Slashdot Mirror
Testing the KDE 4.2 Release Candidate, On Windows
Verunks writes "Ars takes the KDE 4.2 release candidate out for a test drive on Windows. The popular open source desktop environment has moved beyond Linux and is becoming increasingly robust on other platforms. Even KDE's Plasma desktop shell is now Windows-compatible."
As long as I can hit F4 and get a Bash terminal window into a Unix-like environment, I'm a happy guy.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Here we are, 2009 - we're supposed to have replaced Win32 and all it's shortcomings by now. Why do we bother to test fire on Windows?
Now whats a KED?
I installed this in order to use kate on windows. What can I say: I've grown attached to the editor. But I found that it no longer feels so crisp and clean as on linux.
There I fixed it for you.
And yes I'm a KDE user, have been for around 10 years.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
The new KDE 4.2 is just a cheaply done ripoff of the far superior NinWM from Ninnle Labs.
I never really used KDE before but will give it a try on my windows Gaming Partition :)
The screenshots look great btw.
...the article doesn't make it as clear as KDE's website that this "is experimental state" (sic).
Given KDE's recent experiences people should be more careful about opening themselves or others to accusations of punting Alpha quality software as Beta or Beta as production.
Apparently even Kate doesn't work? I'm not knocking their work as this is a very important bridge for moving people from Windows to *N!X or at least moving Open Source software from *N!X to Windows and clearly something that takes great care, planning and skill in execution. However we don't want people's first expirience of Open Source to be buggy unresponsive software with empty error message boxes!
Regards, Phil
No, really, why? Windows already runs poorly with its default windowing interface. Why would I want to use up even more memory for a second windowing interface? No application is worth this layer of added complexity.
Bearded Dragon
hold on to your butts, it may be righting itself. no celebration scheduled yet. still no 'openness' regarding the fake 'cloud' spraying, & inf. about the whereabouts of the real clouds. better days ahead.
Yay?
Will they port KDE *3.5* to windows? Everybody I know has written off KDE 4 as a failed experiment. But we love KDE 3.5, and having it natively on Windows would be nice.
Captcha: registry
I am quite elated at the fact that this GNOME developer says KDE 4.2 rocks . Now, if the two teams could combine resources to churn out an awesome desktop environment (preferably KDE based), that would make the Linux ecosystem even more relevant in today's environment.
My desktop replacement/gaming laptop dual boots into XP MCE and Gnome Ubuntu 8.10 and it is defintely more responsive on Gnome. the XP is a recent rebuild with minimal apps to keep it faster for the couple of games I'm currently playing.
Hell, I ran a Live Disk on a Vista laptop a friend of mine has yesterday and it was speedy fast there after the initial boot up.
Fixed!
Is there any way to remove the first troll comment on this thread. I know that it has been marked troll, but it is _so_ offensives that I think we should not have in on here.
I actually find your comment more offensive than the lame troll post. Should we remove your post to appease my moral outrage?
They wouldn't, because GNOME and KDE have two different design philosophies. Anyway, this argument is kind of similar to the "why waste time making so many distros?" one you see a lot.
Better still, I'd think the admins could tie the comment to a user/IP and just permanently ban said troll. I'm pretty sure I saw the same garbage yesterday morning, too.
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
You prefer writing Mono apps for Gnome?
Next step for EU to dictate MS to stop integrating Windowing interface with the OS and provide a way for users to choose which Windowing they are going to use. WOW. This is going to be great.
If you find it offensive, then don't read it. I can tell you from experience that their have been far, far more offensive troll posts on Slashdot and that ALL of them have been modded to -1 in seconds. The system works, and I see no reason to change it in order to placate you or anyone else in the offense brigade.
You, and people like you, who think that material you personally object to should be destroyed or removed, are the single biggest problem in the western world today. Here we have a system that appropriately and expediently deals with troll posts, and yet you are still not happy. You want the material "purged". You find issue with its very existence, and moreover, insist that the rest of the world cater to your whims.
