gui-less ubuntu install yesterday -- with an open mind to try it again, after reading digg and slashdot articles on both sides -- and when I did, found that the programs menu _still_ made no sense. How about Gnome (on Ubuntu)? Applications, check. System, check. I know where I want to go to fiddle with the computer (so I can say to whoever is using it: "remember to stay away from *this* menu, nothing you need is there"), and I know where I want to go to actually do things (OOo, gaim, FF, etc). Gnome, for whatever reason, makes the distinction much more clear to me.

KDE's code is great, I'm sure, but again, bloat or non-bloat is a non-issue. Its interface organization is, to me, weak. I'm sure that spending a few dedicated days (read: a few weeks in real time) would be enough to customize it myself to the point it's not only usable, but comfortable. But if it's too much of a pain in the ass in the first place, why bother? It's organized in such a way that finding what I want to, fast, is more work than I want to put in...

For example, and I brought this up above, if I want to perform computer maintenance, do I go to System? Do I go to Utilities? Settings? Control Center? For that matter, why include the system: KIOSlave? Konqueror crashed for trying to play sound and failing, and destroyed my settings windows, web pages, and open folders. Integration it its best and worst. Great integration, but even crashes are integrated.

This brings me to the next point: the "tighter" everything is -- the more interdependent it is -- the less it takes to crap it up. Sure, the modularity in KDE makes rearranging stuff a lot easier than in Gnome, just like Legos are more customizable than bricks, too, but hardly any sturdier.

Don't get me wrong -- I like the KIOSlaves idea, it's really a brilliant idea. But settings:/ or such things don't seem to me to serve a distinct purpose. Why make settings look like files when you're probably never going to be dragging stuff in or copying it out? If it's just an interface for settings, how necessary is it to make it an KIOSlave?

Gnome doesn't reuse code as well as KDE does, perhaps. Maybe Gnome has more software bloat. But having tried XFCE and a few other GUIs, KDE is by far the most organizationally bloated system I have EVER used, and thus, has the lowest initial usability, in my opinion.

KDE has a lot of good ideas, but is doomed to be used only by power users until it presents those in a way that *doesn't* confuse everyone but hardworking people who dedicate themselves to learning the ins and outs of the interfaces. People have *work* to do. I'd bet this is the same reason pico/nano and notepad are so successful -- they work simple and they work fast, even though complex things are occasionally a pain in the ass. Same goes for browsers (especially FF), IM clients (unobtrusive except for the messages themselves), and media players (media player classic as opposed to WMP). Fast. Simple. Friendly. For this desktop user, KDE is anything but.

Re:Huh?

[agent_no.82]

I'd just like to make a note that "System Settings" is available directly from the menu in Kubuntu, and does not open into Konqueror. As for customizing, try right-clicking anything or selecting from the app's settings menu, "Configure ". I personally can't stand Gnome, but to each his own.

Re:Huh?

[CarpetShark]

I installed KDE on what used to be a gui-less ubuntu install yesterday -- with an open mind to try it again

Good job. That's commendable, really. Too many people are afraid to try new ideas. I myself was a GNOME user once upon a time, and wouldn't even consider KDE after trying it when I first heard of it. I'm glad I finally changed my mind and gave it a proper shot.

and when I did, found that the programs menu _still_ made no sense.

That's true. The menu system is a little confusing, regarding the overlap of system, system menu, settings, and utilities. But, system menu and settings can be turned off if you don't like them. Utilities, I agree, has completely the wrong content. Most of the stuff in there are small office applets. But, really, is "accessories" any better? Most people work it out, given a bit of time.

Honestly, does anyone really use menus for day-to-day stuff anyway? I find things once, and make shortcuts on my panel for them. KDE does have very innovative ways of getting to programs as well as the traditional menu way -- some much more advanced and usable than anything in GNOME right now.

Anyway, you do have a point there. KDE 4 will be working on that a lot, I hear. In the mean time, I don't think it's a show-stopper, in all honesty.

so I can say to whoever is using it: "remember to stay away from *this* menu, nothing you need is there

If an administrator wants to lock down the system so that inexperienced users don't get lost or get into trouble, they can do that easily, with menu editors, or in a final way, with KDE's kiosk tools. It's quite a rare case for one inexperienced user to tell another inexperienced user what (s)he should or shouldn't be doing, though. Without meaning to be harsh, I do want to gently bring up a notion here, as for consideration. Frankly, it reminds me of the blind leading the blind.

KDE's code is great, I'm sure, but again, bloat or non-bloat is a non-issue. Its interface organization is, to me, weak. I'm sure that spending a few dedicated days (read: a few weeks in real time) would be enough to customize it myself to the point it's not only usable, but comfortable. But if it's too much of a pain in the ass in the first place, why bother? It's organized in such a way that finding what I want to, fast, is more work than I want to put in...

Well, the point is that the code is useful, to actual users. The design actually shows, in powerful and labour-saving ways, if you spend a little time getting to know what KDE can actually do for you. You don't realise how powerful KDE is, precisely because it's mostly well designed, and all of the power is subtly hidden away until you need it. It looks, for the most part, like GNOME or any other desktop, albeit with some small differences here and there. But, when you actually use it for daily work, you'll discover things which make life easier, and make you wonder how you ever did without them. I say discover things, not because they're hard to find, but because they're where you need them, when you need them. You discover the first one purely by accident, and then you think, "oh, that was cool". And then, later, you might think, "oh, it would be cool if it did this.." and you try it, and, much to your surprise, it works. This is a GOOD way of learning a user interface. It's discovery learning, which is one of the most powerful ways for people to learn. It's hidden power, which doesn't interfere, but which users can discover at their own pace, if and when they need it. If not, it just looks like a basic desktop.

The difference is, any time I try something that would save me trouble in GNOME, like dragging a colour onto another colour to copy it, or uploading a file from a remote computer to a remote computer, what happens is absolutely nothing, and I have to do it the old, illogical way.

KDE still has a f

Re:Huh?

[rseuhs]

> If making "bloat configurable" really made "everyone happy", ... then Microsoft Office would be market leader.

Re:Huh?

[borgheron]

Dear A. Coward,

Besides, whether GNOME has a "hope of ever being" "like OS X" has little to do with what language it's based on. Even if it was, you said that being "based on C++" is what's damning it -- and it's not based on C++, so that argument is empty.

Ohhh yeah, that's right!! I'm giving it way too much credit... I forgot it's C using structures right? So GNOME isn't really OO at all. That's advanced technology for ya!!

I haven't found any way to theme GNUstep to make it look anything like a Mac. What theme are you using to put the menubar across the top of the screen? What theme uses my GPU to draw widgets and composite windows? What theme includes the Finder and the Dock and Expose?

After you've demonstrated that you have no clue what a theme is, I wonder if you know anything at all. Also, you seem to not realize that GNUstep comes with GWorkspace which is a fileview, similar to the finder. Also there is a theme bundle which lets you have a menu on the top. It's called WildMenus. GNUstep apps dock using the WindowMaker dock, and as for Expose... well.. it's bloody useless so we didn't implement it. I have a Mac (I am, in fact, a Mac developer) and I find Expose to be the most useless thing I've ever seen.

After what you've demonstrated you know about GNOME, I wonder if you even know what Dashboard widgets *are*.

I do, they are javascript.. mainly... which I suppose means it shouldn't suprise me too much that KDE and GNOME are (once again) implementing a copycat technology based on ideas created by another company instead of actually coming up with something themselves. Not that any other open source project is any different.

GJC

Re:Huh?

[biglig2]

Now, I have to call you on that. The exact quote is:

"I don't tend to bother about slashdot, because quite frankly, the whole _point_ of slashdot is to have this big public wanking session with people getting together and making their own "insightful" comment on any random topic, whether they know anything about it or not."

So you see, Linus accepts that some of us might know what we're talking about, although there's no way to tell who.

Though the wanking in public thing, he did say that, yes.

I leave you with a horrific image that comes later in the same e-mail:

"I was really hoping this particular wanking session wouldn't overflow into Linux-kernel."

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Things don't get to call themselves advanced because of the language they were written in!

Marketers must love you.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ohhh yeah, that's right!! I'm giving it way too much credit... I forgot it's C using structures right? So GNOME isn't really OO at all. That's advanced technology for ya!!

At one level, it's C. So is Mac OS X, and probably every other operating system. All of the interesting work being done in GNOME in the past couple years has been in Python and C#.

This doesn't change the fact that you were trying to put down GNOME by saying that it's "based on C++". Uh, no, you lose.

After you've demonstrated that you have no clue what a theme is ...

I'm trying to understand how a theme could make GNUstep look like a Mac, because for any definition of "theme" I've ever heard, it can't. Just because you can come up with a theme with bitmaps vaguely similar to Aqua, doesn't mean the result will look like Aqua. Features like full-screen double-buffering aren't the sort of thing you can put in a theme, and they're an integral part of the Mac.

as for Expose... well.. it's bloody useless so we didn't implement it. I have a Mac (I am, in fact, a Mac developer) and I find Expose to be the most useless thing I've ever seen.

Among all the Mac users I've ever met, it's considered one of the nicest things about the Mac these days. You can stick your fingers in your ears, but that doesn't make it any more true.

Deny it if you like, but the real reason GNUstep hasn't done it is because implementing Expose on X is really hard. You basically have to hack up the X server.

I do, they are javascript.. mainly... which I suppose means it shouldn't suprise me too much that KDE and GNOME are (once again) implementing a copycat technology based on ideas created by another company instead of actually coming up with something themselves. Not that any other open source project is any different.

The only thing they're doing is copying the file format -- KDE and GNOME (and other systems) have had Dashboard-like features years before Mac OS X did. Heck, Mac System 1 had desk accessories.

If you want to diss open source projects for copying Apple's nice features, you'll look pretty biased unless you also diss Apple for copying the nice features from open-source projects. Where would Mac OS X be without a web browser, web server, email client, email server, file sharing, printing, 3d graphics, or a kernel?

GNOME and Mac OS are both nice systems, and both are getting better all the time, largely by borrowing ideas from each other. That's how progress works. To think that either one simply can't do something the other does, because it's written in C++ (when it's not, even!) is just absurd.

Re:Huh?

[DCMonkey]

A line like that is usual followed by an "Oh, wait..."

Re:Huh?

[jZnat]

I'm not anti-GNOME, but I'm pro-KDE. GNOME has potential, but they're undergoing some unfavourable transitions right now.

Exciting

[BrenBren]

I think this is a great idea. Right off the bat, there will be lots of Widgets available.

The Apple community will also benefit, because there are probably a lot of people in the Linux community that will write new Widgets that haven't been thought of (or thought necessary) by the Apple programming community.

I, for one, welcome our new Widget overlords.

Re:Exciting

[mblase]

I think this is a great idea. Right off the bat, there will be lots of Widgets available.

No, there won't. The headline is misleading. Read carefully:

...the upcoming KDE 4 will be able to run and display Dashboard widgets much in the same way that Mac OS X 10.4 can.... I'm planning to add full OSX Dashboard compatibility layer for Plasma....Basically, this means that a layer (similar in some ways to layers in Adobe Photoshop) in the KDE desktop could function the same way that Dashboard does in Mac OS X.

