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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
You can pass a switch to disable explorer as a shell. That is why things like LiteStep are called Shell Replacements.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
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.
Because QT 3 isn't available under GPL for Windows or Mac, while QT 4 is. Next question?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Why would you run another desktop on top of Windows? Wouldn't you take a performance hit for running two desktops, in essence?
Say you want to transition your office or whatever to use all Linux and OSS. You can get them used to open office, but they still be a bit put off when you make them switch to KDE. This way they can get used to "linux" while still having access to their favorite windows apps. I think it'd be a great idea for preparing people for a transition.
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
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.
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
Program Manager shipped through XP SP1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_Manager
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
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 ?
I worked for a company that ran Outlook as it's shell. Every user logged in and had their mail, calendar, and shortcuts for word, excel, and a couple of internal apps in the sidebar. At first I thought it was nuts, but it was a well managed network, and it worked really well actually.
Mind you, this was a relatively long time ago... Win 95 or 98 era if I remember correctly... when you could change your shell just by editing a line in your system.ini.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
what-does-that-make-gnome-then
The Holy Hand Grenade
Yes, everything still works. If you've tried blackbox for windows, GeOShell, or Litestep, you'll notice everything still works. What would KDE make different about that? It's not like it goes off and assinates MFC and SWF.NET to replace them with libqt
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You realize what you've done right? You've encouraged geeks everywhere to switch their XP to Windows 3.1 desktops for the day! I would, if I could find the "ding..ding..ding" noise to go with it.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Cool. Now we can ask Dell for windows boxes running KDE :-)
. . .does it run on Emacs?
You are not the customer.
The WIN32 API is basically just a collection of library files (dlls) in the c:\windows\* folders. Not running explorer doesn't effect that. You'd just have a different program to organize your desktop, launch applications, etc. Programs access the Win32 API by making calls into those DLLs. As long as you don't delete the DLLs, your API is still there. You'd loose explorer specific functionality--ie, things like adding WinRAR to your context menu--might not work if whoever compiled KDE for Windows didn't ensure that part worked, but it won't prevent any of your individual applications from running and working with each other.
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.
Several KDE 3 apps have already been ported to OS X, such as kwrite as QT3 is available under the GPL on OS X. KDE developers have said that KDE 4 will be portable to other architectures including OS X amd Win32. However this doesn't mean they intend to port port the entire desktop to, say, OS X. Rather the apps themselves will be portable. This is arguably more important than porting the entire desktop. However, Having the KDE desktop replacing explorer on win32 would be wonderful. KDE still won't make Vista any less obnoxious, though. I am looking forward to running great KDE apps like Amarok on my OS X box at some point in the future, though.
In the meantime, Gnome is coming along quite nicely too. Neither gnome nor KDE is the be-all, end-all, last word in desktop environments, though. They both will continue to evolve and develop. More and more cooperation among the two camps through the freedesktop project is happening. Major problems have now been solved, including the clipboard frustrations of years past, drag-and-drop, and removable device handling through dbus. In fact with Qt4, since the glib main event loop can be used, it's becoming possible to mix gtk and qt widgets in the same app, which is handy for plugin developers. Problems yet to be solved include a common theming subsystem, a common virtual filesystem layer (a la kioslaves), and a few other things.
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
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
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...
For instance halflife.exe is a good shell for windows.
©God
So you're saying that merely doing everything Windows does it not enough, it's got to be MUCH better.
1) Nobody said anything about Windows. Why are Linux users so unable to let Linux stand on its own? You never see Mac users constantly comparing everything about OS X to Windows, instead they judge OS X on its own merits and criticize it for its own failings.
Have you ever seen those cartoons with the bulldog who's constantly being circled by the annoying yipping puppy sucking up to him? Linux is like the puppy. It's irritating.
2) If Linux wants to gain users, yes, it has to be much better than Windows. I would think that obvious.
2. cut and paste between ALL applications.
KDE does this. See a thread above.
Only for text. Try copying (say) spreadsheet cells and pasting them in a bitmap graphics program. Or try copying a few seconds of a video file and pasting it in a word processing document.
3. Applications must ALL be uniform in operation of common functions..
I assume you mean dialog boxes. Windows doesn't guarantee it, and neither does KDE. It provides the same (and more) functionality that Windows does, though.
Not just dialog boxes, but also:
* Keyboard shortcuts
* Menu items
* Contents and ordering of contextual menus
* Open and Print dialogs (which you mentioned)
* Button labels
* What the "Home" and "End" button do in text fields
etc.
5. Easily customizable..
You might have something here... Too bad KDE is MUCH more customizeable than Windows, especially straight out of the box.
He didn't say "more customizable" he said easily customizable. If you don't know the difference between those two statements, you really have no business critiquing a UI.
But why KDE would rule the market by only beating Apple, which doesn't rule the market, is byond me.
It would only rule the market if it:
1) Beat Apple's OS X
2) Beat Microsoft's Windows
3) Was compatible with, or had feature-complete equivalents to, all software that runs on OS X or Windows, including custom-developed programs
4) Ran on affordable hardware and was itself affordable (both in monetary cost, and in support costs)
Right now, no Linux environment (KDE included) is even remotely close.
Comment of the year
WindowMaker is a window manager, not a desktop environment. A desktop environment consists of a window manager and related UI items, plus (more importantly) a development platform for applications.
[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.
The workspace (that would be mostly KWin and Plasma) won't be ported to Windows. Only applications will.
Excepted it doesn't disable the window manager AFAIK.
The key I know about is "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Shell"
I've used it to start cygwin xwin X server in place of explorer, but if you're launching a win32 app, it still has XP borders. And if you're launching a browser window, it will launch the full desktop.
Is there an equivalent to 'nautilus --no-desktop' for MS explorer ?
Is there a mean to replace the whole window manager ?
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
1. standardized operation for ALL applicatation.
--> It does, check out dcop or it's replacement d-bus. Through shell, perl, c++, qt... you can communicate between any application in both fore- and background.
2. cut and paste between ALL applications..
Has done that for a while now...
3. Applications must ALL be uniform in operation of common functions..
That's up to the programmers mainly, but all decent KDE applications use the standard QT library
4. Uniform operation of input devices (mouse)..
What's your problem with that? Any mouse I connect works and the mouse buttons too. Mainly an issue of configuration (which can be done from within KDE), doesn't matter which OS you use.
5. Easily customizable..
Check out kde-look.org, I think there's even a plugin into the Themes section of your configuration that automagically downloads them.
6. Standardized behavour on any local or remote environment..
That's up to the environment server. I connect through X or VNC, looks the same as my desktop at home.
7. Some kind of direct video support (games, etc...).
That's up to the Operating System, not to a desktop environment. And those solutions are available, it's called OpenGL and SDL, too bad only good game developers dare to use portable, industry standards instead of closed API's they don't even have full support for (take a look at the UT engine, Doom engine, Cube engine).
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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]
You never see Mac users constantly comparing everything about OS X to Windows, instead they judge OS X on its own merits and criticize it for its own failings.
Really? I thought Mac users' sole purpose in life is to endlessly compare OSX with Windows.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
Yeah, you hack and slash the explorer.exe and pray the M$ gods favor your creation.
Have a look at bbLean, a Windows version of Blackbox. I think it does what you want.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Ok, but CAN it do that?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
KDE4-for-windows is supposed to use the Windows WM. Porting KDE 4 to windows doesn't mean porting EVERY piece of KDE of KDE 4 to windows.
Notice that in XP the WM is inside the kernel so in XP is just impossible to replace it.
Well in that case, you have no problem. Qt for X11 is available under the QPL, which permits applications to use a range of free software licenses, including the LGPL and BSD-style.
Guess you'll be switching now then?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha