Social Desktop Starts To Arrive In KDE

FrankKarlitschek writes "At last year's KDE Conference Akademy, the vision of the Social Desktop was born and first presented to a larger audience. The concept behind the Social Desktop is to bring the power of online communities and group collaboration to desktop applications and the desktop shell itself. One of the strongest assets of the Free Software community is its worldwide group of contributors and users who believe in free software and who work hard to bring the software and solutions to the mainstream. A core idea of the Social Desktop is connecting to your peers in the community, making the sharing and exchanging of knowledge (PDF) easier to integrate into applications and the desktop itself. One of the ideas was to place a widget on the desktop where users can find other KDE users in the same city or region, making it possible to connect to these people; to contact them and collaborate. If a user is starting KDE for the first time, he has questions. At the moment, a lot of the support for KDE users is provided through forums and mailing lists. Users have to start up a browser and search for answers for their questions or problems. The community is relatively loosely connected; it is spread all over the web, and it is often hard to verify the usefulness and accuracy of the information found somewhere out on the web. Although it works relatively well for experienced users, beginners often get lost."

Comments

The Widget

[Anonymous Coward]

It will not take five minutes before the experienced KDE users stop using the widget because they are being bugged by people.

Love or hate forums they are a better way to collate helpful information than using a disparate bunch of people all over the place.

Re:The Widget

[macraig]

Forums, as most of them exist now, are actually an exceptionally lousy way of publishing collective wisdom. The problem is that they don't just collect actual wisdom, they collect lint, cruft, and other sundry garbage as well... and all too often even a smart person can't always discern one from the other.

There is as much or more MISinformation accumulated in forums as there is useful information.

Now, if you wanna invent the Next Big Thing in online collaborative problem-solving that will obsolete vBulletin and phpBB and all the rest, please get back to me! Until then, I'm pretty much sick and tired of spending hours trying to sift forums for that one nugget of informational gold hidden amongst all the pyrite, feldspar, mica, and hematite.

Re:The Widget

[Caledfwlch]

I think the widget is a interesting concept to make the desktop more dynamic, though I can see your reservation that the widget would present a deluge of unwanted traffic. Some people who like mentoring the masses would want this, others who want more targeted interactions probably wouldn't. Then it would be up to the community to come up with filters, voting, & preference mechanisms to make the widget, and presumably others that will follow, customizable to different strata/verticals of users.

Re:The Widget

[who knows my name]

I think it's called a wiki.

Re:The Widget

[macraig]

Yes, it is, isn't it? :-)

Forums are useful for the collaboration that precedes the creation of a wiki page, but they certainly do a lousy job trying to supplant one. If the initial post in a thread is consistently updated to reflect the best and latest collective wisdom of the discussion, it can almost take the place of a wiki, but in my experience that is rarely done, and even when done is even less rarely done well.

Wikis are indeed better storehouses of collective wisdom, but there aren't enough of them and they often don't rank as highly in search engines as the forum posts they should be superceding. That's perhaps what needs to be fixed: more, and more easily found.

Re:The Widget

[cp.tar]

It will not take five minutes before the experienced KDE users stop using the widget because they are being bugged by people.

Love or hate forums they are a better way to collate helpful information than using a disparate bunch of people all over the place.

Not... necessarily.
Imagine it as a kind of torrent, i.e. p2p education. As you explain something to someone, he may in turn explain it to someone else, and even reinforce his own knowledge.

It could prove to be useful and educational, not just in relation to KDE.

Re:The Widget

[Blakey Rat]

Now, if you wanna invent the Next Big Thing in online collaborative problem-solving that will obsolete vBulletin and phpBB and all the rest, please get back to me!

I think StackOverflow (http://stackoverflow.com/ ) is DAMNED close, for programming problems at least. My only complaint is their pig-headed refusal to use anything but OpenID to log in to the site.

Re:The Widget

[macraig]

That's not a bad implementation. I think I've seen it once before, but since I haven't done coding in years my problems are all hardware or compatibility. I don't see a reason why it can't be adapted to suit any sort of troubleshooting.

Re:The Widget

[fyoder]

Or this aggravation, when you're searching for a solution to a problem, find a forum where someone has asked exactly the question you're asking, and the only reply is "Google it. Google is your friend."

Google might be my friend, but that asshat sure as hell isn't Google's friend, the poster's friend, nor anyone's. Answer the fricken question, or STFU and stop adding to the noise.

Re:The Widget

[Blakey Rat]

There's still the possibility of particularly old topics sticking around with obsolete answers, but the good thing about that site is that older questions basically become wiki entries, so if you do find an obsolete answer, you can easily fix it to be relevant, or direct viewers to a more relevant entry.

The OpenID thing just bugs the crap out of me, because I don't see any advantage to it and tons of disadvantages to it. If I signed up using OpenID, built up a huge reputation, history of answers and edits, etc... then my OpenID provider went away, suddenly my account would be lost, with no way to recover it. I don't like all my data relying on the whims of an OpenID provider who might decide tomorrow that OpenID is no longer profitable and get rid of it. That really discourages people (like me at least) from signing up for an account and using the site *seriously* instead of casually.

Re:The Widget

[Anonymous Coward]

Forum with solutions posted to a wiki.

Re:The Widget

[macraig]

The best answer to the conundrum you described, I guess, is to register your own domain and then configure OpenID to use that. I've been meaning to do that with my domain. I haven't needed to use OpenID very much, so it hasn't been as pressing as it might be for you.

Re:The Widget

[FrankieBaby1986]

Maybe they should add moderation and mod points like slashdot to try to seperate the wheat from the chaff.

Re:The Widget

[Blakey Rat]

... or they could provide the same username/password login system every other site on Earth provides (including the vast majority of sites that take OpenID), and then I don't have to waste those hours/days of effort. I don't *want* to be an OpenID provider, or use my domain for anything except serving web pages. I just want to log on to their damned site.

Re:The Widget

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahem.
As a crystallographer I have to inform you that pyrite, feldspar, mica, and hematite are fascinating compounds with superb crystal structures. You could spend a life at investigating all of them. So don't talk so lowly of them!

Re:The Widget

[macraig]

I wouldn't mind that, since it's usually friendly to me. :-)

Re:The Widget

[macraig]

Been there, discussed that! I think we need a wiki to discuss the wiki....

Re:The Widget

[macraig]

I know, but I had to disrespect them for the sake of the metaphor!

Re:The Widget

[gbjbaanb]

I think slashdot is far better - SO's idea of moderation is good, but does suffer from groupthink somewhat. Slashdot has similar, but at least slashdot has a better means of moderating the moderators.

OpenID, so what. if you want, go to MyOpenID and set it up for your own domain,

Re:The Widget

[lennier]

"I think it's called a wiki."

Sort of. A wiki is great for topic-based material. Not so great for time-based (blogs and calendars) or thread-based (comments/forums).

It seems like there should be a framework sitting midway between wiki, blog, forum and calendar: something which deals with chunks of text in a standard safe markup language (Textile/Markdown or the like), tagged with fields (date created, date modified, date due, creator) and then aggregated into views (blog post, blog comment, forum thread, forum comment, wiki page, wiki edit, wiki history).

Why don't we have this yet?

Re:The Widget

[Blakey Rat]

I think slashdot is far better - SO's idea of moderation is good, but does suffer from groupthink somewhat. Slashdot has similar, but at least slashdot has a better means of moderating the moderators.

The system is good in theory, but the problem with Slashdot is:

1) Half the time, the source material is bullshit. (I'd say about 40-50% of the articles are either extremely misleading, or plain wrong.) With Slashdot you *have* to read the comments to get the true story.

2) Stuff that gets moderated up is often plain wrong. A recent example that's come up in a few articles lately, people modding up the "fact" that XP requires IE to do updates-- even though it doesn't, and never has. Plus, the tendency for the first post to be modded up regardless of the quality of the content.

As for OpenID: I *could* spend hours and hours setting up some idiotic system I'd only ever use for one website, or I could just choose not to use that website. I'm doing the latter.

Re:The Widget

[Anonymous Coward]

Or better yet, give the magic combination of keywords that yields the answer. That is what I really want to know, so I can jump to the primary source.

Re:The Widget

[SlashWombat]

I would have to agree that forums are a very poor way of disseminating information/help. One of the issues is that lazy bastards will not use search to find the data that has already been published on their "problem". The second is that many threads tend to contain 2% info, the rest being useless, generally off topic, drivel, or worse, the 2% data is wrong! (H'mm, sounds just like Slashdot ...)

Now imagine this extended to a "community". Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. I am sure that 100 people with an IQ of 60 doesn't equal one person with an IQ of 6000 ...

If you want something done PROPERLY do it yourself!

Re:The Widget

[argiedot]

The only thing worse than that is: "Never mind, I fixed it."

Re:The Widget

[CarpetShark]

It will not take five minutes before the experienced KDE users stop using the widget because they are being bugged by KDE 4's widgets

There, fixed that for you.

Re:The Widget

[Anonymous Coward]

One time a newbie was asking questions on a forum and someone told them to put in the command

      rm -rdf /

which was done.

Not funny, that should never happen to someone.

Re:The Widget

[techprophet]

Because one thing cannot be everything to everyone, or it will be nothing to anyone.

Drupal or other CMS systems come within striking distance by allowing you to have wikis, forums, blogs, mailing lists, and other communication forms all in one place.

Cool

[stoolpigeon]

I like the idea. I find that I tend to look for desktop clients for a lot of connected stuff that I do. In fact I'm writing my own PyQT twitter client right now because I couldn't find a desktop client for linux that really works well and has the features I want. (The adobe air stuff is close but is flaky - crashes, etc.)

I wouldn't mind at all seeing more of this being pulled tighter into my workspace.

Re:Cool

[ouder]

For a long time KDE was regarded as the stable businesslike desktop and Gnome was for the experimenters. It is interesting to me that the roles have largely reversed. Gnome is now taking an incremental, evolutionary approach while KDE is the one taking risks and being more revolutionary.

Re:Cool

[Gerzel]

Give them a few years and the pendulum will swing back the other way.

KDE users wanted more options and new interface gadgets and abilities.

