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KDE 4.1 Alpha 1 Released
Crobain writes "The first alpha release for KDE 4.1 is out, and bugs aside, it looks promising. The KDE Plasma desktop shell now has preliminary support for Mac OS X dashboard widgets and SuperKaramba, and panels can be added and removed via contextual menu items. 'This alpha release marks the start of the 4.1 feature freeze, so virtually all of the remaining developer effort between now and the official 4.1 release in July will focus on bug-fixing, polish, and stability. Despite the current breakage, the actual feature set that has been stubbed out for this release is pretty darn good. If the developers can deliver on all of this functionality and make it stable and robust, version 4.1 will offer a much better overall user experience than 4.0, and Plasma will come close to achieving functional parity with the KDE 3.5.x panel system.' The KDE Techbase wiki has a full list of the features planned for the 4.1 release."
I am a very long time KDE user, and I expected 4.0 to be a great desktop, but it turned out to be a alpha so I kept using the old 3.x series.
The scope of 4.0 was quite big, so understood the problems and I hoped for 4.1 to be a stable release.
Reading the dot news on kde.org I found that the have gone back and rewritten a lot of plasma again. This means that it will need a new period of stabilization again.
I just hope that this time they don't release before it is ready. It would be a huge blow to the project's reputation. 3.5 is excellent, so we can keep using it until they are really ready with the new version. No hurry.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
I'm not a kde user but I must say some of the things that I've seen about it would make me consider giving it another go. I quite like some of the ideas they've got, but I can't help but feel that its a bit of a shame that we have two desktop environmnets for Linux which effectively means twice the effort and a dividing of the developers. I know that there are idealigical differences between the two camps... Perhaps this is part of the downside of open source. We've had the same thing with pidgin - in the end perhaps we could all just get along?
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
KDE
http://arstechnica.com/news.media/kde41a1themes.png
OS X:
http://laptoping.com/wp-content/mac_os_x_leopard_screenshot.jpg
Flame away about being 'shallow' and talk of 'eye candy' but how the hell can anyone expect average computer users to want to migrate to Linux when the desktop looks like a hobbyist Windows knockoff.
I am using KDE 4.0, yeah its rough, yeah some basic functionality isn't there. And I think it is a poor setup not to be able to do things like drag and drop and make things smaller than default. Everything can be made larger, but never smaller.
However, despite all the failures, which I believe will come around, KDE is really moving to the next step and once the polish is applied it will outshine the rest. A desktop were apps of every shape and color can be integrated. Where the best ideas don't have to be accepted by the head developers, customization, and opening the doors to open source even further. It is a place were truly original ways to organize data and display information will come. It is were we will begin to move beyond just making a windows 3.1 gui more fancy and with more features. I think these are worthy goals. I put up with the annoyances now because I want to be part of it. I think it will be big.
But seriously, developers, start getting functionality working. You have to get people to use it. The widgets will come but you need functionality to get people to use it. No drag and drop for icons on the desktop, can't move around widgets in the bottom bar, right clicking doesn't give you widget specific options. And when they do, it is very limited, like the digitial clock being set to 12 hour time. I know these aren't sexy to work on, but nothing else matters if this isn't done.
Lastly, what I think will make the biggest appeal is making kde install easy on vista. People hate the vista interface, but have to have it for the new stuff underneath like directx 10. If you can make kde4 stable and install smooth on vista, you will have a firefox style pickup of it.
Yesterday I installed KDE 4.0 on my corporate laptop!!! Next to Windows, without touching the partitions! All thanks to a small program called wubi and which makes it possible to install Kubuntu and the others _inside_ Windows partitions. So far I have less than four hours of experience with KDE 4.0, but have only found minor details to complain about - like some menus don't get their contrasting font color if you switch to a dark colored widget style. As Debian user I cannot say that Ubuntu is _easier_ to use than Debian. I don't understand why people pursue that mantra. Yes, it is easy to use, but so is Debian. But, without wubi in Sid I won't touch my partitions. KDE 4.0 both look and work nice (so-far) and from what I hear 4.1 is even better. Sounds great!
