Plasma: The Next-Generation KDE Environment Review

slashy writes, "MadPenguin has taken a quick look at Plasma, the next gen. KDE environment. 'Plasma is an ambitious project being pursued by the KDE 4 team which aims at providing a workflow-sensitive design of the user interface that improves productivity of an average KDE user. The focus is on improving the clarity and reducing the clutter present in today's desktops. The plasma development will bring together key contributors, such as the visual artists, usability experts, technology experts, programmers, and enthusiasts at a very early stage during the development process. This will enable them to create a new desktop environment that meets the requirements of novices and experts alike.'"

Comments

Reducing clutter

[betterunixthanunix]

Let me start by saying that I have been waiting for KDE 4 since it was first announced, mainly because of it's lower memory requirements.

Having said that, I have found that most people will clutter their desktops regardless of what the software tries to do. Remember XP's desktop cleanup wizard, which attempted to help people remove things from their desktops that they didn't use often? I still see the majority of people with hundreds of icons and files haphazardly arranged. When I helped my friend migrate to Linux, it only took him a week to turn KDE into an icon pile. Add Firefox into the mix, which drops downloads onto the desktop by default, and the battle is completely lost.

Re:Reducing clutter

[tolan-b]

I think they mean UI clutter rather than clutter of the desktop 'surface'.

A quick look?

[ledow]

A quick look is somewhat understating the review - not a single screenshot and 8 paragraphs of next-to-nothing except what "will" or "should" be in Plasma.

Useful content: 1%

Like the "Buy a Link Now" on the article itself... I think someone just bought themselves a link from Slashdot.

...an icon pile?

[NotQuiteReal]

So?

I thought the whole idea of personal computers was to allow people to work they way they wanted to?

You may like clean desktops while others like cluttered desktops.

Let's start a holy war over how many icons can dance on a screen.

Re:New Project - Redo X-Windows

[LLuthor]

And do what differently?

Care to point out some deficiency in the X codebase?

Workflow-sensitive?

[TheWoozle]

The average user can't figure out how to organize their *own* desktop to accomodate their workflow better than "this pile of icons is for this, that pile of icons is for that", and these guys are going to come along and have the *computer* decide what's best?

Sheesh, have we learned nothing from Microsoft? Having the computer decide what things a user can interact with and how the user can interact with them based on a set of hidden, unchangeable rules is counter-productive at best; at times, it can be murderous-rage inducing.

How about we actually help people become better-organized by, oh, I don't know...teaching them some useful organizational skills?!

Re:the grass is always greener

[lawpoop]

I used to think that 'duplication' was just a waste of effort. Wouldn't it be better if we all put our effort together in harmony and came up with the Next Big Thing? United we stand, divided we fall?

The problem is, when your working on a huge monolithic project like that, people really don't work together. There are arguments and disagreements. Energetical people with radical, new ideas will encounter old farts who want to do things the old way, become disenfranchised and give up. Productive old workhorses will be frustrated by young upstarts trying to pull them in 100 different directions at once, selling a bad idea from 10 years ago as the latest, greatest idea. The project will proceed on the lowest common denominator, implementing vanilla ideas that are promoted simply because nobody could find a reason to reject them.

Would you like it if Apple and MS got together to make a unified desktop? Don't you think that the bureaucracy and organizational overhead would stymie the project and ultimately water down the end result?

Instead of waste and duplication, think of it as parallel development teams, developing, implementing, and polishing the latest new ideas as a presentation to the larger mindshare market. Those ideas might need to re-developed or re-implemented, or they may be ready to be included in larger projects, like KDE or Gnome. It's a very effective and efficient way to harness human motivation and inspiration and deliver new ideas to the masses.