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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."

6 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Fixed it for you by dotancohen · · Score: 4, Informative

    Portability was one of the goals of KDE4, and it is encouraging to see it works.

    Now if only the other parts of it would stop sucking...

    Today's Daily KDE4 WTF: My clock has two lines. The first line is the time, in military time -- 08:31. This works fine. The second line is the date: Tue, 27 Jan. It might be 27 January, but I can't tell, because the T and half the u in Tue, and most of the n in Jan, are cut off.

    I realize it's meant to be scalable, but why is it scalable right off the edges of the widget? And in a widget which is in the panel, by default?

    Just one of many KDE4 WTFs which makes you wonder, "Forget QA, did anyone actually fucking boot it up to see if it was working?"

    Please post a link to the bug report that you filed so that I can help triage it. Thanks.

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    It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
  2. Re:Why? by squoozer · · Score: 5, Informative

    I suspect the reason you might want to do this is so that you can use Linux tools on a Windows base platform. Kate, for example, is rather a nice editor (although I tend to use Notepad++ under Windows). Don't forget as well that KDE almost certainly has more development than the Windows desktop - although this can be a mixed blessing in my experience due to random breakage.

    As others have suggested just kill explorer.exe to free your machine from the default Windows desktop.

    --
    I used to have a better sig but it broke.
  3. Re:Editors: Can we remove the first troll comment by ObsessiveMathsFreak · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    May the Maths Be with you!
  4. Re:Fixed it for you by Karellen · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm not a developer, and I'm running KDE 4.2 RC. I have a clock on my panel showing the date and time. I do not see this bug.

    From How to report bugs effectively:

    Give the programmer some credit for basic intelligence: if the program really didn't work at all, they would probably have noticed. Since they haven't noticed, it must be working for them. Therefore, either you are doing something differently from them, or your environment is different from theirs.

    The whole thing is worth reading, really.

    Now, go file a damn bug, with a screenshot, and help make KDE rock!

    --
    Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
  5. Re:What about my right to be offended ? Easy ... by Herschel+Cohen · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?

  6. Re:When a GNOME developer says KDE rocks, I'm elat by mpyne · · Score: 4, Informative

    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).