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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.
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!
People's first experiences with OSS is likely to be with Firefox, not KDE (or its children) on Windows. I think Firefox shows that OSS can be professional, keeping up very well with its closed source rivals.
SSC
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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'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?
Linus, is it you?
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!
Isn't that a little bit like testing out a corvette in a driveway?
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?
> 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.
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).
"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 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.
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.***
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 ).
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* FWIW I focus on a couple of non-KDE projects and do my best to report bugs and provide user support for them.