GNOME users wanted a stabler client on a saner development schedule.

Re:Cool

[FrostDust]

It seems to a be a natural product of competition. If your competitor is doing better than you, you're going to look at the situation and change things up.

The "market" of getting people to use your desktop environment is different than other products (for example, a user can switch between using one or another as often as desired with no downsides), but seeing how Gnome is currently more popular than KDE, its not surprising that they're brainstorming new features to get more users.

Re:Cool

[jank1887]

I agree. I can't count the number of times I peek at my facebook homepage and see someone mention that they're looking for something, wondering how something works, or where to get more information about something. If I was at work, trying to do a tech review on a particular subject, and I could 'update my active status' to say 'anyone out there familiar with X?' and actually get a set of valid responses, it would make my job easier. if there was a way for me to see other people's queries, I'd probably take time to comment. (tapping into that same energy pool that has me commenting here.) The key would be getting the right group of people using the tool. The same question posted above would be useless with my Facebook friends. Maybe less useless for linkedin, but most people I know there don't keep that site up for status notifications. twitter's just never taken off with people I deal with, even though facebook's getting closer and closer to that functionality. I could see similar benefit for linux. post a status message "ack... what the heck's an ndiswrapper? links please?" and maybe get a response faster than googling.

Re:Cool

[mebrahim]

Have you tried Choqok for Twitter on KDE?

MS Bob + Forum Jerks

[Hoplite3]

I know, I know. This is probably different, but when I read the description, I pictured MS Bob with bright, colorful rooms that someone far away thought would put me at ease when using a computer. Then when I start a task, the helpful animated dog pops up, but instead of the vanilla "looks like you're writing a letter," some random jerk from the low end of the internet gene pool pops up and says something in between "Nice letter, fag!" and
http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/4/27/

I feel like there's too much desktop in my face most of the time. I want it to be a helpful tool, but most often being helpful means staying out of the way. But I am glad KDE is so configurable, so I can mold it into the desktop I want. That part is great.

Re:MS Bob + Forum Jerks

[pongo000]

I feel like there's too much desktop in my face most of the time. I want it to be a helpful tool, but most often being helpful means staying out of the way. But I am glad KDE is so configurable, so I can mold it into the desktop I want. That part is great.

Then why would you use KDE, instead of a minimalist desktop/WM like XFCE?

Not a troll, not a flame. But I can't quite figure out those who run KDE, and then complain about how "thick" KDE is.

Re:MS Bob + Forum Jerks

[RiotingPacifist]

I'n terms of interface kde3 can get pretty minimal.
*All kde apps (except amarok) let you hide the menubar for many apps (especially media players!) you rarely use the menubar
*there is a shortcut to toggle window decoration (for when you just need more screen real estate
*the window decorations can get pretty light (e.g BII)
*kasbar can float and expand to show your running apps
*the autohide feature on being a per toolbar and widgets being pretty useful can also save a lot of space

I've played around with fluxbox and others but i really get the most screen under kde3 (i mean im sure it can be beaten but not easily).

Re:MS Bob + Forum Jerks

[speedtux]

Presumably, it's a compromise: there's some feature they need or want, and for that, they are putting it with problems.

Other people complain about KDE after having tried it and then not using it as their main desktop (I fall into that category).

Re:MS Bob + Forum Jerks

[Anonymous Coward]

Good Point, but still an idea with considerable promise.

It would seem that KDE folks might benefit by considering application of these ideas in various "modes", which define the desktop social universe. You want the collaboration/social benefits, without it being constantly "in your face". This would allow for a degree of freedom in selection of how rigorously applications will ultimately be forced to integrate with the underlying distributed desktop services. Although this would constrain every conceivable universe of social interaction, it would provide a narrower set of incompatibilities that might emerge as effort evolve to address new issues, across desktop applications.

I like the idea of "neighbors near you idea", but it needs to be conceptually broader, so that the neighborhoods define various aspects of nearness with respect to "functional space", so that references to it via desktop API's facilitate user needs rather than offering only partially configurable alternatives to what the user seeks.

Being able to get the underlying API hooks in the desktop to assist in the organization of information, topics, help, projects, etc. in a more integrated, lower-level mechanism that could greatly facilitate progress across a broad variety of fronts by forcing some fundamental thinking and consensus across applications, without the need for individual applications to partially reinvent the wheel.

This will be a challenge given the diversity of viewpoints with respect to what is really important on the desktop, especially in a consensus Open-source approach, where there is no single commercial authority that ultimately chooses among numerous alternatives.

Ultimately, if one ones to get beyond the 1%, KDE or any "alternative" OS needs to be able to provide a platform for a much broader array of POPULAR software to coexist and thrive. As the applications emerge that more seamlessly work together (freeing the user to focus on tasks and results rather than implementation/installation issues) the larger the audience.

This approach to the hardware problem paradigm is interesting, but KDE needs to see the development of more than a mechanism to help the user identify problems and solutions (that section of the presentation was I thought very good). It needs to provide a fundamental framework of establishing how the accumulation of these minor problems can get resolved and better integrated across distributions. A desktop that would make that task easier would be a big step forward for Linux and OpenSource in general, given the constant change in underlying hardware and software.

It would be wonderful to see these ideas incorporated into "custom desktops" (back to the "modes" ideas) that might allow say integration
between a "science and computation desktop" with say a "web media" desktop, which might be two alternative "end user modes" for desktop integration to take.

A good place to start might be along establishing which API's, apps, and OS administrative "utilities" are most popular, most similar in terms of underlying language, compilation, libraries, etc. and then developing functional modes for each subset, with desktop API's geared to interaction with the kernel to optimize within and between modes.

Establishing priorities or security within and among modes could provide mechanisms to facilitate the exclusion of MS Bobs and Forum Jerks, say by only allowing input that users determine meets specified criteria be met before being able to communicate either within or between certain modes. By allowing the user to set the desktop mode, users could decide if they really like MS Bob or some Forum Jerks to get through or if their highly secure, only interact with specific IP addresses, API switch settings, etc. apply for their customizable environment, say "global warming prediction community desktop" or "numerical algorithms working group desktop" or "web media news working group desktop", etc.

Anyway, my 2 cents as a sometimes KDE/Linux user, who would l

Re:MS Bob + Forum Jerks

[Gerzel]

Like it or not KDE and Gnome both have a great deal of functionality that the minimalists simply don't or have with much prodding.

I will sometimes switch to a minimalist setup but always come crawling back after a few days or weeks(sometimes months) usually for some small widget or behavior that just isn't available or easy to configure in the minimalist environment. Its a trade off, configuration/learning time vs functionality vs footprint.

Re:MS Bob + Forum Jerks

[westlake]

when I read the description, I pictured MS Bob with bright, colorful rooms that someone far away thought would put me at ease when using a computer.

The next edition of The Sims will be woven into social networking.

The geek is whistling past the graveyard when he summons up the ghost of MS Bob.

If there is a true break from the desktop metaphor - if intelligent avatars do become important - you will see it first in the home and not at work.

Re:MS Bob + Forum Jerks

[FlyingBishop]

KDE is hideously bloated, but that bloat does have a point. It has the nicest, most easily configurable desktop from hotkeys to anything else.

That said, I use Fluxbox, because KDE itself takes up around 300 mb, and then the only KDE app I used, Amarok, takes up 500 mb in its newest iteration. It's clear the developers don't test on anything with fewer than two cores.

Point is, there's a difference between being easily configurable because of really well thought out design (perhaps overly thought out), and being so minimal as to make anything configurable trivial to configure.

Re:MS Bob + Forum Jerks

[Hoplite3]

It's vastly easier to mold KDE into a simple desktop than do do the same with others. I played with XFCE and *Box window managers, but they can't touch how easy KDE is to configure. Besides, I like a lot of KDE apps, and they work well together. The arguments for a light window manager don't always add up to me. I'm not an extemist when it comes to picking software. That's why I like "mixing metaphors" like putting files and program launcher icons on the desktop. It doesn't make sense (is it a file or something else? why put stuff on the desktop, the thing the windows cover?), but it is really convenient.

There have always been strange ideas in KDE that some have found useful but others not so much. There was a simple file-share system, klipper, etc. Many of these quietly faded, but I'm sure they were a big help to someone, else they never would have been written. I feel like lots of plasma is the same, but who knows? Some parts will turn out to be great. In every way that it breaks some UI paradigm, there will be some other way in which that breaking will be useful.

Re:MS Bob + Forum Jerks

[perryizgr8]

the thing that makes me go back to kde again and again are the apps. i mean is there any damn player better than amarok? but then there is a very glaring void: firefox. it is a mad bitch on kde. the thing looks fugly and hangs up as regularly as you click on links. does someone know of a good kde browser. except konqeror. that is even worse than ff on kde. its like safari. eww!

Re:MS Bob + Forum Jerks

[Anonymous Coward]

. Then when I start a task, the helpful animated dog pops up, but instead of the vanilla "looks like you're writing a letter," some random jerk from the low end of the internet gene pool pops up and says something in between "Nice letter, fag!"

I just can't help laughing at the thought of switchable personality modules for a digital assistant. The "Punk" personality module would do wonders for political writings, spicing it up a bit. "It fucking looks like you where about to write a fucking letter of proposal for the fucking ministry of education. We don't need no education, fuck the establishment!"

Re:MS Bob + Forum Jerks

[fast turtle]

I'm a long term KDE 3 user who feels that the current KDE Devs have gotten caught in the same trap that the Window UI devs did. Change for the sake of change instead of fixing the many minor flaws of the current 3.5 UI. Don't get me wrong as I'm not saying they didn't need to rewrite things. What they didn't need to do was change the UI so drastically that it now gets into the users way instead of being as functional as the 3.5 version is. One feature I depend on in 3 is the ability to change dekstops by simply using the scroll wheel on my mouse. I also depend on the ability to configure the background on each desktop independently of each other and they've killed both of those features. I even find that Konqueror works nicely as both my web and file browser so why in hell did they introduce a new file browser that looks like Gnome's?