Furthermore, keep in mind that a not insignificant number of OS X widgets interact specifically with OS X apps like iTunes. Obviously, only internet-based widgets (like Google lookups) could be cross-platform.

Re:Exciting

[superpulpsicle]

I am really scratching my head on all these posts. Are they implying more or a Mac-to-linux wine emulation type deal? Or are they implying that one day a linux installation will have the option of a Gnome/KDE/Mac interface?

Re:Exciting

[saddino]

It's success will probably hinge on its execution. Many people dislike Dashboard widgets existing in a seperate desktop layer than the rest of the OS. The KDE implementation would be wise to allow a desktop-centric Dashboard widget manager like Amnesty for OS X.

Re:Exciting

[bonzoesc]

Mac widgets are basically tiny HTML/Javascript applications, with the option of using native code and certain JS functions to access system stuff normal web pages shouldn't.

They're rendered and run by WebCore (derived from KHTML), so adding them to KDE is simply getting KHTML to support transparent windows and the extra JS stuff. Getting them to run the widgets with native code parts probably won't ever be a priority.

Re:Exciting

[Hatta]

Can anyone explain to this fluxbox user what a dashboard widget is. I gather it's something like a slit (or dock) applet, but we've had those for years. What's special about the dashboard?

Re:Exciting

[Kesh]

The slick bit is that the widgets are always running, but hidden. A single keypress (or mouse in the corner of the screen, or mouse key, etc>) causes all your running widgets to appear on the screen & update their contents. Another keypress/click and they go away.

The other appeal is that they're mostly just HTML + JavaScript. Since they're on a Mac they can also take advantage of AppleScript and some features of Cocoa, but most of them are just little webpages with a pretty front-end that run in the background on your machine.

Re:Exciting

[penguin-collective]

No, there won't. The headline is misleading. Read carefully:

Read carefully yourself: the statement simply isn't definitive either way. The author will attempt to offer compatibility, but it may not be possible (presumably either for technical or legal reasons).

But even if full compatibility isn't possible, by keeping the systems very similar, many widgets should port very easily.

Re:Exciting

[rampant mac]

"[...] there are probably a lot of people in the Linux community that will write new Widgets that haven't been thought of (or thought necessary)"

I can't wait to download the 324 widgets that will allow me to control XMMS, each just a little bit different from the last.

Re:Exciting

[BrenBren]

I can't wait to download the 324 widgets that will allow me to control XMMS, each just a little bit different from the last.

I'm sure. I don't have XMMS on my iBook, so I can't say that I've ever wasted my time with them. My point was simply that with a wider base, there will be people that want to have a Widget do something, but the Widget has not (yet) been written. Those people would (theoretically) write that Widget and make it available to everyone else, so that people like me can try them. (I'm not much of a programmer.)

Re:Exciting

[Hatta]

The slick bit is that the widgets are always running, but hidden. A single keypress (or mouse in the corner of the screen, or mouse key, etc>) causes all your running widgets to appear on the screen & update their contents. Another keypress/click and they go away.

Same with slit apps. Just hide the slit and they pop up when you mouse over the edge of the screen. Or set a hotkey to expose the slit. Big deal.

The other appeal is that they're mostly just HTML + JavaScript. Since they're on a Mac they can also take advantage of AppleScript and some features of Cocoa, but most of them are just little webpages with a pretty front-end that run in the background on your machine.

So instead of running a small C program, I have to run an HTML interpreter just to display the desktop? And since HTML can be written by any idiot, it will be. I really don't see what I'm missing.

Pulling numbers right out your arse?

[Anonymous Coward]

None of the UNIX people I know use MacOSX. And I personally think the UI is awful.

Re:Pulling numbers right out your arse?

[hahafaha]

I know of plenty of people like that. You might have misinterpreted what I said. I did not mean that most people that like UNIX, use Apple because of its GUI. I said that most people that use UNIX and use Apple, do so because of the GUI.

Why do you think the UI is awful?

Re:Pulling numbers right out your arse?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I misunderstood. Sorry.

Why do you think the UI is awful?

It just feels clumsy. For example I didn't find out how to enable "focus follows mouse" and turn of "active window in front".

Re:Pulling numbers right out your arse?

[Mike Savior]

Every UI that is new to a person requires a bit of patience and education.. sure, the options might not be readily available to you (or available at all, in a more unfortunate case) but isn't it a little wise to try and understand not every OS runs -exactly- the same? I mean, look at all the windows converts going to OS X for the first time and having to get used to two effective taskbars to work. Some may find it inefficient and go back, which is unfortunate. Those that are more sensible will learn to get around it on their own or make the best of it.

I mean, the way you describe how window focusing works for you? Personally doesn't work out for me. But if I was by some miracle using your computer, I'd get used to it, griping about it aside.

Re:Pulling numbers right out your arse?

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried it for some months, when my Debian installation broke, and of course I got used to it, but I still feel much more comfortable with KDE or Windowmaker, that's why I switched back. I always work with multiple windows at the same time and having the active window going in front of smaller non-active windows whose content I need to have a look at is one of a few showstoppers. It just doesn't work out for me.

Re:Pulling numbers right out your arse?

[JoeCommodore]

Go to a Linux gathering (LinuxWorld, etc.) count the number of people using Intel/AMD laptops with Linux vs. iBooks and Powerbooks. I am sure for portable connection (untill we get some decent wireless drivers) OSX seem to rule mobile computing.

Re:Pulling numbers right out your arse?

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm, I wouldn't be so sure about that...
(Posted from a PowerBook running Linux)

Oh goody

[melonman]

Another GUI layer? What is the minimum RAM requirement for running Open Office with this lovely system going to be? Windows is rapidly starting to look like the low-bloat OS...

crap

[Billly Gates]

I was writing notes down and being ready to write my own widget dashboard for kde. Someone beat me to it.

I know about gdesklets but it seems a little unstable at the moment.

Re:crap

[bombshelter13]

Why not get the code from these guys, read it through, and code in anything you'd thought of that they've missed? If you've been studying this for a while you should probably be able to make yourself into a useful contributer to their project.

Re:crap

[10Ghz]

There already is a "widget dashboard" for KDE, has been for a long time. It's called SuperKaramba.

Re:crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything 'G' seems unstable at the moment :-)

Am I the only one

[Keruo]

who thinks this is rather bad idea?
Why do we need to bind the browser this deep to the GUI?
Haven't we learned anything about bad design from microsoft and IE5?
I mean something like this.

Re:Am I the only one

[AntiOrganic]

Can you explain to me, from an accomplished software engineer's perspective, what's so bad about modular components that can be reused in multiple applications?

The problem with Internet Explorer was never that it was coupled too deeply into the file manager and it was therefore buggy and insecure, and only someone with no clue whatsoever would tell you that. Internet Explorer is problematic because it has multiple zones with different security settings, and as history has shown, it's very, very easy to trick Internet Explorer into thinking that a script executing from the Internet zone is actually in the Local Computer zone, and thereby able to overwrite files, instantiate arbitrary ActiveX/COM components, and do all manners of naughty things that it shouldn't be able to.

Re:Am I the only one

[AndroidCat]

But finally Linux users will be able to have all the functionality of Microsoft Bob! :)

Re:Am I the only one

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody's forcing you to use KDE. Or even to use KDE with KHTML installed.

Re:Am I the only one

[2nd Post!]

Yes, we learned that the OS should not attempt to read the user's mind. Apple fixed that problem by not installing software without the user's consent.

Re:Am I the only one

[Keruo]

I'd rather quote.. these widgets have almost the same braindead design as ActiveX/COM.
I don't want any invisible modular components on my desktop, that randomly install stuff on my computer(even if it's only the limited widget dir) or throw pictures at me, but hey, if Bonzi Buddy is your friend, go ahead.

Re:Am I the only one

[NutscrapeSucks]

. Internet Explorer is problematic because it has multiple zones with different security settings,

That's also true of Apple Safari & WebKit. IE has a special "no sandbox" zone for ActiveDesktop widgets, and Apple has a special "no sandbox" zone for Dashboard widgets.

Now, it could be impossible to "trick" Safari into the wrong zone, so this won't be a problem. But the overall architecture is nearly identical.

Re:Am I the only one

[FaramirTook]

You're not "binding" the browser in. You're using KHTML to render HTML/CSS/JavaScript-based widgets in a seperate layer. You don't need to use it or enable it. One could use Gecko to accomplish the same feat, but it being KDE and Apple using KHTML in thier WebKit, which drives Dashboard, the KDE devs used the KHTML rendering engine. Konquerer has no part here, if I understand correctly.

Re:Am I the only one

[tawhaki]

It is actually quite difficult to use KDE without KHTML being installed. Lots of things depend on it. I believe you wouldn't even be able to load KDE without KHTML.

Re:Am I the only one

[monkaru]

Konquerer will have everything to do with unless the abstraction layer is running off the X server, much like Windows ActiveX components, which wouldn't make any sense. KHTML has to be rendered by a browser because that's how the scripts will be parsed. The desktop is just a Konquerer shell anyway. It's going to make Konquerer even more like Windows Explorer, which it is a lot already, with the browser making calls to the hardware abstraction layer. I see the makings of a security hole you could drive a small band of Mongols through.

Re:Am I the only one

[monkaru]

The biggest problem with it is the widgets are going to have to have elevated permissions in order to function. Maybe not Administrator rights but higher than the user in any case. So, I can write a Javascript, call it a widget and it will run from the desktop with elevated permissions. The malicious 13 year old in me sees considerable opportunity in that arrangement.

Re:Am I the only one

[FaramirTook]

I don't know all that much about KDE, but would I be correct in assuming that the panels with the K menu and such are a separate program? 'cause that's where I would run something like that, much like Dashboard that runs off of the Dock.

Re:Am I the only one

[monkaru]

The KDE desktop, the file browser and the Konqueror browser, itself, are shells runing on top of the Konqueror engine in exactly the same fashion as Windows Explorer and the IE browser are shells on top of the Explorer engine. It's a very economical way to do it and, because the engine starts at login, it gives the impression of being very speedy. All in all, a great idea. Where Windows falls down is the ActiveX components having elevated permissions and being able to make system calls from what is essentially a browser window. Until now, KDE has been immune to that and the permissions are very tight. But, the widgets will need elevated permissions to run and the Konqueror engine will be doing the parsing and rendering because it would be redundant to use a seperate engine. Now, the whole thing might turn out to be well behaved and malicious widgets won't be a problem but, short of sandboxing, there is no guarantee there won't be problems because there will be broswer objects running with elevated permissions and that is exploitable. Haven't we been here before?

Re:Am I the only one

[Uncle_Al]

> KHTML has to be rendered by a browser ...
> The desktop is just a Konquerer shell anyway.

Hmmm...A few points about KDE:

• Konqueror is just a shell to plug in KParts. One of those KParts is a khtml part, which makes Konqueror behave like a webbrowser. So to render a webpage you will not need Konqueror but khtml!
• The Desktop is a program called kdesktop. It is not Koqueror!

Why do I get the feeling you are not the KDE expert you seem to think you are?