Constantly trying to reinvent a perfectly round wheel results in
a) New problems that need to be worked out from scratch
b) Totally different use patterns which may or may not work in the real world
c) Reluctant users
Personally, I don't see a problem with following patterns that were created for Windows. There's no reason that the existing desktop format can't be extended and have features added to it if need be. This "lets go a totally different direction just coz we don't want to follow MS" is stupid. MS spent huge amounts of R&D finding out what regular users will be able to use, and freeriding on that seems like a good idea to me.
Also, open source software doesn't have a good track record when it comes to ground up usability designs. Compare GIMP, Pidgin and Blender with their commercial counterparts. Then look at how long Linux has taken to get to a point where it's considered barely usable by the every day user.
Oh, and anyone who throws in a "but my grandma has been using Linux since 1965 for $fooTinyUseCase" gets a kick in the backside.
I hate printers.
Have you even used KDE 4.1? It is nothing like Windows 2K. I guess I really shouldn't respond to trolls.
That's not true my friend, I think you misunderstood the 4.1 Release Schedule. We're in soft feature freeze, but planned features can still be added to the code until May 19th ;-)
But when will we get KDE4 for FreeBSD? I know netcraft confirms its dieing but there's no reason not to port it anyway.
Here is a related (p)review of latest revision of KDe 4.1 (not the exact alpha just released): http://polishlinux.org/kde/kde-4-rev-802150-work-in-progress/ "Plasma has gone under major API changes and is still a bit wonky, Dolphin gets tabs (hell yeah!), Phonon gets a Gstreamer backend, KWin gets wobbly windows (hell yeah!), and KInfoCenter and K3b get KDE4 ports. KDE 4.1 will be sure to blow your mind." A bit more comprehensive and screenshot-rich than the ArsTechnica article.
Polish your GNU/Linux! http://polishlinux.org
I really hope kde-pim will make it into this release, as the kde3 version gives me grief when using IMAP, however this looks far from certain...
They've made it look nice but that's about as far as it goes. Most of the things I care about don't work this time around, and among other things I was a bit annoyed to find out that its opengl desktop stuff runs slower than compiz while doing less.
They're trying too hard to copy vista when they should really be concentrating on making a good desktop.
Soooo does anyone know if KDE can do per-pixel alpha transparency?
From what I can tell with using KDE since 4.0.0, it appears KDE4 will be a nice balance once its fully implemented.
:)
Icons and the taskbar and a "start menu" type thing will not go away, so if you prefer a more Windows-like interface, you still have it right there. There's also the work on a Mac-like bar, so people that don't want to change their habits from other OSes will still be able to use essentially the same interface as before.
However, the groundwork is being laid for departures from that; if you prefer, eventually you'll have a large library of Plasma apps to choose from, as well as many customization options. And that's just the desktop; I know KOffice was also experimenting with a new streamlined approach to documents, though I am unsure how much they're doing and how much they abandoned.
But that's the difference - you can now (or will, once it's finished and officially released) fully mess with the desktop, instead of only being able to change a few colors or behaviors of pretty much the same static desktop, as it was before. Keep the standard Windows model, or completely throw away the panel and start menu and set up little applets to do what you need, or anything in between; You choose. And I think that's a powerful thing, to give people that option - certainly a defining characteristic of free software.
Maybe the Windows GUI will eventually prove itself to still be the best; but depending on what people come up with in the next few years as Plasma matures, we may be discussing how we can't even imagine using a computer without a Plasma-esque GUI.
I have tried it on my small-screened laptop and found the candy annoying and pixel hogging. Yes, I know I can turn it off...
As my 16 year old son said of the jello-wobble screens: Cute, but what's the point!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I am using KDE 4 (latest builds) at home on my laptop and desktop. Yeah, production environment.
:).
Q. But it's an unstable alpha right?
A. Right, a lot of the KDE4 applications crash. Never fear, for any buggy KDE4 app I simply run the equivalent KDE3 version instead.
Q. But this uses a lot of memory to have kde3,qt3,kde4 and qt4 loaded at same time right?
A. Right, but it still manages to use under 500MB and run smoothly with compositing enabled thanks to the new code and efficient toolkits (qt3 and qt4).
