Slashdot Mirror
KDE 4.1 Beta 2 – Two Steps Forward, One Step Back?
jammag writes "Linux pundit Bruce Byfield takes a look at the latest KDE beta and finds it wanting: 'Very likely, KDE users will have to wait for another release or two beyond 4.1 before the new version of KDE matches the features of earlier ones, especially in customization.' He notes that the second beta is still prone to unexplained crashes, and goes so far as to say, 'Everyone agrees now that KDE 4.0 was a mistake.' I'm not too sure about that — really, 'everyone?'"
"Everyone" agrees that Vista is "a failure", even though it's really not. So why can't dumb generalizations be applied to software that's supposed to be perfect in every way?
You know, I thought that the idea of Beta software was so that people could report unexplained crashes back to the developers....
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
KDE 4.1 Beta 2 â" Two Steps Forward, One Step Back?
One step forward, two steps back? If the "old version" is better than the "new version" ???
Evolution is a state-sponsored, state-protected religion.
Damn. I've got 2 users on xubuntu because ubuntu with gnome is too "bloaty and funky" for them, and kubuntu is too squirrelly. Neither is all that happy, both have been looking forward to a fully usable kubuntu with the 4.1 (because it "seems more like windows"), but maybe I should begin looking into E17 for them? I just hate this kind of crap, wish we could all just use ion3 or wmaker. But these are people who'll willingly click through a half dozen GUI menus no prob, but as soon as I say "It's easy -- just open a terminal and type" I've lost them... I never have understood why they have that mental block, it's so limiting.
Caveat Utilitor
I certainly don't think KDE 4.0 was a mistake beyond calling it "4.0" which led a bunch of idiots to expect something "finished", and that despite the up-front warnings that it wasn't finished.
It's a clear design improvement on 3.x in every way (though I don't particularly like or use the new desktop with its "plasmoids", I didn't like the 3.x desktop either, and the 4.x desktop can emulate it trivially - desktops widgets are just pointless, you just don't see them or the desktop for 99.9% of the time you're using the computer), it's just not stable yet.
I use Kubuntu and right now I have 8.04 Hardy with KDE 3.5.9. I tried Hardy with KDE 4.0 and felt like it was still in Beta. My main reason for switching back to KDE 3 was Amarok, which is my favorite media player / itunes substitute and it isn't working in KDE 4, yet.
Gee, complaining about glitches in a beta. That's brilliant. Hmmm the beta has some glitches! It must suck! Let's write it off permanently as crap! Ugh, as long as they don't pull a Vista or Leopard and release it with tons of unresolved problems and actually call it done, you won't hear me complaining. But if the entire basic design of it sucks, that's another story. I personally haven't seen it.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
> How is it possible that open source developer
There is a fundemental and fatal flaw with the entire Linux/open source development model where there is no single controlling authority. KDE is built of a million little projects and packages that all are their own boss and answer to no one but themselves. So if there is some poor design decision that is causing stupid and annoying problems in KDE(or other projects) there is no one that can force the project to fix or change their stuff. Sure you can fork and fix the stuff on your own, but you quickly end up taking over the work of all the sub projects you were trying to leverage.
So what happens is things just never get fixed. Instead new shinny things keep getting added and the year of the Desktop Linux gets incremented once again.
the point --> .
.
.
.
. (this is the whoosh area)
.
.
.
you --> x
Whoosh. Next time follow your own advice.
(not the original AC)
I hate it. I run in along side 3 just to keep an eye on the progress. Often, I'll see a batch of changes come down and I'll boot into 4 to see the progress. I agree with with emeade, I'm very happy I have a choice. It's one thing to not like it because of the problems (it is beta), but I just don't like the direction it's going.
One of reasons may be that they are doing it for free, in their spare time. Not eight hours a day, with their paycheck dependent on the quality of the result and with best professional artists, designers, usability specialists etc hired for big $$$ to decide what is best.
As much as we want to think otherwise, most of open source software is amateur production. Some of it is professional in means of program, but great most is amateur when it comes to UI design, art, and such.
"I'm not too sure about that â" really, 'everyone'?"
Well, if the writer of the article already disagrees, this is clearly wrong. Easy question to answer really.
Honestly, if enough users complain about something then the project will most likely fix it, if one person out of their whole userbase complains, they won't just fix it just for that one person and get everyone else pissed off.
You sound a lot like the guy complaining about how long it tool Macs to copy a 17 Mb file. What made you change your mind?
The point of a beta is not meant to be a stable release, its meant for users to report bugs! I do find it kind of annoying that they are removing a lot of functionality though. Most of the changes are purely aesthetic. Either way, I'm sticking to stumpwm.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080702-the-critics-are-wrong-kde-4-doesnt-need-a-fork.html
KDE4 will get better. There's a lot of promise in plasma. Until then, 3.5 is totally usable (I'm using it now). KDE has often put forward a lot of wacky ideas just to see what sticks to the wall. Good on 'em, I say.
Look about the full KDE3 installation, you can find all sorts of ideas that never really made it. Drag and drop stuff, little file servers, and so on. Some of these things are probably in use by someone now. It's all part of KDE's great flexibility.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
An upgrade? I thought we all agreed that I was perfect!
ha ha
I "agree". If only the GP would "pay attention" to their own "words" and the way they is "using" them.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
Most open source developers have been hanging out and posting here on Slashdot for a very long time and you start to believe your and everyone else's bullshit.
"Did you submit a bug report?"
"All hail choice!"
"You obviously haven't read teh Cathedral and teh Bazaar"
"Well, I LIKE it that way"
and all the rest of the garbage that gets posted and modded up here means nothing ever get fixed. Nothing ever changes. No grown up hard questions or criticisms get asked or considered. Just endless BSOD jokes and self congratulatory mutual masturbation of the glories of open source.
That crap keeps getting modded up and shit never gets fixed. And Microsoft continues to rake in tens of billions and retains their lock on the desktop OS world.
The world is waiting for open source developers to grow the fuck up and start acting like adults. People WANT to use open source software, and yet the juvenile open source developers continue to putz around with spinning 3D accelerated cubes proclaiming how they are 'ahead' of Windows and OS X.
and they still can't come up with something remotely polished as Win2k was years ago?
What is your idea of "remotely polished"? If you mean any modern Linux distro I would say that it is better than W2K. Lets start from the top...
1. Solid kernel.
2. Solid GUI base (X)
3. Solid GUI (take your pick, XFCE, GNOME, KDE, etc)
4. Lots of programs (just take a look at the Ubuntu repos)
Now look at all the things that Windows 2000 doesn't have that Linux has
1. Out-of-the-box driver support for just about everything (only exceptions are ATI/nVidia graphics cards, but some distros now include them)
2. Central package management system
3. 3-D effects
4. Support for all major filesystems out-of-the-box
5. Support for all major filetypes out-of-the-box
Your comments are nothing but trolling. Show me how Windows 2000 or any Windows is better than Linux and stop making up your "facts"
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Here's why:
1) NIMBY - If Z is a feature or program I don't use, not only do I not care about it, I don't care about whether or not it can interact properly with programs I do care about.
2) Windows-ism - Many projects now try to replicate the functions of Windows apps. But the clones and work-alikes they produce are not only imperfect, programmers also can't take the same shortcuts that the Windows developers do.
3) Real Programmers - If a program isn't hard to write, it isn't worth writing, and if you make it easy for programmers to write for a platform, especially new ones, they will only produce crap that you somehow have to deal with. Compare this with MS's "Developers developer developers" motto, or Apple's excellent dev tools.
4) Esoterism - The command line is better than graphics. Graphics, and especially graphic quality is unimportant, and studies with evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, whether an interface is cleaner or more obvious or better-looking is irrelevant. It's okay for GUI tools and programs to just be front-ends for their command-line equivalents, even if it puts unnecessary limits on the graphical version.
5) Arrogance - (related to 1) There is only one right way to do things, one language, one library, one kernel, one package, one work-flow set-up. If you do it any other way, you're wrong; if you suggest that another way is good, I must shoot you down and insult you because you implicitly threaten the validity of my worldview; if you say that there can be more than one solution to a problem, you are really saying that your solution is right and mine is wrong.
I once listened in on a conversation by some digital typographers about their work set-ups, and unlike linux-heads they were genuinely interested in the advantages and disadvantages of different ways of solving the same problem, instead of arguing over whether which was best.
I've ranted about KDE 4 before, and unfortunately must continue. I've always been a big KDE advocate, but they took damn near everything that made KDE great out of the 4.0 release. I was disappointed, but willing to give them a break and get to 4.1 (and restore some features from the 3.x series). Now we hear that 4.1 is worse than 4.0. I don't want to switch to Gnome or xfce or anything like that...but how long will I have to continue running 3.5.x?
:q!
Long time KDE fan and Kubuntu user, tried KDE 4.0 in Hardy, expecting that a lot more apps would have been ported over. Didn't like the frame around Konsole and the Panel is so locked down it's not nice to use. After a hard drive in my LVM died I reinstalled Hardy with KDE 3.5.9 and it was really nice to be back there. I'll wait for 4.2 at least... What's the difference between Kontact and KContacts (he mentioned that in the article)?
While having a story linked to on Slashdot always makes my day, the summary given with the link doesn't accurately report what I said:
-- To say that I found 4.1 "wanting" is incomplete. I say that it is a major improvement over 4.0.x, but, based on the beta, isn't likely to deliver everything people want. I suggest that, while it has faults, it may be the most innovative free desktop currently.
- I say that it crashes, not as criticism (it is a beta, after all), but to suggest that casual users might not want to spend the time compiling it, and should use a Live CD to explore it instead.
- The full context in which I call KDE 4 a mistake is: "Everyone agrees now that KDE 4.0 was a mistake. However, what the mistake was -- and whose -- is a matter of opinion. KDE developers blame distributions for rushing to include a release that was never intended for everyday use, while users blame developers for changing everything." In other words, all I'm saying is that it's causing a lot of controversy -- a fact that anyone who knows how to open a search engine can easily verify.
Trying to correct an impression that gets started in comments is difficult, but I thought I'd try anyway. So, let me spell out my opinion as clearly as possibly: I'm fascinated by the KDE 4.0 series with all its innovations (in fact, I'm using it on my laptop), but I think the KDE developers seriously misjudged user reaction, and that the software itself has a ways to go.
I don't mind in the least if people disagree with me, or even condemn me; you get used to it, after a while. However, I would prefer if they disagreed with or condemned what I actually said.
If you don't need Vista, if you don't need KDE4, don't let it worry you. KDE3 suits my need perfectly.
is the incredibly slow-ass file previews. What happened? I can now open up a folder of digital camera images and have Dolphin or Konqueror preview them, and 45 minutes later it will still be working to get all the thumbnails done.
Compare to the current version of Nautilus (or the KDE 3.x version of Konqueror) that previewed more or less instantly... What gives?
Other than that, I've not had any major stability issues or gripes with KDE 4.x (I'm using Fedora 9 and have switched from the new menu to the old "accordion-style" menu.)
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
4 is almost a complete rewrite. It seems people have the impression that the reason all of the 3.5 desktop features weren't completed in 4.1 is because of a conscious choice. When actually, it is was just limited time. Feature freeze tends to stop the adding of magic ponys.