Do you know the difference between you and a fundamentalist mullah complaining about "immodest dress" or "images" for or of women? There is none. You're the same person, just with different hang ups. And the rest of us should not have to give up our freedoms to satisfy your scruples.
May the Maths Be with you!
For what it's worth (posting AC and all), I agree.
KDE4 has a lot of rough edges that prevent people from seeing the greatness of it.
I really think KDE has a stellar future.
Yes, lets get into the habit of censuring posts, surely that wont ever get abused! Maybe not feeding the troll would be more effective. Welcome to the internet btw.
Browse at -1 to keep an eye out for abuses.
I wonder if Plasma runs on ReactOS.
(Though I would rather see XFCE ported).
I have to say it works quite well for me apart from a few glitches playing shoutcast streams. It's at an early stage but if they keep going at this rate then I can get rid of Linux and go back to Windows.
If I can run all my Linux programs on Windows and also use all my hardware on Windows then I guess it makes more sense for me to use Windows.
Okay, the responses to inquiry have given some intriguing reasons. But, if I kill explorer.exe to just run KDE, then I can only run KDE apps. Are there enough KDE apps available to replace the Windows GUI full-time? If so, this becomes a very weird hybrid of Microsoft's kernal and FOSS that Microsoft never pondered...or feared.
But, then I would have to ask, why run Windows at all if you are going to be running all of these Linux apps? Wouldn't you get better performance and security by just using Linux as the base OS? And then use WINE for one or two Windows apps you just gotta have? Or VMplayer it?
Bearded Dragon
If KDE 4.2 is already an awesome desktop environment, and you want an awesome desktop environment based on KDE, why are you advocating integrating Gnome?
If compatibility is your concern, than the FreeDesktop.org projects are already taking care of that, without having to consolidate DEs. If competing widget toolkits is your concern, well, to bad, that's not going to change anytime soon, and its not really a big problem anyway.
Gnome is already moving common components out of the Gnome libraries and into gtk, so that running a GTK app under KDE won't require all the gnome libs. I don't know if a similar project is underway on the KDE side, since the KDE devs don't have any control over the development of QT, but I suppose they could do something like it.
http://www.mhall119.com
Your insesative post is putting it on my radar.
It was -1 and I didn't see it, except somebody had to post a reply with a 0, thanks.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
The only design philosophy that should matter is pragmatism. The desktop environment that allows the user to take the best ideas, no matter where they come from, or what their philosophical base, and combine them easily to create a successful environment for the user's own work is what all of the projects should work towards.
And they are. Xfce for instance can integrate quite a bit of stuff originating from both KDE and Gnome. So parts are already fairly interchangeable between environments (at least if you've got the required support libraries). They should become more so.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Godwin's law?
There's one app I want to see ported to windows.
Etherape
I thought maybe today was the day. But nope, it GNOME 2.. in the requirements, not KDE 4.2.
The workarounds continue.
I apologize ahead of time for my language but speaking as someone who doesn't run kde as their wm (e17 for me), all I have to say to this is:
FUCK NO!
From my perspective, if I want to run any application that has to do with kde, and there's a lot of great ones, I have to wait for all the damn dcopservers, kio_slaves, kdeinits, etc. to load and it's a royal pain in the ass. The kde environment is bloated and irritating for anyone who doesn't want to run the kde wm. The gtk and gnome apps have no such irritations. Think about what you're saying, you'd turn kde precisely into what we all hate about windows, a monopoly. A huge bloated mess where somebody up on high says, thou shalt do it this way and no other and the rest of us have to live with it. Frankly, I'm waiting with baited breath for more mainstream qt4 apps to come out that aren't tied to kde. VLC has already done that and it's such an improvement over the wxwidgets interface.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
You might want to try MSYS. It provides a shell, a handful of common Unix commands, and it translates path names so you can type "/c/Program Files/" instead of "C:\Program Files\". It allows me to cry a lot less when I have to use Windows.
Without compositing, X can still look and feel slow (even if it's not). Those artifacts when you drag a window just scream "processor and/or video card is so overloaded it can't draw a proper 2d screen element", even if that's not the case.
