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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?"
how about memory usage ? be nice to run KDE on older hardware to replace those soon-to-be-defunct Win98 boxes
That's easily said and not so easily done.
How about this one...
All "official" KDE apps get restructured to be command line interface (CLI) and graphical user interface (GUI) front ends to shared object libraries. In every KDE app you can find an entry in the "about" function that shows you how the CLI would do various tasks, including the last task you did. You can even make it optional as a compile-time option in source code. (Power users would rather not have that function bloat up their code, no doubt.)
In a flash, any GUI using novice with a hunger to know more about Linux, can look right there and see how it's done.
In no time you'll have tons of people speeding up their KDE by doing everything on the command line and perhaps even using less memory (as far as CLI vs GUI memory usage is concerned).
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Kappy Kirthday to you,
Kappy Kirthday to you,
Kappy Kirthday Kister Kresident,
Kappy Kirthday Ko Kou
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Keep up Khe Kood Kork
I'd just like to say congratulations and thank you for making such a great desktop. Keep up the good work for KDE 4. Just in case anyone is interested in getting involved, here's the link to the Support KDE page. There's info there on how to donate money, time, code, etc.
I've always pictured the color of OS zealotry as a sort of bright flamingo pinkish hue
Yet another sickening blow has struck what's left of the Linux community, as a soon-to-be-released report by the independent Commision for Technology Management (CTM) after a year-long study has concluded: Linux is already dead. Here are some of the commission's findings:
.005% of internet servers. This led to Mandrakesoft, makers of another troubled distro, to purchase Connectiva and become Mandriva. However, industry anaylists say that this will not help since Mandriva is already a shell of its former self.
Fact: Linux has balkanized yet again. There are now no less than 140 separate, competing Linux distros, each of which has introduced fundamental incompatibilities with the other distros, and frequently with Unix standards. Average number of developers in each project (except for Redhat and Novell/Suse): fewer than five. Average number of users per project: there are no definitive numbers, but reports show that all projects are on the decline.
Fact: The trivial issue os what to call Linux continues to hound Linux. At a recent Linux conference in San Francisco, a fight broke out between RMS (Richard M. Stallman) who says Linux should be called GNU/Linux and Linus Torvalds who created Linux and says that Linux should be called Linux. This led to a massive barroom style brawl involving at least 150 Linux geeks. The SFPD was called out to break up the melee, and arrested 150 people. It was estimated that at least 2 to 3 times that many were involved in the brawl, but there wasn't enough police on hand to arrest or count all of them. Sixty one people were hospitalized as a result of this brawl, and one person is still in a coma. Another three people had to get their jaws wired shut.
Fact: Linux is plagued by a lack of professionalism. The stereotype of Linux users being fat unwashed dateless geeks who still live in their parents' basements and refuse to shower more than once a month is all too true. The best example of this is RMS who claims to have a "water phobia" and thus rarely bathes. RMS also looks like he has been living in a cave for the last 5 years. In fact, RMS has been arrested twice because he has been mistaken for Osama Bin Laden. While RMS has always been found to not be Osama Bin Laden, it has created a perception of that Linux is the "terrorist operating system". Linus Torvalds has been forced to spend a great deal of time correcting this perception instead of working on the Linux kernel. Alan Cox quit Linux kernel development since he got tired of everyone saying that he was a terrorist.
Fact: There are almost no Connectiva developers left, and its use, according to Netcraft, is down to a sadly crippled
Fact: X.org will not include support for Redhat's Fedora project. The newly formed group believes that Fedora has strayed too far from Unix standards and have become too difficult to support along with other Linux distros and Solaris x86. "It's too much trouble," said one anonymous developer. "If they want to make their own standards, let them doing the porting for us."
Fact: Ubuntu Linux, yet another offshoot of the beleaguered Debian "distro", is already collapsing under the weight of internal power struggles and in-fighting. "They haven't done a single decent release," notes Mark Baron, an industry watcher and columnist. "Their mailing lists read like an online version of a Jerry Springer episode, complete with food fights, swearing, name-calling, and chair-throwing. It also doesn't help that most people think the word, "Ubuntu", is an obscure term for a homosexual orgy." Netcraft reports that Ubuntu Linux is run on exactly 0% of internet servers. An attempt to save Ubuntu by creating a derivative distro called Kubuntu has also failed.