You could sit down with a Mac or Windows machine and a Linux box running KDE and come up with thousands of stupid little,a nd boring to fix, problems in KDE that could be addressed and fixed TODAY?
A few things, KDE/Gnome/Xfce isn't supposed to be a remake of Windows or Mac. It is KDE/Gnome/Xfce. It is different. Get used to it. I bet that I could sit down at a Mac or Windows machine and come up with thousands of stupid little and boring to fix problems in the Mac/Windows GUI that could be adressed and fixed TODAY. For one thing, in Windows I can't rearrange my open windows on the bottom bar like I can in some Linux DEs.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
How come this stupid lamer got +2 insightful? Really I think sometimes the system decides to give mod power to the worst retards in the site.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
But I still find it more stable than 4.0 of about two months ago. That was the time I decided to just run off 4.1 checkouts, and I haven't had anything close enough to being a showstopper to switch back.
Everything will be taken away from you.
Good analogy, but you stopped too soon. A Linux/Windows comparison is like a comparison between a blow-up doll and a badly groomed transvestite.
You need to go elsewhere to find anything comparable to the sexiness of an actual woman.
I don't think you really understood the parent. He's talking about the look and feel of the User Interface of Windows 2000 and OSX, and how they are far beyond the mediocre offerings of open source design.
Rather than defend it, you sidestep the argument and mention things not even related to the parent post. Kernels, Drivers, and File Systems? What do those have to do with what the issue is here? Nothing. You are doing your own brand of trolling by beating your chest over the wrong issues.
KDE shot itself in the foot by making the KDE 3.x so polished. KDE 3.5 is essentially 9 years of evolutionary development from KDE 1.0. Unfortunately, its impossible to recreate 9 years of development and polish in only 3. I think that the long term prospects for KDE 4.x are great, but short term I'll continue to use 3.5.
I've tried the first beta of 4.1 and while its much more functional than 4.0, its still not there and probably won't be for a few more releases. On the other hand, I remember that KDE 3.0 was, while more functional than 4.0, also much rougher than 3.5, so I can't complain too much.
1) NIMBY - If Z is a feature or program I don't use, not only do I not care about it, I don't care about whether or not it can interact properly with programs I do care about.
And... So would you rather have someone who doesn't care about how something works/knows what works write something or would you rather have someone who uses it all the time write something? It is like saying, would you rather a graphics program be written by an artist or a songwriter? The songwriter may make a graphics program that is nice for him, but doesn't satisfy the needs of an artist.
4) Esoterism - The command line is better than graphics. Graphics, and especially graphic quality is unimportant, and studies with evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, whether an interface is cleaner or more obvious or better-looking is irrelevant. It's okay for GUI tools and programs to just be front-ends for their command-line equivalents, even if it puts unnecessary limits on the graphical version.
Again, most people using Linux are not artists nor do they use GUIs much, so their needs are different then the ones of other people. So they write programs to fit the needs they have.
3) Real Programmers - If a program isn't hard to write, it isn't worth writing, and if you make it easy for programmers to write for a platform, especially new ones, they will only produce crap that you somehow have to deal with. Compare this with MS's "Developers developer developers" motto, or Apple's excellent dev tools.
Yep, and as you have seen with all the Visual Basic crap that floats around for Windows.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Hey, thanks for getting it.
Come on folks. This is a Linux desktop. You have a choice. If you like KDE and want stability, stick with KDE 3.x. Want "cutting edge" or want to assist with development? Go with KDE 4.
I suspect that KDE 4 was too ambitious and the developers tried to do too much. Perhaps just moving KDE 3 over to QT4 and _then_ doing a complete redesign of the inner workings. That at least would have had all the developers familiar with QT4 and allowed for an easier migration to the new whiz-bang version of KDE.
I started using KDE in the pre-1.0 days and have participated in some development and documentation and sat some out; you just go with the flow.
TFA seems to misunderstand the Linux culture in general.
Isn't there anything like the automated snap to grid UI layout tools like Interface Builder
KDE makes heavy use of QT which does have an interface builder. It's quite advanced compared to VC2005's MFC dialog editor, supporting niceties such as defining dynamic resizing behavior.
Why do the UI elements and widgets look like they are straight out of the damn stone age
QT renders controls itself. On windows and on OS X, QT apps blend in seamlessly unless you manually change QT's current theme. This is means that QT and KDE are capable of mimicking these standard widgets exactly. So, I have to wonder whether you have any idea what you're talking about. It sounds like you're just saying shit, kid.
I didn't understand 4.0 at all. It just seemed completely broken to me compared to 4.0. But now that I am onto 4.1 and have done some more learning I have to say that I now have a desktop that works better than Vista does and looks just as slick as aero. The move to the 4 series of releases of KDE gave us a huge jump in potential but it was also very ambitious. For KDE to focus on 4 makes a lot of sense but I don't think it should have been the KDE desktop in Fedora 9. Whether the distro guys got to ambitious or the KDE developers over sold what 4.0 would be I don't know. But every one should know that if you are running the latest and greatest Fedora you are going to be out on the bleeding edge. If you don't want that just run one version back. The bigger problem than the including KDE 4 is the way Fedora is always trying to kill off your KDE install and replace it with the steaming pile Gnome. If all you were to take was Grub and the kernel as your install Fedora and the rest of RedHat would make sure that you also got GDM, Evolution and a boat load of other i386 Gnome crap with it. I mean really why is GDM the default desk top manager for KDE on Fedora? rpm -e gdm should be the first step after installing Fedora with the KDE desktop.
People can write their own widget theme engines; there are actually some pretty nice ones if you go to kde-look. You could argue there should be a better default, but there's actually a lot of people who like the default theme. Similarly, there's enough people who dislike the Mac and Windows guis that they theme it with third-party apps.
Comparing with the Mac is not really fair though. Apple spends a lot of money on UI design and not too many UI designers do open source work.
You might find that last bit of anecdotal offering out of place in this discussion since most of the participants don't actually have any work to produce. ;)
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
KDE's UI group is made of user interface designer experts, people who studied years in their respective colleges to learn how people should do computing. They dismiss user feedback. If you raise any questions, they ask you if you have a PhD like them.
1) Greater freedom demands greater responsibility. Open source developers love the freedom part but complete failures when it comes to the responsibility half. The sorry state of the Linux desktop is what happens when people are left to work on whatever they want, when they want, and how they want. Freedom without responsibility leads to endless new features and bugs that never get fixed
2) No chain of command. Every project is an island unto themselves. You're using my code and it doesn't do what YOU want. Tough. I'll either ignore you or stick your request at the bottom of my list. Why should I work my ass off for your project where you get all the credit
You're right. I've managed to get an Ubuntu GNOME desktop running like a Mac one, though, so it can be done.
Um ... I don't think he "got" it quite the way you thought ... :)
(hint: try looking at the quotation marks!)
Not that it would matter even if the quote marks weren't there, since language doesn't have to parse logically to make sense. This is why we easily understand the meaning of double-negatives, for example. And also why everyone else on this site instantly understood the GP's point ...
It's okay for GUI tools and programs to just be front-ends for their command-line equivalents, even if it puts unnecessary limits on the graphical version.
On the other hand, there's a pretty strong argument this should always be the case EXCEPT for the tools that build the GUIs themselves.
Consider the standard menu of a program[1] where you'll find the same options from the File menu almost always as buttons in the application right under the file menu and you'll find the edit menu items in the context menu.
Point is, there are plenty of ways to display these UI options to the user. They can and should be separated from their actual implementations. This would ultimately mean that the UI can be generated according to a user's personal preferences and needs (including assistive technologies or device limitations) while the actual guts of the application stays the same.
At least, I believe this is the way forward for GUIs.
[1]
[...]
-HobophobE
Nothing laughs forever.
The thing about CLIs is that they do anything you want them to instantly, if you know what you're doing. The disadvantage to CLIs is that, unlike GUIs, they offer absolutely no prompts - in a GUI there's always words or pictures at least labelling the buttons, even if it's just "load". Another "advantage" to GUIs is that they're "safe" - anything you want to do in a GUI requires at least 2 steps, so it's nearly impossible to do something dangerous accidentally (I'm counting loading the application as a step - in a CLI you can almost always open-and-execute-command in one step). This idea has become so deeply ingrained in people regarding computers (see: Any "hacker" in a movie, general societal impressions of 1980s supergeeks, etc). Most people are actually terrified of command prompts for this very reason - although they might describe it more as "it's confusing"/"I don't know what I'm doing here"/"What if I get it wrong and break something?". Hell, I remember being terrified of "breaking windows" the first time I opened command prompt to do something innocuous (maybe it was proper DOS back in those days though..).
/y C:\* for a GUI).
This is basically why most geeks use CLIs when they can - because it's much faster and more efficient to do something you know how to do, while most newbs prefer GUIs - it's safe, easy, faster for doing multiple unrelated things at once, and they're used to it. Personally, I'm glad that there is this mindset - I'm getting a little tired of having to fix my friends' and parents' computers, I hate to think what damage they could accidentally do if they managed to get a dangerous command out in a command line (I can't imagine them accidentally deleting everything with a GUI - there's no one-step rm -rf or del
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
AFAIK, KDE4 isn't the default KDE for Fedora 9, but I could be wrong. But if so, you can probably change it in the install.
Also, the reason that the gnome stuff is installed is because there are so many apps that rely on it, Evolution, Firefox, etc. (As far as I can see, anyway.)
Then again, I run openSUSE with KDE4.0 as my default DE, and I quite like it. (There are a few bits that need a bit of a polish, but I don't know enough to change them), but there are always Gnome apps I'm relying on and I don't mind this so much. (However, I can't stand using gnome as my default desktop... but, to each their own.)
(Hmm... was there a point to this post? note to self: don't internet while tired.)
Oh, the irony... "Anonymous Coward: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear!"
Now is the time to pile on more complaints, FUD and disinformation against KDE4, and personal attacks against its developers!
Oh, never mind. You already are.
"If a program isn't hard to write, it isn't worth writing"
thats probably the most stupid phrase I have heard all year. A program is worth writing if it gets a job done that you have to do more than once; and whose total time of use and time saved is less than spent writing it. Just because an action might only take a minute doesn't mean I shouldn't have a program that could do it for me in an instant. Further; easy to write for who? the person writing the app or the person using the APP?
2. what the hell is a windows app? (as applied in your usage) I'd like to laugh at an example of a clone and work-alike. If you mention a file system explorer prepare to be slapped over the head.
Along with your whole crud on great developers make great developers. blah blah... have you heard of man pages? make? automake? tools that Visual Studio have been emulating for years; heck mac development relies on unix linux tools.. what compiler do they use? oh gcc right...
The reason windows is polished is because there is a SINGLE standard for the gui's they all have to be the same they all play with the same tool kit; same with mac. Linux gui apps often have to be written to be compatible with one of several.
Furthermore linux gui's can be user customized in a variety of ways which a BASIC user will never do on mac or windows. But more importantly windows and mac both spend a large amount of time and money (more so for mac) on their uniform gui design paradigms. They have a single ethos of how each app is expected to work; linux does not. You are free to do whatever you want. And frankly I think that on a gui side kde and gnome have been on par with linux for awhile; at least since 2005. I'm not going to get into kde4.1 because i havent used it or kde4.0; but as poorly as others have retorted you haven't expressed what about the gui was lacking. what is this mythical 'polish' you speak of?
its as vague as saying "it's not good"; well what is good?
Arrogance? ironically that describes everything that makes windows and osX themselves. there is only one real api set available, and in then end one way to do things. Arrogant people are present everywhere; the OS however is not Arrogant about it which is why you are free to choose whichever gui or lack of one that you want.
which only makes your esoterism line even more pathetic.
"Graphics, and especially graphic quality is unimportant, and studies with evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, whether an interface is cleaner or more obvious or better-looking is irrelevant." so basically lets throw out all knowledge and study of human computer interaction, human factors in design and principles of user interfaces.? You just made your whole post meaningless because it contradicts everything that you say.
Interface does matter. And if you don't think so and love command line so much, then uninstall X from your linux machine and go knock yourself out. Too bad you can't do that on a windows machine or a mac. Me I'm going to enjoy the combination of command line and GUI.
There are plenty of nonlinux heads who are arrogant too; lots of OS/2 nuts, windows junkies, etc floating around. They also exist in politics, you have conservatives, christian conservatives, etc. The one thing they tend to have in common is those people all seem to be members of the baby boomer generation.
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
KDE 4.0 and 4.1 are not meant to be perfect in every way. They are meant to establish a new scheme of APIs and a new design dynamic. It is a big overhaul that is in its beginnings. Nobody is claiming KDE 4.x is feature comparable to 3.x right now. This is just one person's view, and this is another view with excellent counterpoints. It is a failure where people are expecting too much of it in its current state.
Vista is supposed to be a workstation solution ready for every day production use right now. People are considering that to be a failure in its current state as well, and you are right, these two alleged failures are similar. But one product that is at an early start (4.0 & 4.1 beta, the more mature 3.5+ still seeing a lot of active development and use due to its maturity) and the other has the promise to be mature enough to use right now. You are not forced to upgrade to KDE 4.x, but Vista is required for some of today's games and applications because they don't run in earlier versions. This is the difference.
Twinstiq, game news
A picture is worth a thousand words...
Users expect more than Windows 2000 in the year 2008. I'd say the KDE 2 UI is more like Windows 2000 than anything else.
I think KDE 3 is pretty polished. It works, and apps written in QT all have a very similar look and feel. And with the theme add-on to make your GTK apps look like your QT apps, it even makes GTK stuff fit in to a good degree.
I think KDE 4 shows a lot of promise. I like the basic idea, and it looks nice. I expect that in a few releases of KDE 4, we'll be looking at a much more stable desktop system that I'll be happy to use. For now, I am using Gnome because it's more stable than KDE 4 but I get annoying with Gnome, so I look forward to perhaps KDE 4.5.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Yea, I think KDE 4 is good and shows a lot of promise. They're attempting to do something different - a better UI with guidelines, a new API, plus a lot of new code.
I've always liked KDE and I have every confidence that they will do right by it. Sure, I'm a little disappointed that I can't use a perfect KDE 4 right now, but I'd rather it take another year and get done right without shortcuts or too many concessions.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I could be wrong, but I do believe that most (if not all) of the people working on KDE/qt itself are working for Trolltech, and do get paid for it. Also, I don't think I'd agree with the rest of your conclusions. You're comparing DEs which are integrated into their corresponding OSs with a DE designed to be a modular add-on for several OSs. That makes it a lot more challenging in a number of ways. Also, you are probably grouping a lot of independently built qt apps together with KDE. It just isn't that simple. KDE has to work with all the *nix distros. I expect that building a single interface to work with a single OS is perhaps 5% of the job the KDE devs have to do. So I'd say you've got it backwards -- a better question might be, "with only one little OS to focus upon, why on earth can't Vista's be the most perfect windows UI yet?", or even "why can't Aqua be the last word in flexibility and customizability?".
Caveat Utilitor
Well, language doesn't parse logically; parsing is a syntactic operation. Logic occurs at the semantic level, and a string that has a valid parse doesn't have to yield a valid semantic interpretation. Such phenomena are quite common in natural language: to take a somewhat famous example, the sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," is syntactically valid though semantically aberrant.
Everyone "agrees" Vista is a failure just because it is *cool* to bash Microsoft and any product they produce.
You mustn't actually USE any open source software, or have actually contributed to any of it.
I'm not a developer, or a programmer, and I've found that most of these guys working on these projects take a lot of pride in their work. I've sent e-mails to quite a few projects and I almost always get a very favorable response. I've submit bug reports and have had them fixed in the next release.
Where else can you get that kind of user-to-developer connection?
You seem to have a lot of anger towards open source, and you think that everyone doing it is in it for some kind of glory or something. Whatever man. Go work for some slave shop like EA and leave us alone.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I call BS. KDE uses the Qt toolkit to do all UI drawing. Qt is the most polished toolkit out there, in terms of look and feel and functionality, *on any platform*. While open source UI's in general are poor (layout, usability), the look and feel of individual widgets is certainly as good as on any platform. KDE 4.x will also be available on OS X as native apps! And they will look just like your Mac apps, thanks to Qt. I could drop a Qt application on your Mac right now, and it'd look almost indistinguishable from a native Cocoa app. Qt excels at looking great on any platform. Now with Qt 4.4, we're seeing an increase in vector graphics use throughout the toolkit. This means widgets and themes are going to look even better!
I can tell you have no significant experience in GUI design. *No one* does absolute position of widgets on any platform anymore, at least on a pixel level. Instead GUIs have to be more fluid and dynamic and respond reasonably to resizes of the window. Yes things have to line up. That's what alignment widgets are for and packing managers. Even OS X's Interface Builder is going to have to change now that Aqua is finally vector-based (it wasn't before Leopard), and can support very high resolution displays. Dropping widgets on a grid is silly. Nothing annoys me more than a dialog box that can't be resized because someone assumed I'm running at a certain DPI and with a certain font size.
Depends upon the context. It's pretty tough to fine tune "a picture" with arguments and switches. And my fingers can hit these keys a whole lot faster than my are can move that mouse. :)
Caveat Utilitor
Yea, and don't you hate the argument that MacOS is always somehow better than anything else? Gah, I don't like MacOS. I have never liked the "dancing" top bar or no click-through. Ever wonder why nobody else does a UI this way? Because when given the choice, people would rather not use the MacOS UI.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
If you like Gnome, you'll love KDE4. It lacks many of the same features Gnome lacks.
lol! Circular reasoning at it's best.
Quit feeding the troll people. (Obviously, this guy's not seen KDE in a couple of years. Sure, KDE 2 looked bad, but KDE 3.5.9 looks as good or better than XP, and KDE4 looks as good or better than OSX and Vista.)
You are comparing Windows 2000, an operating that is 8 years old, to a Linux distribution. I am a professinal software engineer who works on Linux all day and comes home to Windows at night. Linux has its place (it's a great development environment, and it works excellently on the server side), but I think Win2000 was a much better desktop OS than current Linux. To address your points: 1. The NT kernel is well known to be excellent. 2 & 3. Win2000's GUI was stable and consistent. Neither Windows nor MacOS have a need for a dozen window managers. 4. There are far more applications for Windows than for Linux. Further, there are far more quality applications for Windows than for Linux. I would gladly give my money for Photoshop than to use Gimp for free. Same for games, same for Office. On to your other points where you try to compare current Linux to Windows 2000 (again, an 8-year-old OS): 1. Not all Linuxes have out-of-the-box drivers, particularly those that try to be free-software-only. Windows typically has all the drivers you need (USB, SCSI), and even when I buy new peripherals (scanners, printers, iPod, video camera), the products will come with a CD with the driver. 2. Windows 2000 had the "add/remove software" control. 3. 3-D effects. I don't care. I'm not 15. 4. Support for all major filesystems. NTFS is solid, and FAT32 is at least reasonable. 5. Support for all major filetypes out-of-the-box. I have no idea what you mean. All file types are major, by definition, if they can be used on an OS that's on 90% of all desktops, like, say, Windows.
Now that's something I don't care for. Those 3D effects are quite pointless, as far as I could tell. I prefer the way OSX does Exposé/Spaces/Coverflow/Dashboard... enough eye-candy to impress, but always serving a purpose and not going too over-the-top.
Also, you forgot to mention this feature: pretty much every Linux distro out there has virtual desktops, while even Vista needs some add-on for that.
Circumcision is child abuse.
To quote Dave Zingg: "The Mac is my friend. If I were gay, it'd be my boyfriend."
Circumcision is child abuse.
Here's the real story : you said something stupid and, instead of admitting it, you are now trying to save face. Unfortunately, you're not very good at that game and you now look like a fool.
BTW, I say this because I'm in a good mood. Otherwise, I would simply laugh at you.
...the sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," is syntactically valid though semantically aberrant.
You empathetic insensitive clods kindly insult us colorless green ideas. :p
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
http://boycottnovell.com/2008/01/07/mistake-bruce-byfield/
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
The distros have had a big hand in the unpopular reception of KDE4.0.
I've been a Fedora user since Core1, followed most of the revisions, and recently upgraded to F9. I have found most all Fedora major releases to be more stable and usable than previous.
Upon installation of F9/KDE4.0, I thought something really bad had happened to my system (strange menu, taskbar screwed up, desktop icons weird). Only after some reading (yeah, should have RTFM first) did I learn it was all intentional - KDE4.0 !
Having used it for a while, I admit it has potential. Due to the independence on display resolution, KDE4 looks much nicer on my old 1024x768 laptop than KDE3.x ever did. The guts feel great, the skin is flaky (I humbly await your jokes).
But I wish Fedora (yes, I do realize that Fedora is a 'testbed' of bleeding-edge packages) had waited before including KDE4.0, perhaps giving an install option, or simply putting it off until F10/KDE4.x
Fortunately, I didn't upgrade my office machine to F9 - I would be really in a mess if I tried to used it as productively as I can with F8/KDE3.x
KDE4.x future looks bright, I'm more disappointed with the Fedora team that chose it as the only KDE desktop for F9.
The opinions expressed here are those of this individual, and may not reflect the policy or practice of the collective
Wrong. You say that because you are under the mistaken impression that what you have to say matters. Please, feel free to laugh at me.
they are just people and yu should give them a break
I for one welcome--er, wait....what were we talking about again?
1. The NT kernel is well known to be excellent.
I didn't say that it wasn't I put them both in the "Both Windows 2K and Linux have these in common side"
4. There are far more applications for Windows than for Linux. Further, there are far more quality applications for Windows than for Linux. I would gladly give my money for Photoshop than to use Gimp for free. Same for games, same for Office.
Yes there are far more applications, however there are also far more applications that charge outrageous amounts of money for use, and buggy software just the same. The average person, has no need for Photoshop, and right now Linux is trying to hit the average person point, The GIMP is even overkill for most (85% or more) people. Now, if you were a graphic artist for a living, you might need Photoshop, for the rest of us who might need to just crop a photo or make a small banner, The GIMP does fine. As for Office, OOo does what most people want/need. However, it does things differently from Office, now some of the specialist tools are not there, but for most people (85% or more) it does the job and the fact it is different is becoming less of an issue as Office 2007 looks nothing like all the rest of the Offices and OOo.
2 & 3. Win2000's GUI was stable and consistent. Neither Windows nor MacOS have a need for a dozen window managers.
Neither does Linux, you really only need one DE and WM, and that is either Gnome or KDE (and perhaps XFCE). Pick the one you want. While some people want something different and use lighter WMs such as IceWm or Fluxbox, most users will never use them or even need to know about them. Different people prefer applications to be coded in different ways, with different featuresets which is why we have tons of different text editors, etc. But all distros usually install one, so they can use that and not worry about the rest.
On to your other points where you try to compare current Linux to Windows 2000 (again, an 8-year-old OS): 1. Not all Linuxes have out-of-the-box drivers, particularly those that try to be free-software-only. Windows typically has all the drivers you need (USB, SCSI), and even when I buy new peripherals (scanners, printers, iPod, video camera), the products will come with a CD with the driver.
I am only comparing Windows 2000 to Linux because that is what the post I replied to was comparing them to, a lot of my points can carry over to XP or Vista.
It is true that perhaps Debian will not have the latest drivers, but Ubuntu which is what most people will use, usually does. Linux has drivers for just about everything out of the box unless you use *really* specialty stuff. Most printers/scanners work with a bit of configuring and will work without configuration if they are HP, most media players who support USB standards will, again, work just fine with no configuration on Linux, and even though I haven't tried, I am rather sure that most big-name video cameras will work with Linux. And those drivers are rather hard to find if you don't have the CD (or in the case with some UMPCs, no CD drive) and if your wireless card isn't supported out-of-the-box in Windows (and most aren't), and your only connection is wireless (like many people's and you can't just plug in an cord) you can't download the drivers. And every wireless card I have come across I have gotten to work with either Ubuntu, Mepis or Puppy Linux.
2. Windows 2000 had the "add/remove software" control.
Yah, but how could you add software? With Linux it is simple as opening up Synaptic checking "mark for installation" and clicking the big green check mark and your software is installed, same thing with uninstalling software. And, even in Vista add/remove software usually hangs the machine and sometimes even when you do remove the software, icons, directories, and registry values s
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I could be wrong, but I do believe that most (if not all) of the people working on KDE/qt itself are working for Trolltech, and do get paid for it.
You're wrong. ;)
Trolltech (now Nokia) does sponsor some developers to work on KDE, including at least one full-time dev that I know of. But KDE does not have a large paid developer base, and a lot of the paid developers work at jobs that are not KDE-specific (i.e. many work for Novell on OpenSUSE but their responsibilities are more far reaching than KDE). There are a few Nokia employees who got jobs at Trolltech to work on Qt (and they continue to contribute). But overall the involvement in Trolltech/Nokia to KDE development is really not that high.
But hey, if anyone wants to sponsor my work on KDE I'll be available around 2011 or so. ;)
2001 when they released XP. I never had the issues people seem to have with KDE. I suppose it is because I took the time to learn it because it is inherently DIFFERENT. I don't see why Gnome heads or Windows fan-boys come trying the new release of KDE 4.0 or 4.1 and expect it to work like they expect it to. That is what you get when redesigning something two steps forward and one step back. It is phasing out the old crap that caused a lot of issues in lieu of a new design. I have seen this so many times in Linux. A patch or something will come along allowing older stuff to run if need be. Long live KDE!
How'd you get access to /. from jail?
I'm just going out on a limb here...but maybe it is because KDE4 is a complete rewrite? KDE3 was extremely stable; I suppose you never tried it?
Or you could be an AC troll. I'll go with that one.
Palm trees and 8
"Out-of-the-box driver support for just about everything" is really more of a virtue of Windows and not Linux. When I first started with Linux, I had to compile in support for my soundcard. My video capture hardware still doesn't work under Linux although that's Pinnacle's and eMuzed's own fault. So this is one way in which Windows is better than Linux.
"Central package management system" Whose Linux do you run? I myself never could stand RPMs during the Red Hat Days, and I never bothered with Slackware's own PKGs. I built and installed everything from source. Windows apps use an executable installer which works pretty much all the time. Plus, Windows users can uninstall many if not most apps effectively.
"3D effects" ? I'm not sure I understand? Did you mean application layer stuff, or the OS' user interface? Windows has DirectX and Open GL.
"Support for all major filetypes?" This is application level stuff. Linux doesn't know anything more about a JPEG than does Windows absent a graphics app. With Linux, there's a glut of apps available for immediate installation so yes, this saves the user trouble of hunting down apps to open specific file types, but that strength is also a weakness. I prefer the Windows camp's method of just going online to find my own apps to use.
Disclaimer: I don't use Windows.
It's a little different but everyone on /. who runs kde3.x will figure it out in a day. Our office just "upgraded" to office 200X with the new gui and waste far more time sorting out some features on the new ribbon gui.
It's not rock-stable, but functional. A mix of 3.5 and 4.0 apps work pretty well. The newer Kontact isn't done and kmail works fine for me. YMMV.
I'm easily running a mixed testing/experimental environment with no issues. If you are running Debian testing, just add new repos with experimental instead of testing, I defined the pinning such that testing is preferred, but it pulls experimental packages as needed. I would copy -R .kde kde-3.x to be sure you don't lose anything valuable.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I'm a huge fan of linux and use it regularly as my primary desktop OS, but some of the stuff you're saying about linux's advantages over Win2k is at best, misleading.
Well, let's ignore how useless a term like "out of the box" is for linux in general rather than a specific distribution. If you consider downloading, compiling and installing a software package or recompiling one's kernel to be "out of the box" then you get partial credit. Linux can do a fairly impressive amount if you know where to get the packages. It can't do nearly everything though, even if we define "everything" to mean everything that Win2k could do when it was released. Other things it can do, but does them poorly. Case in point: I have a printer that does technically work under linux in that it prints and does so in good quality. However, apparently all the work is done in driver. Printing in linux is dog slow; we're talking 45 seconds or more for a simple black-on-white text page. Yes, page, not document. Graphics can take literally minutes, and none of this counts things like the printer warming up. Printing the exact same things in Windows is essentially instantaneous.
I don't blame linux or the driver authors for this. I blame vendors who aren't interested in putting out linux drivers, or cooperating with those who do. But it's still one of a long list of things linux can't do or doesn't do nearly as well, which I'd say makes your statement pretty dubious.
For installs? Yeah, you're right, and that's certainly a great convenience to me most times. For managing post-install, most applications in Windows shove themselves in the Add/Remove Programs dialogue. There are some that don't, but that's essentially true of linux package management systems as well: They only know about programs that they've been given explicit knowledge of, either by installing through them (linux) or being told how to play nicely with them (Windows).
As somebody else pointed out, Win2k is essentially 8 years old (more counting development time). I wouldn't even have WANTED such things on a computer from eight years ago. Beyond that, 2k was not primarily intended as a system for home use, so fancy presentation methods would be even less welcome there than, say, XP. I know somebody out there is thinking "linux isn't primarily intended for home use either!" and they would be mostly correct. However, if we're talking about linux with a GUI and visual effects I think it's also fair to assume we're taking a step away from strict server environments.
Linux support for NTFS is still sketchy at best; certainly it's incomplete. Saying NTFS isn't a major filesystem would be downright dishonest. It also hinges on your definition of "major;" in terms of market share, does something like ext3 even break a 10% barrier? (That's a serious question; I have no idea.) If not, Windows supporting NTFS and FAT32 would basically satisfy this same definition.
The bigger thing, though, is who cares? Linux clearly has support for its OWN filesystems, same as Windows does. The only people interested in what else it supports are people tasked with interoperating with those other systems. Many, probably most, people with a linux box will have a desire to deal with Windows partitions, but only a very small fraction of Windows users care whether or not it can read ext3 partitions out of the box.
Once again this very much depends on what box. A lot of distributions don't have default support for
Well twitter, I can't take credit for finding this, but your dislike of Bruce Byfield is well-known. Judging from your comment in that blog, I'd say he's not as radical as you'd like, thus probably diminishing the value of everything he says. You've made it clear once and again that you see everything in black and white, meaning anyone who doesn't hate Microsoft must hate free software and extremes of that nature. In this case, Bruce Byfield must be "ignorant", because he's saying something you don't like. As opposed to a well-researched opinion, which is what I thought after reading the article.
Opinions you disagree with are not "FUD".
By the way, I'm probably the last person you should be replying to with your sockpuppet accounts.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
twitter doesn't "dislike" anyone, he just hates everything and everyone who doesn't dance to the same tune he does.
and he knows He Is Right(TM), no matter what anyone else says.
If that is really the case, then why did they steal the incredibly fugly look of the Java Desktop that even Sun couldn't stomach?
KDE3.5 is not available at all in F9, except for compatibility libraries and certain programs that were not ported to 4.0 (Kwebdev, for example). Fedora's devs have stated that no KDE3.5 port will be done, because it requires too many coding hacks.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
If you mean any modern Linux distro I would say that it is better than W2K. Lets start from the top...
This is a bunch of FUD which isn't based on any facts that I'm aware of. The NT/2k kernel is a fairly solid piece of work. It does feel a bit overengineered in some respects, but I'd like to see some evidence that it's not solid.
That said, the userland DLLs and APIs which surround it are a mismash of inconsistencies and ill-thought out abstractions.
As for GUI bases, the Windows assumption that there's always a display with set policies (window station, window manager, win32k.sys, etc.) is unfortunate for servers, but a definite improvement over X for desktops. Sure, X abstracts out the transport layer allowing for decoupling of the application server and display server, but nobody uses this anymore -- both the protocol (too many round-trip queries kill performance over anything but the lowest latency connections) and limitations (no sound, printing is an after thought, changing configuration midsession) were its death. (We use VNC or NX for serious work over remote X sessions.)
And aren't "solid GUI" and "take your pick" contradictory? If the GUI was solid, why can't I code against a single API and have it "just work?" The fact that a user can tell that a given program was coded against a different toolkit might have been amusing in the late 80s and early 90s.
Don't get me wrong -- I love Linux as a coding platform and for deploying a fleet of thousands of web/application servers, all alike. The kernel, though, I'd rate as equal to NT (especially given the latency and driver integration issues we've had, notably with HP's recent servers). The desktop experience, though, is decidedly inferior.
I had hopes for Berlin/Fresco and other from-the-ground-up rewrites for awhile -- my opinion on X is that it's a lost cause; we must "nuke it from orbit. It's is the only way to be sure." Alas, they all seem to have stalled.
Vista failed to achieve the goal that MS had when designing and programming it. I'm not sure how that can be anything other than a failure. The fact that they're really having to pull the plug to get people to move on and that people will likely switch directly to Win 7 if they can will prove it. And I see no evidence that that's not going to happen.
As for KDE, make it less bloated, better modularized and make the defaults include fewer programs.
I stopped using Windows because of the bloat and the unwanted features, I'm not about to start using a desktop environment that's as bad. But, really the same could be said for gnome and pretty much every desktop environment.
And for the love of god allow some alternate way of compiling the smaller applications without KDE itself. I hate having to install both the gnome and KDE libs because there's that one program which invariably requires the other set of libraries.
DIE blasted SLAB menu, DIE! Is there anyone who likes the Slab menu? Why?
This is a perfect example of my point 5. I'm not saying that Open Source doesn't have advantages, that they don't fix bugs, or that the developers involved aren't (mostly) wonderful people. In fact, I'd even say that the quality of open-source command-line tools is one the reason why such tools are even still viable. Be Linux, GNU got its start as a non-brain-dead version of the standard Unix tools, plus Emacs.