May not be the parent poster's problem, but it's the first thing that comes to mind.
So I can get the stability of windows with the a compatibility an open-source desktop... hey why don't I load it on expensive Apple hardware and go for an all around win!?
Honestly, it's a little difficult to see the point it seems like you'd getting the worst of two worlds with KDE on windows....
I'm curious...if one were to launch KDE in windows, then somehow kill the explorer leaving KDE as the windowing system, could one then launch both KDE and native windows applications in this environment? That would be an interesting setup.
Isn't that a little bit like testing out a corvette in a driveway?
Damn, that A.C. took my comment seriously! o_O
It seems to have succeeded.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
I agree with your first paragraph 100%. Beyond that, I think you're getting a bit insulting. Reasonable people have disagreements, and considering that some CAPTCHAs have been broken and there is some sort of verbal-diarrhea comment spam that seems to exist, banning an IP might be a reasonable response. I don't think it's the solution by any means. But I do think we need to be careful in going over the top in our responses. It's not that far different from banning people based on their opinions.
Let me remind you that KDE is and will be Open Source! That means you are and will be in position to modify it to your heart's satisfaction. Now your problems with KDE can be solved.
The post incites racial hatred. They would be arrested in any public place for saying such things, if they weren't beaten to death by the black community first.
/. provided a way of not listing AC posts? That would filter all of the troll rubbish in one go, is done by user, and everyone benefits. Those who don't mind leave it off and get more valued content from the ACs which post good material (those who had modded, for example). Those who object get their watered down content.
Free speech does not mean you can say anything you want, anywhere you want. By all means have your own opinion, but expect repercussions if you share it with people who object. He has as much of a right to ask for it to be removed as you have saying the guy is entitled to his opinion.
Maybe if
Your knee-jerk reaction is the second biggest problem in the western world today.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
That is true ... but what about my right to be offended ?
Don't I have rights too ?
You're just encouraging them by responding *at all*. This *what they want*. The one thing they don't want is to be modded to -1 and then completely ignored. Any response or discussion beyond that will be seen as a small victory for them. (And yes, I realize I'm now contributing to such as discussion but it's too late in this case).
You also didn't change the title in your reply so you've now further propagated the offensive title of the offensive post. Well done.
The post incites racial hatred. They would be arrested in any public place for saying such things, if they weren't beaten to death by the black community first.
This has got to be the dumbest fucking thing I've read on slashdot in a while (about 15 minutes...) Who is going to read that post, and think, "Holy cow! I've been wrong all this time, I really do hate black people!" The person and their ilk who cut and pasted that drivel did so to get a rise out of you and your ilk, and it worked, superbly.
Get a grip, you wiener.
The post incites racial hatred. They would be arrested in any public place for saying such things...
Not in the U.S. it won't. Unless the speech incites to riot, is slanderous or poses a direct physical danger (i.e. -- shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, causing a stampede), it is perfectly legal in the U.S. in a public place. Actually, there would be more repercussion in private in the U.S., as speech like that will get you fired or evicted and banned from a private location rather quickly. The U.S. is rather zealous about the right to free speech.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Set your read level to -1. Others avoid any posts by ACs by reading only level one or higher. The option is yours, why hadn't you noticed? Are you predisposed to complain?
Can we please remove the above post it is very lame and should not be on slashdot.
Rich
Free speech does not mean you can say anything you want, anywhere you want.
What does it mean?
Your worries are warranted, however, you can play a role by following the moderation guidelines and set your read level to -1, then catch and correct abuse.
Free speech does not mean you can say anything you want, anywhere you want.
Yes, it does.
Not being allowed to incite racial hatred in a public place is a restriction on free speech. So is not being allowed to shout "there's a bomb!" in a crowded train station. Many people find these restrictions desirable.
Maybe if /. provided a way of not listing AC posts? That would filter all of the troll rubbish in one go, is done by user, and everyone benefits. Those who don't mind leave it off and get more valued content from the ACs which post good material (those who had modded, for example). Those who object get their watered down content.
http://slashdot.org/my/comments#people_bonus_anonymous
Set to -6, click Save.
That you may say what he approves of, when and where he approves of them, or get locked up with the other people who 'incite hatred'. You know, probably like those scientists who didn't accept creationism, gays (can't have hatred without the hated!) and other such groups that need to just learn to shut up, because the OP doesn't want to hear what they think.
Great Intellect...
Partially related: Linus Torvalds has recently switched from kde to gnome.
"The option is yours, why hadn't you noticed?"
It isn't !!! That's why I am complaining.
If he doesn't have the right to express his offensive thoughts, then I won't get my rights fulfilled. Even setting the level as you suggested won't help ...
From my perspective, running the whole thing makes that I _don't_ have to wait for all those things to load. Because there already loaded. Your desktop probably is faster to initialize but I really don't care about a lightning fast starting desktop, I want a complete desktop with all the bells and whistles.
I can tell you from experience that their have been far, far more offensive troll posts on Slashdot
Also, perverted. And just straight disturbing. It's part of what gives slashdot its charm. We're like a big family, and the GNAA etc. are the racist old granny you can't get to shut up.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
People who complain about "wasted effort" or "lack of standards" in the open source world (whether distros, GUIs, or whatever) fail to realize that open source development is founded on voluntary choice. Nearly everything comes from the bottom up, not the top down. Do these people honestly believe that if one day, some authority came along and declared "from now on, gnome and kde will merge as one", that the developers on both sides would comply? On the contrary, I suspect you would then have three projects: the two original projects, which most of the original developers refuse to give up (because they are both successful, after all), and the newly "merged" project which, strangely enough, lacks the momentum of the originals.
You can bring a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. He'll drink when he's good and ready, not on your command. Or more likely, he'll find his own preferred watering hole.
I heartily recommend "censuring" posts when appropriate. I think you're referring to "censoring" posts.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
If you find it offensive, then don't read it.
How can he tell if it is offensive before reading it?
Right, KDE being open source means you can just dive into the code and de-bloat the thing. Piece of cake. Seriously?
No you simply replace the explorer.exe with the main KDE app ....
I don't run explorer most of the time (I use Litestep) and Windows still works fine (well no worse than it ever did)
Windows has a mechanism to do this built in .... you can replace the desktop shell fairly easily ....
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
and what, exactly, are all of those bells and whistles necessary for? XDND, XDS, and pipelines already exist, so why the necessity for all of that other crap? I agree with grandparent. KDE is a bloated environment, which is why although there are nice KDE apps out there, I will never run them in my gnome or windowmaker environments. No thanks.
Porting unix software to Windows instead of improving Cygwin to run these apps without porting is an awful waste of time. Improving a common support layer that supports Unix APIs instantly allows thousands of Unix apps to work, rather than trying to port thousands of Unix apps to Windows.
KDE4 is such a disaster on Linux I do not think that porting to Windows should be a higher priority. Fix all of the regressions and feature loss between KDE3 and KDE4. KDE 4 is an embarrassment and a piece of shit. Torvalds is right.
GNOME uses DBUS as well (and therefore dbus-server). KDE no longer uses DCOP but uses the same thing GNOME uses.
KIO Slaves are launched on demand as needed, not just because kdeinit loads up.
On the other hand there is usually at the very least a kbuildsycoca step involved when running your first KDE app in a session. I'm sure GNOME has something similar (gconf?) although it may be faster, no doubt.
Really a lot of the startup time concern in my experience has been related more towards C++ symbol bloating (which is significantly reduced nowadays between prelinking and symbol visibility support). The kdeinit you talk about was actually a hack designed to work around that problem, by turning KDE applications into shared libraries (that would startup up much faster as a result).
I will say that I also am cheering on the adoption of more plain Qt apps, for the same reason that I have quite a few GTK+ utilities but no GNOME ones. Less startup time is always a good thing. Unlike the grandparent though I'm not hoping that one DE ends up winning out, I'd actually prefer there be choice available (as long as it interoperates).