Fact: Debian Linux, which claims to focus on "being free" (whatever that is supposed to mean), is slow, and cannot take advantage of multiple CPUs. "That about drove the last nail in the coffin for Linux use here," said Michael Curry, CTO of Amazon.com. "We took our Debian boxes out to the backyard and sh
Not that KDE's a bad window manager, but it seems too... childish. Brightly colored icons that bounce up and down whenever I click something don't generally appeal to me. Let's kill the bouncing.
Finally improve kphone to the point where it is stable enough to live through 2+ phone calls and make it use arts instead of using the sound hardware directly.
;-)
Even better, throw it out and start something from scratch that aims to be a good SIP phone while being modular so you can expand it with plugins to a useable Asterisk switchboard console or add codecs that cannot be GPLed (or both).
This is possibly the only KDE app that I feel like missing when using KDE.
Disclaimer - I have not looked at kphone for a few months now so I may be barking up the wrong tree
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
It would be annoyed to see another flame between KDE, GNOME, XFCE, *box, FVWM, E17, WM, ...
Shall we just focus on KDE, buddies ?
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.
Come on, guys. Troll? RMS has been arrested twice because he has been mistaken for Osama Bin Laden ... RMS has always been found to not be Osama Bin Laden .... is just one of the gems in this mess of meta-troll.
(OB)
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Couldn't /. celebrate the birthday by finally replacing the old (as in 10 years old) logo with the new (as in 5 years old) one?
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
I had installed plain-old Ubuntu a few months back, and was fairly impressed.
But Kubuntu....well, it sucks. The interface is cluttered as hell. I actually had a couple of apps FREEZE, which I've never seen before. It's slower than Gnome on my machine. File management is goofy. The themes are ugly. And, honestly, it seems to me that most of the cooler applications are written for Gnome/GTK, and don't fit in very well under KDE.
I was suprised at how bad it was, actually. I used KDE way back when, because it was better than Gnome. But I think the tide has turned.
Now if the Gnome guys (and KDE guys, too) could just figure out a way to have decent fonts installed by default, with the correct anti-aliasing and hinting. I *hate* all the screwing around you have to do to get fonts to look good on Linux. It's retarded. Everything else is a few clicks away, but to get fonts looking good you have to hand edit multiple config files.
- One of our machines has a TV for it's second head, but the TV is almost always turned off or displaying a movie from our DVD player. Since the TV is never used for anything but movies, KDE should be able to ignore the presence of it entirely when a new window is opened, but still let me drag an already-open window over to it if I want to.
- From the point of view of an advanced user, there doesn't seem to be any logical reason for the Dock-Apps panel to exist. Why can't I just dock my WM/AS apps into a regular panel instead?
- As one other user pointed out, there are a few sluggish spots here and there that shouldn't happen on a fast box like mine (AMD64x2 3800+ with 1GB RAM and Nvidia 6600). These seem to concentrate on Konqueror when it's used for file management.
- When the Control Center can't load a settings module, it should display a warning message and tell me what to do to fix the problem, instead of just saying "Loading..." and then returning to the 'main' start screen after a couple of seconds.
Other than these, KDE seems to do pretty well for my husband and I. I've tried several other environments (Gnome, E, Windowmaker, Afterstep, FVWM, XFCE) and KDE just had the best round-up of features for my needs and preferences.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.
For me, it's the two major sub-items covered under one big one: Beauty.
I stopped using KDE years ago, but does Konqueror still do that ridiculous thing where it asks you what you mean when you drag and drop a file, every single time you do so, with no option to set a default?
As ridiculously poor user-interface decisions go, introducing extra clicks to achieve a common goal rather than defaulting to the almost universal standard of assuming a drag-and-drop means "move" ranks right up there as one of the worst I've seen.
First of all. Congratulations. Kde has come a long way.
r ience/. These people are know for the usabilty of their os and applications. Why not learn from them? There is ample room for improvement.
Now as for things that I would like to see:
- better integration with sites like kde-look. Why is there a "Get New Wallpapers" button and not a "Get new icons", "Get new themes" and so on. Everyone likes eyecandy (even those who claim they don't:) ).
