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Is KDE 4.0 the Holy Grail of Desktops?
An anonymous reader writes "With KDE 4.0 being expected some time this year, expectation runs high in the linux/unix users camp and the media read a lot between the lines of what the KDE developers say and do. In some ways KDE will provide a standard as to how a desktop should look and behave. This interesting article wonders whether KDE 4.0 will become the complete desktop which will meet the needs of a wide cross section of computer users. One of the common complaints that some Linux users have over KDE is that it is too cluttered. And by addressing this need without putting off the power users, the KDE developers could make it an all in one Desktop. Keep in mind that KDE 4.0 is based on Qt 4.0 and so can be easily ported to Windows and other OSes too which makes this thought doubly relevant."
Vista will be superior, ALWAYS
Why would you run another desktop on top of Windows? Wouldn't you take a performance hit for running two desktops, in essence?
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
To conquer the world... er... desktop they'll need to smooth out the theme a bit, and simplify -- which FTA seems to support. I'm all for unifying the desktop to some extent, further bridging the gap between Gnome and KDE. Lets face it, when you use a computer you have never touched before, you kinda expect things to work similarly and for widgets to be in more or less similar places.
And it has to be pretty, can't forget pretty.. lol
Why hasn't it been done, then?
The only thing that's "easy" is for non-programmers to say "well this toolkit is released for multiple OS's so it must be easy to port!"
Let me know when you got that working, k?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
... in 3D like pages in a Rolodex, then I'm not interested. (sarcasm off)
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Because if they did, they might notice that blog post talks more about Dolphin than anything else, and has virtually nothing to say about whether or not KDE 4.0 is the Holy Grail of desktops.
Hope they get some click-throughs from the traffic though.
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
No.
No it isn't.
I was briefly interested, but then I glanced at the screen shot, and nearly vomited from the ugliness.
finally I can use a windows box with a different gui, thus negating that iky feeling when I use a win box... I like my centos box quite nicely running gnome.
Ever since Windows 3.1, and even today, you do not have to run "Explorer" as your desktop.
A lot of people don't realize this, but the whole of the windows "desktop" - the task bar, the icons, the menus, the right click on the desktop, all runs under a single instance of the "explorer" process.
Via the registry you can change your shell to anything - including the old progman.exe from Windows 3.1 if you have it lying around (heck it even shipped with Windows until Windows 2000). I have switched my shell to Afterstep many times.
There is no logical reason you couldn't switch to KDE as your desktop environment after it had all been ported to windows. It would not have any kind of a built-in performance hit.
I'm not quite sure what the parent is talking about... Highlight some text, go to another app and press the middle mouse button, and presto, copying has occurred. Am I missing something?
I kAgree.
Fixed.
Ok, I recently switched from Gnome to KDE 3.5 and really have no plans to go back, but saying something which isn't even close to finished is "most-bestest" would seem to be jumping the gun.
I'm sure we can find as many blog entries about how Vista is most-bestest, or Gnome, or Xfce. Of those, I'd only ever buy the Xfce argument but to each their own.
Just take a look at the ugly cluttered mess in the screenshot and tell me the article's author isn't being sarcastic.
Thank god for fluxbox and multi-aterm.
I also hope that this release will make KDE fonts look sharp, crisp and beautiful by default. It is unfortunate that many times, we in the Linux community have to seek Microsoft's help on fonts in order to have a desktop that is a pleasure to look at.
Hardly.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm a huge fan of KDE. KDE is the project that made me think "yes, I will eventually be able to learn to use Linux" -- that was back in its 1.0 days. Now I use Linux full time (I still consider myself a beginner though). KDE is a good desktop -- it's knaming konventions are a klittle kstrange, but it's still a good desktop that makes basic Linux use a lot easier while not actually preventing you from getting into the guts of everything. It's my desktop of choice (I use Kubuntu).
But the Holy Grail of Desktops? There is no such beast, and there are too many opinions about what such a beast would be. There are too many people who want too many different things in their desktop. For my part, I want to see some desktop incorporate all the OO elements from OS/2's Workplace Shell... I've yet to see it happen. That's my "Holy Grail," and I expect if it were ever implemented it would be anathema to someone else.
The very thought that it might be able to "meet the needs of a wide cross section of computer users" would automatically make it fail in the eyes of some. I know and have spoken with some usability nuts who claim that there is One True Path to usability, and anyone who wants to do things differently is simply doing things WRONG, and that they need to learn the One True Path and experience how much better it is. "Acommodation" would be a design flaw from that perspective.
All that aside, I'm looking forward to KDE 4. One thing I've come to expect from the KDE developers is that everytime they release a new version of KDE I wind up liking the new version significantly more than the older version, and I think that's the most realistic expectation you can hope to have about software...
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Seriously. You can. CTRL-C and CTRL-V works just fine. Plus, you can normally just highlight and then middle-mouse click which is faster and *gasp* Windows doesn't do this. Think outside of the box?
Yes, you are. Though since I haven't used Linux as a desktop OS in awhile, I'm not sure if it's still an issue. Basically for a long time Linux had two different clipboards, some apps used one, some apps used another. So while what you describe worked 95% of the time, 5% of the time the two apps couldn't talk to each other via clipboard.
Pfft - my KDE desktop copies/pastes between all applications on Open Suse and Fedora. Plus, with the Klipper, I can paste things that I copied a while ago. I deem it superior.
I'm a student. I write iPhone apps.
It's ironic that you swear in the process of advising upon how to be taken seriously, in that your argument is subject to being automatically adjudged wanting for it's (unnecessary) inclusion of a low-grade shock tactic.
Please, bestow more sagacity upon us, I know I'm primed to receive after your first offering...
I can't imagine either. I just finished copy/paste-ing from a Windows VM in VMWare under Kubuntu to Kate, something I wasn't even sure was going to work. I copy/paste between any application I choose all the time, and the ONLY time I've had issues is when I'm running Windows as the native OS and try to paste into an app running across the network via cygwin.
I suppose that's why he's marked Troll so quickly.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
As far as I'm concerned, the perfect desktop is Windowmaker.
I use it on OpenBSd and Linux and it works nearly perfect.
I think I must have got the wrong article from that link. The one I read said that there may be a replacement for Konqueror called Dolphin but that Konqueror would still be available if people wanted it.
Was the one about KDE Being The Holy Grail Of The Modern Desktop anymore interesting ?
Maybe when I get a newer faster computer, but for now I'm sticking with fvwm and tkdesk.
...or maybe I don't?
They talk about how they want to basically include two file managers - the cluttered yet powerful Konqueror for power users AND the simpler yet still powerful Dolphin for everyone else, and then go on to say...
"Indeed if this trend is duplicated across other KDE applications, KDE 4.0 could very well end up as the holy grail of Desktops."
Different users with different needs is the problem here, and they need to solve it somehow. Are they suggesting that there should be two text editors, two video players, two web browsers, etc? Why not just keep saying "KDE is not for you" to those who don't like it?
Basically, they can't come up with a solution for everyone and want to include more options and more confusion, and THAT is the "Holy Grail" of desktops?
what-does-that-make-gnome-then
The Holy Hand Grenade
He means a copy paste functionality ala COM/Windows. Where you can copy and paste from any browser windows then paste it into any email client/word processor and keep the format. Or it can translate the data depending of the COM filter ..
... etc
... as they/we spend our whole life using computers only as tools not for development issues ... I am not working in programming anymore and my only issue with a comp that I have at the office is that it can sends emails, cut time spent in my daily tasks, and in my job, Windows is, for now, better suited for that.
It is quite nifty in an office environment to copy paste a screenshot, the content of a browser window, application data
You see, alot of people whose job is not IT related need these kind of functionalities
I am not a pro-windows guy nor a MS employee, refrain from modding me from what I stated above, which is only my own and personal opinion, and, you are, of course, allowed to disagree with me.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
I think he might want to cut and paste with a highlight, right click, select copy, click on new location, right click, select paste. instead of highlight, and center click to paste.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_Manager
KDE looks so tinker-toy with all its icons and crap.
Though, they both seem to have issues with me customizing them. Yeah, it's possible, but the options I want are always hidden in some gconfedit.cf.conf.1.3 bullcrap file somewhere.