Q. So sure, they keep rewriting stuff and a lot of the applications are unstable. However, this doesn't mean you can't start using it now. It's a really nice desktop environment. Enjoy it now
A. This must be hard to setup though right? Having KDE3 one run instead if KDE4 one is buggy.
Right again but most distros shipping a KDE4 version (Opensuse, Ubuntu) do all that hard work for you. They still use the KDE3 version for anything remotely unstable. So you shouldn't get any crashes using it. If you do though, it's not hard to install the earlier version.
Your comment is a bit silly, to say the least. After all, in order to try to prove that all F/LOSS is somehow inferior to all commercial software, you picked up the GIMP and Pidgin, which are two of the most god-awful UI examples there is. Nonetheless, you failed to cite what the commercial counterparts are. In fact, if you compare Pidgin, which is a god-awful mess, to MSN Messenger, the "commercial counterpart" isn't exactly great either. Not by a long shot.
If that wasn't enough, you try to use Blender as an example of how F/LOSS is somehow always inferior. Well, that is a stupid example due to Blender's origins as a closed-source, proprietary, commercial product which only ended up being liberated by pure luck. And yet, there are quite a few users swearing by Blender's UI. You see, just because it is different to all that crap you got used to it doesn't mean it's bad.
But the biggest issue you chose to ignore is that F/LOSS presents us with quite a lot of examples of superb usability when compared to proprietary, closed-source, commercial counterparts. For example, both GNOME and KDE are leaps and bounds above and beyond any desktop environment that Microsoft has been pushing for the last two decades, not only in UI design but also in technical prowess.
So care to rethink your silly argument?
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Been a Linux/KDE user for longer than I care to remember and I really, really donÂt like KDE 4.
I wish them luck with the project as I think there is some really impressive technology underneath that interface.
However as a tool to use to get things done it has all the worst aspects of OSX (and there are many) together with the dumbed down minimalism of Gnome.
Since KDE 4 I find I mostly only use Linux at work now because if I am going to have to use the bastard child of OSX and Gnome on my home machine I may as well use the god awful OSX because at least that supports all my gadgets out of the box.
My favourite apps are all Linux; digikam, amarok, k3b but non-kde 4 versions of these are a dead end now.
Where does someone who enjoyed the complexity and reconfigurability of KDE 3.5 go these days except a different platform.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
"KDE 4.1 is out, and bugs aside, it looks promising. T"
Come out , what kind of stupid comment is that?! People slam MS for shipping buggy code but when its OSS , weelll thats ok right? Hello? Double standards anyuone? No its not ok. If its still full of bugs it should have remained as an rc , not an official release!
Ah hell , just spotted its an alpha , ignore my stupid comment.
From what I can tell its dick heads like you that don't like what's on offer who should STFU and go do your own coding.
I mean, look at this. Are they purposefully trying to waste as much screen real estate as possible? It looks like they deliberately put 50 pixels of even more no-quite-brushed-metal-looking empty space around each little button there.
I agree. I like that KDE is there, and I like that other people like it, and I know that a lot of people hate Gnome.
Me? I simply don't get KDE.
To me, it looks messy, cluttered and slightly juvenile.
That is coming from someone who migrated to Tux around about the time XP was released (meaning I was a bonafide 2K user). The person that helped me switch told me that I should use KDE because "it is most like Windows".
That lasted about 6 months until I discovered Gnome. I much prefer the clean lines of Gnome.
I still have KDE on my Ubuntu box, and fire it up occasionally just for fun (ie new version). I also use it at Uni (Scientific Linux) and I have XFCE on my old P3 laptop. I'm not fanatical about any of them, I just prefer Gnome, XFCE and KDE in that order.
Having said that, it really is all about choice.
I guess that's what makes Linux great.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
GIMP needs improvements in a few areas (what does't though?), but it's nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be.
You're right about Pidgin, even though it's the only chat program I use, I sure do wish its developers would find someone with interface design knowledge.
As far as Windows vs Linux is concerned, I feel you're statement is fairly accurate. Trying to be different for the sake of being different while ignoring some simple GUI concepts is incredibly stupid.
In fact I'm going to pick on Slashdot, I know we're all computer literate and know what a <p> tag is, but do we REALLY need to use HTML inside our posts just to get some line breaks? If you're going to setup Javascript functionality for everything, then how about updating this ancient post box.
