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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."
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
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.
...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
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?"
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Pretty much any software can be described as much-criticized, especially when it's popular and then undergoes a rewrite or significant changes. Hear the cries of "it doesn't do x, it used to do x like so" for [Gnome|KDE|MS Office|Vista|Python|Finder|fill in blank]. Regardless of whether many people are happy with the changes, you'll find a group that is very vocal in its discontent.
On the other hand, not all software can be described as popular, which KDE certainly is (in the OSS world).
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.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
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.
Please post a link to the bug report that you filed so that I can help triage it. Thanks.
No. If your desktop environment wasn't tested on HIS computer under HIS operating system with HIS libraries, you failed. I mean, you could've stopped by his apartment all last week! He was available then! You have no excuse for this complete laziness.
(laugh, it's funny!)
Won't happen since, as far as I know, the Windows version of Qt3 is not released under GPL.
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.
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.
That's nothing. What will really make you scratch your head is when you try and fix it by changing the font, and only the time's font changes, not the date.
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!
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).
Silence, you ninny!
Has it really not crossed your mind that perhaps your experience is unique? Maybe you have a bad font or font handling library somewhere that is incorrectly reporting size that is atypical.
Maybe some other obscure combination of things that a tiny few people have causes this, and everyone that has experienced it is just assuming _everybody_ does and that _clearly_ nobody is paying attention. Screw a bug report, obviously everyone can see this issue and it's just been ignored.
Get over yourself. The KDE devs are the most responsive people I've ever dealt with including companies that are paid 5 figures a month for enterprise class support, but they cannot respond if they are not notified. They do not have huge farms of systems sporting every possible combination of hardware and software. They rely on proper reporting and triaging.
except that the three computers i've got kde4 on don't appear to do that, at all. there's something different about your setup (my guess would be something with fonts).
It won't matter by the time the rest of the assorted bigger "gotcha!"s, bugs, whoopsies, errors, and general binary buggery get fixed.
Tried KDE4, found it unusable because of massive incompatibilities with 3.5-based apps (and lack of 4.x upgrades).
Tried KDE4.1, found it barely usable, but still lacking enough of the functionality of 3.5 that I switched back.
As far as I'm concerned, KDE4 is a lot of glitz with damn little to back it up. If/when KDE3.x goes away, I'll likely switch to Gnome.
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
This may not be an obvious flaw. Text not fitting in a widget can happen if the user's font settings are outside the default range. So unless this is a case were the widget is in trouble on a virgin install - where there are no settings inherited from a prior KDE instance - or on a system were the user never altered any of the default settings - then how are the developers supposed to have seen the problem as "obvious"? What may be more obvious is that if you allow the user to tune his system some proportion of users will get theirs tuned so stuff like this appears.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Fallacy. If we had one look at the OP's desktop then we would have seen it. Unfortunately, the users who test KDE cannot possibly test every permutation of hardware that exists that supports KDE. It's simply impossible. However, I'm willing to bet that the machines they did test on did not exhibit this problem. Hence, they never knew a problem existed.
He asked only that the OP tell him where the bug report was, nothing else, and then he would help fix it. Instead, you criticized him, implying that all KDE developers should magically know about every bug before the users find it, regardless of the users' hardware.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not a KDE zealot. Actually, I'm a much bigger fan of GNOME for completely separate reasons. However, going around arguing that KDE developers are a "cabal" and implying that they should have some superhuman (unpaid) testing team is ridiculous.
I use Kde 4.1.x from Kubuntu, I am right now seeing the date line very clearly, nothing is cut off.
So apparently the bug isn't very obvious and might have to do with his specific settings.
Think about it this way: Writing the bug report would take about as much time as bitching about it on slashdot, the difference being that writing a bug report might actually get it fixed.
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
There shouldn't be bug report for this category of obvious flaws. If you had one look on the desktop you would have seen it.
I'm looking at it right now and don't see it, my clock looks fine, so clearly it's not affecting everyone and it's not obvious just by looking at the desktop.
How would you expect a developer to fix a bug if he's never even seen it, and instead of trying to help you just insult them.
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
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:
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?
Godwin's law?
wow. if you substituted Vista, SP1, and 3.5 for KDE4, KDE4.1, and XP respectively in that rant, it sounds exactly like almost every Windows rant I've been hearing for way too long now. Just thought I'd point out the humor.