But the nuance of my point is lost on you, because I have something critical to say about Open Source. Therefore everything I say about Open Source is negative, therefore I disagree with you, therefore I'm wrong. Therefore I should shut up and work for EA or something.
If you read what I wrote, and your reply, carefully, you'll see that I said absolutely nothing with respect to friendliness or the user-to-developer connection. I didn't even say that developers don't take pride in their work; I said they don't care much for projects they don't use or work on, which affects how well applications interact with each other. I could write a whole book on this topic, but if you read about some of the problems other OS's have had with getting interoperability from glibc, or anyone getting copy/paste to work in X, you'll see what I mean.
If you like Gnome, you'll love KDE4. It lacks many of the same features Gnome lacks
I noticed that :)
The real proof that the Gnu/Linux has serious Desktop issues is the fact that even RHEL's desktops (which Red Hat has spent many hundreds of hours polishing) still feel like they lack the polish of Windows XP (after the Idiotic Luna theme is removed).
Applications don't have the same Level of UI consistance as Windows. Sure Windows has a few oddballs iTunes, Windows Media Player, and Office 2007 come to mind, but most have pretty good level of consistency. Even the Apps that come with the Desktop Environments of Linux lack the level of constancy of the non-oddball Windows apps. on Linux once you start using apps from another toolkit all hopes of UI consistancy are shattered.
Also copy and paste. There are still a few apps pairs where copy and paste don't work right. (Well, the middle click X11 buffer usually works well, but the other (primary) copy buffer seems to only be partially supported by some apps.)
And the terminology of Linux desktops is Awful. Take the term "Menu" which refers to the Start-Menu-like application launcher. That name is far too vague to be clear. If anything is just called the menu, it should be the optional MacOS style single menu bar feature.
At the very least, one would probably agree that GNU/Linux's only real rivals for servers would be the BSDs, or perhaps some commercial Unices. But this should not be surprising, as they share quite a bit of the design relevant to servers, and even some of the major software components (Apache for one).
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
You know what was a real stupid mistake? Releasing Kubuntu 8.04 based on KDE4.0, thereby letting down everyone who had been long expecting the widely anticipated long term support release, in sync with regular Ubuntu.
I think you've misunderstood a lot of what I had to say. Those opinions are not my own, they are what I've imputed to authors of many open-source software communities, having observed and even participated in some of their discussions. I don't agree with the perspective I listed above, but I enumerated and explained them so that the OP (and whoever else) could gain some insight into the problem.
And for the record, it is possible to remove the GUI component of Mac OS X, just edit /etc/ttys, same as any Unix that auto-boots to GUI.
It's not really a question of artist vs. songwriter, but rather would you want two different kinds of graphics programs to play nicely together? Do you want your sound file editor to be able to interact well with your MIDI composer? Do you want your music ripper, your jukebox program, and your CD burner to all work together? And so on.
It may have been true years ago that most Linux users may have stuck with the console, but these days any given command line is likely to be running in x/k/gterm. Nearly everyone using a web-browser is doing it through a GUI, music players all use GUIs, digital photo management is done through a visual interface, chatting (even on IRC) is done with a graphical program, email, etc etc etc. Even so, GUI is still treated as a second-class citizen or sorts, since if mouse-and-clicking something might be too hairy, or if adding another control would take up too much space, the developer can just resort to the command line. The end user can't always do that, but they do always make a note of the shortcoming. In other words, if you can't do it simply with a mouse, for a lot of users you can't do it at all.
Yes, I sure have. But I've also seen plenty of good, useful apps. Quicken, Photoshop, most games, inventory management systems, library back-ends, and so on. And hey, you never know when you might decide you want a GUI for SCP or something like that. It may be easier to write and compile command-line programs for Unix than for Windows, but the ease of building graphical apps on Windows or even Mac is way ahead of Linux, and as almost no work is being done in this area on Linux, the gap is going to get wider.
A quick anecdote: the first version of Quake, for Windows, was developed on the original Next OS because the tools for development, even on other platforms, were so far ahead of everything else. No matter how good Wine gets, as long as developing for Windows is easier than for Linux, FOSS will be trailing, not leading, on the desktop.
The title you chose is rather amusing because it succinctly describes my thoughts immediately after I read your original post.
..when they're copying other products, people complain they are not being innovative.
1) possibly a valid criticism 2) replicating good, often used functions is a GOOD thing. 3) bullshit. there are a lot of good OSS dev tools. 4) strawman 5) commercial developers do this too, only they get paid not to do it in public.
Applications don't have the same Level of UI consistance as Windows. Sure Windows has a few oddballs iTunes, Windows Media Player, and Office 2007 come to mind, but most have pretty good level of consistency.
Yup, Windows is just the model of visual consistency. Note that every application in that screenshot is a Microsoft application, so we're not even talking about third parties making a mess here.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
We're in feature freeze, so that means bugfixing.
If you can code: go to bugzilla (http://bugs.kde.org) find a bug, write a patch, send it to the appropriate mailing list.
If you can't code: watch http://dot.kde.org/ for the next BugSquad BugDay (oh look, Kopete is having one *right now*!) (they are usually Sundays, every two weeks or so) and come learn bug triage. It's pretty easy, and can save developers hours upon hours of work.
Or: write documentation #kde-docs ;)
join the artists, join usability, etc etc
There's a lot out there. If nothing else, you can at least file a bug report for your next crash:
http://techbase.kde.org/Contribute/Bugsquad/How_to_create_useful_crash_reports
When all is said and done, KDE 4 is the fruit of an enormous amount of effort and dedication, and I respect that. I really hope the KDE project continues to develop and polish their work, and I will wait patiently until they do, although I'm pretty sure I'll have to wait for at least another year before KDE 4.2 is out: debugged, polished, and enhanced.
This doesn't mean however that I will be using KDE 4.1 any time soon (except for beta testing, which I feel I'm obliged to do). It will be KDE 3.5.x for me until they get it right.
The harsh truth of the matter is that end-users are unforgiving when it comes to user-interfaces, and that for all its internal faults I consider the MS Windows GUI to be pretty good (better than KDE 3 and KDE 4 in its present state). Just look at folders: MS Windows had them from the beginning and KDE 4 only now introduced them (calling them plasmoids and containers) and is struggling a bit to make them all work.
Ah well, why complain? I'm in a luxurious position: I have something that works (MS Windows and KDE 3.5.x), I have something a bit in-between (Wine 1.0), and I have something that promises to be better but only requires to be patient and wait for another year or so (KDE 4.2, KDE 4.3). And yes, perhaps KDE will be forked, perhaps not. I don't care because I certainly won't be involved in forking it.
So what's not to like? The only thing I shouldn't do is mistake KDE 4.1 beta for an end-user ready product. That's all.
What is your idea of "remotely polished"? If you mean any modern Linux distro I would say that it is better than W2K. Lets start from the top...
GP is talking about UI and widgets, and you're taking oranges, eway to go, there.
1. Solid kernel.
2. Solid GUI base (X)
3. Solid GUI (take your pick, XFCE, GNOME, KDE, etc)
4. Lots of programs (just take a look at the Ubuntu repos)
1. Ditto. The NT kernel is solid, if nothing else.
2. Ditto, and it's a standardized, uniform GUI, with standard widgets and APIs. All 2k systems have the same set.
3. Ditto, and it's uniform, across all 2k machines, to boot. Plus, there are plenty of alternatives availible, some more polished (Lightstep, and its derivatives) than others (Geoshell, SharpDE, blackbox/xoblite/bblean, etc take your pick).
4. Ditto.
Now look at all the things that Windows 2000 doesn't have that Linux has
Which isn't true in every case you list, and isn't always necessary, having these or not is neither good nor bad.
1. Out-of-the-box driver support for just about everything (only exceptions are ATI/nVidia graphics cards, but some distros now include them)
2. Central package management system
3. 3-D effects
4. Support for all major filesystems out-of-the-box
5. Support for all major filetypes out-of-the-box
1. Vendor supported drivers. pop the CD that came with your devicew in, install nthe driver. Though, I'd love to get more exotic hardware like K-OS pads and certain midi instruments working at all, under Linux.
2. True enough. Except it isn't necessary in Windows. Package management comes as a necessityof using shared libraries, where dependencies are an issue. You don't really need this when you can download an installer, run it and have the necessary libs installed into their own directory. "DLL hell" was a 9x thing, and even then, was nowhere near as much of a hassle as the dependency hell on early rpm-based systems.
Worth mentining too, is that there are 3rd apt-like systems for Windows, they just don't see much use, because such systems aren't necessary on NT-based systems.
3. Ditto, third party though. As mentioned earlier, there are many choices for alternative WMs on Windows, some of them do that fancy 3d stuff.
4. There's no real demand for this on Windows.
5. When did MP3 stop being a major filetype?
Show me how Windows 2000 or any Windows is better than Linux and stop making up your "facts"
Likewise, stop making up "facts". OP never claims his/her opinion was a fact, though.
OP also never claimed win2k was better or worse than Linux. OP never even spoke of Linux directly, his/her beef is with KDE. OP was talking about UI, not OSes.
Your comments are nothing but trolling.
Pot, kettle, black.
Linux works well for you, great, more power to you. You really don't need to jump down someone's throat because they don't share the same opinion. And the fact that you're getting all defensive and douchebaggy, while not even addressing the points that were made, just kills your argument.
"Meaning, Linux will recognize an ISO file as a disc image, Windows won't. Linux recognizes an SMC file as a Super Nintendo ROM, even without an emulator installed, Windows won't. Etc. This is not only a cosmetic problem, (that the file type doesn't have an icon and Windows doesn't recognize the type) but a security problem as binary files may not always be recognized as binary files and may end up containing malicious code."
I find this very amusing. Linux is a kernel and this part refers to an application level element from your GUI desktop environment running on X. It would "do that" on BSD or Solaris too. It has nothing to do with the kernel.
Microsoft and Apple have written some software to tag files in some capacity that are downloaded from browsers, so they aren't executed without approval (on their respective OSes). Apple got flamed for not doing it in safari on windows. That's some level of "security" from malware. What you described is silly. I think you don't know what a binary file is. All files are a series of bytes. Text files just happen to be human readable and contain a subset of combinations of bits to form characters.
You obviously love Linux which is ok, but please don't defend it anymore. You sound like a jackass. Repeat after me, Linux is a kernel. Now look at wikipedia to find out what a kernel is.
Oh no!!! I hope I am not as dumb as shit. I smell okay...??
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
Well, language doesn't parse logically; parsing is a syntactic operation. Logic occurs at the semantic level, and a string that has a valid parse doesn't have to yield a valid semantic interpretation. Such phenomena are quite common in natural language: to take a somewhat famous example, the sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," is syntactically valid though semantically aberrant.
Ann Hiro-Nao.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Arrogance? ironically that describes everything that makes windows and osX themselves. there is only one real api set available, and in then end one way to do things. Arrogant people are present everywhere; the OS however is not Arrogant about it which is why you are free to choose whichever gui or lack of one that you want.
I agree with you except for this point. Arrogance isn't what drives Microsoft and Apple to adopt unified GUIs for their operating systems, and neither is arrogance what keeps developers writing conforming code. That's just silly. I can't speak for Windows devs because my experience is mostly on Mac OS X, but the simplicity of following the standards (because of the Apple frameworks) is what drives us to write conforming software. Their libraries are just so good and easy that there is just no reason not to writing conforming code.