Right...but then can you run say notepad.exe from this new environment? I would assume so but I've never tried it. It seems odd but I can't think of any reason why it shouldn't work.
"KDE is a bloated environment, which is why although there are nice KDE apps out there, I will never run them in my gnome or windowmaker environments. No thanks."
One hears this often here. Here's someone who decided to test this common Slashdot wisdom: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-linux-memory.html?ca=dgr-lnxw07LinuxMemory
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Also, bravo on trolling so successfully. I've not seen this much karma burn in a long time.
I have to wait for all the damn dcopservers, kio_slaves, kdeinits, etc. to load and it's a royal pain in the ass. The kde environment is bloated and irritating for anyone who doesn't want to run the kde wm. The gtk and gnome apps have no such irritations.
Mono.
So much stuff from KDE3 is broken, may as well use GNOME:
* kwin won't stop breaking gl xscreensaver hacks, disabled compositing and switched to XRender
* konqi web shortcuts lost
* kicker replacement is shite:
** won't stretch across multiple screens
** no 'Run command' konqi bar option
** won't let me change icons for shell scripts on the bar
* still heinously buggy after 'release' version releases
* where's my alt-drag? Now it only works in title bar or window edges, I want whole-window like before!
* why did you break middle-mouse-button rearranging on the panel?
* fix qt-gtk theming cooperation to at least as good as KDE3
* where's the Baghira aqua window candy?
So far, I'm very unsatisfied, and this is with Fedora Rawhide updated this AM..
> I have to wait for all the damn dcopservers, kio_slaves, kdeinits,
> etc. to load and it's a royal pain in the ass.
dcopserver? That's history. KDE depends on DBUS nowadays and that makes absolutely sense. Btw, so does Gnome.
kio_slaves: those are not started before the application comes up but started on demand, if the app requires it. What is wrong with that? The extra process? That's unix philosophy and good design.
> The gtk and gnome apps have no such irritations.
Of course, they also depend on dbus, hal and whatnot.
Any modern desktop, be it gnome or KDE requires some common background processes to communicate, share user data etc. And usually you have the penalty only if you start the very first application.
You can make a good arguement that not only does it not apply to the rest of the world, but is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) problem in most of the world.
Of course, in many parts of the world comments like this will not only get you labeled an a**hole - they will also get you arrested.
Seen any cartoons about Mohammed recently?
I wasn't posting an original insult. And my karma is still as it should be - positive.
I am not insulting anyone, so I am not breaking the rulez. I am just talking about my rights to be offended ....
It is an interesting question. We all think, human rights should be focused on good things. But I think that idea of human rights is sometimes misused. Humans need some level of violence in their environment to operate normally. Human beings have developed in an environment of extreme violence. In our society, where we are trying to protect our rights by removing violence, we are sometimes doing more harm then good. Even if we are claiming that we are trying to achieve the opposite, we are creating harm on the other end.
My Karma should be burned for being offtopic, that's true ... but your karma will also burn for that reason ...
KDE4 is primarily an architecture revamp over 3.x. It's the cleaner codebase (both because it's based on Qt4 instead of 3 and internal restructuring) that allowed them to port it.
Porting KDE3 would be harder both architecturally and possibly legally (has Qt3 been released GPL? I know 4 was...).
it's a well known and copy and paste troll. It's been posted a thousand times before. It's obviously the product of a 12 year old mind, so just ignore it.
Can we please remove the above post it is very lame and should not be on slashdot.
While we're at it, how about removing all posts with run-on sentences, incorrect punctuation, and lack of proper capitalization of the site's name?
Advice: on VPS providers
Slashdot is about freedom of speech, alternate points of view and exchange of ideas. Well, this pin-head got my dander up. His perspective is so backward and cretinous that he does not deserve to be modded as a Troll. Rather that going on about it at length, may I propose that slanderous items of this nature should have a further, lower category: Dung. If a posting gets modded Dung, it should not appear on any basic search - unless a user specifically requests to look at the Dung Heap.