As I said, I feel that the kde devs are caught in the same trap that the MS devs are. Changing things because it works better, which is rarely the case. Instead keep the UI consistent and rock stable. Don't change things. Instead fix the many issues such as instabilities in the kicker app. What causes it to crash w/o warning? What about Knews? Fix the damn thing so I can download multi-part posts (split files) and combine them into a single for saving along with caching the blasted message headers and any messages I've downloaded to save bandwidth. Did they fix these in kde4? I don't know (he's in left field today). That's what they really needed to do instead of changing the entire UI as they did.

Re:MS Bob + Forum Jerks

[Anonymous Coward]

User interface gets in your way? Sorry, that doesn't mean anything without examples.

As for scrollwheel and diffrent backgrounds.. It could possibly not be that these features simply are not yet implemented? If you *really* *really* want different backgrounds you could set up different plasma containments, which gives you exactly that possibility and more.

If you don't like dolphin, err, don't use it.. it's not like Konqueror has stopped working.

Kicker is dead, doesn't exist in KDE4, so it cannot possibly crash. Period. The "kicker" is a plasmoid. If you have problems with this, upgrade to 4.2, fix your graphics drivers, or if this fails, complain to your distribution (Kubuntu?) as they have botched it.

Knews? What does that have to do with KDE? Last time I checked their newsreader was called KNode.

All in all I think you're more than a bit unfair when you compair the massive mess that is Vista/Windows7 with KDE4. Sure, KDE4 does a few things different, and all peices are not quite in place yet, but all in all, it has been very stable since 4.2, and especially since Nvidia started sorting out their drivers.

Re:MS Bob + Forum Jerks

[dotancohen]

I'd love to know what KDE 4 is missing for you. I file bugs with KDE and I've filed tens of bugs and feature requests on KDE 4 on behalf of users. You can reply here or email me. My gmail username is the same as my slashdot user name.

Will this end up like Nepomuk?

[orkybash]

Don't get me wrong, I love the KDE 4 desktop (though lets not start that debate...), but one thing that has been plaguing KDE is the introduction of new "revolutionary" desktop paradigms that no one actually uses.

Nepomuk, for example, was supposed to launch us into the era of the semantic desktop, with everything tagged with all sorts of metadata andd actually searchable. The problem is, applications don't use it. Developers for Amarok and Digikam, two major KDE apps, have both stated that they have no interest in integrating with Nepomuk for the time being.

It gives me hope that there are already ideas on how to use this (Plasmoids, or desktop widgets for those of you who don't speak KDE), but those strike me as the moral equivalent of being able to tag things in Dolphin (the file browser) but not being able to make use of those tags elsewhere.

So until I see commitment from developers, I'm not excited.

Re:Will this end up like Nepomuk?

[tick-tock-atona]

WTF?

Because a lots of new codes have been done in digiKam for KDE4, we need to stabilize current implementations before to play with Nepomuk. Also, the new Database interface from Marcel which is already very stable need to be polished before to be interfaced with Nepomuk. So, it's something planed for 0.11.0 release.

Gilles Caulier

Re:Will this end up like Nepomuk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nepomuk is already integrated with Digikam, so you can tag, search, rate etc. the images.

As for Amarok, 'we will not do it' was related to implementing the collection framework in Nepomuk, not that there is no interest in using it. (there is some work being done)

Nepomuk has only begun its journey and is not widespread yet. Plasma, for example, has yet to provide its activities info to Nepomuk so that other apps could benefit from it...

Re:Will this end up like Nepomuk?

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

Of course, because for the most part tags are worthless except for limited in scope items. The only possible use case I can think of is actually for photographs, which makes me a little confused why digikam doesn't want to integrate. But on the otherhand, who wants to tag documents or songs? Songs have metadata that should contain all the information you might possibly want to tag, same for documents, open them for a full text search when indexing. The idea of user input tags if a flawed one for all but the narrowest of use cases (or for people who are anal retentive about organization).

Re:Will this end up like Nepomuk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, Nepomuk support is not (yet?) on digiKam.

Currently digiKam use normal database where it stores the metadata and it syncs if user wants them to pictures too, as well the other software (like exiv etc) supports. Currently there is beta quality of RAW writing and normal PNG/JPEG/TIFF etc files can be written with metadata on them.

Nepomuk is currently still too slow for digikam and it ain't so well designed to manage hundreds of thousands photographs on remote medias, servers etc... like digiKam has.

Right now you can use nepomuk on KDE 4.2. By typing to dolphin/konqueror addressbar or open/save dialog a:

nepomuksearch:/tag:TagNameWhatYouWant

And if you have tagged files with Dolphin, you get them listed on that. And you can place save that as path to save/open dialoge or every wanted application dialog only if wanted. Or even place it to "folder view" widget and get updated views of tagged files to your desktop.

What nepomuk is missing is easy way to include tags, rating and other metadata when storing data and when downloading etc. The semantik part is still missing bretty badly. Like I can not search yet the "tags: Funny, Video from: Thomas"

Re:Will this end up like Nepomuk?

[gardyloo]

(though lets not start that debate...)

You must be new here.

Re:Will this end up like Nepomuk?

[JackieBrown]

Or to use instead of folders (think gmail)

Re:Will this end up like Nepomuk?

[metachimp]

Speaking of which, can anyone tell me what happened to the tagging facility in Dolphin? After moving to Kubuntu 9, it seems to have disappeared.

Re:Will this end up like Nepomuk?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what? As soon as GNOME implements even a 10th of this technology, you and every other person cursing it in this thread will start saying how the Linux desktop is now ready to take on Mac OS and Windows!
I have seen this happen time and again ... best example is krdc (KDE's remote desktop). It had been around at least 2 years before GNOME got it right. Then, everybody said, *NOW* the remote desktop works well in Linux.
Most of the anti-KDE trolls here are Unix administrators (frankly) and the app they work with 99 times out of 100 is a terminal!
This is not a flame-bait. I work with such admins everyday ...

Re:Will this end up like Nepomuk?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about connecting with the new open social network from wordpress? If it would be possible to bridge this into the desktop, it would be a huge gain. Just an Idea.

Re:Will this end up like Nepomuk?

[Eruaran]

"Nepomuk, for example, was supposed to launch us into the era of the semantic desktop" Was ? Its in progress, no one has dropped the ball on that one, these things don't happen overnight you know. "Developers for Amarok and Digikam, two major KDE apps, have both stated that they have no interest in integrating with Nepomuk for the time being." What the ? Amarok has been working with Nepomuk for some time...

KDE Logo

[eille-la]

Why is the very old KDE logo still used by slashdot?
http://www.kde.org/stuff/clipart.php

Re:KDE Logo

[mister_playboy]

For the same reason they use the Gates Cyborg icon? Being stale is cool, apparently.

Re:KDE Logo

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot ain't never been cool.

Re:KDE Logo

[centuren]

Why is the very old KDE logo still used by slashdot?
http://www.kde.org/stuff/clipart.php

Nostalgia. We're all getting older, regardless of how many teenagers newly sign up.

What???

[hwyhobo]

If it's as useful as the slide presentation in TFA is informative, then it will be as eloquent as twitter and as disciplined as USENET.

Decentralization

[ultrabot]

Decentralization is not necessarily a good thing. It spreads possibly valuable information to isolated cells (private chats?) with no googleability.

Also, do you really want to be interrupted even more than you used to, by some newbie that can't be bothered to google around?

Re:Decentralization

[RiotingPacifist]

Isn't this what IRC is for, only if you go to #kde with a question about anything that isn't to do with kde, its quite hard to figure out what you problem is when your new, you get next to no help (seriously its like kubuntu killed most of their dogs or something).

Re:Decentralization

[Gerzel]

Who pray tell is posting all these magical answers to questions that may or may not be asked by someone googling?

Googling around only gets you so far with most interface/specific computer questions. Often there are bugs which take time to reach forums let alone well written help pages. More often then not your problem isn't going to be what people are linking to/talking about on many pages and so will NOT show up on Google page rank. Many problems also are rooted in individual configurations and individual mistakes made along the way thus appear vastly different to different users.

Oh and the kicker is often to get the most out of google you have to know a bit about what you are searching for which for newbie help is almost never going to be the case.

Perhaps one day when we put as much time and thought in writing the helpfiles and user information bits of programs then google will be the ultimate answer but for now it is in most cases thirty minutes of frustration that would be more helpful just hitting IRC or a forum to ask someone who might have a clue as to what they are doing or might have seen the problem before.

Re:Decentralization

[xiong.chiamiov]

That's why we have IRC, for the quick "I need someone to tell me things right now so I know where to look" type of problems.

I wish they would focus their energies elsewhere

[bogaboga]

While I appreciate the efforts KDE programmers have put into making KDE really usable, I wish they (KDE developers), would focus their efforts at reducing the huge number of bugs in KDE 4.x and improve the user experience.

I know KDE is a mostly voluntary effort but in the current situation of over 50,000 bugs, introducing even more features which translates to more bugs does not help at all.

I tried the latest KDE on a 2.4 GHz, 512MB RAM system with an on board graphics card and I must say I was underwhelmed. The system (Kubuntu) was so slow.

Heck...why is it so hard for programmers to make KDE beautiful by default?b Operative word here is "default". Why do the menus and widgets have to be huge...wasting space?

I had to say this otherwise I know I will be castigated for saying what is true and is on my mind.

Existing Features

[nurb432]

How about get 4.x as stable as 3.5x before we start moving forward?

Re:Existing Features

[Anonymous Coward]

How about you start using a sane distribution rather than freaking Kubuntu? It's got to be the lamest distro on the planet.

Re:Existing Features

[lbbros]

You do know it took seven years for the 3.x codebase to stabilize, right?

Re:Existing Features

[oever]

I'm happy with it. You think it is not sane and lame. Without further information that does not help me. Perhaps you could do a more in depth comparison of Kubuntu with a few other distros that are more sane and less lame. You seem to have made up your conclusion already, but I am nevertheless interested in such a comparison.

Re:Existing Features

[segedunum]

How about get 4.x as stable as 3.5x before we start moving forward?

Hmmmm. Maybe because software doesn't stand still and those that do become irrelevant curiosities promoted by irrelevant people?