Furthermore, you misunderstand development on Windows or Mac OS X if you think there is "only one real API set available." On Mac OS X alone, there is Cocoa, Carbon, qt, wxWidgets, Java, or just the command-line if that's all that's needed, just to name some off the top of my head. Perhaps you were trying to refer to window managers, and it's true that there is only one on Mac OS X ("aqua"; actually you could probably port and run any other X display manager with X11) and one on Windows (dwm). You often hear Linux users citing that as a negative, but it does have the benefit of giving us (users of OS X, Windows) a very consistent, well-designed system, and those of us actually using it don't often complain because it usually Just Works and looks great doing it. When it doesn't Just Work (let's all get away with expecting perfection from software), then we can complain, and those of us with technical skills can tweak things just as easily as if it were Gnome or KDE.
then uninstall X from your linux machine and go knock yourself out. Too bad you can't do that on a windows machine or a mac.
Again, I don't know about Windows, but this is definitely possible on a Mac. It's called: install Darwin. I'm sure there is also a way to use OS X without launching the graphical login, at which point you could potentially uninstall aqua and do all manner of customizations. Anyway, just some small clarifications.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
KDE? more modular?
Kparts means that you can include practically entire programs (spreadsheets, browsers, editors) inside other programs - how much more modular can it get?
I run semi-nightly builds of SVN from Project Neon and I can say I'm very satisfied with KDE 4.1. Compared to 4.0.x there has been a tremendous leap in features and polishing, and the new Plasma features make it better for me to work. An explanation: Plasma enables you to zoom-in and out of your current desktop. When zoomed out, you can add another desktop ("Activity") in which you can place plasmoids like the one you were using before. You can switch between them using keyboard or zooming in and then out.
What makes it different from X11's standard virtual desktops? The fact that activities are completely independent from each other. I have one set of plasmoids on my "leisure" view, a different one in my "coding" view, and yet another one in my "writing" view. In this context, Folder View is absolutely brilliant, as you are not enslaved to ~/Destkop, but instead you can view many more dirs (including remote ones: anything that KIO supports works), and you can filter for file names/extensions (there are plans to do MIME type filtering in the future, IIRC). Like that, I actually work much better than with the old desktop paradigm (I *hated* when desktops became huge and pointless dumping grounds for anything).
Some missing features have crept in since last beta, including moving the applets on the panel.
A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
KDE4 is hell if your monitor is not recognized by Linux at installation time, which is at least the case for both mine with OpenSuSE 11.0 : a Samsung Syncmaster 940NW (1440x900, D15 plug) and an Asus MW221U (1650x1050) when on D15 plug. Try to customise KDE4 when your monitor is "recognized" as 800x600 (sometimes even 640x480!) and you are ine for w big nightmare and/or a big headache.
People are attached to little expected details, details as seeing for instance the three windows buttons (maximize, iconize, cancel) present on the window title bar when they need them, rather than disappearing randomly, with a slight preference to disappear exactly when needed. Or a detail like seeing a button yielding action when clicked, not 300 milliseconds afterthe click... or not reacting at all !
Resising and/or rotating icons ? OK. niw where is the laxian key ? That is : if tou did it my mistake, how do you put them back again exactly as they were without guessing ? Why not align on Picasa standards that keep unchanged the reference images, and allow to step back on every movement you did previously ? (a depth of 10 changes would be sufficient, of course).
But also there are great things : plasmoids, especially the ones with small diaporamas, are just lovable. Their border color following the (changing) screen background color is splendid. Windows with round corners, for a reason I cannot understand, really feel better - something strange after we all changed our rounder-corner TV screens for straigth-cornered screens some years ago. And the choice of background screens images (at least as I can see them on OpenSuSE)is gorgeous. Working on the computer is a splendid experience again. I am ready to change my graphic card and even my CPU if needed just for the sake of KDE4. On the other hand, is it reasonable to change a 32 W graphic card for a 120 W (or more) one when everybody is trying to save energy ? I have no answer to that question :-(
Signature omitted in order to save space. Thanks for your understanding.
Why KDE4 fucking locks my system up after ten minutes, I'd be all set. Once it finishes loading, I've got about 10-20 minutes before some graphics get randomly corrupted, then the system freezes dead. Doesn't happen if I play a fullscreen game, only if the KDE4 desktop is visible. It even happened when I started a single KDE4 application inside KDE3!
I spent hours trying to get an answer on #kde and got as far as "your backtrace is useless. It's probably the video drivers, go bug nVidia," even though I'd used two totally different drivers - the accelerated one and the glacially slow nv one.
I am afraid this is not a feature, but a flaw.
When you use somebody else's car (and every one of us has to do that once in a while, just as using somebody else's computer), you feel confident that the accelerator will be on the right and the brake on the left. When you unscrew something, you expect you can achieve it rotating your screwdriver counterclockwise. When you are in the rest rooms, you expect hot water to be on the left and cold water on the right, and counter-clockwise movements to open the water flow (though I did see different arrangement, which were hell !)
When one "buys" (in the figurated sense) a graphic interface, on expects a kind of normalization, a common rule, to be part of the package. If it is not there, is is as useless as X-Window used alone formerly was. Normalization, and clever normalization, is a part of the product, and it could be a terrible error to try avoiding it, because most orders, however imperfect, are still preferable to complete chaos.
Signature omitted in order to save space. Thanks for your understanding.
This isn't a virtue, it is a necessity.
If a program isn't in his distro's repository, the non-technical user may never be able to successfully install it - assuming he knows that it exists at all.
Actually earlier versions of KDE were actually nicer and much more functional than windows 2000. if you look at the the task bar on OS-X you could at one stage do something similar with KDE using the small to tiny task bar. For KDE things have changed and IMHO not for the better.
Annoyances of KDE 4:
Where is the auto hide setting for the task bar (easy to set in 3.5 back)?
Why use a widget to position the task bar when you could drag it in 3.5 back?
Even if you position the task bar why don't the fonts on the task bar auto scale (3.5 back did)?
The KDE designers appear to have the "new" KDE look like MS Windows. Again why since you could always change the look and feel to MS windows if you wanted to?
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Since you also apparently stopped using Linux in 2001, what are you running now?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Everyone agrees now that KDE 4.0 was a mistake
ZOMG. KDE folks stopped repeating this - because they got tired repeating this.
Nobody takes away from you KDE 3.x - if it's better to you, then use it. It is stable. It runs. It has uncountable number of features. Use it.
Precisely because KDE 3.x works that well, KDE devels decided to use the opportunity to solve many long-standing problems and give a UI major lift up. Seeing how long it took KDE2/KDE3 to stabilize, I personally didn't expect that KDE4 release would be any faster in that aspect. That's experimental stuff, that's new stuff - more than any KDE was before. Software has to be redeveloped more or less completely for KDE4.
So why is everybody so surprised that KDE4 doesn't work on par with KDE3??
KDE4 and Qt4 provide better (technical) foundation for development - more features, stability, applications - more of all that to come. But do not expect it just overnight.
KDE4.0 was seen mainly by developers. Main goal of KDE4.1 release was to deliver something somewhat usable to wider audience and receive feedback. Nothing more.
You do not like actual KDE4? Do not use it. KDE4 is not like Vista which is pushed on innocent customers by simply removing other options (WinXP). Grab fresh KDE3 and use it instead. It is there, it works and it is supported and it will be supported.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
I'm still compiling KDE 3.x.x.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with KDE 4 preview performance? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of an Opteron box running KDE 4.1 for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to create a thumbnail for a 17 Meg file in one folder on the hard drive. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running KDE 3.5, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this box, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Konqueror will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even KWrite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on KDE 4, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a KDE 4 box that has run faster than its KDE 3.5 counterpart, despite the KDE 4's faster library architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of RAM runs faster than this 3000 MHz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that KDE 4 is a superior desktop environment.
KDE 4 addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use KDE 4 over other faster, cheaper, more stable desktop environments.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
There's only one way to know if something is stable or not for daily use.
Check Slackware current.
This is blinging
It is as unintuitive as Gnome, too.
I am living on the semi-bleading edge. I have Kubuntu with the backports repositories (latest svn builds used by Ubuntu developpers and packaged for download) and so it happens that I always have the latest or second latest builds of KDE4.
I use KDE4 because I love the technology, the Plasma design and because I am curious ofcourse.
Not much has changed since 4.1 beta1 except for a few bugs being squashed and some positive changes in stability. In fact, it seems that most of what was there in terms of widgets for the desktop and the panel are now gone! This probably has something to do with redesigning the overall Plasma art.
From my experiences with KDE4 I can only conclude that if you are not into bling-bling then KDE4 by far is not even worth considering yet.
Here be signatures
After reading a previous message about KOffice being available for the Mac, I thought I'd give it a try. There's a bunch of packages to fetch, so I decide to pull in everything.
Three days to fetch 3 gigabytes of data over Torrent, OK, I figure, most of that must be unnecessary, it shouldn't need to install everything just for KOffice. But no, I go to do the install, and it says it's going to need 3.1 GB of free disk space to do the install. Yes, I've got that, but I'm not curious enough about KOffice to install 3.1 GB of software that is almost certainly going to shove itself into /usr somewhere and be a pain to winkle out just to see it. And if all of KDE really needs 3.1 GB, what in hell do they have in there?
While KDE 4 is far from feature-complete, I would not call it a mistake in any regard - the linux desktop needs to advance just like any other. The difference here is that, unlike some upgrades in other OSes, you aren't forced to use KDE4. The developers are aware that it's still pretty early in the game, and so should users. If it causes you trouble, let the devs know what happened and install KDE 3.5 in the meantime. Just realised something - - I've been wondering for a while why they took it out of beta when it was still so buggy, and I think it's rooted in what I just said. Beta software (esp. something like a d.e) scares some people, so you won't get as large a user-base to give you feedback on bugs. This is especially important when you are on an open source dev team without huge piles of resources to use on testing. So, what's the solution? Push it out early and see what people bitch about the most. Once it hits stable, more people will be willing to download, giving the devs a larger pool of feedback to look at and (in theory) providing a faster response time from first report of a widespread problem to a fix - the larger the population, the more accurate the statistics, the easier it is to tell just how bad a particular bug is, which in turn helps the devs to prioritize. Just a theory, but it makes sense to me.
KDE and GNOME essentially work the way windows 3.1 worked on top of DOS.
Its limitations will show.
KDE? more modular?
Kparts means that you can include practically entire programs (spreadsheets, browsers, editors) inside other programs - how much more modular can it get?
From the article :
"KDE 4.1 continues the porting of applications, notably with 4.x versions of KGet, a versatile download manager, and the KContacts, the KDE personal information suit."
What other desktop environment comes with a wearable PIM ? And I'm sure it's themable too, so you don't even have to change before you go clubbing !
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
. . . Steve Ballmer and Steve Jobs both think it was a great idea. And it must be right, because how often do you get those two to agree?
Not that you arn't already a huge retarded shitstain, but you pretty much just fucked yourself up your own ass.
PROTIP: Change the pronouns if you copy and past the reply from your main account to your sock-puppet before you post it. You fuckstick.