In the Options menu there is a "Comment Box Size" setting: Is this really the year 2008? How do you expect non-webdevelopers to know what the number 50 for the Column variable is suppose to specify exactly? How about just adding resizing functionality to this box that uses.. dun dun dunn... the mouse, you know, that thing invented all the way back in the 1960s.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
I dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu Linux, spending 95% of my time in the former (MS Visual Studio and my own novel writing software), and 5% in the latter. What I'd really, really like is a way to make the KDE or Gnome desktop font as similar to Windows XP as possible.
I've searched the web and found a few solutions, but I don't want a theme which adds a Windows start button to KDE, and I don't care about the system tray. It's the desktop font - resolution, type face and size - which I find really distracting. Firefox also seems to do its own thing, despite me juggling fonts & sizes in the options.
It's like reading novels in 11pt Times New Roman all day, and then picking one up set in MS Comic Sans or Courier New. The difference is like a smack to the eyeballs.
(For the record, I've been importing and configuring TTF and Bitmap fonts into Linux since, I think, the Redhat 4 days, including converting the MS Sans Serif system font to some other oddball format. I just haven't hit on the right setup.)
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
Hey, that's a great idea.
Alternatively, I guess he could just go and use another desktop.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
I recently upgraded to Kubuntu Hardy. After much agonizing, I eventually decided reluctantly to stick with KDE3.5 - for me it's just not ready yet in Kubuntu. But since Intrepid Ibex will include KDE4.1, I'll be very glad to switch to that. KDE4 is brilliant - just not yet.
The GUIs of Windows 98/2000 are essentially tweaks of what Windows 95 had. Now I happen to remember Windows 95 was explosively popular, which happened for a reason. It worked. Cloning what works isn't a bad thing at all, what the developers of GTK+ did is a bad thing. I'd take a clone of Windows 2000 over that god-awful mess any day of the week.
Thankfully they have got rid of those absurd glass borders. On immediate appearance however I think it still looks pretty discontinuous and lost as an overall design.
Why such vast tracts of grey? In some of the screenshots on the PolishLinux site window elements are surrounded by entire football fields of grey nothingness.
Why the faded titles in the panel? What are they intended to signify?
Why are the minimise and maximise icons raised, tiny and 'stuck on' rather graphically integrated into the window title? Window barnacles? In some screenshots they look annoyingly small to be a mouse target, especially compared to the window title.
Why is the panel so g i g a n t i c? To show off the icon authors scalable icons in all their glory or is there a practical reason to swallow so much valuable realestate? I would certainly never want to see this on my laptop..
Such things make KDE4.1 look lacking in vision, despite so many improvements graphically and otherwise in other areas. Perhaps it's time to cave in and simply pay an accomplised designer to pull it all together. Alternatively, why not hand it over for critique to a master's degree design class?
I suggest you take a glance at the option just under "50 for the column variable"
Slashdot still defaults to "HTML Formatted" for new users I think... but if you switch to "Plain Text"... you can type "normally" (ie: enter = new line) while still being able to use bold and italics and also
Paragraphs
The other examples I can understand; I'm not a gimp user and I do get confused when I use it. Blender looks awful, but again I don't use it and I know that heavy users do swear by it.
But Pidgin? I use it daily. I see nothing wrong with it.
I have a list of users, I double click on them and I get to chat - whilst it could be flashier I'm having a hard time seeing how the UI is bad.
Any comments would be welcome - so long as they're not about resizing the text entry part ;)
I find it funny some people say KDE should stop copying Vista, others OSX, Gnome or Win2K. If you want to say they copied something at least agree on what it is.
Mada mada dane.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't really care what the KDE developers state, but the way they have gone about releasing and hyping KDE 4.x.x is stupid. They built and built and built the hype for the 4.0 milestone, even though they were screaming it wasn't perfect. But the hype outshone the voices of caution. Now everyone was waiting for some stability in 4.1, and we're not going to get it then either, again, after hyping 4.1 will be usable. By the time the 4.x version is usable no one will give a crap about it. I, personally, was looking forward to 4.x series to be usable but it doesn't look like that'll happen for a year or so and I'll keep my happy ass right at 3.x until then.
