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Interview with Sebastian Kuegler, KDE Developer
invisibastard writes "Linux Tech Daily has an interview with KDE's Sebastian Kuegler. Sebastian talks about the KDE 4.0 release event, goes into detail about how KDE has improved its processes and much more. '[...] there are many easy ways to help. The most obvious is helping people installing KDE, answering questions on forums, IRC and other media. Lately, we're getting also an increased amount of requests for speakers. Often local LUGs are interested in talks by KDE knowledgeable people. It might sound a bit scary, representing KDE in your local LUG, but it's really what KDE is about. Everybody comes from a local community, that is where our grassroots are. People often don't think that they are entitled to represent KDE, but that's just not the case at all. In fact, the marketing and promo team have a hard time finding enough speakers for all events. Slides are usually available, so it doesn't need all that much preparation.'
Personally, I was skeptical about the KDE 4.0 release too, initially. But given the scope and size of the project it was unavoidable and did not turn out bad at all. You should compare KDE 4.0 with Linux 2.6.0. There too, the problem of chicken (stable finished code) and egg (large userbase) caused delays which led Linus to make a release. The label '2.6.0' finally got distros to shift to the new release and accelerated stabilization.
We are now seeing the same for KDE. Before the schedule became so strict, people were working on the libraries mainly. Since last November progress towards stable and compelling applications went very fast and currently KDE 4.0 is not complete in terms of ported applications, but is a very nice environment to develop for and is perfectly nice to use. This desktop has high potential for the well-integrated sexyness that is the hallmark of KDE.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
I've been using KDE for a long time and I really like it. There is one thing that annoys me though, I'll find a bug and try to report it, only to be told that I'm not on the latest version. I'll need to upgrade and see if it's still a bug. Well, as much as I'd like to help make KDE better, I'm not going to upgrade my entire OS just to test a bug. They're not very receptive to bug reporting.
The article agrees, he believed that it should have been called a point-oh-oh release. But your completely wrong claiming they are redefining the meaning of a point oh release, the practice of releasing early and releasing often, is completely normal. They've got a development cycle quite similar to that of the kernel, only because kde is an end user "feature" they have to compromise with the distros and have a more ridged release cycle. I do however encourage you to go the the LKML and convince Linus that they should really wait longer between release and that 0 bugs/regressions should be the target of any release!
OR instead of arguing about the usefullnes of release often, and release early look what happens when you dont, Vista, the beryl split, etc.
Ive tried KDE4.0 on a low end system and it ran fine, it did have some stuff crash but it was a beta. Unfortunately the style of the system wasn't to my liking, im quite disappointed by plasma as i feal that kicker was fine ( i say fine it does have a to fast timer and a few other bugs but aesthetically its where I FEAL it should be), but i supose that sort of thinking is what leads to people insisting CLI/CDE/other old system, is far better than the modern alternative. I supose that apart from bug fixes they're wasnt much left to be done on the 3.x branch?
The article suggests that 4.0 was a framework release that allows bugs to be fix in the core, and programs to be fixed ontop of it and to that end it was a definite success.
Keeping in mind his comments on KDE vs Gnome, i do wonder what the gnome development process is like?
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
i switched because i found that gnome limited me too much (although this was before i was confident with the CLI) and xfce was well ugly ( having tested it recently i realise that this isnt true but i still think that kde looks nice *disclaimer* for me *disclaimer* )
also i recently suggested kde over gnome to a newer newbie and he felt that gnome was better, i think its not a question of newness but taste. ( although stupidly i said that xfce probably wasn't worth trying, should have encouraged him to try everything like i did)
I have tried a few light DE/WM and found that fluxbox was nice but i never spent the time to set it up, maybe id like it more if i was a 'pro' and had set it quickly?
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
IIRC, 3.0 was a big improvement over 2.0 in functionality and elegance
You're looking back with rose coloured glasses. KDE 3.0 had a hideous default look and wasn't terribly stable. The only reason it was reasonably featureful was because not a lot of the core changed from KDE 2. But then it turned into a great series, just like KDE 4 will eventually.
No seriously, by now there are sooo many programs for KDE for every possible use. I just checked for a gui program for creating bibtex files: kbibtex was the first one I stumbled over. KDE 4 will run under OSX as well as Windows. Personally I also dislike the MS Office / OpenOffice.org approach to Office tasks. OpenOffice.org might be great for people coming from MS Office, but I rather like the KOffice way of doing stuff. Though there are a couple features I am still missing.
The user also doesn't care about the os their programs and their guis are running on. They only care about what they are looking at while using the programs they want to use. So I think it is rather KDE vs. Gnome vs. Luna vs. (whatever Apple calls their desktop) vs. "that new thing in Vista.