- Mac Spotlight 'nuff said
- And when we are stealing from apple: why not read http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExpe
- Some way to easily steal extensions from firefox and import them into konq. (I like kde, but no way in hell I'm giving up ff).
- Enough with the K crap, please
- One toolbar per application. Kile (a nice app none the less) is a scary example of not getting the idea of a toolbar.
- XGL + KDE. Is it at all possible?
- KDM shutdown picture (the lightning thing) is horrible.
Thats it. I am really looking forward to kde4.
CP/M-80 with ZCPR for the win.
And yes, I still have my Kaypro II.
Happy Birthday KDE! I love you!
Where I would like to see you improve -- Please, Please Please implement support for OSX style application bundles -- it would make it so much easier for me easier to make easily distributable packages for you if you would support them.
Don't pay attention to the clueless dorks who are suggesting that you should switch everything from C++ to something else, use GTK libs or reimplement everything to be a GUI front end to CLI commands -- those are incredibly bad ideas. You are pretty much perfect the way you are (especially on openSUSE). Next steps should be to make yourself more accessible for non-core Qt/KDE developers. Adding support for a flexible packaging scheme like the bundles used on OSX would go a long way towards that.
Paul.
As I tried out Vista a couple of months ago I became rather fond of some of the (for windows) new features. I would love to see some of them implemented in Gnome/KDE/Ubuntu/linux in general;
Instant searches and dynamic stacking of files. A constantly indexed system *cough*spotlight*cough* that lets you create dynamic stacks. Stacks behave like folders - you can browse a stack for instance - but have no physical location on your drive. This combined with instant searches from anywhere in the OS, gives you the ability to generate "directories" sorted on basically any kind of index. If you create a stack of every file in the system created since a given date it would stay updated in real time!
Searches that include the entire system. Search for "resolution" and you'll not only get files, but also info on how to set the desktop resolution, and links to the settings page.
Per-network settings. The system remembers networks you connect to, and lets you define custom settings for each network. You want your firewall disabled when connecting at home, but back on when you connect from school? No probs.
Quick swapping of pre-defined (configurable) power settings will let you avoid your laptop going to sleep in the middle of a presentation. I would like a built-in application for power control that allows me to set not only the standard options of HDD spindown and screensaver - but also a detailed control over advanced settings like core and memory voltages, CPU clocks, WLAN output effect and so on.
One of my pet peeves is the taskbar. Having long textual descriptions on the buttons for open windows is fine when you have only a few windows open, but gets problematic rather quickly. Putting two layers of buttons over one another is not a good solution, as the top layer takes a lot longer to reach (Fitt's law). Moving the taskbar to the side of the screen helps somewhat, but results in the window buttons being rather too small.
The right way to solve this, IMO, is to use icons, just like NEXTSTEP and its descendants (WindowMaker, OS X, etc.). I know there is kxdocker, but last time I tried to use it is was unstable like nothing I've ever seen before, and it doesn't play together with the KDE dock very well (as in, not at all).
For the rest, I find KDE a very nice desktop environment (and have since 3.1), although I must admit that desktop environment aren't really my thing; I prefer ratpoison, uxterm, and screen.
Special kudos go to Konqueror; it's my favorite browser, because it's both fast and featureful. I can't comment on its qualities as a file manager; I never use it as such, and, frankly, I'd probably sleep easier if that functionality were moved into a separate program. Still, it works great as it is.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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?
In the words of Zim: "Lies! Filthy earth-boy lies!!"
"We've come a long way in ten years, but where must we still improve?"
Continuous session saving. KDE already saves session state on logout. Now the API for doing this should be changed so that each application saves its state not only on logout, but on every change (with several seconds' delay so as not to overload I/O).
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"KDE Celebrates 10 Years of Existence"
...don't we call that sort of event a birthday? Original wording seems, kinda... well... wordy....
...we could be pithier and simply state:
"KDE turns 10"
As per this 5 year old bug, proper mouse button support would be nice. Hacks are not very user friendly, as the whole POINT of KDE is that an end user isn't going to have to monkey with something like imwheel. Heck, 7 button support has been in Window Managers like Sawfish for 7+ _YEARS_. I'm not quite sure why this isn't implemented, but it sure as hell isn't because of QT.
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34362
I wonder about a recent bug I found.. about three months ago, about applications not showing on iconification when also shaded, in the tasklist. The bug report I found was about three years old.
My point? Usability means that perhaps you should deal with usability bugs. I have KDE set up for my parents. Trust me, when they iconify an app that happened to be shaded, they don't know to use ps to find it and kill it. They don't know about alt-tab. They just think it crashed.
Kongrats
I think the best thing you can get from MacOS is the SDI vs. MDI issue.
/usr/bin$ ls -l k* |wc -l
.app files I can easily drag into my ~/Applications directory (to install), and delete (to uninstall). Have fun doing that on Linux!
In MacOS, Apple+Tab = switch Application. Apple+~ = switch window. This means I can easily go between application windows without futzing accidently into other applications.
In KDE and Windows, this is not enforced, so I run into the situation of EVERYTHING being hidden in alt+tab.
Consider: are subdirectories a good thing? Would you rather everything was in one root directory, each time having to search it for a file you want? No.
Here's another one I'd like: hiding applications. If I'm not working with an application, but I'd like it to retain its state, I just Apple+H it (it'd be even better if all applications were stateful, but that's a bit harder to enforce). I can Apple+Tab back to it when I want it (and have its state restored as it's unhidden). No analog to this behaviour exists under other systems. The closest would be virtual desktops, but those bring their own set of problems (do you switch to a desktop when you switch to that application? Is it bound to that desktop? etc).
MacOS is very consistent in its keyboard shortcuts. Apple+Q, Apple+W, Apple+H -- they all have the same meaning (unless you use bad applications, like Microsoft Office or Photoshop, which are greedy and appropriate every shortcut they can). No such consistency exists in UNIX land.
Current attempts to clone Quicksilver and Expose are terrible, and not ready for prime time. The 3D features of my video card are not used to accelerate anything. Why not?
In MacOS, if I go into the system Applications directory, there are maybe 20 programs. I can live with that (do full development, documentation, office work, etc).
334
I know that not all of these programs are KDE applications, but there must be a better way. MacOS is nice in that it keeps the GUI world and the CLI world connected, but not intermingled. the KDE team could learn from this.
In MacOS, applications and their support files and libraries are bundled into
KDE is great if you are used to Windows, which is a bad paradigm to begin with, but it's trash if you've used a real GUI system.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
You can find them at:
c e%20Tips
http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Performan
And, according to http://terra.es/personal/diegocg/kde/#DCOP
KDE 4 will use Qt 4.0 which is a big improvement in that field. When Qt designer was ported to Qt 4.0 - only the neccesary changes to make it compile - the "libqt size decreased by 5%, Designer num relocs went down by 30%, mallocs use by 51%, and memory use by 15%. The measured Designer startup time went down by 18%".
Open FireFix in Win32. Hit Ctrl+N. Now, does Ctrl+TAB move between the two firefox windows, or does Alt+Tab move between the two Firefox windows? How many entries for Firefox are there in the Windows taskbar?
I thought so.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
1. Split the packages
:)
Yeah it's more of a distro maintainers problem, but it reflects badly on KDE. It's so annoying to have to big packages of stuff i mostly don't use. E.g. I like the dirfilter konqueror extension, but it's part of kdeaddons which depends on kdegames and kdepim (which i don't want)
2. Better file association management
If you can't split the packages the least you can do is provide better file association management. It should be easier to edit a group of file types. E.g. I want everything in the image group to open with gwenview with krita second and nothing else. I had to go through every one and edit it.
3. Separate Konqueror and kfmclient
Konqueror the Web Browser and Konqueror the File Manager should be separate. Completely separate toolbars, menus, settings and file associations (konqueror the web browser's file associations should be much simpler, something like Firefox's). At the moment i can't get konq web browser to work the way i want it without messing up konq file manager.
For the most part I like KDE
10 years of the Kool Desktop Environment. really Kool!
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
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/
I love KDE, but my biggest complaint is the time to start KDE. It's fast enough when it's running, but man, you have to get it started up first...add KDE startup on top of a live CD (like KNOPPIX) and then you're talking intolerably slow. Startup time alone keeps me using GNOME on my laptop, though I use the K on my desktop.
