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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.'"
yeah!
KDE is dead.
Fix those bugs, and make it usable.
It's really embarrassing to use kde 4.2 for 5 minutes and spot several visual glitches, after 30 minutes I'm off to gnome (which I despise, but at least it works (tm)).
Go back to 3.5 and restart. V4.X is going down fast. The methodology of those controls arent eficient.
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.
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.
In principle, KDE's Brainstorm is more ideal for FOSS than Ubuntu's, because KDE is a higher-level project (more FOSS projects draw from KDE than from Ubuntu). An idea implemented by KDE will propagate to all distros that use it, while the only way for an idea at Ubuntu's Brainstorm to reach as far and wide is to send the changes upstream. Something I understand has been an issue with Debian and could be just as contentious with other projects.
And, maybe it might not be popular mentioning Windows 7 on /., but I really like the feature in Windows 7 beta where you can drag a window to a screen border and it resizes to the screen height and 1/2 the screen width. I imagine that this would be easy to do as a plugin for KDE, but (so far) I haven't been able to find one.
I think it's great that there's now a place to 'request' features like this instead of on the KDE wiki or emailing the devs directly (hey, they're busy and don't always have time to reply, which I understand). On that note, I do my little bit by submitting src patches and (more often) editing the KDE wikis; I figure that each little bit helps.
Ubuntu and KDE with their own idea centers. I have one. Ditch the idea centers and allow ideas to be submitted in the same way as bugs. Then allow bugs to be more freely accessed. Why make two systems when they do pretty much the same thing? Play off the strengths you've already built up. Clearly it wouldn't be hard to make this happen. This is my sole request for KDE/ubuntu/ff/anything with an open bug reporting system.
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.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
These guys used to rock, when they were working in KDE 3.5. Now they just copied all the annoyances of Windows Vista into KDE (such as an annoying auto horizontal tree in the file manager). They totally broke Kate's search function. It's one big HELL to use that search function that has independent settings in every text file you have open at the same time. They left us with the most annoying file manager ever (dolphin, the file manager that hardly has a tree) and a broken konqueror (also with broken tree), instead of the good konqueror of KDE 3.5. They removed the handy compress and decompress options in the file managers and instead gave astupid Ark thing that I have never seen working and other people also haven't. I need "one mouseclick unzipping to this folder", anything else makes using the terminal faster than doing it in filemanager. In KDE 4.2, they STILL didn't fix ANYTHING about graphics glitches in the taskbar. It's STILL not possible to have multiple horizontal taskbars at the bottom of the screen. When KDE 4.2 was out, I tested it on a friends pc and EVERY thing that I found broken about 4.1 was still broken in 4.2, and I didn't see any other useful improvement. The only good thing in KDE 4 is the graphics of the window manager, but its frustration of it's annoyingness to use forces me to stay with KDE 3.5. I miss those graphics in KDE 3.5 though, but I can properly manage files and work with Kate which makes more than up for it. They can't even, or don't WANT even, to fix the above problems. So I don't expect them to listen to my ideas on that forum either. I mean, they have their bugtracker with popularity voter, what's the difference with this idea forum? I suppose they'll just keep doing the same as now: only do ideas they find "fun" to program, like multimedia things and such, while totally neglecting programmers and such who used to like KDE as desktop.
For those that don't know what I'm talking about, it's the yellow thing in the top right of the desktop, used for some sort of menu button.
Anyway, there is no obvious way to get rid of it, not even a config file that can be edited - the only option being to download a third party add-on.
Seriously, is it so hard from a programming perspective to add a "Hide" option?
It's the only thing that annoys me about KDE (apart from the system tray icon background issue, which I think is being worked on).
Somewhere between KDE 4.1 and KDE 4.2, the KDE developers decided that MySQL was required for a desktop. Not mysql-libs, but a full-on MySQL server. The offending application requiring this dependancy is Akonadi, which is part of KDE's PIM. And what are they using MySQL for? As a cache to pass data between desktop applications.
X11 protocol was writen long ago for effective (ashynchronous communication) between terminal consoles and servers. Note that at the time, whole mindset of personal computers was different. Companies had huge powerful mainframes and just connected to them via their simple consoles.
X11 worked great in that aspect... was perfect asynchronous protocol that allowed for reasonably fast GUI.
But then desktop market exploded and everyone had powerful computer on their desk. And X11 just isn't designed to work well in this situation. The client-server architecture of X is just overhead in most cases. (Tell me, how many times did you attach to remote Xserver? - and with fast internet lines this could be done via VNC easily) The next thing is X11 protocol itself, the asynchronous design makes programming for X a terrible experience and just creates more problems than it solves (and it solves absolutelly nothing when it xserver and xclient are on same computer).
All in all... the X window system simply sucks for modern desktop. The whole unix (and especially linux) community should start working on new small and fast GUI framework that is designed to work well on desktops.
And no, there is no possible way to fix X11. The only way is to do it from scratch... or pickup some projects that didn't take from the ground, because lack of support.
http://www.std.org/~msm/common/WhyX.pdf
It would be easier if Kindle's UI tweaks were adopted back into the 4.x series.
I find Gnome's UI very difficult. I know this is personal preference but I'd hate for KDE to become more like Gnome, I'm only just getting used to KDE 4.2.
And, maybe it might not be popular mentioning Windows 7 on /., but I really like the feature in Windows 7 beta...
Heh, just try comparing Windows 7 unfavorably to KDE or Gnome or even previous versions of the software in a Windows 7 story and you'll get modded a troll like I did. :P
Anyway, the same feature you liked annoyed me yesterday, but that may just be the old fogey in me. KDE4 annoys me similarly when it shrinks all my windows to postage stamp size at half-alpha which I'm guessing is supposed to allow you to choose an app to go to next, but if you're eyes are only 20-20 with glasses all your apps look pretty much the same and contrast. Maybe these really are good things that just aren't for me. This is opposed to bugs like Windows 7 betas leaving chaff behind it from incomplete redraws to the point that you long for the 'ctrl-l' command of yore, or the KDE4 "alt-tab" handler putting the long list of windows _behind_ the fancy animation; so you can't just see at a glance that you need to press the key combo X times to get to the desired window, instead you need to pay attention to the animation and slowly go through the list one application at a time.
It would be easier if Kindle's UI tweaks were adopted back into the 4.x series.
Please elaborate, I'll file the ideas.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Hey KDE guys,
Howsabout getting KDE4 feature-complete with KDE3 first? Then again, it doesn't really matter much to me anymore, I've already abandoned KDE4 for XFCE at work and GNOME/Ubuntu on my toy Aspire One at home..
Still, I'll miss having the konqi run command applet in kpanel, whipping off "gg:" and "man:/" commands there was super l33t and efficient.. Frankly, I only needed a few icons, the run command applet, the lock/logout applet, the running apps, and the status thing at the end to get everything I needed to do done.
I would like it to get rid of the modal dialog boxes, especially the one for knoqueror which makes it a pain to use for web browsing.
Maybe the could implement a modal dialog stack which would stack them up unobtrusively on the side some where, but not so that they can steal focus.
I really tried to use KDE4 but it
just doesn't work well on my machine
for whatever reason.
I got angry when I realized that the beta KDE 4.0
was bundled as the default with, I think fc9 (there are so many fedora distros . . . ). That really
was a crappy thing for fedora to do.
Or was it a mistake to release KDE4.0 too early?
I remember reading that KDE 4 was a total rewrite of KDE 3.5 for many of
its pieces (the kicker, for example, was replaced).
I just can't use a desktop that locks up
in unexplainable ways.
So I switched to gnome and didn't look back.
And gnome has come along and doesn't have all this bouncey in your face popup and notification stuff going on.
Anything KDE will still run. But the desktop,
it just isn't ready for real world use (sorry KDE, but this is the truth). I can still use kdevelop in gnome.
With KDE 4.0 there were a few modes that made my system lock up solid. And when I have to ssh over and kill the desktop more than once, well I don't like that. So I figured out what the settings were that were wedging my system and figured, if they can't get that right, then what else isn't right? KDE 4.0 was new code I am guessing. And they didn't take forward the things from the past that worked. The feature list of KDE 3.5 was not used to make the feature list of KDE4 is what I figure.
I gave KDE 4 a chance again, the other day. Still was too bouncey and poppy and having unexpected wedges on common clients.
I'm used to gnome now. It doesn't bubble on the screen, but it doesn't wedge either.
My biggest complaint with KDE4.x is the loss of support for multiple X screens. My configuration is 3 monitiors on 2 NVidia cards. 2 of the monitors are configured as XScreen 0 with TwinView, and the other is on the second card configured as XScreen 1. KDE 3.5 handled this perfectly and I had the desktop spread across all 3 monitors. KDE 4.X doesn't have support for multiple XScreens (and last time I looked nobody was working on it).
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Having said that, I'll probably buy a Mac instead. Functionality without the risk or hassle...
I wasted some $1200 thinking I'd get something more functional than Linux with a Mac. In the end, I simply ended up with a Linux laptop which probably doesn't work as well as if I had done some research and specifically bought a well-supported laptop for Linux.