Re:Am I the only one

[monkaru]

Those are the Koqueror runtime components, aren't they? What you see, file manager, desktop and browser are all shells.

Re:Am I the only one

[Matthias Wiesmann]

Widgets are not run by Safari. They are separate Unix processes. They just happen to share a library that handles HTML.

Re:Am I the only one

[Carthag]

How does it need elevated permissions? Dashboard widgets run with the same permissions as the user under whose account they are running (obviously).

Re:Am I the only one

[monkaru]

It depends on what the widget is going to call. A restricted user can't call hardware, for example, but a widget might have to. It won't be a seemless experience if the end user has to run to the administrator every time they install a widget. So, there will have to be some elevation or, at the very least, it will become very tempting. Anyway, you can cause all sorts of mischief without needing elevation. They are browser objects, after all. I'm sure we've all experienced stumbling onto a web page that has some crappy javascript or a botched applet that has locked the bowser, or frozen the desktop or even crashed the X server. A malicious or just badly written widget won't need Administrator rights to ruin your day.

Re:Am I the only one

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you're confused.

A kpart is an embeddable component. There are kparts for dealing with all manner of things. Such as if you wanted to edit text in your app, you might use the kate kpart. If you wanted to play music, you might use the kmplayer one.

Konqueror is a small program that makes use of kparts. That it uses the khtml one makes it useful as a web browser. Nothing "uses" Konqueror.

Re:Am I the only one

[NutscrapeSucks]

ActiveDesktop Widgets are not run by IE. They are seperate Windows processes. They just happen to share a library that handles HTML.

Re:Am I the only one

[Anonymous Coward]

Until now, KDE has been immune to that and the permissions are very tight. But, the widgets will need elevated permissions to run

Rubbish. Why would they?

Re:Am I the only one

[AntiOrganic]

If this is true, and that hasn't been shown to be the case yet (and I certainly doubt that be the case for the majority of widgets, which are basically just prettying up XML web service calls), what's the difference between running a widget which may be malicious and any other program full of untrusted code that runs natively instead of through a widget scripting engine? What makes a bunch of images and Javascript on the desktop any worse than a C++ Qt/KDE application that does the same thing?

Re:Am I the only one

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut the fuck up, for the love of god. You have no idea what you're talking about. You sound like you're 15 years old.

Re:Am I the only one

[Pollardito]

i've experienced a crashed IE taking down the explorer shell/taskbar as well as a crashed explorer window making IE unlaunchable (some sort of network timeout when exploring a mapped drive, and yes this was very repeatable). i would say that those are also issues with making a lower level system rely on a higher level app, it's another layer of risk that some people won't agree with.

Re:Am I the only one

[nikster]

Can you explain to me, from an accomplished software engineer's perspective, what's so bad about modular components that can be reused in multiple applications?

Yes. It's fairly obvious.

- The components are very old and therefore contain a lot of cruft
- They are not particularly suited to the task (how is browsing your desktop like browsing the internet?)

To cite a current and perfect example to prove both points: WMF contains executable code. This may have been a good idea - a long time ago. It's also totally unsuited to the task of browsing the internet.

Reusing code is generally a good idea, but like everything in programming, it really depends on the circumstances. To reuse old crufty code is often more trouble than it's worth. To reuse code that doesn't fit the application is also a bad idea.

IE is a good example of all of this: Trying to fuse things that should not be fused - maybe even for political reasons, like trying to extend the windows desktop into the internet - and then try to patch it up with lots of duct tape where it's bound to break (the completely failed attempt to provide security via different zones).

Title possibly misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

The article title makes it sound like the widgets that are available for Dashboard will be directly compatible with KDE 4 (just download and run), which I'm not sure is exactly true.

I just don't see the point

[monkaru]

The very first thing I do, whether an OS is Mac, *NIX or Windows is turn off all the eye candy that slows the box down. Yay, One more thing to disable.

Re:I just don't see the point

[Bralkein]

Well things in the style of the OSX dashboard widgets can be useful too. In this interview, Zack Rusin (the guy mentioned in the summary for this article) talks briefly about OSX-style eye-candy in KDE4, and he says that they want their interface to be useful as well as good-looking. If you still don't want the useful magic eye-candy thingies because you think they're too heavy on resources or annoying or whatever, then you'd probably be better off not using KDE anyway. You could just use XFCE or Fluxbox or something like that instead. You'd still be able to run apps from KDE or GNOME or whatever, but the DE would be more minimal.

Re:I just don't see the point

[monkaru]

Like Windows 2000 or XP, the KDE desktop is very light and nimble once you turn all the crap off. I want my OS to start basic and I choose what to turn on. It reminds me of the first time I installed Win 2k Pro and I was greeted with transition effects. Nothing says "professional" quite like sliding menus.

Re:I just don't see the point

[Anonymous Coward]

indeed,I'm exactly the same.

The first thing I do, is switch OFF all the Gary Glitter shiny spiny things.
that produce only unnecesary bloat. Then you have an OS, that's ready to use.

Dosen't matter if it's MAC OS X, windows or Linux either. that's the first thing I do.
Switch off all the crap that slows the os down, then you're ready to go!

Re:I just don't see the point

[Bralkein]

Yes, OK, sliding menus are actually a pet hate of mine, because they waste my time and don't do anything. It really pisses me off on OSX when things take a second longer to happen than they should because some stupid animation is playing. However, there are some eye-candy effects that I actually quite like.

If you really don't like unnecessary bells and whistles, but you're still dead set on using KDE, then it should still be OK though. When you start up KDE for the first time, it asks you a couple of questions about things. One of the questions is about eye-candy. There is a simple slider, and when you move it all the way to the left, all of the eye-candy that can be disabled is turned off. This means that it still easy to disable everything even when there are 500 fancy features... so more features (like, say, dashboard widgets) does not necessarily mean more work is needed to disable it all.

Re:I just don't see the point

[monkaru]

That's true and it's not that big a deal for my personal use but, if I'm deploying a Dist with that version of KDE to the cubical drones you know there will be no end of whinging if I turn off the latest toy from the Administrator account. They're still all bitchy from losing their precious Windows. If I go ahead and let them have it they are going to download every widget out there good, bad or indifferent and that means headaches for me. Now, if they want to make this functionality, if you can call it that, a seperate piece of software I can choose to install or not, that would be fine. But, geese, I really don't want those monkeys to lay hands on the Linux version of Bonzai Buddy by default.

Re:I just don't see the point

[Citizen Gold]

Not everyone needs to upgrade their hardware though...

Re:I just don't see the point

[Narishma]

That's what the kiosk tool is there for.

just for what it's worth

[I WILL KICK YOUR ASS]

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Will enable the pent up demand for Apple Switchers

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple users looking to exploit the availibility of more games that Linux provides may now consider switching.

Dashboard is fun

[asv108]

For a few days. You can load all types of little crazy applets, but after awhile I hardly ever used it. Its one of those OSX features that has a huge WOW factor, but doesn't change the way people work. Its great to see that someone is finally following through on Linux compatibility, but considering Gnome is the default desktop for nearly ever major distro, it will not effect most desktop Linux users.

On the topic of OSX, why would anyone want to write commercial software for the OSX market? If your product is successful, Apple will simply duplicate the functionality, include it in OSX, and act like they invented it.

Re:Dashboard is fun

[Anonymous Coward]

There are plenty of successful applications for OS X that haven't been eaten up by apple. stop your bitching. i thought competition was good. oh and i am an OS X developer.

Re:Dashboard is fun

[xwizbt]

Except I use it all the time. Every day in fact. I use it on my interactive whiteboard to teach my class. We start the day with the dashboard displayed, showing weather, iCal class events, the weather in Stockholm (or other areas of interest depending on our geography topic) and, until recently, a countdown to Christmas.

Then throughout the day I have instant access to a calculator, the dictionary or thesaurus; it's invaluable. Sure, it's fun, too, but it's got that functional edge to it as well, and being able to fling up the calculator and suchlike without having to trail through applications is great.

Re:Dashboard is fun

[ThaFooz]

On the topic of OSX, why would anyone want to write commercial software for the OSX market? If your product is successful, Apple will simply duplicate the functionality, include it in OSX, and act like they invented it.

As opposed to Microsoft's strong arm tactics, or the Open Source community releasing free clones at zero cost and about 80% of the quality? I don't see a difference. Besides, as far as selling to home users, wouldn't Mac users be a better target audience? By and large, they don't mind paying top dollar for the best software whereas Windows users tend to be uneducated/apathetic and/or VERY cost-concious and prone to piracy, and the Linux crowd frowns on intelectual property altogether.

Re:Dashboard is fun

[dangitman]

If your product is successful, Apple will simply duplicate the functionality, include it in OSX, and act like they invented it.

That's absolutely not true. there are many successful products thaqt Apple isn't duplicating. And you have probably based your myth about Apple claiming to invent things, and stealing things from third parties - on a very unreliable source. Care to show some evidence?

Re:Dashboard is fun

[GrahamCox]

You can load all types of little crazy applets, but after awhile I hardly ever used it

I must admit I found the same. It's annoyingly slow to get going the first time you invoke it too. All I use it for now is the calculator, and the older calculator app was much better.

On the topic of OSX, why would anyone want to write commercial software for the OSX market? If your product is successful, Apple will simply duplicate the functionality, include it in OSX, and act like they invented it.

I think that's a little unfair. There are thousands of apps that Apple would have no interest in duplicating, but on the other hand the key "bread-and-buitter" apps like Pages, Keynote, iTunes, etc - well, they pretty much have to have those to keep the platform viable so they're not going to leave their existence to chance. That still leaves a vast space of unexploited marketplace where OS X apps do very well indeed, and Apple will not interfere. If you as a developer decide to compete with iTunes then that's your lookout, but frankly there are plenty of other areas that you'd do better to look into, so that choice would be silly.

Hey

[zsadiq]

Look at it any way you want... it does not change the fact that this will make Linux even more viable as a desktop OS in the future to the common masses, as what they (the common masses) want is a pretty GUI and some form of familiarity.

What these new widgets will do, is make Linux look more familiar to OSX users, thereby increasing the overall Linux user base.

Re:Hey

[monkaru]

I don't think so. The basic KDE desktop enviroment is pretty comfortable and easy to use anyway. The biggest problem for Linux is hardware compatibility and management. Apple gets around it by tying the OS directly to their hardware. A Mac user isn't going to care much how familiar the desktop is if their network card doesn't work and their monitor is stuck at 60 Hz VESA.

Stop compaining about bloat!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is great. KDE is a wonderful, powerful, flexible, full featured desktop enviornment. I currently run KDE 3.4.3 on a P3-450 laptop with 256mb of ram and it runs great.

Do I think that KDE 4 will also run great on that hardware? I'll be honest, I have my doubts, but that is fine. I have seen how the KDE team did a great job of optimising the KDE 3.x series. Every release got faster and smaller (in memory). Still, if I need to get more ram, I'll do that.

For people that want to run a computer with less ram, or can't afford any more: Don't run KDE! You can run blackbox, fluxbox, IceWM, twm, and many more!