Oh, and anyone who throws in a "but my grandma has been using Linux since 1965 for $fooTinyUseCase" gets a kick in the backside.
Translation:
And anyone who dares to disagree with me gets a kick in the backside...
Threatening posts that you disagree with is also censorship
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Does anyone know if you can get rid of that annoying swirly yellow thingy in the top-right corner yet? I really liked 4.0, but it drove me nuts that someone thought I needed that thing so much that I should not have the option to remove it.
www.livejournal.com
Exactly the same thing with the Ubuntu release. All hype. And then a release comes and it's (knowingly) buggy as hell.
Doesn't shipping with a beta web browser that is known to be broken and extremely unstable enough evidence? I can't even print in their version of Firefox 3 without the browser crashing.
Wireless support (especially in laptops) is (yet again) a nightmare. No progress really has been made. Wext is insufficient in many cases. Ndiswrapper doesn't work a lot of the time. Gnome or KDE network manager doesn't work sometimes and doesn't have enough configurability.
Hot (and even cold sometimes) laptop docking support is again non-existent or broken. Especially if you have an external monitor. So corporate usage isn't possible.
So back to KDE -- same kind of thing. Incomplete or broken features for two releases now. Some very basic things were knowingly overlooked in order to have time to add unimportant polish.
When is "desktop Linux" going to figure out that getting the basic stuff correct and solid along with ease-of-use is the important thing. Nail that first, and then add on all of the polish.
Damn. That's bothered me forever. Thanks.
See? Easy-peasy!
.there is enough of everything for everyone.
I hate to harp on about it, but that start menu has got to be fixed.
I see that it's now resizeable, but that doesn't fix the basic problem of it hiding all the contextual information about where you are in the menu structure and being useless for people who rely on spacial memory.
I'm seriously wondering whether I'll have to switch to GNOME or Xfce.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I really miss using "ggl:blah" in my run dialog.
However, two things have been keeping me with Gnome lately:
- KDE applications start slowly.
- Ubuntu is much more mature than Kubuntu.
The second is inevitable, I guess, and is being worked on, so there's less to complain about.But the first really annoys me - launching one of the smallest KDE applications I could find (kate) as a benchmark of app startup time shows that it takes 3 seconds to start, whereas gedit takes about 1 second to start in Gnome, and notepad takes unnoticable time to start in Windows.
I am really puzzled by these weird startup times. What is it that these programs waste their time on at startup? Can't those things happen "lazily" later in the run of the program, when they are actually needed?
Are there inherent penalties of Linux executables that have lots of dynamic libraries, and in the case of KDE, C++ mangled symbols?
KDE 4.0 was pre-alpha. I mean it was bad. It was almost criminally bad. Significant rebuke has been placed on the KDE team. Such a horrible release that even now is still quite bad even with the updates.
KDE 4.1, hopefully will be much better. We'll see.
KDE 4.x has the potential to change the landscape of desktop managers in Linux but if these guys can't get it worked out and faster than say 5 years, it will seriously disappoint.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
So I've been using Ubuntu 7.x on my Toshiba laptop for the last several months, and found it pretty easy, albeit with certain caveats (getting wireless to work was a pain, as was graphics - ATI chipset) I'd tried KDE quite some time ago, and was interested in trying it again. So I downloaded and installed the KDE4 Remix for AMD64 machines. Looked fine at first, but then came those damn wireless issues again. I downloaded, built and installed ndiswrapper, grabbed the latest XP drivers (Atheros AR5007EG chipset), and thus began my long struggle. I finally got it to see the card, but it wouldn't connect; it would stall when trying to obtain an IP address. Ok, screw this, time to download the latest 32-bit version and try again - I'd been using a 32-bit version of Ubuntu, so I felt confident I could get it to go. Only, the torrent for the supposed KDE4 Remix CD isn't; it's the 3.x install disc. Ok, open a terminal, sudo apt-get install build-essential, launch Adept, and do a full upgrade. At this point I went to bed, because the servers were SLOW. When I awoke, I had to re-download some items, apparently the servers timed-out. Ok, now time to install kubuntu-desktop-kde4. Looks good. Looks can be deceiving. Cleaned out all(?) vestiges of ndiswrapper, rebuilt, reinstalled, and added the driver. However, when it came time to load it with modprobe, my computer would hang. Ok, reboot, remove, and let's try that older version (1.47) that I still have. Make distclean clean ; make uninstall ; make ; make install. Only, make fails with an error about 'CFLAG's being changed. To Hell with this, I'm going to make 1.52 work if it kills me. What I finally ended up doing was leaving it alone after it built and installed, and just added it to the modules load list. After rebooting, it worked like a charm.