Since KDE 4 is a different desktop to KDE 3 with different libraries, tools, applications and functionality I don't know how you can compare both with a statement such as 'as stable as' because it just assumes the two can be compared. KDE 3 took a number of point releases itself before it became 'stable' in the eyes of many people (I notice you wrote KDE 3.5x) and I would imagine that would be the case for KDE 4 as well. So, they should focus on making KDE 4 as 'stable' (however you choose to define that) as KDE 3.5x...........but they had to get to a point release of 3.5.x to actually achieve that 'stability' and they should ditch all new functionality in the meantime to get there?! Logically, that's just stupid. I know of no software project that has managed to defy logic like that.

Re:Existing Features

[Anonymous Coward]

Mankind needs goals. Just like the mars mission:
On first sight quite useless, but the side-effects will catapult us forward.

Re:Existing Features

[nurb432]

Yup, but they made it a *priority* to get there. I don't get the same feeling of commitment with 4.x, especially with stories like this.

Re:Existing Features

[david@ecsd.com]

4.2 is quite stable and very usable. I've been using it in a virtual machine to do video editing with kdenlive. (It was quicker to grab the .iso torrent for Intrepid and share some directories than to upgrade my whole box.) I understand that with jaunty they're backporting 3.5.[whatever] for us diehards who are afraid of change, but after fiddling around with it 4.2 for a while, I actually became used to it. (Though, I was having problems with some settings "sticking" but am not sure if its a problem with KDE or hte virtual machine.)

Re:Existing Features

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, let's go for that.
Akregator is always miscounting feeds,
Amarok crashes regularly,
Akregator crashes regularly,
weird black spots show up in Firefox,
and KWin distorts the screen a little bit when I change desktops, then it doesn't bother to re-draw it.

Besides, wouldn't noob help just be like an IRC channel? Just point them to the IRC client and the KDE help channel.

Re:Existing Features

[lbbros]

You see news about this, but not about the millions of bug fixes that go in for a particular component. Pushing out stories about new ideas does not mean there is no polishing going behind the scenes. There is quite a lot, and if you see lack of "polish" remember also that manpower, especially for some KDE areas, is quite limited.

Re:Existing Features

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the same people who implement new features aren't exactly the same people that work on stability. Not only that, if you put twice as much people on a single task you will not get the end result in half the time.

Re:Existing Features

[JackieBrown]

I almost wish I hadn't commented on this story just so I could mod you up.

This post is exactly what people seem to miss in comparing the two. I almost wish that KDE could have been called something else so it could skip the comparisons - even though 4.x is the perfect evolution of KDE 3

Re:Existing Features

[metachimp]

How about we find a few apps that work and improve upon them, instead of replacing them with something that barely works?

I'm talking specifically about replacing the network management app that worked with this KNemo piece of shit that doesn't work at all.

And how come Amarok no longer works with iPods?

Re:Existing Features

[ion.simon.c]

KNemo? I've never heard of that.
I used to use the KNetworkManager tool from KDE 3.5. I now use the networkmanager-applet plasmoid.

Maybe you don't use NetworkManager? You might want to consider it if your home network uses DHCP.

Also, this email
http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/amarok/2008-September/006652.html
seems to indicate that the IPod should work with Amarok 2.

Re:Existing Features

[SomeKDEUser]

No more, no less. In fact more, because there are now bug-triageing projects.

But they now also have cool technology to show-off. So they do.

Technically, they had that before, but it used to be that when GNOME issued press-releases for getting more or less the features KDE had years before AND getting all the good press. So now KDE announces its features.

So people notice that they are the most advanced environment...

Re:Existing Features

[metachimp]

When I went from Kubuntu 8.10 to 9.04, it automatically removed that package. I tried the plasmoid, but it was a buried shovel, as it provided no means to actually configure the network settings. I had to use iwconfig from the shell. I finally ended up using wicd, which I am very pleased with.

At any rate, KNemo is this new thing, and it hardly qualifies as Alpha, let alone something that should have been in a release. Avoid it at all costs.

With Amarok, yeah, my iPod was mounted and all, and still nothing. So they suck now. I switched to RhythmBox, which I don't like as much, but at least it plays nice with my iPod, and doesn't obscure it. Wrong turn there, Amarok team.

I swear, is TrollTech outsourcing to Slovenia?

Re:Existing Features

[ion.simon.c]

That plasmoid that I mentioned is *really* beta software and is still in heavy development. It's possible that Kbuntu packaged a crappy version of it. (The version that I have [from April 26] works just fine for wired and wireless connections.)
I'll check out wicd, thanks for the mention.

Also, IIRC, TrollTech doesn't have all *that* much control over KDE as a whole, and doesn't have any control over Amarok.

Not flamebait

[ultrabot]

Then when I start a task, the helpful animated dog pops up, but instead of the vanilla "looks like you're writing a letter," some random jerk from the low end of the internet gene pool pops up and says something in between "Nice letter, fag!"

Mods, not flamebait, +1 funny

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[destroyer661]

Don't want to flame, but *ubuntu is usually a pretty bloated install. I built KDE 4.2 from scratch on Debian installed on a P4 with 768 ram and an old Intel onboard, it ran perfect. *shrug*

IMO both KDE/Gnome meet their real potential if you take some time to customize them and work out what makes you, as an individual, happy. I don't think they're going to satisfy many people left just on default settings.

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[freedumb2000]

Just looked at some screenshots of KDE4. It looked like Vista. Why do the always have to emulate a current Windows version for looks? Windows has _always_ been ugly. Vista especially being hard on the eyes with it's glossy black style.

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[RiotingPacifist]

Until i can make my toolbars the same size as kde3's tiny, I'm simply not interested in kde4. I used to love kde for the way i could get it out of my way, right now it feels like they're just trying to show off all these fancy new desktop changing ideas, instead of focusing on what users want!

Use choqoK for you microblogging needs Re:Cool

[SteamedPenguin]

Are there features in choqok that you are missing? http://choqok.gnufolks.org/

Re:Use choqoK for you microblogging needs Re:Cool

[stoolpigeon]

Thanks- I've looked at quite a few but for whatever reason that one did not show up in my searches. I'll be giving it a spin this week.

Re:Use choqoK for you microblogging needs Re:Cool

[SteamedPenguin]

It isn't as advanced as other Twitter clients like Twitdroid for my G1, but if you are investing the time writing a Twitter client for KDE I am sure the choqok developers are open to ideas. For example, choqok as of version 0.5 doesn't have Follow/Unfollow functionality as far as I can tell.

Keeping the Open Source Desktop Relevant

[segedunum]

Like it or lump it, I see KDE as the only open source desktop trying, or even able to, to keep open source desktops relevant and on the radar with people with respect to what the proprietary competition is doing and will be able to do in the future - graphics, resolution independence, development tools and libraries, searching with semantic meaning....... With the foundation of all of that in KDE 4 they have the ability to create actual tools, applications and widgets that can make the social desktop a reasonable reality rather than just creating the appearance of it with hastily put together front-ends to Facebook because that foundation isn't there. I'll mention no names there.

Without this stuff going on then the open source desktop is just where CDE ended up - a woefully inadequate alternative that saw itself as 'good enough' when the rest of the world said 'No' and moved on to Mac OS and Windows. Until people wise up to that all we'll have in the open source desktop world is a bunch of sad people arguing about what the 'default' desktop is in a Linux distribution that well over 90% of the world have never heard of and have no reason whatsoever to use. If Psystar wins its case that will probably get several times more difficult and Apple will make a crapload of cash bizarrely, but I digress.

Re:Keeping the Open Source Desktop Relevant

[stevied]

This is why I like OSS. The cool kids with more time and energy than I have can invent and play with this stuff in KDE, and have a fighting chance of achieving something. In the meantime, I can stick with the relatively clean and business-like GNOME on my main machine, and run XFCE on older stuff. I'm sure there are some people out there who still aren't happy, but this sort of freedom must be getting us closer to the ideal ..

Re:Keeping the Open Source Desktop Relevant

[segedunum]

This is why I like OSS. The cool kids with more time and energy than I have can invent and play with this stuff in KDE, and have a fighting chance of achieving something. In the meantime, I can stick with the relatively clean and business-like GNOME on my main machine...

Can you hazard a guess as to how many businesses are using Gnome because it looks business-like? A lot of people really do drink that anti-freeze it seems. I believe I covered that with this:

"Until people wise up to that all we'll have in the open source desktop world is a bunch of sad people arguing about what the 'default' desktop is in a Linux distribution that well over 90% of the world have never heard of and have no reason whatsoever to use."

That means that unless Gnome, and KDE for that matter, and the distributions they are a part of can do for them what Windows and Mac OS can, and they can do stuff that Windows and Mac OS can't, then they just won't buy it and they won't give a shit about you. Really. They just don't give a shit how clean and business-like it is because real businesses care about applications and functionality.

Mandriva 2009! for KDE, not the worthless Kubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

Mandriva is a sane, stable distro that is tweaked for KDE and not Gnome. Kubuntu is garbage.

Seriously, Mandriva is really nice.

anti-social apps

[ifeelswine]

am i the only one that pines for anti-social applications? and in this case a desktop? i don't want a picture of me smiling gaily or puking my guts out on facebook. i don't want my professional qualifications smeared across the interweb. i don't want to 'tweet' my latest bowel movement to the universe. 1. write app to crawl the interweb and cleanse the world of references to your name 2. ??? 3. profit!

Re:anti-social apps

[Blakey Rat]

You could just... not use the feature.

I don't get why people like you always have to complain instead of just saying "huh," and going on to *ignore* the thing you don't like. If you don't like it, don't use it. Period. The end.

Re:anti-social apps

[Anonymous Coward]

They already made an anti-social app.

They call it vim.

Flame on.

Re:anti-social apps

[Eruaran]

i don't want to 'tweet' my latest bowel movement to the universe

LOL! Brilliant. :P

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[segedunum]

I know KDE is a mostly voluntary effort but in the current situation of over 50,000 bugs

Take a memo: Since when has the number of opened bugs, certainly in an open bug tracking system, ever reflected the general quality of any software? How many of those bugs are actually relevant? How many of them are just arguments over functionality? Have they been triaged? Your argument is meaningless if what you've linked to hasn't been filtered. All it tells me is that people obviously care about what is going on in KDE 4.