GNU/Linux/*NIX/OSS/Free Software is all about choices, so PLEASE don't sit around complaining about bloat (or anything else, for that matter.) Make sugestions. Make contributions. Enjoy the amazing bevy of free software!!

Re:Stop compaining about bloat!

[Rich]

> Do I think that KDE 4 will also run great on that hardware?
> I'll be honest, I have my doubts

Actually, most code ported to Qt 4 gets smaller, so there's a good chance you'll be fine.

Rich.

Why a separate layer?

[jbellis]

That's just apple's workaround for "we think virtual desktops are too complicated." No need to impose that on KDE.

Re:Why a separate layer?

[Vaevictis666]

By layer, they're referring to a rendering layer.

I think the intention is to allow more dynamic desktop environments by putting multiple layers in your view. For example, Desktop Background -> water effect -> Widgets -> Desktop Icons -> App windows.

Re:Why a separate layer?

[Smurf]

That's just apple's workaround for "we think virtual desktops are too complicated." No need to impose that on KDE.

It seems you are confusing Dashboard with Exposé.

Re:Why a separate layer?

[10Ghz]

The widgets on KDE live on the "normal" desktop (just look at how SuperKaramba works today). The widgets on OS X live on "separate" desktop. So they will work differently, even though the widgets themselves will be the same.

Re:Why a separate layer?

[mnemonic_]

Actually, if you had ever used OS X for longer than a few hours, you'd realize that virtual desktops are unneccessary. The Dock and the Finder, along with Expose make window management a breeze. I do agree though that another virtual desktop would work well for KDE; KDE has always been about redundant functionality, shown by the presence of 3 audio players which do the same thing. Another virtual desktop would complete KDE's idiotic design, hopefully reducing its popularity further.

Re:Why a separate layer?

[otomo_1001]

No they don't. Dashboard is just an overlay of html.

To put widgets on the desktop:
In Terminal.app
defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES
log out and back in again OR kill the Dock, either way works.

hit F12 (or the key you use to activate dashboard)
click and hold the widget you prefer while still holding down
hit F12 again to move dashboard out of the way.

Voila! Dashboard widget on your regular desktop.

Re:Why a separate layer?

[thatguywhoiam]

That's just apple's workaround for "we think virtual desktops are too complicated." No need to impose that on KDE.

That's just your workaround for explaining Apple's more elegant solution to the problem...

Re:Why a separate layer?

[mildgift]

That's funny, because I use one of my virtual desktops to hold my widgets. The difference between Dashboard and what I do is that I get to use real programs, not memory-hogging html/javascript programs.

Re:Why a separate layer?

[toddestan]

That's just your workaround for explaining Apple's more elegant solution to the problem...

Just like Expose is Apple's more elegant solution for not having something as basic as a taskbar?

Re:Why a separate layer?

[thatguywhoiam]

Just like Expose is Apple's more elegant solution for not having something as basic as a taskbar?

They... have a whole other thing called the Dock for that. In fact, its the sort of thing that is completely impossible to not know about, if you've ever used OS X. Even for 30 seconds.

Re:Why a separate layer?

[10Ghz]

Only problem is that the Dock absolutely, positively sucks. It's a nice piece of eye-candy, and it's fun to swoosh over it with the pointer (for about 5 minutes that is), but it's terrible for actually managing your apps.

Re:Why a separate layer?

[Anonymous Coward]

When I switched from a linux workstation to an apple workstation at my place of employment, I quickly found "Desktop Manager" and configured 4 virtual desktops. After I got used to expose, I found that 3 desktops were usually empty.

Re:Why a separate layer?

[thatguywhoiam]

Only problem is that the Dock absolutely, positively sucks. It's a nice piece of eye-candy, and it's fun to swoosh over it with the pointer (for about 5 minutes that is), but it's terrible for actually managing your apps.

Hey, to each his own; works great for my production flow. So I guess it doesn't absolutely, positively suck. (I have the zooming turned off, myself.)

Re:Why a separate layer?

[aristotle-dude]

Virtual desktops were a workaround for a lack of multiple monitor support and a lack of proper window management in the past.

Re:Why a separate layer?

[aristotle-dude]

How are you supposed to differentiate from multiple picture editing windows based on a textual description such as image1 image2 image3? An MDI application would be even worse. You would have to switch to the application first and then cycle to the one you wanted.

I'm not sure there is a more useless feature

[Queuetue]

I'm not sure there is a more useless feature in all of OSX. Some widget thingy that does not fit in with the UI and I have to actually leave my working desktop in able to use? Why don't dashboard widgets a) get bounded by a normal window and b) follow the same window stacking rules as every other application?

Turning the dashboard off lest I accidentally trigger it is my first priority on OSX - even before installing quicksilver.

Re:I'm not sure there is a more useless feature

[Trillan]

I really like Dashboard, but I will admit to changing the activation key from the default to make it less easy to activate by mistake.

Re:I'm not sure there is a more useless feature

[brainnolo]

Probably because they would not be widgets anymore?

Re:I'm not sure there is a more useless feature

[znu]

Why don't dashboard widgets a) get bounded by a normal window and b) follow the same window stacking rules as every other application?

Because then you'd have to actually manage all of them like normal windows. One of Apple's major goals with OS X (vs. OS 9) has been to reduce the amount of manual window management users need to do.

Open Source Likes Apple?

[romiir]

If I recall correctly, the original code of the machintosh OS came from BSD 3... (Before they modifyed it extensively for commercial release) Now Opensource is taking the apple standard? This is interesting. Maby Microsoft will see this and include dashboard widgets for windows? It would be nice for once to be able to write something and run it on every os, not just Mac and Linux or Windows and Linux.

Re:Open Source Likes Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maby Microsoft will see this and include dashboard widgets for windows? It would be nice for once to be able to write something and run it on every os, not just Mac and Linux or Windows and Linux.

Uh, I think we saw how much Microsoft liked the idea of write-once-run-anywhere based on what they did to Java-- which was to "extend" it in a proprietary manner and encourage developers to take advantage of those extensions.

Always remember, Microsoft's idea of "choice" means you get to pick what you want from Microsoft's range of products and services, and nobody else's.

Re:Open Source Likes Apple?

[Yahweh Doesn't Exist]

MS has already annouced their intention to rip-off Dashboard. it came soon after Tiger's release. they claim it will be teh even bettarr than Dashboard, but obviously take a few extra years to be released. they call it startlets or dashlets or something.

Re:Open Source Likes Apple?

[dangitman]

If I recall correctly, the original code of the machintosh OS came from BSD 3

No, the original MacOS (it wasn't called MacOS back then) was written in-house by Apple. But you seem to be referring to the BSD part of MacOS X. Why that has anything to do with dektop widgets is totally beyond me.

Re:Open Source Likes Apple?

[penguin-collective]

If I recall correctly, the original code of the machintosh OS came from BSD 3... (Before they modifyed it extensively for commercial release)

No, that's not accurate. The OS X kernel is based on CMU Mach, with some BSD kernel code added to it. The command line utilities come from different sources, including a lot of BSD code. The compiler is GNU. Cocoa was essentially developed by NeXT, borrowing a lot of ideas from Smalltalk.

Now Opensource is taking the apple standard?

Dashboard is mostly web standards anyway (HTML, JavaScript, XML), the software components Apple is using for it are largely open source, and the concept of Dashboard comes from Konfabulator. So, I don't really think it's fair calling it "the apple standard", in particular since it's not a standard.

good work

[know1]

As someone who would dearly love a mac (since their OS has had a BSD core and a brilliant GUI) as a second computer this is good news to me. If i could take the eye candy of a mac and put it on my debian kde box it would be excellent.

Re:good work

[lasindi]

If i could take the eye candy of a mac and put it on my debian kde box it would be excellent.

Have you tried out Baghira? It's not perfect, but I think it's a pretty darn good imitation of Apple's eye candy.

Good enough for me!

[rodoke3]

nt

Not "most" widgets

[saddino]

KDE's runtime will be able to run most widgets designed for Dashboard. Also, KDE's runtime will be limited in that it will not be able to run widgets properly that use AppleScript or Cocoa in some way.

Those two statements are contradictory. Most widgets for Dashboard, especially for those that anyone considers useful, use Applescript and/or Cocoa. So in fact, KDE will be limited to only the simplest of widgets. Not much of a feature, IMHO.

Re:Not "most" widgets

[thatguywhoiam]

Most widgets for Dashboard, especially for those that anyone considers useful, use Applescript and/or Cocoa. So in fact, KDE will be limited to only the simplest of widgets. Not much of a feature, IMHO.

I don't know if this is generally true... for instance, I have running on my dashboard:

- calculator
- calendar
- weather
- weather doppler satellite image
- 4 webcams
- Buzztracker widget
- Akamai News usage widget
- SysStat
- Google Maps widget
- Wikipedia widget
- an armillary widget

... and as far as I can tell not a one of those uses AppleScript or Cocoa. I only have one that uses AppleScript, the album art fetcher. I don't think I've seen one that uses Cocoa yet.

Who knew that open source would be beaten

[ShatteredDream]

I hate to break it to you, but Java beat them by a wide margin a long time ago. Java has been able to do the write once, run anywhere since around JDK 1.2. Yes, you still need to do testing on platforms you plan to officially support, but the big difference is that Sun has made incredible strides in making Java that reliable on all officially supported platforms.

Now, as a Java developer I see nothing wrong with this and even see a good place for Java in the development of widgets. It's an easy language to pick up and you have the applets concept which was the first attempt to create something similar to widgets. All things considered, Java is an asset, not a competitor, for widgets.

Re:Who knew that open source would be beaten

[trollable]

Why JDK1.2?
1.1 is much more portable. Classpath (in particular Kaffe) runs on dozens of system. Then add MS JVM, IBM JVM for Windows 3.11, ... OTOH, JDK1.2 is much less available (Graphics2D being difficult to re-implement).

Re:Who knew that open source would be beaten

[CaptDeuce]

Now, as a Java developer I see nothing wrong with this... [Java is] an easy language to pick up

Really? Compared to what?

I'm finding that learning to speak Italian is easier, even though it will take longer. And Italian is a lot more useful for ordering food at a restaurant in Italy. Java is pretty useless in that respect -- even at a Starbucks.

Re:Who knew that open source would be beaten

[theAtomicFireball]

Sure... and long before Java, there was NeXTSTEP/OpenSTEP which allowed you to write once and deploy pretty much anywhere except on a Mac (ironic, since OpenSTEP turned into Cocoa which is the "preferred" application development tool on the Mac). Different approach than Java, but it supported as many platforms as Java does now and didn't have the overhead of a virtual machine. Of course, OpenSTEP for Windows was always a bit wonky, but it was a cool idea and the technology behind it is what's allowing the upcoming transition to Intel processors for Apple.

Sounds neat.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now the kde4/dashboard widgets just need to be merged with the custom boxes on Google's Personal Home Page, and Microsoft's vaporware feature set will be matched :D

RAM-hogging pleasure

[kitzilla]

So now KDE users can enjoy the same RAM-hogging pleasure afforded us OS X users by an array of useless, bloated widgets. Now THAT is progress! ;-)

Re:RAM-hogging pleasure

[EnderWiggin99]

Choice is seldom not progress.