It does parse logically. But there's more to the grammar than what they teach you in grade school. Certain arbitrary rules are created through unconventional use, double meanings, reception of pop culture, and emulation of body language through text. So, it's perfectly logical to people who are familiar with the culture/context of the spoken language. There's just a kind of pseudo-grammar.
In other words, the are only very few context-free grammars in widely used languages. "Proper" English grammar is just the template for that bizarre concoction that we, the west and most of europe, use.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
Now look at all the things that Windows 2000 doesn't have that Linux has
Well, as always, Linux has all these features - that are in beta.. Don't be so quick at bashing people who use Windows. You are acting like these up and rising GPL advocates who are defending territory like there was a war on. Before I go on, keep in mind that I've been a Linux user since 1998, and I am not using Windows for anything these days. But Linux is, for many, even like myself, a crossroads while we're waiting for something better comes along. With it's /usr/local's and /var/log's and X on to of "DOS" state that never seems to go away, it is just good enough until somebody finally manages to create an OS which is fast and lets you get on with your stuff without getting in your hair first. Now lets move on to your points.
1. Out-of-the-box driver support for just about everything (only exceptions are ATI/nVidia graphics cards, but some distrobutions now include them)
Windows 2000 also had this, for 2000 era hardware. And the stuff that didn't come with the OS was easily installable from CD/Floppy. I don't think this really is a point, unless you compare Linux to Syllable or some system like that.
2. Central package management system
This is not a good point! I'd love to have Windows' method of installing apps in Linux. Really I would. I don't want to hear your arguments about shared libraries and messy system folders, really I don't. One of the biggest problems common users have with Linux is the packages - and that they can't easily grab some installer off the app developers' website. Everything is fine as long as you play by the distro rules, but immediately when you go to a page with a "linux" download (which happens to be an rpm) and try and install it in Ubuntu, you run into a wall.
Please keep your package manager away from Windows, BeOS, AmigaOS, etc. They are all fine with the solutions they have.
3. 3-D effects
Linux has 3d effects that crash and some times locks up the computer - or kills your window manager. On some of my machines it works. But I'd turn it off for most people, as I wouldn't want to fix all the problems they'd get with it running. Still, Xorg is more stable with regular desktop setups - but compiz is not problem free.
4. Support for all major filesystems out-of-the-box
This is a plus, but for most windows users, it is quite ok to just buy an app that gives you access to a given file system if you need it. Besides, for most users, this is not a big deal. (And please, if we are talking about us nerds, can I access my AROS affs partition in Linux without a linux recompile? What about SFS?)
5. Support for all major filetypes out-of-the-box
This point is granted. Linux has a lot of software included from when it first boots. But the whole point with the argument here is that Linux has so much included that it has become a bloat fest. Please, give me a linux distro that has a DE alike AmigaOS 3.x, Windows, BeOS, MacOS9, heck even GEM. They were lightning fast, did all your file management, application launching, customization.. on less than 60mhz. Windows 2000 ran on slow hw - Linux DE's do not. Why do you think I put BeOS Max on this box instead of Linux? Linux has become a bad performer the last few years, and it isn't stopping because nobody is acknowledging the problem.
I happen to switch between Gnome and KDE3 regularly (several month cycle) because i never could decide which to use. Gnome didn't interrupt my workflow by throwing huge amounts of configuration dialogues in my way but KDE had better applications (like KStars and Amarok). Now that KDE3 lost ground to current Gnome (and even KDE4. They both lack a proper working desktop search engine. Strigi isn't as good as beagle or even tracker) and KDE4 isn't ready for someone who simply wants to get some work done (crashes way too often, dolphin is slow like hell, plasma doesn't focus on basics like a clock&date applet that is viewable even on small panels but on fancy things i don't care about) I found Gnome's evolutionary approach to be quite better.
Some of the 3D effects are quite nice. Having non-current windows be transparent helps find things, and having transparent window drags without slowdown is wonderful. The Expose-style "Expo" desktop which displays screen updates while zoomed out is very nice. I really like the flip task switcher, which also shows window updates while you flip. And of course, the widget layer plugin is also helpful. Other than that, it's mostly a bunch of bullshit eye candy. But anyway, everything but "Dashboard"'s functionality is readily available via compiz. I think.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's funny that the title seems to be "learn from Apple", since Apple has three different widget-looks themselves.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm not so sure about that. Take my favourite distro, Kubuntu, for example. Version 8.04 was supposed to be a Long-Term-Support (LTS) version, just like Ubuntu 8.04 with GNOME. I had been looking forward to upgrading my previous LTS version, Dapper (Kubuntu 6.06), which shrivels up in June 2009 (wrt desktop support).
But the Kubuntu maintainers felt that KDE was moving forward to KDE4. While KDE4 was too immature to be used mainstream, they did not want to provide three years of long-term support for a KDE 3.5 that was going to be obsolete soon. So they said decided that 8.04 was not going to be a LTS version for Kubuntu.
This is reasonable, and I think a lot of the blame should lie with the hype of KDE 4 saying, basically, that we can all switch from KDE 3. In fact, I for one would like to be reassured that people will still continue to develop for KDE 3 until KDE 4 is stable, and now it looks like that won't be for at least another 1-2 years. By that, I'm not just referring to the KDE 4 software, but the applications that run on top of that environment, and the entire KDE software ecosystem (including community attitudes and expectations).
In a way, I'm glad; the fact that KDE 4 is still immature means that I can continue to get support for KDE 3. I mean, people still run Apache 1, and I wish PalmOS 3.5 would come out with another version PalmOS 3.6 rather than speeding along with the barely-backwards-compatible PalmOS 5 (or whatever it is now).
So, in summary, we need to emphasize (and make feasibly practical) the choice of sticking with KDE 3.5 for the foreseeable future, until KDE 4 as a whole is ready.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
I agree with your other points but I find a central package management system to be a definite negative. Vendors should target a standard, such as LSB 3.0, and then build packages for that standard. Then users can download and install the package, or add the vendor's repository to their list if they want to receive updates, to any LSB 3.0 compliant system. OS vendors can concentrate on making a solid Linux-based OS without the overhead of packaging thousands of applications just for their OS. Instead they can add entries to the vendors package repositories in the configuration file for the OS package management software.
This also has an advantage for users who might want to upgrade the OS to receive new drivers and security support, but who do not, for whatever reason, want to upgrade all of their applications. Distro support for such users doesn't exist at this point. Such users instead must become steeped in the nuances of system administration, such as software compilation and apt pinning, if they wish to keep their applications from being upgraded or replaced.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
fag.
KDE? more modular? Kparts means that you can include practically entire programs (spreadsheets, browsers, editors) inside other programs - how much more modular can it get?
You say that as if this is some magical, never-seen-before new technology in KDE4 that indicates an unprecedented level of good design and modularisation. This is nonsense. Component frameworks have been a standard part of desktop environments for ages. Gnome has Bonobo and now D-bus; Microsoft has COM and now WCF; etc, etc.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
KDE 4 is a horrible mess. It's what you get when you a have a team working for free.
By "Linux" I mean a Linux distro such as Ubuntu. Not the kernel. Just as if I said NT, I would generally mean the Windows NT operating system, not just the NT kernel.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Why listen to a "pundit" when you can go to the source where the issues are dealt with. Yes, eventually you get to something useful like this to sort the FUD out. Basically, KDE 4.0 is not "ready". Though it is more flexible and has all of the old features and more, not all of those features have been exposed yet. This is not a big deal because reasonable distributions still ship with the still excellent KDE 3.5 applications. Bruce needs to do more research before he spouts off like that.
Except that the post isn't about KDE 4.0 it's about KDE 4.1. ANd what, by the way, does your post have to do the post you replied to?
"You say that as if this is some magical, never-seen-before new technology in KDE4"
No, it's not really new in KDE4, since that technology existed in KDE since KDE2.
"Gnome has Bonobo"
Which practically is not used ANYWHERE. Kontact is merely a collection of separate apps (Kmail etc.) embedded together with Kparts. Is there anythins similar in Gnome? you can embed Konsole in to Konqueror, thanks to Kparts. How about Gnome? Filemanagement in Dolhin and Konqueror is just a filemanagement Kpart that can be used in either app. How about Gnome?
So can we really say that "Gnome has similar technology" if that technology is not used anywhere? Yes, Gnome has Bonobo, but it's not used at all. KDE has Kparts, and unlike bonobo, it's actually extensively used across the desktop.
"and now D-bus"
Um, Dbus is an interprocess communications protocol, similar to DCOP in KDE (which has been replaced by Dbus in KDE4). And, BTW, DCOP preceded Dbus by a quite a margin.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Ohh shove off. There's plenty of problems of OSS, but I don't think it's as bad as YOU make it out to be.
You say "if I have something negative to say" - no, you didn't just say something negative. You said "'ll either ignore you or stick your request at the bottom of my list." I refute that statement strongly, and I refute your stance that nobody writing OSS has any "responsibility."
I don't see any difference here between OSS and non-OSS in each aspect. Every Windows software development house is your so-called "island." There's so much shitty commercial software out there, and they have no accountability to anyone either. Sure, you pay them for the software, but if there's a problem - then what? You call support for best-effort fixes. And in the case of Microsoft, you have to PAY for that luxury.
Maybe the last time you seriously have an OSS desktop a chance was in 1999. But now a days, copy/paste works like it should, and software interopability is shaping up very nicely. And I hope you're not saying that somehow Windows or MacOS is any better in this regard. Cite an example of some interop that's good on those systems that doesn't work on a Linux desktop. I dare you to come up with some meaningful examples.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Ha, I can tell you are an Amiga guy. One thing I loved about the Amiga was that I could do this in a shell:
lha x ftp:ftp.aminet.org/misc/emu/fmsx.lha ram: ...which, for non-Amiga owners, does the following: it uses FTP to download a package from ftp.aminet.org, unpacks it to the RAM disk, and then runs it from the ram disk. Note that download and unpack are one step. Also note that there is no installation step. You unpack the software, and it works fine where you unpacked it. If I wanted to delete I'd follow this up with:
ram:fmsx/fmsx
delete ram:fmsx all ...and that would be that.
Ahh, the joy of the RAM disk. Because back then, RAM was so plentiful that we could actually use it as an extra, dynamically-sized volume!
By the way, thanks for raising the visibility of my post.
Your posts are still at -1, where they belong.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
What does your signature do, other than crash my computer? It's just an endless loop, but what is it doing?
That links to a comment made by "Will Hill" and your username is "willyhill"...? I'm confused now.
Good to see more complaints about this. I have tried kde4 on Suse, and Kubuntu. Both times, I have been disappointed to the point where I just kept using my mac.
Long story.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
No, it doesn't. Parsing is syntax; interpretation is semantics. See below.
Yes, I know; I speak 5 languages and work in human language research. I've actually put a lot of time and effort into studying human language and grammar - it's kind of my thing.
Actually, "proper English grammar" is one dialect among many that comprise the larger language of English.
Judging by the bulk of your post, you didn't understand what I was saying. Syntax is structural. You could consider it as a collection of rules for governing the generation of strings in a language, or as a logical model for a system that analyzes strings ostensibly belong to a given language and yielding parses therefrom. It isn't a body of rules about sticking prepositions at the end of sentences or splitting infinitives, both of which are perfectly acceptable and common features of English grammar that have been in wide use for centuries. Syntax are the rules that make the sentences "John loves Mary" and "Mary, John loves" have the same interpretation (the second should be read kind of in a frame like "There's a big difference between Susan and Mary. John hates Susan. Mary, John loves.") and "Mary loves John" have a related but different one.
