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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
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.
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.
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
- 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.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.
For me, it's the two major sub-items covered under one big one: Beauty.
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.
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.
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?
Kongrats
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/
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.
I'd like to offer a rebuttal to that. Mac OS has always been about the general interface and styling being consistent across apps, and this is still true with OS X. Some rogue apps (looking at you, Microsoft) sometimes use retarded, non-standard shortcuts, but even in Microsoft's case this is not as bad as the majority of Windows or Linux apps I've encountered. Toolbars, buttons, dialogs, menus, and the majority of keyboard shortcuts work the same across all OS X apps. The only common exceptions are poorly-written little utilities, which I'm sure even KDE is susceptible to.
As for the spell check engine, password management, etc. your assertion that OS X does not do that is just downright false. The standard text widgets support the system-wide spell checker, and any app can easily take advantage of the system Address Book, Keychain database for passwords, Spotlight for searching, etc. Any app worth using will support all of these things if they are at all applicable to the program.
So, yes, I resent the "not anywhere close" remark. Windows is a lost cause, but I would say that OS X is at least on par, if not far beyond in some areas (e.g. the ability to AppleScript any virtually application, even if it was not coded with that in mind... or the combination of Expose with drag-and-drop wizardry to make it easy to move chunks of data around).
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