Thanks for the interesting comment though.

Re:RAM-hogging pleasure

[Anonymous Coward]

Turn it off then?

kthxbai!

Re:RAM-hogging pleasure

[kitzilla]

I know people who absolutely *love* Widgets. I think most of them are better served by conventional applications. It just seems wrong to allocate 100MB or more of RAM to an array of programs that run in the background most of the time.

But you're right: choice is good. And KDE users have plenty of opportunities to choose bloat, don't they? ;-)

In all seriousness, I expect KDE 4 to be a formidable desktop./p?

Obviously you didn't read the link.

[Spy der Mann]

The title read:

"Malicious Web Pages Can Install Dashboard Widgets". It was about Safari and OS/X, *NOT* about MS-IE.

What version of OS X are you running?

[Hamster Lover]

I had, and so have several others, a similar problem with my Mac Mini until I upgraded to OS 10.4.4., but you probably already knew that.

Re:What version of OS X are you running?

[WeblionX]

No, I doubt he knew about your problems and what fixed them.

Re:What version of OS X are you running?

[Millenniumman]

10.4.4 doesn't exist. The last release was 10.4.3 .

Re:What version of OS X are you running?

[Life2Short]

Not likely since 10.4.4 hasn't been released to the general public yet. Mac OS X 10.4.3 is the most recent version available to us proles.

re: Dashboard and usefulness

[King_TJ]

That's exactly the problem with Dashboard though ... it's too tempting to approach it as "let's load it up with all types of crazy widgets!". By doing that, you make it less functional. (Takes longer to switch to them when you've got a whole screen full of them, etc.)

Certain Dashboard widgets *can* change the way you work, but only when you select the right ones, and eliminate the rest!

For example, Ambrosia Software makes a free widget for easily printing addresses on envelopes (http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/easyenvelopes /). That's something I occasionally need to do, and it's something you don't really want to load up a whole word processing package for.

I find the weather widget handy too. It lets me get the forecast on a whim, while not constantly running and eating resources when I don't need it. Sure, you can visit a web site to get the same info - but a widget is faster and always saves your preferences. (Web sites usually rely on cookies that you might clear out of your browser cache.)

I don't like KDE.

[Fluffy_Kitten]

It's not that I think it is bad, I just don't like it exactly because of these kinds of things.
KDE just adds anything which seems popular at the moment.
If flash is opensourced and becomes THE most popular thing ever, KDE will probably RUN on actionscript!
Is this the kind of desktop that you want to be using? Maybe you, but not me.

Re:I don't like KDE.

[RPoet]

If flash is opensourced and becomes THE most popular thing ever, KDE will probably RUN on actionscript! Is this the kind of desktop that you want to be using? Maybe you, but not me.

No, I don't want to run a desktop environment implemented in Actionscript. Now, can we get back to the topic?

Re:I don't like KDE.

[pembo13]

Soo KDE shouldn't give users what they want?

Re:I don't like KDE.

[Fluffy_Kitten]

if what they want is something outrageous like this, then no!

Optional components

[nurb432]

Then dont run the parts you dont like... Pretty simple.

Re:Optional components

[Fluffy_Kitten]

but those parts will still hog my drive space up! (if you are like me, I need every bit of my 2 drive's memory)

Yay

[Anonymous Coward]

YAY! More useless bloat in KDE!

MOD PARENT DOWN

[100 Percent Troll]

only YOU can prevent java-troll-karma-whoring!!!

Not all of office...

[bigtrike]

Well, you can run MOST of office. There's no Outlook or MS Access, which prevents Macs from being used in many corporate environments. It looks like Entourage can finally work with an Exchange server, which may eliminate a barrier to Mac adoption in the corporate world.

Focus follows mouse wouldn't work in OSX

[Andrew Tanenbaum]

because the menubar is global, and will change to the menu of another application if the mouse moves over its window while on its way up.

Re:Focus follows mouse wouldn't work in OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

Might be a good idea to use OS X before you say things like that. The menubar is global, but it only changes when the active application changes, not just when the mouse is over an app's window. To change the active/frontmost application, you have to either click on its window, or switch to it some other way (cmd-tab, the dock, etc). OS X doesn't have focus-follows-mouse behavior (except as an option in X11, but that's another story).

Re:Focus follows mouse wouldn't work in OSX

[Andrew Tanenbaum]

Read my post and the parents post, I was demonstrating WHY it doesn't have focus follows mouse you fucking idiot.

Re:Focus follows mouse wouldn't work in OSX

[Kesh]

To be honest, your post confused me at first too. Here on /. I generally ignore the subject line of a post, because it usually ends up irrelevant to the post itself. So, splitting part of your sentence into the subject caused the context to be lost.

Re:Focus follows mouse wouldn't work in OSX

[Nexum]

Yeah, your post was poorly written. And your reply totally out of order, courtesy costs nothing :)

Re:Focus follows mouse wouldn't work in OSX

[Ohreally_factor]

courtesy costs nothing

But a troll account is priceless.

Andrew S. Tanenbaum

Re: Dashboard and usefulness

[NutscrapeSucks]

I'm skeptical that one nees an entirely new UI mechanism just to print addresses on envelopes. Seems like a utility would exist just fine outside of dashboard.

I mean, if the Dock and Finder are designed as well as everyone says, then you shouldn't need save a few seconds by using a special launcher for your Envelope-Printer-Utility. And if that special launcher is more useful than the Dock/Finder, then you ought to be able to use it to launch Microsoft Word and Photoshop.

Dashboard is modal interface that comes with it's own desktop and it's own dock, sitting on top of the regular ones. Really seems to me like something the Marketing Dept thought up with the only goal of looking K3WL, rather than by the HCI Designers with the goal of being integrated and useful.

Really?

[Greyfox]

In my experience with Java, you're lucky to get a "Hello world" command line app to run the same from system to system, much less anything more complicated than that. Oh, the language does well enough despite the multitude of JVMs and display options available, but each platform has irritating little quirks that must be accounted for in order for your program to run correctly. It really IS "Write once, test everywhere."

I also seem to recall having about 5 different versions of the Java VM installed on my laptop at one point, one for each app the company was developing at the time. Admittedly that's just because the in-house programmers were lazy, but it all adds up to a not-very pleasant experience with Java.

On the other hand, my favorite online poker site uses java for their application and it works great with just my web browser. Apart from the fact that the browser and java VM crash after about 5 hours of online play, easily avoided by restarting every other break or so.

Re:Really?

[Decaff]

In my experience with Java, you're lucky to get a "Hello world" command line app to run the same from system to system, much less anything more complicated than that.

Oh come on! I just can't take this statement seriously. There may some extreme situations (high performance networking) where platform-specific issues appear, but for the majority of Java code, the platform makes no difference at all. I have written hundreds of thousands of Java code. Usually boring stuff - database front-end applications, but also numerical stuff and image processing applications and I have never once had a platform-specific problem.

Oh, the language does well enough despite the multitude of JVMs and display options available, but each platform has irritating little quirks that must be accounted for in order for your program to run correctly. It really IS "Write once, test everywhere."

No, it really isn't.

The typical Java developer situation (as determined by developer surveys) is that development is done under Windows, and then the binaries are given to the client for deployment on a range of platforms - mostly Linux/Unix. Testing on multiple platforms is rarely needed, as things just work. There may be some highly specific issues (such as network socket handling on Windows), but if large applications like the Tomcat Application server (highly network intensive and multi-threaded) can provide the same binaries for Windows, Linux and other Unix systems,

Admittedly that's just because the in-house programmers were lazy, but it all adds up to a not-very pleasant experience with Java.

Sounds more like a not-very pleasant experience with programmers! Sorry, but most Java developers really don't have these problems. Writing Java code that won't work on a later version is very hard (although I have seen it done). The guidelines for keeping Java portable are very clear, and most developers stick with them.

Apart from the fact that the browser and java VM crash after about 5 hours of online play, easily avoided by restarting every other break or so.

Java application servers routinely run non-stop for weeks.

Re:Really?

[Serpent Mage]

In my experience with Java, you're lucky to get a "Hello world" command line app to run the same from system to system

I can only presume that your experiences was with J++ and not Java OR that your experiences was nothing but a whole bunch of JNI calls to precompiled c libraries and the such. Otherwise, I'd seriously have to ask you to put your code where your mouth is as this sounds like nothing more then flaimbait :)

I also seem to recall having about 5 different versions of the Java VM installed on my laptop at one point

Starting with java2 (meaning 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5/5.0, 6.0) all jvms are backwards compatible with one another. If you want to install lots of jvm's that is your perogative but that wasn't a requirement to test or develop. That was you not knowing how to use your tools properly. There may be bugs with specific jvm's but odds are, those bugs were fixed for that particular jvm release and you have to update that jvm anyway. Typically whenever a fix is made it is retrofitted all the way back down to 1.2 (though with the advent of 6.0 they are starting to only go back as far as 1.3 jvm's now).

Apart from the fact that the browser and java VM crash after about 5 hours of online play

You do of course realize that java cannot be blamed for crappy code being written by developers. Pick a language and I bet you I can crash the entire computer in under 20 minutes of code running on it written in whatever language you like. Use a little common sense here. There are hundreds of commercial grade applications that run for over a year without restart written 100% in pure java that are much much more complicated then hello world. Try looking at these annoying apps like eclipse, tomcat, azeurus, sunone, jboss, weblogic, [insert several jms servers], hsql, and a few ldap servers as well.

Sorry but everything you've posted is nothing more then flamebait with no legitimacy what-so-ever.

Re:Really?

[FatherOfONe]

"Java application servers routinely run non-stop for weeks"

Our J2EE app servers run for months and could run for years without a problem.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you really this stupid? I would love to see a programmer that's incapable of writing a Hello World in Java that doesn't work on all platforms. This idiot is the type of programmer that calls vbscript.exe from his Java code. If you can't write multi-platform Java applications then the problem is you and not the language or the JVM. It seems that millions of other developers can do it without much trouble.... Have you ever considered the fact that you suck at programming? I think your website makes that abundantly clear.

Re:Really?

[mab]

Not my experience a lot of our SAN management devices and software use java. One version of the SAN fibre switches will only work with JRE 1.3 while the others will only work with 1.4. Navisphere only works with 1.4 and the EMC NAS will only work with Windows (even tried changing user-agent on linux/firefox to IE windows)

Re:Really?

[Decaff]

Not my experience a lot of our SAN management devices and software use java. One version of the SAN fibre switches will only work with JRE 1.3 while the others will only work with 1.4. Navisphere only works with 1.4 and the EMC NAS will only work with Windows (even tried changing user-agent on linux/firefox to IE windows)

Only working with 1.4 is acceptable, if it works with 1.5 as well, but working with 1.3 only and not later versions of the VM is simply bad coding, suggesting that the developer is using clearly labelled non-portable parts of the JRE (com.sun.* and sun.* classes).

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I have written hundreds of thousands of Java code.... I have never once had a platform-specific problem."

I wonder why I'm skeptical of both these claims :)

Re:Really?

[Decaff]

"I have written hundreds of thousands of Java code.... I have never once had a platform-specific problem."