So, now that it's installed and wireless is working, I can start messing around with it. A couple of things jumped out at me right away -
1) Dolphin throws up an error message every time I close an app that was launched via it.
2) You can't drag-n-drop from the desktop to a Dolphin window. WTF?
3) How does one add an app to the launcher? I installed xtightvnc, and have to launch it via a terminal window.
4) When I resize the 'Task Manager', the bottom couple-three rows of pixels of the clock gets cut off. Not so much that you can't tell the time, but it's obvious enough.
Anyways, I'm going to give it a whirl, and see what else. I do like the general look better than 3.x and GNOME, but frankly it's about usability.
-peter
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand
Sorry but that's a very valid point and you're just an arrogant troll. Many developers are blindfolded enough to think their views fit better what the users want than years and a bunchload of dollars invested in R&D, then invest their time in re-inventing the same thing again, with maybe a slight difference no one really cares about (or that makes a feature totally missing the point). Just look at the current Pidgin controversy for a good illustration of the parent's opinion. It's in yesterday's /. news.
And (since the parent mentionned it), look at the usability disaster that GIMP is! It's so incredibly bad it should actually have a room in a museum somewhere. Why didn't people just followed the examples provided by the very successful commercial applications that are around in this field? Why is that such a big buzz around making GIMP look more like the Photoshop layout?
Any answer to that besides "do your own coding"?
(which we probably do better than you according to your level of language and the total lack of ideas expressed in your post).
R&D does not necessarily translate into the end user experience. There's a little thing called "the bottom line" that haunts the dreams of many a well meaning (corporate shill) coder.
I don't like bad mouthing myself in public, so forgive my anonymous cowardice.
Blender was a commercial package when it was built from the ground up. Apparently, when you get familiar with the blender interface you can become very productive.
It's about familiarity. If you are familiar with Photoshop and then try and use Gimp, sure you'll thing it sucks because it's not the way you are used to using a drawing package. That does not mean gimp does not have effective usability.
I've used MS Paint and no matter how familiar I get with it, it's still ineffective. MS has spent huge amounts on R&D and they still have worked out MS Paint sucks and needs work.
More importantly, all of that R&D that he is speaking about is directed at how to create HCI that sells. It doesn't matter if it sucks as long as people buy it. It is comparable to the movie industry where the movies that get made are the ones that can be effectively marketed to consumers in order to sell lots of tickets. The consumer products sold by Apple and MS(both of whom have done much research), are designed according to marketing and branding not usability and productivity. This is necessary if they want the sales volumes that they have. Should Linux emulate this? If they want to capture a comparable percentage of the market then they will have to. If they want to offer highly productive interfaces then they will have to do something different.
You're making a simple math equation, but 1 + 1 is not always 2.
If you combine the developers working on GNOME and KDE you won't end up with one project that's twice as productive. In fact, it will be very unproductive because each set of developers have vastly different vision.
Two parallel projects keep each other motivated to become the best one. It also creates playground to implement new features. Sometimes GNOME might not like an idea because it's to controversial. When the developer can implement it in KDE and get successful with it, GNOME may copy the feature. -- and visa versa. So no productivity is really lost here.
Merging two two commercial companies gives a similar problem. Sometimes managers refrain from merging two companies after all when it becomes clear the cultures are too different. It would cut the productivity making the merger useless; the added value of merging the companies would be lost by the lower productivity.
The best way to accelerate a windows server is by 9.81 m/s2
"Oh, and anyone who throws in a "but my grandma has been using Linux since 1965 for $fooTinyUseCase" gets a kick in the backside."
Why every person who actually dont know things, must say that?
Why you just cant say straight "I dont know jack sh*t what I'm talking about, but dont try to explain why I'm wrong, because I will KILL YOU!!!" (And then chairs are flying again somewhere).