I don't want a new window every time I click a folder. I like to store my files heirarchically, and nest directories. I don't see how this makes me a bad person. Don't bury the option to turn that shit off. It was annoying in Windows 3.1, it's just as annoying on a linux box.
And KDE really needs a "lite" checkbox somewhere, to turn off all the bling blang for those of who choose not to "keeps it real".
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Lookee here, dipshit:http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/
1.) If developers wants the everyday non-savvy users to use Linux then as a professional web developer I shouldn't have to even think of messing with the console just to install a Firefox nightly build. I don't care how much power is in the console I'm not using it and regular computer users sure as hell aren't. Point: get a unified installer system setup. Hell OSX is based on Unix (just like Linux) and it has a "drag the icon from here to there" installer. Why doesn't Linux (ANY flavor of it for that matter) have something ANYTHING along those lines? 2.) Don't use the crappy AC97 onboard audio in place of my Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum audio card... and then give me no GUI option to switch from the onboard (no-3D audio btw) audio device. 3.) Keys need to work include Win+D, CTRL+ESC, ALT+TAB, CTRL+ALT+DEL, among many others. Xandros gains credit in my eyes for at least saying, "Hey, we know since 99% of the frigin world is stuck on Windows we thought it'd be cool to let you use those same keyboard controls". 4.) Call your control panel a control panel, or at least use the words preferences, settings, or something exceptionally obvious instead of just plain "YAST". If I'm a non-savvy user YAST sounds like spyware. 5.) If you debate me don't use your family who have all been learning Linux ANYWAY and aren't considered the typical non-savvy computer user. 6.) Stop using virtual memory by force. Sure it's a safety belt to some degree such as with web servers but I have yet to see any program that say, "Oh crap, using the hard drive as memory, maybe I should say something". And don't give me the "Well it doesn't need to be in memory" crap argument because if it doesn't need to be in memory then DON'T FRIGIN LOAD IT. Kudos thought to Linux for running on really old hardware. 7.) Stop turning my hard drive in to swiss cheese. One drive one partition. 8.) Make Konqueror's GUI a little easier to use by allowing icons to be dragged instead of the extremely confusing separate CAGE layout where I can't move an icon all the way to one side because it's locked up on another. Firefox's GUI has the potential to be good (it's default settings just aren't any good for the non-savvy). Kudos though for it doing pretty good on the CSS3 selectors test... http://www.css3.info/selectors-test/ Don't get me wrong, Linux is great and all but for as long as it's been around you'd think someone would have fixed these problems by now. I'm sticking with XP for now though for now I give Xandros the most credit thus far. Hey, at least they have made an honest attempt with their Windows EXE installer even though it did not work with a Firefox nightly build, kudos for making it to begin with.
- John
http://www.jabcreations.com/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Any desktop that is free of smelly feet is automatically the holy grail.
> Please, bestow more sagacity upon us, I know I'm primed to receive after your first offering...
Alright. *UNZIP*
That's a GNOME problem if anything. KDE has something called Klipper for a long time now, and that manages the clipboard between all applications. You can still do X-style copy/pasting via selections and middle-clicking, but Klipper keeps a history of your clipboard and is overall an awesome clipboard manager; better than the default offerings in Windows and OS X by far.
In fact, KDE is far more consistent than GNOME in my experience, and even more consistent than Windows or OS X in some cases.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Until KDE exhibits the following:
1. standardized operation for ALL applicatation.
2. cut and paste between ALL applications..
3. Applications must ALL be uniform in operation of common functions..
4. Uniform operation of input devices (mouse)..
5. Easily customizable..
6. Standardized behavour on any local or remote environment..
7. Some kind of direct video support (games, etc...).
And, don't tell me that these are all true. I have to use a linux GUI desktop and KDE is the best choice but lacks all of the above.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
I too have inferred two things namely:
1) You are an idiot.
2) Whoever submitted this is an idiot.
I'm actually a daily KDE user, so this isn't a rant.
I want linux to succeed as much as the next kde user but articles like this just set everyone's expectations way too high. There are issues that don't have much to do with KDE, but because that's what the average user sees, they may blame it on KDE. It's the ages-old hardware issues. Printers is still an issue for home users.
Beyond that, there are glaring holes in some of the applications. (print selection for example)
My personal wish is that some of the kde projects would focus on specific types of users. For example, I bet Law Office users have some needs that outlook doesn't do well instead of being a medium-slow follower. No, I'm not talking about an "exchange killer" because trying to eat a big part of exchanges market isn't likely. (not impossible, not likely)
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
'dipshit:' is not part of the URL. Wanted to point that out just in case.
Is retardedly cluttered. If that's what KDE calls cleaning up, I'd hate to see what they consider busy. As long as KDE continues to look and behave as a second-rate Windows 9x, I'm staying the fuck away.
Again? I've been hearing that this is the year of the Linux desktop since 1996!
. . .does it run on Emacs?
You are not the customer.
Especially if you use fvwm2.
Then there is the g thingy.
NB: Desktop wars can be just as much fun a editor wars. vi fan.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Right! They should behave like the serious folks in Microsoft calling everything with the full beautiful "Windows" before the app name instead of a little "K": Windows Mail, Windows Firewall, Windows Media Player. Or Apple, using a slick, minuscule "i" instead of a boasting "K": iPod, iTunes, etc. True, big companies really HAVE grown the fuck up!
[sarcasm mode off]-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
I have a few small problems with KDE's present file manager. TFA was very short on details, and TFS is entirely misleading. The article is about a new file manager called Dolphin, not about KDE at all.
Konqueror problems: Like Windows Explorer, it wants to be a web browser. I don't want it to be a web browser; I have Firefox for that! Firefox is far, far superior as a web browser.
More importantly, Konqueror, like some damned Microsaoft application, wants to do things its way and won't remember my way. Like Windows Explorer it wants to give me icons. I don't want icons; I want a detailed list with time stamps, etc. But it won't remember that I told it that; the next time I open it it's back to the same damned defaults.
If Dolphin overcomes these two behaviors I percieve as being bugs (even though the designers surely think of them as features) it will supplant Konqueror on my desktop.
Too bad TFA was so lame.
It's called paragraphs.
for exceptionally large values of 'year'
"In the game of life, someone always has to lose. To me, if life were fair, that someone would always be Oklahoma." -DKR
Good thing you can then.
As a current Linux user that mixes everyday Gnome, KDE, and desktop-agnostic apps at home and work, I can assure you the "clipboard hell" issue has been fixed long ago.
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
It sure won't be the ultimate desktop without this. I use ubuntu (I know, gnome based) a lot, but the font rendering in linux drives me nuts.
BTW, cleartype costs about US$1 to licence per desktop.
"it's good slashdottes never RTFA"
/.ers) will blame the editors for the bad headlines & stories that we pick.
So are you saying this new-fangled Firehose means we're not blaming the editors anymore?
I propose a compromise: Allow Slashdot's experiment in direct democracy to continue, but we (the
Well, you can call it broken by design or working by design, but there are (last time I checked) two separate ways to use a clipboard. The Linux way that you just described (select and middle-click), or the Windows way (Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V). Those two are completely separate, you can't copy one way and paste the other. This can work one of four ways:
1. Disable Linux clipboard. Hell breaks loose.
2. Disable Windowsish clipboard. Hell breaks loose.
3. Merge clipboards. Hell breaks loose as Windows userrs have their clipboard contents "mysteriously" replaced.
4. Keep it as is and have slashdot trolls complain about the copy-paste system.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
... is Qt. GPL is by far the biggest problem with KDE. It's impossible to develop non-GPL applications using the KDE stuff without paying a crapload of money to Trolltech. Currently Qt is way too expensive compared to other things like MSDN and it just keeps getting more expensive while MSDN gets cheaper (plus Apple's tools are free!).
I have tried KDE many times over the years just to check it out but I stick with GNOME based pretty much solely on the licensing. Qt is a fairly nice API (if buggy at times) but forcing me into GPL isn't good (I prefer LGPL and BSD-style). I wouldn't even mind paying for Qt if it was reasonably priced.