Yes. It does.
I loved Gnome back in the days of 1.4, which was the last good version in my book.
Ever since 2.0, Gnome has started turning into a confining environment, restricting more choices with every release.
First they made a new window manager; I'm sorry, but until this day I don't see what Metacity has that Sawfish did not. But I immediately noticed all the options it did not have.
Then they started dropping options from various configuration dialogs, basically turning applications from tweakable tools to one-size-fits-no-one crap.
I know I'm not the only one who hates what Gnome is turning into, and while I do keep trying out different UIs (and I'm very partial to E17, BTW), KDE 4 may prove to be interesting and comfortable enough for me to convert.
Then again, I'm less likely to mind the "yeah, sorry, we haven't had the time to implemet $OPTION properly, but we'll have it in the next version" attitude than the "it was confusing some users, so we removed it" one.
Ignore this signature. By order.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
I personally haven't tried Gnome much. Everytime I wanted to use it, I felt like my productivity is being hindered.
All my friends have used KDE exclusively. Those who know, install kde as first thing when they get Ubuntu. Those who know more, install kubuntu.
Ofcourse there are people using Gnome, and rise in Ubuntu means a lot for Gnome users, but look at these results from linuxquestions.org:
1) http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2006-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-awards-76/desktop-environment-of-the-year-514945/
2) http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2005-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-awards-69/desktop-environment-of-the-year-409028/
3) http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2004-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-awards-62/desktop-environment-of-the-year-272100/
4) http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/lq-suggestions-and-feedback-7/2003-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-133391/
5) http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/2001-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-awards-winners-15903/?highlight=LinuxQuestions.org+Members+Choice+Awards
KDE all the way.
Nobody expected KDE 4.0 to be completely stable, but as of this moment Konqueror can't use the ctrl-tab shortcut to switch browser tabs because that shortcut crashes it. Kate can't properly save a new file (or save as an existing file) when using the fish protocol because it always saves into the root directory. Also try setting the alt-d shortcut in Konqueror (focus address bar to make it behave like Firefox) and a bug will actually reset all your shortcuts to their defaults instead of creating the new shortcut. These bugs includes 4.0 and the nightly snapshots I test about twice a week.
What I most hate about KDE 4.0 is that there are lots of very elementary bugs that should have been fixed. These bugs are even worse than releasing Plasma, which is so lacking in features that it resembles a pre-alpha release. It can't even set wallpaper to tile properly (though fiddling around can make it work).
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
A similar thing happened with FreeBSD 4->5. FreeBSD 4 was at some point the fastest, most stable and most administratively sane operating system for the x86. Linux 2.4 was already ahead in SMP scalability, but since this did not affect many users back then, not many people cared.
Then FreeBSD 5 was planned to include a major architecture shift to modern parallel programming, which required changing almost all of the kernel code sooner or later. FreeBSD 5 was downright unusuable until the 5.3 "stable" release, which was tolerable but still performed a lot *worse* than FreeBSD 4 for many workloads because it was half way between the very well optimized uniprocessor code and the very raw and experimental multiprocessor code.
FreeBSD 5 was looking so bad even early on, that Matthew Dillon predicted (incorrectly) that it would become unmaintainable and fail to modernize to new usages. He forked FreeBSD 4.8 into DragonFly BSD, and developed it with more clever, innovative and forward-thinking designs.
However, FreeBSD 6 and finally FreeBSD 7 polished things up to the point that a slightly reconfigured FreeBSD 7.0-rc1 will compete with and often outperform Linux 2.6.22 for database throughput, with comparable responsiveness to CFS in 2.6.24. FreeBSD 7 is stable and fast, and still includes as many features as the old FreeBSDs did, including running well on old hardware. FreeBSD 7 humiliates the current DragonFly (and in fact, all of the BSDs) in throughput and scalability alike. Here, have some numbers: http://www.slideshare.net/sim303/7020-preview/
An exceptionally bad 5.x branch did not kill FreeBSD. So I don't suppose KDE 4.0 will kill KDE either, or even significantly reduce its mindshare. Especially if 4.1 comes out by the end of the year and improves significantly, KDE might gain even more adoption than it has now in 3.5.
Sam ty sig.
Stats are a funny thing. For example, the 2007 Desktop Linux survey showed more people using GNOME than KDE.
:P)), so I can't really put a lot of stock in your anecdotal evidence, either.
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS8454912761.html
I know way more GNOME users than KDE users (I prefer GNOME myself (I guess I don't know
Meh, just use whatever you prefer.