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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."
Konfabulator?
Sure... if you define "anywhere" to mean "anywhere but windows"
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.
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.
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.
None of the UNIX people I know use MacOSX. And I personally think the UI is awful.
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.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
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...
Apple users looking to exploit the availibility of more games that Linux provides may now consider switching.
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
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!!
That's just apple's workaround for "we think virtual desktops are too complicated." No need to impose that on KDE.
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.
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.
Virtually serving coffee
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.
Features != bloat (especially if off by default)
Btw, KDE has had this for years, namely SuperKaramba.
We've always been at war with Eurasia.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And now they've got Active Desktop!
nt
There's nothing like a good gunfight to uplift the spirit--Calvin
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.
.rc files).
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
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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.
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.
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.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
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.
Then keep on using those old GUI's. If modern GUI's are slow and bloated, why are you using them?
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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.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
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! ;-)
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
The title read:
"Malicious Web Pages Can Install Dashboard Widgets". It was about Safari and OS/X, *NOT* about MS-IE.
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 :)
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.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
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.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
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.
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?
Welcome to the Entropy Bar, may I take your order?
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.)
s /). 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.
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/easyenvelope
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.)
the mojority of personal computer users don't matter?
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.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Then dont run the parts you dont like... Pretty simple.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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....
Yeah, who would have known that HTML and JavaScript/ECMAScript would have been more portable? Hmm...
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
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.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
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...
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?
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
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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.
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.
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.
'Capitalists of the world, unite! Oh
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?
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.
So you wanted the advanced features of the newer GUI's? Guess what? Those advanced features need RAM and CPU-horsepower! TANSTAAFL.
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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.
Alright. You two both go to separate corners for using works that hurt my brain.
You are all a bunch of idots.
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.
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.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
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.
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
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.
Read even the summary: KDE is *not* going to run Apple widgets. They're simpyl copying the idea. Nothing to see here, move along.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Hmm
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.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
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.
Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions. It's the only way to mak
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.
"Sufferin' succotash."
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.
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.
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.
"Java application servers routinely run non-stop for weeks"
Our J2EE app servers run for months and could run for years without a problem.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
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.
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?
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Soo KDE shouldn't give users what they want?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
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.
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.
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.
Not everyone needs to upgrade their hardware though...
Clever signature text goes here.
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.
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.
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?
... and then they built the supercollider.
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.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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
~jeff
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)
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.
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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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).
Heck, who still uses that legacy stuff anyway?
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
K-Names make me want to K-rush my K-cranium in a trash K-ompactor.
... and then they built the supercollider.
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
1p}{ 1 sp34k |33+ +|-|e|\| p30p13 \/\/il| 8e i/\/\pr3553|)
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
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.
Wouldn't it be nice if Yahoo! open sourced Konfabulator so that people could port it to Linux?
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.
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.
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."
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.
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
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.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
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.
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.
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.
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
> If making "bloat configurable" really made "everyone happy", ... then Microsoft Office would be market leader.
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.
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.
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).
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
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.
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
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
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?
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 ...
Kris Kerwin kkerwin@insi__REMOVE_ME__ghtbb.com
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
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
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.
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
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."
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
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?
why don't gnome people make news like this ? :-(
Sent from my desktop computer
A line like that is usual followed by an "Oh, wait..."
DCMonkey
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.
Someday we'll all be negroes
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.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Now all they need to do is merge KDE and GNUStep, and we'll be in business!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I'm not anti-GNOME, but I'm pro-KDE. GNOME has potential, but they're undergoing some unfavourable transitions right now.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
"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?
That's what the kiosk tool is there for.
Mada mada dane.
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
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
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep