KDE Project Invites Ideas With Online Brainstorm

ruphus13 writes "In addition to working with the community for source code, KDE is looking to democratize idea creation and innovation via its new initiative called KDE Brainstorm. The initiative, which attempts to further decentralize roadmap decision-making by allowing popular ideas to be voted up, is outlined here: 'The KDE team recently announced the KDE Brainstorm initiative. KDE Brainstorm, in practice, works much like Dell's IdeaStorm — community members of all walks of life are invited to chip in their ideas for new and improved features and functions, with the wider community voting on (and fleshing out) these ideas. Ideas that generate enough interest are then reviewed further by developers, who work to make them happen. KDE Brainstorm officially rolled out March 20th, and the response over these first few days has been enthusiastic. In less than 24 hours, over 100 new ideas were proposed.'"

Comments

*storm

[Tubal-Cain]

First Dell's IdeaStorm*, then Ubuntu's Brainstorm, And now KDE's Brainstorm. I guess the whole "get ideas from your constituents" thing actually works.
But why do their names all have a *storm pattern?

*Actually, I think Lego beat them to it.

Said with no wish for partisanship

[Dasher42]

I wish KDE would adopt at least some of Gnome's Human Interface Guidelines. It'd help everyone if the Linux desktops came together in that respect, at least to ditch those silly Windows-centric "Cancel/Apply/OK" preference dialogues which don't offer any reason not to be done more simply.

Re:Said with no wish for partisanship

[Dasher42]

Any suggestions on how it could be done simpler? And will your suggestion allow the same degree of control?
The only idea I have is to drop the 'Cancel' for being redundant with the 'Close' button in the corner.

Yes. Gnome, XFCE, and OSX do it. You click an option, it takes effect. Don't like it? Just put it back. Optionally, the dialogue can have a revert or defaults button.

Gnome's gone a bit far in the direction of stripping down features, but overall, I like the uncluttered presentation. I'd love to have KDE's power behind that kind of thinking.

What's with all the hate?

[haeger]

Every time there's a story about KDE a number of people complain, saying it's a failure, that the 4.x-series are dead and so on. Where does all this come from? KDE is one of the high profile open source applications along with gnome, apache, and others so it should be in our common interest to have it succeed.

Why the need for all the trash-talk? Why not focus on the positive? KDE does some things great, as does gnome and others. Constructive criticism is fine but "KDE4 sucks" is hardly constructive.

It's not like we need to fight amongst ourselves. There are plenty of other opponents out there that we could focus on. Now we're only weakening our position. I just don't get it.

Re:What's with all the hate?

[cheros]

Hmm, I don't think it's "hate" as such, more profound disappointment. I can't speak for others, but KDE 3.5 was moving along nicely, was functional and had *heaps* of apps to make it a complete desktop. With Compiz Fusion added it was even damn flash, but the main thing is that it did the job and enough apps were available to create some flexibility.

Along comes 4 and whammo - I even have trouble finding a decent WiFi manager. All those 3.5 apps I was used to don't have a 4 replacement, and I don't really want to be a whining git asking the developers of every single app to upgrade their code (which is AFAIK not that easy either) - besides, I don't have the time.

So 4.0 was for me going from a functional 3.5 desktop to a black hole. I won't bitch about it, I occasionally check in and see if the situation has improved. So far, the answer is "not really", so I'll use Gnome of a lighter desktop. It also means that I can no longer wean people off Windows because KDE 4 just doesn't cut it yet as a replacement.

In summary, to me, going to KDE 4 was as much an upgrade to 3.5 as Vista was an upgrade to XP..

What I'd like is simply what 3.5 was offering, stable compiz fusion graphics added (flashiness aside, a cube is actually quite a good working desktop model from a functionality point of view) and a complete array of apps form printing, WiFi (well, OK, that still sucks in seven ways to Sunday on Linux IMHO).

Having said that, I'll probably buy a Mac instead. Functionality without the risk or hassle..

Re:What's with all the hate?

[penguinchris]

Agreed - I had my doubts about KDE 4 and thought it was terrible when I tried the 4.0 and 4.1 releases. However, now I've been using 4.2 since it came out, and when I recently set up another computer I tried to go back to 3.5 (it's a netbook and I figured 3.5 would be faster) and I couldn't. I got used to the improvements in 4.x and don't want to go back.

Which is not to say there aren't still features in 3.5 not in 4.x yet that I dearly miss. KDE's not quite there yet and I can see why many still wouldn't want to switch. But despite their gaff with 4.0 - which I think really was a bad move - 4.x is coming along nicely and in time most people will realize this and start using it.

My point is that the "KDE 4 sucks" talk is the natural result of people resisting change, combined with some pretty big mistakes the KDE devs made (the 4.0 release and the many still-missing features from 3.5, for example.) It'll die out within the next couple of major KDE 4 releases, I suspect.