Penny - plain text accounting
Now before you flame too hard, keep in mind:
Gnome...sucks.
Vista...sucks.
MacOS...sucks.
CDE...still sucks.
User interface design is retarded. We need to get some complete computer neophytes to look at our interfaces, and point out the obvious blind spots we've created for ourselves.
Put another way: Computer user interfaces SUCK! The current set of 'innovations' are only innovative and progressive within the context of users (such as ourselves) who have rigorously trained ourselves to think like computers.
Nothing about computers is intelligent, elegant, or intuitive. Ironically enough, the command line interface is probably still the best thing we've got, beyond a certain level of complexity.
No computer interface--not a single one--deserves a celebration. Not until they figure out people think when they're not trying to think like computers.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Those are way better complaints than the typical ones, which are usually something like "KDE isn't the way I like it by default and I don't understand why a desktop environment is not exactly the way I like it by default! Forget navigating one menu and clicking one option, What about my needs!"
;)
1. OK/Apply/Cancel - Yes, this was stolen from Windows and I can't say I like it myself. In the Control Panel, if you forget to apply your settings before moving on, you will get a notice asking you if you want to apply them. That kinda helps the problem, but not really.
2. Open folder in new/same window. - I thought for sure this was the default setting anyway. If not, in Konqueror go to Settings --> Configure Konqueror --> and it's the very first checkbox you see, right on the Behavior tab. That's a really, really easy fix. I was beginning to doubt you until you said...
3. Too many menus! - This is a very good point--I would mod you up for it if I could. A lot of software has novice/intermmediate/advanced user settings that hide or show certain options based on the user's sophistication level. With KDE it's just WHAM: "How about these 500 different settings, do you like those?" If you don't know where to go to change a setting, then be prepared to look for it. And I agree, that's not something a user should have to do. (note: There may already be a way of doing this, but if there is, I'm not aware of it and it's buried in the menus somewhere. How's that for irony?
4. Customising shortcut keys. Yes, shortcut configuration is more intuitive in GTK apps. With KDE, you usually have to navigate a few menus in the DE and/or in most KDE apps to change them.
5. The open & save dialogs. I'm not sure I completely understand your problem, but I will say that the GTK dialogs, in my opinion, are even worse. They're blocky and borderline non-functional and love to ignore old save points as well. My own issue with the KDE dialogs is that getting file listings for large directories just chokes. It doesn't matter if I'm trying to get listings for FAT or ext3 partitions, too. I've got lightning fast drives, but for some reason giving me the graphical equivalent of an "ls" under KDE takes forever. So yeah, you've got another legit complaint--the dialogs need some optimization work or something.
6. Complexity. This is just the same problem as #3. There needs to be a way to pare down the options so that just the ones that most people will want to change are obvious, while advanced users still retain access to the more minute settings.
You raise some great points. You know, I was once a huge critic of KDE. On my old box, it was slow, unresponsive and bloated. I don't know exactly when the KDE people fixed those problems--version 3.x maybe? But anyway, when I tried it again after another few years of development I was very pleased with it. Now it's less a question of optimizing the code and more about tweaking the design. The good news is they're listening to their userbase and they're willing to make changes to whatever we don't like. That's about the best we could hope for from the people behind such a huge open source project.
No, I read the word "default" just fine. I guess I just don't share the arrogance associated with believing that I'm some kind of Everyman and that all software I use should be exactly the way I like it the first time I use it--especially when making it that way requires the most trivial of changes.
Bizarre megalomania aside, if the default settings are too spartan and ugly for you, then perhaps you've forgotten that every time something is made "prettier" it uses more RAM, burns more CPU cycles, or both. The idea is to make software that will run capably on most anything without tweaking, from a lowly Pentium I all the way up to the latest and greatest hardware. Complaining that you own the latest and greatest gear and have to change a handful of settings to take advantage of it tends to resonate as so much empty bleating. Are you sure you wouldn't just be happier running Vista?
Forcing the user to change to sensible defaults IS a broken interface.
Now you're getting it! That's a broken interface, though that's hardly the only reason the laughable Windows interface is so shoddy (don't get me started on the Start menu).