I tried the latest KDE on a 2.4 GHz, 512MB RAM system with an on board graphics card and I must say I was underwhelmed. The system (Kubuntu) was so slow.

Well, for an awful lot of people it hasn't been. If you want people to take notice of what you say then you'll have to qualify those claims further with specifics because I'm afraid just saying it doesn't make it true.

I had to say this otherwise I know I will be castigated for saying what is true and is on my mind.

Wow. It's true is it? I didn't know ;-).

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[FishWithAHammer]

I said the same thing for a while, until my new laptop came with Vista. It's actually pretty nice. The transparency isn't as jarring as it feels the first time you use it, and the glass effects are pretty muted.

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[ultrabot]

I tried the latest KDE on a 2.4 GHz, 512MB RAM system with an on board graphics card and I must say I was underwhelmed.

Buy some RAM, they are practically giving it away for free. KDE4 is not really meant for low end machines (yet).

KDE4 is also very quick to expose bad video drivers. A while ago nvidia sucked, now it rocks (mostly) - whereas the Intel driver is in bad interim state.

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[bogaboga]

...Your argument is meaningless if what you've linked to hasn't been filtered...

So you haven't even bothered to find out have you? Amazing. What I linked to were confirmed bugs. Now for what I know about bugs, "they should not be there in the first place". Are you proud of any bugs?

And who said the number of bugs define the quality of the software? Come on...bugs however small or "insignificant", should not be there. Period. Get it?

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[maxume]

Well, they only released what they called a 'user ready' version of KDE4 a couple of months ago, so, based on the way all software releases everywhere work, an actual user ready system is only a version or two away.

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[lordtoran]

Well, I don't know how the setting is called in English as I run German KDE, but somewhere in systemsettings in the applet where you can choose your icon set there is a second tab where you can set the size of the toolbar icons.

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[Clarious]

Er, really? I still seeing people complaining about using KDE with nvidia driver on nvnews forum. I am using an nvidia card and planning to switch to KDE 4.3 when it is out so I need to know if it will work properly or not.

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[segedunum]

So you haven't even bothered to find out have you? Amazing. What I linked to were confirmed bugs.

Says who? I don't think you know what goes on in Bugzilla in any project, how it works or whether most of what is in there there is actually representative. Regardless of what has or hasn't been marked as confirmed in Bugzilla that snapshot still needs triaging to see whether it is indicative of the current quality of the project. You just linked to it because thought it proved something. Sorry, but it doesn't. Bugzilla never does.

Come on...bugs however small or "insignificant", should not be there. Period. Get it?

Uh, huh. I'm sure every software project would love to have zero bugs but the bizarre thing is, no one has ever achieved that. It's funny that. Haven't you noticed? You're trying to hold KDE to a level that no software project has ever achieved anywhere, and to try and do so for your own ends is obviously just plain daft.

Re:Mandriva 2009! for KDE, not the worthless Kubun

[lordtoran]

Definitely agree. I tinkered with Kubuntu for two releases, then went back to Mandriva because it is a KDE distro that Just Works.

And the Control Center is awesome :-)

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[Anonymous Coward]

Weird. I am using kubuntu at the office on a P4 3GHz, 512 MB of RAM and a NVIDIA GeForce 6200 (that card is so wimpy that it uses passive cooling) and it runs great. No slowdowns or anything like that.

year of the linux desktop

[cmdr_tofu]

It sounds to me like KDE will make this year 2009, the year of the linux desktop.

Re:year of the linux desktop

[socceroos]

Nah, it'll be 2010 dude.

By that time, KDE 4.4 will be out and hopefully many more of the applications in KDE's network will have integrated more closely with KDE4's 'pillars'.

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[RiotingPacifist]

Buy some RAM, they are practically giving it away for free. KDE4 is not really meant for low end machines (yet).

Why? kde3+compiz ran fine on less than that.

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[segedunum]

I should also add that the graph that you have used to 'back up' what you're saying only confirms that as a software project gets more complex and popular the number of bugs increases - over a period of years. Well stone me. I never would have thought that. It doesn't give any picture on the current state of the project at all.

Re:Mandriva 2009! for KDE, not the worthless Kubun

[Anonymous Coward]

kubuntu is like driving a sports car on its rims with no tires!

it's already here

[speedtux]

The "social desktop" is already here. It consists of web sites, site specific browsers, instant messenger apps, feed readers, desktop notification, and widgets. Some people also still use local mail, calendar, and address book apps.

What is KDE trying to contribute to that? Even more heavy-weight local apps and new protocols? How are they going to keep up with the rapidly evolving set of protocols and features available through web apps? And why bother?

I think KDE suffers from a serious case of paradigm envy: they keep wanting to revolutionize the desktop instead of just focusing on what works and coming up with specific, useful, incremental improvements.

Re:it's already here

[tick-tock-atona]

One of the major ideas behind the Social Desktop is desktop network transparency.

Re:it's already here

[speedtux]

Yeah, actually read that page and think about it: to share a workspace, KDE is developing APIs, distributed data storage, services, and new desktop apps/widgets.

Meanwhile, people who actually need to do this open a Google Doc or Spreadsheet in their browser and are done with it. If they need to go off-line, they use Google Gears. (I'm just giving Google as an example, there are many other similar multi-user web apps.)

Re:it's already here

[marcello_dl]

Well there is a difference: google is centralized, a social KDE network would be more of a P2P.
But I'd still go through the browser. I hope they go as much as possible with existing protocols.

Re:it's already here

[tick-tock-atona]

Google's done it, so everyone else should give up?

A proprietary solution is being developed so free software should give up?

I'm having trouble seeing your point.

Re:it's already here

[speedtux]

And P2P is better... how? How is that data backed up and replicated? What's gonna happen when some users whose data I rely on upgrade to KDE5 and stuff starts failing?

Running these services centralized has a lot of advantages.

Re:it's already here

[speedtux]

Which part of "I'm just giving Google as an example, there are many other similar multi-user web apps." did you not understand?

The point is: go ahead and implement open source equivalents, but don't waste your time on developing heavy-weight C++ desktop apps.

Re:it's already here

[tick-tock-atona]

Dude, Google Gears is developed in C++! (but it could have been developed in anything - it doesn't matter) It also runs as a browser extension. Is that more 'light-weight' than a plasma widget or desktop app?

So are you saying that all my networking needs should be met through browser plugins, instead of desktop apps? I can see that working.

Re:it's already here

[speedtux]

Dude, Google Gears is developed in C++! (but it could have been developed in anything - it doesn't matter) It also runs as a browser extension. Is that more 'light-weight' than a plasma widget or desktop app?

Dude, Google Gears is not an end user app, it was a first cut at browser-based persistence. Now equivalent functionality is part of HTML5.

So are you saying that all my networking needs should be met through browser plugins, instead of desktop apps? I can see that working.

Where did I say "all" and "networking"? The KDE social desktop proposes to replicate a lot of functionality that works perfectly well through the web browser; that's a waste of time. If you come up with something genuinely new that doesn't have a good current solution, knock yourself out.

Re:it's already here

[lennier]

"Meanwhile, people who actually need to do this open a Google Doc or Spreadsheet in their browser and are done with it. If they need to go off-line, they use Google Gears. (I'm just giving Google as an example, there are many other similar multi-user web apps.)"

But the problem with that is you are now trusting your data to a corporation - an *American* corporation at that, which for those of us who are not US citizens is pretty much the same as handing our country's information wealth to the NSA.

Sorry, but though I use Google for search, I don't trust them at all for anything more. They don't need to read my email and they sure as heck don't need to read my documents.

I'm a GNOME fan but this Social Desktop thing seems to be the right direction, and KDE is looking a lot more interesting because of it.

Re:it's already here

[socceroos]

I think you're missing the point of the social desktop.

Currently, Google is waging war on the current desktop by showing how all you really need is a browser and an internet connection - making the desktop mostly obsolete (I am aware that there are some exceptions to this, as with everything).

These guys are showing how we can make the desktop relevant again. Instead of living through your browser, your Desktop Environment is clued in and is built to work with your social needs. Instead of leaving the desktop as a completely introspective tool, these KDE4 guys are making it more extrospective - more relevant.

I would far rather have a simple widget on my desktop that I can 'tweet' from than having to go to a website, login, and then use their interface to 'tweet'. It eliminates many levels of complexity. It brings something that would otherwise be a big chore for your granny and makes it dead simple (black pun).

My head hurts

[westlake]

Nepomuk, for example, was supposed to launch us into the era of the semantic desktop, with everything tagged with all sorts of metadata and actually searchable.

Amarok

Plasmoids, or desktop widgets for those of you who don't speak KDE
Dolphin (the file browser)

Nepomuk sounds like he should be hunting seals on the artic ice pack in the Brittanica films your grandad slept through in high school.

When Geek-Speak meets Marketing-Speak all hope is lost.

Re:My head hurts

[Hurricane78]

Well, KDE always was a bit German to me. You know, the K in everything.
As a matter of fact, I'm from Germany. And Nepomuk is a pretty old, but known name, around here.

In the 80s and 90s, we had a nice TV show with a small town of puppets here.
In that show, there is also a puppet called Nepomuk: http://www.hallo-spencer.de/home/images/stuff/wallpaper/nepomuk.jpg
He is portrayed as a somewhat weird old man, who is a bit cold at first, but in fact a very nice man on the inside, when you give him a chance.

So this is what I thought of, when I read "Nepomuk". :)

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[quickOnTheUptake]

Not a flame but Kubuntu is terribly slow, in my experience. I tried it and moved to openSuse 11.1; I got a much better experience, even on cheap hw (1.7Ghz, 1Gb, intel graphics).
I've heard it speculated that KDE is not a terribly high priority for Canonical, whereas the reverse is true with Suse. Don't know whether its true, but my experience definitely jibs with it.

KDE is actually repeating the CDE mistake

[speedtux]

Without this stuff going on then the open source desktop is just where CDE ended up - a woefully inadequate alternative that saw itself as 'good enough' when the rest of the world said 'No' and moved on to Mac OS and Windows.

Quite the opposite. CDE, in fact, was trying to do too much: it had many things that came to other platforms much later, including styles, theming, remote access, config databases, scalability, and GUI scripting. And the people who owned CDE thought that because it was ahead of the competition, they could charge a premium for it. Meanwhile, in the PC market, companies were pushing out low-cost machines with crappy and cumbersome low-level GUI libraries by the millions.

KDE is repeating the CDE mistake: instead of focusing on what people need right now and doing a really good job at it, KDE is trying to realize some long term pie-in-the-sky technical visions of its developers that no user asked for.

Re:KDE is actually repeating the CDE mistake

[cp.tar]

KDE is repeating the CDE mistake: instead of focusing on what people need right now and doing a really good job at it, KDE is trying to realize some long term pie-in-the-sky technical visions of its developers that no user asked for.

Since CDE's greatest mistake was charging premium for it, I'd say KDE is not doing anything wrong.
I used to be a Gnome fan myself, but nowadays KDE appeals to me much more.

Re:KDE is actually repeating the CDE mistake

[Rich]

> including styles, theming, remote access, config databases, scalability, and GUI scripting.

Styles - not unless you count colour schemes which were available on platforms like win3.1 already.
Theming - not at all
Remote Access - only the basics that X11 provided for it.
Config Databases - nothing beyond Xt resources which were a pretty much failed implementation from the start.
Scalability - don't make me laugh.
GUI Scripting - did you ever try tooltalk?

CDE was a poor implementation of existing ideas and brought nothing new to the table.

Re:KDE is actually repeating the CDE mistake

[segedunum]

Quite the opposite. CDE, in fact, was trying to do too much: it had many things that came to other platforms much later, including styles, theming, remote access, config databases, scalability, and GUI scripting.

No, they focused on the wrong things and some of the right stuff they focused on was half-baked to the point of being unusable so it never turned into anything an end user might feel the benefit of.

KDE is repeating the CDE mistake: instead of focusing on what people need right now and doing a really good job at it, KDE is trying to realize some long term pie-in-the-sky technical visions of its developers that no user asked for.

Which is exactly what the CDE guys did about fifteen years ago when they declared CDE as a 'standard', looked at Windows and Mac OS and said "We don't need anything developer friendly. We don't need any of this new fangled 3D programming API stuff. Who wants to play something called Half Life anyway?" Microsoft also said "Who needs the internet?" and quickly realised they were wrong. I'm sure no user asked for any of those things until they came along. The world moved on and left CDE in its own sad little world.

We all now that no one uses any of that stuff and Microsoft was right about the internet, right? Your statement is so stupid on so many levels it isn't even funny. Why bother with any new functionality at all? We all know that each new version of software can be sold on the basis that it has 'less' functionality so it 'doesn't get in your way' right? I'm afraid no one is moving off Windows and Mac OS with that strap-line. The sad part is that you probably believe it even when the contrary has been pointed out and that is why I see KDE being the only thing that is helping the open source desktop on. Either people don't see it or they just don't want to see it.

Chagning the subject line of the thread won't make it true either.

Re:KDE is actually repeating the CDE mistake

[xoundmind]

Which is perhaps why I find even the latest KDE pretty much unusable.
I want 3.x back!

Re:KDE is actually repeating the CDE mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, it's not worth responding to your crap. You really don't know what you're talking about. Go on believing that Windows and Mac invented it all.

Re:KDE is actually repeating the CDE mistake

[speedtux]

Why bother with any new functionality at all?

Who said I had anything against "new functionality at all"? I like new functionality. Now, what exactly is "new" about the "social desktop"? I get all that stuff with standard web and desktop applications already.

We don't need any of this new fangled 3D programming API stuff.

Again, you don't know your history. SGI pioneered the 3D programming API stuff (incidentally, running on CDE desktops). Microsoft and Apple were late to the party and came out with poor imitations.

and that is why I see KDE being the only thing that is helping the open source desktop on

Well, you just go on believing that. I suppose we should be grateful that KDE sucks up people with the wrong priorities.

Re:KDE is actually repeating the CDE mistake

[optimus2861]

Case in point: Amarok 2. I was just getting to like Amarok 1.4. The musicbrainz tie-in was golden to me; I've got so many mistagged files downloaded and copied from various sources, that looking up all the tag info myself was downright painful. Enter Amarok 1.4, one mouse click, and the suggested tags are right there. I usually do a quick wiki lookup to double-check before I save, but still much faster than having to look through an entire discography manually.

Enter Amarok 2, which I tried today for the first (and last) time. Musicbrainz is ripped out. Why? "We're planning something better," say the devs. Any progress on it? Nope. Toss in a totally new, butt-ugly UI, loss of smart playlists, loss of wikipedia plug-in, loss of ipod support (!!!), loss of postgre support (though that one I can at least understand even if I don't like it) and you get an app that went from being a near-killer desktop app to useless garbage.

I thought it was just the KDE developers who went insane with the "blow everything up in a massive rewrite" mindset, but it seems to be infecting their apps, too :(.

Re:KDE is actually repeating the CDE mistake

[socceroos]

Dude, no one is stopping you from installing KDE 3.x. Honestly, that was a really stupid thing to say.
I actually find KDE 4.2.2 to be very stable. I've been using it on my work desktop since January (KDE 4.2.0) and I haven't had any crashes. Plasma hasn't died on me once. KWin hasn't been slow for me at all. KDE is screaming along on my Pentium 2 with 256Mb RAM - no slowness whatsoever - and thats while actually using apps like DigiKam and Kontact.

I honestly don't understand what people are talking about. KDE4 *IS NOT* a resource hog. I've got it installed on my phone and it runs great! I can use all the same plasma widgets that I do on my desktop on my phone.

Really, how many people are giving their opinions on how 'KDE suckzorz' but HONESTLY haven't used it extensively - or are blaming KDE when its another level in the OSS stack that's at fault?

Re:KDE is actually repeating the CDE mistake

[ion.simon.c]

This ToolTalk? ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ToolTalk

I was completely unaware of anything but DOS at the time that that was created. How much like DBus was it?

Re:KDE is actually repeating the CDE mistake

[ion.simon.c]

What phone are you using?

Re:KDE is actually repeating the CDE mistake

[socceroos]

OpenMoko Phone - its about 1.5 years old now.

Re:KDE is actually repeating the CDE mistake

[kayoshiii]

well yeah Amarok is a complete rewrite... and yes music brainz functionality or equivalent has not been added in again. At the moment I am using Picard for this (the official musicbrainz app)...
Amarok-2.0 or even 2.1 is not yet a fully functional replacement for 1.4...

Smart Playlists.... Actually there but the UI has been much simplified and seems to be able to do everything I remember doing with 1.4 and a few things I couldn't. I actually thing this is one area where amarok has improved.

Wikipedia plugin -- Is definitely there - it is uglier than the older version but still definitely there. You access it in a different way.

Ipod support - believe is back in but not as functional as in 1.4 (I could be wrong on this one)

Postgresql - basically the devs got sick of maintaining 3 seperate database backends and decided to standardise on one.

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[ultrabot]

Er, really? I still seeing people complaining about using KDE with nvidia driver on nvnews forum. I am using an nvidia card and planning to switch to KDE 4.3 when it is out so I need to know if it will work properly or not.

Yes, my nvidia chip works fine on Jaunty (stock nvidia driver, not self-built one), unlike the intel chip I have at work. Resizing is still not perfect, but it's pretty much a smooth ride now.

KDE4 is Just EZ

[soloport]

KDE 4.2.2

Click the settings (yellow yin-yang) icon on the far right. Click the Hight button (center of settings bar). Drag up or down to grow or shrink icon size. You can make the icons virtually any size you want.

Wasn't that easy?

Re:KDE4 is Just EZ

[RiotingPacifist]

24px is perfectly ok in 3.5.x, when i last tried kde4 (4.1) the system tray was put into a curved box that meant the icons would get cut up if i went anywhere below ~34, i tried a few different themes but i couldn't find a way to disable the box.

PDF made with Mac OS, not KDE?

[omz]

Mmmm. the PDF linked in TFA was created with "Apple Keynote 4.0.3"

Does it run on KDE ;-)

Re:PDF made with Mac OS, not KDE?

[Ash-Fox]

Mmmm. the PDF linked in TFA was created with "Apple Keynote 4.0.3"

Does it run on KDE ;-)

Yes. I have osx86 running in VMware under KDE just fine.

Re:PDF made with Mac OS, not KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but KDE4 runs on OSX. :)

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[Snarky McButtface]

I see this complaint about KDE often and wonder how so many others are having a very different experience than me. I am currently using 262.6 MB of the 1 GB of RAM I have and 26 MB of that is due to the system monitor running. The processor is just an AMD Socket 939 something or other. I am running Kubuntu 9.04 and my system is very responsive. I do not doubt that others are having a very different experience than me but I do wonder why.

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to split your number into 17451 bugs and 15561 wishes

And in the last year more bugs have been closed than opened:
https://bugs.kde.org/weekly-bug-summary.cgi?tops=20&days=365

Forums poor way of collaborating

[caseih]

Actually they are not. Forums are really horrible collaboration mediums. They don't preserve any kind of conversational flow (forums are flat, usually in a straight chronological order within a topic). Additionally topics that might be of interest frequently fall off the front page and die rather quickly while other popular threads go on for thousands of posts and have to be split into new topics. These two flaws make it really really hard for someone to jump into an existing conversation. Having to go back and read hundreds of pages of posts trying to find relevant pieces of information is extremely time consuming. And half when you open a new topic people will say, "this has been discussed many times. Search the forum." But forums all have horrid search features. It's not so much that the algorithms are bad but rather there is a lot of noise (even relevant noise). Also I find forums to be very slow and cumbersome. Having to load a new page just to check to see if there are new posts is really bad, and it gets even worse when you are trying to follow many different forums on different sites.