I used a plain WinXP with the kde4win packets. Even there I never came beyond the splashscreen. Maybe it has something to do with the drivers for the soundcard. So I miss amarok when I am stuck with Windows.
There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want. --Calvin
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.
Linus, is it you?
Yup, there is a certain sense of deja vu, isn't there? :-)
Don't get me wrong - if KDE4 hadn't broken so severely and radically from 3.5, they'd likely have had a winner. The eye candy and all that IS nice; just not worth the missing/broken/works-inside-out functionality, IMHO. Me, I think they probably should have made the KDE4 golly-wog stuff as options IN ADDITION TO the functionality of 3.5 - i.e. new lib(s) that 4-specific apps could call, while maintaining compatibility with older 3.5 favorites.
But hey, what do I know -- I'm just an end-user :-)
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
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?
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.
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.
There shouldn't be bug report for this category of obvious flaws. If you had one look on the desktop you would have seen it.
Fallacy. If we had one look at the OP's desktop then we would have seen it. Unfortunately, the users who test KDE cannot possibly test every permutation of hardware that exists that supports KDE. It's simply impossible. However, I'm willing to bet that the machines they did test on did not exhibit this problem. Hence, they never knew a problem existed.
So... the bug report will be marked "Cannot reproduce". Then a couple other suckers that were so annoyed by it that they took the time to create an account in the bug system will post "Still reproducible on 4.4", but it'll never get fixed. And even if it does get fixed, the bug report will never be changed from "Cannot reproduce" to "Fixed" since it's lost in the morass. The people who filed and posted 'me too' and the people that read the report and didn't register will all be even more pissed off.
Testing and bug tracking does not work well when the underlying code is really buggy. Quality of a program should be judged by its worst part... it's better to have good quality throughout than to have some perfect code mixed in with some really bad code. IOW, there shouldn't be problems with just a couple fields being a couple pixels off like that.
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.
> So... the bug report will be marked "Cannot reproduce". Then a couple other suckers that were so annoyed by it that they took the time to create an account in the bug system will post "Still reproducible on 4.4", but it'll never get fixed. And even if it does get fixed, the bug report will never be changed from "Cannot reproduce" to "Fixed" since it's lost in the morass
I've filed a lot of bugs against KDE4. A *lot*. My experience is that (surprise, surprise, I guess), the KDE4 developers are like any other sample of human beings. Some bugs get responded to almost immediately (within minutes or hours). Some are acknowledged and are worked on over the course of days or weeks. And some indeed languish and one thinks "why did I bother? Doesn't anyone care that this is a REALLY ANNOYING BUG?" Maybe the poster just had a bad experience with one of the last kinds of bugs. Yes, it's frustrating sometimes. But hey, it's still on average hugely better than filing bugs with a big company.
Try filing a report to MS. Or Google -- or Seagate in the current mess. I've never even received a sane acknowledgement.
So bugs.kde.org sure isn't perfect; and neither are the developers. And even though I agree with most posters that the current state of KDE4 is that it frankly sucks, the best way to help is to file reports. It sure isn't going to get better if we don't.
The people who are making it stop sucking aren't the same as those who are making it portable and you can't just assign them to whatever you want. This isn't how open source development works.
Mada mada dane.
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.
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.
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.
First off, I'm not the original complainer. But I'm very upset at the complete lack of quality control within KDE development. Every release in the 4.x series has been so unbelievably broken that pre-alpha doesn't begin to describe it.
In my opinion (which is obviously biased) they should revert to the 3.x source tree as the current development strategy leads to madness.
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.
Please post a link to the bug report that you filed so that I can help triage it. Thanks.
I suppose, being unemployed now, I have less of an excuse not to file bug reports.
But understand, so much was broken in 4.0 and 4.1 that reporting bugs could be a full-time job. I realize this might be unique to my hardware, or to my setup -- but it was one thing, after another, after another. It's not an exaggeration to say daily WTF, here. Today's WTF is, why can't kde3 apps connect to the kde4 kdewallet? Kubuntu seems to have "solved" this problem by castrating kdewallet support right out of kde3 apps -- which is really frustrating, for things like networkmanager.
I mean, the API is, what, a hash table? How hard can it be? It's not like we're trying to embed a whole browser plugin...