*** Don't be dull.***
The whole point is is that they wouldn't necessarily agree on their best ideas, or where to take things. It's not quite as easy as witnessing the perfect Form of a windowing system and building towards that.
We can run KDE 4.2.0 on Vista!
(Please note I don't use Gnomono out of principle).
You apparently never tried to make even simple application in GTK. Anything more complicated than HelloWorld is complicated as hell. Why actually most GNOME applications switched to Glade to help generate code.
Qt library is magnitudes easier to program for.
The only problem - in past - with Qt was that it used GPL license. GTK was preferred because it is covered by LGPL allowing commercial applications to link against it. This is more than ironic and flies right into the face of many RedHat's (historically major GNOME supporter) openness claims.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
I agree ... Dung should be awailable as an offical mod option ...
Lets vote for this option.
KDE in itself is a clone of Windows look and feel. Perhaps if Gnome was ported to Windows then I'd consider but Windows isn't the most stable thing ever. The last thing I'm going to do is add something on top of it that could make it worse and looks more or less the same.
<rant>P.S. Not to mention that somebody at kde decided that konqueror should be a web browser and not a file manager. I'll never understand this... from my perspective they had some software that was a very mediocre web browser but what was in my opinion, the best file manager in existence and they threw out the file manager. For one thing, those two functions should never be in the same software, you can thank Microsoft and leveraging its monopoly for that particular monstrosity, but something is obviously wrong with the kde development process if they're making decisions like this. It's no wonder that kde4 turned out so badly.*grumble grumble*</rant>
You didn't mention the worst part - they chucked out Konqueror FM and put Dolphin in its place. No problem you say, Konq is still there, just that all the file manager views have been ripped out and hidden to try and stop you using it.
We're on the verge of 4.2 (I've got 4.2 RC1 on Kubuntu 8.10) and I can't have filesizes in icon view, I can't get image dimensions without opening an image, can't view meta-data in the information pane, don't have bookmarks (no "Places" don't count), don't have a visual filesize view (either filelight or that funky squares view from Konq-KDE3), don't have view templates or memory of previous view properties.
And there are good reasons to have the FM able to open web pages, like being able to drag-drop a download. I use to love being able to right-click a zipped folder on a website (think Wordpress / Joomla templates, etc.) choose "open with ark" then output the unzipped files to an ftp/fish site. You certainly can't do that now.
There's some progress for sure, but Dolphin isn't to 1.0 yet IMO depite being labelled 1.1.80.
And before the apologetics claim I'm resistant to change, I'm not. I just like features to be available; more features in higher versions.
All that said, kudos to the programmer dudes, just please try not to listening to the marketing demons when adding your version labels.
I had the same bug.
From my few brief experiences KDE developers _seem_ to have an attitude of "if it affects me I'll fix it" which is fine, they're mostly working for free. But that does kinda make me not bother reporting bugs + if I was reporting all my bugs/crashes I wouldn't have time to read Slashdot.*
The bug in question sounds like the effect I was getting which appears to have been fixed in 4.1.96 (RC1) but was present in 4.1.80.
KDE teams appear to have known about it: ... etc ...
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=166883
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=157537
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=158762
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=163870
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=178840
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=178859
This was not, as other posters in the thread appear to want to claim, due to that users incompetence. His comments weren't totally unreasonable.
KDE has had major problems with font support on the desktop until recently; incidentally there are currently no settings to alter the size of the date text. The date and time font sizes are set by the height of the panel - clearly this is a sensible and neat feature, but it was broken. I hesitated to say "horribly broken" but the clock is one of the main visible elements in most peoples kicker/panel/application bar and as such is one of those "first impressions" features that are really important to get right if you want your interface to appear professional. Changing the font used by KDE seemed to help before.
For those just looking at the RC it's like the [relatively] massive numbers used in the clocks pop-up calendar widget ( https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=178588 ).