Compare this to the various OSS mailing lists I'm on. It takes me about 15 seconds to fire up thunderbird and see all the different folders (filtered according to list) and where there are new messages. The threaded e-mail display makes it very easy for me to jump into conversations (lessons the problem of trying to get relevant background info). For example, in the GTK list I tend to look for posts from key developers in a thread and follow that section (branch) of the thread. I can see them right away without going through pages of posts. I follow probably a dozen lists this way. However I only follow forums occasionally because they are so awkward compared to this.

I think forums exist for several reasons, none of which are particularly good. I know in the case of rcgroups the forum is a an ad revenue vehicle, first and foremost. This is the case with many forums I know. Some people like forums because they don't want to clutter their inboxes. This really means they don't know how to effectively use e-mail and automatic filtering (gmail makes it very easy). Or maybe they are worried about spam (legitimate). In any case, these problems were solved years ago with NNTP. However NNTP doesn't do a great job of preventing spam (can't control membership like you can on e-mail lists). Many forums actually have e-mail and nntp gateway plugins, but few forum operators use them because they would reduce ad revenue.

For forums that I really do want to follow, I've gotten annoyed enough to actually write my own NNTP gateway that scrapes the posts off the forum and offers them as nntp to thunderbird. This almost works well, but is a bit wasteful of bandwidth (have to load an entire page of 10 posts even if only one is new). Hopefully I can figure out how to optimize it better and make it generic enough to adapt to other forums. Also it's fragile, needed work when page layout changes. But since most forums use specific forum engines, even if the style changes the underlying tag structure does not.

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[vdboor]

Just looked at some screenshots of KDE4. It looked like Vista.

Interestingly enough the designers of Oxygen didn't look at Vista at all, and implemented their own vision of a nice desktop style :-p

If black == vista, then yes, almost everything can look like vista..

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[ultrabot]

Why? kde3+compiz ran fine on less than that.

Who knows - maybe the devs thought it's more important to drive the technology forward instead of implementing yet another lightweight desktop environment.

Most probably, though, it's just about different parts of the stack evolving separately from each other (Qt, KDE, X, drivers), and it's taking some time for everything to get optimized.

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[JackieBrown]

That 5000 doesn't really mean what you think it does.

If there is a bug with kpacman, it goes on that list. If there is a problem with kbackgammon, it goes there. Problem with ktorrent, kopete, kcalc, koffice... you guessed it - they all go on the KDE bugzilla.

Most people base their desktop assumptions on Windows and how few tools and extras it comes with. KDE is much more massive while yet retaining modularity.

By the way, is your system going slow, change kwin to openbox in systemsettings. That is KDE 4 using the lighter window manager for it's desktop. Seems like a solution since you don't care about visuals. (It still looks great, though.)

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[JackieBrown]

I left off a zero :)

50000.

But then, the report you are linking to is not reflective of KDE 4 (which was more or less built from scratch.)

That report has bugs from KDE 1.x and so on.

Hopefully, when KDE 3.5.x is officially no longer supported, they will just mark all bugs below version 4.0 as 'fixed in upstream.' ('Won't fix' would be more accurate, but semantics are important. I can just imagine the Slashdot article KDE closes 40000 bugs after refusing to fix them.)

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[Blakey Rat]

Windows 2000 Pro is well-known to have had over 64,000 bugs on release, and it's widely considered one of the best Windows versions ever made. I don't see how the bug count is relevant.

freenode

[Danzigism]

I know a lot of people have been criticizing IRC as means of getting the help you need in regards to a lot of BOFH's and just random jerks, but ever since I joined freenode I've found that there's a good portion of people very willing to help regardless of your skill level. it only starts to tick off the ops and regulars when someone has a hard time forming their question.. I've got a lot of patience with newbies, but sometimes it just gets out of hand.. if you read the manual, readme's, help documentation, and google'd your problem and still have issues, then you should easily be able to form a proper question that most anybody would be willing to lend a hand with..

Re:freenode

[Eruaran]

I agree. IRC is a great resource for getting help. It's one of the things I show to new Linux users so they can get help when they get stuck. The community is very helpful and friendly.

Experts Exchange

[swahebrumaf]

One "forum" does this quite well. You've probably seen Experts Exchange appear sometime when you were searching the web looking for solutions to a problem. With EE you award points to users who have helped you, and other people can value answers as well. Because EE is not free, unless you help other people, the community is of great value. I use it quite a lot, and many times it has helped me finding the right answer.

Re:Experts Exchange

[macraig]

I've seen it, indeed, but I was put off by the "business model". Since the people who help, for whom it happens to be free, are not actually paid for their expertise (are they?), the site is actually abusing BOTH ends of the process: making the "users" pay and abusing the knowledge of the "experts".

Experts Exchange operates on a business model exactly like many dating services, where women are allowed to join for free and then the desperately horny men are milked for all it's worth: women = experts, men = users with problems.

Re:Experts Exchange

[swahebrumaf]

You can use their service for $10 a month, which is no money. The experts are really experts, although there is no guarentee. I joined because at that time at work the system administrator left and I had to fill in the blanks. Whenever I had a problem I couldn't handle, and googled for it, EE appeared on top. And the service has helped me many times.

The fact that they earn money with this service doesn't bother me. If you want to use EE for free, you have to answer about two to four questions a month. This means that the asker should reward you points. The competition to earn points can have a good effect on your skills. You can learn a lot here, both by asking and answering questions. But you have to be open for it. After a while you enjoy it, and the points come in without effort.

Btw, many serious dating sites let women pay as well!

Re:Experts Exchange

[Anonymous Coward]

One "forum" does this quite well. You've probably seen Experts Exchange appear sometime when you were searching the web looking for solutions to a problem. With EE you award points to users who have helped you, and other people can value answers as well. Because EE is not free, unless you help other people, the community is of great value. I use it quite a lot, and many times it has helped me finding the right answer.

ExpertSexChange.com

Re:Experts Exchange

[who knows my name]

you sound like a shill...

Re:Experts Exchange

[sgbett]

$10/month != No Money
$120/year != No Money
$3600/30 year career (or should that be 'job' as you appear to be relying on experts exchange) != No Money

Experts my ass... they should rename it ameturegenderadvice.com

Re:Experts Exchange

[sgbett]

yeah, real matuer comment, maybe next time learn to type.

Re:Experts Exchange

[crazybilly]

Please send me no money. Monthly. There's a fifth of fake whiskey I'd like to buy.

Re:Experts Exchange

[Anonymous Coward]

It's even closer to a dating service if you misread the URL. Expert Sex Change, anyone?

Re:Experts Exchange

[Mike Savior]

EE would be pretty great if the experts got paid to share, but that's not the case. And so, if you're not going to be going there to post your own expertisse, it's a lot more worth it to simply check the google cache (as detailed in a rather recent 2600.) Because if the only people who are getting paid are the site admins, then I'm not paying for the "expertisse."

more features?? how about usability?

[itzdandy]

for those who will likely flame me out here, I am a huge KDE3.x fan. Back in my ricer days, it was custom compiled everything with a tricked out KDE desktop all the way up to and including some of the beryl/compiz stuff.

unfortunately, KDE4 came along. Sure its got that makings of a real next-gen desktop with eyecandy and function as far as the mouse can click, but today it sucks.

KDE4 is a gift to Gnome!

I have a number of machines I use regularly and have settled into a nearly stock ubuntu/gnome system for most of my work. I make a few minor usability tweaks to compiz and to gnome but otherwise it does the job and does it well.

Does it have KDE4 level eye candy? maybe not, but it looks pretty good once I change to color scheme away from the stock camel-poop-brown theme.

A social networking desktop? how about a usable desktop first.

This is the equivilent of poping a 600HP engine in a chevy citation. worthless.

Re:more features?? how about usability?

[dotancohen]

I'd love to know what KDE 4 is missing for you. I file bugs with KDE and I've filed tens of bugs and feature requests on KDE 4 on behalf of users. You can reply here or email me. My gmail username is the same as my slashdot user name.

This is the equivilent of poping a 600HP engine in a chevy citation. worthless.

That's called a "sleeper" and they're fun. Corvettes and Mustangs do not expect to be pawned by a Citation.

Re:more features?? how about usability?

[itzdandy]

its missing stability. its missing polish. granted there are parts that are very nice and very polished but the whole is not.

Id would say that gnome lacks the potential of kde4 but it has much more of that completeness, that cohesive environment as of right now.

I really prefered kde3.x over gnome. The switch the kde4 was poorly timed I think. Too many distros switched way before it was ready. I understand that you need to get the code out there to be tested but there was so much that obvoiusly needed/needs cleaned up before it is production ready that it was just a release of some early beta with a tag on it that said it was final.

too me, right now, production linux is one of the 3 (ubuntu, rh/fed/cent, suse) with gnome.

dont get me wrong, I would love to see kde4.x come back with a vengence. I have no hard feelings for the kde team, i just dont see kde4 as anywhere near ready for a production environment.

oh, and a 'sleeper' like a chevy citation is a novel joke, not a prized automobile.

Re:more features?? how about usability?

[dotancohen]

its missing stability. its missing polish. granted there are parts that are very nice and very polished but the whole is not.

Could you be more specific? I would like to file bugs and feature requests on the problems. I don't know about polish, but KDE 4.2.3 is very stable (KDE 4.2.0 less so).

Id would say that gnome lacks the potential of kde4 but it has much more of that completeness, that cohesive environment as of right now.

I really prefered kde3.x over gnome. The switch the kde4 was poorly timed I think. Too many distros switched way before it was ready. I understand that you need to get the code out there to be tested but there was so much that obvoiusly needed/needs cleaned up before it is production ready that it was just a release of some early beta with a tag on it that said it was final.

too me, right now, production linux is one of the 3 (ubuntu, rh/fed/cent, suse) with gnome.

dont get me wrong, I would love to see kde4.x come back with a vengence. I have no hard feelings for the kde team, i just dont see kde4 as anywhere near ready for a production environment.

If you'd like help filing bugs and feature requests, you can contact me here:
http://dotancohen.com/eng/message.php

Or email me. My gmail username is the same as my /. username. Thanks.

people like me

[ifeelswine]

You could just... not use the feature.

