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

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:Maybe it does already

[baileydau]

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.

KDE does have a feature that is similar, but not the same.

If you right mouse click on the "maximise" button, the window maximises in the VERTICAL direction ONLY. Similarly, you can maximise to full width by clicking with the middle button.

Unfortunately, I don't know of anything to expand to 1/2 height or width.

Re:The true problem is X

[Ash-Fox]

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.

Of course, these days we have billions times more powerful 'dumb terminals' and billions more powerful servers.

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.

Here is my personal experience -- My Windows games, with all the settings maxed out, perform better (can be even 20fps difference) running under Wine/Crossover+x.org+Linux than natively under Windows. The only issue graphically is fonts, and that's caused by patent issues.

In my personal opinion, I think x11 is doing far better than Windows and OS X (considering that games tend to perform worse with crossover games mac than they do with crossover games linux) is.

The implementation of x.org does have it's issues, but these aren't issues in the x11 specification, GEM should be fixing these issues. I have written a bit on the subject.

The client-server architecture of X is just overhead in most cases.

Overhead that seems to be beating Windows on the same hardware. I'm not convinced it's a issue.

(Tell me, how many times did you attach to remote Xserver? - and with fast internet lines this could be done via VNC easily)

Once or twice, but I have ran plenty of applications remotely on my local xserver - I do it all the time. VNC doesn't give me application specific windows, or allow applications to communicate with the rest of my desktop applications, or use the theming of my desktop, or work well on very low latency connections (I use compressed ssh tunnels - doesn't work well with VNC), or allow desktop composition to work, or do 3d acceleration... I can go on, but I see no point.

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).

Perhaps you should give first theoretical examples? And then give practical applications of real world instances where this happens. While, I am aware of some theoretical disadvantages, they're not really a issue practically speaking.

http://www.std.org/~msm/common/WhyX.pdf

There is a lot of random rubbish you find in that documentation like "Unreadable window attributes", whereby it's been a non-issue for a while now because the freedesktop specifications provided a suitable workaround for this ages ago on how WMs etc. should communicate with each other and applications.