---
* FWIW I focus on a couple of non-KDE projects and do my best to report bugs and provide user support for them.
what distro are you on? im sure those on gentoo can compile with --nodcopservers or something. There is also the fact that kio_slaves is not bloat, in fact its anti-bloat as it allows for code reuse, the kio_slaves could be compiled into every single program to give them the ability to read from networks/drivers/etc but if you have 2 programs running then you'd have to load them twice.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
"People in on the prank will often redirect the victim to several other places"
Seriously though, I would just make extended keys work over the connection, or refuse to work with it. It's 2009 for crying out loud. And the other commands you give aren't demonstrating VI's usefulness very convincingly either.
Starting k3b from Window Maker takes ~10 seconds [1], the bulk of which is spent starting kdeinit and the dcopservers and what have you [2]. Those apps seem to stay around after k3b terminates. Subsequent KDE app launches will be faster. Okular starts in ~5 seconds. [2] The only extra things that start with Okular are /usr/libexec /gam_server and a dbus daemon and client. [3]
I understand your concern, but think that you're blowing this a little out of proportion.
[1] Athlon XP 2800+ @ ~2.1 GHz, 2GB PC3200 DDR RAM, a single SATA 1 drive @ 320GB, 2.6.28 kernel.
[2] And this is with an ongoing GCC compile niced to 14.
[3] No kinits or dcopservers or anything like that started. I even restarted X, so the kinits and what have you from the last session terminated.
On the other hand there is usually at the very least a kbuildsycoca step involved when running your first KDE app in a session.
I *think* that Gentoo does this after a KDE app is built and installed, so hooray for that!
OTOH, you *do* have to wait for the app to build, so I don't think that you end up saving *any* time with the Gentoo way. ;)
n/t
Informative.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
We've had Winamp banned by some clueless git in our upper echelons (apparently, it poses a risk of copyright inringement... I would personally be more worried about the burglary you'd need to commit to rip someone elses CDs with it).
I tried Amarok on my Ubuntu box and was quite pleased, it's easily got the best music organiser I've seen on a Linux music player, the library being the reason I used Winamp in the first place.
On Windows it's rather sluggish to start, the program itself eats over 100MB of memory, not to mention the various daemons that KDE requires to function which eat another 60MB between them with ease, and stick around even after you close the last KDE application. The file dialogs are rather slow to arrive, even after "warming them up".
VLC has a much more spartan media library, but it only consumes a slim 20MB.
I'm guessing that I'm going to be happy to see Qt4 applications on Windows, but possibly less enthusiastic about ones that drag all the KDE baggage in with them ; it just goes to show that Windows does not have a monopoly on enormous bloatware.
Yes you can ... the core of the system is still Windows. Explorer or KDE is just a shell wrapped around this that runs programs for you, you are not running Linux or Unix, you are running Windows with a pretty desktop on top
In the Windows world this is a difficult concept because the system is sold as an integrated whole and the components are crosslinked and at multiple levels and have multiple tasks, in the Unix/Linux world the components are separate and can be individually replaced (mostly) so you have the core (Kernel) with drivers and services on top, a GUI system on top of that, a window manager on that, and a desktop on that, and then desktop components on that ... any of which can be replaced
KDE on Windows replaces the top three levels (which are normally handled by Explorer.exe) (partly) the window manager, the desktop, and the desktop components ....the Kernel, Services, Drivers, GUI, and some of the Window manager functions are still handled by the base Windows system
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
You're missing the point. To run just ONE KDE app in, say, a clean windowmaker environment, all of that other stuff gets launched, whether you need it or not. Not so with other software.
I totaly understood your point, but if you'd read the article _you_ would have understood my reply to your point. It is true that running one application from one DE is uneconomic memorywise. However, if you i.e. like to run konqueror it is smart to also use the kate editor and kwallet (for your pasword management). That way KDE3.5 turns out to be really memory efficient (compared to other DE's). The article also nicely shows why running firefox will have _big_ impact on memory use if you also like to run KDE. It should be noted that this was firefox2 and 3 is much better, but also KDE4 is||will-be doing this better than 3.5 did.