I don't get why people like you always have to complain instead of just saying "huh," and going on to *ignore* the thing you don't like. If you don't like it, don't use it. Period. The end.

i would concede your point IF these social network sites did not ensnare new members by requiring you to sign up to look at, say, pics of other people smiling gaily or throwing up after drinking too much.

Focus on the basics first

[billcopc]

I might care more about these new experimental features if they could at least get the basics down pat.

Right now, KDE 4 is an unusable mess compared to its legacy. I've no need for a social OS if it obstructs my ability to work, like the rest of this checklist-designed WM.

Re:Focus on the basics first

[dotancohen]

I might care more about these new experimental features if they could at least get the basics down pat.

I'd love to know what KDE 4 is missing for you. I file bugs with KDE and I've filed tens of bugs and feature requests on KDE 4 on behalf of users. You can reply here or email me. My gmail username is the same as my slashdot user name.

Birth of an idea

[Simon80]

At last year's KDE Conference Akademy, the vision of the Social Desktop was born and first presented to a larger audience.

Did the author of this sentence stop and consider that someone, somewhere, might have had the same idea before last year's Akademy?

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[centuren]

Why? kde3+compiz ran fine on less than that.

And it still does. I have little sympathy for anyone who complains how KDE3 "was" better than the current release of KDE4; it's not like KDE3 has deactivated and no longer installs or runs. If it's better for you, use it.

Love the KDE!

[mcrbids]

Love it, hate it, doesn't matter.

KDE begat Konqueror. Konqueror begat Safari and Webkit. Webkit is now commonly used for cell phones and alternative browsers, including Google Chrome, all of which are gaining marketshare. In a very real sense, KDE has the unique distinction of birthing one of the most common and popular browser engines anywhere on the Internet.

Whether or not you use KDE, you've almost assuredly used software created therefrom!

Re:Love the KDE!

[macraig]

This is a tangent... we weren't even thinking about KDE any more. ;-)

So Fucking Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the same tired old garbage this clown is spouting that makes it clear Linux will continue to flounder down in its 1 percent or so range.

segedunum, go away. It's been a decade that people have been trying to get Linux for mainstream users going and idiots like you running your mouth off with the same crap isn't helping.

Great Idea

[HermMunster]

I would love the idea of being able to meet more people in my community. Everyone of them can be used to spread the word and bring clarity to the misinformation generated by Microsoft.

Neopmuk actually is an acronym

[Anonymous Coward]

And it isn't a term that users will ever run across, unless they're reading marketing materials. :D

Interesting, but...

[coaxial]

Let me point out the obvious here, since it was apparently lost on the person who unveiled the idea with the slides.

I care about my community, not yours.

This seems really really navel gazing. While I have my doubts about the usefulness of some of the ideas ("show me users near me" for one), I generally like the integration of social networks into the desktop. My concern is this. I, and many many other (potential) users of KDE don't care about the KDE "community." What does this do for me? It appears the answer is nothing.

This certainly reeks of the the second biggest problem within the FOSS world: navel gazing

Java version of a social semantic desktop

[Paul Fernhout]

I've been working toward a Java version of a Social Semantic Desktop. The code is here:
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
"The Pointrel Social Semantic Desktop is an RDF-like triple store implemented on the Java/JVM platform, as well as related social semantic desktop applications inspired in part by NEPOMUK and Halo Semantic MediaWiki."

oh yummy

[mrmeval]

Twiddly idiocy on the desktop where twittering morons, myspaced hellspawn and facebooked crack heads can crap all over my desktop. KDE doesn't get it, hell guhnome 'regressed' back to what KDE was and is usable and KDE 4.xx is excrement.

Re:oh yummy

[socceroos]

Uh, I'm not sure why you'd want them to 'crap all over your desktop'. Ooooh, I get it - do you think you'll be *forced* to have all this on your desktop? I'd say you're a primarily proprietary software user - because you don't seem to be used to the idea of 'choice'.

Re:oh yummy

[mrmeval]

I'll point and KDE 4 and mock you.

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[chadruva]

You should try Mandriva where KDE is top priority (the default desktop environment). They have, in my opinion, the most polished and usable KDE4 available, they did it in the past with KDE3 they keep up with the latest KDE.

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[kayoshiii]

Your problems are probably further down the stack. KDE for better or worse uses parts of other underlying graphics stack that other desktop environments don't yet. With hardware that implements these features well KDE is very smooth. For a lot of people It is not - this is because the parts of the driver architecture that KDE uses haven't previously been real world tested. As X and the graphics drivers for your machine improve you will probably see a speed improvement.

As to your comments about beautiful by default. I agree that the defaults in KDE could be better. - but - beauty is largely a subjective thing and what I might find beautiful and you may find ugly. AS to why space being wasted - The perception of this can vary hugely depending on the size of display you are using and the pixel density. The challenge I guess is to get something that scales well.

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[V!NCENT]

I tried the latest KDE on a 2.4 GHz, 512MB RAM system with an on board graphics card and I must say I was underwhelmed. The system (Kubuntu) was so slow.

FWIW... I have a AMD Phenom 9950 X4, 8GB RAM and an ATI Radeon 4870x2 with 2GB RAM and it runs slow on my PC too. Kubuntu 64bit with latest proprietary driver... What the? Must be some kind of flow of code problem instead of performance...

Why do the menus and widgets have to be huge...wasting space?

KDE scales to the size of your resolution. That means that if you are used to 1280x1024, and you buy a new monitor that is 1680x1050 you can still read it in the same size (portion of the screen).

You can see it when a fullscreen Windows application with a different resolution run in Wine crasheh to the desktop. You need to switch back to your native res and then the configuration menu is super tiny.

Re:I wish they would focus their energies elsewher

[V!NCENT]

Latest KDE4. Unlock widgets. Bottom right Plasma icon. Click. Change size of the taskbar. Click on 'X'. Lock widgets. Done.

Hang on now

[Anonymous Coward]

Screw the social desktop, I'm still waiting for the semantic desktop to arrive in a useful way. The KDE team needs some Adderall, they keep losing focus and getting ahead of themselves. Couldn't they stick with something until it actually works for once?

StackOverflow.com

[mverwijs]

I think that this is exactly what StackOverflow.com is intended to be.

A community driven wiki enabled forum catering a specific group of people (programmers, in this case).

Take a look at Joel's talk at Google on the subject:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ

Re:Mandriva 2009! for KDE, not the worthless Kubun

[Eruaran]

I've been using Kubuntu 9.04 since Alpha 5 (it was stable enough for daily use even then) and its easily the best release of Kubuntu ever. KDE 4.2.2 is great, KPackageKit integration with System Settings is wonderful, the selection of apps is very pleasant, Ext4, vastly faster boot time and more... Kubuntu 9.04 is a huge improvement over previous releases. I would hardly call it garbage...

The "great ion.simIAn.c" (NOT), see inside

[Anonymous Coward]

"Google failed to find any offical mention of your work with Russinovich" - by ion.simon.c (1183967) on Monday May 04, @10:57PM (#27825779)

GOOGLE didn't fail, YOU DID (as usual, per this reply AND the list of your screwups here I enumerate below in this exchange)...

See this -> http://www.pcmech.com/article/defragging-the-windows-page-file/ (& the comment by "SuperFluid" there)

YOU can't even GOOGLE something right, lol...

LOL, trouble is, you're showing yourself to be nothing more than a "I can't do anything w/out GOOGLE" type online... and, you say you're a programmer? PROVE IT (how do you like it? That's the kind of crap you've been saying to me & I provide proof below... lol, you do not & have NOTHING LIKE THE LISTS I PROVIDE BELOW, to your credit)

----

"I've emailed Mr. Russinovich to figure out what work that you've done with him" - by ion.simon.c (1183967) on Monday May 04, @10:57PM (#27825779)

For Sunbelt Software (I'll save you the time there) to whom we contracted out wares we had written, thru LC (& also MANY years later, in 2003, when I fixed up his pagedefrag program, instructing him where it was hardcoded and how/why it could adversely affect the operations of his application if people moved their pagefile.sys location (which is doable on both accounts) to another disk (he had them hardcoded to C: drive only, & it made his program fail - he emailed me back thanking me in fact).

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"You're thread's not stickied on xtremepccentral, btw. Why is that? It's not stickied over on Ars, either. Why is that? :)" - by ion.simon.c (1183967) on Monday May 04, @02:18AM (#27812855)

I don't believe they do that, & I can't get that EVERY place I imagine though I'd like to!

(However, my guide IS rated "5/5 stars" there, AND is in the top 2 most viewed of all time @ that website within the forums section it is featured on)...

NOW, for what You're asking for now? Well, it has done so in becoming an "Essential Guide", & on these websites:

http://www.tcmagazine.com/forums/index.php?s=ab63b5c5b7b51bde1ed34c6db909d3a7&act=SF&f=87&st=0&changefilters=1
http://forum.soft32.com/windows/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewforum&f=26&start=0
http://forums.guru3d.com/forumdisplay.php?s=c90357a670c55c225331de7ca6e1d8a2&f=27&page=1&pp=25&sort=views&order=desc&daysprune=-1
http://forums.tweaktown.com/f34/?pp=20&sort=views&order=desc&daysprune=-1
http://www.proprofs.com/forums/index.php?s=abcd398e654a2bb1de0042564186ceeb&showforum=135

(AND, as noted above? On many websites, it is in their top 1-5 most viewed usually, or "5/5 star rated" many times, would you like a list of those also?? Heh, sad really, all those years you claim to have been on a PC & yet accomplished nothing on your end apparently. I.E.-> My guide alone thus is, by far, more than YOU have shown you have ever done over 22++ yrs. on these machines on your part, for comparison's sake!)

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"You claim that you're a professional. Prove it" - by ion.simon.c (1183967) on Sunday May 03, @08:52PM (#2

Prove you are a professional programmer ion.simIAn

[Anonymous Coward]

After all, you said you were, and asked for proof from others if they were and you got it. A registered user asked you for the same here http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1219095&cid=27884199 and you keep avoiding it and providing the proofs requested of you, which are the same as you asked of others in that thread. Why is that ion.simIAn.c? Because you lied about being a professional programmer perhaps??