"Compare GIMP, Pidgin and Blender with their commercial counterparts."
Funny, I like how GIMP has better GUI than Photoshop on multiple monitor and when handling 25+ photos same time. (actually only reason why it is bad is lack of 16-32bit support!)
Pidgin, much better to IM than Live Messenger or Trillian if you use windows. Blender... Have nothing bad to say about that, so great possibilities to customize GUI so I dont need to fight with it when Im doing work.
And soon you might say that KDE or GNOME desktops are terrible and only good way to go is Vista GUI with Office 2007 Ribbons used everywhere...
Uh, ok
[backs slowly away]
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
According to the article, 4.1's still in the crashes-a-lot type of alpha stage. Some kinds of quirks I can put up with, but it's obviously not for me yet...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
My biggest beef with KDE4 is typified in your post. It is littered with promises of what is to come without delivering any of it to make a usable desktop. They are working on toys ignoring core functionality. This *IS* the release of 4.1 the long promised "it is scheduled for 4.1" the KDE devs kept posting to every bitch to the last release. This release is still crap IMO. More, I'll wrap up all their problems with it in one word...PLASMA! That POS is being forced down users throats and any attempt to add functionality to disable it has met a brick wall. Worse, almost all development on 3.5.* has stopped to concentrate on getting the limping KDE4 up to some sort of scratch.
Look, I'm in favor of cleaning the code up which is a big motivating factor in doing KDE4. When you add hours to my day because you screwed up my workflow, I take that personally. Most users do. And when you make it impossible for that user to set up a reasonable likeness to what they have been using for years, don't bitch when users treat KDE4 the same as Vista and refuse to adopt it.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
She would, but they got lost under the mountain of sarcasm you seem to have missed :P
I hate printers.
Get off your knee0jerk horse. I love FLOSS, however if you think that it has up until now a good track record with user friendliness then you're fooling yourself. It's getting better, mainly because FLOSS devs are realising that they have sucked in this area up until now and have endeavoured to improve. Head in sand attitudes are not helping.
KDE and Gnome have not been ahead of Windows despite having quite a few neat tricks up their sleeves. If you take a brutally honest look, the fundamentals are still easier on Windows than in any Linux desktop. Adding cool extras is good, but the main game is in the average users's day to day use case, which is an area Windows still leads in. In fact most of this thread is about whining that KDE/Gnome copy Windows too much. Aside from perhaps the barest of bare minimum use cases, Windows use is still far easier for the average luser than any Linux flavour or remix. I'm not talking about clicking to launch OpenOffice or Firefox. The average user also needs to install apps that they want, add new hardware when they get it and other things like that. FLOSS is not quite there yet.
Saying all this does not mean I am saying FLOSS is inferior or that I don't support FLOSS. It's not a one or the other question. Get off that binary high horse of yours.
I hate printers.
No, it's threatening anticipated and oft-used canned responses that are either deliberately misleading or plain stupid. It's not censorship, they can still make the point if they like, I'm just pre-emptively pointing out how stupid the reply I know some people will give is.
I hate printers.
You don't think that even MS knows that MSPaint is a totally invisible app that nobody but the most idiotic user would use? There are piles of free alternatives. Also, were MS to add anything else to MSPaint we'd get Adobe and the open source community calling antitrust and unfair competition due to bundling. MS won't without good reason include anything other than a trivially functional app in Windows, and graphics tools is something MS will gladly stay out of.
I hate printers.
I can't find a way to easily sort users by what account I have them on. I have to mouse over and read if I want to look.
I would like the ability to collapse my work list and only have my friends show while at home. and visa versa at work.
These are separate logins, but I cannot find a way to group by them. I admit to not spending too much time, but I did try to google for it, and I read the name and scimmed the descriptions of every plugin I had.
I actually think the resizing text input is brilliant, though I don't see why it they didn't add an option if people are really pissed by it. I guess option creep is as big a risk as feature creep though.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Can't you install the Windows theme, and then go back and change the decorations, icons, etc. but leave the fonts?
Then save this as your new theme?
This assumes that those other solutions have indeed it on the right setup.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Have you used Kword 2?
They use a ribbonish interface on the right edge, and I love it.
It also lets my page look like a page.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg