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KDE Celebrates 10 Years of Existence
Rob Kaper wrote in to tell us about KDE's 10th anniversary. From the article:
"Yesterday at 10:00 AM the president of the KDE e.V. Eva Brucherseifer welcomed the audience of the presentation track at the KDE anniversary event at the Technische Akademie Esslingen (TAE) in Ostfildern near Stuttgart, Germany. Keynote speakers were Matthias Ettrich, founder of the KDE project, as well as Klaus Knopper of Knoppix fame. During their presentations they looked back at KDE's successful past 10 years and they offered their thoughts about the future of KDE and Free Software."
Rob adds this thought: "We've come a long way in ten years, but where must we still improve?"
I was a KDE user on FreeBSD before I bought a Mac a few months ago. I was generally very happy with my KDE experience, and they seemed to have done a great job with their desktop. There are a few complaints that I've had:
Those are my only complaints about KDE. KDE is a very nice desktop environment. These improvements will make it the perfect desktop environment for me, and a serious contender to GNOME, Windows, and OS X for most other users. Keep up the good work.
"Let's kill the bouncing."
Or disable it in the configuration options. In fact, the several times I've used KDE in the not-too-distant past, it was off by default.
Speed. KDE (and Gnome) need better speed optimizations.
This is most likely your video card drivers. KDE is plenty fast, but if you dont have acceleration working in X, then everything will seem sluggish. My card is poorly supported (ATI Xpress 200m) and it makes everything seem slow.
Memory usage. The memory requirements of KDE and and Gnome are ridiculous.
Yes, if you mean ridiculously low. Fresh boot, Debian with KDE 3.5.4 on my old box, 32MB of ram used. Start up konversation (irc client) and it's about 45MB. Every subsequent application uses less extra ram, because the libraries are already loaded. Fresh boot on windows xp is at least 100MB, on my laptop more like 150. Most likely you have no idea on how to measure memory usage on linux. Have a look here: http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/
Clutter.
You've got a point there, it's getting better with every release though. And no, sacrificing features for simplicity like Gnome did is not a good strategy.
Consistency.
That's one of the strengths of KDE actually. Everything works the same across the KDE apps. Keyboard shortcuts, look, general menu structure, colours, style, etc etc. And then we get into the even more important consistency, which is functional consistency. Just about every app that needs a text editor uses the same one, so they all behave the same. The same spell checking engine is used almost everywhere, and the password manager saves passwords for every application that has a need to store them. No other operating system is anywhere close to that consistent. Not OS X, not Windows, nothing.
DCOP can already do amazing things, like opening and writing a koffice document (including commands to do things like ie: activate bold fonts and many other things)
Do you want to send the oputput of ls -l to your IM contact via Kopete? Just do "dcop kopete KopeteIface messageContact jabber.com "`ls -l `"
Those are the kind of things that make many people use KDE instead of Gnome BTW
First there was Kat, which seems to be dead for unknown (personal to the lead developer?) reasons, but is still packaged by eg Mandriva, and is very useful, see its Wikipedia entry. Now its successor is Strigi which acts as KPart and KIO-slave. I don't think anyone's currently packaging it because it's pretty new, but there's no real cost to switching something like a search engine, so use Kat for now if you want it, and switch to Strigi when it becomes available for your distribution. I love the Plastik theme and the customizability of the KDE toolbars, so to each his own on that front. I think you will find that with KDE-look, you hardly have to spend hours looking for themes if you do want something different, however.
U.S. War Crimes blog. Email for free Mandriva support.
I would like to add that KDE 3.5 starts faster and loads applications quicker than earlier versions, in contrast to some other desktop environment I shall not name. Kudos to the KDE developers to work on this.
You know, I don't particularly like KDE (see my other comment). But compared to Mac and Windows, KDE is a lot faster and more consistent. I think it also has significantly lower memory usage than a Mac. I'll give you that it is more cluttered than the Mac.
It's funny how most of KDE's critics just have no idea what they're talking about, and haven't even used KDE long enough to know how to fix any of the "problems" they have with it. All of your issues with KDE are easily fixed. Watch:
The fonts are ugly.
Font anti-aliasing isn't even enabled in the screenshot you linked to. That's a very easy fix. Control Center --> Appearance & Themes --> Fonts --> Tick "Use anti-aliasing for fonts". The difference will be dramatic. Everything will look beautiful after that. In fact on my main box, the fonts in KDE with anti-aliasing turned on look much better than the fonts in Windows XP with font smoothing/Cleartype turned on. I kid you not.
The interface by default, is full of huge buttons wasting screen real estate.
Again, I can tell you haven't actually used KDE. Otherwise, you might know that the little perforated area on the left of the toolbars in that screenshot let's you easily drag the toolbars to where you want them. If that's not good enough, you can right click on the buttons and customize the toolbars that way. In fact, in my own setup, I have those two toolbars combined into one.
They (KDE) should look at hiring a beautification expert. Xandros and Linspire should provide a hint.
This gave me a little chuckle. You see, both of those distros ship their own KDE theme on top of ordinary, run-of-the-mill KDE. So what you've basically just said is that you like the default KDE themes for those distributions. That's why KDE is themeable in the first place, just like Windows, Gnome, and pretty much everything else--there is this understanding that all users might not like the same color schemes and graphical changes. KDE allows for plenty of different ways of customizing what you see. In fact, I daresay you can change pretty much everything you see. My own desktop looks very OS X-y because I spent about 5 minutes making it look like that. If you're not willing to invest the same amount of time into making KDE look better, than why do you have all this free time to complain about how it looks?
Every one of those features is originally from Mac OS X, not Vista.
"Sufferin' succotash."
That's what xfce is for. It has a KDE compatibility layer, and now even comes in handy Xubuntu live CD form.
http://xubuntu.com/
nVidia with 128mb RAM. Official drivers. Windows feels more responsive.
I am no fan of Windows. However, run KDE or Gnome on a PII 400MHz machine with 128mb RAM. They crawl, especially when actually trying to do something like run Firefox or OpenOffice (don't even bother). Windows XP, however, will run adequately. Firefox works and feels responsive. So does OpenOffice. To get KDE or Gnome to run adequately, you need to bump up the ram to at least 384mb, though it still feels less responsive.
If you still don't believe me that KDE and Gnome use ridiculous amounts of RAM, download VMWare Server (make sure your machine has at least a gig of memory). Create several VMs with 128mb of ram. Try several Linux distros, both with KDE and Gnome. Feel how unusable they are. Bump it up to 256. See the improvement. Bump it up to 384 and notice more of an improvement. Now try Windows XP with 128. Doesn't work great, but it does work better than KDE or Gnome with that amount.