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Open Source Victories of 2008
Meshach writes "Ars Technica has an interesting run-down on the major open source victories of 2008. Some, like Firefox 3, we can probably mostly agree on. Others — KDE 4 comes to mind — will be more controversial. And Mono 2? What else should be on the list?"
Uh, Wine went 1.0? How is this not on the list, but Google Chrome is? Chrome isn't even open source, Chromium is.
...because there is no war.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Uhm, 4.1 is only marginally better than alpha quality. Perfect example: yesterday, I needed to import a CA public key for use in all my KDE apps. There is no tool for this, and I actually had to use 'cat' to append the certificate to the system certificates file. That is an embarrassing oversight, and forces one to question just what sort of design practices, if any, were adhered to by the KDE 4 team.
You say that 4.0 was a temporary step backward from 3.5? 4.1 is still a step backward, just slightly less of one. 3.5 derived a lot of its power from a very solid, well refined OLE framework, and 4.1 has yet to even approach that. In 3.5, it was seamless to browse a tarball, because the ArK component would embed right into Konqueror. ArK does not embed into Dolphin or Konqueror in 4.1, and in standalone ArK, you cannot open most files without extracting, which is annoying and basically defeats the purpose of a tool like ArK. Many users, myself included, use (or used to use) keyboard shortcuts for various actions -- yet that is still completely broken in KDE 4.1, and worse yet, some application shortcuts are broken if you run the application with KDE as the WM, but work just fine if you use something else.
If the KDE team does not get their act together fast, and give people some sort of hope with the 4.2 release, KDE is going to die.
Palm trees and 8
Disclaimer: I am using KDE4. I like it for what it could be. As it is, I'm looking at alternatives.
Replace "4.0" with "Vista", "4.1" with "Vista SP1", and "4.2" with "Vista SP2" -- and, for good measure, "3.5" with "XP Pro", and you have a fair sense of what's going on here.
In fact, Microsoft has handled this better -- they still fix bugs in XP.
In KDE4, and in some of the bigger KDE4 apps (like AmaroK), there's this completely new, exciting, amazing version which almost has all the features you needed from the old version, in a very cool-looking but annoyingly different way, and sometimes crashes. Then there's the old, boring, unsupported version, which does everything you want it to do, but has some annoying bugs and deficiencies -- yet whenever you point them out, people close the bug "wontfix" as development has stopped on that branch, and the KDE4 version will be done so differently the bug is irrelevant.
At least Windows has a mostly-working version -- XP. KDE has no working version.
An example of something that worked in 3, but is broken in 4: The panel. Everyone always said, "Don't mind that, it's fixed in 4.1." Well, I'm running 4.1, and I can tell you, it's not even close. How do I make the panel thinner vertically? How do I adjust its translucency -- how do I give it a completely transparent background, but solid foreground?
An example of something that doesn't work anywhere (wontfix in 3, not done yet in 4) is encoding scripts in AmaroK. There's no longer a GUI option to tell AmaroK what your preferred format for a device is -- if you've got an iPod, it's going to give you mp3s, whether you want them or not, even if you can handle AAC just fine. Yet the KDE4 version of AmaroK doesn't yet support encoding scripts in any way, so my choice is mp3s, or no encoding at all. WTF?
Maybe I'm just using the wrong distro? I was pretty appalled at Kubuntu's handling of Intrepid. Bluetooth is broken, due to conflicting versions of a few packages. The only available solutions are, use the commandline (I tried, didn't work), go back to Hardy, or use the Gnome bluetooth GUI.
Isn't that why you use a distro in the first place? So bullshit like this doesn't happen?
Here's hoping by 4.5, they'll finally attain the functionality of 3.5. Maybe they'll still have some users left by then. Meanwhile, I'm going to take a long, hard look at going back to Fluxbox or straight Compiz.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I agree. Frankly, KDE 4 sucks. KDE 3.5 was polished and efficient. KDE 4.1 is well, not even close to where KDE 3.5 was. To pick one example, panel hiding is still buggy. Sometimes it hides, sometimes it doesn't. The number of options on panel hiding are now yes or no rather than a gradation of possibilities. I'm wondering if we'll get to KDE 4.5 where things are good again, and then we'll come to some screwy KDE 5.
Honestly, I wish people would just sit back, relax, and realize that there mere EXISTENCE of open source is the real victory here. Do we really need more than that?
yes, we do. we need software that actually works.
some of us have work that needs to get done. (that's why i use gnome and winXP.)
-I only code in BASIC.-
Okay, mod me flamebait if you want, but I fail to see how Wine is any sort of win for the open source community. Wine is a pretty good open source implementation of an ugly, broken and virtually unimplementable API that really shows its age and irrelevance in an increasingly Internet-driven world.
No, you're not flamebait. The more applications that can work in Wine, the more options I have for migrating away from Windows. This year for the first time, I was able to get rid of my Windows box. Everything that I was keeping it for I can now run under Wine. I would say that Wine is a legacy layer that is continuously improving in a world that still needs it.
A few years ago...I never thought I'd use GNOME, what with its child-proofing mentality.
But now its the only choice that's both functional and actually supported.
(Functional is a relative term. The release that shipped with Intrepid has entirely broken session management, which is a regression from even the ancient releases)
"Strangers have the best candy" -Me