Granted you don't have to use Qt to develop for KDE but then you're not really integrating with the desktop (especially for anything with a UI).
The ratio of people to cake is too big
Yes, obviously it should be the Holy Krail. Someone might mistake it for a Gnome thing if it begun with a G.
It still seems to be there sometimes... at least I switched from konversation to xchat (on kubuntu) because konversation seemed to use its own clipboard, couldn't paste things from other sources in there, or paste things I copied on it on other sources.
I'm not sure about KDE, but I'm pretty sure he's talking about how there's not so much of a system clipboard as there is an application clip board with system level pointers. When I was a new Linux user I noted that I couldn't open Firefox, copy something, close Firefox, open another app and paste it. In order to paste between applications, both applications need to remain open.
I've gotten used to the behavior and it not longer causes be problems, but I know the behavior hasn't changed and that it still causes woes for new switchers.
For one, the KDE 4.0 development snapshots are using Qt 4.2, and by the time KDE 4.0 is released in a few months, Qt 4.3 will probably be released and used as well.
Another gripe is that KDE 4.0 is the base KDE 4 release; that is, it will contain the foundation for all KDE 4 applications along with its "core" applications all updated to use said base. KDE 4.0 (like KDE 3.0 and presumably 2.0 and 1.0; I'm not that old a Linux user sadly) will be more of a "proof of concept" release that updates all the KDE 3.5 applications to use Qt 4 along with the new "Pillars of KDE" (check the Dot for articles about it). However, it is expected that KOffice 2.0, Amarok 2.0, KDevelop 4.0, and several other key applications will be released with KDE 4.0, and those are major upgrades beside the typical updated usage of KDE libraries, Qt 4, and all the other things updated with KDE 4.
What I'm getting at here is that KDE 4.1 and beyond are the Holy Grails if anything; at this point, the developer interest in KDE should spike to above KDE 3 levels (especially due to the new platforms it supports: Windows and Mac OS X) and the new applications and innovations will begin. Just look at the major differences between KDE 3.5.6 and KDE 3.0 for example to see how much a major revision tends to change over time and include new programs. Basically, KDE 4.0 is the beginning of the quest for the Holy Grail (not to mention all the Python usage in some KDE distros like Kubuntu), but the Holy Grail itself will be a future release of KDE 4.
If you speak from a developer's standpoint, KDE 4.0 can be argued to be the Holy Grail, but not from the user's standpoint.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Personally, I find the defauly Windows XP GUI patronising and completely unusable - I much prefer the Windows "Classic" desktop, the only thing missing from it is a proper dual pane file manager that shows one directory in the left window, another in the right window and a number of easily accessible commands for working with files beneath each window (a la Midnight Commander or Directory Opus).
KDE is also nice but far too flashy and bloaty for a power user like me - given the choice between KDE and Gnome, I choose Gnome but even then with some reservations about the wasted screen real estate with Gnome.
But if I need a GUI enviroment that just allows me to have multiple shells or apps running, without too much need for filetype integration (so that when I double-click on, say, a JPEG image icon, a viewer application opens the image for me) then XFCE4 is a good compromise for usability and speed.
I can see *ABSOLUTELY NO NEED* for 3D file explorers on 3D desktops unless you simply want a fashion accessory just to show off to friends. Unless you use a PC for gaming (which admittedly I do quite a lot), then everything else you do on it is about productivity and using an application to get a job done quickly and easily - if any desktop effects do not make that productivity work any faster, then they are a complete and total waste of time.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
If you are a full-on Free Software advocate and only care about writing free/open source software, then I can see why KDE/Qt is usually the best choice. On the other hand, if you are interested in commercial development, like myself, you need to look at pricing as well. If you only want to develop for Windows, then the "SDK" is free and the "IDE" can range from free to a couple of grand with a premium MSDN subscription. But Qt itself costs around $1780 to $6600 on a per developer basis depending on console/GUI one/two/three platform development. If you work for a company with any clout, you can probably cut that cost in half for either platform.
Although I'm not doing anything now, the first thing I would use for a lean startup cross platform development is ACE with wxWidgets on Visual Studio Express or Eclipse with CDT.
It is just my opinion, but I think the pricing for Qt is too high. I wonder how big the Linux Desktop "pie" could grow if we could all settle on Qt if it fell under LGPL or BSD? Trolltech's smaller piece of a bigger pie, might still be bigger than the one they have now. Putting GPL/Free Software asisde for a second, from a commercial perspective, I don't want a "new Microsoft" on the Linux Desktop. Perhaps someone with some cash could revive the Harmony Toolkit...
To be merely usable by me, they'd need to include a theme that doesn't suck (bundle; I don't want to go hunting for themes online, only to replace the default crap; and yes, they all suck), icons that don't look like crap, but most of all, unclutter the UI (no, even Dolphin doesn't really look uncluttered, but rather crappy; take a look at Thunar for a better example; its only fault is that it doesn't give you a decent desktop (xfdesktop sucks)).
Oh, and basic things like remembering window size and location. Konqueror, I'm talking to you. It also sucks that I have to remember how many windows I have open. Close-window is C-w, but if it's the last one, I have to C-q to quit. AarrgH!
The best thing: all these issues could have been dealt with with KDE3. There's nothing that would benefit from a better or faster toolkit. While KDE3 isn't fast, it's still adequate. OTOH, I can run other WMs or DEs, so why even bother? If some people like KDE3 or 4, power to them.
Unix Socket, general Sockets, Signals, IPC, Process control, File locking, fine control over FileIO, etc.
Yeah, they operate in similar ways except in all the parts that make life difficult porting, which MS has seen to it, that it is some of the most important parts.
IOW, they are nothing alike and it requires quite a bit of work to port from any OS to Window. It is even easier to port from Unix to VMS or Unix to MVS since they both support POSIX beyond the first level.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
For instance halflife.exe is a good shell for windows.
©God
not until it starts to look more like gnome and less like an explosion in a widget factory.
OHHHHHH
flame on.
As current Linux user that mixes everyday Gnome, KDE, and desktop-agnostic apps at home and work, I can assure you the "clipboard hell" issue has not been fixed at all. And I'm not anti-Linux trolling, I'm a Debian fan and used to be a package maintainer there. But you should be able to admit where Linux is just weaker than Windows or OS X. Here's an extract of the various "clipboards" or "yank buffers" or whatever they're called I deal with on a daily basis: - The venerable X11 buffer - select and middle click. This works great BUT if you happen to select something by mistake whatever you had in the clipboard before has gone. This is especially annoying if you select a link from somewhere and want to *replace* the URL in the address bar of Firefox. What you intuitevely do is the following: 1. Select the link in some program 2. Alt-Tab to Firefox 3. Select the link currently in the location bar (in order to replace it) 4. You just lost because the second selection replaced the first. - Then there is the Gnome Clipboard (I believe that's what it is called). This is the Control-C, Control-V clipboard which works like in Windows - with one subtle difference. If you close the program you have cut/copied from, the content of the clipboard is *gone*. 1. Select and copy some text in some program 2. Close the program 3. You just lost - Then there is the vim yank buffer. Yes, you can have multiple yank buffers and probably program them and whatever. But it is totally separate from the other clipboards. Vim even stores it when you close and restart vim. Thus you can: 1. Open vim, yank some text (that's "copy" for non-vimmers) 2. Reboot your machine 3. Log in from another machine with ssh 4. Paste it back. You win! BUT of course it doesn't work across multiple concurrently running instances of vim. Don't tell me that I should use only one vim for multiple files and splits and all that crap. I want to be able to yank and paste across vims. Which you can't. And if you use gvim (the vim with gui) then pasting from the Gnome clipboard is as easy as...pressing (no joke) ESC : " g P They must be out of their mind. - And then there's the Emacs buffers (I believe it's called the "buffer ring" or something like that) which are again similar to the ones in vim. I hope I don't offend any emacs users here since I'm not that familiar with it, but I know that they are again incompatible with everything else. What Linux needs is ONE universal clipboard. Just ONE. It shouldn't be part of Gnome, KDE, Xfce or even X11. It should be a system service. So you can copy and paste LIKE A SANE PERSON in ALL PROGRAMS. Just like on Windows. Or a Mac. You could throw in persistence across reboots. And maybe across different sessions (say, local X11 and remote SSH). Then it would even be better than everything else. I'm actually thinking of implementing something like that - maybe even with X11 and Gnome clipboard bindings to "unify" them finally. There should *definitely not* be multiple buffers, rings and crap like that. 99% of the time they are just confusing. If a program *really* needs multiple buffers - and most do not - they could still implement that ON TOP of the universal clipboard. It's ok if *that* is not compatible across programs. Greetings from one who loves, and loves to works with Linux but just *HATES* its clipboard functionality.