Another WTF: At some point, I had a USB sound device plugged in. Solid chose to inform me -- in a gigantic message, which covers up the entire system tray, and can't be closed except by waiting a few seconds -- and on every single boot -- that it couldn't initialize this device which I had plugged in for one evening. I had to manually open the config file and remove the entries for that card -- but I would like that card to work, if I plug it in again.
Another: My soundcard, at one point, lacked a "master" volume control in ALSA. Now it has one. Despite this, I still cannot get the volume keys to work. The closest I got was volume keys working for the PCM control (not Master), yet the display was of the Master control, so the display was broken, and it would control the volume of the video, but not the rest of the system -- one beep from the system could be deafening.
Another: No bluetooth support in Kubuntu. I know it's Kubuntu's fault -- but there you go, how do I determine who's fault it is?
Another: The font spacing/size in Konsole changed, with no way I could find of changing it back.
Another: Can't flatten out the clock. I want it to display the date and time on the same line, and stretch out, so I can make the panel even smaller.
Another: When typing in alt+f2, pressing enter launches whatever the cursor was on at that point, rather than finishing the search first. This means that if I type too fast, even if I know there is only one possible completion for something (example: kons should launch konsole, whereas konq should launch konqueror), I might get konqueror instead of konsole, or vice versa, simply because it took the results for a search on "kon" before I typed the last character. Only workaround is to pause for a second or so after typing, to make sure it gets the right one, or type the full name each time.
I can do this all day.
I did occasionally track down some of them and found they'd been reported. Not all of that matters -- I realize Amarok is a separate project, but the problem now is, the old version is depricated, and the new version isn't done. (I know it's released. It's not done.) So bugs against the old version will be marked "wontfix", for that reason -- meaning there is, for the moment, no working version of Amarok, for some of the things I want to do.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
That sounds like EXACTLY what would happen if I reported a Windows bug to Microsoft. Actually, no, that's not true; instead, I'd spend three hours on the phone being bumped from incompetent tech support staff in India to incompetent tech support managers in India to incompetent tech support staff in the U.S.... before finally giving up. Microsoft most certainly would not release a patch that fixed my problem if it only occurred on my particular machine. At least KDE developers wouldn't dick me around about it.
Not only is rude to assume that the developers are so incompetent that they will by default just leave the bug in purgatory forever, it's also not what I have experienced with most open source projects. Every bug report I have ever submitted to a substantial open source project (including GNOME, Ubuntu, GIMP) has been addressed in a relatively timely manner. I have never submitted a bug to KDE, but I know that they are not somehow dumber than the rest of the open source community.
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
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..
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 will agree to a point, except every KDE4 app I have used I have loved (have not used Amarok 2).
The way that QT4 handles interfaces is unmatched IMO. Try out Eric IDE for an example of what I mean.
I also find Oxygen theme (icons toolbars, not window decorations) to be nice (but way too big, kcalc for KDE4 is ridiculous in wasted space).
I can't wait for Amarok 2 t get stable, and feature complete, or for the new koffice to be ready, but until Plasma and the new Kwin mature some more I will almost certainly continue using them in gnome.
I like Plasma in principal too, but yuck on performance, and stability (speaking from 4.0 and 4.1 usage).
My largest problem with plasma is that my folder view widget scrolls very slowly, and I would actually like some more dolphiness in it too, for example, switch view mode to details, or use it as a file browser, but have a "home" button that goes to the folder it is set too.
Also, it feels like there are a lot of features offered that are not yet finished (e.g. I have NEVER had an OSX widget even sort of work, I tried 5 or 6). The OSX widget thing was quite shocking, because all I read about was how they were supported, and then I couldn't get them to actually work.
I think at if the rate of improvement between 4.0 and 4.1 continues, 4.2 will be usable, and 4.3 will be something beyond 3.5, though maybe not for lower end machines, though the fact that handhelds are a target, I hope it works on something with 512, or even 256 MB of RAM, less would obviously be better even.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Sorry for turning /. into a kde trac btw.
So, where is the bugzilla bug so that this information can be added? Seriously, do you think that Aaron Siego trolls slashdot looking for bugs to fix? No, he trolls _bugzilla_ looking for bugs to fix. File it here:
https://bugs.kde.org/wizard.cgi
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
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...).
I can do this all day.
