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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.
Well, I'm sure I'll have the unpopular opinion, but KDE is a mistake. Period.
... I dunno ... gnome... xfce ... or emacs ;)
stick with
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.
If Vista wasn't a failure, then everyone wouldn't agree that it is a failure, and as your own post points out, everyone agrees that it is.
Do you think about this crap before you post?
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
How is it possible that open source developers have been working on KDE for a decade now and they still can't come up with something remotely polished as Win2k was years ago?
And something that just isn't in the same universe as OS X?
Why do the UI elements and widgets look like they are straight out of the damn stone age? Putting Aqua side by side with KDE makes it look like KDE is some sort of college computer graphics programmer art.
Why the hell can't the most basic UI and font spacing be handled. Isn't there anything like the automated snap to grid UI layout tools like Interface Builder?
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?
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'
the point --> .
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you --> x
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.
"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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
The old kernel 2.4 had shred implemented in konqueror in KDE 3.1. This was very handy and allowed safe removal of many files..spam..employee records after they left, sales estimates, etc. With it gone, we had to go to windows to get a convenient shred program and put up with windows vulnerabilities. However, these vulnerabilities, onorous as they were, were nothing compared with the insecurity of having no shred function. No good substitute for shred, regrettably, is found anywhere in linux. The lame excuse for gutting linux by the so called kernel 'improvers' was that somehow 'magnetic media' was somehow flawed. The only thing flawed was the monopoly sock puppet saboteurs that used that specious claptrap to gut a necessary feature, shred, from linux, and somehow managed to suppress anyone from coming up with a replacement....and lied to cover it all up. Shame on you Linus! If we are stuck with old windows editions or SuSE 9.0, the last good linux, it is your fault!!
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
Just asking, why do we still all use the file system as a database to store all our important personal documents? Isn't subversion a better backend, and google / search a better gui metaphore?
they are just people and yu should give them a break
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.
No calls now, I'm
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?
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
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?
DIE blasted SLAB menu, DIE! Is there anyone who likes the Slab menu? Why?
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.
..when they're copying other products, people complain they are not being innovative.
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.
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.
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
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
What a crock of loony bullshit and flamebait. I've pointed to KDE documents that explain the problems in KDE 4.0 and remind people that 3.5 is still the default in reasonable distributions. KDE is free software and it's developers are happy to talk about their code's shortfalls as well as its advantages. The source code is available to everone to judge for themselves so developer comments are usually accurate. Do you have anything useful to say about that or are you too blinded by hatred to have a useful conversation?
Except for his ignorance and position (fuck pulpit as you trolls call it) this has nothing to do with Byfield. It has even less to do with Twitter and other people you hate or are paid to smear.
By the way, thanks for raising the visibility of my post. Who needs sock puppets when there are idiots like you around? You should not let your personal hatred get in the way of your job like that. You might be paid to harass twitter and everyone you think is twitter but your primary job is to bury him. The usual AC or -1 account replies would have served the purpose of harassment without raising the visibility of an obviously insightful post. You could just be demonstrating your ability to moderate, but it's more likely that you are stupid and self defeating in that uniquely M$ way.
No calls now, I'm
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.
. . . 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.
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.
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]
fag.
KDE 4 is a horrible mess. It's what you get when you a have a team working for free.
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?
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
Wow, who the hell moderated this useless flamebait up.
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.
Let him have a few mod points. It never lasts long anyway.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.