Re:What's with all the hate?

[baileydau]

Hmm, I don't think it's "hate" as such, more profound disappointment. I can't speak for others, but KDE 3.5 was moving along nicely, was functional and had *heaps* of apps to make it a complete desktop. With Compiz Fusion added it was even damn flash, but the main thing is that it did the job and enough apps were available to create some flexibility.

Those KDE 3.5 applications you like still exist, they didn't go away. You can use them with KDE 4.x, 3.5, Gnome, or many other desktop environments.

Along comes 4 and whammo - I even have trouble finding a decent WiFi manager. All those 3.5 apps I was used to don't have a 4 replacement, and I don't really want to be a whining git asking the developers of every single app to upgrade their code (which is AFAIK not that easy either) - besides, I don't have the time.

So use the WiFi manager you like. Personally, I use KnetworkManager. I believe that is a KDE 3.x application.

So 4.0 was for me going from a functional 3.5 desktop to a black hole. I won't bitch about it, I occasionally check in and see if the situation has improved. So far, the answer is "not really", so I'll use Gnome of a lighter desktop.

Sorry, this is an attitude I don't understand. If you like KDE 3.5, but don't like KDE 4.x, why go to Gnome (or other desktop), just use KDE 3.5, it's still available. It seems like people are cutting their noses off to spite their faces (that is assuming are actually changing their desktop and not trolling)

It also means that I can no longer wean people off Windows because KDE 4 just doesn't cut it yet as a replacement.

So why not show them KDE 3.5 instead.

A quote from the KDE website:
"KDE 3.5 is the more mature version of KDE. For more conservative users, this is the recommended version of KDE."

In summary, to me, going to KDE 4 was as much an upgrade to 3.5 as Vista was an upgrade to XP..

What I'd like is simply what 3.5 was offering, stable compiz fusion graphics added (flashiness aside, a cube is actually quite a good working desktop model from a functionality point of view) and a complete array of apps form printing, WiFi (well, OK, that still sucks in seven ways to Sunday on Linux IMHO).

Having said that, I'll probably buy a Mac instead. Functionality without the risk or hassle..

So, why not stick with KDE 3.5 for the time being??? You aren't being forced to go to 4.x.

Personally, I now use KDE 4.2 on all of my machines (both home and work). I really like the "Cover Switch" alt-tab tool.

I tried KDE 4.0 and 4.1 and didn't like them. I stayed with KDE 3.5. I found KDE 4.1.3 OK and made the switch.

Re:What's with all the hate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Having spent a lot of time just to get the latest 4.x version, 4.2 running, I'm still very, very disappointed. All that made KDE so good is gone. Keyboard shortcuts are more limited now and occasionally don't work at all, file management is much worse, the launch menu is primitive compared to what it was (and whilst Lancelot can replace it, it isn't as good as the 3.x version was), plenty of useful, small apps no longer work like they should and finally, it's still quite buggy. I do wonder what they were thinking when the great launch menu was changed like that - having the most frequently launched applications gathered automatically was a great feature but now you have to add favorites manually.

Furthermore, file management doesn't work well anymore - I was used to being able to move icons in windows but now they all align to a grid no matter what, which sort of defeats the purpose of a graphical file manager. And as a consequence of my preference to double-click to open folders and files in the file manager (selecting by one click is what I'm used to), quick access too requires double-clicking, which is ridiculous.

And then some plasmoid replacements for useful apps simply make you ask if they're joking with users. I got quite used to knotes and liked being able to put post-it notes on my desktop - and it was great when you could turn them into reminder alarms for kalarm or e-mail messages in kmail. Now you have the ridiculous widget - with knotes you added new ones by right-clicking on the icon in the system tray and choosing "new note". Now to add a note widget you must first chose add widget, pick the widget from a long list and finally you end up with a note on the desktop that you can write something in but once you close it, the contents are forever gone. With knotes it was only removed when you closed it but still saved and accessible through the icon in the system tray. It's still possible to use knotes but it doesn't work very well - notes disappear too when you click show desktop and before the very idea was that they were there, stuck to my desktop and not like regular windows. And occasionally it gets buggy and the notes show up as windows in the task bar too, which takes a lot of space in it.

In general, I do wonder why they had to fix something that wasn't broken. Is it really a good idea to make so much from scratch just so that anybody that has just written "hello world" can proceed to easily write a widget, which sits on your desktop and says "hello world, the weather today is..." The KDE developers have strange priorities. If it does turn out that in addition to the widgets that nobody except the author and his mother consider useful, a bunch of useful once start to replace the small, useful apps that made KDE so good, users will of course start to like KDE again but for now, it's as bad as Gnome. Eye-candy is a bonus but good usability should always be the most important issue.