[Sorry for the bad formatting, this is the same thing again. That'll teach me to use preview first.]
As current Linux user that mixes everyday Gnome, KDE, and desktop-agnostic apps at home and work, I can assure you the "clipboard hell" issue has not been fixed at all. And I'm not anti-Linux trolling, I'm a Debian fan and used to be a package maintainer there. But you should be able to admit where Linux is just weaker than Windows or OS X.
Here's an extract of the various "clipboards" or "yank buffers" or whatever they're called I deal with on a daily basis:
- The venerable X11 buffer - select and middle click. This works great BUT if you happen to select something by mistake whatever you had in the clipboard before has gone. This is especially annoying if you select a link from somewhere and want to *replace* the URL in the address bar of Firefox. What you intuitevely do is the following:
1. Select the link in some program
2. Alt-Tab to Firefox
3. Select the link currently in the location bar (in order to replace it)
4. You just lost because the second selection replaced the first.
- Then there is the Gnome Clipboard (I believe that's what it is called). This is the Control-C, Control-V clipboard which works like in Windows - with one subtle difference. If you close the program you have cut/copied from, the content of the clipboard is *gone*.
1. Select and copy some text in some program
2. Close the program
3. You just lost
- Then there is the vim yank buffer. Yes, you can have multiple yank buffers and probably program them and whatever. But it is totally separate from the other clipboards. Vim even stores it when you close and restart vim. Thus you can:
1. Open vim, yank some text (that's "copy" for non-vimmers)
2. Reboot your machine
3. Log in from another machine with ssh
4. Paste it back. You win!
BUT of course it doesn't work across multiple concurrently running instances of vim. Don't tell me that I should use only one vim for multiple files and splits and all that crap. I want to be able to yank and paste across vims. Which you can't.
And if you use gvim (the vim with gui) then pasting from the Gnome clipboard is as easy as...pressing (no joke)
ESC : " g P
They must be out of their mind.
- And then there's the Emacs buffers (I believe it's called the "buffer ring" or something like that) which are again similar to the ones in vim. I hope I don't offend any emacs users here since I'm not that familiar with it, but I know that they are again incompatible with everything else.
What Linux needs is ONE universal clipboard. Just ONE. It shouldn't be part of Gnome, KDE, Xfce or even X11. It should be a system service. So you can copy and paste LIKE A SANE PERSON in ALL PROGRAMS. Just like on Windows. Or a Mac.
You could throw in persistence across reboots. And maybe across different sessions (say, local X11 and remote SSH). Then it would even be better than everything else. I'm actually thinking of implementing something like that - maybe even with X11 and Gnome clipboard bindings to "unify" them finally.
There should *definitely not* be multiple buffers, rings and crap like that. 99% of the time they are just confusing.
If a program *really* needs multiple buffers - and most do not - they could still implement that ON TOP of the universal clipboard. It's ok if *that* is not compatible across programs.
Greetings from one who loves, and loves to works with Linux but just *HATES* its clipboard functionality.
There is no holy grail, that's why there are many other window managers out there in wide use. You might as well ask if Ubuntu is the "Holy Grail" of Linux.
I personally can't stand KDE. I have the libraries installed because of one application that just works easier than other alternative I've found (k3b) but that's it, and I don't run it all that often. I run Gnome (vanilla Ubuntu) but since I've got to wipe that computer for other reasons, I'm going to be installing Xubuntu, because Gnome, like KDE, has a bunch of bloat, both from a visual design and code perspective, I just have found Gnome less bad. XFCE is darn close to my Holy Grail as far as window managers go, but that doesn't work for my father, who will be running MacOS X until his dying day, because he loves it, or my girlfriend who still uses Enlightenment e17 and is EXTREMELY touchy when anyone suggests that she try something newer.
This kind of religious evangelism from the KDE community over a window manager turns off an awful lot of people. Yes, there are an awful lot of people that find that KDE is a wonderful desktop for them. Awesome. However, there are an awful lot of people that don't like it, too. Gnome didn't pay off Sun Microsystems, Canonical, or Red Hat so their window manager could be made the default. Acting like the Flying Spagetti Monster wants KDE to be on everyone's desktop just makes you look like jerks.
Is KDE 4.0 the Holy Grail of Desktops?
<flamebait type="religious">No. KDE4 isn't vaporware which makes a lot of promises but is nowhere to be found.</flamebait>
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Very informative, but some line breaks would be nice.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
This interesting article wonders whether KDE 4.0 will become the complete desktop
Does it also dream of electric sheep?
Have you read my journal today?
No. KDE 4.0 is not the holy grail of desktops. Anything else you wondered about?
"as someone with a Microsoft Office Word Expert cert, ABIWord feels most comfortable"
Wow man, I bet you're a real hit with the ladies :)
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
- The venerable X11 buffer - select and middle click. This works great BUT if you happen to select something by mistake whatever you had in the clipboard before has gone. This is especially annoying if you select a link from somewhere and want to *replace* the URL in the address bar of Firefox.
That's intended behaviour, not a bug. Select = copy. Middle click = paste. How do you think the clipboard can know that the *second* selection is not a copy?
- Then there is the Gnome Clipboard (I believe that's what it is called). This is the Control-C, Control-V clipboard which works like in Windows - with one subtle difference. If you close the program you have cut/copied from, the content of the clipboard is *gone*.
I heard of this bug, and it *is* a bug, but what the hell is the purpose of closing a program after you copied info from that? It's a sane measure to wait until you pasted, just to check if you copied-and-pasted what you really wanted to paste, for example. Yes, it's formally a bug, and I agree it has to be fixed (it makes sense to have the intact clipboard if the ctrl-c app crashes, for example) but every sane user should almost never have seen it.
As for emacs and vim, I don't use them, so I trust you about the issues.
What Linux needs is ONE universal clipboard. Just ONE. It shouldn't be part of Gnome, KDE, Xfce or even X11. It should be a system service. So you can copy and paste LIKE A SANE PERSON in ALL PROGRAMS. Just like on Windows. Or a Mac. You could throw in persistence across reboots. And maybe across different sessions (say, local X11 and remote SSH). Then it would even be better than everything else. I'm actually thinking of implementing something like that - maybe even with X11 and Gnome clipboard bindings to "unify" them finally.
Ok, I surely agree with that and it would be damn cool. It would be really good. What I'm saying may be corrected this way: today, for Joe User using mostly desktop apps, the issue is practically solved. But I endorse what you say.
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
How about the ability to copy one line, move elsewhere, select some other text, and when you paste, the selected text gets overwritten with the original selection? Using your method, you lose the first clipboard when you select the second batch of text. No, it's not *essential* to work this way, but once you're used it it, it's damn handy.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Hey, do the Gnome devs know you managed to find your way to the web browser? Don't tell them or they'll take it away from you.
Ooooh, snap!
Xfce with the iFox Graphite theme. Minimalist desktop with no clutter. Program launcher at the bottom and Window selector at the top. Now if only the Apps were designed so the menus stayed static at the top and the status line stayed static at the bottom, just like the mac, that would be really cool.
I agree that that's intended behavior, and it was great back in the time when the only thing you would copy/paste around was command lines from and to different terminals. But the desktops have changed since then; I find myself (and observe other people) doing this kind of thing a *lot*:
- Copy something
- Do some other editing, possibly with selecting things, e.g. deleting some text
- Paste
And the select/middle click model just doesn't work for that. I'm not complaining about bugs here, but about bad design.