I wonder why I'm skeptical of both these claims :)

Apart from me having missed out the word 'lines' (hundreds of thousands of 'lines' of java code), I have no idea.

Why? How much Java code have you written? What problems have you had? Why is it so amusing?

Thanks...

[Hamster Lover]

What I meant was several people had problems with Dashboard widgets taking up huge amounts of memory in 10.4.2 that was fixed in 10.4.3 and that he was probably aware.

Re:Thanks...

[Breakfast Pants]

How would he be "probably aware"? It isn't even released yet.

Superkaramba

[biscon]

As only mentioned by one poster earlier. Isn't superkaramba an older implementation of the same idea? im curious since everyone seems to give apple credit for the concept.

Re:Superkaramba

[10Ghz]

SuperKaramba, Kicker and the Desktop are going to be merged in to one coherent whole in KDE4 called Plasma. These widgets and related technologies will be part of Plasma. So, in KDE3.x, we use SuperKaramba to handle widgets like these. In KDE4, it will be handled by Plasma.

FTFA

[AgNO3]

runtimes for Dashboard widgets also appear in GNOME or even in Windows, if not from Microsoft, but a third party. Ok Don't we just call this Konfabulator already? The guys/girls/dude/chick that wrote konfabulator then had the idea taken by Apple, don't seem to get much credit. Am I missing something? Why is Apple getting so much praise for Wigets and Konfabulator getting so over looked for coming up with the idea to begin with. Is this a, yahoo bought it now its evil thing? Anyway Konfabulator, Is free and runs on windows and Mac OS. Oh and does anyone really know the differnce between wigets and konfabulator running on the Mac? I just use wigets because they are there and I don't know the difference.

Re:FTFA

[dangitman]

The guys/girls/dude/chick that wrote konfabulator then had the idea taken by Apple, don't seem to get much credit. Am I missing something?

You seem to be, because I almost never see Dashboard mentioned without someone mentioning Konfabulator. I had never heard of Konfabulator until Dashboard came out. It's been wonderful publicity, and I think I have a vague memory that the Konfabulator people had increased downloads after Dashboard.

Why is Apple getting so much praise for Wigets and Konfabulator getting so over looked for coming up with the idea to begin with.

I don't see much praise for Dashboard widgets. Most people say they suck. And what I said about Konfab above.

Anyway, how do you "take" an idea? Ideas aren't property.

And was it really Konfabulator's original idea? Seems like a new variation on an old theme to me. There's not much that's particularly innovate, it's just a tweaked GUI for applets.

Re:FTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Kofabulator is based on old Apple Desk Accesories. They copied the idea, not Apple. Doesn't anyone remember having fun with the Font/DA Mover?

Re:FTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Desk Accessories were available on the Mac OS 1 back in 1984. If there was any "idea taken by Apple", it was from their own prior art.

Re:FTFA

[lisaparratt]

Ok Don't we just call this Konfabulator already? The guys/girls/dude/chick that wrote konfabulator then had the idea taken by Apple, don't seem to get much credit. Am I missing something?

Yes - the fact that Konfabulator was just a glitzy rip off of Apple desk accessories in the first place.

Re:FTFA

[Listen Up]

"Anyway, how do you "take" an idea? Ideas aren't property."

What in the hell planet are you from? Intellectual Property, Patents, Copyrights, etc. are all ideas, with a few of those ideas manifesting themselves into physical form or product.

Re:FTFA

[Listen Up]

I.e. An idea does not have to have a physical form or product in order to be considered the property of or belong to an owner or group of owners, have merit, or have value.

Re:FTFA

[Listen Up]

Great examples of that are Mathematics and Physics.

Re:FTFA

[dangitman]

So, who has the patent or copyright on the idea of mathematics or physics?

Existing Dashboard-ish-ings for Linux

[Shazow]

Just to set the record straight, there already exists something like this for Linux (and, more specifically, KDE). In fact, there are two major branches in development for such widgets:

1. The fancy branch (since sometime in 2003):
SuperKaramba, which spawned from the plain Karamba.

2. The non-fancy minimalistic branch (since god knows when - probably early 2004):
Conky, which spawned from the even less fancy Torsmo.

- shazow

Re:Existing Dashboard-ish-ings for Linux

[biscon]

the Plain karamba was inspired by http://www.samurize.com/. I wonder who originally came up with the concept, but then again who cares..

Re:Existing Dashboard-ish-ings for Linux

[Martz]

Superkaramba has been included into KDE 3.5.x series I believe, which is still considered unstable/beta.

Re:Existing Dashboard-ish-ings for Linux

[Coryoth]

And somewhere in the middle there are things like adesklets, which provide a reasonable amount of eyecandy without the weight.

Jedidiah.

Did you know Gnome already has something like this

[Eminor]

Check out gdesklets for gnome. There are all sorts of widgets for the desktop, including starterBar, which is much like the animated icons at the bottom of the screen on OS X.

Most misleading headline in slashdot ever?

[CountBrass]

Read even the summary: KDE is *not* going to run Apple widgets. They're simpyl copying the idea. Nothing to see here, move along.

Re:Most misleading headline in slashdot ever?

[Anonymous Coward]

The summary is misleading, not the headline. Read the article. Quote:

I finally got most the implementation of the HTML Canvas element for KHTML finished. It's in the kdelibs-js branch in SVN. After George/Maks merge their other changes we'll merge it to HEAD. I'm planning to add full OSX Dashboard compatibility layer for Plasma (hence why I've spent most of the day yesterday on implementing the Canvas element).

more info ?

[Macka]

Hmm .. I've got a 1GB PowerBook running 10.4.3 (latest) and I'm not seeing what you're seeing with more apps running than that. Fire up activity viewer and select System Memory. What's the value of the Green (free) slice of the pie? Also, what does it show as for the Page out value? This increments since your last reboot. Mine is 0. If yours is higher than that, then you've definitely experienced memory exhaustion at some stage.

Re:more info ?

[WMD_88]

Haha! My pageout number is 968,666. 29 days uptime. I have a lot of widgets and only 512MB.

Re:more info ?

[SpinJaunt]

We all know "640K ought to be enough for anybody."

Bill Gates, Microsoft Corporation.

Re:more info ?

[Macka]

LOL .. you're in dire need of some more memory mate.

Re:Did you know Gnome already has something like t

[10Ghz]

And KDE also has something similar: SuperKaramba (which is official part of 3.5). In fact, gdesklets appeared after Karamba/SuperKaramba appeared. So it's not like this widget-functionality exists in GNOME today, whereas it doesn't exist in KDE.

KDE and GNOME trying to be OSX

[borgheron]

How come so many projects that spend so much time trying to be like OS X miss the entire point? They're both based on C++ which is, quite honestly, the worst of all OO languages and they incessently try to be like OS X when they have no hope of ever being so.

GNUstep, on the other hand is themeable and can look like OS X or anything else for that matter. You see, GNUstep HASN'T missed the point.

As for Dashboard widgets... they're a passing fad, IMNSHO.

GJC

Re:KDE and GNOME trying to be OSX

[rdean400]

I don't think it's a passing fancy. There have been some form of desktop widgets out there for almost as long as there have been GUIs. The key to longevity will be whether anyone can actually come up with a set of useful widgets, and I think that's entirely possible.

Re:KDE and GNOME trying to be OSX

[NorthWoodsman]

Oh man, if you think C++ is the worst OO language, clearly you haven't seen GObject + C. http://www.le-hacker.org/papers/gobject

Re:KDE and GNOME trying to be OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a big fan of GNUstep. I actually think its goal of a truly cross-platform development framework makes it a much more noble project than Cocoa, and thus, I have more respect for it than Mac OS X.

But its strength is not its appearance. In fact it's pretty ugly.

Re:KDE and GNOME trying to be OSX

[borgheron]

One of the things which is going to become the focus this year is precisely that. The look is badly in need of an update.

I'm one of the maintainers of GNUstep, so I'm hoping to beautify GNUstep in the months to come.

Re:KDE and GNOME trying to be OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi,

I'm the AC from before. I did a google search or two and found lovely screenshots like this one. Very nice. With looks like that, GNUstep really does have a shot at some kind of acceptance at the end user level, which it currently lacks.

For a few weeks now I've been messing with GNUstep and objc for kicks. As someone who's been frustrated before with Java's general strictness (and how awkward it is to use reflections, for example), I must say I really do appreciate it. Keep up the good work.

This is sort of apropos, but what would you recommend as a project for someone who knows his way around Unix and C, is maybe not an objC/NeXT genius, but wants to contribute something or otherwise help GNUstep? I was thinking of maybe reimplementing Cocoa's NSStream classes (since I ended up doing something similar for an app I'm working on anyway, and I have it mostly working), but I'm not sure where to start in communicating this.

Re:KDE and GNOME trying to be OSX

[borgheron]

The lists are the best place to start for this. Either discuss-gnustep@gnu.org or gnustep-dev@gnu.org. You can join either. Just go to the following URL to subscribe: http://www.gnustep.org/information/gethelp.html#de vel.

You should simply say you would like to work on something. For base, you should talk to people on this list for contributions to the things which they are responsible for. Myself for gui and Richard Frith-MacDonald for base.

Later. GJC

What?!

[Lost Found]

If you think KDE devs spend their time trying to be like OSX, then you've obviously only ever used KDE or OSX. Support for "dashboard widgets" turns out to be a relatively simple thing to do because of a few things (A) Plasma and (B) the fact that Apple based all of their HTML rendering on KDE technology. Dashboard widget support would be a single (optional!) feature in a sea of others. Last time I checked, (uh, right now... I'm typing this post on a KDE desktop and sitting next to a Powerbook laptop), KDE's differences from OSX make it *vastly* more usable.

Will I use dashboard widgets in KDE? Likely, no. But I'll be happy to have the choice.

Yet Another Idea Stolen by OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Open source despite all the efforts to prove otherwise continue to be a concept for lame programmers to steal ideas. Nothing open-source is original, it steals, it help steal and it's downright bad at it. The idea is good but one has yet to see anything comming from open-source that isn't a rip-off of something else badly done, badly layed-out, crapility implemented and riddled with bug. Open source fail on all of its promises and is merely an excuse to a total and uther lack of originality and quality.

This again, the "we steal widgets" is a point in case, "yeah but apple stole it from konfabulator" said the oss twit, yeah that for sure makes it legitimate for you to steal too. But im sure every oss proponent has an excuse and some obscure software to prove its not about stealing and making software that help stealing, open source lives on its promises cause thats all it has to offer promises, not a single piece of crap comming from this movement is worthy of anything but intellectual masturbation.

We are in 2005 if by now, after tens of years of existence it still doesn't deliver, face it, it never will. Happy copying!

Re:Yet Another Idea Stolen by OSS

[PenGun]

To qoute NTK:

  "They stole our revolution,now we're stealing it back"

      PenGun
    Do What Now ??? ... Standards and Practices !

Linux Stuck In Copycat Mode?

[GaryPatterson]

Why is it that Linux offers pretty much the features of Windows or OS X, or Unix for that matter? What is new and unique to Linux from a usability or UI point of view?

