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?"

Comments

KDE Possible Improvements

[linguae]

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:

1. All of the themes look too "plasticky" and fake to me. You may find this very strange coming from a OS X user, but compared to OS X's Aqua or the Windows Classic theme (or even GNOME's themes), the KDE themes just don't feel right to me. I want something either a bit more serious (like Windows Classic) or something that does a great job with fanciness (like Aqua or even Vista's Aero). The KDE themes aren't terrible, but they can use some more work. I am also somebody who spend hours on web sites finding alternate themes, either; I call that a waste of time that can be better spent actually doing work.
2. Now that I've been using OS X for an extended period of time, I can't live without Expose and Spotlight now. Expose is easily doable; I've seen GNOME and KDE clones of that feature. A clone of Spotlight is much harder; the closest thing that I've seen to it is Beagle. I'll like to see an effort to introduce something like Spotlight or even the long-delayed WinFS to the Linux world. Heck, I may strongly consider contributing to such a project.
3. This page describes a few more complaints that I have about KDE. As an ex-Windows user (I dual-booted between FreeBSD and Windows XP), I like toolbars (I was upset with the Office 2007 ribbons because operations that used to require just one click on the toolbar may require two or three clicks, and there is no customizability). However, there is a such thing as too many default toolbars and too many options on the screen, which I notice in KDE applications. Many OS X applications handle access to features with Inspectors, which are dialog boxes that contain all of the main functionality of a program stored in tabs. The toolbar is only used for very commonly-used operations. Whenever I get to work, I just want a good-sized window to work with, along with a toolbar that contains some commonly-used operations. I don't want my workspace to be hidden by gobs of menus, toolbars, and other options. However, I don't want my functionality compromized either. Inspectors are a nice way of handling this. KDE can improve in this regard.

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.

Re:Improve?

[midkay]

"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.

Re:A few thoughts

[pherthyl]

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.

Welcome to the past

[diegocgteleline.es]

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