Next.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Hit the nail on the head. The good news for people who have unsurmountable problems with KDE is that there are literally dozens of other options out there. With enough energy and curiosity they'll find something they like. KDE, one of the few DE's that at least tries to be a shoe that fits every foot is taking heat for its lack of customization and default options, which I find highly ironic. I can tell by the way this thread has been moderated that I'm alone in noticing this.
But keep in mind that these people are not KDE users--they're people who are logging onto Slashdot using Firefox on their Windows machines to complain about how ass-hurt they are that KDE didn't have the exact settings they wanted enabled by default. They're typically not people who even use KDE/Linux/whatever else enough to have anything but the stupidest of complaints. A legitimate complaint about KDE would be something like "Help! There are all these menus and I can't figure out how to change this stuff!" That's a good sign that something's wrong. Not, "I'm such a pompous ass that I believe this should already be the way I want it by default. I represent all KDE users, everywhere."
Oh well, at least another person gets it.
The moderation on the parent message is predictable KDE groupthink and just reinforces my point.
All other major desktop environments (Gnome, Mac, Windows) allow no-cost commercial development and distribution, and all other major desktop environments are moving to languages other than C/C++ (namely, C# and Objective-C). You can make KDE as wonderful as you like from a user's point of view, and it may maintain a significant market share for another few years, but this is as good as it's ever going to get for KDE.
Amarok - I believe the collection Tab is what you are looking for. Rather than the Playlist tab... (Look at the left side of Amarok there should be a bunch of vertical tabs running down the side of the screen... These are pretty central to running amarok...
You misunderstand, either that or have a predetermined agenda...
A neophyte is a neophyte until they learn better, than then from then on until the day they die, they know how to use whatever technology it is we're discussing.
Why cater only to neophytes when people who are actually interested in learning how to use the tools will not be neophytes for the vast majority of the time they spend using it?
I mean (random example), there are excel wizards in my company who can do stuff i can only dream about in excel. Should excel be dumbed down at their expense so I can more easily use the program to add up a couple of rows of numbers? Another example... autocad is hard to use. Should it be turned into something like paint so that any dumbass can use it, but using it for professional level tasks is made more of a pain in the ass?
No.
I'm not sure why you bring up the original IBMs in your argument, as they were much harder to use than modern machines, and the people who decided to learn how to use them had to put in the effort...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Yeah. I'll do the same and not touch Linux until is GPL! Oops, wait...
Plastikfox is a theme for Firefox that mimics the default Plastik theme. Openoffice also has a Qt interface that blends into KDE fairly flawlessly.
"I have never seen any benefit to OS X's method. "
Great, you haven't, I have. I believe the question was, "what can we do to improve KDE" -- and adding this behaviour would improve my experience with KDE.
Feel free to turn it off on your install, and I'll feel free to turn it on, on mine. There's no such thing as a "right" interface.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I have used KDE for years, and have been pretty fond of it. (I have not liked Gnome when I tried it, but the last time was a while ago.) There's only one complaint I have. Every so often someone on the KDE team gets the bright idea that the way to implement some feature is to trap some key combination in the window manager or X server or some low-level place where the behavior is unconfigurable. In one release, a couple of years ago, the Windows key brought up the K menu, and there was no way to change this, not even using xmodmap. And now I find that in the new KDE used in SLED 10, Alt-Space brings up the Kerry Beagle Search dialog, and there's absolutely nothing I can do to change this -- it's not a configurable shortcut. In fact, it's clearly implemented at some low level, because it has a bug: not only does the dialog pop up, but somehow the Alt key's key-release event is lost, so Alt stays on unless I press and release it again.
Dear KDE team: please make it a part of your culture that you never ever ever do this. All special key combinations must be trapped in such a way that they are configurable, period. (In fairness, these things do seem to get fixed in subsequent releases... but I have to live with them in the meantime.)
Since I'm sure you're wondering why I care -- well, you must have no Emacs users on your team; Alt-Space (or Meta-Space in Emacs-speak) and Control-Meta-Space are both important Emacs commands which I use frequently. Interestingly, both of them are now bringing up the Kerry Beagle dialog, which is additional evidence that the key combination is being trapped incorrectly.
Except for that -- keep up the good work!
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!