Mac's may "just work" but they acheive that by hardly doing anything. I was constantly trying to right-click on things because I was always looking for functionality that I couldn't find. I don't remember it all as I really only tried it for about a month, and it was more than a year ago, but there were stupid little things missing everywhere. For example, if you wanted to change the background color of your desktop, you could only choose one of about eight colors, and none of those choices were black. There wasn't a color-picker for a solid background color, but ironically enough, if you chose an image for a background and it didn't fill the entire screen, you did get a color picker to choose the color that surrounds that image. I worked around it by using a small transparent PNG image so that I could use the color picker, but people shouldn't have to work around stuff like that. ...and the Mac is swamped with shit you have to work around because Apple decided that basic features were simply too complicated for people to understand.
What got me the most was the problem with the mouse acceleration. The acceleration curve has a very steep point at which it goes from very slow to very fast, which makes it incredibly difficult to control with precision. So you think "that's no problem, I'll just adjust it in the mouse settings," but like everything else in Mac OS, it has been simplified beyond comprehension, and so you can control the overall speed of the mouse, but you have zero options as far as the acceleration curve is concerned.
So I searched the web, and I found several utilities that were supposed to fix it by playing with hidden variables, but none of them actually fixed it, and one of them rendered the OS rather crash-prone. ...or, no, what rendered it crash-prone was the utility I installed to eliminate the start-up sound, the noise the BIOS makes when you boot the computer. By default it is at whatever volume level the laptop was last used at, so you listen to something at high volume in a noisy environment, then pack up and go to the library, and as soon as you turn on your laptop, it makes the loudest fucking noise ever. The utility simply muted the audio at shutdown and restored it after startup, but somehow it also caused the thing to fail to shut down every other time I tried. Naturally, there was no configuration option in the OS for the volume of that stupid sound, as Apple simply thinks that options confuse people. ...and then there's that whole deal with the menu bars being at the top of the screen. I don't care how many usibility studies say it's better that way, it's completely fucking obvious that it isn't. ...and, Apple not wanting to confuse people, there's naturally no option to configure the GUI. Your only choice is menu bars at the top of the screen. Your only choice for a taskbar is the row of icons at the bottom of the screen which get a blue dot under them if that application is running. Your only choice is that when you close a window, the application continues to run with no windows open. I loved that one. I was told it was because Mac OS was a document-oriented OS rather than an application-oriented OS. I never understood how forcing me to take note of when I have closed all of the windows belonging to an application so that I can manually close that application as well makes the OS more document-oriented and less application-oriented.
Eventually, you realize the sad truth: If you want stuff to "just work" then you need Mac OS. If, on the other hand, you want your computer to do what you want it to do, then you
Interesting. Your story ties in with my experience with the iPhone. I have one as a business phone (there's a sensible reason for it) and I was shocked by what I call a lack of depth to the interface. Even with MS software you can grow from beginner-with-a-mouse to experienced-user-with-shortcuts (although in 2007 they've done their best to ensure those users too totally lose productivity - hence my OpenOffice default at work :-)).
There is *nothing* below that glossy surface. Niente, nada, nop, zilch, zip. Nothing at all. My normal phone is a Sony Ericsson P1i and that is quirky but more usable by miles. About the only app that redeems the iPhone in my eyes is TapForms. If that's what the Mac is like as well it will probably take me about an hour or less to cross the system edge to edge and get exceptionally pissed off with it.
An iPhone makes life easy for beginners. And you'll remain a beginner forever - no thanks.
Thanks for the tip.
Insert
KDE knowingly did something self-destructive. They announced a product that they knew wasn't finished.
If that's what the Mac is like as well it will probably take me about an hour or less to cross the system edge to edge and get exceptionally pissed off with it.
I wish it had only taken me an hour. It took me 15 days, which was one day longer that the period in which I could have returned the thing. During the first 14 days, I just figured it was simply different, and I would adjust to it in time. It took a while to realize there wasn't any adjusting to it, and it was just as you said: it makes it easy for beginners, and you'll be a beginner forever.
I'd loved to have returned it and bought a more linux-compatible laptop with an LCD that isn't postively the bottom of the line. It would have been well worth it to simply lose the $100 restocking fee.
I'm pretty sure that cheap LCD screen is the reason why black isn't an option for a solid background color: You can't see black over the entire screen no matter what angle you view the screen from, but if you can't get solid black over the screen, then you can't tell it has that problem. The truly sad thing is that they try to pass off the "glossy" screen as an optional "feature" to the people who buy the MacBook Pro.