And yes, I know about the benefits of free or open source software, but that doesn't explain what I can do in Linux that I can't do in OS X or Windows. I have licences for both anyway, so why should I install Linux? If it's just a political statement ("Software should be free!") then that's not much of a benefit for those of us who either don't agree or don't care enough.

Cherry-picking features from other OSs isn't a good way to develop a coherent OS. I know there's a lot of programming talent in the Linux userbase, but is there any design talent, or more particularly, UI-design talent?

I think this may be one of the big issues Linux has to face to gain wider acceptance. When a thing works just like something else that people already have, they may not find a reason to switch.

Re:Linux Stuck In Copycat Mode?

[10Ghz]

Why is it that Linux offers pretty much the features of Windows or OS X, or Unix for that matter?

Linux shouldn't offer same features as Windows, OS X or UNIX offer? Why not? Should Linux purposefully offer different features? Windows has the ability to connect to a network, therefore Linux must NOT have that feature?

KDE already has this feature (desktop-widgets that is). This feature has been available for a long time in Linux in general (for example, gkrellm). What the KDE-folks are doing is to simply support the Dashboard-widgets. The widgets themselves are an old hat on KDE and other GUI's. So KDE is NOT copying this feature from OS X. KDE already has technology for displaying and creating desktop-widgets, has had it for a long time already. They are merely adding support for Dashboard widgets in the future versions.

What is new and unique to Linux from a usability or UI point of view?

What is "new and unique" in Windows or OS X? 99% of features in GUI's are old stuff.

I have licences for both anyway, so why should I install Linux?

If you are happy with Windows or OS X, then go right ahead and use them.

Cherry-picking features from other OSs isn't a good way to develop a coherent OS

This feature has been available to KDE, Linux and *BSD for a long time already. They are merely adding support for Apple's implementation. And that is a bad thing because.... ?? Or do you think that everyone should do their own thing and not interoperate with others at all? If someone wants to interoperate with others, it means that they are "copycats"?

I know there's a lot of programming talent in the Linux userbase, but is there any design talent, or more particularly, UI-design talent?

Short answer: Yes.

Really, your whole rant is pointless. You are whining because "Linux is copying a feature from OS X!". Well, they (KDE that is) are not. they already have this feature. Have had it for a long time. They just decided to support Apple's implementation as well. And that is a GOOD THING!

Re:Linux Stuck In Copycat Mode?

[Harv]

Really, your whole rant is pointless. You are whining because "Linux is copying a feature from OS X!". Well, they (KDE that is) are not. they already have this feature. Have had it for a long time. They just decided to support Apple's implementation as well. And that is a GOOD THING!

Really, your whole reaction is so defensive that it's clear you missed the point. Try looking at this from someone who's not already a convert to Linux. He makes a perfectly valid point: Linux cannot appeal to switchers if it has nothing new to offer other than stability. OS X is more stable and free, so far, from malware and virii, but even there, and with a very good GUI, you're not seeing people leaving Windows for OS X in droves.

Linux is around 1% on the desktop and has been there for a looooong time. No movement. Why do YOU suppose that is? It's a valid question, and the kind of reaction you had typifies why nothing is likely to change.

Re:Linux Stuck In Copycat Mode?

[10Ghz]

Really, your whole reaction is so defensive that it's clear you missed the point.

His "point" was that "linux is copying features from other OS'es". And while he whined about that, he also whined about lack of "new and original" features in Linux.

Linux cannot appeal to switchers if it has nothing new to offer other than stability.

It does offer more than just stability. for many people it (including the GUI) simply works better than the GUI in Windows or OS X. I have used OS X extensively. And I noticed that while I did use it more or less exclusively for few months (I wanted to find out what it has to offer), I noticed that I'm moving back to KDE, even though OS X might have all kinds of fancy things in it. For me, OS X simply does not work as well as KDE does.

Hell, if you REALLY look at it, OS X doesn't really offer anything new over Windows. Maybe some superficial things, but in the end, the two are very similar. It's more or less the same with Linux. If you look at the GUI's, you will notice that 99% of them all, is exactly the same stuff. It's the details that are different, and there's PLENTY of differences in the details. However, in the grand scheme of things, Windows, GNOME, KDE and OS X are 99% identical.

People keep on saying stuff like "Look at OS X! They are doing new and exciting things!". Like what? They still have icons, windows, menu's and pointers, just like we had 20 years ago! You mean stuff like Expose? That's a rather small thing in the grand scheme of things, and it's more or less related to the fact that OS X does not have virtual desktops, a feature every single Linux-GUI has. Virtual desktops are a one example of a feature that KDE (among others) offers that OS X or Windows does not offer.

Yes, OS X is very polished and it has lots of eye-candy. But that doesn't mean it's doing "new and exciting" things. It's doing the exact same things GUI's have been doing for the last 20 years. Yet, for some reason, no-one complains that "Apple isn't doing anything new!", whereas everyone whines that "Linux/KDE isn't doing anything new!". Apple has some nice trinkets (oooh, revolving cube when you switch users! Whoa! Minimized videos keep on playing back in the dock!) in their GUI, but there's nothing fundamentally new in there. I have watched the keynotes where Jobs demos OS X. What are the features that got the biggest applause from the crowd? The minimized videos/genie-effect, spinning cube at user-switching, expose and the "ripple-effect" in dashboard. Those are mere trinkets. they are just neat gizmos, but in the end, they are just pointless eye-candy. Where is the "new and exciting" stuff? Something really worthwhile, and not mere trinkets?

Linux is around 1% on the desktop and has been there for a looooong time. No movement. Why do YOU suppose that is?

Ask 10 different people what Linux'es market-share on the desktop is, and you will get 10 different answers. I have seen estimates ranging from 1% to 5%. And considering that it has only been in the last few years that Linux-desktop has really progressed, I don't think that's so bad. Why hasn't it taken the desktop by storm? Well, data seems to indicate that it's share is rising. But it's VERY hard to overthrow an entrenched competitor that has something like 95% market-share.

Re:Linux Stuck In Copycat Mode?

[Harv]

I'm not saying that Linux doesn't have a lot to offer, but rather than what it has to offer doesn't distinguish it *enough* from Windows or OSX to make a big enough difference. How are you going to get people to try the Linux GUI's as long as it's still largely a tweaker's OS? I'm not saying OS X is perfect, either, but the difference is that it has a single entity (Apple) doing the promtions and marketing and developing other things, like the iPod, that get it noticed by the proletariat who are used to just one thing: Windows.

Personally, I think we'd all be better off with three strong OS's on the desktop, but right now we only have two. IMHO, that is.

Re:Linux Stuck In Copycat Mode?

[10Ghz]

How are you going to get people to try the Linux GUI's as long as it's still largely a tweaker's OS?

I'm not. I even told the original poster that "If you like Windows and OS X, go right ahead and use them". I choose to use Linux/KDE for my own reasons, and if someone asks for my advice when it comes to OS, I would recommend either OS X or Linux, or both. I'm not going to tell anyone to "use Linux, or I will kick your ass!".

That said, I don't think Linux is a "tweaker's OS". It can be "grandma's OS" just as well. Just because I CAN tweak it, does not mean that I HAVE to tweak it. Back when I used Gentoo, I tweaked and tweaked the system, and I loved every minute of it. Now that I run Kubuntu, I haven't tweaked the system at all. Just because I have the option of doing something, does not mean that I have to do it. Just because I can compile my own kernel in Linux (for example) does not mean that "Linux sucks, because you have to compile your kernels!". I have the option of doing something, but there's no requirement for me to do it.

iGoing Krazy

[dangitman]

iNames just make iMe want to iPoke my iOut with an iFork.

K-Names make me want to K-rush my K-cranium in a trash K-ompactor.

A little bit of history

[Anonymous Coward]

If I recall correctly, the original code of the machintosh OS came from BSD 3

Mac OS X has its history in NeXTstep. NeXTstep was a commercial operating system by NeXT Computer, Inc., founded by Steve Jobs after he left Apple in the 1980s.

The underlying software behind NeXTstep was BSD and the Mach microkernel. This was before the more recent "free software"/"open source" movements, so to call it based on "open source" would be fairly anachronistic. NeXTstep was, of course, not free.

Anyway, BSD and Mach were not the most interesting part of NeXTstep, they were not what set NeXTstep aside. Its most unique feature was an object-oriented programming framework based on Objective-C.

NeXT was a business failure.

Circa 1997, Jobs came back to Apple which purchased NeXT. Apple, who had been desperately searching for something to replace the cruft that was Mac OS 8 at the time, decided to make NeXTstep into the new Mac OS. They gave NeXTstep the Mac OS 8 look and feel, and called it Rhapsody.

The big Mac OS software vendors didn't like Rhapsody, because it deprecated the APIs that Mac OS 8 used, which dated back to the 1980s. This meant that the big Mac OS software vendors (Adobe, etc.) would have to rewrite most of their utilities to use Objective-C, and they didn't want to do that.

So Apple created Carbon, and called the NeXTstep libraries "Cocoa". The rest, as they say, is history.

Personally I think Apple marketing has intentionally confused this history. They want potential customers to think they're riding the wave of the more recent free software/open source movement, when perhaps the more significant (characteristic, unique, innovative) portions actually have their roots in NeXT. They also probably want Unix users to buy their stuff, so they emphasize that part. End result? You see posts on Slashdot that say "Mac OS X is basically just FreeBSD", and make no mention of NeXT.

Re:A little bit of history

[romiir]

True, but like I said, the ultimate roots are from open source software, I hate when posts like yours get scored 0, that is worthy of something more. I haven't really ever liked macs, and never will. I would have said more about the history, but I have it all memorised myself.
--
Anything mac can do AMD can do better, AMD can do anything better then mac =P

Windows/Mac are unoriginal

[penguin-collective]

Why is it that Linux offers pretty much the features of Windows or OS X, or Unix for that matter? What is new and unique to Linux from a usability or UI point of view?

You seem to be suggesting that people should be using new systems only if they offer "new and unique features". Well, why are you using Windows or Macintosh then? Those systems didn't offer "new and unique features" when they came out--most of their interfaces are copycat--derivative from earlier user interfaces of systems like UNIX and X11.

In reality, originality has little to do with commercial success or market share; when it comes to user interfaces, copying someone else and then improving on it is the norm, and there is nothing wrong with that.

And yes, I know about the benefits of free or open source software, but that doesn't explain what I can do in Linux that I can't do in OS X or Windows. [...] If it's just a political statement ("Software should be free!") then that's not much of a benefit for those of us who either don't agree or don't care enough.

Many people who use Linux use it for reasons like better reliability, usability, compatibility, interoperability, lower cost, and higher performance. If you don't care about any of those features, just don't use it--it's a free country.

Re:Windows/Mac are unoriginal

[GaryPatterson]

I used the Mac when it was original and nothing else like it was available in Australia. That was some time ago, and I stayed with it because of its better reliability, usability, compatibility, interoperability, and higher performance. I left lower cost out of that list though, although my current Mac is an iBook, so I could probably claim lower cost.

It's not that it has to be unique and new, just that there needs to be a compelling reason to switch. Yes, Linux is stable, but so is Windows now, and Windows is more compatible with the apps that people use at work or at school.

I'm not trying to knock Linux, because I like it a lot, but I don't see why someone would pick it over Windows when they then have to learn a heap of new things (good example - in this topic someone recommended something like 'just recompile the application, stripping out the things you don't want' as the solution to a performance issue) just to do what they already do now.

Re:Windows/Mac are unoriginal

[Anonymous Coward]

"use Linux use it for reasons like better reliability, usability, compatibility, interoperability, lower cost, and higher performance"

*Reliability - ok good point there
*Usability - rofl, Linux has a reputation for being extremely hard to use
*compatibility - let me see if you have this distribution download this build, if you have this download this, if you have this download this, oh before you can use this you need to install some parts of gnome because it would not work if you only have kde.
*Interoperability - same as compatibility pretty much
*LowerCost - "you can't use this CHEAP winmodem go buy yourself a real modem"
*Higher Performance - assuming you figure out how to use it after spending countless hours reading help sites, asking people on irc for help, and finding the right drivers for all your prehiperals then yes it soars greatly in this.

Re:Windows/Mac are unoriginal

[10Ghz]

Usability - rofl, Linux has a reputation for being extremely hard to use

Just because something has a "reputation", does not mean that it's warranted. Linux is quite easy to use. Yes, it's a bit different from Mac or Windows, but not harder as such.

compatibility - let me see if you have this distribution download this build, if you have this download this, if you have this download this, oh before you can use this you need to install some parts of gnome because it would not work if you only have kde.

I have a nice list of apps I can choose from. I point and click to install the apps I want, and with zero hassle. Honestly, I'm not seeing the situation you are describing.

LowerCost - "you can't use this CHEAP winmodem go buy yourself a real modem"

So, because WinModems don't work, it somehow proves that Linux as a whole is expensive?

assuming you figure out how to use it after spending countless hours reading help sites, asking people on irc for help, and finding the right drivers for all your prehiperals then yes it soars greatly in this.

Usually after the installation is finished, things "just work". I don't spend time tweaking the system or reading bazillion manuals. And the performance is fine. Of course, I COULD tweak the system to my hearts content, but I'm not REQUIRED to.

And I fail to see the problem in "finding the right drivers". Just last weekend I helped install bunch of Windows-machines, and guess what? I had to find the drivers for the hardware on WIndows as well! And it can be a bit difficult to find those drivers when Windows just happily reports that there is a "display adapter" in the system and that it needs drivers. Luckily I had Knoppix-CD handy, I used it to snoop the contents of the system, and then fetched the correct drivers.

wouldn't it be nice

[penguin-collective]

Wouldn't it be nice if Yahoo! open sourced Konfabulator so that people could port it to Linux?

Re: Dashboard and usefulness

[monkaru]

Well, I think advertising has a lot to do with it. Imagine you are an advertiser and you haven't much luck getting your message onto Linux desktops. Well, browser objects are tailor made for it. Putting a toolbar in Konqueror or Firefox would be trivial and well within the users permissions. Of course, the object itself is a perfect place to put an advert. Heck, you could even rotate the ads while the widget is looking up your stock quotes or whatever and it could keep track of which ads you click.

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE and GNOME trying to be OSX [...] They're both based on C++ which is, quite honestly, the worst [...]

Never developed for GNOME, have we? I can't imagine why you would think it's "based on C++". It's not.

incessently try to be like OS X when they have no hope of ever being so.

Never read a GNOME mailing list, have we? I can't imagine why you'd think they try to be like Mac OS. (Several times I've even advocated a Mac-like solution, only to be shot down.) How do you account for the huge differences between GNOME and Mac OS X, then? Perhaps they're simply trying to do a good job, and Apple is trying do a good job, and so naturally they ended up making some similar decisions.

Besides, whether GNOME has a "hope of ever being" "like OS X" has little to do with what language it's based on. Even if it was, you said that being "based on C++" is what's damning it -- and it's not based on C++, so that argument is empty.

GNUstep, on the other hand is themeable and can look like OS X or anything else for that matter. You see, GNUstep HASN'T missed the point.

GNUstep is better ... because it's "themeable"? That's "the point"? Have another look at GNOME one of these years -- they're just as themeable as GNUstep.

I haven't found any way to theme GNUstep to make it look anything like a Mac. What theme are you using to put the menubar across the top of the screen? What theme uses my GPU to draw widgets and composite windows? What theme includes the Finder and the Dock and Expose?

As for Dashboard widgets... they're a passing fad, IMNSHO.

After what you've demonstrated you know about GNOME, I wonder if you even know what Dashboard widgets *are*.

Learn to read

[ThousandStars]

Before telling me to check my facts, maybe you should check yours, or at least read the very article you cite. It states: "May marks the first time notebooks have outsold desktops over the course of a full month, the firm said."

Re: Dashboard and usefulness

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously haven't used the dock and dashboard. I was pretty skeptical of it myself. I had tried Konfabulator and I never found it particularly useful. I couldn't live without Dashboard, though. I love the label printer, the weather widget, the dictionary widget. They all are major time savers with me.

No one seems to have pointed this out, but dashboard is very much the unix way of doing things. "Do one thing, and do it well" is the unix mantra. Dashboard is the GUI version of that -- tools that do one thing and do it well, and quickly.

Sounds nice....

[ShyGuy91284]

I've used OS X for half a year now, and I find the dashboard widgets to be very useful for quick stuff. Although it is a _huge_ memory hog from what I've seen (as others have commented). Some widgets (especially third party) can take up 20+ megs of ram, and that adds up. I ended up getting 512M on top of 512M onboard just to run the widgets. Otherwise, it's a waste of time. Hopefully KDE will make their own type of widgets that don't take up as much memory and perhaps rely on shared memory for various things. I'm not a very skilled programmer yet, but I fail to see why this many widgets have to take up 20M+ each when most aren't really that complicated.

Why KDE4's approach is better than superkaramba

[CarpetShark]

I gather this is HTML- and Javascript-based, whereas (Super)karamba is python-based, I think.

But, the biggest difference will probably be proper support for desktop widgets. In other words, it won't be a "hack" any more that doesn't really work like you'd expect it to.

Right now, superkaramba widgets, like gapplet applets in GNOME, are little windows on the screen, that stay on the bottom. But, this screws up various things. For instance, icons get hidden underneath them, rather than the widget or the icons moving around to fit nicely together.

At least, I hope they're going to fix that... the whole "layer" thing is a little worrying. But yes, proper design and integration will be the best part of KDE 4's desktop widgets.

Re:Why KDE4's approach is better than superkaramba

[coolGuyZak]

From what I have read about Plasma, the icons will be treated as "dashboard widgets" themselves. There shouldn't be a problem with that. Of course, this is a drastic simplification of the whole thing. For more information, I recommend you look at the Plasma Project and the Appeal Project. Reading Aaron Seigo's blog may shed some light on things as well.

Re:Why KDE4's approach is better than superkaramba

[CarpetShark]

Ahh, that clears it up then, thanks :)

10.4.3...

[Hamster Lover]

When you install 10.4.3 (I mistakenly said 10.4.4) it lists Dashboard improvements among the changes and if you check Activity Monitor the amount of memory for each widget drops by a lot. I just wondered if the fellow installed 10.4.3 that's all, I didn't expect the third degree.

Re: Dashboard and usefulness

[NutscrapeSucks]

Well that's true -- the XUL system used in Firefox was originally designed so that AOL could make an advertising-enhanced version of Mozilla.

The MS ActiveDesktop thing spawned a bunch of junk that was little more than ad rotators. Probably one big reason the feature was forgotten about (much like Dashboard will be).

widgets? who needs such crap?

[AlgorithMan]

Yes sure, lets all waste cpu time on running scripted programs in our OS, they are not horrible enough on websites... script languages are so great because every moron can use them... do you realize that the fastest "programs" written in SCRIPT languages need about TWENTY TIMES the ammount of cpu time that a COMPILED C++ Program would need? Is it so important to us, that every idiot can write "programs" for us? do we need them so badly that we have to throw our CPUs performance out of the window for them? just my two cents I love my c++ compiler =) AlgoMan

Re:widgets? who needs such crap?

[lasindi]

script languages are so great because every moron can use them... do you realize that the fastest "programs" written in SCRIPT languages need about TWENTY TIMES the ammount of cpu time that a COMPILED C++ Program would need? Is it so important to us, that every idiot can write "programs" for us?

To a large extent I agree with you, and C++ is also my preferred language. However, there are good reasons for making languages easier (so that "every moron can use them"). The fact is, no programmer is perfect; and if it's easier for a very imperfect programmer (moron) to use a language, it's (usually) also easier for a good (but still imperfect) programmer. Easier languages mean fewer mistakes by programmers, no matter how good they are; fewer mistakes mean fewer bugs.

I like C++ as a good compromise between being able to do low-level stuff (like pointers and memory management) when you have to, and still being able to hide all that low-level code inside classes and benefiting from the features of OOP. However, sometimes ease-of-coding (and the greater reliability of your programs that comes with it) is worth more than the performance, and C++ may not be the best language for the job.

I have discovered a truly wonderful signature, but this margin is too narrow to hold it

Seems like you got your sig from the same place I got mine. ;)

Re:widgets? who needs such crap?

[AlgorithMan]

alright, lets make a html css etc compiler to make real programs out of the stuff..... which would also make widgets redundant... ^^
cya

AlgoMan
P.S. nice coincidence with the signatures ^^

NOTE to SCUTTLEMONKEY:

[Hosiah]

http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Simple_Animations/ Gimp also has layers. Must we continue to perpetuate the mythology by implying that it's a Photoshop-only feature?

Re:NOTE to SCUTTLEMONKEY:

[Anonymous Coward]

"http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Simple_Animations/ Gimp also has layers. Must we continue to perpetuate the mythology by implying that it's a Photoshop-only feature? "

Who gives a shit. Stop circle jerking about pissant matters.

OFFTOPIC: Telephone Game

[kkerwin]

From the above teaser:

ScuttleMonkey posts that:

"Ryan writes to tell us [that] Applexnet is reporting that Zack Rusin ... has confirmed that ..."

Slashdot: News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.(c) Straight from the source ...

Who cares about the dashboard...

[Lord Flipper]

wake me up when they have driver for the airport extremes and the spanned desktiops on the Powerbooks, that can be run right off the install of Linux on a mac. So far, that's the showstopper for me. To get even a user-friendly install like ubuntu, or a debian install to even recognize an external monitor is like pulling teeth barehanded. When Apple, or broadcom, gets through blaming 'the other guy' for why the Airport Extreme chip can't be ported oiver to Linux, well, then they're onto something. But dashboard? who gives a fuck?

gnome

[slack_prad]

why don't gnome people make news like this ? :-(

Fonts

[Anonymous Coward]

My big problem with KDE is, the fonts look substandard and shoddy compared to Windows and Mac OS X. They need to be a bit more polished and professional looking.

I may want to commit only a moron's worth of brain

[Szplug]

power to building something. Sure, knowing C++ & Qt I can figure out how to do something in KDE but, it's a lot of work; being a moron's level of difficulty means I might actually do it.