If you've ever taken logic, the difference might be clearer if you look at an example from predicate logic. Assuming that for this example, "A" is the universal quantifier:
A(x)(man(x) -> mortal(x))
Which is a translation of "all men are mortal." However the truth values of the predicates man and moral map onto the universe of discourse, there are rules that make assertions formally valid for interpretation. You could not say:
A(x)(man(x) mortal(x) -> )
not for any reason related to the interpretation of the predicates, but purely because of the syntactic constraints on the expression - it's just not well formed.
To be fair, you will probably be only able to use it until 2032, but that should be enough for everyone.
http://etotheipiplusone.com/kde4daily/docs/kde4daily.html -- Have fun :)
I could come up with a thousand little stupid and boring things to fix on Windows, too. Ever see the font install dialog? Oh yeah, it's the same in Vista as it was in Windows 3.1, which means it has the same limitations of 8.3 filenames and so on. How about file browsing dialogs in Windows that don't have a horizontal scrollbar? Those still exist.
Don't act like Windows or OSX are paragons of perfection while KDE and Gnome are the only DE's that have any issues. Because you're wrong. And the chance of fixing open-source problems is a hell of a lot higher than it is with Windows or OSX.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Kparts means that you can include practically entire programs (spreadsheets, browsers, editors) inside other programs - how much more modular can it get?
System services on OS X. With KParts, the developer can add functionality easily. With system services on OS X, the user can add functionality and other applications can add functionality (add a program with some function like translating japanese and you can call it from within all your other programs).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_bomb
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Hey, this is getting way off topic, but I do find this interesting. I have more classroom experience with mathematical language than any spoken languages, but I was of the opinion that any spoken language could, for example, be interpreted by a Turing Machine.
How does your previous post relate to the OP? My point was that the quotation marks being used were meant to indicate sarcasm, and everyone got it. It's probably not a whoosh thing; you understood what had happened. What exactly was it that you disagreed with?
What's the value of information that you don't know?
I think the point was modularity in libraries, not in functionality.
Kparts / OLE / Active-X are all the same game, but "#include <windows.h>" was awful, and so is linking against KDE.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I agree completely with that. I didnt mean to say suggest that this was a feature of linux; just that it wasn't a concrete given that you were stuck to one standard. I couldn't agree more that normilization is important. The thought that "that" didn't matter is what prompted much of my response to "interface doesn't matter".
My point was just to say that I suspect that the freedom to deviate is partially responsible for the less consistent gui design within linux desktop ui's.
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
I am definitely behind in Linux distros. I stopped chasing distros years ago after upgrading to Slackware 10. But these days, I use Mac OS X almost exclusively and virtualize any other environment I might need.
The only distro I've been casually following lately has been Yellow Dog because I have an interest in trying it out on my PowerPC and my PS3.
by any chance, would it? Some of us remember OOXML and that whole
nastiness. This is feeling like some of the GNOME guys are playing
dirty.
Okay, if a Cocoa app announces a service to the operating system in Mac OS X, that service is available from the application's menu on every other Cocoa app.
Practically every commercial graphics application, even those that compete with Adobe products, supports Photoshop .psd files. Most RAW digital camera formats also work well with pro graphics software, whereas GIMP requires (at the very least) the intercession of another program, dcraw.
Most personal finance/tax software plays well together; support for H&R's .txf format. AFAIK there aren't even any competitors in the open source arena, so maybe this is just a cheap shot.
Anyway, three examples good enough for you?
Wow, who the hell moderated this useless flamebait up.
Careful now.... you are throwing too many facts into the mix.. You've just killed the thread..... :o)
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Grandpa, is that you?
FAT32 is completely unusable. 4gb files? any iso image weights around 4.3 gb.
and no low-level linking, either in fat or ntfs.
both are steaming piles of crap, and nowhere even near the features of real filesystem that are pervasive in any *nix system.
Before you have a fit the GP was talking more along the lines of the libraries you have to install when you want a kde app under say gnome or xfce. When you say want to install k3b you end up with a ton of kde deps of which most are simply not required - where as say when you need gimp or naultius you get gtk and some minor deps and that is it. Now it may be a distro problem but I've yet to see one that doesn't have the issue.
I ate your fish.
Ah, I stand corrected.
As you can probably tell, I've not used F9 that much. (I was in fact only going off what I remembered the one time I installed it.)
Oh, the irony... "Anonymous Coward: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear!"
twitter, the next time I am in a "useful conversation" with you, I'll make every effort to call you an idiot, claim you are paid to harass me and call my posts "obviously insightful". I hope to hell someone mods me up, but just in case I'll link to this little jewel to back up my demands for karma.
Oh, and nice to see you created another troll puppet.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
To "work in progress." Which doesn't necessarily mean "not ready for mainstream end users/prime-time."
I remember (and let me put on my old-fogey hat)... well, in my day "beta" used to mean something. *harrumph harrumph* It meant that you're using software that may not be all that safe to use and you'd be better off using a stable version, such as the last version released.
The idea of what beta (or alpha) is is lost apparently. It used to be that it meant "tread carefully" and "here there be monsters" and it wasn't a challenge to use it, but a truthful admission that the software sucks because it's not ready so don't use it if you're not willing to work with us to shake out all the bugs.
No.
You're talking about closed document formats, specifically Adobe formats, and Photoshop doesn't run on Linux without WINE/Emulators. The PSD format is not an open format - so until someone reverse engineers the extremely complex PSD format, you're SOL.
On a Linux desktop, Gimp documents are supported by most Linux apps. Last I checked, Photoshop doesn't natively open Gimp documents either. (GIMP has beta support for PSD format documents, BTW. Works okay for many documents.)
This has nothing to do with the type of application interoperability that's worth mentioning. I mean, wow - closed source document formats don't always perfectly on open source software. Weird.
The camera "RAW" formats aren't necessarily open either. Canon or Pentax might both charge for the specifications (I don't know.) On Windows, almost nothing opens RAW with any success. Some other apps try, like Acdsee, but they don't do a good job. Only Adobe Camera RAW seems to be any good, and again, is a Windows/Mac only app.
Not sure what you mean by the Cocoa "service announcement" stuff. But if you mean something like OLE, OLE works fine with most GUI linux apps; at least the ones I use. But yea, that's the only example of interoperability you've mentioned here.
Both KDE and Gnome have interfaces to allow applications to directly interact with the desktop or framework. Many apps written for either GTK or QT (which is almost all of them now a days) make use of these interfaces.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Let him have a few mod points. It never lasts long anyway.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
When I read post like this, I always want to lash out and hurt someone. Luckily, We have ants here, so I kill a few of them and get back on track.
The truth is, I was abused, less than a year ago. By Ubuntu. It started out ok, reviews were good download was fast. Burnt to CD like a champ. The install was gentle, and there it was, Ubuntu 8.04, on my PC. Ant crawling on my leg.
Ubuntu gained my trust, but I was wild and reckless. I wanted to get "Down and dirty" in the configs and console. It started with the repository sources. A tweak here, a change there. Synaptic became needy, angry. Always wanting more,more,more of my time to start up. And I'd sit there, helpless, knowing I couldn't do anything until Symantec had It's way with me. I've stuck the ant to a piece of duct tape I keep handy.
Then there was firefox3 beta, which didn't support any of my extensions. I cried and cried, but still it would support my extensions. Then there was Endora. Why, why was there Endora? Where was Thunderbird to keep my email, to hold me? In a repository? With Synaptic? Noooooo!!!
Then there was the console. It happened again and again. Ubuntu was exposing it's inner-most parts to me, and I was forced, again and again to use the console. The system beep would sound if I typed stuff in wrong. Beep beep beep. Beep beep beep. I told it no, but it beeped me anyways.
Eventually I wen't back to windows, but my self worth had fallen, and I would find myself back in Ubuntu, with the console, getting beeped.
Decapitated the ant.
Then I said no, I am better than this. I'm a enpowered-user.I can leave this Ubuntu thing once and for all. So I got my GWSCAN disk, and I got my Windows Xp disk, and I left Ubuntu. 4 hours later, my XP install was exactly how I liked it, all my programs were working. I repented to Bill Gates, and havn't looked back, except sometimes when I cry to myself. I know what Linux does to people. Me and windows, we've had our rough spots, but nothing, nothing like that. I don't think I've ever be quite the same.
Actually, a lot of human languages look like they could be parsed by a machine that's strictly less powerful than a Turing machine - finite state automata turn out to be pretty pretty good for a significant portion of natural language parsing. Unfortunately, there's some problem areas - some languages have crossing dependencies, etc. which make simpler automata unsuitable.
The problems are a bit bigger than the type of machine you use, though. We don't have a complete grammar of any human language, for example. There's a lot of ambiguity in the input, too - assuming you're working with "perfect" text (no misspellings, etc) and didn't have to worry about disambiguating homophones (to, too, two) or alternate spellings, you've got problems like the fact that the word "gray" could be an adjective, a verb (to gray out a disabled control), or a noun (one commonly reported type of space aliens are called grays). And that's not even getting to what are called structural ambiguities - where you place an item in the parse dramatically affects the ultimate interpretation, and you can't always tell from the text what the intended placement is.
For what it's worth, a lot of people do machine translation statistically - I think google translate does, among others.
My original post? It was a joke. I know what the scare quotes mean - I was playing dumb and giving an interpretation that was deliberately obtuse. Why did I make the joke? Part of it is a reaction to scare quotes - they're dumb, I think. Also, I'm kind of tired of the general complaining posts about the Slashdot anti-MS bias. It's like bitching about everyone's always sweating in Burma - it's just the way things are there. Most of my jokes are primarily to entertain me, though, so they sometimes don't translate well to others.
This is something I've come to notice at the companies I've worked for. At my previous job I had to colaborate a lot with designer-types, and while some of them can be very precise about their workflow, most of them are actually quite interested in how you (and more generally "things") work and how you can get a really productive workflow.
This may sound like a lot of marketing speak, but take for instance a webdesigner who's used to some form of template system for webpages with forms. It's often very interesting to listen to how they've optimized their own workflow, and most of them will gladly listen to you when you have some useful tips for them. The thing is though, that this has to come from both ways. You can't expect someone to adjust their entire way of working simply because it's easier for you. Find a good middle ground and you'll have a really positive experience.
Developers on the other hand... There are a lot of developers so convinced that their workflow is the best, and the ONLY viable way of doing things. You'll still find a few who are willing to find a common ground, but it's far less common than with designers. Again it's a two-way street.
It just seems that with developers you're more likely to get this "I'm right, and you're wrong" situation followed by 3 hours of pointless bickering until one of them finally grudgingly gives in.
Having said that though, I've enjoyed working together with a lot of people over the years and it's been both a frustrating and very enjoyable experience at times. Whatever the experience was however, I've never missed the opportunity to learn from other people which I think is very important, and I hope that some people have picked up something from me at some point.
you don't have to install KDE
just the QT library.
same goes if you want to use gnome apps in KDE,
just install GTK.
-- Sex is the antonym of pringles. Once you pop it's time to stop.