Well, suppose you're editing some text. Then you think "oh I'd like to paste something from another file in here". So you open the other file - possibly in another editor, or a browser, or whatever - copy a sentence or maybe just a single word or number - close the program and...do it again. It's of course not a good idea to use the clipboard as "storage for otherwise non-existent data" because it's just too easy to lose. But the behavior many Linux desktops expose nowadays is just plain user-unfriendly.
This makes me wonder though. I'm not a linux pro nor have I been nominated for the "Master of teh shells![tm]" award at any time, but if you can get KDE running as a Windows Desktop replacement, would beryl run on top of that ported KDE instance too? This would be a nice Aero replacement that has no "Vista and a uber-performance computer" only restriction.
Whereas KDE policy is "If you disKover some empty spaKe, add an useless feature or somethinK very very irritatinK. The iKon must be shiny, rotatinK, and Kontain at least one K.", the GNOME policy is the opposite: "If you find a feature, it might confuse a user, so remove it." [1]
Dynamic binding defeats CPU branch prediction regardless of how it's implemented -- if the target of a jump instruction is taken from a pointer whose value is determined at run-time, rather than compiled into the program, it can't be predicted. Ordinary C structures containing function pointers, like GNOME uses, work the same way. This isn't a problem with C++ virtual functions; it's just that current processors aren't able to accelerate a certain technique that's often used in modern software design.
As for the extraneous symbols, GCC 4.0 introduced some facilities for suppressing them, and I'm pretty sure KDE uses them now, so that should no longer be an issue.
My only real issue with KDE's programming environment is that they don't use standard C++; they use a variant of C++ that's "enhanced" with syntactic support for signals and slots, and the code gets preprocessed into standard C++ at build time. That's a bit ugly.
The kind of Slashdot topics are always entertaining and generate lots of activity. they have ever since the first "X versus Y" arguments were made and are the preferred intellectual geek sport. My inner geek wants a say, so here it is.
X11 is a wonderful "desktop". You can decorate it any way you want with Gnome or KDE or many other excellent window managers and desktop environments that all server different needs and are highly customizable. Just take your pick and expend a little effort and your GUI desktop becomes your servant, supporting your productivity and enjoyment. Do we want just one way? Hell no!
If there is and "Holy Grail" in computing, it is the design of applications to be as platform and OS agnostic as possible. There are many technical reasons why a particular piece of hardware is the best for a job or a particular OS is the best for a job or a particular app is best, but no hardware/OS/app is useful universally and diversity will encourage innovation and provide more and better choice.
The real threat is that the hardware/OS/app thing is used in an anti-competitive way for vendor lock-in; that just mucks things up and rarely results in anything good for the end user. From hardware manufacturers to OS vendors to software developers, those who ply their craft and ignore standards and interoperability should be exposed and ridiculed and shunned. The tolerance for pushing out crap should be reduced. Best practices should be the hallmark of everyone if we want things to get better, because the "Best Practices versus Ass" arguments is mercifully short. We can argue all day over Best Practices, but at least that keeps us headed in the right direction all the time.
After all, it's the quest for the Holy Grail that's important, not the Grail itself.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
... in Soviet Russia!
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
You should use Total Commander, which is a la Midnight Commander (or Norton Commander if you prefer, it was the first). It has a lot of functionality, integrated ftp client, you can unpack archives etc. You can download a fully functional trial version to try it.
I run into this madness a lot when I'm switching browsers. It's an old habit, copy address bar. Close browser "f", open browser "o", click in address bar and [ctrl+v], swear and repeat.
"He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. [...] It's what drives men mad, being methodical." G.K.Chesterton
Why the hell does this idiot who copies his content from other places, usually dot.kde.org, after some cropping of the images get this publicity so he gets more ad revenue.
If you want to post some news, link to the originals please.
It's kluttered.
KDE ressembles more and more quartz-wm/OS X.
Most screenshots really make it look like a girl with too much makeup.
But wow I like that System Monitor. Just seeing that CPU load drop with that cool transparent effect really turns me on!
And Kate, oh she's a beaut'!
Last thing: people who are going to install KDE just to play KMahjong might be interested to know we've got lots of lonely-geek games like that on OS X.
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
> That's a GNOME problem if anything.
> KDE has something called Klipper
> for a long time now
There is a small little utility named Glipper, similiar to Klipper in functionality, but based rather on GTK than Qt.
Klipper sucks.
Klipper is annoying. Each time I copy any URL to the clipboard, it pops up with a stupid menu asking me "WTF do you want to do with that URL, open it in mozilla, open it with Konqueror, disable this popup, etc". It's *REALLY* annoying. Selecting "disable this popup" doesn't help much (Klipper pops up with another window reminding me that I can always turn the popup menu back), and my choice not to use the popup is not remembered across restarts.
Glipper is just better. It doesn't load the whole kbuildsycoca/kinit/kded/ksomething crap and my E16 desktop starts much faster.
I love KDE but it is not the "Holy Grail!"
:)
If you have read the Da Vinci Code, then wouldn't the "Holy Grail" be Linus's daughter, Patricia Miranda Torvalds?
Wake me up when you can copy and paste between applications as you can in Windows or on the Mac.
I'm not sure about Mac, but Windoze copy and paste would be a huge downgrade to what's available in free software desktops. KDE and Gnome co-operate well as do most other applications these days. Cutting and pasting preserves formats most of the time. For instance, I can cut a table in Konqueror and paste it into Gnumeric and have it line up right. The same thing happens with text editors ... across desktops ... across networks. I can compare this to the clumsy world of Windoze where cutting and pasting between non free applications is always a crap shot and the network is opaque at best. When I'm forced to use a Windoze machine, I feel like reaching for a floppy.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Could you point me to a instance where the X11 buffer doesn't work?
2. Alt-Tab to Firefox
3. Select the link currently in the location bar (in order to replace it)
4. You just lost because the second selection replaced the first. There's no need to paste the address into the location bar -- just middle-click somewhere in a browser tab, and it will load the page. If you hold down Ctrl while you paste, it will open a new tab. IMO this is a perfect example how X11's clipboard logic is way superior to the logic on Macs and Windows.
On Windows I have two additional steps:
1'. Ctrl-C to copy the selected text into the clipboard
3. either Ctrl-L into the location bar or Ctrl-T open a new tab
3'. Ctrl-V the address into the location bar
PROS:
I had it up, running and debugged in six weeks. I had never seen the Qt library before in my life. That is how quick the Qt Framework is to learn and deploy.
CONS:
The completed work was shelved, never to see the light of day again, because the library licensing fees were so outrageous ($4800 for just little old me? what?)
I have looked at both GTK and Qt, and IMHO the Qt framework is more consistent and reasonably defined, and seems to port more easily to other operating systems. If you get the chance, browse through the class libraries at Trolltech.
But at these prices, Qt is almost, but not quite, worth it.
I agree with most of what you say. The clipboard behaviour would benefit from some standardisation across applications but there is another issue at hand.
I'll state it using Emacs as an example since I'm am Emacs user. The kill-ring which allows you to yank multiple pieces of text and paste them back is quite useful when you're coding. It allows you to move around chunks of code quite easily. I'd like some subset of Emacs' kill/yank behaviour to interact with the graphical subsystem to provide consistent behaviour but inside Emacs when I'm developing, I'd like the custom behaviour since it's quite useful when I code. I think vim users will have similar concerns.
"Of course, if you're using KDE on Windows as a migration step towards KDE on Linux, once you move to Linux the WIN32 API disappears along with the windows apps."
Wow! There really are no drawbacks to using KDE on windows!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
There is no clipboard in X. There are only copy requests and a selection mechanism. Clipboards can (and are) implemented using a daemon like Klipper.
I'm sorry, but I don't want my text to look blurry and/or have color fringing by assuming it can shift pixels between RGB triplets on an LCD. The days of the Apple II are long since behind us.
Before I get into this, let me say that I am a linux fan and use it for several servers I manage.
But....it is in no way shape or form, ready to conquer the desktop. Hell, it can't even copy and paste like a sane operating system should. Read other comments for details.
Since I don't use the windows managers on the Linux boxes I run, I guess I have never noticed this issue. Honestly, I thought it had been resolved but all you have to do is read the posts here and its clear that it has not been solved.
Don't think of the first one as copy/paste. Think of it as a text drag and drop... a bonus given to you by linux, rather than a replacement for the copy/paste you're used to. If what you want to do is replace a URL, you can just do it the same way you would in windows:
1. Select the link in some program, C-c to copy
2. Alt-Tab to Firefox
3. Select the link currently in the location bar (in order to replace it)
4. C-v to paste
Wow. That entire clipboard analysis flew right over your head.
It doesn't matter if something is implemented as intended or not.
If I attempt to do something right, and I do it wrong, the result is wrong.
If I attempt to do something wrong, and I succeed in doing it wrong, the result is wrong.
If cooperation among different groups is required for something to be done right, but these groups do not cooperate, the result is wrong.
Your bit about "every user would keep both apps open when copying, just to be safe" demonstrates a fundamental misconception about how the human brain thinks. I would imagine any interface you design would be a disaster. Your mind has been so affected by years of working with badly-designed software that you can't even imagine how everyone else thinks. Don't ever EVER attempt to design a HCI. You're damaged goods.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I think the whole thing is pretty k-lame, and it really needs a better, more k-wRad alternative.
That enhanced C++ that you deride are the Qt extensions, which are what make it even remotely possible to have K* applications on other operating systems. I wouldn't knock it too much until you've tried it.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
No, it's a perfect example of one application's method of using the X11 clipboard logic.
The parent to your reply still has a point: sometimes a person has to first select the text that they intend replace with text from the clipboard.
That middle-clicking a tab to paste behavior always throws me off when I use Firefox on Linux. I'm used to using middle-click to CLOSE a tab, not paste to it.
My only real issue with KDE's programming environment is that they don't use standard C++; they use a variant of C++ that's "enhanced" with syntactic support for signals and slots, and the code gets preprocessed into standard C++ at build time. That's a bit ugly.
Depends on how you look at it. Before preprocessing signals and slots are one of the cutest things I've ever seen in C++ -- and saying 'cute' and 'C++' in one sentence is certainly not usual for me. (Python is my weapon of choice, to put some background here.)
just a model.. Shhhh!
If religous zealots don't believe in Evolution, then why are they so worried about bird flu?
You mean its mythical and can never actually be found?
Life needs more saving throws.
You're missing the original issue. It used to be that ctrl-c/ctrl-v didn't work across different apps. It has supposedly since been fixed. End of story.
That was a long rant. Anyway, you might want to check out Klipper, which fixes all that except the network thing and vim integration... the latter being a vim problem, I'd say, xemacs works as expected. You have to configure it correctly to get the behaviour you want... Wild guess would be synchronize, keep 200 items in your case, prevent empty clipboard. If the popup on links etc annoys you, you might want to disable action.
Problem solved :)
PS: You are wrong about the Gnome keyboard, that is an X feature. It is called PRIMARY clipboard, if I recall correctly. (The other one is SELECTION, I think).
P.P.S: Those that really want it like windows might want to disable sync, hit "ignore selection", set the history to 1, hit "prevent empty clipboard" and disable actions.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
The obvious solution to the different desires and needs of different users is configurability. Of course, if you throw too much configuration at a user, you end up with something that is impossible to use for simple configurations.
That problem has been solved already. Once upon a time, there was a graphical desktop system called...
I'm getting ahead of myself.
Suppose there was a way to, you know, show and hide configuration based on a user's needs? Call it a "difficulty setting" for the GUI. People who just want to go through the basics get some common templates for settings, and don't even see most of the configuration options. People who are slightly more sophisticated get another level of complexity; they can actually change the UI templates.
Power users get all kinds of details. They don't need templates any more; they create their own configurations per application. And finally, you have every potential configuration option in the universe visible and modifiable.
Once upon a time, there was a GUI that did this. it wasn't perfect; sometimes a level 1 user had to switch to level 2 to find just that one feature she needed. Sometimes a user had most of what she needed at level 3, but also a handful of things she wished she could do without. But even just giving her the option made her feel more empowered.
And it ran on 8-bit computers.
We don't need another digg.
Give this man vodka, for he speaks the Truth.
Seriously, some kind of a clipboard daemon and a simple yet powerful libclipboard with assorted APIs would be great.
...will have support for composite and 3d effects built in. Beryl won't strictly be necessary for fancy Aero-blasting effects. Beryl probably won't exist in its current form by the time KDE 4 hits anyway.
Nothing to do with C++, indirect calling does that... which you have to explicitly state if you want it in C++ (the virtual keyword). And C++'s killer feature, templates, makes thing go faster in some cases... qsort is only half the speed of std::sort for this reason.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
Well the old X copy and paste shouldn't really be considered as the official copy and paste, just as something that's useful from time to time. Like say someone posts a url without linkifying it. I just select it, hit ctrl-t to open a new tab and middle click the URL bar and press enter. Or if there is a variable name I want to copy to a bunch of different places, I can just select it and middle click all the places I want the name to go.
If you don't like the quirkiness of the X style copy and paste, just don't use it. You can just use ctrl-c and ctrl-v and you'll always get the expected behaviour. You can consider the X style copy and paste either as deprecated behaviour or as a shortcut.
The snapshot given in the article shows the same crappy, retarded default font which KDE has been using for at least five years.
You might say it's a minor issue, but nonetheless it is indicative of something. Why hasn't it been changed? It is those apparently-minor issues which contribute greatly to the initial reaction of new users. Retarded fonts give an unfinished and unprofessional impression, and new users are likely to dismiss the system right of the bat.
No doubt people will respond by saying, "just change the font." Of course, they will have missed my point entirely.
You can also middle-click in the area where the page is displayed, so you can escape the confusion. If your hands are not glued to the moused, the fastest way to close a tab is Ctrl-W.
It's a perfect example of using X11's clipboard logic, and it's not possible to do something similar with Windows' clipboard logic. Hence the X11 logic is superior. I'm rarely replacing text by other text from the clipboard, so that argument doesn't do it for me. Anyway, text should be edited in a text editor using a keyboard, and they offer much better functionality for this than could be offered in a point & click interface anyway :-)
Thats funny, considering that I've never had Klipper pop up on me unless I MANUALLY enabled those. Maybe your distro just decided to mess with the default settings? (Or some how patched it and borked the settings handling? It doesn't do that to me on Gentoo/openSuSE, as well as when I used Fedora core several years ago.)
If we're going to have a "universal" clipboard, I'd want it to work in BSD and OS X (GUI and command-line) and Cygwin and Windows too. Therefore, even being a system service isn't enough; it needs to be part of POSIX!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I middle-click the page to turn on autoscrolling...
for me the perfect desktop is BlackBox, no cruft, no fancy stuff
and I lauch apps from an xterm
Why the hell does ignorance get modded up these days? You are confused because you expect X11 to work the same as Windows or MacOS. It doesn't. Get over it.
X11 has and always has had two clipboards, short term (highlight/middle click) and long term (^C/^V). The "gnome" clipboard as you call is is just the X11 long term clipboard. And guess what? Firefox supports it, so you can ^C, ^V in to the address bar if you wish. I guess you never tried that SINCE IT WORKS FINE. Or, you can go the shor term route and simply middle click in the window. And that all works with KDE programs too. And vim, and ooffice and abiword and indeed any program which has a reasonable implementation of the now ancient and well understood ICCCM protocol for copy/paste.
As for the "closing the program" problems, this one is solved to. Run a clipboard manager and it will save the contents for you. For those of us who don't wish this to be the case, we don't have to run it.
I don't get your point about vim. The X11 clipboards are just named buffers like its own internal named buffers.
Anyway, linux has one universal working clipboard mechanism and it's called X11. Just like any system, it works between all programs that obey the protocol correctly. And X11 presents two standard clipboards, which I like. In fact, I prefer it to the single clipboard system you seem to want. And really, its only confusing because you expect X11 to behave like windows. Well it doesn't. For me, I find Windows and MacOS confusing because they don't behave like X11.
Anyway, here are the points to take away from this:
1 Copy and paste on X11 works.
2 Don't expect it to be Windows/MacOS, because it isn't.
3 Copy and paste on X11 works (I'll repeat this since no-one here seems to have a clue).
4 I'll repeat this one again, since people are really stubborn about this one: It's X11, not Windows!!!!!
SJW n. One who posts facts.
First things first, the article does explain the latest technology that KDE plans on implementing in 4.0, Dolphin. Which I'm glad to see that they are taking this approach because a single application trying to run the entire Desktop is not a good idea. I thought that the Linux community was out there to show everyone how things SHOULD be done and not simply imitate what others are doing. One of the biggest pitfalls of Windows was the fact that Explorer.exe and Iexplore.exe are practically the same application. In KDE Konqueror is trying to do the same; File-manager (not after they implement Dolphin), Internet Browser (Which crashes way too often to actually utilize), and everything else in between.
The Linux community needs to take a better approach if they want to be able to compete on the common users desktop. Ubuntu and Canonical are taking strides in the right direction by cutting deals with companies that will aide them in the process of competing in the desktop market. Ubuntu will implement Linspire's Click -n- run distribution system and Linspire will use Ubuntu instead of Debian as their base distribution of choice in Freespire and Linspire.
One of the biggest problems plaguing Linux in their efforts to make it on the common users desktop is software installation and updating. In windows its a very easy process they have learned over the years. Download the installer, double click the installer, and in moments you have installed the latest and greatest piece of spyware without even knowing you did anything wrong! Though I don't suggest users should install spyware, I do think that the process by which they install software is much simpler than in Linux. There are many dependencies which sometimes need to be hunted down before an application will work, and often times software is buggy.
One good thing though, is that companies do realize the potential of Linux on the desktop. Ahead for one is porting Nero to work in Linux, and I believe Adobe is porting Photoshop as well. (I could be wrong, don't slay me just yet). In any case, not all software must be open source in the world of Linux, but companies that sell proprietary software that will run in a Linux environment will benefit the open source community as well as the computing industry as a whole. People are realizing that a myopic perspective when dealing with computers is not the route to go. They are also realizing how similar Windows Vista is to HAL9000, as I recently discovered when using Vista for the first time on a clients laptop. "I'm afraid I can't let you do that..."
There's much to do... I suppose Dolphin is a step in the right direction. Ultimately, I think someone has to take a leap of faith and come up with an entirely new UI that will blow everyone out of the water. Maybe a mind-link function.... so you can just think about burning a CD and the application will open, and the CD-R/W drive will ejects it tray; Then again that could get messy quickly if your thoughts are impure.
Relocating to San Francisco / Palo Alto... Hire me?
strange. i'm using kde and konversation for years and i never had any problems with it.
:D
ok, besides the mixed keyboard and middle-mouse-button controlled clipboard confusion hitting me randomly but that effects every application
"As for the extraneous symbols, GCC 4.0 introduced some facilities for suppressing them, and I'm pretty sure KDE uses them now, so that should no longer be an issue."
Thats the hidden visibility option (or hidden visibility for inlines which is supposed to not require support from the developers but doesn't work as well). And that option is supported (not sure if its 100% supported in all apps/libs in the mainline KDE 3.5.X series, but theres an option you can give the build system and it'll use it where it is safe). I ran some tests on a 64bit system comparing prelinking (hidden vis off) vs visibility (prelink off) vs normal (hidden vis and prelink off) and found that hidden-visibility's results for Konqueror ended up spending the same amount of time doing the relocations at startup as a prelinked binary (not to mention produced smaller binaries than prelink/normal would since there were less symbols to export)! (I used the LD_something_another environmental variable which had LD print out all the statistics, I did it a while ago and I believe I used GCC 4.1 with KDE 3.5.4 or so (unfortunately I didn't save any of the numbers, it probably would have been interesting to do more testing like finding about what % of a space savings you gain)).
There are also several other techniques to speed up the startup time of applications that are being worked on in GCC/binutils (-bdirect is the name of one similar to prelink I believe, it was incompatible with prelink I think but the plus was that you wouldn't have to constantly 'prelink' the binaries but was a link time option).
FYI, the signal/slots stuff is great to work with, it takes a lot of the effort out of writing the code (especially since you can now use signals/slots across threads with Qt4!)
Wish I'd thought of it. :)
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Everyone makes these arguments about Gnome vs KDE and it gets so boring and repetitive.
I think the real difference is in the design philosophy of both.
KDE is more of an all-encompassing project, it seems. It is viewed as a tightly woven collection of pieces. There is a lib/program with K in its name for everything involving anything. The last time I tried using a KDE program, I had to download 50MB of support libraries.
Gnome seems more agnostic and less branded. Sometimes, this means less integrated. When there is a needed library, the Gnome people go off and write an agnostic library that can be utilized by anyone without compounding into 100 dependencies. They focus on generic API creation and orthogonal design, and then deal with integration later.
I think that's probably why Gnome is written in C rather than C++ as well, and why Miguel de Icaza is attracted to C# as a language. That's also why the KDE people settled for a GPL library and not an LGPL library.
From a developer's perspective, I prefer Gnome's methodology. I'd rather things be done 'right', in that orthogonal, reusable, generic fashion. Maybe it lacks some of the features, but that's the price I pay... GTK has more of the killer Linux apps like Gaim, Open Office, Mozilla, etc.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
A small quibble with your sig -- atheism is not a religion, but neither is it a lack of religion. It's a belief set that can be part of a religion or used by a non-religious person. Buddhism, for example, is an atheistic religion, much like Christianity is monotheist and Greek mythology is pantheist.
Well, one mans bloat is another mans features.
And all those who complain about the wasted cycles. What are they doing with those cycles? Are they running something like F@H and feel that a few lost microseconds might affect the end result.
I just don't get it.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
I've been banging on about how great Linux is for years. A co worker installs Ubuntu, and Beryl, and immediately, people are interested in Linux because of the wobbly windows, and spinning cube.
People just want eye-candy. So if the best way to get people to use Linux is to make the desktop look excellent, then long live KDE, and Beryl. (I don't like Gnome though. Blech.)
Get your own free personal location tracker
Its the underlying structure and libraries that are really important.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"Linux" doesn't have two clipboards; it has none. X on the other hand, has a PRIMARY selection, a SECONDARY selection (which everyone ignores), a CLIPBOARD selection, and 8 cut buffers (of which usually only the first is used). The "current selection" generally ends up in PRIMARY, and middle-click pastes from there; explicit cut/copy/paste operations use CLIPBOARD. If an app owns a textual selection and it wants to exit (or whatever) it will put its data into cut buffer 0, and a paste from CLIPBOARD will (generally) fall back to that. The problems a few years ago were that everybody didn't agree on these things, so if app X copies into somewhere that app Y doesn't paste from, you're screwed. But nowadays things are pretty uniform, and the "two clipboards" bit isn't a problem, it's just really nice. People who think it's scary can just do all their work with CLIPBOARD using the exact same methods they're used to with windows, and ignore PRIMARY.
I have no problem using windows-style behavior independently to linux style copy-paste (example with firefox can work with window shortcuts as long as it's between more recent toolkit apps). GTK and Qt programs seem to happily cooperate here this. Of course there are more traditional apps (Vim, Emacs, Console) and their communities find it hard to interact with rest of OSS realm, but for those applications unix-style universally works (as well as for the consoleDE cases and it isn't bd once you get used to it).
Maybe Linux is not at the level of interaction like in OSX where you can even drag'n'drop picture from firefox to powerpoint, but in fact at freedesktop.org there are descriptions which try to define such interfaces and they are even implemented in most popular DE's (although applications like Openoffice or firefox maybe don't follow enough of it). Portland is another project that tries to deal with this kind of stuff and bring in coherence, so there is ongoing progress in this area.
I believe you misspelled "yawnnnnnn!" :)
ESC : " g P
They must be out of their mind. No, if you use gvim, then pasting from the "GNOME clipboard" (there is no such thing, it's the X selection named CLIPBOARD and has not a goddamn thing to do with GNOME, now or ever) is as easy as Edit -> Paste. Why else would you use the GUI if not to use the GUI? And if you're not using gvim, it's still "+gP (or "+p if you're not picky where your cursor ends up). You don't have to be in gvim, you just have to have vim running in an xterm, and you don't have to use the completely bogus command that you pulled out of your ass because you misread what was on the menu and didn't even know enough vim to realize was completely senseless. (The only command-mode put command is
Only on slashdot do people get into a dozen pages worth of a conversation about copy-paste.
Wow =|
Sorry, but I'm going to be a bit pedantic here.
You have described one clipboard (Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V), and it's the Mac way, not the Windows way. Macs originally implemented this with Cmd-C, Cmd-V (and -X, of course) because the Apple UI people were smart enough to realize that Ctrl-C and Ctrl-X already had some important (and somewhat dangerous [kill, cancel]) standardized meanings that shouldn't be messed with. Early PCs did not have a command key, so early Windows versions decided to copy this feature, but using the Ctrl key instead, and to hell with standards.
The Linux way you describe is actually an X11 feature that predates Linux (and probably Windows cut/paste), and it's not really a clipboard at all. Middle-click copies the "primary selection", not the clipboard. The distinction is lost on many (I said I was going to be pedantic...) but technically selections are a protocol for implementing clipboards. By default there is a primary, secondary, and a clipboard selection, and those can contain many separate buffers of data. (The xclipboard client lets you manipulate the clipboard buffers, if you're curious.) But middle-click in X doesn't hit the clipboard selection at all, but rather the primary selection. You can use this to copy/paste stuff without messing with the contents of your clipboard, which might doing more important things.
So X selections are really a superset of clipboards. As with everything in Unixland, this imparts a lot of power for those who have been initiated into its mysteries, but creates confusion in those who have not, and hostility in those who think the broken Windows way is the right way.
Does anyone know of a good site which has a listing of multi-platform applications? That is, a huge list of software which runs on both Win and Lin (and OS X)? Not only the obvious ones such as OpenOffice.org, AbiWord, Firefox, but also XnView, Acronis True Image, Google Earth, etc..
You can't develop closed-source applications with the QPL no matter what your license is.
BSD and LGPL allow closed source applications.
KDE runs a clipboard manager that lets you do what you describe.
I can't drag an image from anything to PowerPoint, for lack of PowerPoint on my linux machine. I can, however, drag an image from Konqueror to OOImpress, and from Opera to OOImpress. Firefox "works"... except that instead of getting an image in my presentation, I get a text block containing REAL useful guys. But evidently Firefox's bug.
Um, since when have I not been able to do so?
I highlight whatever text (Firefox, Opera, Kate...) select CTRL+C, go to whatever app (Pan, Firefox, KMail...), press CTRL+V and it works.
Am I missing something?
The only place I find annoying is in the shell thingy where I have to do this obscure SHIFT+INSERT to paste.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
"Printers is still an issue for home users."
Perhaps at home, but if I may quote the President, "Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream."
In that vein, I was home users am always hopes for prints, and the issue wing Linux dreams good.
Running KDE 3.5 at the moment, you can access both clipboards easily using the Klipper menu, which is very handy and, in my opinion, superior to windows clipboard (you can see the images you copy before you paste them). Actually, I don't remember seeing the problem you describe since many years ago.
I had a really long reply but I lost it all because I double-right-clicked it out of emacs and then selected text while switching back to this window... damn you linux and your insane copy buffers! And you thought power failures were the only reasonable way to lose work...
Try Cream for Vim for clipboard smoothness:
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
I call bullshit. Semi technical people in my office use linux. They were typing shit out because they couldn't figure out how to paste in the terminal.
This works great -- most of the time. However, there are many occasions in which I am confronted with a URL that is "multiline" or needs edited in some way. Pretty common if you use mutt or use IRC in an xterm. In Windows it's actually not that bad to highlight, ALT-TAB, ALT-D, CTRL-V, then jump back and copy the remaninding bit and repeat. With this type of scenario, the middle-click-somewhere-in-the-browser method doesn't work and we're back with the original problem of wiping out your paste buffer accidentally. :-)
Not a huge deal; I've certainly gotten used to it, but each time it's still kind of annoying.
I think KDE should be attacked by ninjas. Or giant squirrels. Or eaten by a bear.
I've never much cared for the bouncy mouse pointer. Which you can turn off. For that alone, ninjas.
Now wash your hands.
It's inconvenient to the extreme, but it saved me a trip to gvim. My main complaint about viminfo's stored buffers, though, is that it isn't unlimited like my regular in-memory vim buffers. I can probably configure that, but it's still a pain.
Is it really based on Qt 4.0, or is it on Qt 4.0.1, released just days later with critical bugfixes? Or is it Qt 4.2, which still doesn't (at least on Mac OS X) handle Unicode combining diacriticals correctly?
Disclaimer: I work for no one who could benefit from Qt's or KDE's not being the Holy Grail of Desktops. It just pissed me off that this priority 1 bug, supposedly scheduled to be fixed in Qt 4.1 was put off, and still wasn't fixed in 4.2.
And finally, snark aside, just to restate the question: is this thing really based on Qt 4.0, as the write-up says?
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
That's because ctrl-c, ctrl-v, and ctrl-x were already reserved for other stuff, long before windows came on the scene. I rarely use Ctrl-V in linux, because it is easier to just select and then middle-click to paste.
Though I've never middle-clicked - well not since I was learning Unix on a SPARC 5 anyway - I can use the menu in Konsole to copy and paste. People often tell me that simply selecting something puts it in the clipboard - not true.
In any case, maybe I should just take advantage of the OSS-ness of Linux and add CTRL-C, CTRL-X, and CTRL-V into the borne shell or into Konqueror.
Sounds like a plan!
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
IMO this is a perfect example how X11's clipboard logic is way superior to the logic on Macs and Windows.
On Mac OS X, you can also drag and drop an URL (or any text string for the matter, but it has to be correctly formated) to a browser icon in the dock, and have it open in a new tab/new window. It can be handy.
"That'd be the shell, Bob."
X11 has and always has had two clipboards, short term (highlight/middle click) and long term (^C/^V). The "gnome" clipboard as you call is is just the X11 long term clipboard. And guess what? Firefox supports it, so you can ^C, ^V in to the address bar if you wish. I guess you never tried that SINCE IT WORKS FINE.
Except for the fact that many programs (notably, xterm) that don't support copying to it. Which makes that trick kind of useless in many applications.
I had to shorten it down quite a bit to get it within sig limits. It was supposed to be something like
Atheism is a religion in the same way as not collecting stamps is a hobby.I stand by that. As you say, strictly speaking you could be an atheist and superstitious (like believing in reincarnation), but most atheist are non-superstitious as well. Personally, I see no difference between monotheism or any other superstition.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
So you think before you use X11 copy-and-paste about whether you will need to select something else before you paste?
What a pain.
Here's an explanation of the X clipboard, the PRIMARY selection and the emacs kill-ring (whatever that is).
Just as a data point. gvim on Windows also requires "+p to paste from the system clipboard (or "*p).
> >X11 has and always has had two clipboards, short term (highlight/middle click)
> >and long term (^C/^V). The "gnome" clipboard as you call is is just the X11
> >long term clipboard. And guess what? Firefox supports it, so you can ^C, ^V
> >in to the address bar if you wish. I guess you never tried that SINCE IT WORKS > >FINE. Except for the fact that many programs (notably, xterm) that don't
> >support copying to it.
> Which makes that trick kind of useless in many applications.
And like many X bashers, you are WRONG. Read the XTerm manual. You can configure keys to copy text in to any clipboard. So you can do it with xterm.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
And like many X bashers, you are WRONG. Read the XTerm manual. You can configure keys to copy text in to any clipboard. So you can do it with xterm.
OK, so I have to read the manual of the terminal emulator to find out how to copy text in a useful way. That's hardly friendly...
My complaint: You can't paste a copied image once you've closed the app you copied it from.
Your response: X works over a network.
Wha-huh?! Think you can explain what the hell the response has anything to do with the complaint? Maybe you should be condescending, you might make a little bit more sense.
You cleverly cut your own complaint, but you were actually complaining about the algorithm. To quote: " And yet, even with that experience, I can easily see how horribly flawed the Linux way of handling the clipboard is."
I cut out the whining, I can't stand the hypocritical nonsense anymore. I tried to help, and I am sorry I did.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.