Please do. But not on slashdot. Do it here:
https://bugs.kde.org/wizard.cgi
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Running small screens with higher resolutions (like 1920x1200 15.4" laptops or something like that). You will have a HUGE DPI
Because... we can?
Moving huge developer base tied into M$ platform isn't easy task as RedHat/RMS/etc's PR departments try to paint.
On other side, providing people on dark side the thread of salvation is always a good deed.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
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.***
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.
From the top of my head. Try to hit Ctrl-L once: widgets in KDE4 can't voluntary change their size. To allow resizing/etc, Ctrl-L is used to toggle the "Lock Widgets" mode.
Long term solution is of course to set font to monospace. Or even better - report bug and ask KDE folks to fix it... :|
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Not only is rude to assume that the developers are so incompetent that they will by default just leave the bug in purgatory forever, it's also not what I have experienced with most open source projects. Every bug report I have ever submitted to a substantial open source project (including GNOME, Ubuntu, GIMP) has been addressed in a relatively timely manner.
And have you submitted bugs that cannot be reproduced? Because this is what the OP was talking about.
I've submitted bugs that can't be reproduced, some well-known such as static in the left audio channel (since at least 2.6.21, still not fixed despite lots of people with same problem), and several others. The only bugs that have ever been fixed were ones that were easily reproducible. IF they are reproducible THEN you get a hit-or-miss where there's either developer that sees it right away and fixes it or it sometimes gets 'lost' for a while. One of the bugs I submitted for firefox finally got fixed after >1 year.
I think some of you guys, including the moderator who spent his points for a cause rather than merit, mistook my post as some kind of slight against KDE or open source in general. It wasn't meant that way, only that having outrage against somebody for not filing a non-reproducible bug is way over the top.
It's much criticized, because some top tier distros flushed it on heads of innocent users.
KDE folks said that from beginning: KDE3 works perfectly, it's a good opportunity to fix long term problems by rewriting KDE4 from scratch.
Regardless of whether many people are happy with the changes, you'll find a group that is very vocal in its discontent.
Normally that are people who are unwilling to change anything in their default Linux install. If their got half backed KDE4 instead of properly working KDE3 - it's not really fault of KDE folks.
I personally refrain from KDE4 comments. In a way it works for me under Sidux for past 6+ months. It's just my requirements for *nix system are very minimal: bash, vim and gcc. From KDE4 I use handful of widgets, new desktop and Alt-F2. And that's it.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Yes. And it was addressed by very enthusiastic developers.
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.
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.
This effect of course is amplified in KDE which has in the past been highly configurable. Plus KDE4 (at least for the initial release) forced a paradigm change, a desktop environment without the desktop metaphor ... curious!
Your bug was a serious issue (locking up the interface for 30+ seconds), was marked 'cant reproduce' even though lots of other people said they had the same problem. In the end, months later, the problem still exists.
A user finally found a work-around. That's great, but hardly inspirational... if the user posts that his clock text looks bad then months later maybe, if he's lucky, there might be something he can do to work around the problem. And then everybody else with the same problem has to find that bug report or they're screwed, and everybody individually has to work around the problem themselves.
Every bug report I have ever submitted to a substantial open source project (including GNOME, Ubuntu, GIMP) has been addressed in a relatively timely manner.
I guess by 'addressed' you mean either 'closed; can't reproduce'? or 'closed; wont fix'
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!
Update: As of today's Ubuntu Jaunty update. the clock is fixed. I'm assuming that's 4.2 final.
As far as I understand, KDE 4 had to be a severe break from 3, as Qt 4 was a severe break from Qt 3. They needed to nearly redo everything, so they took the opportunity to fix stuff and implement new stuff, some of which (a lot, really) doesn't really work yet.
And remember, when you compare KDE 3 to KDE 4, you're comparing about 6.5 years of development work (from .0 to latest version) to barely 1 year.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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. ;)
I sometimes feel the need to see if I still have what it takes to troll effectively...
:D
Apparently so
N.B. I didn't post the original comment either.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
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.
The problem as I see it is that KDE 4.0 should have been called KDE 4.0b1, and 4.2 should have been called 4.0.
I'm not even sure it merited a beta tag, as it wasn't feature complete.
It didn't even have a way to put the menu bar at the top of the screen where it belongs. I'd call that horribly broken.
Oh, good plan old boy. Let's break everything even worse than it might already be by rolling back a widely adopted major release. That's a step in the right direction.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.