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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.
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.
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.
the point --> .
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you --> x
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.
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?
Or perhaps they can stop expecting it to be something it isn't and get used to Linux as a real operating system, not "that shoddy free Windows clone" they expect it to be.
If there's anyone I hate more than stupid people, it's intellectuals.
It probably means just that. Familiar paradigms are important to a lot of people.
blah
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!
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.
Short answer? Mnemonics.
Long version: it's easier for most people to fudge through something they vaguely remember doing by pictures than it is for them to memorize a set of arcane terminal they vaguely remember. People who do things other than program and learn Linux inside and out have all sorts of other random esoteric knowledge buried away, and there's only so much that a single person can keep in their head. These people are called end users, and frankly, if you don't understand why politely asking them to "simply" learn the terminal commands is a mind-numbingly stupid proposition, I seriously recommend staying the hell away from UI design.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
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.
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.
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.
Why?
Aren't you aware of the Linux development paradigm that has been the rule since Linus released Linux? ... "Release Early, release often!" FOSS depends upon the users helping in the development of software, not whining about perceived or real problems.
Bruce Byfield summarized his findings with the following statement:
How stable KDE 4.1 will be when released at the end of this month is anybody's guess. But, judging from its features, the release will be a major milestone in the 4.x series. Unfortunately, it will almost certainly not be the complete answer to user discontent that has been promised. It might even drive large number of users away from KDE altogether.
Such a reaction would be misguided. KDE 4.x has many features, including the use of scalable vector graphics and natural language searches that make it the most innovative free desktop currently in development. Moreover, if you dislike some of its experiments, you can work around them with no more trouble than it takes to change your desktop wallpaper -- for instance, one of the widgets you can add to the desktop is a KDE 3.5.x menu.
That is wise advice.
Troy Unrau introduced KDE4, before the first beta was released, on Jan 1, 2007 with the "Road to KDE4" series at http://dot.kde.org/1167723426
Before he resigned KDE4 to focus on his Masters in Geology degree, Troy posted the following comments:
We knew there would be some pushback to the major changes in KDE 4.0, because, believe it or not, history is simply repeating itself. KDE 2.0 was met almost exactly the same way, although open source was flying a lot lower under the public radar in those days. It took until KDE 2.2 before distros mostly stopped shipping KDE 1.1.2 and were happy with 2.x.ferent standard. Somehow though, there's still a lot of positive press about KDE out there, which means that the developers have done something right (or us Marketing guys are worth our weight in Rhodium...) and the naysayers have not killed a project they confess to love.
So my message to all the disgruntled users out there are: use KDE 3.5.x, and wait until 4.x makes you happy, or better yet, help. That's what the Mac OS users did. That's what the Apache users did. That's what our KDE 2.x users did. The software you are getting from the KDE project is free, worked on by a team of developers that actually like to use their own software. Improvements are coming fast, and KDE 4.1.0 is scheduled for July. 4.2.0 for January, etc. If you use 4.0.x, have found issues, and would like to help improve 4.1 before the release, grab the SVN version, using KDE4Daily (virtual machine image), the automated kdesvn-build script, anonsvn, and file bugs. Join the bug squashing days that are announced via planetkde or the dot. And bring a positive attitude because KDE is yours, just as much as any coder!
The hysteria in some complaints (and deliberate FUDing and astroturfing in others) is misplaced. FOSS software is not static, especially when there is a vibrant body of users CONTRIBUTING to its development (coding, testing, documenting or donations). Users who do not contribute but only complain are "poisonous users". A project grows when it has an amply supply of contributing users. Any project dies when its users are poisonous.
It is also obvious that some "complainers" are not KDE users at all. Their motives are obvious. A lot of this brouhaha has been exploited by a few bloggers trying to increase their page hits by inflammatory comments with little basis in fact.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
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
"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
And so does any GUI.. they all have icons, some sort of "OK" buttons, a close button, etc.
KDE 4 is probably more different then Windows then Gnome. Just because Gnome's main "bar" is on the top, doesn't make it somehow completely different than Windows. Move the bar to the bottom, and BAM, you have a Windows-looking UI.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
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
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. -
If you like Gnome, you'll love KDE4. It lacks many of the same features Gnome lacks.
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.
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
How'd you get access to /. from jail?
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.
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.
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
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